By Philip J. Carroll
Professional Visual Artist
Award Winning
Medium: Oil
Haddonfield, New Jersey
Philip Carroll Gallery at cWOW
Carroll Red Easel Gallery
The creation of a work of art starts the same way every time no matter how long you have been painting …Staring at a Blank Canvas. It is our choice of subject matter that inspires us to paint and to begin our artistic journey. I find the selection of colors on my palette to be fairly consistent each time I start a new painting. I have been working with the same values and mixtures from warm to cool for over twenty years. The amazing aspect of painting is even though we may choose similar palettes, our perception of color, how we mix and mingle the values, tones, and the shading will always lead us to create an individual work of art. I like to think of it as "The Artist's DNA!"
A second, and very important choice for me after the composition, is light. I prefer morning, to late afternoon or evening light versus midday light because it gives me a full range of color variation that moves from warm to cool. The variation adds a special character to my paintings that I would be unable to capture with the unchanging light of the midday.
All of my paintings begin with an exact pencil drawing to guide my initial composition. I generally work in standard sizes, but often follow the Fibonacci measurements of perfect proportion for the format. I record images with a camera and develop preliminary thumb nails in water color to help capture the overall feeling of light, color and sense of place. We all know the general guidelines of oil painting from dark to light but I find that after working with watercolor for so many years, from light to dark, my painting process lies somewhere in between. It is the "in between" approach that has helped me to
add depth and the subtle nuance of color, shading, and atmosphere that I prefer in my paintings.
The painting, "River Walk,” an oil on panel, depicts a tranquil scene of a stream flowing gently toward the horizon, framed on either side by dark shade trees and buffered by the cool gray of the rocky banks. A landscape with a plethora of choices and elements requires many hours of mental sketching before ever placing a brush to canvas. It is not just about the tools and images I have at my disposal. I have to think long and hard about the composition and the execution of this landscape before I begin to paint. The greatest challenge for me at this preliminary stage is to find the cipher, that single key which brings the pieces of the puzzle together and leads me to a finished work of art.
I use a limited palette of burnt umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, sap green, viridian green , ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, pthalo blue, cadmium red, alizarin crimson and white. The very basic construction of a painting and my own personal preference is to work from back to front laying in the sky first. The small patch of sky in this painting has been planned as a subtle back drop for the edges of the trees to stand out on the horizon. The blue of the sky will become more obvious to the viewer when the reflection in the foreground of the painting is complete. From here I begin to paint the trees behind the bridge and in front of the sky using a chromatic gray with viridian green to keep it on the cool side. I use the same chromatic gray for the bridge but substitute yellow ochre for the viridian green, as I want to create a warm under tone in anticipation of the subsequent layers of gray blues.
The lighter trees which frame the bridge are painted with a mid tone yellowish green. The greens on either side of the stream are developed with a mixture of sap green, pthalo blue and burnt umber which gives me my first real sense of the dark but lush contrast I am trying to develop in the painting. The cool grays of the rocks are painted using ultramarine blue and burnt umber and the crevices of the rocks are fleshed out to give me some sense of their structure using a bluish gray tone.
The water is a perfect example of that "in between approach" that I mentioned earlier. To create the water I paint a lighter value over the entire surface using burnt sienna and sap green, with the exception of the sky reflection in the foreground. I then go back with the green mixture, that I used for the initial wipe in of the darker trees, and scrub that mixture into the surface of the water to capture the deeper reflections. This technique helps to unify the values on the surface of the water and create a cohesive movement of light and dark patterns in the stream. Finally, I capture the reflection of the sky above with a basic wash of cobalt and cerulean blue.
It is important to note that the green mixtures used to create my foliage always contain either burnt umber or burnt sienna to shade them. This helps to tone down the harsh nature of these colors when taken directly from the tube. I also never use commercial blacks and prefer to use a mixture of burnt umber and ultramarine blue. This gives me a range of values that move from warm to cool and lean either on the brown side or on the Payne's gray side of the black spectrum.
To paint a landscape of this complexity takes about 2 1/2 weeks, although the time is usually longer because I work on several paintings simultaneously. The basic wipe in of my painting usually takes about 3 to 4 hours and then I allow it to dry for several days between sittings. After it has dried a light coat of varnish is sprayed over the entire painting which helps to isolate one layer from the next.
The most wonderful thing about landscape painting is there are endless subjects and vistas to capture the imagination and stimulate the intellect. Translating these inspirations into a painting is the greatest gift and labor of love! I have never been able to figure out why the word "work" is in "A work of art"?
I hope this brief synopsis gives you some insight into my approach to landscape painting. I am happy to answer any questions you may have.
If you wish to contact me or be notified of upcoming exhibitions please send inquiries to : pcart1@comcast.net
Philip Carroll lectures, teaches, and is a curator of art in New Jersey. He is represented by Deschamps Gallery in Lambertville, N.J.. If you wish to see more of his work just follow the link http://www.deschampsgallery.com . Or look under artists on the Red Easel site.
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