Category: General

I added “alla prima” to the title today because yesterday we learned what it meant. A little review is good for the memory.

This style of painting has never appealed to me unless it is just WHAMO briliant.

Want to know why I don’t like this style of painting? Good question – glad you asked. It is because I’ve spent my entire life with myopic vision. That means if it isn’t a few inches from my face, it is blurry. Alla prima painting is BLURRY! The detail is fuzzed out, the edges tend to be indefinite, and personally, I’m sick of seeing the world that way.

Anyway, I digress.

After getting the yellow book painted,  I thought it looked plain. Boring. Lacking in detail. Fuzzy edged. Well, duh, it is alla prima’d up – that’s the way it is.

Nope, not in my studio, it ain’t! I put down the short square stiff brush (called a “bright” in Artspeak) and picked up a smaller brush that could be used for better edges. Not my best brush, because I was trying to stick to the program of being an alla prima painter. My best brushes squish to a nice point so I can try to draw with them as with a pencil. (Drawing with a paintbrush is considered a crime in ArtWorld. As I said yesterday, I am trying to be a law-abiding citizen of that place.)

What do you expect from a pencil artist of 30+ years? (time spent drawing, not my age, which does exceed 30 but by more than a single plus sign)

Sorry. Still digressing. Have a look at the finished painting. All the edges were wet so I had to hang it up and then the shadow from the bars of the window crossed it. (What do you expect when I am so darn rushed with this alla prima method??)

Then I went outside for a cigarette.

Just kidding! But if I was a smoker, that would have been a good time to smoke. I wasn’t able to do any therapeutic knitting because there was oil paint on my hands and I didn’t want to get it on my sweater in progress. So, I took it out on the blog.

Are you still wondering what the titles are? Any guesses?

After that last post I decided to paint the books. I carried them out to the workshop, photographed them in 29 different arrangements (yes, I counted), then decided to just see if I could slam out a small painting in one sitting (standing, actually).

Could I apply the paint thick enough? Could I make it look accurate in just one pass over the canvas? “Everybody else is doing it” – many of my painting friends, many of the artists whose work is selling on daily painting sites, many many artists paint “alla prima”, which means all in one session, wet-on-wet, single application with bold brush strokes. (that is not a literal translation – I don’t know Italian or Latin or whatever that is)

Here is the painting, step by step.

First, I mixed the colors (but didn’t photograph that step).

Then I drew it on the canvas.

I painted the background with the mixed color that passes for black. It is against the law in ArtWorld to use black. I try to be law-abiding. (But I want to know why it is manufactured if you aren’t supposed to use it??)

The common wisdom in painting is to go from back to front. That is why the background came first. The blue book is second because it is underneath (behind?) the other 2 books.

The red book sat upon the blue book.

And then it was the yellow book’s turn to get painted.

Nope, not finished yet. To be continued tomorrow. . .

Anyone wondering what the books’ titles are?

I painted a yellow pear and used a reddish background. It didn’t sell when other pear paintings did. I did some honest re-evaluating.

Here is the Before and the After.

Before.

After.

If you prefer the Before, please don’t tell me. I am not mature enough to handle it. Thanks.

Sincerely,

The immature California Artist