White Teapot #1

oil/canvas 9x12 inches, 2010

White is a fun challenge for a painter. Since white is not a colour, but a value,  it can be rendered with any colour.  What is important is a good tonal structure. Another great challenge is to paint using a limited palette. I painted this old teapot using just ultramarine blue and orange with white of course and a small touch of yellow.  I structured the colour using the concept of warm versus cool.

Here is a detail:

Scherzo in Blue and Green

     This is a study in analogous colours for my Impressionism class. The cool colours and the misty atmosphere seem quite appropriate for the rainy week-end that we have had in Montreal. It is often difficult to completely finish a painting demo when I am teaching a class so I thought it would be interesting to show how the colours and composition evolve when I work in my studio.  See the video below.

Still Life: Scherzo in Yellow

11 x 14'', oil/canvas, 2010

I love to work with yellow.  It is the colour that I most associate with light. This is a study using the yellow family of analogous colours.  It was done with my Impressionism class.

When I studied art history at University of Toronto, one of my professors described Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting as a mastery of the colour yellow.  According to him, yellow was a difficult colour to work with.  Does anybody have a particular colour that they find hard to work with?