Lisa McShane Art

Thomas Moran,  Cliffs of the Green River, Amon Carter Museum,  Fort Worth Texas First, thank you Amon Carter Museum for allowing people to take photos of the paintings in your permanent collection! Artists learn from studying artists and without the freedom to take a photo to look at later, again and again, it is difficult to study paintings. For me it's important to look closely at the surfaces to see the hand of the artist. For instance, here are three closeups of the Moran painting. With the top photo I'm interested in his trees and the edges of the hill and sky. Beautiful clouds here and nice darks. The warmth and dark values in the foreground are interesting to see. But this closeup is what I'd wanted to really nail: the reflections in the water in the lower left of the painting. Thinly painted; very nice.

On Friday our workshop group hit the road and went to the exhibit , The Hudson River School, Nature and the American Vision , at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth Texas. It was about a 3 hour drive from Deborah Paris' home and studio in Clarksville, Texas. The Hudson River school exhibit was very good and I especially liked the work of William Hazeltine. Because it was a traveling exhibit, we weren't allowed to take photographs. However the museum's permanent collection is terrific and I took photos, including closeups of several key paintings. Here is Martin Johnson Heade, Marshfield Meadows, Massachusetts, ca. 1866-76. And here are the closeups I took because I'm working on a painting with rain: Tomorrow: more paintings

Closeup of Rattlesnake and the River with burnt sienna ground. T his winter I read in several sources that Sanford Gifford first stained his surface with burnt sienna.  I first read about this on Philip Koch's great blog  in a post titled Bold Power Hiding in Subtle Colors . And of course the next day an artist friend, James Lourie , forwarded me the link to Philip's post knowing how I'd love it! Loriann Signori wrote about it on her blog here , saying " Sanford Gifford stained his white canvas with burnt sienna, drew in white chalk and then glazed more rapidly. He would paint non-stop from sunrise to sunset when he began the color part of his painting. He had already worked out his color idea in his oil sketches. Gifford kept working and blending his glazed layers while they were wet. " David Dunlop, in a blog post titled Luminous Skies has a great, brief explanation along with images. (BTW: his blog is great, deep with information and his own wo...