Daily Painting: Zurich with another funny sky

Zurich Riverfront: Yellow Sky, 18 x 24 cm, oil on canvas board, €120, ©2012 Julie Galante. Available on Etsy.

We recently went on vacation (Italy – yay!), and before we left I found myself with a motley assortment of colors still wet on my palette. Hating to let good oil paint go to waste, I challenged myself to use up the remaining blobs in a new daily painting (without squeezing any new paint out of tubes). And here we have it – yellow sky, green water, and all. Hey, it’s fun to challenge myself to work within certain constraints every now and again.

I didn’t do this on purpose, but it just so happens that the last time I used this Zurich photograph as a reference (way back in 2007), the resulting painting also had a wacky-colored sky:

Zurich – Red Sky, 40 x 50 cm, acrylic on canvas, ©2007 Julie Galante. [SOLD]

I haven’t been back to Zurich for a couple years now (we lived there from 2005-2007), so as far as I know the sky there really has turned yellow (from its previous red, of course).

Tags: acrylic, cityscape, daily painting, Europe, oils, painting, Switzerland, Zurich

Medieval cities in paint

Rovinj, 24 x 18 cm, acrylic on panel.

I love medieval cities, especially the parts where the buildings are chaotic mixes of construction and decay from various centuries. I am constantly in awe of how beautiful they manage to be. I mean, how is it that people 600 years ago could create buildings that could age into something this charming, while my culture’s predominant architectural calling card is the strip mall?

These days I have been experimenting with ways of capturing the layers of walls, arches, and brickwork that one sees when wandering the narrow, cobblestone streets of a medieval European town. The panting above is a scene from our recent trip to Rovinj, Croatia (from last week before I switched to oils). Below is a painting of a building I photographed in Assisi, Italy, at the beginning of the year. I’m considering doing a larger (and more colorful) version of this one.

Assisi, 24 x 18 cm, oil on canvas

Tags: acrylic, cityscape, Croatia, daily painting, Italy, oils, painting

Landscapes, little and imaginary

Most of my work is subjective and painted from life, but every once in a while I create images purely from my imagination, such as these two. Usually I have a hard time choosing a direction when painting without reference material. I like to push myself to try it every once in a while. Both pictured paintings are acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm.

I have been coming back to this color palette a lot recently. Somehow it seems particularly appropriate for these unreal landscapes.

Do you work mostly from source images or do you rely exclusively on memory and imagination?

Tags: acrylic, daily painting, imaginary landscapes, painting

Daily Painting: Naples harbor

acrylic on panel, 18x24cm

This isn’t one of my favorites, but it was fun to play around with a new style. It certainly doesn’t do justice to Naples.

Tags: acrylic, cityscape, daily painting, Italy, Naples, painting

Little daily paintings

Venice, acrylic on canvas, 20x20cm

For most of my art career, teachers and mentors have pushed me to paint larger. While I appreciate the advice in general, this month I’ve been feeling the urge to run in the opposite direction. I’ve been playing with tiny canvas sizes, anywhere from 15 x 15 cm to 30 x 30 cm, and producing one or more finished paintings per day. I find it a great opportunity to practice, experiment, and grow as an artist. Plus it should give me plenty of work to share here. The first couple are scenes from my travels to different parts of Europe, but I’m thinking of narrowing my subject matter down to scenes from Munich, at least for a little while.

Tags: acrylic, daily painting, Italy, painting, Venice

Self (portrait)

Inspired by this month’s Creative Every Day theme, self, I decided to start a new self portrait today. Can you tell what kind of mood I’m in?

I’ve done tons of self portraits, my whole life long. I like making portraits, and I’m always the most available subject. I’m doing this one (like most of my self portraits) by looking in a mirror. I like working from life when I get the chance.

I actually try to curtail the number of self portrait paintings I do, because they are pretty unsellable (and ungiftable). Not that I only do art to be able to sell it, but I have to sell things in order to have room to produce more. And who wants to live in an apartment full of self portraits? That’d be a little creepy. So would giving people portraits of myself as gifts… so yeah, I try to focus on other things. But I’m enjoying this chance to revisit my oldest subject.

Tags: acrylic, Creative Every Day 2009, painting, portrait, work in progress

Revisiting the Volksbad

I keep coming back to this tiny painting, trying to rework it into something I can be happy with. The colors have become brighter since the last time I posted it. Not quite where I want it to be yet, but moving in the right direction.

Tags: acrylic, Creative Every Day 2009, work in progress

Painting: Munich’s Volksbad

30 x 30cm, acrylic on canvas

Last seen in this post, my Volksbad painting has been sitting stagnant for quite a while. I did a little more to it this week. I still think it’s pretty… boring. It’s not the kind of painting I want to produce. Can’t decide if it’s worth any more work or not. Back in the wait-and-see pile it goes…

Tags: acrylic, cityscape, Creative Every Day 2009, Germany, Munich, work in progress

Tuscany in pigments and paints

A painting I have in progress: another Tuscan farmhouse scene, in a mix of acrylics and earth tone pigments. I’m struggling with where to go next. Maybe the sky will get some more color.

Happy holidays!

Tags: acrylic, painting, work in progress

AEDM day 28: cold nights in the city

Yesterday evening’s ‘Experimental Acrylic Techniques’ class was productive, if not quite in the intended way. The experimental material presented to us was white acrylic glaze, which we were to drizzle onto our paintings through a hole poked in the bottom of a plastic cup dangling from a string. The concept made me think of rain, so I set to work on two canvases, having no plan but vaguely intending to produce rainy day scenes. The drizzly glaze was more suited to abstract pictures, I would think, but I am practically incapable of producing abstract art.

At any rate, the resulting paintings came out better than I expected, and the teacher all but forbade me to use the drippy glaze on them. So I ended up with a couple plain old acrylic paintings.

The darkness of the paintings makes them particularly hard to photograph without glare, so I’m including two photos of each scene, taken in different lights. The first ones are more accurate. They are both acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm; I haven’t named them yet.

Tags: acrylic, Art Every Day Month, painting