Friday, August 04, 2006

Painting with Negative Spaces


Linda Kemp is a Canadian artist who paints in watercolor, oil and acrylic. Her technique is very interesting, intellectual, and yet a wonderful combo of free and controlled. One begins with loose layering of color (this is the part that I am too controlling with and want to work on) building up many layers that are applied wet on wet, yet the colors show through (check out her website by clicking on the title of this post, and you'll see what I mean). After these are dry you go in with the detail work. At no point are you ever painting the subject, you are always painting the spaces between, around, or behind the subject which make for a unique look. Many floral watercolorists use this style to build up layers of flowers, but then they paint in the actual flowers in the foreground, Kemp never does this. She also has a style of landscape that is interesting, dreamy and loose, but we only got a tiny little demo of this in the last 20 minutes so I'll have to try it at home.