Saturday marked my third class with Davide Barbini. Davide is an instructor at the Angel Academy of Art. He takes on extra students in his spare time. Besides his deep knowledge and artistic skill, Davide is a dedicated student of art and art technique. We have constructed 3weeks of study centered on color theory and the use of color to model form. Today’s class focused on my learning a third complimentary color scheme: Blue and orange. This time the still life was persimmons on a blue plate. I learned how to turn the form using color shaded with its compliment. The sketch shows my teacher’s schematic for controlling the chroma, hue and values of a spherical form. Much harder than it looks. My next class will include simple rendering of conical, spherical and cylindrical shapes so that I can better understand how to “turn the form.” This is critical since all shapes in the human form are essentially one of these shapes.

Sunday was a stormy and rainy day so we just stayed in and rested—until the rain let up long enough for us to do take a 60 minute walk (in light rain). Lea continued working on getting her weaving pieces hemmed.

On the 6th-8th of November, I completed my time with Amy Florence Mosley by finishing the portraits of Chris and Lea. Chris’s portrait was 6 3-hour sessions and Lea’s was 7 3-hour sessions. The last few days were ones with a steep learning curve related to how to get the shadows and accents in the right balance—and with the correct chroma and hue. It was (and still is) one of the more complex and challenging aspects of painting (for me). I also had to get “bold” and apply paint with a brush that was more fully loaded. At first this was a trepidation. However, once I overcame my fear, I realized how forgiving oil painting is. If the sequence is right, nearly any mistake can be “fixed.” Sometimes the fix can be made the next day by overpainting the dried offending stroke or area; other times it is just a matter of pushing/pulling the paint or lifting it with a palette knife or dry brush. I also had to learn to push the darks “darker”. This is crucial to enable the “lights” to appear correctly—otherwise the values across the painting would be too similar.

In my final lesson with Amy, I completed two quick sight-sized still life paintings and one 3-hour portrait sketch of a Mark Malone, a friend of hers. One still life was a silver milk urn with Indian gods on the surface;  the other was a glazed white tea pot with blue Chinese patterned animal swirls.

In the morning on the 9th, I continued with my work with Davide Barbini. This day’s work consisted of painting a bunch of bananas in order to finish my cycle of lessons on complementary colors. This time the complementary colors were yellow and purple. It is noted that none of these “studies” with Davide were meant to be finished—they are all exercises in teaching me about color, painting and maintaining balance with hue, value and chroma.

In the afternoon we left for a long 3-day weekend in Venice. I will bundle Friday’s notes with the report on Venice in the blog post for week 46.