Watching Steve Paint.

Watching Steve paint this week is making me hungry for the metallic taste of biting my nails with cad red under them (Don't do this it's very bad for you). I think I'm going to begin painting again. It takes up less room than printmaking anyway for now and I can't seem to get my shit together enough to make any prints. I did just buy a bunch of paper though to have on hand when I spontaneously decide to go for it.

Here's some blogs I've found and websites I've looked at recently.
I'm going to start back with the "Zorn" palette because in Cameron Bennett's class that's the one I enjoyed using the most- I used the others but I didn't really have fun using them like I did with the Zorn palette so I'm gonna bust out the ochre and move on with my life. It's about time I stopped quipping Cameron-isms at Steve and actually used them for a change.

Firstly I started looking up what the Zorn palette was becauseI had a brain fart and I was going "what's the palette we used with the four colors? It had like...red black white and another color. sepia? no. umber? no." So I googled "limited palette portrait 1860's" (why the 1860's? because my brain is amazing) and up pops Zorn, famous for his limited palette, born ~1860. VOILA - proof that it's all up there if only you can access it.

SO then I remember that Cara painted in this really austere beautiful aqua and yellow and cream palette that I FELL IN LOVE WITH. Cara- seriously. senior year work= lovely. Thanks  for giving me some of your naples yellow light off your palette- that dreamy hardboiled egg yoke color. Sadly, no one here seems to sell it. She started if I remember correctly by looking at Kanevsky who, as it turns out, has a really large and complicated palette with similar airy lovely results. I love the colors.
Also at the link, George Nick who is a great painter.

They are sort of like the pastel Thiebaud cakes I also am in love with.    I feel like everyone at art school has a brief torrid affair with Wayne Thiebaud and Jenny Saville etc. The love never goes away but you keep moving up and finding other artists to drool over.

I also found Lorraine Shirkus, who is really good with what looks like a palette knife- nice loose marks, and a great color scheme. These plums are really beautiful.

The links on her blog lead me to this great painter, Qiang-Huang who does an AMAZING painting a day and mas a really lovely workup quickly. He has a really great time lapse Demo I watched and loved because it confirmed everything I ever learned about painting- start with a big brush, block in your values, find your strong highlights and your strong darks, work vague to specific. the paintings are beautiful- seeing how he makes them is encouraging. Also looking at the ones that are sold and the ones that aren't sold, it also confirms my suspicion, you put a little orange in a painting and it'll sell. Bitches love orange. I've always thought it made a lot of sense to see what colors were trending that year in interior design and work with those. You would have an ever changing palette dictated by the people who are decorating their spaces and buying things to go in them. If you were that kind of person.