This course has enriched my writing, vocabulary and process. Writing about my work took a while to articulate because simply I just think and do. There had yet to be a need or requirement to talk about my work or describe my procoss, plus I am on a new path. Colorful imagery, yet flat with lots of movement emerged in my early work of dancing figures inspired by Kazimir Malevich. I remember loving the bold, simple sporty colors, the strength of the four together and in the absence of detail the unity of shape and form. In SCAD’s painting course 704-01, the pursuit to find the oyster with the pearl among shucking through all of my ideas, grass became the common denominator. I was and am my most creative in the grass. Makes sense being from Tennessee. With little of my own art education, grew the determination to provide the best for my students and push myself to paint large. Grass allowed me to move, repeat, stretch and practically dance with each brushstroke. My process was simple: select a color and start moving. Green is actually my favorite color. The demonstrations and discussions of pigment Knudsen’s course PNTG 728 expanded my palette in the understanding of transparency and the application of paint in composition to consider: intensity, unity and complexity. The painting “Sea Grass” on canvas below (I have yet to measure…could be 9 ft x 9ft) is in oil, the second painting I have painted in oil since sheesh…like 1994(?)! Primarily as an art teacher rather than artist since then I have used acrylic. Acrylic is slick, fast and now produced in so many fun colors that I love and see in the work of Theibaud, Deibenkorn, Ellsworth Kelly and Kerry James Marshall. These artists inspired my work while studying at the Corcoran in Washington DC.
The paintings “Summer Marsh” and “Three Blades” guided me through oil painting in the process of timing the layers and blending colors directly on the canvas. Many if not every time I painted in acrylic, one color would be mixed to apply rather than swirling multiple colors within a brushstroke and moving color across the canvas.
Paige P. Byrne 