Critique for Rhonda:
(1) Do
not stop painting.
The bicycle painting:
(2) good palette
(3) great draw to move the eye from the foreground to the back
(4) nice interest points back there
(5) lights and darks are extreme enough and balance well.
(6) I don't see any further draw to bring the eye out of the background. Perhaps a piece of trash in the lower right? This is a very clean alley.
(7) I'm not getting a good sense of time of day: lighting sources and direction are ambiguous. The even lighting down the alley suggests late afternoon to me, but the interior house light (critical to the composition) suggests night-time. Artificial lighting in the alley should be more differentiated.
(
I really like the way the red wall takes up a huge amount of physical space, but doesn't
hold the eye. Nice work! It has just enough texture to make it a wall, and that's
all it does. That's
art.
The street scene:
(9) Again, good palette, albeit muted this time. The red building against the sort-of-yellow car and the blue scene makes good use of colors that often comprise a trite palette.
(10) The focal points I see are the car, the red building, and ... even following the pavement off to the left, there's not enough to move the eye around the picture. Perhaps one fuzzy human form (all in a very dark brown?) near the left, walking towards us, would complete the motion. I suspect that you're trying to avoid people -- including one barely recognizable person might violate your artist's vision, but I think it would be a sharp contrast, actually adding to the desolation. Is s/he coming to drive away and leave the neighborhood
totally deserted?
(11) The building style is really nice. I've seen this attempted and failed far too much in our monthly openings around the city (Portland OR)
(12) Again, I really like your ability to put a small amount of texture on a surface, defining its function without having that texture detract from the rest of the piece. Texture and depth are really hard for a lot of artists, but you have the basic gut feeling already licked.
(13) Do
not stop painting.