I recently decided that I’d like to practice oil paintings with buildings in a loose style. Most of my previous paintings with structures had a greater amount of detail and realism than I intended. I get comments saying “that looks just like a photo”, which are given as a compliment, but not really where I want my art to go in the long run. I want to paint in an impressionist style, but I keep falling back to detailed paintings if there are structures in the subject. So the other day I bought a pack of ten cheap little 8”x 10” and decided to work on small quick paintings with architecture done in a quick loose impressionist style. My first one is of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house in the woods of western Pennsylvania that he built for the Kaufman family, who owned a chain of department stores. Fallingwater was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019 along with five other Wright designed buildings. I don’t think anyone would ever mistake it for a photograph, but I’ll call it a success because it only took a couple of hours and I didn’t get the tiny brushes out to add lots of detail.
Frank Lloyd Wright is often considered the greatest American architect. His work, especially his Prairie and Usonian residential architecture is known for clean lines with lots of horizontal planes, uses natural materials, and sits in the landscape rather than on it. Below is my reference photo for the painting. I have visited Fallingwater a couple of times and no painting or photo can really do it justice. I can imagine the Kaufman family enjoyed spending time in this house.
Thanks to all who have voted on and supported my oil painting posts in the past. As a relatively new painter, the response to my work has been very encouraging.
