The trip to the Dayton Art Institute to do my presentation was splendid and the Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art Exhibit www.daytonartinstitute.org was even more so. The scope of this Dutch collection is mind boggling in that this is the only time these ninety masterpieces have been out of Holland. The directors of the 3 destination museums, Dayton Art Institute, Phoenix Art Museum, and Portland Art Museum, have been in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum for the past year planning the logistics of the event.
All four days in Dayton were spent in the exhibit galleries taking notes about the paintings and making selections from the 90 works in the exhibit. Initially, the plan was to use 10 Dutch paintings from the exhibit on which to base my paintings. However, it was too difficult to narrow it down to 10, so now there are 14 to consider for this project Lessons of the Low Countries. The 14 works chosen will be the basis for my painting project that culminates with next June's exhibition at Lawrence Gallery www.lawrencegallery.net in Portland, Oregon. This will also correspond with the opening of the Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art Exhibit at the Portland Art Museum www.pam.org which will be the last leg of the tour.
Every painting was examined and considered for color variety, size, chiaroscuro quality, and most importantly color accuracy. When recreating the color palette of each selected painting for purposes of painting my body of work, the color will be the most critical factor. The show catalogue documents each painting very well with the exception of a few where the color is too reddish/orange or just plain all washed out. The book's pages became my palette as I took copious notes about the color corrections. This seemed the best approach, as there was no way they would allow any sort of paints in the exhibition galleries, and even colored pencils would be awkward to use.
Each page now is filled with specific color observations, too warm, too cool, too red, too blue, brighter here or there, too washed out, and many other such comments. If there would be any specific criticism of the photography of the paintings it would be quite a few had an all over reddish look that was not in the actual painting. A stunning portrait by Aert de Gelder was not represented well in the book at all, so it was necessary to do some color comparisons with other paintings that had good color accuracy. The de Gelder is definitely on the list. The counter-play of grayish umbers and rich earth reds is lovely and will make a great still life. Other paintings selected include of course Rembrandt and one Hals. I will try to post some images soon here.
It will be interesting to convert the palette of a splendid portrait into a still life or landscape or vice versa. But this will be much of what the project will encompass because the color palette is the most critical aspect. Madders, lakes, ochres, lapis...more coming on this topic very soon. Just the thought of this makes my heart do flipflops. This is my mad scientist side surfacing again.
The Shaw Gothic Pavilion at the Dayton Art Institute was a perfect setting for my presentation. Each of the three display paintings were set up on the easels where people could look closely and also ask questions about my Lessons of the Low Countries project. That's me in black with an blue apron talking to a philosophy professor about the Dutch Exhibit. The guests expressed enthusiasm about seeing the process of the three stages of the painting The Golden Age. Just scroll down and you can see all three shown on a previous post. Many non-artists expressed curiosity about how a painting is begun and what steps are taken to get to completion. Other guests were especially interested in the pigments, mediums, and samples of linen which were unprimed and primed with rabbit skin glue and lead white. More on this topic later.
