Thursday, July 5, 2012

Blue Surge (not to be confused with Red Serge)


Today felt like an early 'surge' day...ergo my title for today's post Blue Surge. Finally, it's starting to look and feel like a painting! It takes a while and a lot of brush swinging to get to this point where I get to feel that I am overcoming the sheer physical size of the start-up but after today I feel like I have a bit more wind in my sails so to speak.



It was much quicker to apply the richer glaze of pthalo/cobalt blue to intensify the upper reaches of the sky off an extension ladder than going through the laborious process of shifting the scaffold across the eighty foot running length of the mural.



Yet more regions of blue are introduced into the bottom panels, throwing the figures, horses and farmyard buildings into sharp contrast.






While the large portraits remain dark at this moment (due to not a smidgen of 'light' yet introduced) they appear to almost hover in a three-dimensional contrast to the blue atmospheric effect in the background.
 






With the dialed-up blue initiated the various shapes and objects in the middle and fore-ground take on a surprising urgency. Suddenly, things seem to really pop.
 






The potash mine appears looming on the distant horizon behind the family dressed for chillier weather. At this moment, all of the blues of the sky are introduced as transparent glazes into the shadowy regions of the potash mine. This effectively mesmerizes the eye into accepting that the mine is set off at a considerable distance into the extreme background; the very blue of the air is suspended in such great breadth as to colorize the distant edifice with the barest hint of 'blue'.

No comments:

Post a Comment