Color Massing II

Describing a breakthrough he had while struggling with a landscape painting, 19th century American painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder wrote, “…the old scene presented itself…and before my eyes , framed in an opening between two trees. It stood out like a painted canvas…three solid masses of form and color: sky, foliage, and earth. The whole was bathed in an atmosphere of golden luminosity. I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work at hand. I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color, and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white, and brown in great sweeping strokes. As I worked, I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas! Exultantly I painted until the sun sank below the horizon. Then I raced around the fields like a colt let loose and literally bellowed for joy!” *

A gallery of color massings from the centuries:

*From Painters on Painting, edited by Eric Protter

Andrew Crane

On his blogsite Andrew Crane states: “I paint. Sometimes I paint on concrete.” I like how he cuts through the Romantic b.s. that artists can fall into when they try to use words to describe what they do. These days it’s all too easy to call yourself, or anyone else, an “Artist.”  To be a Painter, you have to paint.  And what you paint with, i.e. the medium itself, and what you put the paint on, in terms of a surface, and how you put the paint on that surface, are the first and most fundamental questions you have to answer. What you paint, as my teacher Robert D’Arista said, “…is the real angel you have to wrestle with.” That’s a question for another time.

Check out the link at left for Crane’s site to see more images, or access it here at: http://andrewcrane.posterous.com/