When purchasing a waterfall painting, Vastu Shastra says that the water should look like it is entering your home. This is because water entering the house is believed to be a good sign.
Waterfall Painting Vastu: Importance, Benefits & Placement
Vastu shastra is based on the five elements of nature: fire, air, space, earth, and water. Each of these elements stand for something and water is associated with positivity and wealth, provided its flowing water.
While ideally, you should have a small water body in the house, it is not possible for many thanks to space constraints or design layouts. In such cases, you can have a vastu waterfall painting in your home.
In the blog below, we share with you everything there is to know about a vastu waterfall painting. Vastu tips on ideal direction, placement, benefits and more. If you follow these vastu waterfall painting tips you will be welcoming home lots of wealth and prosperity, and at the same time also keep negative energies at bay. Read on to know more:
Waterfall Painting Vastu
Why should you have a waterfall painting as per vastu, how should it be placed, is there an alternative to waterfall painting and more. Find out.
Water has connections with money. Hanging waterfall paintings on the wall results in the flow of positive energy. When there is a flow of positivity, prosperity, and abundance of wealth follow.
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Waterfall surrounded by bright-pink flowers
The Direction of the Waterfall Painting
When you stand in front of the painting, the waterfall should point towards you. Alternatively, the direction of the waterfall should be towards the center of your home. If the front door is in the center and the doorknob on the left, the waterfall painting should go on the right side.
Waterfall should be in the center
Howard Friedland: Painting Waterfalls in Oil
$130.97
Video Length: 4 Hours 8 Minutes
Category: Art, Landscape, New Release, Oil, Water
- How to create a “sense of place” in your paintings
- How to express a damp, misty atmosphere
- The one key to make any waterfall seem alive
- A secret that evokes that sense of awe
- How to block in large value masses quickly
- The best way to create light AND shadow
- A proven way to get a feeling of movement in your waterfall
- A methodical way to check and correct errors as you go
- How to use sketches, field studies, and reference photos
- The one secret Howard uses to bring the outdoors into his studio
- The key to developing your own style without forcing it
- How to let time disappear when painting and enjoy the process
- Exploring the subtle power of surrounding rocks, cliffs, and trees
- Keys to color mixing for harmony
- How to harness the primal human reaction to water
- And much, much more!
There’s only a handful of top artists who are really skilled at capturing moving water. This is a rare opportunity for you to learn from one of them in Painting Waterfalls in Oil with Howard Friedland.
No matter your current skill level, you’ll find yourself admiring Howard’s talent and ability for painting raw beauty. You may even catch yourself saying, “I wish I could paint like that!”
As you study with Howard throughout this video, you’ll advance from wishingyou could paint like that to actually creating the magic of moving water easily, quickly, and consistently.
Always carrying a camera, Howard takes photos of paintings from other artists and uses them to further define his own signature style. This has led him to develop unique methods for both painting, and teaching others to paint beautiful water.
Let Howard take the lead as he shows you his process in vivid, clear, and compelling detail.
“It doesn’t take much motivation to get me to paint — I just like the process of doing it”
— Howard Friedland
Look for inspiration
If you’re like Howard, you’re constantly noticing the paintings of other artists and finding ones that inspire you beyond your ability to explain why.
These experiences wouldn’t just float on by for Howard. When he ran into this, he would study the artist and learn the process they went through to create that final work.
If possible, he would take classes from the artist. He would do whatever it took to find out the actual steps the artist took. Then he would try it in his own studio.
Yes, old-fashioned trial and error.
And now, YOU benefit because Howard has created this new video that shows you ONLY what he proved worked every time.
Who is Howard Friedland?
Howard started with a love of drawing as a child. He and his best friend would go down to the Natural History Museum in New York and sketch the dioramas.
It didn’t take long for people to pay him compliments. According to Howard, “That really got me going!”
From there, he went to the High School of Music and Art in New York, where he was introduced to oil painting for the first time.
College was at Cooper Union (in New York), which was a special school for art and science. It was here that Howard directed his talents to commercial art. He had his sights set on a career in advertising.
After that career was over, he moved to Miami, Florida. He attended the Miami Art Center and started taking painting classes at night.
“Painting really got in my blood.”
Later, he made a move to New Mexico, where there were a lot of galleries that were showing the representational painting that Howard really liked. This is where his love of landscapes was ignited.
Soon his art was hanging in several galleries in New Mexico.
All that time, he continued to learn, grow, and develop as an artist and was “drawn” to all types of water in landscapes. Whether a babbling brook, creek, bigger stream, rapids, small waterfalls, or of course the giant breathtaking waterfalls. Something about water just captured his imagination.
Now, YOU benefit because his new video, Painting Waterfalls in Oil, breaks down his entire process into easy-to-follow steps that will have an enormous impact on your ability to paint like a master.
The process is broken down for you
See Howard go through his process in vivid, clear, and compelling detail:
Grid, sketch, and line
Howard will block in the larger elements with a technique so easy that you’ll be surprised. It’s here that the true focal point of the piece is decided and composed.
Color-block like a master
In these clear steps Howard explains how the colors work together and exactly how to lay them into the painting so they’re pleasing to the eye and work to build the emotion of the piece.
The “core four” water details
Howard has perfected four critical elements of painting water that he teaches step-by-step in this video. You’ll be amazed at how well YOUR paintings will turn out when you use what you learn from Howard!
Where process meets improvisation
Where the freedom of music meets art
Howard has a long history of teaching other artists the best of what he knows. He had terrific teachers along his path, and he has dedicated himself to paying that forward.
As his career progressed, Howard discovered that his “style” also became more fully featured. He found himself incorporating various methods from his different teachers along the way.
When he melds those pieces together, he says it’s like jazz music:
“I like jazz music, so improvising and trying uncontrolled techniques will take over. Most times, those accidental, unconscious brushstrokes are the freshest parts of my painting. If not, I just scrape it off and try something else!”
— Howard Friedland
Put an end to flat, fake, and lifeless water features in your paintings
How to use photo adjustments
Using Photoshop, a photo can be manipulated in ways that expose different elements of the water. Howard also shows in this video that every photo has problems. So, whether you have software or not, he shows how you can use the photo as a guide or as raw material. The goal is NOT to try to paint a good “copy” of the photo. Some parts of a photo will work in your painting, and some will NOT. Howard shows his thought process in this video, and just this one piece alone may give you a new appreciation of the power of your artistic license.
The waterfall trio
The composition , values, and edge control are a vital trio of parts to your waterfall. When any one of those is off, the entire painting suffers. Howard goes over this trio in detail with you in this video.
The “core four” will bring your waterfall to life
Howard believes that light AND shadow are two of the “core four” that need to be present for the painting to have a chance at a soul-stirring impact. The other two are part of his secrets that he reveals only to his in-person students. But now, for the first time, he shares them in this video. These are truly worth the price of admission!
In his video, Howard has included some amazing EXTRAS for you:
- The TWO steps you must do when finishing your painting
- Two reasons you should varnish your painting and HOW to do it
- A multi-sensory way to bring the outdoors indoors
- A high-speed compilation of all painting steps for a quick overview
- Personal insights from Howard
The Flow of Chance: Pat Steir’s ‘Waterfall’ Paintings
While it should be possible for someone looking at Pat Steir’s “Waterfall” paintings at the Barnes Foundation to feel that they depict or suggest the flowing of water downward over rock or stone, that is to miss the point of works that are concerned much more with the potential of paint than the need to represent something in nature.
In Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s fascinating new documentary about the painter Pat Steir, which premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival earlier this year, Steir recalls an interview with the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer in which he remarked: “When I look at your work closely, I feel that your entire career has been a long effort to disappear.” “It’s true,” Steir says in the film, adding that she has been “trying to take my ego out of the art and my body out of the art. I want the paintings to express something in the will of nature.”
In much of her work, Steir—whose latest paintings are on view in the exhibition “Pat Steir Silent Secret Waterfalls: The Barnes Series,” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until mid-November—applies a mass of oil paint to the upper part of her canvases, many of which are taller than herself, then lets it drip. Or she throws paint at the surface, letting the marks happen by accident or by a process we might call random design. “My idea,” she says in the documentary, “was not to touch the canvas, not to paint, but to pour the paint and let the paint itself make a picture. I set the limitations. The limitations, of course, are the color, the size, the wind in the room, and how I put the paint on. And then everything outside of me controls how that paint falls. It’s a joy to let the painting make itself. It takes away all kinds of responsibility.”
Born in 1940, Steir grew up in Newark. She studied at the Pratt Institute—Philip Guston was one of her teachers—and at Boston University College of Fine Arts and began painting in New York, where she also worked as an illustrator and book designer. The documentary takes us through the associations that have influenced her art in the past half-century, especially her friendships with John Cage, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin, whom she visited in New Mexico every August for thirty years. Courtesy of these relationships, Steir became interested in lessness, erasure, the idea of the aleatory image, the space between the deliberate and the unstructured, the image eventually emerging through a sort of chance.
A still from Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s Pat Steir: Artist, 2019
From Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s Pat Steir: Artist, 2019
As she talks about her work, Steir sometimes sounds tentative, ironic, or amused; but when she discusses technical matters—how a color was mixed or a texture created—she is confident and sharp, brilliant and quick. When she speaks about being a female artist, and the different ways in which male and female artists are seen and valued, she makes clear how great the struggle has been. “Now I’m over seventy so I’m like an honorary man,” she says; she remembers with indignation a gallerist in New York with many female artists on his books who had said, years ago, “I can get high quality for a low price if I deal with women artists.”
In the Annenberg Court of the Barnes Foundation (the large space where people line up to see the permanent collection), Steir’s monumental black-and-white paintings—all seven feet tall and ranging from about five to seventeen feet wide—cover three walls. These eleven “Silent Secret Waterfalls” enact the falling of water, and the idea of water as having its own internal power; but they also enact the falling of paint—the great, luminous whiteness that Steir allows to have its own inner life. She is more concerned with essences than with experiences, more interested in what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape than she is in landscape.
While it should be possible for someone looking at these paintings to feel that they depict or suggest the flowing of water downward over rock or stone, that is to miss the point of works that are concerned much more with the potential of paint than the need to represent something in nature. They are, to a large extent, autonomous spaces, powered by the visual possibilities of chance and flow. This may connect them to nature: they do what a waterfall does. They have some of the same force. But as paintings, they are dynamic rather than completed; they happened by an arranged accident, the surface is not settled, it is often fully free, moving beyond the natural phenomenon of the exhibition’s title and reaching into the realm of the visionary.
Pat Steir: The Barnes Series VI, 2018
Pat Steir: The Barnes Series VIII, 2018
Pat Steir: The Barnes Series V, 2018
Each painting makes no secret of how it started. You can see the place toward the upper part of the work where Steir used a brush to apply the dripping oil paint to the canvas. What is mysterious, as you look at the different ways in which the paint flowed down, is how much she could judge the extent and direction of the flow or how much the direction of the paint depended on chance. It is miraculous how beautiful this white paint against a black surface appears, how fluid, how oddly patterned and animated with energy.
Steir’s journey toward the making of the “Waterfall” paintings began in the 1980s, when she was paying close attention to Japanese woodcuts and Chinese brush painting. “The Waterfall paintings,” she told Gonzalez Peña, “were everything I hoped my paintings would be…. The less I tried, the better the paintings were. The more I tried, the more controlled and stiff they got. In the ‘Waterfall’ paintings, the paint made the images.”
Steir has the ability to leave a painting alone, not to fiddle too much with contours and edges. But there are times when small details carry a strange emotional charge. In one of the widest paintings at the Barnes, the paint flows as in the others, making a number of different patterns, patterns that, as the paint moves down the canvas, created a great drama of whiteness—unstable, undecided, unsettled. If you stand back, studying the purity of the flowing white paint against the black background, there is a sense of grandeur about the work. But, as you move closer, the smaller details seem to matter as much as the larger pattern.
There are, for example, five or six very thin vertical white lines near the center of the canvas, like wrinkles or stray marks, each no more than an inch or two in length. Against the sheer drama of flowing paint going on around them, these marks might seem like afterthoughts. But the more you look at them, the more they pull your eye in further, the more enigma and emotion they seem to contain. They are like nothing, and yet they offer us an image of frailty against the strength and the rush of what is going on around them.
Pat Steir: The Barnes Series XI, 2018
