Warm demanders are teachers who insist on the highest standards but remain sensitive to a student’s need to belong—and to succeed. By bracketing the most frustrating lessons with work that elicits a child’s feelings of competence, teachers can “bolster students’ math motivation and engagement” in a way that does not “involve reducing the rigor of the material that students learn.”
Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill, “The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024“, Edutopia 6 December 2024
Be your own “Warm Demander” when you’re learning to paint. Bracket things that challenge you with work that’s within your comfort zone (familiar things), be it a subject or material. Reassure yourself that you do know how to paint whilst you’re trying to master something new and uncertainties can creep in.
In the sunflower painting below, the Payne’s grey ink layer was my comfort zone, a starting point I had often used on paintings on paper, and still do. The unfamiliar was doing this on a large canvas, on a coloured ground (the blue), and the tall/narrow format of the canvas.
Would it give me the dark tones I would need without being too dominant, would adding yellow whilst it was still wet mix to give earthy greens, would I loose too much of the dark using an opaque yellow? Would I be able to make the very tall composition work, getting the top to feel connected to the bottom, with sufficient visual interest the entire length? Would there be too much green, and how would I vary the shades of green to keep it interesting? Could I use the type of linework I’d used in Never Still as the final layers, to get a similar sense of energy and movement?
In the end, the answer was “yes, I could”. Alistair (the in-house art critic) loved this painting (as I do), and he was delighted it didn’t sell when I exhibited it at Patchings and so put it up at home.
Looking through my photos, I found one of a planning page in my sketchbook for this painting. And a blogpost on the various sunflower paintings I’d done prior to this studio painting: The Sunflower Part 2
Love this painting. Great idea to paint it on a long canvas. This inspires me.
Thank you!
It’s an interesting format to paint. Go for it!