Quang Ho Landscape Workshop

DAY 1 (it was a three day workshop)
Things have been busy around here but I can finally sit down and write a post about the Quang Ho landscape workshop. The workshop was last weekend, Friday through Sunday, then Monday morning Spring Break started so we left town. No time to post!

The first day of the three day workshop Quang did three demos! He painted this little house from his imagination, first without sunlight and then he repainted it with sunlight. On the right side of this board he painted a horizontal landscape. I didn’t get a photo of that one.

After lunch we painted from a slide that Quang projected on a large canvas. The weather wasn’t nice enough to go out and paint so we stayed inside. Bruce Williamson was kind enough to let us use his spacious studio for all three days. We have had glorious weather in Houston all winter, no rain for weeks, and the day of the landscape workshop it started to rain.

This little painting (8″x10″) above is what I painted from the photo reference projected in the studio. The key was to keep it simple. Keep the values simple and don’t fuss too much with detail. I was done in an hour, and normally I would keep working on a painting because I can’t paint something in an hour (!) but it was pretty much done so I stopped.

DAY 2
The second day the weatherman predicted showers in the afternoon but only party cloudy in the morning, so we all met at 9:00 a.m. at a beautiful outdoor location. We set up in the gardens of Reinzi, a home with beautiful grounds which is a part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Below is a photo of some of the workshop participants getting ready to paint after they chose they location.

I walked around the grounds for 20 minutes and picked a spot where I could see a pretty path covered in pine needles winding through some trees and azalea bushes. My painting is below, it’s small, 6″x8″. The sky was overcast so you will notice there are not strong lights and darks in this painting. I loved painting this, loved keeping the whole painting simple and focusing more on the design elements. Just as I was finishing, about 11:30 a.m., we could hear the distant thunder rolling in. Time to pack up! Within 10 minutes it was pouring down rain.

On the way back to Bruce’s studio, this is what the weather looked like. I took this through my windshield (at a stoplight!).

Still day 2 . . . Quang painted a fairly large beautiful snow scene from start to finish for us that afternoon in the studio. It was very helpful to me to see him paint an entire painting, from block in to finish. Amazingly, once he had the canvas covered with loose squiggly shapes, it already looked like the snow scene he was painting. He had all the shapes, colors and values in the right place and that’s all it took. Well, that’s all it took for him to make the painting already beautiful. Below is the painting in progress.
And almost finished.

I didn’t quite stay til the end of class on day 2 because I had invited the class over to my house for wine and cheese and I wanted to get home and make sure everything was ready. It was, thanks to my husband.

I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, Quang is an amazing teacher and I was so happy that he came to my home. The workshop was full of artists that I am so happy to have either met or gotten to know better, it was a great group.

DAY 3

Another rainy day. I can barely remember all that we did on this day, but Quang gave everyone a critique of the painting they did at Reinzi the day before. This was very helpful. He turned each critique into a little lesson about something.

At the end of the third day Quang sold his demos, same as in the “Light and Shadow” workshop which I wrote about in a previous post. Since I bought a painting in the first workshop I didn’t even put my name in to be drawn this time. I’m thrilled to have the one painting I bought the week before and to have gained all the knowledge that Quang shared with the workshop!