Johanna Harmon 9-19-09
September 19th, 2009
“Embrace” 16″ x 26″
I love painting for a living. My second love is following other artists who paint for a living. I’m not exactly sure how I’ve managed not to run into Johanna Harmon’s work before now but it has been my loss. I came across her site via a link on another artists site and I’m thrilled that I made that one little click. As with all the painters that I post here, she handles the basics with great skill but she also has some aspects to her work that is very difficult to put into words. You can call it soul, feeling, essence or emotion but there is a magic to Johanna’s work that impacts that wordless part of the viewer. Your just impacted and this quality is found in almost all of her paintings.
What I like about the oil painting “Embrace”
- Color Harmony - This is one of the qualities that you find in the oil paintings of exceptional artist. From a technical standpoint this comes from sticking with consistent light source temperature. I really need to write a short article about this for those of you who are not artist but “Embrace” is a great example of doing this well.
- Flow - I spoke of the flow of paint in my last post but here I am using “flow” to refer to the composition. You view this painting and feel like you are viewing an elegant dance. Once again this is a difficult aspect to analyze with words but you can feel the grace and flow of this composition.
- Center of interest - The way the light in this composition moves from right to left draws you gently to the models face and then there is this wonderful area of dark values to the left of the models head which solidifies this area as the center of interest. Wonderfully done!
- A site note - Johanna does workshops, which is always nice for those of us striving to bring our work up to another level.
Look and Enjoy!
