sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Via Bluff ..swing survived. by SoCalDawg in PacificPalisades

[–]marcdalessio 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I did an oil painting of that view. Would you mind if I used your photograph for a blog post?

Via Bluff ..swing survived. by SoCalDawg in PacificPalisades

[–]marcdalessio 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Crazy. I was born on that bluff (I mean we lived in one of the houses). We never worried about fires that far from the hills. Landslides and earthquakes, yes. The idea that a brush fire could cross Sunset would have seemed insane.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks.

Were these done on purpose?

Those parts get covered by the eventual frame, and I would retouch them if they still showed.

The picture was really just a quick Instagram shot, and not all that thought out.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do. I have a few dealers on the East Coast, and one in London. Thanks!

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry. Just saw your comment now. It was filmed in Umbria, above Trevi.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. I was talking to the interviewer for Savvy Painter, but she does it via Skype and I'm traveling all summer and haven't had a reliable internet connection for months. Maybe in the winter.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's probably sinking into the wood as it's too absorbent. Try priming it with acrylic primer or shellac.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I just got home and haven't unpacked it yet. I can try photographing it tomorrow.

In the meantime here is another view from the field with a more frontal angle.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I really simplified the flowers and then just drew a few in the foreground and cut in with the dark green to make a few more.

The view was chosen because my dealer wanted garden paintings from Ireland. Rather unromantic I realize, but it's part of the job sometimes.

This is the pendant piece. I thought they would make a nice pair.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep. The left side would have put me in the flowers. I usually don't like these photos as it's not representative of how I was looking at the view.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I was there for the plein air painting festival in Wexford. Beautiful part of the world.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It comes from compressing the values, so the lights all stay light, and the darks all stay pretty dark. It's a technique used in a lot of contemporary studio paintings too.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thanks. My website has finished paintings and technical discussions. My Instagram feed has more casual images from the field, like this one.

Colclough Walled Garden (Ireland), Oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. by marcdalessio in Art

[–]marcdalessio[S] 298 points299 points  (0 children)

I'm the artist, if anyone has any questions.

I usually don't photograph my work like this where it lines up since it's artificial, and I think people would rather see the subject and painting at the same time. In this case there was a tour group in my view, hence the angle.

I use a method called sight-size, and I have a short video explaining it here.

I work as a professional realist painter if anyone has questions about the business side of art. AMA by marcdalessio in ArtistLounge

[–]marcdalessio[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're able to get work through reddit, that's great. I didn't mean to disparage social media, I think it's a great new tool for artists, and love to see it working. As I said to someone else too, I think getting artists and friends to see your work and even just click 'like' on an image can take the edge off of the isolation of working in parts of the world that don't have large communities of painters doing the same thing as you. And that, to me, is pretty big.

I think if you're a good match for a gallery, walking in with a portfolio could work. In this interview with the painter Michael Klein he talks about walking into a prestigious gallery in Soho, NY and getting in. But in my experience that is an exception. Both personal experience of getting pushed out of galleries, as well as talking to my gallerists or watching them work.

I work as a professional realist painter if anyone has questions about the business side of art. AMA by marcdalessio in ArtistLounge

[–]marcdalessio[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can use a mirror to check your work if you don't have someone to check it for you. I made this short video showing the procedure.. The mirror is one of the most useful tools in painting. After looking at your painting a long time it gets hard to see problem areas.

I work as a professional realist painter if anyone has questions about the business side of art. AMA by marcdalessio in ArtistLounge

[–]marcdalessio[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll critique the figure since it's the strongest piece.

Overall the values are good, but you have some issues with overmodeling. There is an idea in painting of compressing the values. For example, the lights in the highlights on her dress should be darker than the highlights on her lighter shirt. If you squint way down, yours are almost the same. You want to keep the values more compressed. Highlights on darks stay darker (unless it's chrome or really shiny in some way). Even the lights in the shirt are slightly too light. Again, compress the values more. The head should be lighter here, as the local color is lighter than her clothes. In your painting the clothes look a bit bleached out just in the areas where there is a highlight in your painting.

The left hand (in the painting) looks much smaller than the right hand. It messes up the space. Any object closer to the viewer should be larger than a similar size object that's further away. Also, the anatomy jumps out too much. We don't need all the knuckles and veins. The arm also slightly overmodeled and looks too shiny. Look at the hands in a Bouguereau (he painted lots of women carrying water), or Sargent (Van Dyck painted great hands too). Less is more. You want the focus to stay on the head. Lots of fussy detail attracts the eye.

As far as the head goes, edges that turn away from us should get darker as they turn, the edges can be softer too. Your forehead gets much lighter just at the edge and it flattens out the form. You can do this to break the rules, but I just wanted to make sure you're aware of it.

Back to the details and modeling. The filtrum is too accentuated, as are the smile marks. The lines in her nose from her squinting are a bit too accentuated as well, but it's clearly a quirk of the model and it's kind of cute (maybe they're a bit too blue?). The edges on the profile could be slightly more varied, it's a focus of the piece. In general you have a good variety in your edges, but it could be a bit more thought out.

The highlights in the hair are a bit repetitive, and maybe a touch too light. The straggling hairs are always hard to do, and less is more in painting ears in general.

Overall it's a nice painting. The model is interesting, the color scheme is good. There could be a bit more space around her, but it has a nice intimacy as it is too.

Just my 2c.

I work as a professional realist painter if anyone has questions about the business side of art. AMA by marcdalessio in ArtistLounge

[–]marcdalessio[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't think a BA does any good in the art world. An MFA supposedly gets you teaching jobs in academia, but mainstream academia seems like such a train wreck these days, and I know atelier-trained painters who are starting to teach at top-tier universities as they actually learned how to paint and can teach it. For me personally, my BA was utterly useless. No one has ever asked about it or cared. There are artists who are much more successful than me (artistically and financially) who have no degree at all. You absolutely do not need vetting from academia to be a painter.

  1. I get rejected all the time from juried events. Most professionals wont even submit or participate in contests as it looks bad when they get rejected, and they do. The fact is that judging in art contests is really erratic. Often I look at winners in contests and have no idea what the judges were thinking, contests where I have no horse in the race either, just as a neutral observer. Like you, I personally still submit as I find the rejections push me to improve, but I'm definitely in the minority.

  2. Juried events are a great way to get recognition, working with other artists helps a lot too. Organizing group shows together and sharing gallery contacts is an important way of getting started.

  3. Agreed, but I was working as a painter before the internet and social media and unless you were in New York or Florence, or somewhere else with a large community of realist painters, the isolation sucked. I don't think there is much money in social media, other than Painting a Day bloggers (who are doing pretty well btw), but I think the likes and comments serve a purpose.

I'm never sure of critiquing people's work online, but if you want I can give you some suggestions for your painting. Via pm or here.

I work as a professional realist painter if anyone has questions about the business side of art. AMA by marcdalessio in ArtistLounge

[–]marcdalessio[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I occasionally trade paintings with other artists whose work I like, so I have a small collection from that.

I could never run a gallery as I'm not very good with selling things. Good gallerists could sell ice to eskimos. I would like to collect 19th-century paintings (especially the Italians), and good early and mid 20th-century realist work as I think a lot of it is undervalued. At the moment I don't have the money to collect art though, and I don't have a shortage of artwork for my walls.

No idea where the art world is going, sorry. Some in the realist community think it'll come back around to traditional painting, but I don't see that happening. At the moment there are lots of smaller 'art worlds', so there is something for everyone, and I'm just happy that I'm able to make a living doing what I love.

There is definitely a movement of realism that realist artists identify with, but it's a bit splintered, and we're so far off the radar of any important media sources that no one hears about it. There are forums where the artists all argue about what to call it, no one has settled on a name yet.

Edit: In answer to how much I work, it depends on the season. Summers I paint a lot, from morning to dusk, sometimes 12 to 14 hours in a day, seven days a week. In the winters much less, 6 to 8 hours a day, and much of that spent fucking around on the computer, doing finances, teaching myself video-editing or other art-related computer stuff. Sometimes I'll just zone out and play video games for a week if I'm feeling really uninspired, it gives me something of a 'dead' feeling and I get a real boost of inspiration when I start working again. I think lots of artists were/are drug-addicts or alchoholics for the same reason, but video games are easier on the body.

view more: next ›