Maine: Is 09 still on track to become the coldest wettest summer on record? Painters go up to Maine in summer because the light is so wonderful-- sunlight. We had two good mornings of sun, and 8 days of rain or fog. David shows us how to make luminous grays. We work on color for 2 weeks. He teaches us to do thumbnails, helping us to edit and see the big picture.
We none of us have any gray tubes of paint as far as I know. We mix our own. I have forgotten my gray chart, so I start another one adding some of my own favorites using the more opaque Holbeins. They find their way into my sketches. Which gray? They are not all the same. It matters which colors you use together. The wet is challenging but David is never daunted. He just gets on with it. One tries not to listen to the whiners.
As quaint and picturesque as Maine is, I did not come up here for the maple syrup or even for the lobstah. I am looking for colors to arrange on a piece of paper and relate to each other. Am I in first grade yet?
I have gained confidence and I share some of my gray mixtures with other students. They seem to like my work though it looks to elementary to me. I like my sketches better than previous years and I am less frustrated. Only one day I hated the painting I was working on and others liked it. Mainly I do not like mauve and I keep needing it in my gray paintings.
