Mural Step by Step

by
Armand Cabrera

I was awarded this commission through a design company I work with from time to time. The client initially liked a barn painting I had done. The image for the original painting was 20 x 24. For the mural the client wanted the painting to be 119x19 almost five times the original length. I mocked up the new version in Photoshop for approval and once the okay was given I started the project.

The first thing I needed to do was build a frame work for the linen. I decided to just tack the linen to the framework and after it was completed roll it up and ship it to the clients where it would be stretched and framed for the hotel. The framework consisted of three pieces of 2 x 4 foot birch panel held together with 1 x 3 pine. This would allow me to sit it on my easel and secure it. The easel is counter balanced and slides side to side making it easy to paint awkward sizes like this.

I figured on a week for the painting process; one day for the drawing, one day for the block in/ wash, and three days to finish.

For the drawing I divided the image space into twelve horizontal and two vertical sections to make it easier when placing the elements. The drawing took me 9 hours.

I mixed some test colors for the foliage before I made up the large piles of paint and I blocked in the dark cedar trees and some other key elements as guides over my initial drawing.

For the block in I worked on the background and then the foreground saving the middle areas for last.

This way I would get the two extremes in hue and saturation shifts established making the middle section easier. The block in took me 10 hours.

The last few days were spent refining and adding details where appropriate. I changed the middle of the painting, moving and shrinking a tree between the barn and pond that I thought looked good in the initial digital mockup but was distracting at full size. The total time for the painting was a little more than sixty hours.

This is the first mural I have done in many years. There were three done for businesses back in the seventies and eighties, a store in Hawaii (6x15 feet) and a restaurant (9x12 feet) and store in California (12 x24 feet).Those are long gone, they were painted directly onto the walls and did not survive the remodeling process and in one case the store was demolished for a newer store.

I’m hoping because it will be mounted and framed it might make it through the inevitable remodeling ten or twenty years down the road. The Mural will be in the Gaylord Opryland Hotel which reopens on November 15th 2010 in Nashville TN
http://www.gaylordhotels.com/gaylord-opryland/

Adolphe William Bouguereau Quotes

by Armand Cabrera

Adolphe William Bouguereau became the epitamy of what was wrong with academic art in the late 19 and early 20th centuries. Villified by the more progressive movements in art, his work has been trivialized for 100 years now. These atitudes are slowly changing and Bouguereau seems to have had the last laugh. His work has continually risen in popularity. He was a successful artist and an important and influential  teacher in Paris in the 19th century. With a resurgence in respect for quality in drawing, painting and beauty, Bouguereau's impact on art and his work has a chance to be placed in correct perpective within art history.

For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif.

Paint as you see and be accurate in your drawing: the whole secret of your art is there.

If you want to draw and model effectively you have to see all of the details as well as the whole at the same time.

One of the tricks for getting the overall feeling of a painting is to blink your eyes while looking at the model.

One is born an artist. The artist is a man endowed with a special nature, with a particular feeling for seeing form and color spontaneously, as a whole, in perfect harmony. If one lacks that feeling, one is not an artist and will never become an artist; and it is a waste of time to entertain the possibility.

The craft is acquired through study, observation and practice; it can improve by ceaseless work but the instinct for art is innate.

First one has to love nature with all ones heart and soul, and be able to study and admire it for hours on end. Everything is in nature. A plant, a leaf, a blade of grass, should be the subjects of infinite and fruitful meditations; for the artist, a cloud floating in the sky has form, and the form affords him joy, helps him think.

Before starting work, steep yourself in your subject; if you don’t fully understand it, seek further or turn to something else. Remember that everything must be thought out beforehand, everything, down to the last details.

As soon as a painting is completed, I know that in this or that portfolio I’ll find such and such a sketch, and straight away I go to a new canvas. I never ask myself, “Let’s see, what can I do now?” I have my work all cut out for me. Not to mention the many works that will go unfinished for want of the ideal model.

Think about the drawing, the color the composition- when you work you must consider all these things equally.

You leave unpainted what you cannot see; it is ignorance that makes you blind; it is inattention that makes you ignorant; inattention is imbecile.

I understood that the subtlety of accents, in contrast with large planes, is what makes drawing great. This truth, which I have yearned all my life to express and which still drives me on, is the secret of art. It applies to composition as well as to drawing proper. It is the principle that must guide both the young beginner and the fully developed artist.

Bibiography

William Bouguereau 1825- 1905

Louise d'Argencourt Mark Steven Walker

Exhibition Catalog published in 1984