Albert Handell Study

I don’t paint a lot of architecture, and I’m starting to get tired of just painting dead trees, so I’m looking to Albert Handell for inspiration again. This is a study done from his painting “The Scottish Rite Temple.” In his book Intuitive Light, Handell shows this painting while talking about shadows and how they are affected by light in various situations. I’m currently working on a talk for this subject to give to the Northern Indiana Pastel Society at some point in January or February of 2026. I don’t plan to make this a finished painting (it’s not really my composition), but this was a helpful exercise to see what he did with the shadows in various places. One of the things that is notably different between his original and mine is that the ground plan in mine is much curvier, and part of the reason is that I took a photo of painting and the page was curved. It affected the way I painted the cast shadows of the trees outside the frame and I hadn’t even intended for that to happen. He also painted on sanded board, and I did this on mi-teinte paper that I put a coat of gessoe on in order to give it some more tooth. I do this sometimes now in order to use the mi-teinte paper rather than do studies on my better papers while still getting a rougher surface to work on. I have found that the gessoed surface doesn’t really take the Diane Townsend terrages very well, and that it eats up my Terry Ludwigs too. The unisons I use on the gessoed surface work great and so do my rembrandts (those are my workhorses currently, and I’ve been pleased with them).

The holiday season is coming up, so I am gong to start cranking out some 5x7s.