My Favorite Painting

The artist is Steve Hanks; he painted Take Five in 1979 using the watercolor method. After many years perfecting his drawing skills he was able to master the watercolor technique.
Steve Hanks is recognized as one of the best watercolor artists working today. The detail, color and realism of Steve Hanks' paintings are unheard of in this difficult medium. A softly worn patterned quilt, the play of light on the thin veil of surf on sand, or the delicate expression of a child—-Steve Hanks captures these patterns of life better than anyone.
Hanks calls his style ‘emotional realism’. He often leaves the faces of his figures obscured or turned away, not only to leave the face to the imagination of the viewer but also to allow the entire figure to express the emotion. Backlighting is also a signature element of his style. “Sunlight has become one of my favorite subjects. I’m fascinated by how it filters through things, how it floods a whole room with color. Often my paintings are really more about sunlight than anything else.” 1 https://www.artifactsgallery.com/art.asp?!=A&ID=640

Painting with watercolor is not like oils where you dip your brush and apply it to a canvass and the paint stays where you put it. Watercolor paintings use color suspended in water and gum arabic to dampen the paper and once the brush touched the paper the color spreads and is absorbed by the paper. There is always a mathematical equation when painting with watercolor because you have to calculate the paper absorbency and the amount of paint on your brush. One mistake and the painting is ruined. Although the paint dries quickly and is inexpensive the colors change in value as it dries and changes in value as it bleeds into other colors. So it is important to work the lighter colors first to assure that their value doesn’t get adjusted.

In the painting “Take Five” it is saturated in cool and warm colors. The dancer is dressed in cool colors as well as the colors on the back of the wall. The floor and her body are warmer colors indicating the warmer parts of the paining. The leotard’s cooler colors indicates, to me, that she is cooling off, taking a break. This painting is a representational art piece. You can see every little detail in the floor and the dancer muscle structure.

The form in this picture is a subject that is sitting backwards in a chair in the middle of a box. The content is what brings this picture alive. The colors used helps to express exhaustion, and loneliness. The expressive contour lines of her back hunched over and the dancer head down indicates a resting state. The horizontal line on the floor gets fuzzier as the lines get further from the viewer, giving the viewer a one-point linear perspective. Also, if you look right to left the colors get darker meaning that he painted the picture right to left, this also reveals that the light source is coming from the right.