My journey into painting - Part 4
Painting is not an exact science but I was glad to find that there are quite some parallels. I liked the fact that there are good methods to evaluate the quality of paintings in a comprehensible way. If it was just about taste or only about the pleasure to create, our desire to improve skills would not make much sense to me. Just like other fields of human activity, painting can be sectioned into subareas: visual concept, composition, color theory, drawing, brushwork, materials and so forth. On all of these, lots of smart people have spent a lot of time and effort to improve and made their findings available to all. Many people, scientists and artist in particular, have a natural desire to reinvent the wheel and we need to be careful not to waste this precious emotion. Learning from others that have solved similar problems before is usually the best way to proceed. Sounds too obvious to mention but looking at my own path, excatly there often lies the biggest problem. We often desire so much to be on a path „our own“ that we keep it even knowing it‘s not right. Desire can make sense and should!
My desire is to learn alla prima oil painting, a direct way of working with wet paint, allowing to finish a piece in one go and sometimes even several on one spot. The most significant difference compared to working slow and from photos, is freshness and mood. What’s left on a photograph can hardly be compared with the light seen from direct vision. To learn efficiently I simply stick to common reasonable advice: paint from direct vision less from photos, paint many small studies instead of large pieces, work outside regularly, paint and draw daily.
Alla prima does not mean, that the piece MUST be finished in one session. It‘s more a general approach of painting loosely and without the need of drying steps. It can, given we can, well be applied for large studio paintings.
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