Painting a Day - Week 5

This week's paintings are inspired by Mark Rothko's works. After being pushed for the past few weeks with varied subjects, color palettes, brush strokes, styles, etc., I've settled on branching out with something abstract to simplify things a bit. Color studies seemed ideal as I love to paint with different colors and see how they play off one another, and Rothko is quite well-known for doing this beautifully.

Inspiration:

Featured from Top Left to Bottom Right:

- No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum) 1958

- “Untitled, 1960”

- UNTITLED (RED ON RED), 1969

- No. 17, 1957

- Untitled, 1959

- Untitled no. 17, 1961

My Works:

Initial underpaintings

Second coat on underpaintings

Third coating

Finished paintings

Reflection:

This weeks painting schedule was unconventional for me due to a five day weekend at school. Due to this time off, I noticed that my painting approach was influenced upon returning to work on these paintings. Additionally, Rothko's abstract work was a diverse style for me to begin with. Overall, I loved learning more about color and oil paint while working on these paintings, and I had fun getting a break from tighter brushstroke and detail oriented painting.

Approach -

Instead of implementing my conventional one-painting-a-day practice as I have in the past weeks, I worked on all four of these paintings more or less simultaneously. I had researched Rothko's techniques for his famous color studies paintings before beginning and I knew the significance of painting in layers. Therefore, I decided it would make sense to put down a layer of color on each canvas every time I came to the studio and come back when this layer had dried. The first posted photos show my beginning steps with paint layers.

Although Rothko worked with various substances such as resins to dilute his oil paint and build transparency, I figured an effective alternative would be thinned down layers of paint with my usual linseed oil. You can see in my first three underpainting photos that I was working with VERY thin paint that was extremely wet and at some points even dripped down the canvas. It wasn't until I came back from my fall break at school that I realized I was needing to apply paint more thickly to achieve stronger colors.

Results -

It was harder to know went to call it quits on this week's paintings since I didn't have a designated time limit on each painting session. Some studio visits I was in and out pretty quickly, and others I stayed for an hour and a half. I found it easy to put down a color that I liked on one painting, think it was successful with it's surrounding colors in a piece, and then completely change all of the colors within that painting the next time I came in. At least four hours were put into completing these works in total but I think they could almost all use more time or development with colors to deepen their values or adjust their compositions.

The piece that feels most successful to me, is the far right painting or the last one pictured on this post with a darker burgundy background. I think the two floating colors I used (the light pink and blue grey) show more dimension in them and are best blurred into the background color. Some of my other pieces didn't feel like they were blended out quite as well or as strongly integrated into the background, but they each taught me different things.

Overall -

Studying Rothko's works throughout the last two weeks gave me a much greater understanding of how to best build color and give it depth, while learning what strong color relationships can do. I love how powerful a painting as simple as these can be - three main colors, two main shapes, and a whole range of different emotions can be conveyed to a viewer.

This week was much less frustrating for me as the color mixing felt therapeutic and it was nice to focus strictly on color instead of brush stroke technique, etc. I'm now looking forward to playing with color more and attempting more Rothko-style paintings in the future!