Rob Sherrill kicked off the 2015-16 VHAA season
by Dave Crandon
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Rob Sherrill, who teaches at the Art Center College of Design, the Creative Arts Group in Sierra Madre, and at the Huntington Museum and Art Center, kicked off our 2015 - 2016 season, painting a still life with watercolor. He started by setting up a vase of mixed flowers and a few pieces of fruit. To many of us attending the demonstration, the still life was incredibly complex - a chaos of colors and shapes and shadows. Looking at his subject, I imagined how painful it would be were I to attempt painting it - hours of painstaking effort with a very small brush. For Rob it was a 30 minute effort from beginning to end, starting with big, flat splotches of color and no detail. I found myself wondering how anyone could transform a page of color splashes into a still life that I would be able to recognize as flowers and fruit. And somehow he did it, all the while explaining his style of painting, which he described as being somewhere between impressionist and expressionist. His goal, he said, is to produce an end result that not only represents his subject, but also celebrates the beauty and characteristics of the paint.
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