Diattaart Blog

this artist is just great! He attacks the landscape thru the buildup of paint and wax known as encaustic. I enjoy the depth of the paintings as well as the muted color. His work reminds me of artists who make a smooth and blended background with brushes and fingers and then add paint with a palette knife on top, it really pushes the foreground to the front.

Two artists I have written about who build up paint with the palette knife are Richard Schmid and Lynn Boggess.  Mr. Schmid uses the palette knife to build up paint and Mr. Boggess paints only with cement trowels! How interesting is that?

As for Earl Schofield he lives in New Hampshire now and is mainly inspired to paint the landscape of the North East.

Another interesting aspect is the artist usually works with a square board or canvas. For a beginning artist the simple square can be challenging in that its not to make equal shapes of light and dark areas. The artist has a wonderful sense of design.

He likes to paint scenes but scenes that express his mood at the moment, not just a likeness. He achieves this also by the use of very muted color in his backgrounds.

I hope sometime to try this technique of using encaustic but have yet to find a great dvd to recommend teaching the technique.

Try a square landscape today!

Keep learning and painting!

D

This was the grandpa of the previous post, Russell Chatham. You can see the similarity in their work with simple designs of dark foreground shapes and greyed out skies in the background giving the viewer a great contrast of dark against light.

If you can nail down design you can do anything, some of the pieces I posted here are only 6 by 8 inches, they have such use of space I thought them to be 30 by 50 inches like Chatham’s pieces.

The artist was born in 1872 and did most of his paintings of the California landscape in a plein aire style with muted color. He was not of fan of the increasing use of machinery in the country, and liked to make work that was quiet and moody.

Worked in a variety of mediums including etching, murals, painting, and sculpting.

The artist died in 1945 but his grandson still uses his paintbox and easel! A great artist who teaches us all simplicity of design and controlling the colors is very important when achieve more than a simple likeness of a landscape.

Try a landscape with all the summer colors but try to control like the 2 previous posts. Start with a very light grey and then add the color later once you have finished your composition.

Below is a clip from a California museum showing installation of his final mural.

Happy painting!

D