A New Direction For My Art, by Gill Miller

As I mentioned in my most recent blog, my art was recently critiqued by Los Angeles art critic, Peter Frank. To be quite honest,  I was a little bit nervous about what he might say about my art. And even though I had just finished with a year-long, monthly art critique group with members of The Los Angeles Art Association where your art is put under scrutiny, his perspective carried a unique amount of weight. Don't get me wrong, I am an artist who paints what he sees and feels, and not what I think even Peter Frank would like. But nonetheless, here I was, along with the members of the critique group, and Peter, looking at my art while I was on the hot seat. 

But it was an experience that many artists dream about, to receive serious feedback about their art from a respected critic. One of the things that Peter suggested is that I paint on a horizontal canvas, which I had never done, as opposed to a square or vertical one. He said he thought the perspective would be more appropriate for what I paint. And then he demonstrated it with one of the vertical paintings that he was critiquing. And he was right. It worked much better. Even though sometimes when I paint on a vertical canvas and then rotate it around to see how it would look, it never occurred to me to paint that way. Maybe that seems strange, I don't know. Perhaps that's just the way I naturally see the world.
Next Week - I will talk about my progress into my first horizontal canvas. Hopefully, I will be finished with it.