Travel Paintings + Sargent Portrait Exhibit.
As a reflection on the year nearly behind us, I'm looking back at my travel photos and painting from them in my studio. Plus: taking advantage of a local museum exhibit.
Hello friends,
Welcome to this latest installment of my monthly newsletter. My objective with this newsletter series is to show you art that I’ve made and other art that I’ve seen and am inspired by. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you are enjoying peace in your life here at the end of the calendar year. And of course, I’m hoping the fires of the world (literal, political, and otherwise) turn a corner for the better in 2024.
Read on for my thoughts about my current studio painting project and a visit I made to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts special exhibit Fashioned by Sargent.
TRAVEL PAINTINGS
Earlier this month, I rummaged through the photos in my phone looking for nice travel shots from the past year to paint from. I was fortunate to visit some really beautiful places this year, and this exercise of revisiting the photos was rewarding all on its own. I picked out nearly 20 images and started working through them. While other work is available now on my website, I will add these paintings there when they are dry in the coming few weeks.
Here are a few details shots from paintings I worked on recently. More images and videos are available on my Instagram profile. All of these paintings are available for purchase, but they are not dry enough to ship just yet. If you have interest in any of them, feel free to send me a message.
I’ve come to learn that painting from photographs is taboo within some painting circles, and I understand the reasons why. Painting outside, from life, really is the best way to see light and color with your human eye and then represent that scene with color, line, and shape on the canvas. And at the same time, it’s often not very practical to paint outside. Limits on time or crummy weather can really zap the opportunity to paint outside. And my objective is to keep painting; I’d rather paint from my own photos than not paint at all. At this point, after painting more outside this past year than ever before, I can now apply some of the lessons I’ve learned outside when painting from photos indoors. For example, a blue sky in your imagination is never as blue as the sky you see outside with your eyes. I have dialed way back on the blue in my studio paintings. And sometimes the sky contains no blue, just gold, or just pink.
Check out this short video I compiled using footage I filmed while painting these Spanish farm fields, from a photo I took from a moving train when traveling back in June.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT EXHIBIT
Last week, I went to see the special exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Fashioned by Sargent. This exhibit includes dozens of portraits that Sargent painted in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the fashion refers to actual or similar clothing that Sargent painted his subjects wearing, which are included in the gallery alongside their corresponding painting. In this way, visitors get a 2D and 3D experience, and also learn about the museum’s preserving and presenting of textiles.
Even though I tend not to paint portraits (maybe in 2024?), I admire the minimal number of brush strokes that Sargent used in some cases to show shape, texture, and distance. Likewise, his use of color to show the near versus far, and shadow versus light are all examples worthy of study.
Sargent, an American born in Italy in 1856, lived and worked primarily in Europe. He is famous for oil and watercolor paintings of both landscapes and portraits. Sargent painted an estimated 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, plus uncounted sketches and charcoal drawings. His father was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and as a professional painter, Sargent always had close ties to Boston’s academic and fine art communities. Local individuals, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, and local institutions like the Boston Public Library, Museum and Fine Arts, and Harvard’s Widener Library regularly called upon him and supported his work.
You can read more online about the life and times of Sargent (and his contemporaries, like Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla who I wrote about back in June). I’ll show here a few details from the exhibit that I was especially drawn to.
You can see the full image of these seven Sargent paintings here:
Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel, 1903 (MFA Boston)
Portrait of Madame X, 1884 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Henry Lee Higginson, 1903 (Harvard Art Museum)
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892 (National Galleries of Scotland)
Sir Philip Sassoon, 1923 (Tate Modern)
Ena Wertheimer, 1904 (Tate Modern)
Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881 (Hammer Museum)
Thanks for reading! Please feel free to reach out if you have questions about my work. I’ll send out another newsletter in mid-January. Until then, best wishes for the holiday season and a bright new year.