One of the painters highlighted as a master of color and range of styles in my color class--is Paul Klee. When I first saw his work, I was mesmerized. He worked very experimentally and imitated other artists. The way he used color in many of his pieces was not an easy thing to do--but he made it look easy. This is a painting of his titled "The Lamb" done in 1920.
Since my class focus is on faces (that's what all my paintings include), I've attempted to imitate Klee's horizontal lines across the page -- while including a face (like the lamb in this one).
In the piece below to make the face 'pop', I glazed the background colors with white to reduce the intensity. The face looks a bit like a Ninja Turtle. Or as someone in my class suggested it could be a "super-hero". What do you think?
It was fascinating to try this imitation because of the interruption of the horizontal lines (by color, line, direction, etc.) that you have to plan in order for the central image to stand apart from the background. Mine stands out much more distinctly than the lamb. To alter it to be closer to Klee's work, I'd have to work with only tints, tones or shades of the background colors on the face -- and aligning more of the color choices with those background line/curve colors. Make sense?
Time to consider doing another version of this...to paint my way to visually seeing how I could get closer to Klee's concept.
It was fascinating to try this imitation because of the interruption of the horizontal lines (by color, line, direction, etc.) that you have to plan in order for the central image to stand apart from the background. Mine stands out much more distinctly than the lamb. To alter it to be closer to Klee's work, I'd have to work with only tints, tones or shades of the background colors on the face -- and aligning more of the color choices with those background line/curve colors. Make sense?
Time to consider doing another version of this...to paint my way to visually seeing how I could get closer to Klee's concept.
Klee's way of using color in his lamb painting is soft as opposed to what I interpret as the theme being Jesus with a blood drop alluding to his brutal death. Your image standing out like it does reminds me of The Joker of the present day movie. He's so oddly"out there." Bringing him more into background would be interesting, and would, in my imagination, render a very different character still to be unveiled. Bravo, CD!
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