Portraiture by Melody Phaneuf ~What reveals the essence of someone? Each day I see some new expression, another nuance of the complexity of who she was.
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Melody
Dawn, Bass Rocks is a glimpse of morning serenity. It’s a new beginning in the timeless rhythm of sea as it meets the shore.
The expanding awareness of visual experience frees the artist to observe fascinating patterns of light and shadow, rhythms of line, firm and melted edges along with textural contrasts.
Every painting is a quest to express a certain visual experience, the result of focused attention to the light that reveals color, texture, shape and pattern.
Finishing a painting is a painstaking process of adjustment. It is a process of seeing the whole and communicating in paint that coherence. I call to mind the words of a great teacher, Bob Hunter, “when in doubt, simplify.”
The vitality of color in Rhythms and Red has a kinship to the rippling movement of light as it bathes forms and energizes the shadows.
I grin to see the photo of the house today certainly not much different than it was when Bunker painted it. It proves to me again that artists provide a useful teaching by showing us how to view daily life with enchantment.
Walking in Winter is a scene that draws me in by the abstraction first, then the recognition that there is something, a figure walking in a hilly, snow-covered environment second.
New Year 2012~
It all goes by very fast and I remind myself that each day I am constructing memories as I continue to pursue the light and the meaning of things with brushes, paint, and inspiration.
From a high Gloucester vantage point, Village in Snow overlooks little houses and Our Lady of Good Voyage bell towers against a backdrop of the harbor blanketed in snow. Within the narrow range of neutral color, the subtle shifts unfold.