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| Ring Around the Rosie 12 x 16 Oil Painting by Pat Fiorello $850
If you have been missing me, I apologize. I haven't been active on this blog for awhile because I've been focused on my #365 campaign where I'm sharing daily on Facebook and Instagram. Since January 1st of this year, every day I am sharing an image of beauty to uplift people often accompanied by words of inspiration or an inquiry about the nature of beauty.
If you'd like to see a positive message each morning, feel free to follow #Beauty365 on Facebook or Instagram.
I've also been sharing more video from short and time-lapsed videos to a complete on hour demonstrations video. These are on my youtube page.
I did a short video on the painting shown above which might be of interest.
Below is a mixed bouquet my husband recently surprised me with the other day. It had lots of different types of flowers and shapes- large and small roses, several types of mums, lilies and carnations. The variety makes for a lot of interest, but can be challenging for a painting.
Ten different artists could look at this bouquet and paint it 10 different ways. Even one artist could get 10 or more painting ideas from this one bouquet, depending on what they chose to focus on at any given time.
It’s important to select one idea or story for each painting. It’s easy to fall into the trap of loving everything and trying to make everything important and in doing so nothing stands out. When I think about starting a painting, I’m thinking about what I want to be the star of the show and how to I want to create eye movement and energy in the painting. In this case, what stood out to me most was that single rich, red rose and I liked the way the white flowers and lit part of the other flowers encircled it and moved the eye around in kind of a loop. I decided to make that my priority and that meant downplaying other areas, like the lilies, which due to their size could really take over if I tried to paint everything exactly as I saw it.
Once I have my idea, then I think about how I want to get started. I have several different approaches to starting a painting. I decide sometimes depending what I think will work best for that particular scene and other times just what I’m in the mood to do. Sometimes I’m looking to be realistic and sometimes a little more impressionistic and suggestive. In this case, I was not looking for an exact rendering of this particular bouquet but using the flowers at hand to get that movement. I am always free to add, delete, or change anything to serve the vision of the painting- that main idea I started out with.
For this particular painting, I wanted to keep it loose and fun and have vivid colors, so I started with an underpainting of transparent colors. You can see with this approach in the beginning the colors are brighter than they will end up being, but I can always dull something down. It’s harder to brighten up something that is dull. This colorful underpainting is just the base upon which I will add another layer of paint, but it it al done, alla prima- while the paint is wet- not waiting for it to dry and doing sequential layer over time which is ore of an indirect painting approach.
I took some photo’s along the way during my painting process and then did a voice over to explain what I was thinking along the way. Here’s a short youtube video clip (about 5 minutes) that takes you through the development of “Ring Around the Rosie” (The title came to me after I looked at the finished painting, as if often does).
Hope you enjoy the video and feel free to message me if you have any questions.
P.S. the best way to say in touch is to receive my monthly newsletter, "Bringing Beauty to the World" which contains my latest artwork, news on upcoming workshops and events as well as inspiration. Let's stay connected. You can simply sign up here. Thank you! |
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