Is it possible to accurately paint every leaf and every blade of grass in a piece of landscape?
Raymond Ching gave it a try in 1972. He set up with his watercolors along a roadside bank near his studio. Working in watercolor, he had to paint around all the light leaf shapes. Wasps made his life a misery. Unfortunately, they lived in the small, dark hole at the left of the composition.
People were especially keen to try such experiments a hundred and fifty years ago. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, who urged students to 'reject nothing, select nothing, and scorn nothing,' artists have taken as long as months to record the plants in a scene as faithfully as possible.
In 1852, William Holman Hunt painted "Our English Coasts (Strayed Sheep). He did the bulk of the foliage work outdoors, setting up his easel in different viewpoints to capture the near and far scene.
Earlier on the blog I mentioned the story of John Millais who endured flies and built a shed during the months that he painted the verdure in his painting of Ophelia. Another case was Frederick Leighton, who drew a lemon tree leaf by leaf by working from dawn to dusk over the course of a week.
(Video link) Each of these artists ran up against the limitations of the challenge. As the time lapse video of petunias demonstrates, leaves don't hold still. They grow and tilt through the day to face the sun. There can be hundreds of thousands of leaves on a single tree or even a roadside bank, and each leaf has its own variegation of texture and reflectivity. And then there's the practical economic problem. How much would your gallery dealer have to charge for your painting if you spent all summer on it?
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Foliage Series
Part 1: Painting Tools
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Foliage Series
Part 1: Painting Tools
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