After mentioning to my art teacher how much I enjoyed painting florals and how I was interested in finding a painter who had a unique approach to painting them, he mentioned the works of Jane Freilicher. I had never heard of this American artist before but fell in love with her fun Expressionist style after doing some research.
The following paintings are ones that I appreciated many aspects of - the colors, loose style, and creative compositions are all stunning and will be fun inspiration for the week!
Inspiration:
My Works:
Reflection:
Painting this week was a journey.... it felt like I started out on a strong note and had a clear sense of direction with what I wanted my landscape paintings to look like, but went downhill quickly as I got to the floral-inspired pieces. There were many frustrating moments to work through and lessons learned with each piece, but I'm grateful for the growth!
Painting 1 -
My first painting of the week was inspired by Jane Freilicher's, Wooded Landscape. I loved her isolated stretch of trees painted in the center of the piece with bare canvas showing through and drips evident at the bottom. As I always admire a certain tree line out in a field where I run on campus, I was inspired to attempt this scene first.
This painting came together in about 30 minutes and felt like it captured the movement of the breeze blowing through the tall grasses and the clouds moving, etc. I think it was successful with a more limited color palette as well which I was basing off of Freilecher's work, so this seemed like a comfortable painting to me. Overall, pretty smooth.
Painting 2 -
I really enjoyed working on this piece! After studying Italian Sunset by Freilicher, I was inspired to do a loose rendition of a recent sunrise photo that I had taken on a drive. I put down a light blue underpainting to start and then painted freely from here with changing colors and brushstrokes for the 20 minute period that it roughly took for me to finish this up. Although Freilicher's painting has many more light-toned colors and whites than mine, I enjoyed mixing up various darks to contrast with my underpainting.
Painting 3 -
It was with this painting that things felt like they began to go downhill :) I was attempting to go off of Still Life with Flowers by Jane Freilicher, and the first place where I felt I hit a 'finished' phase with this painting is photographed on the left of my posting. However, after taking a photo of this end product, I was not happy with the piece. I started attempting to fix this painting but proceeded to do that for an additional 30 minutes and did not think I was getting to a place of improvement. As an hour passed and I was still unhappy with what was on my canvas, my oil paint was starting to become thicker by the minute and muddied from all the color mixing going on. I stopped painting after an hour and a half, completely frustrated, and determined to try and touch it up the following day.
The photo on the right of this post is where I've left the piece now with it looking in no way similar to a Freilicher painting in any sort of way. It doesn't feel representative of her style or mine, but it did morph into a completely abstract and textural piece that has more interest now than what it started with in my opinion. I'm still not happy with it, but decided not to give it a full two hours of my time when these are meant to be worked on for up to an hour max.
Painting 4 -
As my third painting of a Freilicher floral didn't go as planned, I decided to try this again. However, the result was still rather disappointing for me. I began with a thin underpainting, compositionally moved the floral over to the left of the canvas instead of the right, and did my best to mimic Freilicher's loose brushstrokes around the perimeter of the flower pot. My abstraction technique did not seem to be going well for round two, and after starting to suffer from muddy coloring again, I scraped down the canvas of all paint except the original floral. I came back in with color on the right side of the painting and let it drip and get messy and called it quits around the hour mark.
Although I find this painting to be major improvement from my first floral attempt in Freilicher's manner, I don't think that this ended up reflecting her style in any way either.
Overall -
As stated already, I felt like this painting week began well for me with the first two landscape paintings and worsened as I attempted the florals with abstract backgrounds. Although I love what Freilicher's florals look like, I had trouble replicating this style in my works. I did work on staying patient while painting though and persevering to the end of two paintings when they didn't feel worth my time. I'm grateful for the learning that took place and the struggle for the progress it brings!