Susan Downing-White: Oil Painting Workshops
  • Workshops
  • Class Information
    • Landscape Supply List no.1
    • Landscape Supply List no.2
    • Underpainting (Indirect method #1)
    • Glazing & Scumbling (Indirect method no.1)
    • 1st handout: recipes, etc.
    • 2nd handout: glazing & scumbling
    • 3rd handout: underpainting method #2
    • 4th handout
    • Tips: taking landscape photos
    • Tips: taking pet photographs
    • Handcolor a Digital Print on Inkjet Canvas
    • Notes: Photoshop for Painters, Mobile Museum talk
    • Reference: Useful Books
    • Reassurance: For Beginning Painters
    • Supplies: Handcoloring on inkjet canvas
  • Susan's Blog
  • Contact/Galleries/Links
    • Contact/Galleries/Links
    • Cole Pratt Gallery
    • Susan Downing-White: Gulf Coast Paintings
    • Cloud Appreciation Society
    • American Artist article
    • Google Art Project

Ways of Seeing

11/18/2018

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Ikebana is one of many practices that cause me to look differently at my world. I stroll about our garden with fresh eyes, now that I’ve learned a few new techniques for manipulating plant materials. I see containers in my home as shapes, colors, forms, and think of how they would look as part of an arrangement. 

For a couple of hours, I forget the studio and putter. 

Every season is celebrated with a form of Ikebana. The fall might inspire a harvest arrangement for the kitchen. The winter, bare branches or winter berries, or maybe evergreen boughs. Spring is a temptation to excess, and summer’s a lazy perusal, maybe a hiatus here in the south.

I look at my home in a fresh way after I’ve made an arrangement and look for a place to appreciate it. 
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Finally, there’s a magic when I return to the studio: fresh eyes to reconsider my work, colors, brushstrokes, surfaces, just as I did when casting my eyes around the house for Ikebana materials. It’s all connected. ​​​
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    About the artist

    Susan Downing-White’s work has been featured in American Artist magazine and exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Mobile Museum of Art.

    Susan offers beginner-friendly workshops that explore painting about skies at different times of the day in landscape painting at locations around the gulf coast, and she welcomes invitations to travel and teach.

    Her work can be found in corporate, government and private collections. Her education includes a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in painting, and three years work in art conservation.

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