20 Favorite Paintings #6, Snow Laden by Walter Launt Palmer

Snow Laden

Walter Launt Palmer

I had never heard of this painter or seen any of his work until a Facebook friend posted this and some others from him a few months ago.  As I looked at more of his work, I marveled that he was so relatively unknown.

About this painting in particular, I love the rather subtle nature of the purples here.  I think purple can be an abused color because it so bold and attracts so much attention.  Once an artist starts using it, it can be addictive and become far too overpowering or even a crutch in work.  But here, the purple is kept in check well I think.  There is a nice stillness to this design as well while retaining a dynamic due to the placement of the foreground tree.  I also really like how the sky scintillating qualities due to those flecks of higher value streaming down.  Very nice edges on the barely detectable background hill too, all made possible by hitting the value so very near to the sky at the horizon.

20 Favorite Paintings #5, Mountain Home Church by Harry Louis Freund

Mountain Home Church

Harry Louis Freund was a Missouri born, Arkansas based painter.  Most certainly my favorite non-contemporary Arkansas painter.  He is often identified with the Regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry.  Like them, he painted many murals and scenes that were immediate to his surroundings.  Unlike them, he never gained a great deal of national prominence, which is very unfortunate because I feel the integrity of his work exceeds those of his contemporaries with the possible exception of Wood.  Freund did not tend to practice as much of the visual exageration that can be seen in the work of Curry and Benton.  You can read more about him here.

It should come as no surprise that I identify with the Regionalists in spirit if not totally in style and mannerism.  In Freund, I find not only a Regionalist, but an Arkansas Regionalist, and one whose style I find to be very pleasing.  In many ways he is almost a way marker for me.

In this particular piece, I like how he captured all of the "stuff" around the building without over detailing.  It has that appearance of quickly done well with only enough to tell you what's going on.  The trees are well massed but not in the modern day plein air tendency which would have you mass the entire tree shape and then pop in the sky holes.  He has clearly here built the trees as skeleton structure with the massing taking place over that.  The trees at the edges of the picture may be done more in the modern manner but it is hard to tell without seeing the actual piece.  There is also a lot the appearance of dry brushing here so I wonder if he worked this one in layers.

There is another Freund piece of a typical Ozark farmstead which I like a sight bit better than this one but I cannot find any pictures of it.  If I do ever find a picture of that, I may devote another Favorite Paintings post to it.

20 Favorite Paintings #4, Insect Chorus by Charles Burchfield

 

 

 

I think I came to know about Charles Burchfield via an article in a magazine I was reading at a book store one time.  I was instantly struck by how innovative this guy was and that someone who was so innovative was so little known.  In Insect Chorus, Burchfield tries to give us his interpretation of the cacophony of insects in the summer time.  The varying linear forms are his language for different sounds.   Down in the lower left we have crickets with a sharp raucous call while in the trees, cicadas drone on with swirling forms that seem to wind around each other, starting and restarting within a larger, persistent structure.  This is genious at work.  He developed an entire logical structure of form language for this piece.  In other pieces, he did much that same but with feelings such as joy and, more commonly,  fear and foreboding.  I would really urge you to check this guy out.  He did some really special work.

20 Favorite Paintings #3 - Cezanne's Mt. Saint Victoire

I will be very straightforward, Cezanne's work is rather hit or miss for me.  His work that I like I really like but there is also a good bit that I just really get into.  I tend to prefer some of his earlier work as well as the work he did near the end of his life.  I think his still lifes show his skill as a draftsman.  It seems funny then that I would selelct a painting as one of my 20 favorites that is from a period of his that might be my least favorite.  I could have selected one of several Cezanne's to be amongst my 20 favorites, all from this time period!  Granted, I do really like this piece.  It has great lyrical movement in the tree branches which contrasts nicely with the organized farms and linear elements in the midground.  Normally, I shy away from a design element which is not visibly grounded in the picture frame, i.e. the tree and most particularly the branches coming from outside the frame on the right.  In this case, these elements are not so terribly intrusive to me and contribute well to the design.

But really, it is Cezanne's doggedly relentless pursuit of this mountain that I really like.  It is reported he painted it more than 60 times in one decade!  That is admirable no matter what one thinks of the result itself.  I have places I would like to explore in such a prolific manner.  Hopefully, one day I will have the opportunity.

20 Favorite Paintings #2, The Watermill, Sunset by Isaac Levitan

I've posted this one before.  It's one of my favorite paintings of all time and perhaps I should have saved it again for a later installment of this series.  By far, Isaac Levitan is one of my favorite painters.  I have thought long and hard about trying to do a copy of this painting and possibly others by him.

In this piece, I am infatuated with Levitan's command of value gradations.  I particularly love the light on the far hill.  The values here are wonderfully compressed with the darks still being higher in value that most of the lights on the nearer, shadowed hill face.  I think the reflection of the far hill in the water is more saturated than the actual hill colors but it works for some reason.  It's just SO green and yet does not suffer one bit from how acrid some paintings with so much green can be, the so-called "green hell."  This isn't the only painting Levitan did with just an abundance of green.  There is just wonderful sense of space in this painting.  I think maybe I will try to do a copy of this one.

20 Favorite Paintings, #1: Moonlight Wolf by Frederic Remington

Frederic Remington was a master of the nocturne.  For many years he lamented that he just could not get the color of night correct.  I believe this one was completed after he felt he got it right.

One of the things I most like about this piece is how the main subject is so close to dead center!  Also, check out how that diaganol line of the shore cuts right to the lower left hand corner.  Here we have a Master who breaks two cardinal rules at the same time!  And yet this painting works.  It does more than merely "work," it's stunningly brilliant.  So much for those rules.

Remington centered his subject reasonably often, especially in his nocturnes it seems.  In a lot of the others, though, the subjects take up much more area and are of more variegated shapes so it is less noticeable.  I think this works here because he has divided the space up into essentially 3 regions of value with the sky and water occupying roughly the same value range.  Each triangular swath of value occupies a different amount of surface area, darkest has the least, the lightest has the middle amount of space, while the mid value occupies the largest area.  This variegation of the value pattern creates a unbalanced backdrop which allows the subject to be centered without seeming static.

20 Favorite Paintings

Last night was a meeting of the Arkansas League of Artists.  One of the highlights of these meetings is the demo and talk by a local artist of note.  Last night's demonstrating artist was Emily Wood.  I have been a fan of her work for a while now.  She paints loosely and on wood panels, both of which are common traits between us!  She paints pretty much only figuratives these days.  I love her approach to using the natural wood grain and selective opacity/transparency for focal point emphasis.  This seems to be very similar in nature to my current exploration of thick/thin dynamics.  I encourage you to visit her site, she does really cool work!

But more to the point of this post, she said something that struck me as interesting and I think I'm going to try to it as an exercise.  She said that when she started her MA work, an instructor had the class select 20 favorite pieces and write exactly what they liked about them.  It was an exercise to help define your personal tastes as guidance for what you want out of your own work as well as developing critical analysis skills in looking at art.  Now, I think we all pretty much do this in some form or fashion and I know I have been for a long time.  But the formalization of a process is sometimes key in gaining the most out of it.  So look for this to get started in the coming days.  I already know a few paintings which will be on the list.  If I had no idea what to put, then I would be worried, I should know by know what I like!