The Wedding
INSPIRATION ~ COMPOSITION ~ THEMES ~ TECHNIQUES ~ RESOURCES
Hello and Welcome.
My name is Amy and this web-site is a "documentary"  of sorts for a painting project I am undertaking.  This is my way of both gathering all my information in one easily accesible place and offering the experience of both my pitfalls and successes with other artists. This project is being designed to help me learn the tecniqes used by master painters  and to develop my own artistic style by exploring  new ways to do old things.  (by now it should be obvious that spelling is not my strong point, i'm slightly dyslexic so bear with me until I can get to the spell check!!)

There are three main "styles" of art I find particularly interesting which I hope to combine elements of for this work. The first is commonly refered to (please no letters from art historians!) as "Pre-Rafaeliteism".  This style was dedicated to captureing the "truth" of a given moment by paridoxically creating a false scene in order to observe from life every detail. The theory was that by recording every minute detail, by looking deeply and completely,, you could capture and convey the essential spiritual and pysical "truth" of objects
The result of this approach is a lack of perceptible focal point; every object crys out for attention and it is impossible to clearly communicate with the viewer because the painter has not presupposed the importace of any one object to provide the viewer with a narrative. The style is often dissmissed by "serious" artists for the same reason.

From the Pre- Raphaelites I would like to take three things:
First, the luminous glowing effect produced by thier working teqnique. This was actually a revival of a 17th century method using much improved materials. The effect is achieved by using a ground as "hard as marble, smooth as ivory"  which is incised with the original drawing and then covered in a series of glazes to achieve the depth of color. Even in it's most siimplified form this is a demanding and time consuming working method and I anticipate a working time frame of nearly three months to complete the process.
J.W.Waterhouse "Danaids I"
Second, their use of color. Pre-Rapaelite paintings have a very distinct color sense; they are brilliant, jewel-like, almost acidicly bright. This effect is due both to the actual handling of the paint and to the movements color theory. Paint is applied in strokes of unmixed, pure hues next to and on top of one another to produce optical mixing. The theory basically said that if you were painting for example a head of hair that you should observe each individual strand of hair on that head and paint it the exact color your eye saw. Using a very small brush on a very large canvas they put in every hair and achieved what you would see if you looked very closely at something under a very bright light. Because; a) i'm not a master painter yet, b) I'm working on a 4foot by 6 foot cavas, and c) I'm really not a very patient person, i'm going to dispense with painting every single hair! I want to use that multitude of colors and allow them to blend but not with the smooth finish you see here - i'm aiming for something a bit more energetic.
Third, the compositonal harmony created amougnst very "busy" elements. These paintings tend to be stuffed full of patterns and designs we  identify today as "victorian" with all the ornateness that implies yet they manage to avoid feeling cluttered or visually "busy". In fact most viewers describe the paintings as "moments of stopped time" which sounds pretty restfull! This is achieved by using strong compositional lines to balance areas of pattern.

Overall I find the style beautiful but unsuitible for my needs. I'd like to maintian the specificness of the people and objects but not to this degree as I feel it makes the work  less accesible to the viewer. Which leads us to our next bit of inpiration.

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