CHERYL BAILEY OSA
Choreographed Canadian Landscape Paintings

Blog

(posted on 29 May 2017)

Here's a quick pic of the last painting I completed before the end of the week at Advanced Individual Studies, Haliburton School of the Arts. The Mountain in Town is an abstraction that began on the streets of Banff. It's hard to imagine the streets of Banff ever being empty but in a way , it's not about Banff. Here's what it's about:

The mountain towers over the little town so as the artist, I gave it full dominance using the strongest of contrasts, which is a contrast in value. The lightest part of the painting is the mountain, which may or may not have been covered in snow-- I wanted to create that dominance. There is a repetition of shapes in the buildings on one side of the street. They are a dark low intensity orange, as are the buildings on the other side of the street.

The perspective lines which were used for the sidewalks and streets ending at the mountain are re-used as well for the lamp posts, mountain outcrops and dark sky resulting in pleasing simple shapes along the way.

The painting has a complementary blue/orange colour scheme. High intensity/low intensity complementary opposition bounces back and forth between the 3 oranges and various blues. (There is still a bit of juice to add to the bottom left corner in the orange area.)

The roofs of the peaked buildings echo a mountain peak shape and are brought to life with an intensity-graduated orange...just to make sure you get over to look at that side of the painting :D The same for the relatively bright blue running along the storefronts on the left, providing that complementary intensity contrast and because I love blue ;) Because that blue is more intense, your eye might run out of the painting but you are stopped by the contrasting orange parallelogram shape.

Between the white mountain, the orange rooftops and the blue in the sidewalk, we have a triangulated balance. You could possibly make a case for the street lamps being minor focal points but middle of that collection is still in the middle of the painting.

This week, it's printmaking with Otis Tamasauskas at HSAD. Today, we prepared aluminum plates with toner/alcohol, photographic material, omnichrome pencil, silicone/mineral spirits. I have 3 ready to print tomorrow. Stay tuned. They won't be expert as I've never done this before but it sure is fun! So many tools to use :D