Our demonstrator was Maris Platais, who did an acrylic landscape painting demonstration.
The meeting was held in the Guild Hall, First Congregational Church (middle side door), Sanborn Street, Reading, Wednesday October 10th, 2018 at 7:30 p.m.
We have some photographs of the event in case you could not make it there in person.
To begin, Maris showed us some of his paintings.
He does the paintings from his imagination.
Here he discussed the blending of the sails on the ship
with the sky in the background. That unifies the painting.
Here is another ship painting with landscape items.
Even though the acrylics dry quickly, Maris works wet-in-wet when he paints.
Using a large brush from the hardware store, he started putting in the sky.
He blends multiple colors with the brush using wet-in-wet techniques.
You can see here that he has added yellow to the sky
and pulled it all together using a large brush and wet paint.
The water went in very quickly.
After blocking in the demo painting, he set it aside to dry.
He picked up one of the other paintings and continued demonstrating on that one.
Maris paints with cadmium red and cadmium yellow, but he does not
mix orange from those two. He uses cadmium orange from the tube
to make sure that he gets the brilliance that he wants. You can
see in the photo the difference in intensity between the cadmium orange
in the center and the mixed orange hues that he placed around it.
He went back to the original demo painting and added a ship.
You can barely see the ship in this photo, as he works on the water.
This as far as he took the demo painting.
He ended by showing us one of his paintings in a frame.
Maris Platais came to the U.S. As a teenager from Latvia after World War II. He is a graduate of the Boston Museum School and Tufts University. He worked as an advertising artist for over fifteen years before going into fine art full time.
He is an elected member of the Guild of Boston Artists, the Academic Artists Association and the American Society of Marine Artists. He is represented by many private galleries, as well as the Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport, CT.
He taught drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts for almost twenty years, and teaches acrylic painting in various art groups as well as giving private Lessons. In 2015 he had a solo exhibit in his birthplace of Jelgava, Latvia.
Among his many awards are the Honors Award in graphics from the Academic Artists, the Alden Bryant Award from the Guild of Boston Artists and the 2017 Purchase Award from the Mystic International Maritime Show.