Great Subject Matter in my Backyard
“Copper Centers Past” original acrylic painting by Gail Niebrugge, sold.
This original was painted plein air (on location) during my first year in Copper Center, Alaska, during the period that my style was heavy impasto pallet knife. My early education art came at the height of the abstract art movement, and although all I wanted to paint was realism, I was criticized, critiqued, and admonished as “trite” by my instructors and encouraged to paint my “feelings”. It was a confusing time for me, because I had great “feelings” for what I literally saw around me in my every day life. Not for some splotches of color randomly applied to a canvas and given names like; “Pain”, “Birth”, “Anger”, etc.
And, my natural instinct is to dwell on tiny details. I was encouraged to try to break free of this limiting habit, to paint loose with great intuition. To comply with my teachers, all that I could think to do was to paint the subjects that I liked using a palette knife, without any brushes for detail. I painted this way for 7-8 years, but it didn’t change my nature, or who I was.
When we moved to the wilderness of the Wrangell-St. Elias, Alaska, I was on my own, free to paint what I wanted how I wanted. I gave up the palette knife after about two years and rediscovered brushes, and have been using them ever since. I have to admit though, I really like these early palette knife paintings and kind of wonder about incorporating that technique today with my pointillism. We shall see……I’m always considering something new, but rarely make spontaneous changes.
More tomorrow,
Gail Niebrugge, palette knife artist
