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Inspiration From Artists Wk176 Featuring Artist: Jim Musil and Norman Cornish
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Message
Posted
Welcome to this week’s Inspiration Thread, the featuring artists this week are.
Jim Musil and Norman Cornish. Jenny will start the week with her introduction to Jim Musil , on Wednesday I will introduce Norman Cornish .
Have a good week, hopefully we will have some cooler weather and be mor3 enthusiasts about painting.
Posted
JIM MUSIL, an American artist, grew up in an artistic household in South Dakota and was encouraged to draw from a young age. Although he never had much patience for painting at art school, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1998 with a degree in Studio Arts and Technology. Despite a successful career in technology, after a spell living and working in Costa Rica, he decided on a change of direction, returning to painting in 2017.
The inspiration for his work comes from the natural world and his priorities in painting are colour, mood and movement, including only as much detail as is needed to convey his chosen subject - he says he uses bright colours as that is how his mind stores an image in his memory.
He enjoys painting from life but often uses his photographs as a starting point to create compositions. He paints in acrylics on Ampersand Claybord panels (usually 12 x 12” or 16 x 16”) which give the smooth, rigid support he prefers. (He moved on from using Egg Tempera, partly because his dog kept trying to lick his paintings!)
He originally bought paints in a wide range of colours, but has since migrated to a simpler palette, plus black and white. His most important colour is Quinacridone/Nickel Azo Gold from Golden which he uses for his underpainting.
Getting started …
Finished painting
Getting started …
Finished painting
Edited
by Jenny Harris
Posted
An interesting style, with some nice passages of work on show…
But, overall, I’m not particularly keen on his palette in general, but that doesn’t detract from his skill and application.
The last painting does seem to have a paint-by- numbers feel to it!
That isn’t said in a particularly detrimental way, just my observation.
Posted
I'm pretty well sure I've seen his work before - the style is familiar; and on the whole, I like it greatly; whether the palette reflects the strong light and colours that lie within his experience of the world, or are enhanced by that underpainting I don't know; maybe if you started with a wash of, say, Burnt Sienna - which many of us would use - that would tend to limit the vibrancy; and would probably more suit the generally desaturated colours of the English landscape. I'd rather like to try it; just to see if it really does make the difference I suspect it makes. It was indeed interesting to see the two stages of the last work shown: from which we can see that he starts with a very exact and careful drawing (what Alan means by painting by numbers, I expect), even describing the flow of water, and then adds fluid paint on the smooth Ampersand panel. I've never painted that way, but again - I'd like to give it a try; particularly using the Golden Artists' acrylic (which I don't have) .. high quality paint, highly pigmented.
For me, his high-key palette stops well short of the over-enhanced one that's employed by some contemporary Scottish painters, who seem determined to counter the sterner colours of Scottish landscape by - in my opinion - misrepresenting it, which I'd call tarting-up landscape painting: their work makes me compare them to a certain orange person currently in the White House.... Musil isn't of that sort. Maybe, though, one problem with acrylic painting is the huge range of vibrant colours available to you - the temptation is to use them right out of the tube, rather than to employ the "duller" earth pigments.... and maybe that's complete nonsense! But I do know that there are difficulties with desaturating acrylics, and considerable joy to be derived from exploiting the many new colours - anyway, enough theorizing, I just want to enjoy the paintings and, on the whole, I do. Lovely dog, too!
Posted
Referring back to my paint-by-numbers statement, I wasn’t particularly looking at the WIP, although it does seem overly complicated and not something that I’d recommend doing, simply because you can become a ‘slave’ to those existing lines during the painting process.
I was specifically referring to the finished piece below it - hard edges with little or no blending in throughout the piece. I’m not a great fan of this style, although I’ve seen it used quite successfully on some illustrative style railway posters, I don’t recall the artist.
