"I am a professional artist working in traditional and digital media. Whether I am painting in oils or acrylics, sketching in water colors or even drawing digitally on a graphics tablet the challenge is always how do I make my work compelling and visually interesting to the viewer.
My recent landscape paintings feature heavily textured surfaces as well as both thick and thin paint applications. While the colors in these works are low key and intermixed on the pallette they range in value from extremely dark to very light. I paint on canvases and panels that I prepare with a layer of acrylic modeling paste troweled on with a broad knife. Once I have blocked in the scene with thin washes I sometimes remove broad areas of paint by wiping them out with a paper towel and thinner. This helps to refine the five to seven basic shapes of the composition which are then painted more thickly often referred to as painting “fat over lean”. Besides a square ended painting knife I use only a few brushes, flats mainly. My favorite brushes are the beat-up ones that look like the burr of a thistle attached to the end of a stick. While the paint is still wet I usually go back into completed areas with a painting knife and literally carve lines into the surface to create more textures and details not possible with a brush. My goal in future paintings is to scale up these techniques on larger canvases with bigger brushes, larger knives and more paint." –Michael Anderson
Orchard, 03/11/2012; oil on canvas board, 12" x 16", Michael Anderson.
Abandoned Mill, 02/26/2012; oil on canvas board, 12" x 16", Michael Anderson.
**See Michael's video On Painting at http://vimeo.com/35735947
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