For the last five weeks, I've had the pleasure of weekly watercolor classes from Geri Medway, and they have been wonderfully challenging. The class has loaded me with techniques to practice on for a long time! As I've mentioned in an earlier blog post, Geri is an NWS signature member and long-time Festival of the Arts exhibitor. Her paintings are some of my favorites ever - filled with saturated color and artistic realism. Her range of subject matter is amazing. Most impressive to me are her incredibly complex scenes of congregated koi or tumbled grasses along pebble-filled creekbeds. Her approach consists of glowing underpaintings, built-up glazes, painting shapes, and value contrast, but beyond her years of experience perfecting those strategies, she shared with us a treasure chest of color knowledge that will hopefully, as implemented, keep many of my paintings out of the trash heap. http://www.gerimedway.com/
My favorite class was - ROCKS. How can someone make a painting of boulders so fascinating and luminous as Geri? This class followed a study on sedimentary colors where she gave us her favorite granulating combinations. As I watched her apply one particular mixture onto the paper, my mind wondered, "That looks like Sepia. Why not just use Sepia and save the trouble?" As it dried, the question was answered as well as the glaringly obvious reasons she's NWS and I'm not - she knows what she's doing!! Her "mud" mixture separated into a glowingly warm mixture of siennas and blues with touches of green and brown. In fact, we spent a whole afternoon mixing "mud" with her combinations that seperated into lovely arrays of colors that could never have been manually painted. I must also admit that my mother has encouraged me to do these color studies for years. Geri took the photo above of my start to the rock painting.
It might take awhile to get this finished since I'm in GA right now visiting my new grandbaby, Sophie!!
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