Antiquities and More

[Jeanne de Campos-Rousseau]

I just completed my "Antiquities" dipditch.  It is an abstraction of an ancient city on a hillside.  This painting is done in oils because I wanted to work with earth tones and blends and I do that best in oils. 

 

I am a retired engineer and quite truthfully, I don't have a big imagination.  I see things very realisticly and have a very difficult time abstracting from real objects.  I'm better at non-objective abstracts where I just concentrate on the design.  That being the case, how did I paint this abstracted/expressionistic city on the hill?

You're not going to believe the source--a grocery store fruit section. 

I took a picture of all these beautiful colors in a row and I thought I wanted to do something with it but it was boring on its own.  Photoshop to the rescue!  In Photoshop I tried several different filters and morphed the shapes quite a bit until they suddenly began to look like a few adobe buildings.  I then got the idea of doing a dipditch where the two pieces were not of equal size.  By stretching out my photo I was able to cover the bottom 12  x 30 inch canvas and a small portion of the upper 24 x 30 inch canvas.  The rest of the city is just repeated shapes. 

 

Let me know what you think.  I'd love your comments, good or not. 

 

You can see "Antiquities" in my Abstract Portfolio.  You can also see more of my work on my website at www.jdecdesigns.com