Pulling Your Paintings Together

Pulling Your Paintings Together is a book about making connections: interweaving lines, shapes, and colors; moving backgrounds into foregrounds, positive shapes into negative ones, lost edges into found boundaries-all with the intention to create a painting or drawing that is a harmonious unit, with all elements subordinated to the effect of the whole.

The medium is unimportant. Watercolor, oil, pen-and-ink, charcoal-all are here, each with its own set of rules and techniques. Yet each is surprisingly unfixed in its treatment. Oil can be handled like watercolor, charcoal like oil, pen lines can be smudged and softened, solid boundaries left broken and open. Because even between media there are relationships and interconnections. All is woven together, one into the other, media, treatments, brushstrokes-like the golden threads of a giant tapestry. Pulling Your Paintings Together is a wonderful addition to Charles Reid''s library of art technique books.

Charl