Colored rice

A reader asked me;
"Interesting how you did the brushstrokes. I didn't quite understand when you were describing putting down each stroke of the same color near each other. Do you mean you didn't overlap them..so they would be separate grains of rice? For movement-the purpose?"

I mentioned this in passing a few days ago. I said that I laid the strokes separately from one another when I was doing this kind of impressionist painting. Now, a few may overlap but I try to keep most of them separate. If I have a brush loaded with a color, I try to place each of those colors discreetly, in a mark surrounded by first white canvas and then a different note. I describe these paintings as looking like they are made from colored rice. If you run the brush strokes together you lose the effect.

I am using optical mixing of the hues here. This is not really divisionist color like some of the French impressionist used, I am not putting down a blue note next to a yellow note to get my greens, but I am allowing the colors separately placed to assemble in the viewers eye. It gives a fluttering, lively and happy look. Below is a Childe Hassam from the athenaeum.com

Hassam and Metcalf, good friends, were the primary exponents of this kind of handling. I learned it from them. Do you see how the little highly colored strokes are placed? Here is a Hibbard doing a similar thing.

This painting is a little broader but the technique is the same.The rice grains are more planar and follow the form more, but the notes are laid side by side and separate from one another. Below is a lovely Hassam.This is also from the Athenaeum.org.

This should be a large file and if you click on it should give you good detail to examine his handling.

Here is a detail showing the separate marks he has made. If you were to pull the marks together the vibration would cease and it would be a tonal painting. If you add this method to your bag of tricks there are times when it will be extremely useful, even as an area with in a larger painting that is not handled in this way.

I am getting requests from readers to tell them where within this blog they can reread certain things they remember my saying. I can't find anything in it either. I may have to come up with a table of contents of some kind now, it is so huge that it is becoming impossible even for me to remember what is where. The archive descriptions have way to many posts. I am scratching my head for a solution to this and I will let you know when I figure one out.

Also I have a few slots open in the workshop at the Sunset Hill Inn. I talked to two people today and they were interested. I told them I could save them a year of screwing around. I believe I can......for you too. The information is here.