tourist painting

we went to meet jj’s new buddy, a girl who will join the school in september. she is from new zealand but she and her family have been living in paris for a while already. she lives near gard du nord, so has a bit of a hike to get to school. she has played the cello since she was 5 and goes to various music camps and groups. jj was excited to hear this since she wants to organize a quartet. i’m looking forward to hearing her play.

i have given myself a bunch of tasks for painting, one of them being to do a painting quickly. i want to try to loosen up my style since i feel that my paintings are too uptight. i try to push and exaggerate the colors, but there is too much detail and they look too photographic. there is a fashion now for some artists to do a painting a day. funny, though, many don’t actually do “one a day”, they have watered down the concept to just do “one IN a day”. in any case, i figured if i could try to complete a painting in 1-3 hours, it would free up my style a bit and make it more “impressionistic”. the other task i had given myself was to try to paint tourist landmarks, but in a more artistic style. hopefully a classier style than the stuff the artists sell to tourists on montmartre. someone told me that you can actually make a pretty good living in a few months, selling paintings to tourists. in the past i would’ve called it “selling out”, but now, i figured that every hour i spend painting is improving my skill and if i can make a little money on it, it doesn’t matter what i do. so today i made a quick painting based on a photo i took of the eiffel tower – but just a part of the tower. i was quite pleased. i started with an orange base, because i had wanted to experiment with that. i saw another painter use it and then i looked it up on the web. it is a well known technique. i loved it. the orange peeks through the image and makes it feel more light. when i paint on white backgrounds i work so hard to cover every little bit of the canvas, but with this method i don’t have to do that.

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