With other water-based media, the brush is loaded with paint and then squeezed dry. The brush is loaded with paint that is highly viscous or thick and then applied to a dry support. With water-based media such as inks, acrylic paints, tempera paints or watercolor paints, the brush is usually dry or squeezed dry of all water. The technique of drybrush painting can be achieved with both water-based and oil-based media. This technique can be used to achieve a blurred or soft appearance. The resulting brush strokes have a characteristic scratchy and textured look that lacks the smooth appearance that washes or blended paint commonly have. Load is applied to a dry support such as paper or primed canvas. –Margie White is a former bookseller, an avid reader and a painter of limited talent but unlimited enthusiasm.Painting technique An example of the drybrush technique using black acrylic paint on illustration boardĭrybrush is a painting technique in which a paint brush that is relatively dry, but still holds paint, is used to create a drawing or painting. Without a doubt, one of my favorite reads this year. Life Drawing is a beautiful literary book with deep personal insight and edge-of-your-seat suspense. Trust me, you won’t be able to put this book down until you learn how and why Gus’s husband died. It’s been about a month since I finished an advanced copy of the book and I’m still wondering how she’s doing. She makes her characters live and breathe and entangle you in their world. Gus struggles with the human form she’s not a natural portraitist. Maybe we could take a life drawing class together at our local art league. I found myself wishing that Gus could stop by my own studio some time, have coffee, and talk about art. Was it the subconscious pull of art history that was drew her to the same kind of place as Tissot and Degas? Or did Gus just need a warm sheltering place to change hats after her affair was finally over? Just knowing that Gus had spent weeks sketching and painting in a millinery shop, looking past the vivid hats out to the dingy gray of a February streetscape, and somehow doing a pretty good job of it – good enough to hang the completed painting above the fireplace anyway – made me admire her as an artist. I’d love to know where Robin Black got the inspiration for that fictional painting, maybe. There is a painting above the fireplace, Owen’s favorite, a painting Gus made in an old millinery shop in Philadelphia. Even the paintings on her walls come alive, complete with their own backstory. But still she escapes to her studio and paints.Ĭhances are that you will soon be convinced, like I am, that Gus is utterly real. In contrast, Gus’s imagination is sparked by old newspapers she finds in the farmhouse and she is both enthralled and challenged by her work on a new series of paintings. As Gus says, the betrayal was “a lingering presence in our lives, a taunting little goblin in the shadows, daring us to call him out.” Her husband suffers from writer’s block, and Gus believes that she is to blame for killing his creativity. Gus had an affair a couple of years ago, and they’re still sorting things out. Even before the new neighbor Alison moves in, Gus and Owen are having a rough go. Gus tries to explain: “as one of my teachers used to say, you cannot see a landscape you are in.”Īnd what a complicated landscape she’s in. The mystery is even more beguiling because Gus is just barely coming to understand it herself. It is not a question of what happened to her husband, but how and why. She quickly lures you into the mystery of her misery. Sounds idyllic, romantic even? Hardly.įrom the very first line you know the husband will be dead by January: “In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon.” Gus is narrating, and what a multi-layered voice she has: remorseful, restless, thoughtful, haunted and sad. Seeking to escape the city, Gus and Owen buy a country home where she can turn the back porch into an art studio and he can use the stone barn for a writer’s retreat. Life Drawing by Robin Black (Random House US, July 15, 2014) is an astutely psychological novel about a troubled marriage between an artist and a writer. I just can’t pass up a novel about art and artists.Įspecially if the cover art features a broken paintbrush which has left a streak red paint (cadmium red medium?) across the cover, hinting at some kind of danger or menace.
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