For a few months now I’ve been working on a series of paintings based on photos of ‘Italy from Above’. This 8.5X6″ painting is done using Faber-Castell aquarell sticks and is based on a photo of the Italian coastal area. The colours have not photographed very well: the blues are a little lighter, the overall effect a bit softer.
Not for sale.
I’m starting a new abstracted landscape series based on aerial photographs of Italy. I’ve done 60 or so sketches and now I’m starting to play with colours and materials. Once I’m happy with this stage, I’ll take the project onto canvas. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been working on.
Really looking in the mirror can be a pretty scarey thing – so much of the time we unconsciously prepare ourselves before we look. We get the angle right, run our hand through our hair, perhaps tilt our head a particular way.
But take all that away, and just look – at the colours, shadows, lines, shapes – and you start to see something quite different.
A bit less familiar, and a whole lot less flattering.
I’ve done a series of self portraits over the last week and I have to say this is the only one I’m prepared to put “out there” on publc view! Gives you an idea of what the others are like huh?
I’ve had a few days off over the Christmas break and have been painting non-stop for a couple of days now. I’ve mainly been tackling landscapes, working from a series of photos I took recently of the Patea / Waverley coastline.
When I first started the art course with TLC I had a real passion for painting people but this year have concentrated on other themes. I have a real desire to get back to some faces … so yesterday out came the photos.
I have been working on painting my husband, Tony, at this stage because his face is so familiar. So far I have painted the same photo twice, both in watercolour.
Now I’m going to move on and try the same pose in a variety of different media.I really like working this way because as I get more familiar with the shapes and lines my art gets freer and more expressive somehow.
This is an earlier watercolour, which was inspired by a Georgia O’Keeffee watercolour in a book I tracked down via National Library.
I really like her work and had a lot of fun trying to copy her watercolors and figure out how she might have gone about them.
Cath Sheard Art 