Views of the Ferry

Some live sketches, others from memory, and the last from photo:

Continued artistic efforts

Moving On

A few sketches from around Woods Hole

 Bigelow:

Town dock:

 Coast Guard:

Eiders at Nobska

East of the lighthouse, where the black sand beach is.

Male versus Female face shape

These are factors I have found or heard about.

Some impressions about the impressionists

I have been spending a bit of time looking at impressionists works on YouTube. You can see "645 works of Cezanne" - type videos. Individually the impressionists' work is superb. Who would not want any Cezanne on the wall? But viewed  collectively, and with one artist after another - Corot, Pissaro, Sisseley, I start to get the impression that I am looking at some kind of commercial art that they knew how to crank out. Presumably a proper education at a French school for painting, produced the sorts of basic skills needed to capture those human figures, bovines, hills, and houses that make up the typical subject matter repertoire of these great artists.

But great pictures are great because of what they are 'about'. It brings me around to the notion that: behind a work of art there needs to be an idea of what is being portrayed. Together with interesting and vibrant color combinations, this is what makes interesting paintings. When I view the impressionists works collectively, as per YouTube, I see a couple of great ideas but they get done and done better and better, over and over, until I wonder which artists deserves the credit for inventing that particular landscape, nude, whatever. Then out from the monotonous beauty of -say- Corot we are confronted with an explosion of color from Matisse and his version of the same old subject, plus a few new ones.

There are two things here: the painting design idea and the rendering. I wonder for example if good ideas always include feelings. There, outside my window, is a dull, dull scene. But it has its moods. Perhaps that is a guide to creating art about what is outside the window.