Added 1 new A* page:Thought I'd try some different colors today. : ) I did discover though that the quinacridone magenta doesn't get as dark as the ultramarine blue; in fact, looking through watercolor technical analyses, it looks like nothing else in the red range gets as dark, at least not with nearly so much brilliance, and in general there isn't much in the watercolor world that gets more intensely dark than ultramarine blue. So I may tend to end up staying in a blue period, I dunno. The blue is awful nice to work with.
Thinking over the blue page from last Friday got me thinking about the paintings of Edward Hopper, who is best known for his Nighthawks from 1942:
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As an art student in Chicago, I always tried to spend some quality time with Nighthawks whenever I got downtown to visit the Art Institute. One curious thing about most of Hopper's paintings featuring people--and a similar thing in the recent A* page, as well as the kinda paint-streaky outside of the bar in that page, is what got me thinking about Hopper--well and I guess the barkeep in that scene might have reminded me of the diner attendant in Nighthawks--is that by and large the people aren't doing much of anything. Not that they strike you as layabouts or anything, but just at the time he happened to capture them, they weren't doing anything, and probably weren't really about to do anything. So his paintings have that nice restful, timeless quality about them, reinforced by the solid, simplified construction of architectural volumes around them. And he's very good at using light and shadow in a firm but subtle way.
A couple other Hoppers I particularly like, that I haven't seen in person, are his earlier works Chop Suey
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and New York Movie
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And on an unrelated note, happy New Year! : D
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