Jurors’ walkthrough with Dick and Kari

Enjoy an enlightening video walkthrough, by Kari McCarthy and Dick Nelson, of the Hui No‘eau’s 2021 Annual Juried Exhibition.

Read the post for details and link.

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Seeing the Light

Interview with Dick

Artist Diana Lehr interviewed Dick recently for Yale University Radio. They talk about Dick’s journey as an artist, and how he has extended ideas from Josef Albers’ teaching. They define vanishing boundaries and halation, the techniques of luminosity featured in the current Viewpoints Gallery exhibition.

Seeing the Light

You’re invited to join Dick for the grand opening of Seeing the Light: Homage to a Teacher

The Viewpoints Gallery show, Seeing the Light: Homage to a Teacher, opens this Saturday, December 7, 2019. Dick will lead a walk-through at 4 pm, and the Grand Opening Reception starts at 5 pm. Come join Dick and meet the artists!

View the full post for details and a list of participating artists.

Seeing the Light

Exciting show coming in December

Artists and audiences have long been fascinated with the appearance of luminosity – an inner glow, or sense of light emanating from a painting. This quality is what has made paintings by Impressionist painter Claude Monet such favorites over the years. Yet few artists are able to achieve this effect reliably. It is usually an…

Tri-hue watercolor

Trihue Watercolor, Week 8

The eighth sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, March 7 and Sunday, March 25. The surface and volume color homework was critiqued, and a review covered the whole course. All of the visual phenomena and principles covered in the course are tools you, as an artist, can choose to use, or not, depending on your goals. All have the potential to integrate and contribute to visual harmony, because they behave as nature does. Understanding them will allow you to create visual magic, whether working from nature or your own imagination.

Artist Kit Gentry joined the group by Skype for a question-and-answer session and discussion of artistic concerns.

A ninth, “Do-over” session was held on Wednesday, March 28, for people from both groups to bring reworked studies for critique. Much of the time was spent on the surface reflection exercise, and we have video of Dick illustrating and explaining how to plot reflections and shadows.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 7

The seventh sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, February 28 and Sunday, March 18. The colored light studies were critiqued. The new topic, surface, was introduced. Surface has to do with light being reflected or absorbed. Similar to the value scale of white to black, you can imagine a surface scale from very reflective to not at all reflective: mirror to black velvet. Still water at a distance will reflect the sky or other surroundings, acting like a mirror, while looking down into it at a steep angle, or where an object is between us and the light source, you can see through it like a window. The new painting assignment provides a chance to tackle this intriguing phenomenon.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 6

The sixth sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, February 21 and Sunday, March 11. The white light homework was critiqued. The new topic for this week is colored light. Dick gave a demo of colored light shining on white paper and on an arrangement of different colors and values. Colored light and shadow work to unify a scene, because all colors are affected equally. Shadow colors are the complement of the light color, plus black (because all light contains a lot of white light) and any ambient light (outside, the blue of the sky). Sunset provides an opportunity to observe this phenomenon, with amber light and rich blue-green shadows. For more detail, be sure to read the post linked to in the “Other resources” section.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 5

The fifth sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, February 14 and Sunday, March 4. The film and veil homework was critiqued. The new topic is white light and shadow. You need shade to create the illusion of light. In white light, a cast shadow is a gray (transparent black) film. To paint shadows in watercolor, paint the local colors first, then apply the shadow wash over them. Or, since watercolors are transparent, lay down the shadows first and paint the local colors over.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 4

The fourth sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, February 7 and Sunday, February 25. We critiqued the edges and gradations homework assignments. Transparency illusions, in the form of films and veils, were the new topic for the week. Dick showed transparency illusions from Albers’ Interaction of Color, pointing out ones that succeed, and some that fail because they are inconsistent with the actual phenomenon. Painting film illusions in watercolor is easy; painting veil illusions requires a painting strategy.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 3

The third sessions of the Trihue Watercolor class for Winter 2018 were held on Wednesday, January 31, and Sunday, February 18. The stripes homework was critiqued, with an emphasis on recognizing halation and vanishing boundaries, and knowing how to create them at will in a watercolor by understanding the necessary relationships. Cropping was used to focus on areas which exhibited harmonious relationships. Dick demonstrated halation with several arrays of Color-Aid paper. The new assignment has to do with discovering watercolor techniques, including various types of edges and gradations. This week, we have over an hour of demos captured on video.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 2

The second session of the Trihue watercolor class was held on Wednesday, January 24 and Sunday, February 11. Trihue glazing homework was critiqued, and the class discussed answers to the color pretest. Valerie RIchter and Dick demonstrated the new homework assignment, Composing Color Relationships, by glazing various saturations of the three primaries in sequence. This post contains handouts, photos, videos, and other resources.

Trihue Watercolor, Week 1

The first session of the Trihue watercolor class was held on Wednesday, January 17 and Sunday, February 4. The group started their painting homework in class, creating a 5×5 matrix of colors built up by glazing different saturations of the three primaries. A color pretest was also assigned as homework. This post contains handouts, photos, and videos from the first week.

Design & Color, Winter 2017 week 8

The eighth session of the Design and Color class for Winter 2017 was held on Wednesday, February 22. We shared the last collection of cardboard creations, discussed the results of the last assignment Find A Design Need, viewed another slideshow of What ifs, and had a guest visitor, Valérie Richter, who shared her explorations in color relationships. See the full post for class photos and a full recap.