Camille Engle
My Inspiration
For 2½ years, I learned about, studied and photographed Tennessee state symbols to create oil paintings to travel in my 2017 to 2019 solo museum tour. Tranquility is a close view of the eastern red cedar, the Tennessee state evergreen. In my research, I learned that the eastern red cedar is a sacred tree of the Native American Cherokee peoples and while photographing my references, I noticed how aromatic this particular cedar is. I was inspired to create a painting that would invite the viewer to momentarily imagine the fragrance and enjoy a sacred moment.
My Design Strategy
My design strategy was to create an imaginative realism painting of this eastern red cedar that might not be found in a textbook. When I create my realism paintings, I consider where I might want the viewer’s eye to rest and I concentrate my strokes to capture the most detail in this area…allowing my strokes to be looser and almost abstract in other areas. The simple color palette of this subject and the repetition (using the same shape and color in a work of art) contributed, in my opinion, to this painting’s cohesiveness.
My Working Process
During exhibitions, people often share with me how affected they are by the depth of color seen in my originals. A self-taught oil painter, I’ve come to learn that my intuitive style of painting is called indirect painting, involving procedures in which the final effects are built up gradually by placing several layers of paint, one over the other, the upper layers modifying, but not altogether concealing, the lower layers.
I first create my underpainting to cover my canvas and do not try for a finished effect, complete in final color, drawing definition or detail emphasis. Instead, at the beginning, I concentrate on one or two of these problems, and I depend upon (and make allowance for) the subsequent layers of paint to develop and modify the underpainting until the remaining problems are finally solved.
Finalist
Contact Details
Email: camille@camille-engel.com Website: www.camille-engel.com