Sorolla Art Exhibition

Evening Sun, Jouquin Sorolla 1903

 

My husband John and I have just returned from one of the most inspirational art exhibitions I’ve seen in years, Sorolla And America at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Having long admired Joaquin Sorolla’s loose paint handling and brilliant portrayal of light effects we wanted to be sure not to miss this great opportunity to see his work in person.

Sad Inheritance by Joaquin Sorolla

The first painting in the show was a massive 10′ x 15′ canvas titled Sad Inheritance. A black cloaked monk slightly bending forward to help a crippled young man with crutches make careful steps into the sparkling sea water. Other children play in the distant waves, while some struggle at the waters edge, a very emotional painting which won him numerous awards.

Benito Perez Galdos, Joaquin Sorolla 1905

When he became well known he received so many portrait commissions that he had a hard time keeping up with them.

He was a very prolific painter, producing thousand of paintings and sketches in his lifetime.

Bacchante Sorolla y Bastida 1886

 

Everyones favorites of course where the beach scenes of playful children juxtaposed with weathered fisherman and lumbering oxen bringing the fishing boats ashore.

The photos in art books just can’t convey the grandeur of standing in front of one of his large canvases, knowing that he painted most of them plein air, on location.

Children on the Beach, Joaquin Sorolla 1916

 

Some of these paintings were in the San Diego show, some where from other collections. A great site to see more of his work is The Athenaeum. 

A new painting – Nuns at the Fountain

This image of two nuns in front of a fountain getting water was one I wanted to paint from the photos we took while in Italy this summer.

When faced with something like that sculpted fountain, things can get confusing, darks, lights swirling shapes… the best solution for me is to paint most of the picture upside down.

Turning the photo this way helps me to direct my brain to just see shapes of value and color instead of objects. This makes my process fun, because I am free to “play with paint” and not get hung up of “what things are”. The best part is when you turn the painting right side up, the image of the “things” appear like magic.

Before I started on this I had some minor adjustments to the composition, below is the original photo –

Look at the long horizontal light shape behind the two nuns. See how each nun plus the water fountain all are dark shapes that break into the light. Look at evenly those shapes fall- light space nun, light space, nun, light space water fountain, light space. It’s a little boring and would be helped greatly by just moving the left nun closer to the other one, and the whole group closer to the right side of the picture. Here’s my value sketch below, the first one is how it appears in the photo, the second, how I am going to regroup things-

Here is the almost finished painting-

At this point I like to get away from the painting for several days, than see if anything needs adjustment. Coming back to the image I am having a feeling that something is wrong with the light on the left side of the image, running down the sun struck side. So I start asking myself questions;

• Is the shape reasonably accurate? (I say reasonably accurate, because being a slave to the image is not really important to me). My answer yes
• Is the shape the right temperature compared with the rest of the painting? yes
• Is it throwing the composition off? Bingo – yes, my eye keeps getting pulled over there, I want to look at the nuns but that area of high contrast is fighting for my attention.

So this is a good reason to venture away from the original. I always say a painting is not the live image, it’s not the photograph, it is an entity all its own. Toning that area down a notch was what was needed to complete the painting, below