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6th Oct 2023: Harbour scenes in acrylics with Tony Homer
Thanks Chris, for these photos and for the write-up. Tony is a retired art teacher, now an active artist, based in Teignmouth. His big passion is drawing and he is also inspired by the move towards abstraction exemplified by artists of the St Ives School such as Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. He often puts elements of different drawings into a single composition with an eye on their relationships, colours and simplified shapes. |
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In an enjoyable evening, Tony produced three paintings for us, two [shown below] worked in more detail.
Each started with a sketch before addressing the task of 'removing the white' of the paper. He mainly uses 'flats' [i.e. square-ended brushes] of different widths and we saw him use a wide flat to apply initial bands of translucent colour, using matt medium as a method to retain colour intensity while keeping the original sketch marks visible. [A useful tip there!] |
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In the examples used here, Tony selected cerulean blue, and a vivid mix of scarlet and cadmium yellow. He also uses permanent fineliners.
He finds that cheaper paints and brushes are fine for most painting, although some touches of richer higher quality paint can add a bit of extra zing at the end. Tony also sometimes uses modelling paste to give an oil-painting texture and also uses a credit card to draw scratched marks, [a sgraffito technique Matisse also used, perhaps with the end of a brush?] or, with the edge dipped in paint, to create straight marks where needed. |
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After using these two colours to develop the paintings and add numerous marks that elaborated on the nautical scene - buoys, harbour steps, wave reflections ...] Tony began to work in some subsidiary paint colours such as green and crimson.
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These two paintings were created in alternating windows of time to allow for drying. By the end of the evening they were both fairly fully developed. We are grateful to Tony for working on them further back in the studio and sending us the finished images shown below.
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