Final Semester Week 10

Another week down into the history books...and the next one ready to fire off! This weeks was busy with many tasks, like building new supports for paintings, in fact one id drying now as I type this. I finished another painting, the one above entitled "Going Home" which is 1o x 20, oil of canvas. With only a few short weeks left I have to keep the fire burning bright. When the model didn't show up for class, Scott decided to take the class to his show which is currently running at Gross McCleaf a few blocks away from school.

Scott is always a dynamo teacher and it was really great to have him walk the class through the show and discuss his work and process. he described his way of painting as Slosh and Cut. He sloshes in big big areas of the painting and then cutting the shapes in the wet paint, in what he describes it as building a shape mosaic. Wet into wet paint paying very careful attention to the placement of the shapes and the percison of the shapes. and their opacity. He paints on a lead ground with no glazing or underpainting. he starts in directly working as fast as he can to block in the whole image. He feels that paint is most beautiful when you don't use a lot of medium, often scraping down entire sections or the entire painting at the end of a session and then attacking it all fresh the next sitting.

The painting above was done directly, all in one sitting

Scott believes that great paintings are as clear as the stripes on a flag, and by compressing the contrast between the lights and darks he ends up with more and bigger shapes of colors in his paintings. he feels that paintings should have a sense of coming into view before you can name specific things. He likened this to knowing a friend blocks away walking on the street by the shapes of their features before you can see their face and specific features clearly.