Painting Challenge 4 week 1and Portrait Class

We set the painting challenge to look at the affects of light and how to depict it using tone and colour, so too in this weeks Figure / Portrait session.

The work of Bernard Dunstan was the focus of our discussions. I have attached a painting where both interior and a exterior light is depicted with great impact. It is rewarding to try and decipher the painting technically and pictorially. So for example the dark burnt sienna ground used in the painting is clearly discernible. How has this assisted the way the painting works? Additionally the composition in all the works we looked at aided the way the images are read. It’s good to question how this is achieved, and what pictorial devices are used. In some of the figure paintings the quite radical use of shapes and angles is used as a counterpoint to the form of the figure, and this brings our gaze around and back into the picture.