Author: Ifat Glassman

Another sunset cliche? I think not!

| Ifat Glassman

(Click image to Enlarge)

An artist friend once old me that if what you want to create has already been done, there is no point in creating it.

I couldn’t disagree more. This painting above, “Yseult”, by Frank Francis Bernard Dicksee (1853-1928), is a painting of a woman at sunset and could be easily seen as a cliche. The subject matter is certainly not un-repeating. But looking at it, one can experience a profound and unique moment. One can feel the vastness of the sea, the isolation and sorrow of this moment as the world is in its utmost beauty, laid open before her, at her fingertips.

So long as one is not blind to her face and the content of the painting, one is being carried away into a powerful emotional experience. To that moment all of us know, of feeling truly alone (not lonely; alone) in a vast universe, no commotion around us to distract us and no cheery conversation that occupies our mind. A moment of facing one’s own life, the reality of one’s own existence in the world and perhaps of one’s mortality. It is a moment of looking at one’s existence in a metaphysical sense.

This painting is grand, yet more paintings with a beautiful woman at sunset, at sea can be powerful. It is not the subject matter that matters – it is how strongly an artist believes in their message – how strongly they are inspired by it and are devoted to that and that alone.

An artist should stay true to their passion and disregard all other considerations in choosing what to create. Nothing one creates in that state of mind can ever be a replica, no matter what physical things one draws upon to paint or how many times they have been painted in the past.

 

My weekly post #16

| Ifat Glassman

A sketch I did from my head over the weekend:

I consider drawing from my head to be a very important part of my art training.
This stage of sketching out an idea is the most critical to the creation of art. I am essentially building the backbone for what might later become a finished work. This gives me the idea of what I want to see and achieve when I look at a real model. It might turn out that the pose in the sketch cannot be achieved quite the way I drew it in real life, or the model might not look the same and so on. The sketch serves as a blueprint and guide and can be combined with a real model to selectively create this vision in a realistic way (I should say, selectively real way).

On a different subject, I am officially on my summer vacation now. I return to school in mid September for my final year at Georgetown Atelier.

This summer will be dedicated to making and saving money for next year, some teaching, studying anatomy and perspective as well as moving out to a new apartment.
I am trying to sort some things out for myself, some personal and some relating to my profession. One interesting article I read today, was recommended to me by an acquainted who have had Atelier training himself: “Working on two tracks” by Steven Pressfield. I find the article very interesting. I find that the topic requires a lot of analysis and deserves serious consideration in depth.

The article discusses two possible paths of motivation as an artist: external vs. internal validation.
Granted, this IS indeed something to tackle and think about. Obviously, the right way to go is the path of objective internal validation. On the other hand, External validation is very valuable when other people are a good judge.
This, however, brings up some heavy heavy philosophical questions, one of which is the objectivity of art.
I do believe that external validation is important when it comes from the right source. When it comes from people whose opinion you respect for reasons for which you would judge your own art to be successful or unsuccessful.
Since it’s 1:30am now, I will postpone the continuation of the discussion to another time.

 

During the summer I will be taking a break from my weekly posts since I won’t have as much content to post. I will post occasionally when I have new things to share. 

Last note; I am selling my student work from the past 2 years. Some are 1 week paintings and others 5 months drawings. Sifting through it could be a bit like a treasure hunt.
If you find one you like, contact me about buying it. This will help me pay my tuition and related expenses next year and will be much appreciated.
Here is the LINK to the list of works and prices.

Thank you for your continued interest,

Ifat

My Tuition Fundraiser

| Ifat Glassman

Hello,

As part of my efforts to pay the tuition of my art school as well as related expenses next year I am offering my entire collection of student work for sale. Most of the pieces are framed.

These are all originals and will help support my efforts to make a career as an Artist.

My body of work includes drawings in graphite and pastel, monochromatic and limited-palette oil paintings. Some of these works are a result of 5 moths of work, some are shorter studies done in a week.

If you found one you would like to purchase or ask questions about, please contact me.

          

‘The Merchant’, $2200     ‘Journey’, $850               ‘At Rest’, $850

          

‘The Little Nun’, $480       ‘Seated Nude’, $660        ‘Potion Making’, SOLD

           

‘Reclining Nude’, $540      ‘Sea Shell’, $80                ‘Standing Nude’, $450

           

‘The world in                   ‘Greek Sculpture’, $450    ‘Woman with Red Scarf’,
my Hand’, $550                                                   $60

          

‘Sphere’, $80                  ‘Glass and Leaf’, $80       ‘Metal Vase’, $80

     

‘Standing Nude’, $80      ‘Seated Nude’, SOLD

          

‘Curved’, $60                    ‘Standing Nude’, $80        ‘Ashley’, $35

          

‘Allan’, $35                  ‘Triangular’, $35              ‘A Man’s Profile’, $35

 

My weekly post #14

| Ifat Glassman

This weeks was a rather frustrating painting experience for me. I hit a road block and spend part of this weekend searching for answers.

The painting I’m working on is of the study I shared in the past 2 weeks. I selected a large canvas for this one so I don’t feel “crammed”, but that turned out to be a bit more than I can swallow for this period of time. I run into a lot of problems. For one, working on a large scale makes it impossible to see the whole picture all at once while working on one particular area, unless you step back.
It is easy to become so involved with the painting process and forget to do it, resulting in a well painted area that does not match the rest of the painting.
Yes, big bummer.

Secondly this size introduced me up close to a problem I was having all year long: the style or method of applying paint.
See, oil paint, is by nature a very “blendy” substance. It is rather easy, in my opinion, to make a seamless smooth transition between two paints on a canvas by smooshing them into one another with a brush. However, that creates a surface that is unnatural since most surfaces in real life are not stiff and perfectly smooth. They have small variations in them. This raises the question, how should one use paint, a might mooshy substance but achieve that slighty rough effect?

Here is a painting by William Adolf Bouguereau, a masterful painter (1825-1905):

(Click to enlarge)

You may think it is perfectly blended, but you’d be wrong. Take a look at this digital model to see how a truly seamless blend looks like (Link to the artist’s Deviant Art page):

It looks like plastic (though in this case it was probably intended).

In contrast look closely at the shadow on the neck in Bouguereau’s painting:

You’d notice that the shadow does not have one color, but actually 2: it seems like the darker one is on top of the lighter one without covering it uniformly. This repeats throughout the entire figure. This is what I want to learn to do. I’m not quite sure how he actually achieved this, but I would guess that he softly scumbled the darker paint on top of the lighter one after the lighter one was dry or nearly dry.

Here is an example of a painting that I find very “smooshy” (by a contemporary artist named David Kassan).

This is what oil paints will naturally do for you if you don’t learn to manipulate them to meet your goal.

Working on a large scale, every patch of skin is huge, making it harder than normal to achieve a play of color throughout. But my little research has helped and I hope to overcome the time pressure and other issues and produce a painting that matches my vision, because this one, I really like and want to see done.

Finally, as I mentioned last week, 2 weeks from now my Atelier will have a graduation party. If you live in the Seattle area, please come and feel free to bring friends and family. It is a very nice event & don’t forget to introduce yourself to me.
Here is an invitation featuring my painting on it!

-Ifat

Current project and thought on Anatomy (weekly #13)

| Ifat Glassman

I am now working on the final painting of the year. It is a long, 4 week pose, from a live model, as always.

I showed the color study for it last week:

It is now transferred to a big canvas (linen on wood panel), 18” X 32.5”
Pretty much life-size. I’ve never worked so big before, this should be interesting (or at least, a very humbling experience to go through in the 2 weeks remaining).

This one is my favorite subject matter from the 2 years I’ve been studying at Georgetown Atelier.
A second close would be This one, with a third fourth and fifth for This, This and This.

In fact I like this one so much I already picked a frame for it, which is pretty unusual for me.
If I am satisfied with my painting when I’m done with it, I will be displaying it at my school’s end of the year party, June 30th (in Seattle).
More about this party at the end of the post.

I recently bought an excellent anatomy book by Elliot Goldfinger, which I’m using to study the underlying anatomy for this current pose.

I’ve asked myself yesterday what is the point of studying anatomy?  My initial answer is that I have natural curiosity to understand why something appears the way it is: what’s under the skin that makes the skin look a certain way. Then I thought to myself, “is it really necessary? After all, you can see that there is a bump here, skin fold there – is it really important to know what’s under it to be able to describe it?” And I answered myself “yes”. Because knowing the underlying elements (muscles and bones) help the artist see connections that he wouldn’t otherwise notice, as well as allowing him to notice subtle yet important changes in the skin’s curvature because knowing that a muscle is there helps the artist know to look for it via value difference or something like that.

For example, look at a shoulder:

For someone who doesn’t know anatomy, it would be mighty intuitive to describe it like this:

Then, if they had to replicate that line from memory it might look something like this:

Yes. The notorious Mr. Noodleman.

However, the shoulder area is composed of several main structures which give it a more specific form:

The spine of the scapula, to which the deltoid muscle is attached, and the trapezius muscle, which forms that diagonal shoulder line coming out of the neck. If one looks closely, there is an angle break where I drew the arrow, between the trapezius and the deltoid (link to illustrate).

This is so subtle and can easily be missed without knowing that it’s there. And once you know it’s there, you can no longer draw noodleman anymore, because you know that that curve should be broken down into more segments than 1. 🙂

The more I know anatomy, the more it will free me to be able to work from imagination and the faster I can draw and focus on more important things, like what inspires me about a subject.
I don’t mean “knowing anatomy” in the sense of memorizing every bone and muscle under the skin, but rather knowing practical anatomy – practical for artists, that is, not for doctors.

 

Now a bit about where I’m at with my education: I am now finishing my second year of training, after which I will have one more year to go.
I study at Georgetown Atelier in Seattle.
Next year I will be the senior student and the only one in my year, painting in full palette.
Other than me there will be two more painters in the school, which are just starting out and the rest of the students (9 of them) will be drawing.
I am a little nervous about that. Up until this point I always had more senior students to consult and learn from, but no more.
All 6 of them will be graduating in 2 weeks after 3 years of hard work.

Our graduation party showing everyone’s work, including mine, will be held at the school, on June 30th, 5-9pm.
It will have lots of art, music, refreshments, people and a really neat ” busy art studio” environment.
If you are in the area I would be happy to meet you and show you around, everyone are invited to the party and I will be very happy to see anyone who has interest in my art. Feel free to invite whoever you’d like. Here is the event on Facebook: Link. I would be delighted to see you there.

-Ifat


 

 

 

Creating art as introspection (weekly #12)

| Ifat Glassman

My core motivation in making art is a process of self discovery and contemplation.

Drawing or painting an image from my head allows me to look at it as a concrete and better understand what it is I had in mind. It is a process of translation from something abstract in my mind to a physical representation of it.

As I’m creating the drawing, I would feel compelled to move some parts, increase certain aspects of the gesture or minimize them, have the head turn a certain way, have the character look a certain direction or have a certain expression – I don’t always know all the parts beforehand – sometimes they become clear after I put down some core part of the idea I had in mind.

The best examples to illustrate this can be found in my old drawings (about 10 years ago) when I was drawing from my head. These drawings are anatomically bad, but they have something good. The stuff that makes art – art. That spice that cannot be mistaken for any other – authentic introspection (or inspiration).
They show a process of discovering the physical representation of something I found interesting and appealing, the process of finding that translation.

For example, in the drawing above, I had in mind a certain character, which was best expressed in a moment of fleeting attention to something.
Usually, no one would give this drawing a second or a first look because it is technically poor, but, wait one minute longer, see if you can find something interesting about it that would make you want to see this woman as a well-developed painting.
What I see, is a face and an expression one rarely encounters. She seems cold and mildly interested in what she is looking at, but at the same time she seems like a person who is not easily interested in things because she knows so much already (not because she is shallow or not curious as a person).
For me, the drawing started from a similar feeling to how this woman seem, and the motivation to draw it was a compelling urge to make it real so I can look at it, move some lines, change things, move her eyebrows up or down, decide if her mouth should be open or closed until I know it’s captures “that thing” just right. I don’t know what “that thing” is as I put it, nor why it is better if she has her mouth open and not closed – those questions are answered later, maybe, say, 10 years later as I’m looking at it, or ideally, after the first sketch and before I move on to working on making it a final, well developed piece.

I go through a similar process in drawing the whole figure from imagination, or while describing a certain situation. In the next drawing , for example, I actually had the dragon in mind, and the lady with it was a derivative.

The dragon is upset – it has to go through a long journey chained and shackled. It’s sitting in a corner, looking at its chains and crying, while its captive is care free.
The funny thing about it is that the dragon is 50 times stronger than the woman – the chain is not secured to the ground, but loosely tied to a thin, brittle stick which the girl is holding. The dragon can escape at any time, yet it doesn’t know it because it is busy looking at its shackles and crying. Too busy following its captor obediently to realize how easily he can be free. The idea doesn’t start with a dragon, in this case I couldn’t tell you what the idea started as, it somehow just was in my mind but then I still had that need to see how it would look like, to go through the process of figuring this idea out.

I had a similar moment to that as I was working on the background for the current painting I’m working on at my school. This one, however is different because I have limited choice in the subject matter. I did, however, choose the background:

I was struggling with the background for a while, trying different things that didn’t work until finally, I gave my self permission to just put things down boldly, to put down what I really want to see. So I started by making the curvy line and darkening the area bellow it, then, I knew I wanted bright sky behind her, I put the ocean line and the sky, then I realized this could be the edge of a large round window on a ship.

This is how groping for ideas for the background looked like at the beginning:

 

One last thing I want to talk about relates to the content with which I started this post.
In the past I would draw, not knowing what my technical drawbacks were. Being unaware of any flaws, I felt free to put down whatever was on my mind. I had total freedom to explore my ideas and I produced a lot of such fast drawings and paintings too.
After a while I realized the drawbacks and I was not satisfied with the technical side of my art anymore. I refrained from drawing because I was afraid to disappoint myself.
Today I realize, it doesn’t matter at all. You can always have room to improve the technical side of your work, as an artist, but what is equally valuable or of greater value, perhaps, is to be able to express your ideas; to have open communication with your subconscious and to be able to put down lines to create a drawing like the first one I shared here, of a woman’s face.
Today, equipped with better knowledge and experience I can improve the anatomy of that face, but I could never get back that moment and expression had I not put them down. If all I focused on was getting the anatomy right, all I would have now is one more anatomically accurate face. Boy, am I glad I didn’t worry about all that stuff!

The realization I had was that as an artist, preserving your soul is just as hard a job as improving your technical skills. You must give yourself permission and place to screw up in technique; to be wrong; whatever it takes, but keep that “channel” to your subconscious open.
Creativity is a habit, but a fragile one that needs to be nurtured and guarded. The good news is that all it really takes is your own permission.

Today I am celebrating my 31st Birthday. It is not a coincidence that today of all days I am sharing my oldest work which is also technically worst, something you would expect an artist to keep hidden in their closet.
As an artist, it is THOSE paintings and not my current ones (which are technically superior) which I would celebrate primarily. Those have my soul, these have my mind (as well as some of my soul). I find both equally difficult to make and eventually I will have the combined challenge of both things.

I hope that by putting my old work here for display for all to see, I am giving courage to someone else out there to embrace their own work and cherish their inner “spark”: don’t trade it for a better technique or for compliments. It just ain’t worth it, man.

I wish myself a good birthday and a successful and happy year to come.
Why, thank you, that’s very nice of you to say, Ifat. You too. 😉

-Ifat

The painting process during a short pose (weekly #11)

| Ifat Glassman

Here are the stages I went through while painting a portrait during a short amount of time (5 days, 3 hours in the mornings). I painted this a couple of months ago, when I started expanding my palette.

I started out with a pencil study to decide what I want to include, how to crop the painting and to study the general value range.
Then, I started working straight on the canvas, blocking-in the figure with thinned-out paint and brush. The next day when the underpainting was dry, I started applying paint using about 7 colors. I run out of time before I could complete the painting but I still enjoyed the process.

Here it is:

Pencil study:

Paint Block-in:

The developed Underpainting:

The painting after additional 2 days:

I think it’s interesting to see the facial expression and mood change from version to version. One of the major challenges I encounter and will encounter in painting is how to live up to that initial vision a painting has for me.
Going through various difficulties in the execution of a painting, it is hard to still keep in mind that initial inspiration and vision, but I think doing so makes the painting better.

-Ifat

My finished portrait painting (weekly #10)

| Ifat Glassman

Friday I finished my 4-week painting. Here is a picture of it that I took with my cellphone:

(Click to Enlarge)

I’ll post a high quality picture after the painting is dry enough to varnish (which revives the color and reveals finer details).

I had fun painting this one.
Because of the subject, I felt comfortable painting more loosely than I usually do. The reason for that was that an unblended brush stroke would end up looking like a wrinkle in the skin and stay true to the subject.

This means that I did not make an effort to blend brush strokes into existing paint on the canvas and just let them sit on top. Another aspect of this is that I built up my paint in layers working wet into wet. So, suppose I wanted to paint the feather, for example, first I would put the background, then I would put the colors of the halo of the feather (I wanted it to have a bluish halo), then I put some dark brown, which is the average dark part of the feather and finally built up the lighter paints on top, letting them sit there without blending them into the canvas.

I will try to continue the same method of working on the next long pose – we will have a young woman.

 

I find that I really like finding similarities among objects, as much as I like finding the differences. I may think of the structural separation between the nose and the cheek, but then find that they are similar in value because the light is hitting them both equally, creating very little separation between the two planes. It is a challenge to describe the differences and the similarity at the same time. I enjoy this challenge and I am curious to see to what balance I would eventually arrive to in my style of painting.
Finding differences is more of my natural inclination and I hope the balance will end up being more on the “similarity” side.

For a reason I don’t yet know, subconsciously, I think of being “true to what I see” primarily as being able to find distinction between things rather than similarity. I think that deep down inside, I think that it is the separation from other entities that gives something its identity, even though its similarity to other entities is part of identity just the same. For example, an apple is an apple because it is different than a banana (it’s green, firm etc’), but also because it is similar to a banana (it’s sweet, edible etc’).

Or to pick an example that relates to painting: An object in a bright light is distinct from a neighboring object in the light (they have different shapes and colors), but they are similar in that they are both in the light. The question is, which should takes precedence when painting them – The similarity or the difference?

My answer is: It depends on what the theme of the piece is (I think of it as the “actual subject”, as oppose to the subject matter, which is a different thing). If these are just background objects to the “actual subject”, then it is better to describe them as just “things that have bright light hitting them” and play on their similarity. If these are the actual subject, though, it would be better to emphasize their difference.

The challenge is, then, not to obsess over any particular object and describe it to perfection if it is not the “actual subject” of your piece. This sort of obsessing is easy to do, since when painting it, it is the center of the artist visual focus (Last week I quoted my instructor about this).
I think the key to avoiding the error of over describing something is to keep in mind the actual subject of your artwork at all times. This is achieved by staying emotionally connected to what it is you find appealing in the painting you are creating at all times.

I am discussing this a little too soon, though. I am still an art student and what I create are studies, not art in the full sense. I learn to see and describe value, color, paint handling and so on. As such, they don’t necessarily have an “actual subject” – not a subject I chose and not one I am necessarily emotionally attached to. This is OK, this is the way a school should work, in my opinion, since the primary focus should be technical.

Next year, which will be my final year, I plan to work on a project that would involve more of working from imagination and putting a figure in an environment. That project will be one where I will apply the above thinking more.

Have a good week and I appreciate your interest,

-Ifat

 

Painting and Abstracting (weekly #9)

| Ifat Glassman

Progress with my painting: 2 weeks ago I posted a drawing and the study of the painting I’m working on now at my school. Friday I took a picture of it with my cellphone. This picture is unfortunately not true to color, please take that under account when viewing.

This week’s plan: Work on the shirt and vest, finish the hat, the background, and do final touches on the face and neck.
This picture shows the “sinking in” phenomenon very well. It’s a phenomenon where the oil pigments appear lighter than they are and in a different color. The vest, for example, appears black-gray even though it is brown in real life. This is why it is important to cover the painting with a thin layer of oil before working back into it to revive the color and see it correctly. This process also has its own difficulties; for example, if the paint is not thoroughly dry, the oil may lift it up, it may even get smeared into new areas and make the painting “muddy”. It’s therefore very important to be in control of the painting and know exactly what parts are wet and what parts are dry.

Abstractions.

One thing I thought of is that the skill of figure drawing involves abstracting things about the figure and then using those abstractions as a guide when drawing or painting. The abstractions can take a literal form, such as: “the eyes are located in the halfway point of the head”, or a more perceptual form, such as remembering the general shape of the eye socket.
I’ve been doing a lot of this process of abstraction, which I exercise at home sometimes by sculpting or sketching from my head. Here is one small plasteline-clay sculpture I did this weekend:

I don’t know why, but I find that the pleasure in working entirely from my head is not surpassed by any other process of making art. I realize that the result is not as good as working from a reference, but I wish I knew what causes this feeling of delight and how I can replicate it when working from a reference.

I think it is really important as an artist to let your emotions run the show. I don’t quite know how to explain what I mean perfectly; I am not talking about any sort of random emotion that comes up during work (that can actually be an obstacle), but rather about the feelings relating to the artist’s subject matter. Some parts of the subject matter are bound to carry more interest than others for the artist. I think it’s OK to be bored with some aspects of the painting and let that affect how you paint. In fact this is what produces a good painting in my opinion because it replicates that feeling the artist had about what he paints in the viewer’s mind. It enhances the parts that are interesting and central about the piece and sends to the background the things that are not. It is, perhaps, the closest a person can get to experiencing something through another person’s mind.

Lastly, I’d like to share a small piece of writing by my teacher, Tenaya Sims, which I found interesting and which relates to “seeing through someone else’s eyes”. This is from the latest Newsletter of Georgetown Atelier (where I study).

The basic idea is if you approach painting your shadows in a thin/transparent manner, while building the textural qualities in the lights,  it will increase the depth and three-dimensionality of your painting. Executing shadows in this way helps keep them more atmospheric and ‘shadowy’, and pushes them back into the depths of the painting.  People naturally focus on one area at a time when looking at anything, and usually look first at the illuminated forms rather than those in shadow. Everything not in our focus is more hazy, or by definition is ‘out of focus’. For this reason it’s more effective to simulate the way people see in our paintings than to render each passage equally in focus. Putting in too much information in the shadows, or painting them too thickly (resulting in the surface of the painting coming forward) can negate the effect of how we naturally see. On the other hand, building up the texture and opacity in the lights, or ‘sculpting the lights with paint’ as I like to say, helps to enhance the focal areas of the painting and brings them both literally and perceptually forward to the viewer.

Simulating the ‘way that we see’ in a painting is much more difficult than it sounds. This is simply because while we’re working on any one particular area, that area is in focus for us, but may not be for the viewer taking in the whole scene of the painting on first glance. It requires us to plan out the ‘global relationships’ of our painting, and remember to stick to that global plan even while working in specific ‘micro’ areas. It requires us to be both the General and Marine, or in other tems, know how our ‘shadowy village’ fits within its country.

This method of simulating the human way of experiencing what we see in a painting is a way to further refine an experience and bring it closer to how we experience it as conceptual beings rather than raw sensations (which is closer to what a camera sees). It’s a little bit like a double filter: seeing something after someone else saw it for you first.

 

I’ll end the post here.
Have a good week,
-Ifat

More on integration (my weekly post #8)

| Ifat Glassman

I find myself with only scattered thoughts to write about this week.

In my art school, Georgetown Atelier, I am still working on a 4 week long painting I posted about last week. More to come about that later.

 

One thought I had, is more about the subject of integration of the painting around its theme as the key to good art. Here is an example of how the lines of an artwork serve to enhance its theme. It’s a digital artwork I found on Deviant art. Here is the link to the page (and the artist who created it).

  

(Click to enlarge).

The lines in the right picture are added by me. They all converge into one direction: the direction of motion and they help convey the sense of purpose, motion and how the two of them are flying together (since these lines end up putting them in the same spot). That’s what the theme is: A a deep romantic bond based on a similar way of experiencing life: Instead of fear or weakness, finding joy and strength in this dangerous flight.

What I find interesting is that this sort of convergence of lines is not “classical”. I am definitely not an expert in art history nor in the study of composition, but I would bet ya, that nowhere in any art book about composition will you find a template that describes these lines of arrangement of focal points. The reason these lines “work”, I believe, is simply because they serve the theme – they serve the conceptual meaning of this work, and not because they happen to fall on spacial harmonies within the frame. In other words, they “work” because of the concept of the piece, not because of its precepts (it’s not the “purely visual” that makes them “work”).

Personally, what appealed to me about this digital work was the way it illustrated a deep bond: not through physical proximity, loving eyes or touch, but through spiritual values illustrated by each of them individually (and hinted by the way the male is looking at the female (I am tempted to say “man” and “woman” but am afraid of being targeted by a mob of angry nerds telling me that this is a different race than humans).

A small note: I don’t see myself painting in this style, but I very much like this artwork. I would often display different artworks here in different styles, none of them necessarily something I care to adopt as my own style. Please take it as such.
Later on I’d also like to “chew through” examples showing how value (how dark or light things are) can serve to enhance the theme or break it as well as how other elements in a painting can do that.

 

I’ll leave the rest for next week.
Have a good one!

-Ifat