From the Artist: I have enjoyed this project so much I wanted to do a few more I'm glad I did as the last is more suited than the one I was going to send. This is done from memory; I have photographed the scene a few times drawn and painted it before, so felt fairly familiar with the scene but didn't want to use a photo so as not to merely copy. It is in acrylic and I painted it with one fairly large square brush which stopped me being too fiddly with detail. I'm not sure it can truly be classed as abstract but you said you were giving us plenty of latitude with our interpretation of the project.
From the Painting Guide: The project is about abstraction, not true abstract. So reducing detail, conveying the essence of a scene or an emotional response to it. Painting from memory already reduces the level of detail you'd be able to include without invention (short of having a photographic memory, which is rare).
I like the dominance of blue in the painting, as if the river were asserting itself over the built environment on its banks. There's a lovely sense of the individual buildings crammed against one another, created through your use of color and tone. With an appealing degree of abstraction -- enough suggested detail for a viewer to recognize what's going on, but leaving much for the viewer's mind to fill in themselves from the emotional feeling to the painting. It's the kind of thing I visualized when I set the project.
It's an appealing composition too, with the two bridges uniting the composition and the river pulling my eye across the painting. The tiny figures on the bridge in the foreground compel me to come forward for a closer look, while the colors being used in them and the buildings creates a sense of unity to the composition.
From the Painting Guide: The project is about abstraction, not true abstract. So reducing detail, conveying the essence of a scene or an emotional response to it. Painting from memory already reduces the level of detail you'd be able to include without invention (short of having a photographic memory, which is rare).
I like the dominance of blue in the painting, as if the river were asserting itself over the built environment on its banks. There's a lovely sense of the individual buildings crammed against one another, created through your use of color and tone. With an appealing degree of abstraction -- enough suggested detail for a viewer to recognize what's going on, but leaving much for the viewer's mind to fill in themselves from the emotional feeling to the painting. It's the kind of thing I visualized when I set the project.
It's an appealing composition too, with the two bridges uniting the composition and the river pulling my eye across the painting. The tiny figures on the bridge in the foreground compel me to come forward for a closer look, while the colors being used in them and the buildings creates a sense of unity to the composition.