The painting Garden Steps in Winter is honored this month on the cover of Gage Academy of Art‘s winter catalog and in a group exhibition at Lisa Harris Gallery.
The story of “Garden Steps in Winter”
While I was in the third floor studio at Gage Academy preparing for an upcoming class, a light snow began to fall, but I was too busy to pay much attention.
The original source photo for Garden Steps in Winter.
Immediately north of the school sits a large residential estate. The third floor studio offers a wonderful view of this property. After a while, I decided to look out the window to see what was developing — and I was stunned. It was snowing heavily and there had been a significant accumulation in a short amount of time. Snow has a wonderful way of making the ordinary extraordinary. I had viewed the estate from this window hundreds of times, but it had never looked like this. I knew instantly that I had found a wonderful subject. I grabbed my camera and took several reference photos.
By that evening, I had worked out a composition and was already stretching a canvas. Garden Steps is a composition with a very strong notan design. The notan is a type of compositional study that reveals the underlying foundation of a composition through the use of dark and light, black and white. A notan relies on light and dark to define it’s shapes, yet it is not a value study in the usual sense. It is primarily a shape- and pattern-defining tool.
More about Notan
Video Lesson: Notan – Exploring Shape and Composition
The Wisdom of Notan – A Brief Introduction
Notan: Compositional Studies with the “Notanizer” App
If you compare the reference photo to the final painting, you will see that the composition is extracted from a portion of the original scene, cropped in a way that creates the most interesting (and simple) arrangement of shapes. The painting uses a neutral palette — there are no high-key colors here — but the neutral colors do have a color bias. There are carefully modulated warm neutrals (as seen in the snow in the foreground and on the rooftops) and cool neutrals (as seen in the background tress and on the darker sides of the house). See related post, Neutrals: Selecting the Right Neutral Pigment for Your Palette.
Mitchell Albala, Garden Steps in Winter, 2012, oil on canvas, 28 x 21 inches. Sold.
What a difference daylight can make. The same subject as seen in another season.
The first stage of Garden Steps is a monochromatic underpainting, which establishes the basic composition. All detail, color, and surface development is applied over this foundation. The underpainting is built on a notan design, a dynamic and harmonious balance between light and dark.
Mitchell Albala, Ballard’s End, oil on canvas, 24 x 30. Sold.
Mitchell Albala in front of Ballard’s End (left) and Garden Steps in Winter, December 2014.
1 Comment
What a beautiful painting, Mitch! I love hearing the story behind the painting!