Celebrating 500 posts

This post is number 500 on this blog! I never thought I would get that far when I started this My French Easel blog in August 2007. First, I am sending a big thank you to everyone who follows or visit this blog. This helps me carrying on.

Source: background photo from NASA

I had a several reasons to start this blog:

• This motivates me to paint and create.
• It acts like a journal and I can refer to when I want.
• I like to share my painting tips.
• As a non-native English speaker, writing regularly in English is a good exercise.

A few numbers

I try not to look at the blog's statistics too often, but numbers show some interesting and often surprising facts.

• 199509 pageviews since the start
• 207 followers
• Post with the most page views (5,234 Pageviews): Texture in oil with painting knives
• Most used search term that led to the blog: Hokusai

This blog is not a commercial venture. I decided not to put any advertising on the site and I don’t plan to change that. I use Amazon affiliate links (and managed to buy one art book with the proceeds...), but this does not dictate the content of the blog.

A few favourite posts

Let me do that by category.

Paintings: Cable car ride for oil paintings; Dragon Gate (San Francisco) for mixed-media; River Kennet at Avebury for watercolour and Children at the river for pastel.

Recommended book: It’s hard to pick one, but the most inspiring book I read and reviewed on the blog so far is The Creative habit by Twyla Tharp.

Museum: I can’t really pick a favourite museum, however the Marmottan museum in Paris is a must see if you like Impresionnism.

Painting studio tips: two posts my readers found useful are How to open a stuck oil paint tube and How to set-up your French easel (on your own).

Art material: my vote goes to the daylight easel lamp because I can paint in the evening with it, without fear of discovering the next day that all the colours are wrong.

SF's taxi

SF's taxi - Oil on canvas (24 cm x 33 cm) by Benoit Philippe

Matisse Museum – Le Cateau-Cambrésis

As I was in the North of France with my family, we went to visit the Matisse museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis – his birth place.

Palais Fénelon, home of the Matisse museum

The collection, exhibited in chronological order, counts 170 works. It is interesting to see the evolution of his work throughout his career. You can view some of the works on the website of the museum (link at the end of this post).

During the first years, when he was learning the craft in the art studio of Gustave Moreau, Matisse’s palette was still full of earth colours and he was also copying still life paintings by Chardin.

Matisse then explored Divisionism, after meeting Signac in Saint-Tropez in 1904. The painting was slowly created by the juxtaposition of coloured dots and the final effect relied on optical mixing of colours, when the painting is look at from a distance. But Matisse found the technique too burdensome and only kept from it the pure colours.

Another room showed works from the Fauvism period, a movement he created with a group of painters in 1905: Marquet, Manguin, Camoin, Puy, Derain, Vlaminck, Braque, Dufy, Friez, Valtat, Van Dongen and Rouault. The trademark of the group was bright and pure colours used to express sentiments rather than depict reality.

One of Matisse's sculpture in the courtyard

Then came the paintings done with flat colours and simplified lines. Matisse was always looking for a sensation of calm and balance in his work. A feature of the artist’s work is how he uses black: to create lines but also in planes, as any other colours. In his writings and interviews, he made the point that black was a colour. He even went as far as declaring that he was using black as a "colour of light rather than a colour of obscurity".

Matisse's palette

Towards the end of his life, Matisse developed a unique technique with gouache cut-outs to create his works. The museum has some fine examples from this period.

Matisse also worked on the Chapelle in Vence (South of France) that he created for the Dominican sisters between 1948 and 1951. The museum shows several models and works specially created for this project.

On the ground floor, the museum has a large selection of drawings and engravings by Matisse.

Nus de Dos number one by Matisse

Another aspect of Matisse’s work is the sculptures he carved. The original plasters of the series Nus de Dos are in the museum. And the first one is also in the garden as a bronze sculpture (A full series of the four sculptures casted in bronze is part of the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris).

The Matisse museum also hosts the Herbin Collection (a geometrical abstract artist born in the North of France) as well as the Tériade Collection (he published a number of artists’ books, including Jazz by Matisse).

The museum

Musée départemental Matisse

Palais Fénelon

59360 Le Cateau-Cambrésis

Website: http://museematisse.cg59.fr/

Technorati Tags: Matisse, art museum, fauvism, Divisionism, Signac, Musée départemental Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis

Painting dappled light

Sunny days are back in England and trees are full of leaves. The sunlight going through the trees’ foliage forms spots of light on the ground. I took some snapshots of the patterns form by the light spots on a path.

Observe these spots of light and note the following:

• Some spots are more luminous than others;
• When the spots overlap, their intersection is more luminous;
• The light spots have a soft edge rather than a hard edge;
• Spots of lights are subject to the law of perspective and are seen as ellipsis from a distance.

But why are these spots round when the holes between the leaves are not? The answer is that these round spots of lights are the sun projected on the ground. The physics is the same as for the pinhole camera.

So, if each spot of light is a projection of the sun, their shape would be different during a solar eclipse. This is correct: the spots become crescents of light.

Image of the sun during a solar eclipse through the leaves of a tree. October 3, 2005, St Juliens, Malta – picture by User:Ellywa - Source: Wikimedia Common

Dapple light is a good way to bring variety to a landscape or a scene. You can selectively bring some elements of the subject under the spotlight. The difficulty is to avoid having a patchwork of colours and tone without any focus. Renoir used dapple light in an effective way in his painting Bal du moulin de la Galette.

Bal du moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir (Oil on canvas - 1876) Musée d'Orsay – Source: Wikimedia Common

Picasso’s quick prototyping

Quick prototyping consists in iterating quickly different versions of the same project in order to test your ideas. It is practical when the iteration is not expensive in terms of money and time.

Making a series of sketches before committing to the final composition of a painting is one form of quick prototyping. Having to correct errors at a later stage would be more painful and time consuming. I found a very good and practical example of quick prototyping by Picasso.

Françoise Gilot, in her book “Life with Picasso” explains:

“I suggested that since all the elements of the composition were perfect and it was only the question of balance that bothered him, he try the solution he had brought to my portrait: cut out the skull from a piece of paper and move it around in different areas of the canvas. He cut out another skull form and, hiding the painted one with one hand, moved the paper skull wherever he felt it might prove sufficiently disturbing. He finally found a spot that was much more unexpected than the original one and provided just the kind of fateful juxtaposition he was seeking, where the balance hung by a thread. Then he was satisfied.”

This is such a simple yet powerful way to test a change you want to make to a painting in progress. You can judge directly the visual impact of the change and also find unexpected placement of elements.