The Colour Green.

I’m currently taking a lovely workshop on Palette Knife techniques with my friend Izabella Orzelski (www.izabellaorzelski.com). It’s been great in terms of adding to my Inspiration Bank and remaining connected with other artists.

We meet online using Zoom, and roughly every other class, we’re asked to pick any painting, typically Expressionist, and then try rendering it using a palette knife (supplementing with other tools). So, as it’s been a soggy summer, and i’m seeing lots of lush greens around me, I picked….

Interior of a Forest by Paul Cezanne

So basically, a study in greens….or is it?? On closer inspection (doing my best to zoom into the image on a screen) and with the help of her expert eye, I lit this canvas up baby, and not just in greens.

Side note: Edmonton with its long and dreary winters, which has its own austere beauty, still kind of wears thin around March. We celebrate green hard here when we get it.

My rendition.

Clearly, we have different temperaments and a different hand. His patient, analytical and monochromatic style with the pointillist strokes contrast with my amped-up take on the painting using mixed media (including markers, pastels, fluid acrylics as well as heavy body acrylics). He transitions values smoother, using subtler premixed greens and depicts depth more accurately. Landscapes are not my forte, but I enjoy the challenge of depicting perspective.

Modern materials allowed me to layer more, and work faster which I tend to do. The original was probably painted outdoors in oil and the colours were likely more saturated when freshly painted.

But the real fun part of this exercise was breaking down the green. The greens were made up of the obvious blues and yellows but also purples, oranges, greys, reddish browns, beiges and even whites. These were laid alongside the premixed greens, subtly adding further variation and allowing you to optically mix colour…fun! It’s not the typical Cezanne, with the fruit bowls, the pre-cubist perspective shifts and the iconic Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, but has all of his ideas there while allowing me to celebrate the beautiful colour green.