Customer Reviews

Seeing and Painting the Colors of Nature

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Let me start by saying it's a great book! It's an 8 1/2" x 11" book full of large color illustrations - 200 in total. The only B&W image is the author's photo on the jacket. That's a huge plus. Too many times in the book store I've picked up books on impressionism to find more B&W plates than color. I don't see the point of showing impressionist paintings in B&W... even when discussing just composition.

The book addresses over 50 topics on painting impressionist style paintings with multiple discussions on colors, brushstrokes, figures, composition, and more. Each topic is illustrated with one or more paintings by Dawley and many include one or more close-ups and even photographs of the original scene to reference.

To me, a realist painter who wants to be a little more painterly or dabble in impressionism, this is an invaluable reference that illustrates and describes concepts that I can learn from and apply to my work. I believe it would be even more valuable to someone whose main goal is to paint like the impressionists.

FYI - This book is subtitled "An Impressionist's View" and is the same book with that subtitle available on Amazon.

This book has beautiful illustrations and would be an asset to any landscape painter's library.

Dawley was an accomplished traditional painter but lost his ability to paint details due to health issues. And so while the book deals heavily with impressionist art, many of the examples show a traditional painting, an impressionist painting and photographs that were used as subject matter. It's interesting to see a photo of a man holding a horse and two other photos of individuals. These elements were brought together in the paintings, so that three men were standing around this horse. Then he contrasts the differences in the traditional and impressionist painting, that he has composed from these different photographs. I am currently not interested in pursuing impressionist painting, however this book is one of my favorites. He talks of composition, colors, contrasts, light, depth of field, and much more. These things after all are common in all styles and mediums of art, and Dawley is a master at revealing the secrets of this field.