Texture. It’s the x-factor in painting. . . it can mean the difference between a mediocre painting and a good one, or a good painting and fantastic one.
This week’s featured artist, Trisha Lamoreaux, has found a way to use the textural, 3-dimensional quality of oil paint to her advantage. Using only a palette knife, Trisha’s paintings are ALL about the texture—well, texture and color, that is.
Here Trisha’s used just her palette knife and three bold colors (purple, white, and yellow) to “abstract” a group of flowers into a sort of modern impressionist painting.
The beauty of using a palette knife is that each color can be laid onto the canvas as pure as you’d like it to be. Many of those purple petals are made with just one sweep of the knife, forming crisp slices of color over the top of other paint.
And, as this next piece illustrates, you can also use a palette knife to vary the texture of the paint on your canvas—it doesn’t all have to be thick, impasto work.
Scraping a palette knife more thinly across your canvas will compress the color into flatter planes, which is how Trisha painted much of the sky in the piece above. This, of course, allows the textured clouds to visually (and literally) pop out towards the viewer.
In the painting below, New York Traffic, the texture is practically everywhere, however.
And yet it feels right, doesn’t it? The gridlock traffic, the rush and bustle of a major metropolitan area. . . it becomes more physical when created in such a textural way.
If you have a moment, visit Trisha Lamoreaux’s painting blog and check out the rest of her work. Her paintings seem to be ever-changing, from landscapes to abstract florals, to pure abstracts, and most recently, to a new series of city abstracts.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see where her work goes in the future as well.