Gwenn Seemel, LANDSCAPE painter.
I have no training whatsoever as a landscape painter. Now that I think of it, I have little focused instruction for portrait painting either, but the human figure is a standard subject in art education. Besides, I’ve been making faces for years now, but I’d never painted a proper landscape until I created Indian, a painting for Apple Pie. I dabbled at landscape in the 2007 portrait of Andrea and looked into it with these paintings and these ones too, but I don’t know what made me think I could pull off a four by four foot landscape without a large face in the composition as the focal point.
an unidentified artist’s Meditation By The Sea 1860s
I guess I was inspired, in part, by this image, which I came across in a book* published by Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. I thought “why not?” I may know little to nothing about landscapes, but this artist is clearly no expert at showing the natural depth of scenery either and she-he nevertheless managed to create an exquisitely beautiful painting. I figured I may as well give it a go as well!
I looked to some of the Pacific Northwest artist Michael Brophy’s totem pole works as proof that a landscape with a single vertical in it could make compositional sense.
I started the painting by diving into the large expanse of sky and promptly ran into a problem. I didn’t know how to fill such a big space without painting a face!
I did the only thing I could think of. I layed down the canvas and painted with watered down colors.
photo by David
I’d worked this way once before when I painted the skyscape backdrop for a theater production in 2004. The overall dimensions of that backdrop were 12 x 52 feet, so I had had to spread the unmounted canvas out on the floor in order to paint it.
photo by David
The method had served me well before, so I jumped in with both feet!
I forgot about the totem pole since it was only getting in the way of the sweeping gestures I needed for the sky.
I focused instead on everything else—everything that scared me about the painting!
Slowly, something worthwhile emerged.
Eventually, I put the pole back in so that I could build the piece with an understanding of the whole composition.
I started making some decisions about the background, but then I ran into another problem.
Something wasn’t right about the painting, and, at first, I had no idea what it could be.
Luckily, around the same time as I was working on this piece, I was watching Dutch Masters: The Age Of Rembrandt, a series of excellent lectures on DVD by Professor William Kloss.** I’d just skipped over the lecture on landscapes (since I’m not usually a fan), when I realized that, for me to be able to paint one, I had better, at the very least, learn to like landscapes! So I watched and listened, and Professor Kloss happened to point out in his florid, worshipful, and utterly engaging manner that, for space to unfold in a landscape, the foreground has to be the darkest place moving back to the lightest area. He’d named my problem!
In this phase, before hearing Bill’s advice, I’ve made it look almost as if there’s a spotlight on the pole and the ground around it: it doesn’t look natural.
Here, I’m starting to undo the artificial lighting, and I’ve added an element which will be embedded throughout the painting.
More layering in the sky and ground.
Some work on the totem pole.
Fixing some things…
...tweaking some others. At this stage, I still haven’t really touched the portrait in this painting. I’ll tell you about that part of the process in a future post.
Gwenn Seemel
Indian (Indian-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches
detail of Indian
This is my smallest ever portrait, and it’s only made smaller by the large composition which surrounds it!
detail of Indian
The subject of the portrait, Amal, was born on Ganesha’s feast day, so I knew that the elephant-headed god had to feature prominently in the painting.
photo by David
If the sale of a work is part of its success (and I happen to think it’s important), then this piece is a complete success. It sold at the reception for the show! And, what’s more, the person who bought it does not know the subject of the portrait who is pictured here with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s proof positive that allegorical portraiture is the super genre!
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*American Folk: Folk Art From The Collection Of The Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston by Gerald WR Ward, Abigeal Duda, Pamela A. Parmal, Sue Welsh Reed, Gilian Ford Shallcross, and Carol Troyen (published by MFA Publications, Boston, 2001).
**The DVDs were produced by the Teaching Company in 2006 and are available through the Multnomah County Library.
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CATEGORIES: - Process images - Practice - Featuring artists - Apple Pie -
