Some Acrylic Paintings

This semester I am doing an art course called "Matisse - from his room to yours" with Michael Winters.  I always enjoy his courses as he pushes my boundaries and I do things I never thought I could do or even wanted to do. This course looks at Matisse's paintings of indoors scenes and the way he composes, uses colours and applies paints.

At first we photographed lots of angles in our own home that might be appropriate.  We converted these to black and white so we were not influenced by reality colours.  We chose two of these initially and did graphite and coloured pencil drawings on A3.  They were then converted into small canvas paintings in acrylic.  Things were to be stylised, one was to have a border, and one was to have one colour used for 80% of the painting.

I then painted this somewhat larger still life made from a cluttered arrangement of objects on a patterned textile. Matisse used pattern and textiles a lot. It was first painted loosely in burnt umber and white. Acrylic glazes were then added to it giving some colour but allowing the background to show through.