• Special message: Enjoy this refurbished encore post from four years ago. A few decades ago, I was known regionally as a watercolor painter. Today, folks think I'm an oil painter. And most recently in a local show I was deemed a landscape painter. What's this all about? Why to folks feel it necessary to label artists
according to what they are using to paint with or what they choose to paint? The esteemed John Singer Sargent is often called a portrait painter, and when artists refer to his palette of colors, more often than not they are referring to his oil palette. Take a look at these two paintings by
Sargent. If you go to the WikiArt website and scroll through their archive of Sargent's paintings, you will find that many of them are done with watercolor and that he painted subjects other than portraits. So what is this tendency of ours that wants to label painters? It is true that many painters prefer a single medium just as Yo Yo Ma prefers the cello to other string instruments, and a lot of painters feel more at home with a single kind of content, but neither the medium nor the subject is the goal.
The point is how artists express themselves in whatever medium and with whatever subject. Back in 2012, I took a canoe trip down the Tugalo river. While one potential painting after another swept through my vision, I kept thinking watercolor, but when I settled down to do this new series about the river, I found it was asking to be interpreted with pastels.
This is not so different from the reason Beethovan composed some of his works for piano and others for violin and even a full orchestra. Two of the paintings from my Tugalo River series. THE MEDIUM MIGHT CONTAIN THE MESSAGE BUT THAT'S ALL! Whether the artist uses acrylics, oils, watercolor, pastels, colored pencil, earth pigment, gouache, color inks, encaustic, markers, dyes or whatever-- the material is just the vehicle of expression. It doesn't define the
artist. Enjoy a delightful weekend!
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Happy Painting,
Dianne
dianne@diannemize.com
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During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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