Hello, I am Gerhard Richter and I am the top selling living artist. Through my long life I have gone through many stages of my art, and I have undermined the popular concept that an artist must maintain a similar artistic style throughout my life. Everyday I wake up at 6:15 and do stuff around the house for the kids, but my art starts at 1 pm everyday. I make plans for every piece that I have made, and in any given day I may not paint at all. Earlier in my career, I became famous with my photo painting series.

Heres an example of one of my most successful photo paintings. One of the major techniques I employed in my paintings was the blur. I used to project a painting onto a canvas and replicate the photo exactly, then employ the blur effect. This photorealist period of my life was very long, and allowed me to explore how a viewer interprets a real scene, but with some unusual aspects such as the blur that made me famous. here is an example of the blur:

I do my best to replicate a photo almost exactly. Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity of painting a valid, true picture. 

My Paint Creation

Cezanne

Cezanne's Riverbanks

In the process of this project I gained new knowledge about the act of painting. For example, I have used a miniscule amount of paint in my previous art experience (Survey of Visual Arts) and I never learned how to use the medium efficiently and to my liking. I tested the use of many different techniques of painting (spreading using a wood block, using dried paint chunks, and splattering) along with the traditional brushing technique to create an overall texture that I feel is intriguing and makes the viewer want to feel the painting. A difficulty that I encountered in terms of color making was that I could not recreate my colors after they had dried because we had run out of one of the major brown colors I was using to mix. Despite that I was forced to improvise with other colors, I created a brown that was almost the same, but was a slightly different color. One other lesson that I learned the hard way with color mixing is to add the darker mixing color to the lighter mixing color. I feel that my final canvas is somewhat unified, but that there is more uniformity in the different layers. For example, the sky has much less texture that the middle and foregrounds. I think that this layering of texture is appealing because it end up much more realistic (or I hoped it would). I feel comfortable with using acrylic paints as a medium, but I prefer other mediums to work with. I feel that with paint I am inclined to be more abstract, and to work more with the texture that making an object or a landscape look real. Because of this inclination, I have some trouble controlling the medium so that it clearly depicts the landscape.

Learning to See

Personal Expression:

The techniques tools, and styles that I found most comfortable was the ink pen, because I found that with the ink pen I was able to control the ink with more thoroughly. I used the brushes with ink as well for a large portion of time to make washes as a background for my drawings, as I found this tool made the most interesting shape and design out of the ink. I also enjoyed experimenting with the simplification of shapes and landscapes.

I found I was able to combine my sense of expression into my shape representation by the simplification and abstraction of the shapes. By simplifying the lines I found I was able to interpret what I saw in such a way that I had control of the shapes and how I wanted to represent them.

I have found that my individual drawing style as a representational artist (and what I am interested in) is simplification of figures so that they form unique and interesting shapes.

Silhouette

At this moment, I have completed a silhouette drawing and have been experimenting with line drawings over ink washes. The ink washes have been interesting because I have been looking deeper into the shapes created naturally in the water and have been basing my ideas and drawings off of these shapes, and the shapes I have seen around me (for example: the first line drawing was based off a bird and others have been based off trees). I am interested in looking further into exploring with these line drawings, but adding in negative and positive space and starting to create realistic images from what I see. I have been abstracting my images thoroughly in the line drawings, and I am planning on attempting to morph the line drawing idea and the silhouette drawing together into a drawing style that is pleasing to my eyes and intriguing to look at. 

Contour Drawings

I thought that the process of making my contour drawings allowed me to explore the expressive qualities of line thoroughly. Because we used many different materials we were allowed to try using different techniques and tools to help us express the contour lines of the object in different ways. Between the three tools that we used to create drawings (Pencil, Ink Pen, and Wood Pole), I found the ink pen most comfortable to use because I liked the way I could have control and manipulate the ink into the shape I desire. I was also intrigued by the technique of making an object have a certain feel or emotion, as I have never explored the emotion the viewer feels when he/she sees different lines and line qualities.