Romantic Notes Part II

Romanticism revealed its true colors when it was most operatic. Painters enjoyed turning even their small works into operatic stage sets. The German poet Schiller had written a poem about a solitary walk in nature. Friedrich used this theme to give us an emblematic romantic painting (example 1). Delacroix would borrow the compositional form of Friedrich’s stacked triangles in his later works.  Delacroix’s difference was in his coloring and gestures (example 2).  Friedrich pursued Romantic narrative themes but, Delacroix  added liberated color and gesture for his generation.  His notes on color and gesture would later incubate Impressionism.

When my collaborating partner Max Dunlop and I worked on a recent series we began  with an Alpine image reminiscent of Friedrich’s Alpine painting.  Max and His Munich raised wife, Natalie,(also a painter) had hiked through Austria’s Alps discovering roots of Romanticism with their cameras. Max and I exaggerated the verticality of the trees, the road and the mountains. Our foreground would work like Delacroix’s with a sharper focus than the blurred background (example 3).

example 1. Caspar David Friedrich 

example 2. Eugene Delacroix 

example 3. Collaborative painting by Max and David 

I continued to pursue the theme of  the romantic mountain with a misty distance borrowing images from photos  along Ireland’s Ring of Kerry. Again, You can see how I  used the triangular rock/mountain forms and set them against a misty distance. The sharper the foreground the greater the feeling of contrast  and space against the blurred distance. See examples 4 and 5. Both are painted in oil on brushed gold anodized aluminum. Each  are 24×24″.

example 4. Atlantic Mist painting 1

example 5. Atlantic Mist painting 2 

At the time, Delacroix had begun to uniquely exaggerate complementary color effects because, he had read and interviewed Michel Chevreul on his seminal work on simultaneous and successive contrast which had been published in France in 1839.  He made his own observations on these  contrast principles while painting in North Africa (Tangiers).  When his color ideas were coupled to his bravura gestures the effect confounded French Academicians. They were shocked by this new freedom.

In consideration of autumn, I recently wandered through meadows snapping patches  and fields of wild flora. Returning to my studio I considered the stacked triangle compositions of Friedrich and Delacroix. I also considered the loose and free gestures of Delacroix as well as his complementary color effects.  I began to build a painting with three horizontal bands, each rising in a soft triangle ( example 6). I next superimposed patches of brighter color (white and blue-lavender). Their aggregated shapes also assumed a soft, rising triangular form ( example 7).   I then introduced a dense flurry of gestures using  6″ and 8″ squeegees. The squeegee gestures were both suggestive of the chaos of a web of flora as well as clear evidence of the gestural touch of the human hand as Delacroix had done with his brushes (example 8.)

example 6, step one 

example 7. step two 

example 8. step three 

Finally, I again tried Delacroix’s sharp focus gestures against a blurred focus distance with a horizontal format. In the previous example #8 I used opaque whites because, I was working on a brushed gold anodized aluminum surface.  In this last example I did not add white to the foreground, I just deleted color with my squeegee which revealed the white enameled anodized aluminum surface.

example 9. horizontal meadow