Point Dume Perspective © Marian Fortunati 18" x 14" Oil on RayMar Panel |
The bluffs above Point Dume are a total dream in the spring. The native coreopsis just absolutely light up the whole top of the promontory. In this painting I am looking down the path toward the sea from the south side of famous outcropping north of Malibu known as Point Dume.
Learning From David Gallup
I started this painting on one of the days when studying with David Gallup in his studio. He was in the middle of painting three of the most amazing paintings for his upcoming traveling museum show about the Channel Islands. I have seen many of his paintings after they were already painted but seeing him as he makes changes and progress is totally awesome. It's not that he paints much while we are in class, but we were able to see the steps from one week to the next and of course David delights us with stories about his thinking and processes. Fabulous!
Stymied
While in class, I sketched in the basic forms and began to paint the cliff and the coreopsis. But I really wasn't getting anywhere. David realized that I wasn't really "feeling" it and came over and mixed up beautiful (I mean absolutely beautiful) piles of paint of the same value and began dragging his brush through several of the piles. He demonstrated painting the sea. The direction of his brushstrokes varied - sometimes it was horizontal, sometimes vertical. He is always telling us to vary our brushwork. Where I would have made the strokes all horizontal, he said it didn't matter. It was the value and the color of the work that created the motion of the water. After that demo, I just stopped painting and enjoyed listening to David and watching what he was doing.
Studio Work
A few weeks ago I decided to try again... maybe to "channel" David. (ha ha). I must admit, I did have fun mixing up beautiful piles of paint -- especially for the ocean. I also tried not to make the paint strokes uniform or in the same direction, but I'm afraid I wasn't as good at it as David was. I LOVE the way the colors of the ocean began to make the blank canvas into undulating waves approaching the point. I worked on the coreopsis and other plants and tried to make the path and shadows read. I liked it. I hope you do too.
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