Hagan Tutorial

[sandyartist]

Scott..thanks for the hagan demo..what fun!! The painting is loose and exciting, great color..while I could not work this way, white canvas, then laying on the heavy paint, I do appreciate his insight and the time he spent to share with us...learned about color though...looking forward to the next lesson! Keep 'em comin'!!!!

[Drew Davis]

It's a good article. I think my favorite
point was the child-level view. Good example of what you can do with a limited palette, too.

I've been wondering, why "Impressionist", though? Perhaps my conception attached to the term is just too narrow. As I've said before, I'm not that good with Isms. But it's been coming up a lot recently, what with the Cafe project, this new article, and the critiques. Hagan's example doesn't have the broken brushwork I associate with Impressionism. He mixes paints on the palette, according to the text, rather than relying on optical mixing. It seems to have relatively finished surface and detail. It's got the right sort of immediacy, but then so does a lot of modern painting. Same with light; most paintings involve light, one way or another. So what makes this style Impressionist?

[sasha]

I can't be really historically accurate on this but impressionist paintings don't always have to involve optical mixing to the extent that the early french impressionists did. Many of the paintings of the american and britist impressionists were relatively dark and did include blacks as well as more flattened local color areas. The main idea was a piece which is done from life that gives an "impression" of the values and color rather than the meticulously finished renderings that were done pre 1870's.
The modern idea of working from photos is a little bit of a shift and is impressionistic style rather than true impressionism which was to capture the light and color from the real. The photo distorts the true play of color and we have to always rely on memory for the warm/cool/prismatic play that exists in life. I'm not able to get out and work from life either, so I rely on photos, though I find when I can work from life my sense of color is always much better.

Great lesson, wonderful sense of light.