Black and White

The last two Saturdays I attended Kevin Weckbach’s class. Oct 30 was the critique for the month’s homework assignment. I had not been in town to attend the class at the beginning of the month so I had to glean what I could out of the email that was sent with the assignment. I misread it, so I did the following still life thinking it was a use of “mother” color and that mother color was BLACK (ie every color I put on the canvas should include black in the mix, even if the “color” being applied is white). Instead it was supposed to be a still life of “Black on Black.” To do this I should have had a black backdrop and all the objects should have been black. The Reflective objects I used where fine as well, since they would have reflected all the black around them to make them appear “black.” I failed in that I did not do the assignment correctly, but I passed in that I did the project correctly based on my criteria. I also timed myself so this was a very quick painting. I gave myself 1.5 hours to do a 14”x18” canvas. I cropped out a roll of blue paper towels as they just didn't add anything to the composition.

November 6 we painted in class doing “White on White.” The same concept using all white objects, back drop and table top. It is 11x14 and it took me the whole class time to do it. (10 am-1pm) We did not get to a critique but Kevin said I was getting it. The point of these exercises is to pay attention to the color variations within a color grouping, ie there are warm whites and cool whites and what reflects into or bounces off of each surface also impacts the color.(that is a billy goat's horn (hollow) on the right-not really a white but we got away with it.)