Hmm…I’m in the mood to talk art tonight. How about a two for one special?
For “Little Paper Mountain”, we have an 11 x 14 still life of a simple geometric form on a flat plain with mountains in the distance. It is all in grayscale.
The geometric form is in fact a sheet of printer paper folded into a random shape and posed on a table. The paper is blank; the great differences in shading are solely due to lighting angle. The main goal of this exercise was to discover how lighting angle can create great differences in perception of what is physically a single colored object. I had to carefully compare the value of each polygon while live viewing the object to ensure that the darkness was correct when painted on canvas. I completed the scene by rendering from the mind a background of mountains. I tucked the paper object into the stretcher bars behind the painting as a souvenir.
During another group session, I took this idea to a greater extreme with “Paper Mountain Oasis”, an 18 x 24 inch canvas. For this one, Olga took a two-tone striped sheet of paper and added random folds to it. Then we each got to paint it from our own angle in the room; it was of course crucial that the “mountain” not be moved until we were all done. By doing this with striped paper, one discovers that the lighting angle effects tend to be so extreme as to make a dark color directly in the light brighter than a light color off sides of the light. I completed the scene with a small oasis in the foreground and a series of mountains in the background.
The paper mountain used in this scene sat around on the table for what seems like months…and then one day it disappeared. I never bothered to inquire what Olga did with it…it is surely filed away in her collection of reference material for future use.
🙂
