In this series, plein air painter and instructor Jeanne Mackenzie takes a look at new paintings by contemporary artists and points out why they succeed as painted images. This week, John Lintott’s “Edge of the Cliff.”
There are a lot of nice diagonals in this piece that move your eye around the landscape. With colorful canyon walls, it is tempting to make them too chromatic. The reds and oranges can overpower an image. But this painting is not about the canyon so much as the feeling of being on the edge, and what it is to look out over the landscape. The artist has used the canyon’s warm color as a foil for his subject, the juniper bush. By muting the distant sunlit high-chroma shape, an adjacent complementary color takes on a vibrancy of its own, helping to say, “Look at me!”
