Title and Medium
"Tree Trunk". Acrylic on 25x40 cm stretched canvas. White and Payne's grey (of two various manufactures Pebeo and Amsterdam).
Artist's Statement
Loved the idea of tree in monochrome. There are a lot of olive trees around my home, and their trunk is rich and monochromatic
I love doing trees, they have sort of life in them and I love playing with light and shade of various sorts,
The trunk on this painting is just as I wanted it - and really what was important to me was the crevices in it - so I did not pay attention to the branches
What I'd Do Differently
- I think the brunches would be longer, in doing it again.
Marion Boddy-Evans, Painting Guide, says:
Payne's grey is a lovely choice for a monochromatic painting, as it gives a strong dark tone yet never as flat as a pure black. But your saying you used two different brands of it set off an alarm bell, so I looked up what each brand uses. According to the Amsterdam color chart, their Payne's Grey is a mixture of PB29, PBk7, PV19 and PW6. The Payne's Grey from Pebeo is a mixture of PB29 and PBk7. So although the names of the color on the label were the same, the pigment index numbers show the two are in fact different. It's not that I'm going to disqualify your painting from the project gallery for having two colors; my point is rather that it's a good habit to check what pigments are in a color, not to judge only by the name on the label.
I'm partial to asymmetrical compositions generally, and think you've got it working well here. The negative space on either side of the trunk encourages the viewer's eye to move back and forth, to compare the two spaces. If you'd placed the trunk in the center of the composition, with equal space on either side, the composition would be more static.
The one bit I would rework a little is the prominent light circle. I'd soften the edges or reshape it. At the moment I find it distracting; it keeps pulling my eye away from the rest of the painting.
