Australian
Chiaroscuro
An Australian talking about painting the landscape and comparing it
with other countries' always says, "the light is so different." What
they mean is partly the unusual colours of this "wide brown land," but
also the intensity of sunlight and the depth of shadow, the sort of
thing that makes oils so convincing and watercolours often such a
disappointment here.
These chiaroscuro (from the Italian 'light-dark') drawings with brush
and ink capture the intensity and are maybe as convincing, to me at
least, as more colourful landscape renderings - you just have to fill in
the colours yourself, if you wish. The challenge from an artistic point
of view is to create a composition where shadows, rather than outlines,
create the forms and the illusion of 3-dimensional space.
These are originals, on a tan-natural Rising Stonehenge paper, about 19
x 29 cm or 7 1/2 x 11 inches, $200 each, mailed anywhere in a plain
brown envelope. (The variations in background tone are due to my
scanner, not because they're on different kinds of paper.) More to come,
definitely... I became inspired to do them thanks to my sister-in-law
Caroline, who loves the graphic quality of woodcuts and drawings such as
these.
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