Balancing It All

My online class with Nicholas Wilton is so intense that I am actually dreaming about painting revisions in my sleep!  Nick provides many hours of image adjustment videos each week, in which he, or the other coaches, take student paintings and revise them in Photoshop to show how they could work better by applying the principles he's teaching.  Yesterday alone, we covered 150 paintings in a session.  The guy has endless enthusiasm and energy for the course!  It's really a fantastic way to learn since people paint in so many styles from realistic to abstract, and it's fascinating to see how the principles apply to diverse paintings and a great way to drive those principles home.

I find, though, that I don't always agree with changes he makes.  He tends to like things a lot busier than I do, so I'm trying to find a balance of taking those elements he teaches that are very powerful and applying them to my own work.  Right now I feel like I'm plodding along and analyzing every brushstroke.  I know that's necessary to absorb the info. and I'm hoping that eventually it will feel like second nature.

One principle Nick emphasizes is getting the eye to move all through the piece by having lots of high contrast elements in every part of it.  This is a painting I did before thinking about that principle.  It would never pass his test because the lower right corner has very little contrast to draw the eye down there.  But I like it this way.  I'm a big fan of breathing space in painting.

This one, done for class, shows the principles at work more with the eye pulled to every quadrant and side.  I like this approach too, but don't think it's a requirement for all paintings.

Funny he is having us use the Zorn palette (black, white, cadmium red dark, and yellow ochre) for our limited palette.  I never even heard of it before a couple months ago, and here it shows up in two classes.  I do love the range of colors from it!