It's Complicated

Murs, France

Well, Pont Julien may have been a relatively simple subject for our workshop group, but soon we were on to a very complicated one. Mid-week, Maggie took us to the walled village of Murs. Lots of architectural elements mean complicated drawing issues, which can cause many of us to get bogged down in the details. Our approach for this session was to paint the color of light and the color of shadow, rather than to paint the objects. We set to work to quickly block in all of the light areas and all of the shadow areas, using a representative color for each. The sun was warm, and most of us chose a yellow/orange tone for the sunlit areas, and a cool blue/lavender for the shadow areas. Here's what my block-in looked like:

Once these shapes were defined, we were to modulate the colors slightly to represent some local colors. But only small modulations were to be done. Maggie reminded us, with a quote that came to be repeated through the rest of the workshop, that the painting was like a wedding, in the sense that everything in it needed to be either "on the Bride's side" (light) or "the Groom's side" (shadow).  This proved to be a great approach for simplifying a very complicated subject. 

I ran out of time before I could bring a decent degree of finish to my painting. Here is where I ended up. I didn't get all of the color relationships right, with the result that the painting looked "chalky". But it was worth bringing home, and I hope to make some corrections in my studio that will make it sing.

Just to give you an idea of our setup, here's a photo of the talented Rachel Egan at work on her painting of Murs:

Everybody loved the painting that Roy Williamson did at Murs. It was a wonderful mix of abstraction and representation. Most of us agreed that we could hang it over our mantel just as it was, and enjoy it for years! Here's Roy with his wonderful painting:

Stay tuned for the final few posts on the workshop!