Palm Series: Values

Left: Photo
Right: Value study painting

There are many lessons to be learned from art history. The lives of great artists are intriguing—how they struggled to create something new and visually exciting, what inspired them, who or what influenced them.

Artist Stuart Davis (1892-1964) is best known as an American Cubist painter. Although he started out on a traditional path of realistic painting, he decided to become a "modern" artist after seeing the work of Braque and Picasso at the 1913 Armory Show. He pursued this goal by mounting an eggbeater, electric fan, and a rubber glove to a table and painted only those items over and over for an entire year until he had mastered the lessons of European Cubism. Now that is discipline!

While working on the drawing of my neighbor's palm tree, I thought of several different painting "exercises" I wanted to try out. Rather than work up new subject matter, I am taking a lesson from Stuart Davis's methodology. I have underway three different versions of my neighbor's palm tree with the intention of doing something different with each one.

The version you see posted today is a value study done in black, white, and grays. The point of this exercise is to hone my skills in discerning and matching values. You'll also notice that I've changed the proportions of the various elements in the value study. I wanted less sky, so I made the house larger. There are many details that have been omitted too, since it's just a study. It's not too exciting yet, but we'll see where it goes.

Thanks for taking a look and have a good weekend.

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Text and image ©2010 Carol Adamec. All rights reserved.