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Luis,
Thank you very much for bring us this young man's talent.
Firstly it's encouraging to me because his work shows progress, a depth of experiment and technique and beyond that an understanding of composition. If I could progress a tiny bit in his direction I would be proud.
I, like many artists, try too hard to acheive rather than play and see what appears. This young man is enjoying what he does.
I know, not very well, but enough, the county of Norfolk where he lives and mainly paints. It is very flat countryside so the skies are big. Kieron's sky's are great and reflect the area well.
How he has learned to control his pallette is amazing. He must be mixing colours as he is certainly not using overbright colours and his pallette is consistant throughout each individual painting. His perspective is his biggest gift. It looks pretty faultless.
I shall watch his career with interest.
Roger
Hello Roger,
You are right, his control of color is amazing. He seems to use a very professional pallette, so he must have had good teachers or maybe good books to learn about from. In the painting of the middle, the one with the big tree on the left and the houses, he appears to have used mainly siena and ochres and I may be wrong, but I suspect someone more experienced than him may have suggested him to use them; but of course, in three years he may have learned about these on his own.
On the other hand, those very colors and the green and burnt siena on the tree have been applied with great sureness and proficiency. In the green parts of the tree, for example, it looks as if he had first washed them with a brush loaded with pure water and then rapidly dropped into them the mixed colors, which has resulted in a reliable, diffuse shadow effect at their edges; this is a usual practice in watercolor, but it is very difficult that he could have learned it all by himself. And the same can be said of the shadows on the houses' walls and roofs, which also evidence - or at least suggest - previous, special technical abilities.
The composition is also great on a fairly consistent basis, particularly with the three selected watercolors, though in a few of the paintings in the video (mainly the tempera and oil ones) it looks a bit childish. This of course is only natural, if we consider the boy's age (six and seven years old at the time he made them). So what I think is that in these few cases he just copied very good and professional photos regardless of composition; but in those very few cases, he created his own landscapes from the start - hence his rather childish results as regards composition.
Again, this is in no way a demerit. Copying others' photos and works is an excellent and accepted practice for any artist and besides, I am sure Kieron will in time copy from nature - if he has not done so by now.
Best Wishes,
Miguel