Phil Starke Studio Newsletter - March 2020
Phil Starke is a professional fine artist with prestigious gallery representation, participates in national museum exhibitions, and teaches workshops and online fine art courses.
PHIL STARKE STUDIO NEWSLETTER
March 2020
March is that in-between month where it still looks like winter but is starting to feel like spring. I’m hoping to get out and do some last minute winter painting now that I live in Georgia. Having lived in Tucson, AZ (the Sonoran Desert) for 20 years, I haven’t painted real winter trees in a long time (the Sonoran desert has no winter to speak of).
I have a couple of things on the easel right now, one is an old gas station close to our house in Hoschton, GA. I went out and did a small color study and here is the 16x24 studio piece.
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The 2 paintings below are going to the Artists Members Show at the Mountain Oyster Club in Tucson. The Show will open on April 17th. The first is a cabin in the mountains around Flagstaff, AZ that I came across in the fall, its a 20x24. A lot of great trails around Flagstaff with some wonderful material to paint. The second is a 9x12 at the Grand Canyon during an evening storm. A scary place to be during a thunderstorm but makes for great paintings.
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Phil Starke demonstrating at Bootcamp Live! 2020
Earlier this month I was in Tucson for 2 events. First, I held my annual Bootcamp Live! conference for the Bootcamp Workshop Online Course. We met for 3 days for demos, slide shows, and lectures. It was good to see everyone and talk about painting. Then I taught a studio workshop at the Semanick Studio in Tucson. We had a great group of painters. The focus was on suggesting light with color. Thanks, Daniel Fishback, for this photo from the Bootcamp Live! 2020 Conference.
This month in the Easel Insight Membership, one of the tutorials I posted was on how to create a black and white value study from a value pencil drawing. The purpose of this was to understand how important values are and to be able to complete a value painting with just a value drawing, not having a photograph to copy off of, but to use our memory and the knowledge we accumulated to come up with a working value painting.
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ARTIST AT A GLANCE
T.C. Steele (1847-1926)
Theodore Clement Steele is considered to be one of the finest of the American Impressionist painters to work in the Midwest. A leading member of the Hoosier School painter, Steele was a native of Indiana who studied at the Indiana School of Art as well as the Royal Academy in Munich. Upon returning to the US, Steele co-founded the Indianapolis School of Art with William Forsyth. In these early years, Steele's paintings were very much in the dark, dramatic style of the Munich School. It was only after Steele began exploring the Indiana countryside for inspiration that his palette would brighten. By 1893 Steele was showing, to critical acclaim, impressionist landscapes at the Chicago Exposition. In 1906 he settled in the remote region of Brown County, Indiana, where he painted exclusively in the pure impressionist style he had adopted.
The Brown County Art Colony was formed in the early 1900s by artists who were attracted by the undisturbed picturesque landscape known as Peaceful Valley. T.C. Steele was the first to become a resident of the county when he purchased 200 acres near Belmont. Adolph Schulz is considered to be the founder of the Brown County Art Colony. he began visiting Brown County in 1908 and in 1917 became a permanent resident. Both Adoph Schulz and T.C. Steele influenced other artists and many began building cabins and moving to the area. Will Vawter and Gustave Baumann were among the first to make Brown County their home. Other artists such as Charles Dahlgreen, Lucie Hartrath, and L.O. Griffith came from Chicago and by the early 1930s there were at least eighteen artists with permanent homes in Brown County. The Brown County Art Colony was created nearly 100 years ago.
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ARTIST TIP
“Color Schemes”
It helps to think outside the box when you are trying to learn more ways of seeing and mixing color. One way is to do color charts. We've all seen them and I've done my fair share of charts. I would rather poke my eyes out than do another chart.
I think a better way is to think in terms of color schemes. There are a variety of color schemes to practice and work with. In the images below I demonstrate how to work through a color study using 3 different schemes with the same image. This gives you a variety of ways to view the color without copying the photo and to understand that skies aren't always blue and grass isn't always green. Plus, you can really see how important color harmony is.
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Image 1 uses a triadic color scheme of blue-green, yellow-orange, & red-violet. Image 2 is an analogous color scheme of orange, red-orange, & red with the complement blue-green. Image 3 is a triadic color scheme of the secondary colors, orange, green, & violet.
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