Visit him at
www.mitchwaitepaintingholidays.com
email:
info@mitchwaitepaintingholidays.com
| Mitch's home is in Saint Jeannet, 25
minutes from Nice airport. We were lucky enough to get him to visit us during
one of his English demonstration tours. He set up two easles, each with a 36" x 24" board. To one was clipped a full-size photo chosen by some of the audience from an interesting selection. He had taken it himself when he was out painting (in Nice, 'Rue de la Préfecture'). The woman in white, just to the right of centre, was to be the centre of interest. Everything else does no more than provide a frame. |
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Atelier "InteractiveAcrylics" are
"expensive but worth it". They have plenty of pigment, a clotted-creamy texture
and drying is slower than ordinary acrylics. But above all they dry
through, without forming a skin, and can be revived with a mist of
water. If they have set a little too much for that, there is even a proprietary
rehydrator. "Use oils if you've ample time, otherwise acrylics". Mitch's big wooden palette carried enough paint for the whole evening: white; a transparent cadmium yellow; raw and burnt sienna; crimson; blue and burnt umber. He painted throughout with no more water than was necessary to moisten the brush. |
| Dividing the canvas mentally into rectangles he started drawing raw sienna lines to take the eye around the picture and focus attention on the centre of interest (roughly, with quite a big brush). | |
| Then he began to put in blocks of tone
and colour, drawing fresh paint into the centre of the palette so that he could
always see the relationship between what he was about to use and what he had
just been using. "Don't even consider, at this stage, what the blocks of colour
represent". Mitch uses good quality hog's hair brushes (filberts by the look of it) but he rarely rinsed or changed them until he needed a really clean one (for example for the very dark darks when the mixture in his original brush was loaded with too much white). He frequently misted the painting and the palette with a spray to stop them drying. |
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Mitch stood well back, gripping the
brush well away from the bristle end. He was softening edges all the while, not
just to avoid being committed to detail too soon but also to eliminate hard
edges or physical texture. Nevertheless, he did start dabbing in lights, like
the shirts and the dress He kept "pushing and pulling things around", repeatedly adjusting positions and dimensions and softening edges. All the time he was coming back to the aim of making the girl the main focus. Such adjustment was possible because virtually the whole demo was painted wet-into-wet, "wet" in his context being no wetter than what's in the tub". |
| To give a feeling of depth, the
colours and tones were adjusted, too, quite late on - darker and warmer in the
foreground and lighter and cooler in the distance. The street surface was
modified with some violet to give it more of a gunmetal look (compare below). A
grey-violet bottom left compemented the grey-yellow top right. And he still
kept softening edges, especially in areas further from the centre of
interest. Several times we were told not to do detail too soon. It's good practise, anyway, but if you're not working from a photo, people do move and you have to leave fine detail to the end. |
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Mitch just dabbed apparently random touches into the
dark shadows to give an impression of faces in the cafe. The same technique
added texture and interest to the buildings He brought out a smaller brush for the girl at the centre of interest. He used raw white, but its harshness was killed because it picked up the still-wet underpaint. After the interval came a mass of detail: the man on the right was raised a head-height and defined more; touches were added to all the people . . . |
| . . . the green canopy was extended to break the
distant edge and the red one was strengthened; steps were indicated and street
lights hinted at; the man at the back was linked in with a line of dark; extra
light was thrown across the street. All done in a few minutes with a few
strokes. Easy-peasy! Mitch said that he would make his mind up about how to finish it when he got home. |
As though all this was not enough, Mitch finally
produced a laptop and projector and gave us a 20 minute presentation of Vence,
the painting courses he gives there and his website. The combination of the demo, his relaxed but enthusiastic approach and the presentation got several people thinking seriously about signing up for one of his holidays. |
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