How Richard Sneary makes art of substance and elegant style
Click here to see this email on the web |  | Tuesday, November 8th, 2022 | | Playing Within the Lines | By Bob Bahr | Share this article:     |  | "Carrie Furnace #6" (watercolor, 12 x 20 in.) | A masterclass on what watercolor can do, Carrie Furnace #6 has the crisp lines and dead-accurate drawing of a realist painting, but with the kind of expressive color and varied technique that can bewitch the eye of a viewer with a more poetic sensibility. Wonderfully loose washes give broad areas a sense of variety and texture that would take three times the work to look natural with oil paints. Use of a fan brush provides more broken color and texture. Lights are preserved in the early stages to allow the white of the paper to illuminate from behind layers of paint and, because Richard Sneary is not a strict traditionalist, white gouache provides a few scant highlights.
Even though the Pennsylvania steel mill offers the scrumptious textures of rust and crusty metal, one could argue that the depiction of the light in the painting is one of its biggest strengths. The warm sun of the golden hour elevates the literally tough subject matter in this winner of the Bud and Gretchen Marble Medal given by the American Watercolor Society last July.
|  | "Carrie Furnaces #4" (watercolor, 20 x 12 in.) | — advertisement — |  | This effect is yet more prominent in Carrie Furnaces #4, in which Sneary doesn't hesitate to let the yellow light and blue shadows of the steel structure blend into somewhat startling greens. "I did see some of that green when I was looking at the scene," he says. "I was interested in that figure going up the ladder in the round cage, which gave some sense of the scale. The Carrie furnace is so massive that it is almost unbelievable. It is a somewhat dimly lit area at this time of day, with the lights off because they were not working anymore. I liked the glare and dust; I remember looking at the sun and how it burnt out some things. The yellow-greens were mostly about showing where the light was coming from. The furnace itself was all black-blue and rust. It became about texture, changing colors, and contrast."
And One From the Field
In Moraine Park, Sneary shows how to break one rule and still have a strong painting by relying on another one. The mountains have a lovely softness to them, with washes of color suggesting the variety in the rocks and vegetation, without the sharp details that would destroy the sense of depth. Working en plein air, Sneary confides that the weather that was coming in helped to create this effect in the actual scene. The fence line in the foreground could very well have produced a distracting bit of detail, but its broken line helps the eye move freely about the composition. On the right in the distant middle ground, a few evergreens offer strong darks, and yet they recede. The artist attributes this to careful use of color temperature and attention to the relative darkness of the evergreens against the slightly lighter foothills.
|  | "Moraine Park" (watercolor, 9 x 18 in.) | "The foreground was really only about the light yellow field," he explains. "I made the ranch and woods a bit stronger against it. The darks in the middle ground don't come forward because they are in front of fairly dark darks, so it sits in depth. If it looks like a middle ground dark will come forward, I back off that element and come back in with some added dark behind it. It's always a little bit of an experiment, and you never know if you will get it. Plenty of experiments don't work." |
|
|
|
Paing along with Richard Sneary, Stan Miller, Olga Litvinenko, Thomas Schaller, and Linda Baker at Watercolor Live, January 26-28, 2023 (from the comfort of your own studio!). | — advertisement — |  | Using Light and Shadow to Create Form | By Kelly Kane | "Horses touch the depths of my soul," says Caitlin Leline Hatch. "I cannot imagine life without them. Capturing their grace and majestic essence will forever be my goal. The lights and shadows that define them create opportunities in watercolor to pay attention to detail while at the same time allowing the fluidity of the medium to show us their ethereal wonder.
|  | "Waiting Patiently" (watercolor, 16 x 20 in.) by Caitlin Leline Hatch | "I work mainly with the wet-into-wet technique as it gives me the most freedom to express the emotional story I want to share. I saturate the paper completely so that the core of the paper will stay wet for a long time. This allows me the most time to manipulate the paint. If I find myself getting too tight in my work, I use a spray bottle to spritz certain areas with water to help free up the strained brushstrokes, as I did here in the body of the horse.
"The biggest challenge I faced with this piece was whether or not to add a background. I sometimes worry that if I don't add a background the piece will look incomplete. However, I finally decided that the warmth from the paper created a soft glow around the horse, which supported the light I wanted to capture within the horse, and disrupting that would take away from my goals with this piece."
| "Waiting Patiently" was awarded Best Animals & Birds in the September 2022 PleinAir Salon competition. | — advertisement — |  | | |
|
| | |
|
American Watercolor is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to Streamline Publishing delivering regular email issues and advertisements. To end your American Watercolor e-mail subscription and associated external offers, unsubscribe here. To learn more about Streamline Publishing events, products, and offerings visit StreamlinePublishing.com
Copyright 2022 Streamline Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
American Watercolor® is a registered trademark of Streamline Publishing, Inc. |
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment