Painting the Primary Books Alla Prima

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?