Stapleton Kearns

Regruppeing

2012-01-28T22:11:00.014-05:00

I received a couple of questions about my last Gruppe post so I thought I would talk about Emile a little more . Here a question;

"Was he thinking about this while painting in the field or do you think he did some reworking later in the studio? There is so much to consider while outdoors that it's tough enough to just get the picture on the canvas. Which brings up another question. Do you think he visited the same location on multiple days? Did he go back out on this One , or did he only go there one time? "

I don't think Gruppe took a painting out twice very often, if ever, at least not as a mature artist. He was an extremely prolific painter and everything I have seen looked to me as if it was done in on e shot. The upside of that is that he designed a lot of paintings and got good at that part of the puzzle. He also had LOTS of inventory which he sold like crazy at reasonable prices. The downside is that his oeuvre was extremely uneven. Emile made some really fine paintings, when he was good he was great. However there are a lot of Gruppes out there that are well.... a little undercooked.

A lot of Gruppes are in the 25 by 30 size range.He was a plein air painter even using the tightest definition. He was a plein air painter to a greater extent than almost any other artist I can think of. I don't think he reworked stuff in the studio at all.

One of the ways he made so many pictures was to return over and over to the same scene. The Baptist church in Rockport or some of the dock scenes in Gloucester were used for subject matter over and over, with varying results. On this page are more paintings of the same stand of birches as the one I posted the other night (that's shown below) Above is a grouping that I believe is probably the same place.

I was also asked whether Gruppe "keyed" the whole painting to the bases of those trees. And I think he probably did. The contrast there and the importance off those areas lead me to believe that he probably started there and used that area as his "punchline" In each of these paintings it seems as if that area is real important.

Here is another picture of what I believe to be the same birches from the other side. This time it's a gray day. But there is again the same emphasis on the bases of the birches and the contrast in value and or color temperature there.

Color temperature usage in an Emile Gruppe painting

2012-01-25T01:04:00.004-05:00

Emile Gruppe, probably painted along the Lamoille river in Jefforsonville, Vermont

There are a number of things that almost all workshop students need help understanding. A common one is color temperature. This One can take some work to understand! Their paintings are frequently all of a neutral temperature. That is, they are not selectively making some colors warm and others cool. They often record the hues in front of them as best as they can, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Often they get the value correct (or nearly so), but seldom do they authoritatively state the temperature of the note.

The Gruppe above is a good example of an artist effectively managing his warms and cools. Gruppe has "pushed" the color in this picture. One of the ways he has done this is to characterize the temperature of his various colors. Look at the warm light in the shadows of those birches, and in some passages like the lower parts of the right hand tree has thrown a cool (pthalo) blue in there. He gets a lot of color variety doing that and the painting looks fresh and exciting.

At the top of the painting the cool blue mountains act as a counter point to the warm birches. We see the birches strongly relieved by both the value and the color temperature of those mountains. That strong contrast is dynamic and makes a 'sweet spot" that catches a our eye. He no doubt saw this to some extent, but most certainly he installed most of it, knowing that it would look good. Because......

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE FINE COLOR INTO A PAINTING, IT MUST BE INSTALLED!

Just like design, color that is intentional and deliberate will trump dutifully recorded color. The artist is a poet, not a journalist, or worse an accountant.

Outside in warm light, you can expect the lights to be warm and the shadows cool, with hot reflected lights. If the light is cool ( or you choose to make it that way to suit your artistic purpose) you can expect the lights to be cool and the shadows warm.

Gruppe has chosen to do it both ways in this picture. He may have been inspired by the blue of the sky bouncing into the shadows from the sky itself or perhaps the river. He has played that up to get zing into his color. That made the pictures color more exciting.

Several places in this picture Gruppe has deliberately relieved an object of one color temperature against another of a radically different color temperature.

Above is a detail from the Gruppe that shows him playing this game. At A he has placed the cool shadow of the birch against a hot note of the limpid and Oncorhunchus mykiss infested waters.
At B The cool note of the water meets a warm streak of light defining the edge of the tree. And at C the cool shadow is again strongly contrasted with the hot note in the water. Notice how Gruppe has also painted the thin branches at the top of the painting hot against the cool color of the sky.

Value contrast can give "punch" to a painting, but playing your warms and cools against one another can too. Oh -do- dah- day!

More Seago and minimalism

2012-01-21T23:27:00.003-05:00

Last night I wrote about Seagos use of very downplayed, restrained or "minimalist' color. Tonight I want to look at his shapes for the same thing. Making fine shapes is a root skill of design. Sago was a master of this in an era when that skill was common and highly prized. The fine arts arena was dominated by modern abstractionists who, like em or not, often understood well the making of fine shapes . But more importantly the great age of illustration was still going on, it wouldn't really die until the late 60's or so. Those guys really knew how to design and used fine shape making to get elegance, punch and appeal into their work. They had to design well, because their designs had to carry subjects like soap, girdles and kitchen ware that were not compelling images without some very creative arrangement.

While more interesting than a corset or cheese grater, this is still just a street scene and it would not be very interesting if it was presented in a matter of fact way. A straight photo of the scene would hardly draw our notice. Seago has "sold" us the picture with his dynamic treatment of it. The subject of the picture is his bold shapes and creative and expressive color.

IT IS NOT WHAT IT IS A PICTURE OF, BUT HOW IT IS A PICTURE OF THAT IS IMPORTANT!

As I have remarked before, that would make a dandy neck tattoo, maybe with some barbed wire and lightning bolts.

The shapes in the picture above are large, simplified almost to brutality and have great carrying power. Look at the right hand side of the picture. All of the buildings there are simplified into one big almost black shape. There are a few very subdued grey incursions back there, too subdued to break up the large forms, they are just enough to imply some variation in the structures back there. Then Seago hangs that white oval sign right on top of them. That's an attention grabber and an elegant exclamation point in the design of the painting.

Up in the right hand corner the roof top contains another passage made of the same elements, a big dark decorated by similarly reduced gray shapes.

The windows in the central white building are all different. No two are alike.If you squint at the picture you can see the pattern of darks formed by windows, dormers, shadows and lawn dart legged people. Seago is using a decorative pattern formed of deliberately unique and dissimilar shapes to grab our attention and then entertain our eye as we course through the painting examining them. There is a lot of variation for us to perceive and it holds us a long time as we examine them. That is one of the goals of great shapemaking, holding the viewers attention for as long as possible. Badly designed paintings are used up in an instant. We see all there is to see and move on on search of something more interesting. Seagos shapes are wild, unexpected, individual, and interesting above all.

Notice the pattern that Seago throws across the top of the painting with all of the differently shaped rectangular chimneys superimposed on the sky. Look at the negative shapes in the sky, the "lights". Again it might help to squint at them. Each shape of the bright sky is totally different from its brethren. they all have different areas (in the geometrical sense). There is a big One on the right, a small one in the middle, and a medium sized unit on the right. That's variety and Seago made that happen. He installed that! Every boundary of these shapes has a different angle and little chimney pots and the corners of dormers give even more variety and lace like crenelations to the edges of the shapes of the sky that shows through the apertures between those black chimneys.

Though there is a shadow across the foreground it merely decorates the larger shape of the road, not subdivides it into two smaller areas. He has kept the shape of the road BIG. Part of the skill of an accomplished designer is keeping shapes large rather than chopping them up. Variations within the large shapes are subordinated to the larger whole.

Gee, thats was not the easiest thing to describe! I hope you could follow all of that.

Minimalist color in a Seago

2012-01-20T23:46:00.005-05:00

My friend Renee just posted a bunch of Seago paintings I don't guess I can link to a Facebook page because of the friend thing. I grabbed one, almost at random to write about. It is such a fine one!

Seagos are minimalist, they are from the same time as the stripped down architecture that followed the second world war. They are still traditional painting but they are spare, reduced and simplified to the essentials. They are a different possible take on minimalism. Tonight I will talk about his minimalist color.

Seagos color is reduced in this painting to almost black and white, the other colors are dull and earth colors. He uses very little chroma in any color. They are all desaturated. But they are beautiful in their subtle restraint. He used a simple palette that had earth colors and a chrome yellow (rather like a weak cadmium yellow) vermilion (a warm red somewhat like cadmium red but less strident, it is the color in the lips and cheeks of old portraits ) and viridian He has varied his color temperatures to make them interesting. Good color is not the number of different colors you can use, or their brightness or assertiveness. It is an intelligent arrangement founded on the way those colors relate to one another. The best pianist isn't necessarily the one who can pound the loudest.

Notice the cool color in the light of the house in the middle, the shadow under its eaves contrasts with that by it's warmth. All over this painting dull colors are enlivened by the play of warm and cool hues.

On the first floor of that building are two shops, one red and the other green. They are the most "colored"notes in the entire painting. In most paintings they would look dull and muddy. But every color looks the way it does only in the context of the other colors around it. These reds and greens are surrounded by grays and blacks. Dull as these two shop front notes are, they are gay in comparison to their surroundings. Probably each is partially knocked down by the admixture of the other. They fit together perfectly because grave as they are, the relate to one another.To their right is a third shop, or just a wall, that is made from a pattern of both notes from the other two. There is a progression from a dull red to a dull green to a combination of the two together. That didn't just happen, because as I have said before;

NOTHING GOOD GETS INTO A PICTURE BY ACCIDENT!

Seago made that happen, he decided to make that intelligent and beautiful arrangement because the progression across those tones would be appealing. Most of the viewers would know they liked that part of the painting but not know why. They didn't have to know why for it to work on them, any more than they would have to know what key a tune is in to like hearing it. But the musician who wrote the tune knew and chose that key to make his song "work".

Seago repeats the dull red in that Zamboni ( or whatever that shape is) parked on the sidewalk at the right. The buildings roof has those colors laced into it also. The cool notes in the light struck building at the center contain the green, and the building on the left s a gray containing the red note.The sky has the same dull red dull green pattern hidden there too.

The picture is a black and white warp into which is woven a weft of dull red and green. This is completely arbitrary, he installed those colors. I expect there were some colors actually there that inspired his caprice, but the color in this painting is decorative and not observed. He has made an arrangement of very quiet subtle colors that set one another off, embedded in a field of gray and black.

I think I could probably write more about minimalism in Segos work in my next post because it is in his shapes and design too.

Messages from a friend who died last night

2012-01-19T03:52:00.000-05:00

A Paul Goodnow water gilded 23 carat gold leafed, handmade scraffito cornered, Florentine, closed cornered frame and his own painting. This is about as fine as framing gets.

My dear friend Paul Goodnow, framer and artist, died last night. He died at his easel. painting, late at night. I hope that happens to me too. I am in shock. It is hard to believe he is just gone. How does that work? One day they are here and the next they are not? I can't believe I will never see him again or hear his ridiculous wise guy Rhode Island accent. He was a true friend to me and we went on many painting trips together. Since we both snore, we were always assigned to the same room. We painted together on a Willard Metcalf site in Cornish, New Hampshire this fall. It never crossed our minds that it would be our last and final goodbye. .
One of the things I have done today is to go back and reread some of our facebook messages. Here is a string of them. I hope you can get a feel for the guy he was from reading these. Some of them are a little rough, I apologize to those of you who are weak, self righteous toads, judgmental and ostentatiously over sensitive martinets, but here they are just the same. Portions have been redacted for brevity and content.
Goodnow">
November 13, 2009
Paul Carter Goodnow
When we would go out painting I was the framer but what now ? When you speak of framing , am I the painter? I wasn't forgiving you right away, but I do now .
November 20, 2009
Paul Carter Goodnow
hedgehog
Do Hedgehogs eat barns? Keep him away anyhow . The Woodpecker has a girlfriend and seems to have lost interest in destroying the barn .
Stapleton Kearns">
November 20, 2009
Stapleton Kearns
He is now putting the wood pecker to his girlfriend instead of your barn.
Goodnow">
January 2, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
I stopped filling the holes at this point but he hasn't been around in about two weeks , maybe more . I have about two cords or more of logs he could go to town on but no.....
Stapleton Kearns">
January 19, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
Paul will you grab my two paintings while you are there too, please? I will see if I can get God to replace your hair.
...............Stape
Stapleton Kearns">
June 10, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
Paul;
I don't know what the deal is with that. Its not my birthday. It is some weird face book glitch I guess.
June 11, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
turning thirty nine is no big deal Stape , I am almost there myself
Stapleton Kearns">
June 11, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
59 is not old if you are a tree!
Goodnow">
June 12, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
Thats why I have gotten wider as I grow older , merely to accommodate the rings ." Big Baby Davis " The occasional obligatory sports reference.
Stapleton Kearns">
June 12, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
. Go Seltz!
Goodnow">
June 12, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
34 years married today
July 18, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
and what is your stance on trading vehicles for paintings?
Stapleton Kearns">
July 18, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
Depends on the vehicle. I took in a 76 T-bird once. Great car. Concealed headlights, wicked fast!
Goodnow">
July 18, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
I like the names you come up with in your blog , good thing your wife named the kids. Always entertaining and informative . was that a 390 or a 429 in the t-bird? Remember the sunbeam tiger with the 289 or 302s, my neighbor had one a few years back , bodies rusted horribly but .... My first Car was a Cougar 1967 , second was a 69 Ford Cortina remember those?
Stapleton Kearns">
August 29, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
I know you figured this out, but I don't use Kims name on facebook. Believe it or not he has to keep a low profile, there are weirdos out there when you are a rock and roll hero. Who knew? I know Brittany has problems. I think Taylor Swift is the most talented young woman in show business t0day!
Goodnow">
September 18, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
saw Kim playing one of these in the videos . This one is mine but the major difference is that he can play his .
October 29, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
Cool that you got to paint with Marc Hanson . He told me Stape said you were a good guy , Susan Lammers said pretty much the same thing before . I started thinking , nice that Stape says that but what is it that I am doing that people have to ask that question? I told Susan that you are the glue that holds everyone together . You are like everywhere and everyone knows you . And of course they all like you too , that is important . Get your six by eights ready for Rockport . Drop off is on the 16th .
October 29, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
big orange hat!
October 29, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
You are a good guy. But I told them you were an irascible prick.
October 31, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
Stape you are the reason the Patriots sent randy Moss to Minnesota , just so that we could keep you here . That guy didn't catch a break, grew up down south went to Minnesota first then California , then New England , now back to Minnesota . That has to be like the sauna to the cold dip tub and back etc. Glad you like it here . I hope I get to paint in Vermont with you guys , maybe it works out that we get the regulars all together this year at some point . side note :Deer tick got me good man , looks like antibiotics are in the near future .
November 1, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
Is he related to Sterling Moss?
So you got Lymes. I am always paranoid about that. Maybe I have it too I certainly am at risk. Hope you have a speedy recovery.
........Stape
November 1, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
Gotten bitten anyway , and there was an infection or at least a red circle so antibiotics is the next step. I saw the doc and it is two pills a day for 14 days . Just worth taking the measures they recommend because the disease can be bad . I was thinking about you guys that are out all the time , good news is that the frost ends the threat so .... I found out I have high blood pressure and I told the doctor that maybe the tick had it and gave it to me. I hate deerticks as much as Woodpeckers , well maybe more at least the woodpeckers haven't directly attacked me .
November 1, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
Wasn't Sterling Moss a German test pilot or ace or something?
November 5, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
I am taking the antibiotics for 14 days , it seems that the situation is pretty common so be on the lookout next season and all you need to do is see the doc and get the pills if they do bite . If you don't and it is Lyme disease it can be very serious . I was out filling woodpecker holes in the barn so it is another woodpecker related incident! I tacked a black plastic bag on the back of the barn and so far no more attacks . Happy painting man.
November 26, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
TM and I were wondering if we will be able to get you to go to Vermont in about January when we go because of your celebrity status . happy for you having such a big following but hoping that it doesn't mean you won't be able to go then , would be nice to get the gang together . I think it will be my one trip up there .
November 26, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
Probably, Whats the date?
December 27, 2010
Paul Carter Goodnow
going to Vermont in January with us , right? Or am I going with you?
December 27, 2010
Stapleton Kearns
You will do as you are told
January 24, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
I keep hearing about powerball. Is that a sport too?
January 25, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I believe it is for some . Mostly it seems to be an expensive hobby , kind of like painting is for many of us.
February 1, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I try not to be a follower but logic wins out sometimes , I had tried the walnut oil , and still use the medium sometimes and have titanium white graham paint , which I like , then a year or so later when we were painting in Vermont you were using the Liquin . I tried it one time when I couldn't get the walnut oil knowing that you liked it . I got hooked on it and am even using it mixed with oil color to do some finishes on frames . I guess it is good to have all the info you can because even if reluctant at first ..... I can see the liquin in the picture of you painting . They should give you endorsements .
February 1, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
Paul;
The walnut oil is good too, but I worry about all of the warnings on the bottle about flammability.
Is Tony Francona right about Becket?
........................Stape
February 1, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
The only color that RGH makes that I am not totally happy with is their Cobalt violet. I get mine from Gamblin now
...........................Stape
February 1, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Wow Stape you have added new names to the repertoire , now we have Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez added as well . So you mean that a rag with walnut oil must be highly flammable even more so than another medium ? that would be a concern for sure . I empty wastebasket once a week now . that 11x14 that you did in the fall in Vermont finished drying out with a gloss and hasn't needed varnishing at all , pretty impressive in that regard , love the painting too. I tend to use the Liquin now anyway but thanks for mentioniung the volatility .
February 1, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Ah Yes speaking on volatility , The Tampa Bay Rays haver chosen to ignore the volatlity of our old friend Manny Ramirez (Manram to his closest friends) and they gave him a contract so he will be facing the Red sox this season . They still haven't signed Alex Katz however.
February 23, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Hey Stape when someone says a woman's face has character aren't they really saying something else in a roundabout way? Mens faces can have character and it doesn't mean they are ugly .

February 23, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
It depends on their inflection. Watch their eyes.
February 23, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
If it gets to 5.00 a gallon you might have to be taking weight out of the trunk of the Lincoln or installing a sail or something . I have an 8 cylinder in the truck , fortunately I can't afford to think about changing vehicles so that makes that decision easy. We need something that will run on old turpentine and urine for the long painting trips . If only more scientists were pleinaire painters ....
February 23, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
The gas isn't such a big deal. You would have to burn a loy of gas to recoup the cost of replacing a vehicle. I just got a 96 Honda Civic. Looks clean, runs like a top. That should cut our fleet average. I think it gets 40 mpg. I got a deal on it because it was old and had a stick. No one can drive a stick anymore.
February 24, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Price keeps going up need to find a gas station that takes paintings . How bout that Manny Ramirez? He won't go away now he is playing for the Tampa Bay Rays.
March 3, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
seems like it . There is lots of money for them to fight over . As long as they don't all become painters while they are out of work .
March 10, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I often wish I could go back and listen more to the details in the stories that my Dad told . Can't get enough of that now after it is too late , Great that you listened well , your memories keep him alive . I used to get bored hearing some things then , now they would be treasures to hear again . My dad had a heart attack in my chair in my kitchen while I was making him coffee and My wife , Sister and Brother in law were sitting with him . He had a triple bypass years before but you never expect it so sudden and I tried to revive him but he was just gone . Only 66 . I miss him and it feels good to miss him as I am sure you miss your Dad and always will . I didn't get to spend the time you had with your Dad near the end and I am sure he heared every word you said to him when you were there and knew you were there , all worthwhile time well spent . That story was beautifully done .
April 24, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Hey , I actually have to buy the gold if you think about it . I have started using RgH now too though I haven't loaded tubes yet.. I wanted to tell you that after seeing three of his paintings , I totally get what you ask the question for but it should be "whats the deal with Alex Katz buyers?"
May 25, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I saw something about shellac being from tree resin or something , I was remembering it being from the secretions of the lac bug . Seriously if it isn't shellac it is lacquer but they actual say that in one of the reference books , that stuck with me , not that I was going to go looking for lac bugs to coax out their secretions or anything . Well I bought the RGH now I have been forgetting to buy the tubes and they have been sitting in their jars but I will be using them soon . I sometimes look at the pretty colors when I am squeezing out the Windsor Newton so that is a start. Still using Liquin , I really like that stuff .
May 25, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I found myself using the Zinser on panels sometimes too , I had a gallon and after reading it said "sounds like great stuff . "
wish I could remember this exactly but there was a study by norwegians I believe it was , that found that going to museums and plays was good for your health . I mean it was doctors that did the study . Was on the news yesterday wish I had recorded it but it must be somewhere on the internet .
May 25, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
Norwegians are very nice, but you can't go by their statistics.
May 26, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
And what of their furniture?
June 16, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
How bout them Bruins?
June 17, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
What Bruins are those
June 17, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
winners of the stanley cup , Boston bruins . I was just bringing you your sports moment for the month of june . Hope everything is going well, Paul
July 4, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
I too have come to see the need for the cheap but decent frames and will be gathering up the damaged omegas returned from shows to metal leaf and recycle them . I was just looking at a 16x24 Strisk "driftwood"frame because I won't have time to make one for a show . The frame came off his painting to give way to a nice goldleaf one when I sold the painting. Now suddenly the driftwood has new appeal.
August 8, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Happy Birthday! 59 years young
August 8, 2011
Stapleton Kearns
and not dead!
August 9, 2011
Paul Carter Goodnow
Always better that way, in fact I believe at least four out of five doctors recommend that!
Goodbye Paulie

Various things

2012-01-17T21:51:00.008-05:00

View from the Inn on Sunset Hill.

Here I am again! See, still alive.I haven't blogged for a while. I took a vacation. I will begin again, but sporadically I think. After 975 posts in a row I REALLY needed a break!
I have been absent for a while and I have received e-mails asking if I am OK, not dead etc. I am fine, beginning to regain my bearings after a few trying months. I am getting some art made and it has been nice to take the time off from the blog and just hunker down and work. I do have some ideas for a few posts and I am sitting on a few stored readers questions. I would like to resume the Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas too. There are more recently discovered Dirk VanAssaerts paintings .

Snowcamp begins this weekend and the following two. I am looking forward to that. I have been traveling and holed up to work for a while now, it will be nice to be out and teaching again. I am looking forward to seeing some of you again and meeting the rest of you for the first time. I intend to work you 12 hours a day. Can you keep up with me?

I am also doing an outdoor painting workshop March 1st through 3rd for the Southern Vermont Art Center, that should be fun. It is beautiful country over there. I also am teaching a seascape-design workshop at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester. That's March the 23rd through the 25th. Further out there is Nashville, Tennessee and then Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

There are still a few spaces in two of the workshops, if you want to come, sign up over in the sidebar. Here is a materials list if you decide to come. If you want to know what I use to paint outside, this is the kit.

Thanks to Take-it -easel for the new Stapleton Kearns Signature model easel! I will enjoy having a new Gloucester easel. Counting antique models I must have about six of the things now. The new model has a new leg release system and I am excited to try that out. It looks like a major improvement. The complicated wire release mechanisms always were the only thing that could go wrong with a Gloucester easel and now that should be solved. Go to my side bar and find the link to their site. I do not get a kick back on these, I want Take it easel to survive and prosper as they are an essential part of my equipment. If you are using the Chi-Com version you should step up to the real thing. The difference is enormous, handcrafted in Vermont from American maple, the Take-it-easel is a lifetime piece of equipment. I try to stay away from Chinese art materials most of the time. Their quality control is abysmal. Besides, don't you remember that unpleasantness at Chosin reservoir?

Below I have reprinted a previous post that will I hope be useful to any of you planning to work outside this winter. I will have a new One soon!

An Aldro Hibbard of Rockport Massachusetts

Every year do a post on how to paint outside in the winter. Here is this years. Some of it is from previous posts, however I am getting so many questions about it that I need to cover it about this time every year. If you are a plein air painter and you only work outside in the summer you are only working part time. It is really not too hard to get your act outside in the snow and it is a great subject matter. It lends itself to being designed, and it is not too green.

WINTER IS THE BEST TIME TO PAINT OUTSIDE!

I don't change my palette to paint snow, but I do whip my white. That is; I make a donut shape of white on my palette and throw a shot of medium in the hole. Then I whip it up with my palette knife, I may have to do this to my ocher or another color sometimes too. But I have worked out side at 10 degrees below zero and the paint will still work, It can get a little stiff, almost like joint compound, but I don't really mind that. Somehow it seems to adapt to the kinds of things that I paint in the winter. Bare branches and trees are easier to pant with the cold paint.

If your easel has any wingnuts on it, you had better bring a pair of pliers along. Your hands may get to cold to turn them and at the end of the day an easel that you can't collapse can be a big problem.

It is also best to paint in pairs. If you fall down and break a leg back in the woods it is nice to have some one else along. It happened to a friend of mine a few years ago along a frozen stream in Vermont. He would have frozen to death out there had he been painting alone.

Here is a list I send to my workshop attendees that tells what I use outdoors for a palette and a little about my boots.

Here are the materials you will need for my workshop. Most of you are not in my workshop of course. It would be huge if you were. We would need about five Greyhound buses. But look at the materials list here and you can get an idea of what I think you should have, at a minimum, to paint on location.

Because it is winter painting you will need to have good boots, I recommend these.

Cabela's® Trans-Alaska™ III Pac Boot

Every other part of your clothing needs for cold weather painting is negotiable, this works and that works. However when it comes to footwear I think most of what the average person thinks of as adequate gear won't cut it. Boots that might be OK for shoveling the walk or taking a winter hike will not allow you to stand in snow or on ice for hour after hour without getting cold feet. You have to keep your feet warm.

. Every other part of your clothing needs for cold weather painting is negotiable, this works and that works. However when it comes to footwear I think most of what the average person thinks of as adequate gear won't cut it. Boots that might be OK for shoveling the walk or taking a winter hike will not allow you to stand in snow or on ice for hour after hour without getting cold feet. You have to keep your feet warm. Your Sorels will not cut it. I would impress on you that you think your boots are OK, but they will probably not be. You are going to ignore this and then your feet are going to be cold and you will be unable to work. "I won't be there for you to whine to, but if I was, I would say, Hey, I warned you!"

If you can keep your feet warm standing out painting everything else is relatively easy. There are lots of good parkas and hats, snow pants and suits etc. But it doesn't seem to me that there are many boots that are as serious as these. I have lent mine to other guys who then bought them the next day. If you are worried about getting cold painting, buy these boots and everything else is just a matter adding layers of clothing. But if your boots don't cut it you can't add another pair.

. There are a lot of different winter boots available but I think these are the ticket. Cabelas is a reasonably priced gear merchandiser mainly aimed at the hunters, rather than extreme sports, elitist gear freaks.
I think a woman could probably find boots of this sort there also.

If you can keep your feet warm standing out painting everything else is relatively easy. There are lots of good parkas and hats, snow pants and suits etc. But it doesn't seem to me that there are many boots that are as serious as these. I have lent mine to other guys who then bought them the next day. If you are worried about getting cold painting, buy these boots and everything else is just a matter adding layers of clothing. But if your boots don't cut it you can't add another pair.

Here is a link to the page on Cabelas site where you can find them.
Many of you will decide the boots you already have are fine, and they might be, come to the workshop in them and we will see. But if you absolutely want to have warm feet, heres what you need.

You will need a warm parka of the ski sort or a snowmobile suit. You can by a one piece outdoor work suit at Wal-Mart very inexpensively that seem to be fine. Under that I recommend a wool sweater or poly fleece shirt . I wear insulated snow pants made for snowboarders but there are lots of sorts of snowpants made for snowmobilers and other winter sports, under that polar weight long underwear, Cabelas is good for this.I wear inexpensive thinsulate lined gloves that you can buy at a Wal-Mart or hardware store cheaply. I have a hat with a brim over which I pull a stocking cap when it is very cold. There is no reason for you to be cold painting outside. It is simply a matter of getting the equipment right.

You will need a a french easel, a pochade ( pronounced "pochade") box and tripod, or a Gloucester easel. Aluminum collapsing easels and little wooden tripod easels are generally not steady enough and they won't hold your palette. I don't recommend them.

PAINTING IS HARD ENOUGH WITH THE BEST OF MATERIALS!

In your paintbox you will need:

Titanium White
cadmium yellow medium or light
cadmium red light
burnt sienna
either cobalt, Prussian, or pthalocyanine blue
yellow ochre
ultramarine blue
Permanent alizirin or quinacridone red
viridian or permanent green deep

you also might want, but won't require,

Ivory black or
cobalt violet

a palette of some sort, most easel setups include a palette.

a medium. I like Liquin or Galkyd but if you like an oil and varnish medium that is fine too. You may already be using a medium at home, bring that. Also you will need a top from an olive jar or a small oil cup to put it in.

mineral spirits or turpentine, and a tuna fish can to put that in.

A roll of Bounty or Viva paper towels, all others are inferior. Also a grocery store plastic bag for them after use.

A selection of flat brushes, a couple of #1's, several #4's, a #8 or 10 and a short handled rigger, synthetic or sable, about a #4 . Also a leaf shaped palette knife.

You will need a hat with a substantial brim, a baseball hat works well. I carry a container of Goop, you can get that at Wall Mart or an auto supply store, to use cleaning your hands.

A fine cigar or two, possibly a maduro, box pressed if possible, no White Owls or plastic mouthpieces please.

Some people like to have an umbrella to shade their canvas, I don't use one, but you might.

A camera, you will want to get a shot of what you are painting because it may save the project later in the studio.

Reworking a failed passage

2011-12-11T22:30:00.013-05:00

Sisyphus, by Titian

As those of you who read my blog already know, I fight like hell to get my paintings to work. The more you learn about painting, the harder it gets. Eventually it will become too hard for me to do at all.

IT ONLY MATTERS WHAT THE PAINTING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE, NOT HOW LONG IT TOOK OR HOW HARD YOU HAD TO WORK TO MAKE IT!

Sometimes a passage (or area) of a painting just doesn't work. Here is one of those. Its time to give this One a second chance! This is a group of rocks in the middle of a seascape. After struggling for days with it, finally I decided to rip the whole thing out and have another go at it. It was time for a fresh start. Because I worked a long time trying to get these rocks right, I built up a lot more paint than I wanted. Above is the failed passage, that has been sand papered down. I wanted to get the surface back to flat and level so I could start over and not have pentimenti (ridges from the previous brushstrokes) visible under my newly applied paint.

First I scraped the surface with the side of my offset, leaf shaped palette knife to get as much of the paint off as I could. Then I sanded it until it was flat with 80 grit sandpaper. I wet sanded it by dipping my sandpaper in mineral spirits. Then I finished it off with the 150 (sand paper with a higher number is finer). I think I get better results wet sanding, but also I don't want all the dust from my pigments flying up into the air for me to breathe, if I wet sand the painting that doesn't happen. I wear nitrile gloves when I paint so I didn't get the resultant toxic slurry all over my hands and abdomen.

I had been trying to just " invent" the rocks, something I am sometimes able to do. It wasn't working for me this time so I needed to hire a model. Above is my "model". Those are two pieces of anthracite coal picked up from an old railroad bed in Vermont. I have a box of about twenty of these and I use them for just this purpose. I have sprayed them with krylon to give them a little more reflective surface. Anthracite coal looks a lot like ocean rocks, it has facets and unusual shapes. I can look at it and use those shapes to create rocks in a seascape that don't look too "man made". It is necessary to simplify them or only use some parts of them, but it really helps to imagine the forms and the different planes turning against the light.

I have a clamp light with a 40 watt "daylight colored" bulb in it at the same angle I want my light to be hitting the rocks that I intend to paint. This little tableau is on a wooden shelf cantilevered out from the wall right next to my easel at just below my eye level ( I am 32 feet tall, and weigh over 1600 pounds).

Below are the rocks, redux. I have elongated the rock on the left, I needed it to fit into a particular area of the painting. I have also thrown some color in there, sometimes the coal looks great painted it's actual color, but in this case I wanted a red-orange Cape Ann granite.

Perhaps if I ever get this painting finished I will post it so you can see how it comes out. I still have a fair amount of refinement to do on this area, but you can see what I am up to.

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There is still room in Snowcamp. The first session is filled but the second still has a few spaces. If you would like to come you can sign up here. Snowcamp happens at a big old wooden inn high on a ridge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The inn overlooks the Cannon Mountain and the Presidential range. We paint outside just out the back door of the inn so if you get cold you can run inside and warm up by the fire. The Sunset Hill Inn takes good care of us and everything we need is right there. I park my car and forget it while I am there. Snowcamp is a three day total immersion experience that runs from breakfast until well after dinner. It is a great way to meet other painters and learn how to work outside in the winter. Snow painting is my favorite thing, and I will show you some of the tricks I have picked up in my about 30 years of painting it.

The surface of an Edward Seago, examined

2011-12-01T09:58:00.012-05:00

Above is a painting by Edward Seago that is full of bold impasto. What a fine One it is! As you probably know Seago is one of my heroes ( the others are Aldro Hibbard, Willard Metcalf, and Jeff Beck) If you click on it you will be able to see some of the different textures and thicknesses of paint he used. I will unpack what, in my opinion, he did in various parts of this picture.

Seago texture his canvasses before he painted on them. Here is a link to a post about that. In the passage above, Seago has dragged the branches across his sky, already textured by his ground. It looks to me like he did this with a knife. The rough ground grabbed the paint unevenly from his knife. This had to be done ONCE! This method doesn't admit for much correcting or alteration.
He added the larger branches with a brush, a sable rigger ( sometimes called a scriptliner) would do that nicely. Notice how he allows interuptions in those lines of the branches made with a brush. That makes them look of a piece with the rest of the dragged looking passage. Had he drawn those too carefully and consistently they would have looked too different from the knife work around them and pointed out the paucity of the means used to produce the spotted foliage and twigs against the sky.

Above is a passage from the middle of the painting. I wish I could get better details to show you but this is what I have to work with. The house there is heavily loaded paint, mostly white with a little ocher added to it. Notice how loose and barely suggested everything in this passage is. Seago has made a point of putting a dark contrasting value in the line of trees behind the buildings. the contrast makes the passage pop and draws our eye there. Seago wanted to be sure we didn't miss the buildings down at the bottom of the field. He also dragged his brush strokes across the rough ground in the warm red tree that is just above the white gable of the house. This softens his edges in a different way than a painter would do on a smooth surface by pulling colliding edges together with a soft touch of the brush. Although the mechanics of arriving at that demephasized edge are different than more common methods, the result is about the same.

Here is a passage from the foreground I believe it was mostly painted with a large stiff bristle brush. You can see the marks of the individual hairs in the strokes. That gives it a striated grass-like appearance. Seago varies his paint application in order to best describe the particular texture of the elements of the landscape. He was a very fast and fluent painter and the ability to do this was developed over many years. He spent his early career painting society portraits and horses so his draftsmanship was impeccable. Usually loose painters that are good, have started out painting tightly.

LOOSE HANDLING WILL NOT DISGUISE WEAK DRAWING!

Say, that might make a dandy neck tattoo!

Here is the sky, here Seago is pulling strokes from a large bristle brush over his textured ground again. See the darker clouds soften because they are dragged across the sky beneath them. Seagos ground, besides being rough was absorbent, He added gesso ( real gesso not the contemporary acrylic counterfeit) to the lead mixture that he used as a priming so that his thirsty ground sucked in the wet paint and allowed for rapid overpainting in a way that a normal ground would not. The rough canvas aided him in his ability to work rapidly.

Here is a bit of the distance from the left hand side or the tableau. This is thinly painted, see how the ground shows so clearly through it? Seago is varying his paint thickness for two reasons. Firstly to give the illusion of distance and less resolution, thinner passages tend to drop back from a roughly handled fore ground. But the other and perhaps more important reason, is to provide contrast to his roughly painted passages. In order for some passages to look rough it is most effective to have them share the canvas with thinly painted passages. The thinly painted passages heighten the effect of the thick ones by contrast, just as a spot of dark near a light passage will draw attention to the brightness of that area.

Above is the immediate foreground. It is very thickly painted. See the rough crudeness of the paint? this was probably troweled on with his knife and gives the illusion of texture to the field's freshly turned earth . Seago has thrown some directional signals in there too, the furrows encourage us to follow them deeper into the middle ground of the painting.

WHEN YOU PAINT A PASSAGE, BESIDES THINKING ABOUT COLOR AND VALUE ETC. IT IS IMPORTANT TO DECIDE HOW THAT PASSAGE WILL LEAD THE VIEWER. WHAT IS ITS THRUST? HOW WILL THE EYE LEAVE THE PASSAGE AND WHERE WILL IT GO NEXT? YOU SHOULD BE IN DELIBERATE CONTROL OF THAT!

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A view from the back yard of the Sunset Hill Inn

As many of you know, each year I teach a series of workshops called Snowcamp at a historic inn up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The first session is filled but I do have spaces left in the other. This is a course in winter painting skills and open to all levels of expertise from beginner to self important semi professional.

The Sunset Hill House, a charming old wooden hotel from the days before automobiles, takes care of all our needs including meals served in our own private dining room. Because we eat together, the workshop is a total immersion experience from breakfast until evening. We get a lot done on that schedule. We also get the opportunity to meet and befriend fellow painters.

I teach the workshop right outside the enormous back veranda of the inn, or under that if it is actually snowing. There is no need to carry equipment any distance and if you get cold you can run inside and warm yourself by the fire. If you would like to be there this year here is the link to sign up!

Surface and impasto

2011-11-22T06:38:00.011-05:00

Images courtesy of artrenewal.org They have become a login site. For 14 dollars you get access to a lot of hi-res images. I have downsized these and cut details from them, those on the site are much larger. I believe the library of images they offer is worth the small investment and would encourage you to join. I receive no kickback, funding etc from them or anyone else who I recommend over there in the side bar, well, except for RGH paint who gave me a quart of white once.

I want to talk about surface in this post. There are two main sorts of surface, enameled (as it is sometimes called) ie. very smoothly painted without ridges or areas of deliberately roughened paint, and an impastoed, or 3D surface where the artist has intentionally allowed the paint to project from the surface to carry his illusion. Great painters have fallen into both camps.

The head at the top of the page is a detail of a Raeburn. He has used the thickness of his brush strokes which follow the forms of the sitters face to express the structure there. Until the early twentieth century painters worked with lead white. Lead white comes in a variety of handling qualities from ropey or stringy, to liquid and flowing, to crumbly and dry. The most common was an unguent and easily manipulated version such as you see in the painting above. One of the few drawbacks of flake lead (other than its toxicity) is that it becomes more transparent as it ages. Knowing this, artists would often load their whites ( paint them thickly) to make sure they retained opacity over time. However this gave an added benefit, these thick lights contrasted with the thinly painted shadows and a heightened dimensionality appeared. The artist gained another means to express the illusion of volume and dimensionality on his flat surface that an enameled surface didn't give him.

Painters who work over canvases with carefully transferred drawings on them tend to work very smoothly. Often they are coloring in or glazing these drawings in transparent veils to make their paintings. This is an academic approach. Painters who use impasto tend to paint directly from nature. They drag paint here, load it there, or use a palette knife to create the illusion of texture and form by various kinds of manipulative paint handling.

Below is an example of Rembrandt painting a sleeve. He was perhaps the greatest manipulator of impasto. The globs and striations in the paint surface appear at a distance to be the brocaded details of the material. In the upper left of the detail is a good place to see that. Incidentally, this is some of that crumbly look I spoke about earlier as opposed to the more liquid handling in the Raeburn above.

Art is what the artist brings with him to a painting. It is not found in nature itself. Art is man made and the result of an artists decision making process. It is not resultant from observation or accident, but is deliberately installed through intention.

The use of impasto requires the artist to make decisions about the nature of his paint application and its the varied effects he wishes to obtain. It cannot be more than inspired by nature in front of him, it must be invented. The same sort of passage can be painted absolutely smoothly to great effect as well.

Above is a sleeve and hand painted by Ingres. It has great complexity like the Rembrandt yet it is smoothly painted. In the hands of a master either approach can result in triumphant verisimilitude. I don't mean to say that one approach is better than another, however the use of impasto does require an additional set of decisions for the painter to make about how his surface will look.

Here is a detail of Rembrandt's' Hendrickje bathing. The impasto emphasises the simplified and broad planes with which Rembrandt has described the forms of his subject. The use of impasto and the expression of form are entwined and work together to further the artists purpose. More on this in my next post.

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I also received this e-mail:

"I, of course, noticed that you've ceased your superhuman habit of daily posting. I've grown so fond of spending evenings scouring your archives. Your blog is the art instruction I didn't receive back in the sixties/seventies, and your views and wonderful humor have become a comforting light in my search to improve my paintings. I've looked for a post that might explain your absence, but haven't found anything. I hope you are well, and that you'll be back soon. Thank you, for all your generosity and the effort you've put into what you have produced for us".

I have backed off to posting about once a week for now. I may return to greater frequency but I need to do this for a number of reasons which are:

Unspecified and serious difficulties in my private life.
A need to concentrate on my painting, I have to get my inventory up, which is off partly due to the unspecified difficulties opaquely alluded to above, but also because I have been making such difficult studio paintings, seascapes and such that take forever. I am much faster out on location than in the studio.
The blog was intended to be a one year project and instead extended to a thousand posts, which are archived and available should anyone want to read them. It is an encyclopedic "book" of what I have learned over the years I have painted. It should be useful to many who are looking for that information ( or perhaps slant is the better word ) which is hard to find in the mainstream art world.
I have written most of what I set out to write. The technical and design posts most importantly. I don't want to become repetitive. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There are lots more posts I can write and will, but they are more time consuming and difficult. The Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas are a great example of that. I will do more of those but each one takes about 20 hours. They are worth the time and a lot of fun to do, providing I have the time to use doing them.
The blog will continue, but as I said above, I will have to keep to a reduced schedule for now. I do want to be useful. Thank you all who have continued to follow along.

Some rambling thoughts on inexpensive art

2011-11-11T13:07:00.008-05:00

Carl Faberge 1846-1920 The head of a famed Russian jewelry workshop, Faberge produced thousands of fine objects but the best known are the Faberge eggs. Often their creation was the work of thousands of hours of highly skilled craftsmanship. Most were made for the Tzar as gifts for his mother and wife. The jewelry firm was destroyed by the revolution and Faberge escaped to Switzerland.

Here's a question I received the other day:

"I have a problem selling paintings to friends and/or family. I feel they expect a discount, a hefty discount, and somehow I feel guilty if I don't give them a REALLY good deal... I get this knot in the pit of my stomach every time a good friend or family asks about buying a painting because I know I'm going to have to practically give it to them. I recently sold one that way, and gave the person about 75% off gallery price, and they still haggled with me about paying the shipping. sheesh!!! I was hoping they wouldn't buy it....but they liked it.So, do you have a standard "friends and family discount" or do you just tell them the price, and that's it....? "

That' a difficult question to answer for everybody, but here is how I have handled that. My most recent, favorite, or most likely to sell paintings are never gifted to anyone. I must make a living, first and foremost, before I give anything away. I cannot feed my children snowballs all winter. However I make a lot of art and sometimes things come back from the galleries unsold, even though they might be paintings that I am proud to have made. Sometimes I will give these to people. I have friends who will never be able to afford my paintings and, I try to make sure that my close friends in this category have one of my paintings.Often they get a painting that while well made, is a field sketch or not something that would be as appealing to the general public . That is what is sometimes called an "artists picture"

Anyone who I know that can afford to buy one of my paintings, has to buy them. If I know them quite well I will negotiate a lower price for them. Usually it is a generous but not ridiculous discount. I would rather just give the painting away than take obscenely short money for them. Again my art is expensive. If you are making paintings that sell at workingmans prices, say 300 dollars, I suggest you never give any of them away or discount them at all, except to the most impoverished of your close friends.I think their is a lot to lose by not valuing your own paintings .If you want others to value them, you should begin that yourself.

I often hear an artist who has just been praised on his art make excuses for its quality. I always tell students in workshops to never disparage their own art. Don't make excuses for it like"its not done" or point out a defect you believe it has. In fact, recommend you never make excuses for your art at all. I don't explain em much either, I present them and if you like them, fine. If you don't, I wont try to talk you into it or waste much time wishing that you did. Their are lots of other people and if the picture is any good someone else might. There is a saying in the art gallery world that "there is a buyer for every painting". I am not sure that is true of weak paintings, but it might be true of paintings at or above a certain level of quality. It can sometimes take a long time to get that painting in front of that buyer though.

If someone praises one of your paintings, even if they are totally uninformed and you know they are, smile and graciously accept the complement, don't tell them they are wrong.Even weak paintings are fiendishly hard to make, and it takes years of work and study to make a middling quality painting. If you can do it even a little, be proud of yourself and claim what laurels are offered. It is so hard to make a decent painting that it is a wonder that anyone ever does it! Take credit for your efforts, it will be more than a reward for the time spent it will also be a comfort and encouragement to you as you work towards making even better paintings.

I have noticed a funny disconnect in peoples thinking about art. They want it to be cheap when they buy it and valuable when they own it. I suppose that's just human nature, and everybody loves a bargain. When I had my gallery I had some small reputation for knowing my way around old paintings. Often people would bring me paintings that they had bought at auction. They would invariably tell me that they "knew" the painting was by Corot or some other master. I knew at a glance that it was not. These treasure hunters were always going to find some expert who would certify their find as being a real Corot,although unsigned, and they would resell it for a fortune.

Usually the works they lovingly presented me were amateurish and worth very little. Their owners were treasure hunting, and they didn't know enough about painting to know a good old painting from a weak one. There are LOTS of old paintings out there for sale and many of them are inexpensive. In the 19th century just like today there were plenty of amateur painters and also a "production" art industry making art much like the imported motel paintings of today.

I suppose that it makes sense that antique dealers and resellers of auction finds who have no idea what old paintings that are valuable might look like would have trouble pricing them. I have noticed many times that they usually price worthless, damaged, or old production paintings ridiculously high. The same folks sold me many etchings for ridiculously low prices, often marked as being "ink drawings". I built a nice little collection of old prints that way, they are not particularly valuable, but they are good art and original. These etchings have provided me with much pleasure and instruction.. I suppose the dealers are hipper than that now, that was a while ago, but I always check the price of etchings in the antique shops when I see them. I guess because they are black and white, dealers and perhaps their customers don't particularly value them. If bargains are to be had, that seems to be where I, at least, have found them.

I was once invited to visit the home of an old man ( now long deceased)who had spent a lifetime buying cheap paintings at auction. His limit was about 25 dollars. He had paintings stacked everywhere, on the stairs against the walls of every room and even in his kitchen cabinets. I grew bored pulling through them looking for anything that I though was fine or of any particular value. I am not sure he thought he had any masterpieces, he probably was satisfied just to get his 25 dollars worth. He was an interesting guy and had taken a number of photographs as he accompanied his mother who was working for the WPA documenting life in the impoverished depression era south. I bought one of his photographs of sorghum harvesting behind horse drawn wagons and met him when I sought him out to sign it for me. He placed no particular value on his photographs and I think I paid about 25 dollars for it.

Several new books

2011-11-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

An autumn painting of mine 24 by 30 from 2006. Painted near Jackson, New Hampshire

I am proud to have been invited to sit on a panel of speakers at the Boston International Fine Arts Show. If you are in the Boston area come out and say hello.

Saturday afternoon, November 19, 2011

Boston International Fine Art Show (BIFAS) at the Cyclorama

3-4 pm

Shaping the Present: Realist Art Then and Now

For years, people have been saying realist art is coming back. Judging from its growing visibility and the mushrooming of realist art schools nationwide, it’s more accurate to say it’s here. How are top contemporary realist artists inspired or informed by their historical counterparts? Is it wise to collect today's realist artists when many museums and critics are reluctant to highlight them? Join us for this intriguing panel, moderated by two national magazine editors and popular BIFAS presenters: Joshua Rose of American Art Collector and Peter Trippi of Fine Art Connoisseur.

Panelists

Julie Bangert, Gallery Director, Tree’s Place Gallery, Orleans, Massachusetts

Elizabeth Ives Hunter, Executive Director, Cape Cod Museum of Art
Stapleton Kearns, Artist, New Hampshire

Dana Levin, Artist, Massachusetts
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I am going to do a couple of book reviews today;I buy a lot of art books and recently two of them seemed good enough to recommend. The first is the new book "The Landscapes" by Richard Schmid. Schmid has long been a hero of mine since I found one of his books in the graduate stacks at the University if Minnesota about nearly forty years ago. I thought that no one could paint like that anymore having been led to believe that Philip Pearlstein was the figurative artist of that era. Years later I saw a show of his work at the old Grand Central galleries in New York. I thought it was amazing. I have his book Alla Prima and perhaps I have already recommended that, I think, it is excellent. But being a landscape painter I was excited when I found out that Schmid was putting out a book of just his landscapes. I have always liked his landscapes the best of all of his art. A lot of focus has been placed on his still lives and figures and I am glad that his landscapes will now get their due.
This book costs around a hundred dollars so it is not a cheap thrill, but it is printed on good paper and is entirely filled with full page reproductions of the art. I think it is well worth it and I will study it closely. Is Schmid Americas best landscape painter? maybe so.....

The other book I have been studying is a giant new volume on tonalist painting. "A History of American Tonalism byDavid Cleveland. Tonalism hasn't received the scholarship it has so long deserved. It was the dominant art movement in America for around the end of the 19th century. Tonalism was an art movement that valued aesthetics and achieving a mood in the picture far more than the representation of any specific identifiable place. They tended to paint ordinary places and not grand views. In a way tonalism was a reaction to the literalism of the Hudson River School on one hand and the often scientific matter of factness of the impressionists on the other. There has been so little written about tonalism and I have always wanted to see a lot more of it. Clevelands near encyclopedic work has filled in that hole. I hope other writers will follow with monographs on the individual artists of the movement. There is almost nothing in print on any of them except for the handful who are best known and then often in other contexts than as tonalists.

This is a monstrous 600 page long book that weighs as much as a four cylinder engine. Its a fat One! And it is full of pictures of paintings you will find nowhere else. I am still reading mine a little bit at a time. It is text heavy and the pictures could in my opinion have been given more prominence. The author seems to be overly enamored with Charles Warren Eaton, a lesser known American tonalist painter. There are many others I would have given greater prominence. Cleveland also lumps a lot of painters into his tonalist camp that might or not be in there depending on how big a stadium you need to fill. So the book is idiosyncratic and labyrinthine. Still its eccentricity is a benefit as there is so much information in here. Pathfinders, visionaries and world changers are often eccentric. After they have blazed the trails the more sober but less adventurous follow their leads.

Cleveland does a nice job of examining Whistlers enormous influence on the painting of that era. Whistler is best known today as a footnote,everyone seems to know Whistlers mother and not the man himself. But he was revered in his day and influenced a whole generation of artists who became more concerned with mood and evocation and the idea of beauty as a value apart from that represented. It is not what it is a picture of....but HOW it is a picture of that is important!
The book is priced well considering its size the wonderful paintings in this book are now available for study and have been impossible to see until now.

Fooling with other peoples art

2011-11-01T22:14:00.021-04:00

Above is a painting that was sent to me to critique. I have never been to the place where this was painted so I have no idea what was really there. I also have no idea of the artists original intentions. So I have put my "spin' on it. There are a lot of different takes that could be applied to a painting but this one will point out some problems in the original image and their possible solutions. You may have different solutions of your own. I want to be careful to point out that I have used some of my means of dealing with the problems in a landscape, but not necessarily the only ones.

I fooled with it in Photoshop. I am not an expert in Photoshop so I just go at it with the brush tool. It always feels like I am painting with gummi-worms. However it does allow me to rework a painting without ruining it. So it is a pretty good teaching tool. Below is my version. Below that is a bulleted list of what I did to it and why.

The original was all in a few middle tones. I spread out the values, clearly defining what is in the light and what is in the shadow. No value exists in both!

EVERYTHING IS EITHER IN THE LIGHT OR IN THE SHADOW, THERE IS NO OTHER PLACE FOR IT TO BE!

The lights in the original are scattered about in repetitive sizes and shapes and not sufficiently different than the shadow value to "light up". There are gray days that have no dappled light at all but that is a different painting problem. You might look at the work of Richard Schmid for that, he handles gray days so beautifully.

Here's a detail from the middle left of the original showing a repeated group of V shaped forms. Repeated forms are visually boring and "manmade" looking. I made them into a single tree, but of course there are lots of different way to break up a passage like this. The important thing is variety of shapes and intervals. A painting should contain a great variety of shapes that are different from one another. yet interlaced or rhythmic.

Here is another problem, called a tangent. A number of unrelated lines all meet,for no good reason at a single point. This seizes the viewers attention, all of those lines draw the eye and then short out against the tree limb. Also the upper line of the mountain and the line of the hill below it are opposites, that is they echo one another in reverse. This is overly geometric looking, and makes the distant mountain into a teardrop shape. Below is my fix. The lines of the mountain and the hill now operate independently of one another and pass BEHIND the tree rather than butting up against it.

I reworked the trees varying their widths, again to get a more natural look, and to get more variety of shape. Repeated dimensions and intervals are boring. Those in the original were too straight, like phone poles. I put some twists into them as they writhe towards the light, and broke up their lines with some flecks of sunlight, emphasizing their twisting shapes and deemphasizing their repetitive perimeter lines. Rather than all being bounded by a dark edge their edges now are broken by patches of light. The trees are now made of three values. A highlight, a half tone value and a dark shadow. These three are woven together up the trunks to give more variation there.

There is a mechanical looking diamond shape in the sky right in the middle of the painting. I reworked this again to get greater variety of shape. If you look at my version above you will see I have added some sky holes into the trees and some branches hanging down in to the "diamond" area. This weaves the sky and the branches together more, rather than the sky being HERE! and the ranches being over HERE! I have worked to get a greater variety of shapes and intervals into the sky holes. Remember that sky holes must be a little darker than the open sky outside of the foliage mass. Because a sky hole is a narrow aperture, diffraction "steals" some of the light. If you make the sky holes as bright as the open sky areas they will appear overstated. John Carlson said they would appear like lights hung in your trees, rather than as holes through them.

The edges of the road needed to be softened up as they were too assertive and mechanical looking. Below is a detail from Willard Metcalf handling this sort of passage nicely. See how the boundaries of the road are downplayed and melded into the ground around them. This keeps the road from looking like it is pasted over the landscape. A minimal amount of definition is fine to suggest a road in the landscape, and avoid a primitive look.

I lightened up the sky too, although sometimes it works well to "fake" a dark sky into a painting, particularly behind autumn color, generally the sky should be as bright or brighter than anything else in the light. It looks unconvincing for an object receiving light to be brighter than the sky, its source of illumination.

Two questions answered followed by some unattractive snarling

2011-10-23T21:02:00.010-04:00

Franz Bishoff (1864-1929)

I received this question the other day;

"What is retouching varnish for? What happens if you just paint over what ever it is that you wanted to fix or change? Is it to make the surface slippery to blend things in better?"
...................................Floozette Snorkle

Dearest Floozette:

Oil paintings lose their shine and appear dulled as the oil on their surface sinks into the layers below them or dries.The matte surface this causes returns less light to the viewers eye and makes the painting appear less brilliant. Retouch varnish restores the surface sheen making the picture look the same as when you painted it. Retouch varnish is fine to paint over and that is commonly done. Often artists start their work day by spraying a little retouch varnish on a painting in order to more accurately assess the colors that they must match or complement.

Retouch varnish should "flash" dry and is not intended to impart a particular sort of handling besides its making the surface a little glossier. Easy on the retouch too. It is best to use it sparingly. I have always been suspicious of too many alternating layers of paint and varnish.

Retouch varnish is also used when a painting must be exhibited and look its best, but is not old enough to receive a final varnishing.

=======================================================

"I want to paint more freely, more expressively, more deliberately all from the get-go. I've tried small still life paintings not allowing myself to move the paint but only repainting what I want to change. This works okay. However, when I want to do a full size painting, whether still life, portrait or landscape, and I slip into the "mode" the pushing and glazing returns.

My question is - can you give me a suggestion for changing my bad habits? This is very important to me and I'm really frustrated with my disappointing efforts to change. "
........................Ms. Mia Fecula-Spooner

Ms. Fecula-Spooner ;

Painters generally develop the ability to paint loosely after learning to paint "tight" so you are on the right track. I suggest you do the following.

Use big brushes only, no niggling with small ones
Make broad simplified marks, not lots of little ones
Limit the time you have to work on a piece, try to get it right in one go, if you can. This doesn't mean wild and inaccurate, but deliberate and simple.Good drawing skills are essential to doing this. Loose doesn't conceal weak draftsmanship. Don't think you can choose to be loose to avoid learning to draw.
Try to see things simply and express them simply, ignore detail and the inessential, try to keep your masses big rather than cutting them up with unimportant interruptions.
Study painters who did this well, there are many from Velaquez to Sargent to Seago, or someone else that you find intriguing..
Don't work from photographs. They are full of bristling detail and will lead you to destruction.
Squinting will help you see things more simply
Remember, as Richard Schmid famously said " Loose is how a painting looks, not how it was made".
Try putting butter in your shoes

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now for the hard truth feature of tonight s blog:
I had someone tell me on Facebook that it was too bad I didn't like older painters. I like em fine, and well enough not to jive em about what their chances are of achieving mastery and competing with those who have done nothing else all their lives. Now I am going to upset the plumbers and craftspeople.Here is the traditional "take" on the difference between art and craft. It is, like so many traditional ideas from our culture, politically incorrect and perceived as unkind or offensive. But I believe it to be true.

A plumber is not an artist even if he may do exemplary work. An art object exists only to be beautiful. It is not useful. A craftsman makes useful things, and although they may be may be wonderfully made, they are not art. This is not being judgmental, it is simply what the words mean. There are two words "art" and "craft", each word signifies something different, that is why there are two words and not one.

Joe Bagadonuts thinks that if something is very well done, it is art, he means it as a compliment, but he is mistaken. A painting may be very poorly done, but it is still art, conversely a sink may be very splendidly plumbed, but that doesn't make it art. Sorry Joe, but your high school art teacher lied to you, he should have been teaching drivers training instead or been a guidance counselor (like the one who told me I wasn't college material). He lied to you about other things too, he meant well, maybe, and he wanted to be nice, so he let you down.

Art exists only to be aesthetic, its only use is the pleasure or feeling it gives to its viewer.
Craft items have a use or purpose.

This means if I put a quilt on the bed, it is a craft object.
If I hang it on the wall it is an art object.

I suppose I will have to post another baby animal tomorrow.

Henry Hensche speaks

2011-10-17T09:12:00.007-04:00

Henry Hensche (1901-1992) a demonstration portrait done outside in direct sunlight

I get a lot of interesting stuff sent to me because of the blog. This is one of the most interesting. A former student of Henry Henshe sent me a transcript of a video made showing Hensche teaching. Henry Hensche was a revered Provincetown, Massachusetts teacher who was himself a student of the legendary Charles Hawthorne. Hawthornes book is a classic and is one of the texts that impressionist painters read.

Hawthorne died relatively young and Hensche took over "the Cape School" and ran it every summer for many years. Over that time hundreds (if not thousands) of students passed through his hands. Hensches influence was enormous. He was one of those few men who had a proven reputation for producing painters.

I never studied with Hensche but I knew many people who did. I spent part of a summer in Provincetown studying with Robert Douglas Hunter, who had been a student of both R.H.Ives Gammell and Henry Hensche,. That would have been about 1975, I think. Hunters studio-home in the summer was in an old barn in Provincetown that he had been lent by Gammell. It had been Gammells summer digs for many years, but Ives had recently built a summer compound in the Berkshires near Williamstown, Massachusetts. Half of the ancient and enormous barn was Hunters and the other half was Hensches school. He held classes in a sunny patio behind the barn so I was able to observe his students at work.

Hensche taught a doctrine of color and required his students to work with a palette knife. They carefully mixed the colors of blocks and simple objects in dazzling sunlight being sure to represent each of their planes with a different hue. I wasn't interested much in this method at the time as I was totally enamored with Dutch 17th century painting.

I was invited to witness Hensche do a demo painting one afternoon in the yard of his home. I watched him paint a head like the one at the top of the page. It was an amazing performance. I tried to "be there" and remember as much as I could.

I also saw a show of charcoal portraits by Hensche at the Guild of Boston Artists, in the mid 70's,
his drawings were superb, the structure of the heads was so solid. I never particularly liked the color thing Hensche was into, but his drawing was solid and that is what impressed me, because I had received a Boston school training that focused more on direct visual draftsmanship rather than the expression of planar form. I wish now I had studied with Hensche for a summer to learn more about the expression of form through planar construction. I have worked for years to get as much of that as I could into my work, remember;

FORM CANNOT BE "SEEN" INTO AN OBJECT OR COPIED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH, IT IS A CONSTRUCT CREATED BY THE ARTIST TO GIVE UNDERSTANDING OF SOLIDITY AND STRUCTURE.

The following is from Phillip St. John who has allowed me to share it with you. At the bottom of the page is his information so you can get a copy of the video if you want to learn more about Hensches methods. I must add a disclaimer here, I am not a devotee of Henrys approach and do not necessarily agree with all that follows, but Henry was an enormous influence on a whole school of painters today and anyone who wants to paint outside in sunlight would be well advised to listen when Henry speaks. A lot can be learned from listening to the "Old Ones"
===============================================

Script for portions of Hensche video

This is a copy of the words of Henry Hensche in the film “A Look At The Way We See and Paint.” If you’d like to know more about the dvd of the film, click here.It isn’t a book with a logical flow, but a compilation of random thoughts and teachings Henry promoted, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve added some parenthetical inserts for clarity.

You may have difficulty hearing Henry’s voice on the video. This video isn’t a professional production, more like a labor of love.. This script was originally produced back in the day when VHS players had counters on them. I’m including the counter markers, partly for whimsy, partly because many may still have the players.The video/dvd was originally on 16mm film, then transferred to VHS, then to dvd, now it is going to be offered over the web, at a reduced cost, as soon as I can figure out how to do it. I still encourage you to turn it up. I’m in the process of re-editing the show which is easier due to modern technology.

I have also copied Henry’s voice, word for word, so that you could get a feeling for the way he spoke. It isn’t the prettiest reading, but it does carry the flavor of his speech better than cleaning up the syntax would, in my opinion. I’m putting his words in color and possibly make comments on what he said.

0007 “We are seeking today the reasons for why we are living and what the purposes of life are.”

[From here to 0201 is better audio, myself as narrator.]

0201 “Well, if you are interested in the art of painting, it’s not very difficult to comprehend, it is the art of seeing. And the way you see things is the way the painter creates the illusion of reality. What a painter does is simply make it his business to see more accurately and (0211) more precisely than the layman.”

“Then you are dealing with the human being, wherever there is human affection, there portraiture will last. Because everyone that lives wants images of those they love. That’s why portraiture is done, and for that reason you can buy pictures, you can buy paintings. You want (0220) them around because a painter has taught himself to see more beautifully or truly, which is the same thing, and through the painter, through the painting, people begin to see nature.”

“Seeing is a process of having an image come on the retina. Then the mind analyses what comes out of the retina. It is the mind’s analysis, and the quality of that analysis (0233) that makes the difference between a good painting and a bad painting, or an erratic one. Now the art of translating that, that is, what you see visually, you have to learn. And that’s what they call the physical aspect of it, but the real thing, the learning about seeing and understanding what you’re looking at, and that is the analytical process.”

0246 “Hawthorne (Charles W, was Henry’s beloved teacher) was the greatest painting teacher in the world. He made a technique of teaching, first himself, and then through the method, teaching others to do what the Impressionist movement had done, that is, Money, especially. What had Monet done? Well, he revolutionized the art of seeing. (0279) When Monet came along with the new colors that were added by modern chemistry, around 1860 and 70, then so-called Impressionism was born. Monet now had the pigments to express many more color combinations and especially the bright ones. And he simply applied the use of these colors to expressing (0289) the greater variety of color effects that everybody had seen but nobody had been able to create the illusion of. And this is the core of why Impressionism has come into existence. Monet couldn’t have happened until the time when modern chemistry added the new pigments. The ancients couldn’t of, if the had wanted to.”

0300 “New students should keep studying the units until they are so accurate that they tell the onlooker, the layman, or anyone who looks at it, at the study, what the light effect is. In other words, we’re trying to get a morning sunlight effect here. And that’s done by the units of the color being reasonably accurate. Once you understand this, you’ll realize that units are the more important thing. It’s the (0314) beginning and the end of things. As Hawthorne said, “in the beginning as a student, you make the units crudely because you don’t know anything else. Then you get more knowing, you spend (0319) a lifetime elaborating the variations and drawing and concepts of ideas, and composition ideas”. But in the end, when it’s all said and done, lie he, Hawthorne said “you don’t look at a picture unless, from a distance, it stops you through its main masses.” So....if you lose the central theme of an idea, and lose yourself in the details and lose the sight of the ….......of the big concept, whatever it may be, in painting it is the big color note.”

0334 “The finer painter simply raises his or her visual perceptual sense to a very much higher order that the ordinary one. So this gives you a clue too, to the function of a painter in society. His main function is first of all, to teach people how to see the visual beauty or truth of the visual world, that’s his basic function. And it’s done through colors, through color combinations of different (0346) intensities and depths in a certain color scheme that creates the illusions of reality. When it’s on a high level, and above their experience, then man uses these descriptive words like beauty, aesthetic, quality, and so forth. There is no great painting, no fine painting, that hasn’t got a great color quality.”

“Here is the idea that Hawthorne taught, see, that the sum total of the masses, should, in color, should express the light key in which the things are seen. (0361) He solved the problem of how to develop color sensations from crude sensations to one of great refinement. Hawthorne respected anyone that wanted to study the truth and the beauty of life and things. And he thought it was the most wonderful thing to pursue, to add to the sum total of beauty for the world. So, what you do, you start at the beginning of your life with the crude masses, and make endless studies until those masses express the fundamental truth. (0378) He not only made you feel that you were just as important as anybody else, but you hd to earn it, you had to study. And he was also very kind about the understanding of things. He didn’t judge you by your immediate studies, he judged you by the rate of (0386) growth you made. You learned something about, as Hawthorne said, the glory of the visual world (woman interrupts: “You will learn something!”) Yes, The reason for that is, the theory, the teaching principle is right. So, in other words, he was a true American. If you believe this is not the age for the few rich, for the few endowed with money, this is the royalist and feudalistic concept, that only a few are chosen to be the great painters of the world.”

0398 “He felt that everybody should be endowed with possibilities of growth and each one that want to pay the price should have the right to that development to the fullest of their being, and everybody could and can. He drew through class lines, he didn’t think it was just for the few, it was for the many, for everyone who wanted it. And who is there to restrict anybody in saying that they don’t want what is beautiful and good? Who doesn’t want a good picture? Who doesn’t want to understand the use of it? Who doesn’t want to practice some art form? It’s (0412) the development of their senses that makes the difference between animals and human beings. This is another quality the man (Hawthorne) had and he felt it, and believe me, they loved him for it, so see, because he opened up vistas.”

“Hawthorne, my teacher, put that up in a teaching form, what Monet did in practice, so that everybody could learn to grow, to appreciate the quantity and quality of color sensations.”

Then he, the artist, had a function. (0426) You see, he gives the people looking at it a visual experience that they wouldn’t get without the help of the painter. And then through looking at the painting they’ll transfer that experience into visual observation. And then they’ll learn to see nature more attractively and more truly and that gives you everyday life greater pleasure which you wouldn’t have because you hadn’t developed that faculty without exercising it through observation of good paintings.”

0445 “The art’s deal with the eternal things, with the universal things that man never gets beyond. Each generation should grow in appreciation of what the Greeks contributed to the world. We start from abysmal ignorance as children to the enlightenment of the greatest thinkers of the age. So it is a greater truth. So in a real sense, it is very odd, most painting has been practiced for centuries on the earth. It wasn’t until the last hundred years that (0458) the dominant descriptive power reached its fullest understanding, and also in practice. Now we have a very rich language, in color.”

“Impressionists used it to express visual phenomena, in the landscape painting, were the ones that really did it. And now it has effected not only indoor painting and landscape, but all painting; indoors, the figure, as well as out.”

0470 “What is the purpose of art in society? When you have an answer to that, and that’s a philosophical one, then you know what techniques to teach. But they’ve turned it around, they’ve turning techniques, like a written language and they’ve got nothing to say with them, and this is the dilemma that they are in.”

0478 “And the first thing that realistic painting should tell the story of, is the light scheme in which these things are seen. which all objects are seen, which holds true indoors as well as outdoors.”

“That is modern art, that is modern expression, this which deals with reality, you see? When the sun is out, the indoor color is entirely different than on a gray day, when the sun is in. It’s the dominating thing in visual observation. The third thing man did was start with a line and then fill it in with a color. Now we start with a color, then make the shape. And the edge is the last thing we worry about.”

“Painting is simply arresting some effect of nature, holding it before man so there it is for eternity, as long as the (0449) painting lasts, I mean, to share the delight of the visual experience the painter had.”

“Let’s call it philosophy, but a belief that the goodness of man, his love for each other, his love for the earth that he lives upon, from which we come, to which we go. As Hawthorne said, “Let’s add something to the sum total of beauty to the world.” I’m not going to add to the bankruptcy of things. I believe (0551) in America being full of wonderful people with great goals, but they don’t have a voice in things. Real America isn’t heard. These boys and girls that are here (at the Cape School), they are the cream, they are what I consider....the better. They’re the cream on which, if they, if my little effort, my puny effort, if I can’t instill in the the love of what I believe so much, if I can’t instill in them the willingness to fight for it, that is in (0524) producing beautiful work, and having the fortitude to stand up against all the idiocies, then I’ve failed. But so have they. I’d like to believe that, this is the horizon, these are the horizons that American youth is looking for the leadership of great ideas. What are they? Who are they? Who are these? I challenge anybody to a debate on these matters.”

0535 “Painting should deal with the universal things that everybody can understand. The thing that distinguishes a civilized man from a savage or an animal is exactly what which the arts deal with. And the arts deal with human souls communication with each other and understanding what the past believed in and actually the arts deal with the very essence of human faith and love.”

0546 “Through the painter’s eye he gets educate, through the painting, which he has done, that’s the way it works. That’s the function of a painter. To teach people to see that truth, and then you arrest it. A painting is nothing but a still picture of some phenomena of nature (0556) that thrilled, something that they got a kick about, that’s what a painting is. Someone has such enthusiasm about a view they saw, that they felt it so deeply, that they wanted to register it, first of all for themselves and because the had the great enthusiasm, it becomes a landmark of human visual experience, if it’s on a higher order of perception.”

0565 “That sort of thing that children have, they really get excited about something, about what they are doing, and this same thing should be developed in grown people. When that’s not there anymore, that excitement, or growth of discovery, then we’ve become set in our ways. We develop formulas in which there is no life in them.”

0576 “Most education today squelches that creative desire, creative art, if you want to put it that way. Creation is a matter of being fresh in your vision, and not the manner of putting down things that follows see? The desire of loving the truth more and getting excitement in painting the visual beauty of the world.”

0585 “When the arts don’t serve the purpose of making people, man, a part of the rhythm of the visual world, if a painting doesn’t play its proper purpose, when human beings don’t love, what we call by love means understand reality, the visual world the good Lord gave us, as the Christians say, the paradise, which is a Persian word for garden. If you don’t love this garden, how the hell do you expect (0595) to go into paradise after we’re dead? God is not going to give any Christian a chance of the entrance into a paradise if he doesn’t appreciate the one he has got right under his nose. The painter is the vehicle, and the priest through which he learns to see. He’s the teacher of mankind to see this wonder. Maybe for some people this doesn’t mean anything (0607) but the best way to find that out is to blind yourself, and you find often in newspaper clippings, when people have suddenly gotten sight back, how wonderful it is whatever they look upon, there’s nothing unimportant. Hawthorne put it so beautiful, “Everything under light is beautiful.” Cause it’s true, the charm, the enchantment of human vision, this is what poetry deals with, through color and shape and then, line. (0617) [Applause]

0621 “It (art) deals with eternal things of human relationships. From now until doomsday, as long a man lives on the earth. God help us if he doesn’t love the beauty of a spring day, and enjoys being in it.”

0627 “The thing that makes visual art entrancing is the constant change from one light scheme to another, sometimes it’s very dramatic. When it’s dramatic you can see it; you can see the importance of it, furthermore. If you wake up early in the morning and could sit in the same window and watch it and (0634) remember every change and have a camera click it at every so many intervals and then look at them after you’ve got the print of it , you’d be surprised at not having changed the pattern, how the color scheme would be entirely different. Well, that’s the core of visual art, and that’s the core with what painters should deal with primarily and first (0643) of all.”

0655 “The enchanting visual aspect of nature, in a foggy morning, if you’ve ever been here in New England in the fall, you see the veil of fog laying in the valleys, you hardly see a tree (0661) you hardly see a thing, but it’s enchanting. Even the Chinese noticed that. In their art centuries ago when a mountain suddenly appears out of some clouds. When you see it here, if you’re too dumb to see it, and if you don’t think that’s of any value, God help you. If he doesn’t love the richness of the summer with its fruit and the peace of the fall after the (0671) vegetables and things are stored and you have a celebration, and glorify this event. And one of the loveliest things of that kind was when a draftsman by the name of Stephen Crane in England, and he made a frieze celebrating the fall, when girls, women, and men, in the frieze dancing, you know, like people, peasants do, there’s a health of people in the field. I know we did in Illinois (0684) when we got the corn in and the wheat all in the barns, they threw a party and we had a lot of fun. We had some beer and we drank, women cooked wonderful meals. We sat around and boasted and kidded each other and had really fun together. And then this was celebrated by Stephen Crane in a kind of a frieze. That’s (0694) the kind of thing to celebrate. Those are the eternal things. We all shared it together.”

“In order to do this you have to get busy and study, now to see. And do it on a much higher level. Otherwise, it is foolish, and you are foolish if you think you should (0701) get response from people. But that depends on what level your goal is. The great people, the people that are really interested in living, what they try to do is to grow and to keep growing throughout, to the end of their lives.”

0710 “Painting, the study of nature’s visual phenomena, has kept me sane I think. Given me a lot of delight, selfish delight in a way, but it’s a delight that other people share and want.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and felt a little of the inspiration that Henry exuded. It’s available as a dvd, here’s a link to read more about it, along with ordering instructions.

Phillip St. John 606 436-8785 email

Below is a link to a website devoted to Henry and his teaching.

http://henryhenschefoundation.org/

A note found in an old John Carlson book

2011-10-12T11:02:00.009-04:00

John Carlson (1875-1947)

I receive a number of interesting things from readers of the blog. Below is a copy of a letter that was found in an old copy of John Carlsons Guide to Landscape painting.

If you haven't read this book, you really should. It is the bible for anyone studying landscape painting. If you read only one book explaining landscape painting, this should be it.

a John Carlson painting of Gloucester

Carlson ran a summer workshop program in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for awhile with Emile Gruppe. He was later to establish his own workshop and teaching programs in Woodstock, New York, a place with which he is more commonly associated.

Here are a couple of older editions of Carlsons book from my library. The 1939 edition on the left contains a fair amount of text that was edited out of later editions and is interesting for that reason. It is not a first edition, that would be from 1929, which I don't own. The later somewhat edited versions are renamed Carlsons guide to landscape painting instead of elementary principles of landscape painting.

The book on the right is a 1972 hardcover edition that is otherwise nearly identical to the soft cover version in print today. None of these editions provide a selection of colored reproductions of Carlsons paintings. This blog however does here and here and here too I also have a few more over here.

Here is what I got in my old copy of Carlson. This is a clipping from the New York times dated March 13th, 1936. It explains that John won the Altman prize from the National Academy of Design. The article says that the prize was for an American born artist and included an award of 750 dollars. Carlson was born in Sweden. I will bet there were some artists who didn't win complaining about that!

A tip on paint handling in seascape painting

2011-10-04T11:15:00.009-04:00

Above is a corner of my palette with five premixed values of a blue-gray tone. When I showed it last someone asked how it was mixed. I simply made a big pile of the darkest version using ultramarine, a little ivory black and a smidgen of titanium white. Each of the other piles was produced by diluting that "mother" color with gradually increasing amounts of white. I could of course do this with any "mother" color I wanted and sometimes I have several of these "strings" of color on my palette when I paint seascape, but seldom when painting anything else.

Below is an example painted on my palette of the use of a double loaded brush. I dipped one side (corner) of my flat brush into a dark pile and the other side into a light pile. Now I have two different values (or if I want, two different colors) on my brush. Over on the right I pulled a stroke to show you the kind of mark such a double loaded brush will make. I then painted the little wave study using a double loaded brush. I reloaded the brush after every few stokes.

I have worked at getting this effect to work for a long time and really only figured out how to do it reliably quite recently. It takes some practice and experimentation to control it. I found a reference to Frederick Waugh using this effect. The observer noted that Waugh twisted ( twirled) his brush between his fingers as he worked. That puts the dark on top sometimes and then the light note at others. It will also cause a striation of values within a plane of the water. If you look at the sketch above you can clearly see that. It is important to have the right white when doing this, Waugh used Permalba, but I painted this sketch using RGH (link in my sidebar) titanium white, the Lefranc is good too, and Winsor Newton is slippery, but stay out of the student gradee paints or anything too stiff or crumbly..The important thing for this is that the white is slippery and and somewhat soft, be sure you get the right ONE. Sometimes I add a little stand or linseed oil to get it to move better.

When I am doing this I am thinking about how the various planes of the water are facing. I also pull the shadow strokes downward and the lights up from below. There are all sorts of little niceties of handling, brush pressure and edge control that can be explored with a double loaded brush.

More fiber

2011-09-28T20:32:00.007-04:00

The Wave by Alexander Harrison

I was asked "what pigments did the artist use to get such luminosity ?"

I don't think it is in the color. It is in the drawing. When I say drawing I am not restricting that to line drawing, there is also mass drawing. Somebody once said

DRAWING IS THAT PART OF PAINTING WHICH IS NEITHER COLOR OR DESIGN

Below I have reproduced the painting in black and white, and it is still luminous. A large part of why this painting looks as it does is the great delicacy with which the edges are handled. Edges are a part of drawing, not color incidentally.

I remember Ives Gammell telling us :

THAT WHICH IS WELL ENOUGH DRAWN WILL BE WELL ENOUGH COLORED!

Harrison could have used a different color scheme, such as rose or poisoned gimlet and the painting would still have been luminous. Ives also used to say;

COLOR IS A DECORATION YOU HANG ON YOUR DRAWING!

If you can draw the thing, color it is the easy part. Academic or pre impressionist paintings were often executed in a single tone or in black and white, sometimes called dead color, and then the color was glazed over that. Most of you who read this, are I suppose, landscape painters and are aware of, but unacquainted with those older methods. There is no reason that you have to work that way either, but the men (I know, and women, from here on out the word men will signify not gender, but membership in the species homo-sapien, lighten up, jreez!) who worked in that method clearly understood the importance of drawing.They got the drawing on the canvas, and then dealt with color.

It is no less important in an impressionist painting, but those of us who work in "straight paint" can be less aware of it as we work in colored paint executing both our color and our drawing at once. Below is a black and white of a Waugh. I have a huge collection of 8 by 10 photos taken during Waughs day of his work.

Below in this lousy cell phone photo is a set of gradated tones prepared with ultramarine, titanium white and ivory black.

Remember long ago I wrote about tints and tones and shades? Below is a little chart that explains the difference. Since I have both White and black added to the blue, these are TONES. When painting seascape I find it very useful to have a premixed set of shades like this to work out the water. I can draw the thing out with these and then "inject" my color into them.

A seascape lesson, from Charles Vickery

2011-09-24T20:58:00.005-04:00

painting by Frederick Waugh

Twenty or so years ago I had the good fortune to know Charles Vickery (1913-1998). Charles was a very fine seascape painter, the best I have ever known. I think that in his era he was the best living seascape painter, following the death of Waugh. He came into my little gallery and painted a demo seascape at my easel.When he taught a three day workshop at the Rockport Art Association, I took it. Somewhere I have the notes that I took, I have looked for them many times and never been able to find them. I have way too much stuff.

One of the things that he taught was this;
The waves have a triangular or pyramid shape, the form of the wave moves under the "skin" of the water. If you were to throw a paper boat onto the wave it would be lifted but not carried along as the wave moved beneath it. Though the underlying shape of the wave moves forward, the little paper boat remains pretty much in the same place.

Vickery referred to the largest wave forms as PRIMARIES. At sea, these are sometimes called rollers. When we are looking out at surf these rollers are where the whitecaps and then the turning over to surf happens. This is the where the tube shaped "curl" happens that those unattractive surfers ride. Here is where it gets interesting.

The primaries carry on their backs smaller forms called SECONDARIES. You can see them clearly expressed in the Frederick Waugh painting above. They have the same characteristics as the primaries they are just smaller and live on the backs of the primaries.

Sometimes in very extreme conditions there are TERTIALS. The tertials live on the backs of the secondaries. Look at the surf and the waves next time you are at the shore or studying a seascape painting and you will see the primaries and secondaries. Vickery called the study of the moving anatomy of the sea, HYDRAULICS. I always liked that .

The Vickery seascape above is from the Tutwiler gallery, here is a link to a page on their blog showing some ofVickerys paintings. Check out their art while you are there, they are fine painters and I have known them for many years.

A seascape lesson

2011-09-21T20:16:00.007-04:00

all paintings in this post are by Frederick Waugh

Dear Stape,
I love the Waugh paintings you show on your blog and can't help wonder. Why is it so gosh darned hard to understand water? I've read a bunch of books with titles like "How to Paint Water" that give a basic diagram of a single wave, talk about the importance of perspective or that explain how reflections work, but how do I find instructions for painting majestic choppy seas full of value and color changes? What do I need to understand about the structure of choppy water that Waugh and other maritime painters knew, allowing them to paint such realistic drama from foreground to background. What is the structure of rough seas and what are the principles for coloring the individual chops?

Noah Levi Liddup

Noah;

That's a really big question. Seascape is (at least for me) extremely difficult I have been working on it for years and it still feels really experimental. I am very comfortable painting in front of nature, painting the sea is a whole different animal.

My experience is that a surf painting has to be invented in the studio. Sketches can be done on location, and a lot is learned by doing that, however when you see a Waugh, it is a studio painting. If you really set up in his vantage points the incoming wave would probably kill you.

I am going to lay out a basic explanation of the biggest idea in painting water.

WATER IS A MIRROR, BROKEN INTO FACETS THAT ARE OF DIFFERENT VALUES DEPENDING ON WHAT THEY ARE REFLECTING.

Above is a Waugh, and below I have clipped a passage from the foreground to illustrate what I mean. In this example, the water is reflecting the sky on the planes that are "level" or what I call the "floors". The broken mirror facets on the "floors' reflect the sky pretty well, but not perfectly, they subtract some percentage of the light they receive as some of it passes down into the water. So they are darker in value than the sky.

The facets or planes of choppy water look a little like a mountains slanting surfaces rising up from a broad base in a tapering pyramid shape. Each of those planes either reflects a different part of the sky or is in shadow. Those facets which take no light from the sky, that is, stand between us and the light, are the darkest. The more vertical the facet, the darker they will be. Seascape painters frequently use a back light because it simplifies the representation of the wave structure and it looks wicked cool. Remember that the world of the shadow is always darker than the world of the light. That means there will be a dark line bounding the top of the wave and the smaller little "mountain spurs" riding on it. That line will be the darkest thing in the wave.

You will need to work with at least three separate values to explain the structure of the wave. Those are needed for the shadow, the less vertical planes which are taking less light and the floors or surfaces which reflect the sky most. If you look at the detail below you can pick out these three values.

I will talk a little more about the structure of the "chop" in the next post.

Pouring from a gallon can

2011-09-17T20:00:00.005-04:00

There is a trick to pouring from a new can of solvent. For years every time I did it I got turpentine all over. Then I had someone show me how to do it. The trick is to turn the can over. Pour the solvent ACROSS the top of the can, like in the grainy cell phone picture above. You will need to hold your mouth just right for this to work, but try it, no more turpentine filled shoes!
There are about a million little tricks in painting.

Here is the Ocean House hotel in Watch Hill Rhode Island I have been their guest artist for the week and lived like a king. They even feed me two meals a day in their 5 star restaurants. I noticed one of my paintings hanging in the bar. What a great place.

This is the view from the ocean side. If you want to come, bring money, lots of it.

A few pointers on painting skies

2011-09-14T07:49:00.000-04:00

Here is a question from a reader about sky design:

Dear Stape:

As a pleine air painter that may or may not finish most paintings in the studio, we often move things around for better compositional results. Churches, barns, trees, rocks, you name it, we can move it.

There is one huge part of the painting though that is always dynamic and ever-changing, the sky and cloud-formations. Often fleeting and ephemeral in nature, they are one of the few elements of a painting that are not tangible, so we have to truly design them in to every painting we do, and I often find that a badly designed cloud pattern can ruin a painting. An impressive sky can be the most dramatic thing to see, and its extremely difficult to capture that.

Any specific approach other than doing countless studies? Any tips on who we can look to who has great sense of sky-design?
...................Wyatt Fissure

Wyatt:

I have found that the painters who worked in the lowland and flat countries often excelled at skies. This would be the Dutch masters and the English. They often devoted more than half of their pictures to their skies so they had to make them excellent. The two examples on this page are a Constable above and a more contemporary Englishman Edward Seago (a great hero of mine).
John Constable said: "The sky is the chief organ of sentiment in a painting". Much of the emotional and expressive quality of landscape comes from the sky. Forget that at your peril. A blank sky is easy to do, but often doesn't help the expression of feeling. Landscapes should make the viewer feel something.
Observation and painting sketches of the sky are useful, but that is only half the puzzle and maybe a smaller piece than that, DESIGN is in my opinion, the important thing. A sky is an abstract arrangement of lights and darks first and meteorology second.
Skies are an arrangement of three or sometimes four value shapes arranged over top of, or interwoven with one another.
It is the warm yellows and reds in a sky that make it have light, besides its value. You can pound all the blue in the world into a sky and it won't light up. I am sure you have seen paintings in a thrift store or yard sale that have a sky that has been painted with pthalo blue and look totally amateurish. I like to underpaint a sky with a warm tone and throw my blue down into that. This way I assure that the warm notes are embedded there from the beginning.
The sky is the source of light, therefore it will generally be higher in value than all in the landscape that merely receives that light. The sky is almost always higher in value than the land and trees etc. This goes for the whole sky, by the way, usually including the clouds as well.
Often a sky will progress from one quarter of the painting to another. The clouds are coming from somewhere and go marching to somewhere.
Perspective is important in designing clouds. they have subtle lines suggesting where they recede to the paintings vanishing points.
Sneaking colors from the landscape up into a sky will help tie them into the world beneath their "feet". Be aware of, and use warm and cool variations in the color of your skies. For instance, rather than painting the undersides of clouds gray, ask yourself is this a warm or a cool shadow? Is there another sneaky color in that gray as well? There are a zillion possible grays, and all of them are better than a generic mixture of white and ivory black. Try mixing complements to form the grays of your clouds. Easy does it too, it is easy to overdo the shadowed parts of clouds and thus make them too assertive and heavy. They are made of water vapor, not depleted uranium.
Watch out for repeated shapes and intervals. It is best to have a great variety of shapes and sizes in a sky. Of course the nearest clouds will usually be large and the more distant, small. Play that up, in order to get recession.
It often helps to add a little red at the top or zenith of a sky. That will help bring it over the viewers head, rather than rising as a wall behind the landscape.A sky is a dome not a flat plane.
Strive for an artistic and uneven distribution of your clouds, rather than a 50-50 allotment. Either make the sky more clouds than open sky, or more open sky than clouds.
Overlap your cloud's forms to show that some are in front of others. I have seen many paintings where the clouds are like potatoes of the same size distributed evenly across the heavens like big polka dots.
Some painters to study for their skies are, Constable, and Seago, of course' but also, Inness, Edgar Payne ( very abstract and designy), Ruisdael, Jan Van Goyen and Eric Sloan and Fredrick Church.
I photograph interesting skies and keep a file of them. I don't copy them into pictures but deconstruct them. I try to figure out what it is that characterizes their shapes, edges and value patterns. Copying a photo of a sky above your landscape seldom works very well. A sky need to be tailored to its landscape like a suit needs to be tailored to its owner. Off the rack skies are ill fitting and cheap. Avoid em!
Try putting butter in your shoes, it will make of your entire body a giant electromagnet.

No postcards please

2011-09-08T22:55:00.012-04:00

Etchings by Charles Meryon, French 1821-1868

Here is a question from a reader that I found interesting. I appreciate the questions you all provide me. I have a small file of them to trot out when for blog ideas. I do feel sometimes as if I have picked all the low hanging fruit. The first 400 posts or so are real nuts and bolts art instruction. If you haven't read them I encourage you to do so.

Hey Stape!! Question, if you have an answer - How do I keep the compositions of my paintings (of important structures) from looking like postcards?
...................... Rachel from Cardholders Services
Rachel;
Here are some points with BULLETS;

Postcards usually choose the most generic and obvious view. Perhaps you shouldn't. Balance the important structure with another less important one or.....
Choose a detail or an unexpected view. I joke with my friend T.M. Nicholas every time we paint a picture with a prominent house in it (in the voice of an obnoxious gallery visitor) "I suppose it's nice, but I wish it was MY house". The solution to that is often to

PUT THE HOUSE INTO THE LANDSCAPE, RATHER THAN PUTTING THE LANDSCAPE AROUND THE HOUSE.

I often will paint the landscape and THEN drop the house into it to make sure that happens. The painting then says "LANDSCAPE with a house, rather than landscape with a HOUSE.

We all enjoy sunny, blue skied days, but so do the people who make postcards, avoid that big blue background and use something with a little more edge. Try not to paint too "sweet" postcards are always stupidly cheerful and happy, happy, happy. A less major key look will be less postcardy.
The deep fault you are having is (I think) that you are choosing your pictures cropping and design from an object standpoint. That is : I am going to paint a picture of this house, better to:

FIND AN ARRANGEMENT OF LINES AND SHAPES IN NATURE THAT SET ONE ANOTHER OFF, WORRY ABOUT THE SUBJECT MATTER LATER.

If the shapes are good, the painting stands some chance of being successful, if they are not, and you can't bend them so that they are, you are never going to make a good picture at that location. Perhaps it would be better to introduce some tropical fish.
Postcards tend to be in all happy and bright colors too, introduce some grays and unexpected or even slightly discordant notes. Think Led Zeppelin ( Whole lotta love) not Bread (Baby Im-a want you). That's where power comes from, no edge, no power! Postcards are too "happy" to cut into the viewer much, you have to have some "attack" to get beyond the "pretty picture" problem.

Ask yourself what YOU are bringing to this picture,YOU need to be on that canvas. That could be in the brushwork or in your "take" on the subject or in your color. A painting needs to be poetic, a postcard needs to be just what the average person expects to see. It might be better to shy away from those subjects when you can. If you are making postcards hoping that they will sell, my experience has been that the viewer knows that and feels that they want something more artful. Of course if you have a commission to paint a certain subject, you do what the client wants and sneak the art in there as best you can.

Here are a few notes on Charles Meryon. The son of a doctor, Meryon became a lieutenant in the French Navy. Upon leaving the navy he decided to become an artist. Because he was color blind he restricted himself to black and white, particularly etching. Working first as a copyist in a production house he later went out on his own focusing on scenes of Paris. He made great series of them.

Meryon was technically brilliant but as much as his art appealed to, and was understood by other artists who revered him, it didn't sell particularly well. In later years Meryon went mad and was committed to an insane asylum. I am feeling a little "off" myself.

I a guest artist this next week at the Ocean House, in Watch Hill Rhode Island, a very grand place indeed. If you are in the area, stop by and see me paint, I suppose I will be working on the grounds of the hotel or on the shore pictured here.

The Forgotten Man, detuned

2011-09-05T18:09:00.008-04:00

Above is Maynard Dixons "Forgotten Man": on below I have "detuned" it.
Here are some bullets;

The idea is to subordinate the smaller variations or details to the larger shape on which they ride. The passage above says DARK JACKET with shadows, rather than, dark jacket WITH SHADOWS. My bowdlerized version below says "DARK JACKET with SHADOWS". I have placed as much emphasis on the folds of the jacket as the larger shape of the jacket (the larger form) itself. I also revved up the shirt so it is overstated. It is no longer a variation on the value structure of the larger form. Now the shirt is over assertive and leaves its place in the structure. The shirt now calls too hard for our attention for it to stay on the surface and be part of the form of the "forgotten Man".
You can look at any scene in two ways, piecemeal, that is as an inventory of its parts, or you can see it broadly. Seeing broadly, detail is minimized and the whole scene is apprehended in its entirety. In my version on I have installed a "piecemeal" sort of vision. I have cluttered the scene up with lots of inessential details, that distract from the design. The surface of my version bristles with nasty curlicues and and insistent annoying doo-dads.
Vision is busier than the Maynard Dixon. His picture draws power from its spare and elemental presentation. This formalizing and distancing makes the image read as something special, an altered, more acute, and discreet vision. My version over on the right looks like head comix from the 60's. All of that visual "noise" reads as vulgar, dirty, and cluttered. How the image is presented........ is the picture, not the verbal description idea of image itself.

shapes and masses kept large

2011-08-31T20:58:00.006-04:00

Maynard Dixon, The Forgotten Man

Here is a question I received lately.

Bullet #2 about shapes and masses kept large, is something I want to make work for me better- can keeping the value the same within the mass, and keeping lines soft, enough to get a bunch of little objects read as one unit?
Ms. Prim N. Shrivley

Ms. Prim;
Keeping your masses simple and your shapes large is one of the skills that develops over time. It is part observation and part installation. It results in a breadth of vision that can please the viewer with clean design and lend dignity and import to subjects that are mundane or commonplace. Here are some bullets;

The idea is to subordinate the smaller variations or details to the larger shape on which they ride. Look at the Maynard Dixon above, if you squint at the mans jacket you will see that it is really just a small light area and a big dark. Notice the shadow of the lapel and the shadow next to that where the sleeve sits against the side of the coat. Those deep shadows are only a little different than the area around them. They have been subordinated to the larger shape of the jacket shadow. The passage says DARK JACKET with shadows, rather than, dark jacket WITH SHADOWS.
This is a matter of emphasis. You can look at any scene in two ways, piecemeal, that is as an inventory of its parts, or you can see it broadly. Seeing broadly detail is minimized and the whole scene is apprehended in its entirety. The first time I was told about this I didn't get it at all. I eventually learned to apply it, but for me it was a long process. Ives Gammell (my teacher) used to tell me, don't look into your shadows. He meant to get the "big look" rather than scrutinizing the variations within the shadow field.
Squinting will simplify the the shapes in a scene and help you get the idea BUT, really this is a convention. This is a deliberate simplification of the little stuff in order to sake the big stuff dominant. Any time you paint details you can imagine turning down the volume on them a little.
Connecting lights and connecting dark shapes are both ways of helping along the "big look".
Look again at the painting up top, notice the marching trousers behind our dejected hero. See how simplified they are? They are just lights and darks, in all of those pant legs and skirts there is one (1!) fold. There is nothing there to hang up your eye. This gives the painting an artful look. Vision is busier than this. This formalizing and distancing makes the image read as something special, an altered more acute and discreet vision.
Edward Hopper used this all the time. Below is "Earl Sunday Morning". This picture has had the hell simplified out of it. There is nearly no detail. Look at the awning in the middle of the painting for instance. It is just a long shape. there are no folds or details within it because Hopper left them out. There are no little brick details in that facade either.

I will return to this subject again in my next post.

A Gruppe and some fast food

2011-08-30T20:45:00.005-04:00

Here I am again, blogging from McDonalds. Maybe tomorrow I will have my internet connection back. I am going to shoot some bullets at this Gruppe painting.

All off the greens and blues are pthalo of course, the green grass at the foot of the barn, the foreground shadows, even the deep color of the pines at the right.
All of the shapes and masses are kept large, that is they aren't chopped up with distracting, interrupting details. Every nuance within the shapes is subordinated to the larger shape. That is , when you look at it you see the big shape and THEN the variety within in it.
The trees are handled as a blur of fine sticks against the sky. Both have to be wet to do this and it takes a bit of practice. I always liked that effect though and have painted a zillion trees that way. This is more a convention than something you will always observe. It is a simplified explanation of what is actually seen.
The big squared off shape of the sky as it descends above the pine tree at the right makes the sky the positive shape. It is painted over the trees and makes the sky the "big" shape. This curving, thrusting form also brings the viewers eye around that corner and down towards the river. Gruppe does the same thing again to the right of the barn roof.
Notice how Gruppe has linked all of the light shapes of the rocks beginning at 9:00 and continuing along the stream into the picture. The upright trunks of the trees are tied into that series of shapes too.
The dark pine next to the barn's roof and the pine that "ends" the stream bracket and close in the illuminated tree and barn "punchline".

That's about as much McDonalds as I can take. Be back soon.

WHEN I GET SCARED

2011-08-29T22:34:00.003-04:00

Emile Gruppe

I am typing away in a MacDonalds, The hurricane didn't much any damage here, lots of rain, a little high wind. I still have power, many people around here don't. But I did lose the internet.
I am writing a post on the picture above, if the internet is willing I should be able to get it out tomorrow.

I should throw something of value out here tonight. Lets try this;

WHEN I GET SCARED I DROP BACK TO A THREE COLOR PALETTE.

As you all have seen my palette in previous posts, I won't list my colors, but I have both chromatic and earth colors on my palette. I am not requires to use every color on the palette though. Embedded within my palette are several smaller three color palettes. For instance I could use cadmium yellow, cobalt blue and cadmium vermilion. Often when I decide to use just three pigments I move them in front of the other pigments to remind myself I am only using these three.

When I am floored on how to paint something, at least its color. I will simplify the problem by only using three colors. It makes a smaller problem because there are few choices to make and the notes I do make are easily repeatable. So When I am stuck or just "getting killed" out there. I switch down to a smaller palette.

Gotta go the Macdonalds is closing. More soon.

A Gruppe painting discussed

2011-08-25T20:30:00.007-04:00

As long as Emile Gruppe has surfaced I think I will talk about a couple of them. Emile is one of the artists who from about the 1920's through the late 70's was one of the most sucessful and well known painters of the Cape Ann school. The other "big guy" was Aldro Hibbard. Although I like Gruppe well enough, he is eclipsed for me by Hibbard. The Gruppes seem a little "quick" for my taste. But that is what they were about, and people who like Gruppe like him for that reason.

Gruppe was a splendid designer and pattern maker. The autumn scene is of the Congregational Church in Rockport, sometimes called "Old Sloop" church. The big dark tree on the right is balanced by three or four lighter birch trees leaning away from it at the opposite angle, on the left. These trees include a pattern of darks against the brightly colored midground. Gruppe has used counterchange all over this picture, setting the dark parts of the trees against the light parts of the sky and on the left darkening the sky so the white birches are boldly relieved against it. The strong darks make the colors "pop". A strong shadow is usually called for in order to get a strong light. It is the contrast between the light and the shadow that makes the picture "pop. This pattern of darks is liked together into a web like net thrown over the midtones of the distance.

The strongest and biggest dark (on the right hand tree) is placed next to the church, which gets our attention to that area. Sometimes artists call that a tonal climax, the darkest dark and the lightest light are placed together at the subject. It is a useful device sometimes.

The foreground and the base of the tree look to be painted in the mixed "umbers" that I mentioned last night. They contain all three primaries. The foreground grass looks like it was painted with ocher, but Gruppe used no earth colors, so it was mixed from chromatic color.

I wish Gruppe had taken a ruler to that steeple though. Gruppe lovers don't care, but that would bother me if I owned the painting. Its lean would haunt me. The bottom left corner of the lantern (that part of a steeple) needs to be kicked out a little to look "square". Gruppe was an excellent draftsman, I just think it wasn't important to him. It is that sort of thing that puts me off Gruppe sometimes. I never have that problem with a Hibbard, he adhered to a higher standard in his drawing.

Notice the repeating gables of the buildings across the middle ground. They have a relationship to one another that is rhythmic. The repeated shapes differing in size and perspective give a jaunty bebop sort of a feel.

One of the advantages of painting loosely as this is that you can get away with a lot of arranging. The more literal you are, the less poetic your arrangements will be.

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING!

In order to have rhythm and design in your painting it is necessary to push it around so it has those things. They will not mysteriously appear , they have to be consciously installed. A meticulously rendered highly accurate rendition is often arrhythmic.

The Montana trip and some remarks on Emile Gruppes book and palette

2011-08-24T21:54:00.003-04:00

Above, Emile Gruppe

I have returned from a week in Montana. I was a guest artist at the Western Rendezvous of Art. I met a lot of really fine painters that I had long heard about but never met. A few of the artists I met were, Matt Smith, Josh Elliot and Ralph Oberg, I also met Robert Lemler and John Potter. There were a lot of fine paintings in the show, and we had several large banquets together that provided an opportunity to talk to each other. One of the days was a paint out.

I stayed in Montana for a couple of days after the event and painted with two blog readers who had come a long way to meet me. I took them each out for a days lesson and painted myself too. I really enjoy meeting, and when I can helping the readers of this blog. I am used, therefore I am useful!

One of you contacted me and asked if I was going to do a fall camping workshop in Acadia this year, I dunno? Maybe I should, any interest out there? If you are willing to camp, this is by far the cheapest way to take one of my workshops as camping is very cheap. I like the camping part of that workshop. We hang out till late at night and drink tonic.
There are motels nearby too for the fainthearted.

A reader wrote
Hi Stape,

I am reading Gruppe on painting. He explains that yellow is warm, red a modifier and Blue cool.

In his palette he has a cool and a warm for each primaries. He also says to not introduce a warm yellow into shadows. Until then I have no problem.

My understanding will be to use the cool primaries for the shadows and the warm primaries for the light and never mix a cool primary with a warm primary but ...

When he shows how he creates complements with his palette (see attached) I start to be confused. For the green he uses phthalo blue with lemon yellow but lemon yellow should be the cool yellow. But I can understand that any yellow can be considered warm .... I guess. He goes on with umber and that is confusing. He mixed the cool purple with madder or cad red or cad orange ??? Cad orange has a warm yellow in it ! ??? (but maybe it works because red a modifier)

If I had to do cool umbers I would use ultramarine, madder and lemon yellow (cool yellow). And for a warm umber I would use phthalo blue, cad red and cad yellow.

How should I think to make Gruppe's palette work ? HELP !!!! Thanks !
....................Larry Mantlebiter Jr.

Larry;

Whoa! you are losing me. I think I will just talk about the Gruppe palette a little and offer one possible answer to your dilemma.

Emile Gruppe ( 1896-1978) was one of the best known painters of the Cape Ann school. He kept a studio in Gloucester for many years and was known for his rapid style of painting. A major influence on many New England landscape painters, Gruppe is best known for his harbor scenes with fishing boats.

As you can see from the chart above, Gruppe used a relatively small chromatic palette. That means it contains only pure colors, no earth colors. I have used this palette a little in the past, but not extensively. This palette contains a warm and a cool pigment in each of the three hues, red, yellow and blue. If you want punch in your colors, this palette will help. If you have been using a three color palette, this might be an interesting way to expand your choice of colors

I think you should chart your colors. Richard Schmid explains how to do this in his book "Alla Prima". Here is a basic description of how to do that. On a piece of Masonite or canvas about the size of a place mat, lines are drawn to divide the surface into as many columns as you have pigments. Here is a link to a blogger who has written about that and explains it well.

If you "chart" your colors you will then know all they they can do and I think it will answer your question and any others you might have. With a relatively small palette such as this charting it should go more quickly.

There were once three Gruppe books. I have them all, but they are out of print except for one. I have posted a link to the one that is still in print below and a link to a used copy that is affordable. These are excellent books.

Gruppe talks about mixing "umbers" from this palette.He does this by mixing compliments together. He believed that making your own "umbres" gave you more interesting and varied grays and taught you more about mixing than actually having dulled earth colors on your palette. I don't use umber, but I would miss my earth colors. If I had to choose:

I WOULD GIVE UP MY CADMIUMS BEFORE I WOULD GIVE UP MY EARTH COLORS.

The Gruppe on Painting is a restrike and while its quality is acceptable and you can learn from it, the older original book like the one above it is a better printing. The Gruppe books contain a large assortment of his paintings and even if they were not excellent as art instruction they would still be valuable on that count.

Some comments responded to and a mentor's advice

2011-08-18T01:27:00.004-04:00

I am writing this from a motel room in Helena, Montana. I am here because I am a guest artist this year in the Western Rendezvous of Art. The painting above is my piece in the show. I had a dreadful flight here, That went on for two days but I arrived last night so tired I was staggering. Now my days and nights are reversed it is after midnight and I just woke up. I love to travel and do it a lot, but sometimes it is disorienting. Hotel rooms are a great place to write blog posts, I have no distractions and no studio in which to work. As you all know, if I am awake I am working.

I think I will tackle a couple of the questions from recent comments, comments are often the impetus for good blog posts. I was asked several times about my formula for Pornstar Pink. I use
quinacridone red and pyrrole orange and flake white. Willamsburg's Persian Rose is very close but theirs is made with quinacridone violet and zinc white, I think. My Pornstar Pink is a little more electric pink, but if you want to try this color that is what you should buy.

I also received this comment;
Thanks Stape, but must staunchly disagree with you on your art and do nothing else philosophy. I have been a health practitioner for 30 years--get balanced man!!, exercise, eat well, relax, etc. I was a workaholic, going into an early grave. Terrible cholesterol, prediabetic, etc. and I quit, began eating well and exercising and taking time off. Hope this view gets across that you don't have to kill yourself to be a successful artist. Paint 5 hours a day, do yoga, meditate, take a vacation, have a balanced life and be successful artist too. Sorry, just my point of view.
................Pastor Defenses

Dear Pastor:
Does it seem a little ludicrous to you as a health care professional to advise a successful artist on how to be one? For many, even most people that is sound advice. But there is a level of performance and ability that cannot be achieved with that level of commitment. It all depends on what you want from your art. This is incidentally true of most of life's endeavors not just painting.If you want your art to be something that you do for a fuller life or are gainfully employed elsewhere that sounds like a good plan. BUT if you want to play in the major leagues, five hours a day won't take you there. The players at that level work incessantly and you won't operate at that level working part time. If you are in your twenties and have no children and no mortgage as I did, it is possible to concentrate on getting your "chops" together. Real application at this age when learning is easier and distractions are fewer will build a foundation that allows you to concentrate more on what you are trying to say later, rather than the mechanics of saying it.

Retired people who take up painting never catch up with those who have spent a lifetime honing their craft. I know that sounds hard but I believe it to be true and not heard very often in the popular art press. If you take up painting late in life and work at it only part time you may become a strong amateur painter, but you will not become a real case hardened pro. You might even put together a successful art business, but there is a level of ability that is closed to you. If you think about it I am sure you can summon up a list of the names of those who play in the upper brackets.

I am thinking about hiring someone to do yoga for me. My body is only a shopping cart I push my mind around in. I did drop 45 pounds since May though.
.....................Stape

I was advising a friend recently, as I mentor a few people. I recommended that they pick a favorite painter, for them it was Willard Metcalf, but it could have been almost any painter who was first rate and then learn to work in that artist's style. This is a step beyond copying a painting by that artist (which is a good learning tool also) because it makes you really understand how an artist thought. I suggested that they go to a location and try to make a Willard Metcalf out of it. My intention was not they they become an imitator of Metcalf but that they thoroughly examine one way, a good way, of doing things. That gives them a sort of baseline. When confronted with a painting problem they will know at least one approach to solving it.

A tool for smuggling red

2011-08-11T21:04:00.005-04:00

One of the continual problems for the outdoor painter in the summertime is the color green. Green is everywhere. I do a lot to replace it or shade it towards red to tone it down. I often push my greens towards olive or ocher or heat them up or purple their shadows. I don't want to make paintings that are green all over, so I smuggle red. There are three colors, blue, red and yellow. Green contains blue and yellow so I want to use as much of a different color from those two as I can . That leaves red. So I smuggle reds. That is, I try to sneak it into my greens to "step" on them and get greater variety in my color rather than green, green, green.

I am particularly wary of a certain green that occurs everywhere in the lights during the summer. It is a high key chartreuse color most easily made from a combination of lots of white, plus viridian and some cadmium yellow light. Note I am not talking how to "hit" a given color outside. I am talking about modifying or even replacing the actual note of nature with something I think will make a more attractive painting. You have heard me speak of design a lot, here I am designing my color. Sometimes I want my paintings to be the color of 500 dollar suits. High key lemon greens are not something I would want in my suit.

I make up a custom color for myself that I think of as the anti-green. I call it Pornstar Pink. It is a hot pink with indelicate overtones of chewing gum and feather boa with a hot undertone that is nearly biological. This cheap lingerie color is the opposite of the green outside, and is the antidote. I can throw it into any of the mixtures I use to make greens and it will reduce or "step on" that green. I feed it into the painting here and there to "smuggle reds".

Painters I knew years ago sometimes carried tubes of "flesh color" into the field. They would never have used "flesh ( now I believe it is labeled "Caucasian flesh") in a portrait but it was really handy out doors. My homemade mixture, Pornstar Pink is a lot more vibrant than the old flesh color but the idea is the same, a red modifier pigment. In the winter this is a good color to have for painting snow, too

When I make this color I tube it not only for myself but for a friend or two who liked mine when they tried it. So I make about a quart at a time. I have experimented with it for a number of years and have arrived at a formula that works for me. But you probably don't want to tube paint, so there is this, Williamsburg Persian Rose

I started out using Persian Rose and then formulated my own version over the years from a mixture of precursor pigments I buy from RGH, my paint supplier. Their link is over in my sidebar.
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Snowcamp I my winter painting workshop in the White mountains is filled. I have a few a spaces left in Snowcamp II. If you want to come click here. If that fills, maybe I can do another session, I don't know.

John Pike

2011-08-07T22:33:00.006-04:00

Here I am again. Thank you for tolerating my reduced schedule on the blog, again I am not going away, just spacing things out so I can paint more. I wrote almost a thousand posts in a row without missing a day. I need to adopt a less driven system for a while., but I may return to that when winter comes. If you are new to reading this blog, I would point you towards the archives. I began this with the intention of writing down everything I thought an artist ought to know. That turned into a big project. The first 400 or so posts are like an art school, I started with the materials and worked outwards from there. If you want to get the most from the blog I suppose the best way is to go back to the beginning and read forward from there.

The blog has been described as a rabbit hole. There is no good way to know what is in it in order, but a reader is working to build an index to the site, an enormous task, and I am grateful to him for undertaking that effort. When it is ready I will post a link to it. I am afraid it will take him a very long time.

John Pike was an American watercolorist, who was born in Boston in 1911. Pike was a student of Richard Miller, and Charles Hawthorne. Pike did a lot of magazine illustration and ran a watercolor school in Woodstock, New York, the same town as John Carlson's summer extension of the Art Students League. He died in 1979.

I bring John Pike to your attention because he wrote a wonderful book on painting, "John Pike Paints Watercolors". There is an Amazon link below if you want a copy. I have read my copy many times. The book was originally published in 1978 right before the authors death.

Pikes paintings are far less direct than my own work, he is a broad watercolorist. There was a school of American watercolor that existed up until about his death that had a look to it and many practitioners. Someday there are about 10 blog posts to do on that, but that is a ways out there. Many of them were from California, although Pike was not. Watercolor now seems to be a drug on the market ( I always wondered why that means hard to sell, you would think the opposite) and few of my galleries show them anymore. The best watercolorists I know are now painting in oil. I am sure That is cyclical though and watercolor will come back.

As I am exclusively an oil painter it might seem odd that I am recommending a watercolor "how to" book. But this book is useful to anyone painting in any medium. The book is mostly demos.
Each of the demonstrations in the book begins with the charcoal drawing from which it was made and most of the plates are in color so you do get a good look at how the paintings were made.

Pike shows how he progresses from sketches to the paintings which are done in the studio from them. The second half of the book is a gallery of his paintings, and he was very good. The paintings are in a style that seems a little dated today, but they are very well done and if there were no art instruction in the book I would recommend it on the strength of his art. I have little interest in books about painting by people who don't do it well.

This was in the comments from the last post. I thought it was great and am posting it here.

Maineland said...Something that works for me. I make all my appointments on Wednesdays. Dentist, hair cut, car repairs. I used to do this for environmental reasons now that and so I don't have to cut into studio time.

THERE is a great idea. Thanks Maineland whoever you are. That seems so obvious. If I had to guess, I would guess that this is an idea from a mom managing small children a home and operating on a tight budget. They are a special class of experts with expertise in time management and accustomed to the challenge of pecking away at tasks that are open ended and larger than can actually be accomplished.

Time management for artists

2011-08-03T23:21:00.005-04:00

I received this e-mail:

I think a lot of us, especially if we are doing this full time, have difficulties in managing our time properly. Its difficult to organize a day when there are 20 things you'd like to paint, emails to respond too, late night deadlines that screw up the next days plans, people knocking on your door thinking that because you are a self employed artist and don;t punch a "normal" clock, you don't have any proper responsibilities and can drop anything you are doing because someone needs a favour. We have commissions to handle, money to manage, shows to submit to.

Some of us (me ) actually live in the studio so the line between what is work and rest gets blurred easily resulting in nothing really getting done. Some have rolodexes, some have schedules, "to do" lists that they make before they go to bed, big charts, or keep everything in their head.

What are some of your tips, and what have you learned to avoid throughout your career? Any pitfalls we should watch out for?
.........................a European friend

I am probably the last person to speak on time management. I get a lot done, but I am not orderly. My trick is that I work all the time. From when I get out of bed in the morning till I go to bed at night I am working. I have been doing that for almost 40 years. It works, at least in the long run. I sometimes am talking to a student in a workshop, or one of the people I mentor, and I realize that they think that any one day is going to make such a difference.

I have known many well organized daybook planner types who migrated into the art from the business world, and I haven't noticed they had any great advantage. The race is very long and won by those who get up and run every morning till the light fails. So the short answer is

IF YOU WANT TO BE AN ARTIST, HERE IS THE SECRET. GET UP EVERY DAY, AND DO IT ALL DAY.

I am not well organized, forget to write stuff down and would rather paint than do all of the the things that those creepy books written by career counselors recommend. But I guess I can come up with a few things.

Find Earl Nightingale and study his material. Here is a link to a post I have written on that. I am not a devotee of self improvement literature. Earl is different.
I often carry an index card in my left pocket with five things that I want to get done during the day. I check them off as I go.
I avoid making appointments. I want to paint, not meet with people so I try to keep my schedule freed up. I will obsess about the damage to my work schedule caused by an hour long appointment sometime next week. If I have an appointment during an upcoming day, I look at that day as lost. I try to get as many things done after the light fails as I can, grocery shopping, laundry, family etc.
I have no hobbies, I don't play or watch those sport things. I don't play video games or Farmville (whatever that is).
I don't have a television. If you watch two hours of TV a day and wonder why you are not making it as an artist, you are kidding yourself about the size of what it takes to do this.
I don't seek to earn money from other sources than my art. I don't own a rental unit nor do I buy stock, I am afraid it will divert my attention from my work, part of which is to make a living. If a dollar comes into this house it has to be from the art. I don't do jobs or employment.
I have a a mental list of my contacts the people who are my dealers and fellow artist travelers. I call them routinely and check in. Speaking with my friends who are professional artists who are also at their easels helps. I have about a half dozen of those, and talking to them helps me build a model for my own efforts. We are working together, separately. Their lives are very like mine. We provide emotional support for one another. You need to have a network of people who you want to be like. I have that in spades, very important to me. These are successful painters, you would know their names. We become like the people we hang out with.
I keep mental track of my time at the easel. Doing business things, talking on the phone, etc is all essential but it is not time spent on your art. You have to account for it separately.There is a lot of advice for artists out there on business management, most of it written by people from the business world who want to help us spaced out artists. I know a few artists who do all that stuff too. Often their work takes on the same quality though. It is real important to put your art first. ALWAYS THE ART COMES FIRST. Then worry about marketing it. Good art will sell. I don't mean to say that you don't have to do all of that phone calling a list keeping, but it is not as important as the art. I know a very successful artist who has no e-mail, no web site and no business card. He does do the phone a lot though.
I use Google calender it is on G-mail. It notifies me before appointments and I can look in there and see what is coming up. Many computers are sold with calender and event programs and you probably have one.
Once a month or sometimes more often, I call all of my dealers. I don't do it to ask if they have sold my work. I do it just to talk, I need to work with friends. If I can't be friends with a dealer usually things don't work out.

I will think about this some more and see what else I can come up with. I will do a post aimed at the serious amateur who has to have a life outside of the studio, which I don't.

Homeopathic whites

2011-07-31T21:10:00.008-04:00

Here I am. I have dropped back the schedule on writing the blog to every other day or even every third day for a while. I have so much unfinished work in my studio. Those of you with various "feed" will get the blogs when I publish them and you who find me through Facebook will get the link on your home page when I publish. This is not a symptom of the blog ending. I have a lot more to write about. I keep a sort of flow chart so that when an idea for a post occurs to me I write it down, with little arrows like a genealogical tree showing how a series of posts might follow.

I am going to write about Homeopathy a little bit, not because of the practice itself, although I will tell you a little of that as an aside, but because I am going to describe a procedure in painting by comparison .

Homeopathy is an alternative medical philosophy invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. Hahnemann was writing in an era when medicine was primitive, ineffectual and often painful and dangerous. He expounded a theory of "similars". That is, he believed that a very small dose of a substance that would give you a symptom, was useful for treating someone who had that same symptom. So if you had a problem with skin rashes he might have given you something that would cause skin rashes, like Poison Ivy. Because the remedies often contained noxious. or poisonous ingredients Hahnemann diluted them. In fact he believed that the more diluted they were, they more efficacious they would be. He would put a sprinkling of an ingredient, like salt or arsenic into a beaker of water. Then he would take a tiny eyedropper from that and dilute it with another entire beaker of water. From that beaker he would take another eyedropperful and add it to third beaker, and so on. Often the mixtures made contained no molecules of the original active ingredient actually present in the final remedy.

Homeopathy is discredited today although there are homeopathic remedies on the market. ZiCam for colds is a well known one, and there are people who compound and sell homeopathic remedies. Many of the products available today that say they are homeopathic, are not actually created by this dilution system. They just use the word to mean all natural, and harmless, selling their products to people who are unfamiliar with the actual definition of what a homeopathic remedy is.

The reason I brought all of this up is to talk about mixing paint on the palette though. My long suffering pink camera seems to have died, so I shot the following pictures with my cell phone. They aren't very good, but you should be able to see what I am up to.

I sometimes paint passages in extremely high values, notes that are very close to white but carry a smidgen of a color.This is useful in skies or the sides of boats in sunlight etc. I can mix up a pile of color to paint these passages this way, like a homeopath. I make a very high key (light) note using a lot of white and a pigment. In the picture below I used cadmium yellow.

Then I take a smidgen (like an eyedropperful) of that mixture and throw it into a new pile of white. That is shown below.

Often I will do this to three or so different pigments, with white, creating three piles that are very close to white but contain a little red or blue or yellow. With those three piles I can work in an extremely high value in broken color. I can use each of those different tints to express the turning of a form in bright sunlight.

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SNOWCAMP

Snowcamp I is full. I have a few spaces left in Snowcamp II if you want one now would probably be the time to sign up. If there is sufficient interest I may be able to add a third session I am not sure. The link is over there on the right in my sidebar.

Elected juries

2011-07-28T19:53:00.005-04:00

Trial by combat, man vs. woman.

In my last post I discussed using previous winners as the next jury. Tonight I think I will lay out the moist conventional system for art juries, those elected by the membership.

The strongest argument for an elected membership is....well, they are elected. The artists who will be in the show decide who will be the judge. What could be fairer than that? Here is the usual process.

Most all art associations are governed by an elected board, who hire a director to actually run daily operations. Every year there is an annual meeting and the nominees for the juries are voted on by the membership at that meeting. But the process starts before that. The president, somebody on the board, or the director is detailed to call individual members and ask them if they would accept the nomination to the exhibition jury. If you intend to have a jury of, say, seven you need eight to ten nominees. If you don't have more nominees than positions on the jury it is hardly an election. That's third world dictatorship stuff. You simply have to have some nominees for the members to reject. Getting ten people to pledge their time, that are actually qualified, can be a lot of work. Many people turn down the responsibility, or served the year before and should are often eliminated from the jury pool. So being the guy who has to secure the nominees can be a big job, besides having to ask people to give up their time and possibly make a few enemies.

This system is not immune to being captured by a subgroup either, but it is less likely, unless that subgroup has critical mass at the annual meeting to outvote the rest of membership. Remember though, every year some people are going to be juried out. They will form a disgruntled cadre of rejected artists working to change or control the system. Sinced that seems to be automatic, when I hear that a jury is corrupt incompetent or blind I always remember that this is a constant in the system. Maybe the jury was corrupt and blind, maybe not. Every jury is accused of that
I have sat on many juries and overseen a lot of them. I have never seen a corrupt jury.

I have seen juries deliberately balanced between devotees of the traditional and acolytes of the avant-garde, to be "fair". Those juries often work this way, Real modern art won't pull vote from the traditionalists and extremely traditional work won't pull the needed votes from the moderns. You get a show full of Cuisinart fauve, things that straddle the boundaries of both schools without really exemplifying either one. Often these juries are flabbergasted at the shows their voting produced. No individual on the jury would have chosen that show.

Many organizations prohibit or at least discourage conversation about the pieces being juried. The work is placed before the jury, they vote and the next work is displayed to them. Very seldom have I seen an argument or anger during a jury. When I have, it was by a juror who was characterized by such behavior. Juries show up, and try to do a good job, generally. They are proud to be on the jury, it is an honor, so they want to pick out as good a show as possible. They will be judged by that. Most jurors try to select a broad range of work besides what they do themselves , believing they can reward quality in different sorts of painting. They almost never have it "in" for a particular artist. If you were juried out of a show, it truly happened because they thought your painting was weak. Maybe you should have a look at how you can improve your art by the next exhibition, instead of jiving yourself that the jury is blind or biased.

More about juries

2011-07-26T10:47:00.005-04:00

I have spent the morning working on an illustration for the blog about oblique recession in drawing and it is still not ready. So I will write again on juries as I have further thoughts.

So, I think bringing in outside juries is inappropriate for an elected artists members organization. A one time show or art center will often have no choice but to do this, as they lack a sufficient "in-house" pool of informed jurors, or a least peers to the juried.

There is an odd difference between an art jury and a civil jury. On an art jury I think it best to have people with great expertise and discrimination. In a civil jury the best choice might be a reasonable "everyman" bringing no specialized expertise to the proceedings and representing all of society. The art juror represents a group of artists who can't all be there to make aesthetic decisions for the institution. There are more pictures clamoring for wall space than there are walls, not everything can hang, and some things are not of a quality that the other members would want to hang alongside so some pictures can hang and some cannot. Someone has to decide which is which.

Here is one solution to the problem . This would fit plein air events particularly well I think.

THIS YEARS PRIZE WINNERS ARE NEXT YEARS JURY

You win one of the top prizes, you are on the jury next year. This has a number of advantages. They are;

Since they won a prize last year they have been singled out, at least this one time as having done excellent or the best work in a given show. This plus the vetting they received when becoming a member argues for their expertise.Doesn't prove it, but places them in as a reasonable choice to make good decisions.
It removes last years winners from the prize pool this year. Jurors judge shows but are excluded from winning prizes. That gives others a chance to win a prize that year. A few extremely talented members can take all of the prizes year after year. I don't think that is desirable either. They can't do that if they are on the jury every few years.
There is now a payback to the organization by the prizewinner who can return the blessing that has been bestowed on him, by serving for a morning to help the organization do that for other members. With the prize comes a duty.
This is a real open system. People will become jurors based on their merit ( at least more often than not) not many surprises and not many ways for small cabals of the mediocre to manipulate the system for their own benefit, again a constant problem. To control the juries you have to make excellent work. Spiking the nominations won't do it.
It eliminates "spiking" the nominees. In many institutions some poor sadsack gets the job of calling around to members and asking them to be on the juries. It can be a drag because often the prospect will tell you no. Sometimes with a rude reason why. It is easy just to call your friends. When the membership receives the list of nominees for the jury about half of them are from the same circle of friends or amateur watercolor class.Unlike a slate of nominees from some one individual member or the president of the organization or harried director, the line of succession is clear.

A thought about juries for exhibitions

2011-07-24T09:11:00.007-04:00

Old print of trial by water

Several of the commenters on the last blog were very confused by the oblique stacking design stem I brought up in the last few posts. In order to explain that better, I have to make an illustration. Doing the blog is a time eater that I have to manage. I have done lots of illustrations already, but they are time consuming. The best posts I have done often had illustrations and they are worth the time, but they take about an entire day or more to generate. For someone posting every day, that quickly becomes unmanageable, I have to have them in the works for days as an addendum to my regular blog creation. Here I am doing that again. Someday there will be a pamphlet, and the illustrations will be useful then.

So as an aside I think I will talk about juries at exhibitions. I attended the Annual Metting of the Rockport Art Association the other night and much of the talk after the meeeting was about the juries. It often is. Virtually everyone rejected by a previous jury has a plan for re-doing the juries, a constituency of the rejected, calling for no juries, or juries from outside the organization. Maybe college professors, or newspaper critics or museum curators, REAL EXPERTS.

I have sat on dozens of juries, assembled more than a few and been the president of an art association where it was part of my duties to sit in on, and oversee, the juries to ensure that it was "straight". I have been an "out side juror many times. I have had a very good look at the system.

The other evening I was talking to a woman (or was it two? they were small) who told me that she (they?) thought an outside jury of experts from the REAL (official) art world should come in to separate the quick from the dead. Maybe an art critic from a newspaper. I disagreed gently , being 32 feet tall and weighing over 1,600 pounds. "No ", I said, waving a finger the size of a kids baseball bat at her, and beginning to puff up to a gargantuan size. I began flapping my arms and hunching over, as I hissed through clenched obsidian teeth the size of tombstones .
, I sez:

"This is a juried association of hopefully qualified members. They have been vetted by jury and allowed by the strength of their art to become an artist member. There are art associations that are open to all comers or have thousands of members that often operate on that system. But I think it is tyranny! ( As I said this I spit streams of red hot nails and brads out of my ears) I think that the member ship should govern itself, selecting that jury is part of governance. It is the aesthetic "conscience" of the members. The elected jury stands at the gate and says "This shall not fly! below certain levels of quality we will not go!"

Often there is only so much wall space and many paintings clamoring for that limited space. Some triage has to be done, they all can't hang. They must be sorted, graded. We may disagree on what quality in art is or "goodness" whatever, but it is the best way to put together an exhibition. Pick the "best paintings" and hang them, return the weaker ones to their creators who will now join the other exhibited, in planning the the installation of people who they believe WILL favor their own art.

The membership has a body of vetted artists from which to select a jury, they know those artists and will generally appoint those they think most qualified either by reputation, ability or judgement. They know the nominees and are generally aware of their attributes. Over the course of years they have probably rotated through juries and sat next to them at judgement time.

The members have the right to decide for themselves who will jury them. Bringing in an unknown stranger, usually one who doesn't even paint, to manage this for you, is likng inviting the guy down the street to mange your personal life. For an art association, what gets shown in the exhibitions is important. Exhibiting the art of its members is it's primary mission. A membership needs to summon from its own numbers artist who can represent them on that jury. Like a democracy, not everyone gets to vote in the senate, but you certainly want to a say in choosing who does and have a number of nominees from which to choose rejecting some and approving others.

The membership needs to decide for itself what it wants on its walls their decisions may be erratic, but they will be their own arrived at in the fairest most democratic way. Self governance and not governance by unknown experts from the worlds of journalism, philosophy or writing but practitioners of the craft. Very few are great judges of crafts they themselves do not practice.

An outside jury is usually imposed from above, by the board, or the director. Generally when a membership is informed of the outside juror it is as a yes- no vote (like in 3rd world dictatorships) or the next juror is simply announced to them ( like in the time of Dirk Van Assaerts) by a newsletter from the staff or the board or the exhibition committee or who knows who. Often it is convenient that a member knows so and so at the college and that seemed as an easy way for the board to deal with the jury problem. Everybody is always upset about it (remember jurying automatically produces a noisy tribe of the disgruntled carrying torches and at the gates).

A CONSTITUENCY OF THE MEDIOCRE!

There are definitely mistakes and preferences in jurying, it is an imperfect system. Sometimes an artist is rejected and you wonder why? "Looked good to me, well established artist too". But the greatest number of the rejected, were rejected for very good reason and almost any jury would have eliminated them. There is a wide range of quality in the paintings presented to a jury, with usually about half being very amateurish indeed. Its like the first shows of a season of American Idol, mostly train wrecks that make you ask "what made them think they could do this?" interspersed with the very occasional diamond".

Thats enough for today, more tomorrow.

A little more about drawn planar recession

2011-07-22T19:30:00.007-04:00

Here is an Aldro Hibbard. This is one of my favorite Hibbard. I have written about him before and if you search the blog using the box at the upper left, you can find more. This Hibbard has a great passage that uses the "stacked" recession I was talking about in the last post about the light house painting.

I think this is a big enough idea that I want to stop and make sure that all the readers "get" this one. There is another idea implied by this and that is :

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING

You can look all day and not see this kind of recession, you may find places where it exists, but this is something you "install" into the landscape. It is an arrangement that is forced onto the actual appearance of the scene to maker a better, clearer design, rather than the more random arrangements presented by a natural location.

The detail of the lower right hand corner of the picture shows this tactic, I have photoshopped this image to make the planes a little plainer for you. The upper image has not been altered.

Below I have outlined some of those "stacked planes that recede away from us like dishes drying in a rack, viewed at a 45 degree angle.

The beauty of this device is that it Gives recession and variety to arrangements of things which actually march straight across the canvas in real life. Rather than having stripey lines of landscape elements arranged equidistant from the viewer, they are arranged in serried rows one behind one another. Think of rows of marching Egyptians from some tomb bas relief. The Egyptian sculptors used this device all the time.

Portland Head light beak avoidance and obligue form recession diagram

2011-07-20T21:41:00.007-04:00

Here is the light house I painted the other day. This photo was taken in the late afternoon and I made the painting in the morning and noon hour but you can get the general idea . Below is my painting and below that a numbered diagram that I will use to discuss beak avoidance. I have written before about beaks here.. The actual site is wicked beaky.

Here's what is going on at each of those numbers.

#1, is the main beak area, I have minimized it by making it about the same value as the water around it, I dropped the contrast in the area to make the beak shape less assertive. There is also a camouflaging pattern of shadows and accents that break up the form and outline of the beak. There are accent values in the surf at its feet that also draw attention back and away from its sharp point.
#2, I pushed this shape up so it overlaps the form behind it, that reduces it's knife edged beakyness, and I also made it low contrast next to the water. The cracks in the rocks are sweeping away from the beaks vector, hopefully again overpowering it's beaky point, and distracting the viewer from that.

#3, The most distant beak was clustered or paired with the #1 beak. I made them into a single unit, again I downplayed it's value contrast with the water around it. So I could then.....
Make #4 a large bright attention getting area that gives the viewer something more assertive inn the area to look at instead of those evil beaks. This is the headliner of this little ensemble, not the beak structures. Again I am calling attention to a different area nearby instead of the beaks, by distraction. This large light area and the light house itself are clustered together as parts of the largest brightest shape in the painting.

Something else is going on in this picture too. I have "stacked" all of the receding planes in the rocks back into the picture, at a diagonal starting at #5. This gives me a clear progression back into my painting. This is recession through drawing. Everyone learns about recession through value change, or atmospheric perspective. But often it is a slick trick to establish your recession by bending the drawing a little to tell your visual story. Almost no one ever notices this blatant slicing and dicing, by the way.

A little trip to Cape Elizabeth

2011-07-18T22:16:00.017-04:00

This weekend I went to a plein air event in Maine. It was one of those one day wet paint auction affairs that seem to be all the rage now. I have done a few in the past but it is not really my preferred sector of the art market, I would prefer to continue to operate at retail through galleries. I decided to do this one partly because I knew it was a spectacular area on the Casco bay. I know the next great bay above the Casco very well, thats the Penobscot bay. I have lived up there. I haven't "worked" the Cape Elizabeth area, well, I painted the light house there once with my friend Stefan Pastuhov about fifteen years ago.

I also like to do the land trust events. I have spent an enormous amount of my life painting on properties owned by land trusts. The owners who have great sweeps of wooded hills or pasture don't want to sell it for fear it will be cut up and built over, instead of continuing in it's rural, beautiful and often historic state (this is New England). In return for allowing the public access to the land, almost like a park, the owners get a break on their taxes so they don't have to sell the property, which seems inevitably to lead to construction of expensive vinyl homes . An awful lot of the quiet old New England nooks and crannies and unspoiled places are on these trust properties. You don't have to join a club or pay a fee, just set up and go to work. They usually love seeing painters around.

The artists and staff of the CELT (Cape Elizabeth Land Trust) met at about 8:00 in the morning at their headquarters where they handed us box lunches, maps of the area, guides to local something or other, and pages of instructions. I had chosen a location at the light house early in the process because I knew it was a fabulous view. The 25 or so participating artists were spread out around this small cape. There was a published guide to our locations with explanatory material.

I met old friend Caleb Stone in the parking lot and we drove to the big state park where Portland Head light is. It really is an unbelievably spectacular location. It would make a good Bierstadt or Moran subject. From the moment we got to the light house we both started back pedaling away from it . We backed up as far as we could, a couple of hundred yards until we were at the edge of the park, backs to a cyclone fence where private land began. We walked out a narrow goat path through dense fields of poison ivy till we emerged on the ledges overlooking the light house. This location, though hard to get to, allowed us to look up the coast at the light house, rather than at the light house with the sea behind it.

Caleb and I set up our easels by about ten, I guess, and worked in the sun nonstop until 3:30, when the "rules" said we had to return to the great tents of opulence with our paintings to be previewed prior to auction.
We put our easels up and put our wet paintings on them with no frames in a huge tent Brutal.The tent complex was enormous, here is a picture of that.

This is a very wealthy area and the estate on which the event was held was vast, elegant and looked like late 19th century New England with open fields with stone walls and mature hardwood trees, weathered barns and dirt roads.I know many people think of that stuff as sentimental but I love to paint it, and somebody ought to, because it is going away fast.

Me and a fine box pressed maduro with a 52 ring size moved up to the parking lot to watch the arrival of the "swells". The fields quickly filled with lines of expensive foreign cars and SUVs from Detroit. I thought the lot looked pretty good. I like to see all those fine automobiles it bodes well in these things.

I returned to the event through a gantlet of greeting women with elegant black evening dresses on. Of course I look nothing like the invited guests. They are all in jackets and ties. I am wearing a paint splattered jean and T shirt combo and have been baked in the sun since breakfast.I tower over everyone else and I have shoulder length hair. I stand right out. Its kind of comical. All the other artists are dressed as they have come from the field so we are readily identifiable to the paying attendees. I still have the cigar.

I take my gift bag and then one of the women hands me a little foil package, and I smile and keep moving with the now gathering crowd surging on up the hill to the great tent. I thought, did she really give me a condom? I can't imagine I am going to need one. On closer examination (which I had to do kind of surreptitiously until I knew what the mystery thing was) the little foil package contained a tiny, folded cloth soaked in insect repellant. The CELT organization REALLY does things right, they are well organized and with great style. This is the third year they have done the event and it is obviously growing.

Here is a view of the back of the tent with the auction beginning. We had about an hour and a half of wine and great spreads of food . I stayed out of the wine, it makes me fall down. I am talking to all the people and generally being 32 feet tall. I have done a lot of the meet and greet and am very comfortable in the artists role there. I think all the years in retail made any fear of strangers go away. I am not shy.

Here is the one shot 18 by 24 that I made. It was a morning and noontime picture. I shot the photo at the top of the page as I was leaving so that is why it has different light. Well part of why anyway. I had to paint like a madman to get all of that onto that canvas in the allotted time and make it finished enough that I could walk out with it signed. That's not really my thing. I want to make and sell paintings done in 30 hours not 3 hours.That is my usual practice. But that was the days assignment.

Carrying paintings onto location

2011-07-17T06:26:00.000-04:00

I was asked in the comments:
...so I've wondered this a few times from other posts, but this post where you disclose that you never take a carrier into the field with you really begs the question: How DO you transport your supports to and from your auto? Going in I imagine is easier, but coming out with a wet painting(s)? You have your gargantuan Stape Kearns Signature Gloucester-tower easel, your plywood Deadhead painting box, a case of Moxie and who knows what. I realize you are nine feet tall, 300 lbs and eat Modernists for breakfast, but...
...after painting all day on your favorite Metcalf 26 x 29, and perhaps starting the Masterpiece of your lifetime, how DO you get it and all your other gear back to the car? I can't imagine you carry it in your hands unprotected and risk tripping over an errant root.
Do you employ a Sherpa?
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No. I carry my canvas in my left hand. Here I am in Provincetown carrying my kit. So many great painters have walked that street with their easels. I don't often paint small so little canvas carriers are out. I can also take a couple of panels in a slot device on my paint box. Below is a picture of that. It holds 11 by 14's or 14 by 18's. I seldom paint more than a few hundred yards from my car. I can always walk back to that and trade canvases if I need to. I made that like the box, on my cheapo Sears table saw. I should do a post on that.

I also have the leather attache case in my car. It holds extra paint. brushes, batteries for my i-pod etc.

Here is a peek inside.

Panel Boxes

2011-07-15T09:20:00.010-04:00

I received an e-mail asking me about panel boxes, did I have them and what kind? I have a bunch of them. None are however, the new vinyl and foam light weight store-bought kind.Those are good and light, but I want armor, not portability so I make my own. Also, since I work larger than many of the plein air painters, the available boxes are often not large enough for my needs. I have had the box below for many years and it holds 18 by 24's. It is luan plywood and pine held together by sheet rock screws. It is functional, heavy and ugly. This would never do for air travel, they live in the trunk of the car, I never carry a panel box with me out into the field. I have had most of my panel boxes longer than the new vinyl jobs have been made and I like the utilitarian crate look, but I would like to have a smaller vinyl one as they are light and good for travel.

Here is the slotted inside of the box, I cut the slots on my cheapo Sears table saw. There is a door hinge at the distal end of that lid I am lifting.

Here is a sash lock, that holds the box closed.

Here are a couple of shots of a box made for me by a carpenter, the top slides in a groove and this holds 9by 12's. It ought to have a handle though, or a strap.

Here is a really easy to make and soundly utilitarian box given me by a friend. It is made of rigid Styrofoam insulation joined with duck tape. Below with construction glued spacers in it's interior to keep the panels from mating. This 16 by 20 box is light. It has no lid and is again, something that lives in the trunk of my car. This thing will hold a lot of panels two to a slot and then maybe a few more crammed in there too. Ideal for a painting trip.

/

Riggers

2011-07-14T08:31:00.004-04:00

Here is the second of the two species of brush that I carry. I have but one of these, I carry three, or perhaps four bristle brushes (of course I have spares for each in my brush quiver) but only one little pointy brush.

This is a rigger, for many years I used sable riggers but now I am happy enough with the "golden Taklon" synthetic hair. The one I use is a #4 series 7050 script , and at present they cost 3.64.You can get them from Jerrys here.

I call all long, thin, sable- like rounds "riggers" as a convenience, however different lengths of hair or different manufacturers may actually call this sort of brush a script brush, a scriptliner or for the really whip like ones, a rigger. I believe that ship painters may have used those to paint the rigging on boats. I don't know much about ship painting, it is it's own little netherworld.

I HATE BOATS, THEY SINK.

I am particularly fussy about the condition of these brushes, because as they wear, the tips of the hair explode as they abrade to the unattractive thatched end that no longer provides a crisp line. As soon as they begin to lose their neat tip, out they go!

Don't leave a rigger behind uncleaned at the end of a painting session, if paint dries in one of these it will quickly be ruined. Even if you only clean them real well in your solvent, rather than with soap and water, make sure you never forget to put these away clean and protected in your brush quiver, wallet or pastry belt area.

The rigger is what I use to put little branches in, define the rake-boards of a house or other little details or things with man made straight lines. However! this little brush is dangerous, it tightens up and can rob your work of painterlyness . It's overuse can rapidly give your painting a brittle, seized up and crabbed look, so use it gingerly.

OVERUSE OF THE RIGGER BRUSH WILL GIVE YOUR PAINTINGS RIGGERMORTIS!

Say, that might make a dandy neck tattoo!.

A worn out brush

2011-07-13T08:50:00.004-04:00

I wrote last about the importance of clean, sharp brushes. Someday when I am rich and famous I will just throw my brushes away, with my rags, every evening. I would buy my brushes by the gross, in three different sizes.

The brush ( a #4 flat) pictured above is ruined, worn out ( not good anymore). The pro's are rolling their eyes reading this, for they maintain a collection of fine tools. But a lot of people read this blog and most of them are in the earlier stages of their march to artistic greatness.

Now your brushes may wear more evenly than this abraded specimen but the wear happens the same way on a finer scale. The hairs have broken or been worn off in gradated lengths back to the ferrule ( the shiny part). Why its almost like a Mesopotamian ziggurat, or a layered haircut from the David Cassidy period! The same sort of unattractive wear and fragmented deterioration you would expect to find in a broom.

It makes a stroke or line with a chopped up edge, or drag marks at its side. Next to a sharp brush stroke it looks raggedy assed. Rather than acting as a flexible blade, different units of the brush operate in splayed and stiff independent scales or groups. Like a burr that sticks to your woolen sweater in the autumn ( under fading light at fields edge on a hillside in Northern Vermont, with big maples and a 19th century barn and the whole landscape woven into a tapestry of ochers, grays and violet. There's thistles there and sumac) Or imagine an anesthetized porcupine or large hedge hog, gently, kindly, but firmly, attached at its stomach area to a mop handle.

This is a worn brush, an evil thing, but there is something darker still. There are among us men and women (well, I think there are men) who carry with them a collection of brushes in which the paint has been allowed to dry. These brushes are a solid mass from ferrule to tip. They are like a tongue depressor or small pry bar. Obviously these people have to know that the brushes in this condition could never be used, Certainly there is no way they are going to resuscitate one out on location and work with it. But they still carry them, sometimes a dozen or more. They have brushes that once were an inch and a half long worn down to half an inch and totally rigid all the way to its heel. You could hammer one into a phone pole. But they have em, why?

They are not really being honest with themselves, they are engaged in "magical thinking". Or at best a low level simmering resentment, and yes, regret over the lost value of once useful brushes bought at high retail in some big box craft store. I'm not sorry for them, I just can't be.I don't have the time, I have my painting and my commitments. I don't really think about them that much.

New Brushes

2011-07-12T09:37:00.003-04:00

I bought more new brushes the other day. I order the Winsor Newton artist's brushes. They are a white hogs bristle, the basic oil painters brush. The English company, Winsor Newton has been around for a long time and produce sound, quality products. These particular brushes have an odd tapered waist like a wasp. I am sure they are supposed to balance better in the hand, but I had no problem with the brushes before and I don't choose theses brushes for that feature. They are a consistent quality brush at a reasonable price. At least online. If I go to the big box craft retailers prices are nuts. I only buy a single brush there in an emergency. I always buy brushes online. I buy brushes regularly and eight or ten of each size at a time. Sometimes I will buy a dozen of each of the smaller sizes. The big brushes last a long time. I can use up a # 1 in a session or two.
The Jerrys online catalogue entry for these is Here.

I want my brushes sharp and new. So I use up a lot of them.There are painters who hold a different brush for each color in their painting. They might have a dozen wet brushes. This spreads the wear out over all of your brushes, just as it might with shoes. But' I only have three brushes when I paint outside, plus a rigger. They are; A #4, a # 1 and a #10, all flats.

When I teach workshops I only see a a few usable brushes. At least half of the students are working with a dried out, worn down brush that wouldn't do the job in practiced hands. I have gone for a look in peoples brush collections and not found a single usable brush. Appalling. You wouldn't try to sweep your kitchen floor with a broom in that condition, a worn out broom is grotesquely inefficient. Lots less hair contacts the floor and it won't cut into corners very well.
A brush is a sort of little broom. It works the same way and if it is worn it won't push the paint around crisply.

The real cost of painting is in your time and travel, brushes are not a real driver of costs, There was a time when Robert Simmonds brushes were the first choice and I will happily use those if I can get a good price on them, usually the WN are cheaper from my sources. The Chi-Com brushes seem to have loose ferrules and other minor quality problems and aren't much cheaper than the WN brushes.

Figure Drawing for all it's worth

2011-07-10T22:12:00.005-04:00

Andrew Loomis cover for the Saturday Evening post

Armand Cabrera has posted an excellent collection of quotes from the great American illustrator Harvey Dunn on his blog Art and Influence. you can read that Here.

A publisher call Titian is reproducing the classic texts by Andrew Loomis. They are very reasonably priced , used copies of these books sell for hundreds of dollars. I actually have an old copy of this book.

Andrerw Loomis (1892 to 1959) was a successful illustrator, trained at the Art Students League in New York, he studied with George Bridgeman and Frank Vincent Dumond. Loomis kept his studio in Chicago, and also taught at the American Academy of Art. He published his first instructing book "Fun with a Pencil" in 1939. The most sought after Loomis book is "Creative Illustration", hopefully this rare book will be available from this publisher too. These books are available online for free, but I prefer a real book to reading online. I get a better idea of the flow of a book from the paper version and find it much easier to study.

All that I show professionally is landscapes, but I draw figures one night a week with a group of atelier students in Manchester. You should too, if you want to improve your drawing. Drawing the nude is the best training for your drawing.. Nothing looks so wrong as a badly drawn figure, we all know what a figure looks like and notice any problems in a drawing of one.

Loomis drew hundreds of illustrations of figures showing proportions and tricks to remember them, He shows drawings of all the features, anatomy and construction lines for building the armature of the figure. His drawings from the golden age of illustration show different styles and techniques of drawing and although they are a little dated looking the figure hasn't changed much over the years. The information is as useful as when the book was written. The book is not scholarly but accessible and easy to understand

This classic text has been used by generations of artists and illustrators and is one of the simplest books on the subject.

The Cleave and Heave show

2011-07-09T21:15:00.006-04:00

Here are a last few words of advice for Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver on preparing her show "The Bridges of the Hudson".

By about four months out from the show you should have all twelve paintings going and a hopefully some of them are finished. Now you set them up in your studio where you can look at the lot of them. I have a shelf running the length of my studio for this purpose. I can look at a big group of paintings at once.

I learned how to do this from John Terelac about 25 years ago. He was preparing big shows for the old and now defunct Grand Central Gallery, a very important gallery at the time. I would visit him in his studio and he would have all of the pictures for a show on narrow shelves about the walls of his studio.

Because you can see the whole show, even though unfinished you can make sure they have a common "look" without being repetitive. It will be important to have variety even though the show is a series.

If I work and work on a painting I can get dulled to what it needs. So, I take one down that I think I know what to do with and work on it for a couple of hours. Then I replace it on its shelf and take down another for a few hours. This allows me to work on them "fresh" without getting tied up and spinning my wheels on one particular painting. By the time I return to a painting it is probably dry and that is a nice thing to. If I am "pushing " a painting I like to get sessions on them when they are dry. I often want to throw a unifying glaze over passages or rework an area. To do that, I want to be able to scrape the offending passage down and not have wet paint under my corrections fouling my color.

I am currently working on about eight paintings in rotation and it is a good way to speed up your production. I am faster to make corrections if I haven't worked on a painting for a few days. It is also a good idea to put them on your easel in one of the frames you have already procured and see how they look in a frame.Keep one of the frames of each size for doing this, work on it in the frame and "tune" it a little so that it looks best in the frame. Working on a picture in its frame helps you craft the entire finished product, rather than being surprised at the end by the effect of the painting in its frame.

I sometimes keep a little index card for each painting , or write on a legal pad the steps I need to take to finish each one. If I can, I will get a painter friend into the studio and we will look at the pictures together talking about what the faults of each one are. Then I will produced a checklist for each painting with the necessary corrections. I will actually follow the checklist in order crossing out teach entry as I complete it.

Various things

2011-07-08T23:00:00.006-04:00

Baby Goats

OK, here I am at the helm again. I am in my studio and hopefully I can get back into a paint-blog-sleep mode again. I am done traveling for a while, well actually not quite. I will be on Cape Elizabeth for a wet paint event on Sunday, July 17. But that is a one day affair, and not a massive road trip.

Above is a picture of the garden I have been fooling with, I showed in a previous post how I made a little template out of masking tape with pencil drawing on it for a bird house. I managed to throw another afternoon at it the other day and got to this point below.

I have a ways to go yet, I will have to repaint the flowers around the birdhouse and extend the pole on which it stands. Hopefully I can get it to take its place in the unity of the painting. Stapleton Kearns, the artist who actually lets you see the struggle. Everybody else makes it look easy, I pull my hair out and make faces. I am working round-robin on a gang of half finished paintings stacked around my studio, when I get another whack at this one I will post it and you can see my progress.

I got this question the other day;

Dear Stape
Can you explain the ideas, methods and practical
techniques that you think are most important in making a luminist
painting? Any information you give would be well appreciated.
..................Fissure Cutbait

Dear Fizz;
Your question points out a shortcoming of the blog format , at least the way I am doing it. I have written extensively about luminism and tonalism and wrote for weeks on Inness. But only long term and constant readers know that. There is a search box on the upper left and if you type query words into it you will get to lots of material that should help. This blog has grown so huge (933 posts and counting) that even I don't remember all that is on it, or how to find it all. It is a massive labyrinth. I really should figure out an index and make that available somehow, but the thought of indexing almost a thousand entries, while continuing to write others, seems daunting. I need staff.

The first 500 or so posts were almost all art instruction. If you are learning to paint, I suggest you go to the beginning of the blog and read forward. The first half of this blog is like a textbook. After that it grew more baroque and floral. It is now starting to seem more like writing a periodical or a magazine.

I want to do some more of the Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas posts , I have some ideas for those. They are a lot of work, but fun to write and I hope informative. You also get a little story, a soap opera- Pilgrims Progress- distopia on the Zuider Zea.

Tobin Nadeu of Take-it-Easel has a page online now showing the Stapleton Kearns Signature easel here This is an easel tricked out with the improvements on my own. This is the cadilac of landscape easels. The Chi-Coms made a copy but this is on a wholly different plane. Fine Vermont craftsmanship and maple construction make this a lifetime easel. I have used mine routinely for nearly 15 years. I don't make anything on this, like RGH paints, I want my suppliers to stay in business as I need them. I feel good having my name on this easel. It started out as a sort of joke, "The Stapleton Kearns Signature Easel" like a Gibson model with a guitarists name on it, but now it really exists.

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SNOWCAMP

Held in late January and early February Snowcamp is the flagship model Stapleton Kearns workshop. Set in an old wooden inn on a high ridgetop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the views from the property are unbelievable. With the inn there at your back, if you start to freeze, you can run inside for a cup of coffee and a warm up beside the fire. We eat in our own dining room at a big round table and talk about art and our lives in it. These two workshops will fill, sign up if you want to go.

:Sjvzcdv'dvdang;n;dKA N"Wni'pqrqjw

2011-07-08T07:53:00.003-04:00

Today's blog entry is in the works and will be posted sometime later. I am back from Maine, and then I went to Cape Cod to move paintings around. I have three pieces in a show at the Shipyard gallery in Hingham, Mass. All of the travel and deadlines lately have made it harder to be consistent with getting the blog written. Sorry, when I have to choose between business stuff and blogging I have to put the business first. Gotta eat.

I think things are going to lighten up around here now, and I won't be running so hard, I have a lot of unfinished art in the studio and dealers tapping their little hooves at me wondering when they are going to get it. My paintings often take a lot of time and I need to hole up with this unfinished art and get it out the door.
You who want to paint full time as an occupation, should know that you will get plenty of time painting and at the business of art (which I do poorly). You will get nothing else sometimes.

More about the Cleavo- Heavo show.

2011-07-06T09:18:00.007-04:00

I found this sign at the ferry terminal in Rockland, Maine. It means you won't be allowed in, but with a lot more attitude.

Below is another question from the comments on the Xanthippe Cleavage- Heaver show.

"I think she'd be smart to do at least 3 or 4 paintings on her scouting trip. Why waste time? Paint smart and fast... after all, you see what grabs you in about 3 - 10 seconds...then she can use the studies for some of the big ones she paints in her studio".

Stape sez.............

This is a possible show you could do and it might be very fine. But I am not a plein air, one shot and into the frame guy. Lots of people are and for them that might be the answer. I am not disparaging that, it's not what I would do myself. I in no way intend to tell this commenter or anyone else how they should do their show, but I , having done a number of shows have my own way I can reveal and some of you will find it useful. Some folks are quick to hear "You should do it THIS way!" when I mean only to describe how I would" do it" based on my own particular temperament, abilities and experience. This is an "opinion piece" and not Holy Writ. Bullets!

I don't enjoy making small paintings as much as larger ones. I like the bigger canvas, I find it easier to think on. I enjoy working at least 16 by 20 and larger. I am very happy on a 24 by 30. I am not much slower at that scale either.
I get something in a painting that I make on location, that I lose blowing paintings up from little studies in the studio. Enlarging studies does give an advantage in that I can apply a treatment or raison D'etre to the painting in the studio that wasn't in the study. I am probably going to end up doing just that for at least a few pictures in such a show, but it is also laborious and time consuming in the extreme (for me).
If I am going to make a painting in the studio from a study done outside I would rather do that study 24" by 30". Here's why; If the study comes out real well, it's the painting. If it doesn't, I can either scrap it and try again (most likely ) or if it bears a fault that a redesign would cure, I might make a studio picture from it. When I do, I will have a full sized study to work with and not have the problem of enlarging a little painting, and the danger created by having to invent contents for the spaces that become empty and devoid of information as I enlarge the image.
A majority of the 24" by 30"s I make will see a bit of work in the studio, some a lot. But then they will go onto the walls of the gallery (and rather efficiently), not anywhere near as quick as a one shot study, but relatively quickly. They will however have some of the immediacy that a painting done on location can have. That often isn't often in a blown up study. My brushwork will also have a better look if it is done on location. I can fake a passage or two in a painting but my brushwork is usually better outside responding to nature dancing in front of me than in my studio.
Lastly, as you know, I do a bit of historicism in my painting and my heroes worked this way. When you go to a museum or gallery and see a Hibbard, Metcalf, Monet or other impressionist master, what you are looking at is the painting they made. It is not often the result of blowing up a little study. For the painters from a generation before, this would certainly have been the case, like Hudson River school work. But I do a more impressionist thing than that, generally.

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Snowcamp is scheduled, here is the information on that.

Held in late January and early February Snowcamp is the flagship model Stapleton Kearns workshop. Set in an old wooden inn on a high ridgetop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the views from the property are unbelievable. With the inn there at your back, if you start to freeze, you can run inside for a cup of coffee and a warm up beside the fire. WE eat in our own dining room at a big round table and talk about art and our lives in it. These two workshops will fill, sign up if you want to go.

Carvers Harbor

2011-07-04T22:06:00.010-04:00

I don't know what this post has to do with art, nothing I suppose, but it is very New England and I sometimes stop to show you images of that. People reading this blog are scattered all over the map and enjoy seeing the "old" New England. I shot these today with my little pink camera ( a gift from my wife "you don't care if it's pink do you? I got a deal on it!")

I was on Vinalhaven today. That's an island about ten miles out from Rockland, Maine. It has a small town on it called Carvers Harbor. I have been here many times. It was foggy and all the photos are blurry but they look cool. Below is a corner of the harbor. The economy of the whole island centers around lobstering. There are a lot of very historic and hidden corners of New England, I like to go to a few of them, they are the sort of places I look for painting locations.

Below is the gray ocean itself. Vinalhaven doesn't get much surf, but here is a little. Monhegan, another island outside the mouth of the Penobscot Bay gets more reliable surf.

Here we are on Main street waiting for the 4th of July parade, please note the architecture.

And up the street come the Shriners in little race cars. There were actually fire trucks and people dressed as lobsters and marching veterans. However I liked the little racecars.

And then up the hill behind us; towards the gallamander.

And I love old headstones, this one is in a tiny cemetery on Lanes Island, connected by a little bridge to Vinalhaven.

Interchangeable parts framing.

2011-07-03T12:33:00.004-04:00

I was asked in the comments: how can you order the frames before the paintings are even made? How do you know what will match them?

I was writing to the lovely Mrs. Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver about organizing a show. I suggested ordering the frames way up front in two sizes and all the same profile (shape) and finish. Incidentally I have written about buying framing before. I have written a lot about this sort of thing and those entries are labeled "The art business waltz", if you search the blog for those you will find the text. If I were writing a book I could assume you had read all the previous chapters on your way to this one and our conversation would be cumulative. In a blog you-all parachute in anywhere you damn well please.

I produce to many pictures to have a different dedicated frame for each on. I have to be able to trade paintings in and out of my frame as I take them from one gallery to another, sell one without a frame or lend one to an institution where they will be handled by clumsy intern children. For a show with a clear theme "Bridges along the Hudson" Xanthippe has a very reasonable excuse to use only a single frame design. It will tie the show together as a presentation.

If you have only the occasional picture to frame, perhaps up to a ten or more tuning each frame to each picture and leaving that picture always in that particular frame could work. But I make a lot of paintings. I need to know in fact, before I start a 16 by 20 that I have a frame that size. I don't want to sit on it until I do, I may want to show or sell it. I want that inventory working for me, not waiting for a frame in my studio. I am also likely to trade it into an existing frame from a picture that is returning from a gallery or show. I really need two frames for it, one for high end galleries whose handling I trust, and another to be damaged by interns.

There are many frames that will go on most paintings. Black frames or real gold frames go on most paintings. I try to have several styles of frame around to choose from, so I limit the sizes I paint to about six.

Title plates, those brass or wooden tags that sit on the bottom rail of the frame, are a big problem. If the picture doesn't sell I can't use the frame on a newer piece. I also can't cannibalize the frame for another painting if I suddenly need that size. If you take title plate off, you have two holes and a scar on the finish waiting for you behind it, that means you have to get a new title plate made. And you could have to do that again too, if you use the frame on something else. Why even be alive?

I might also mention that picture frames are cheaper if you buy a number at the same time. The price of frames is negotiated and when you tell a framer you nee 3600 dollars worth of frames you have a right to expect some deference on the always delicate matter of price.

An open letter to Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver

2011-07-01T21:48:00.006-04:00

Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver excitedly opened the waxen seal on the letter from the Accreditation Commission For Conformity Assessment Bodies. The tiny crabbed printing in brown ox gall ink informed her that she was the recipient of the National Assembly of Compulsion grant for the arts. Her proposal for "The Bridges of the Hudson" had been selected for a show at the Great hall of Conformity at the University of East Delft!

Here are some things that Xanthippe is going to need to know. Bullets!

You don't want to do a show like this on short notice. Three months is short notice. Sure you could do it, but that's a finished painting a week with no time to spare, that's every week, so you had better get a few ahead in case it rains or your back hurts. That sounds like a show of 8 by 10's to me. Also every one of the twelve will have to be used, there isn't time built in to reject a few weak entrants.
In order to do the show I outlined for Xanthippe last night a year is a nice lag time. You aren't only going to work on this project this year you have to paint for a living in the meantime, getting all of those paintings done has to fit into your present life's schedule. You are going to have to keep at it though, you will be glad to have the lead time.
I would restrict the paintings in the show to two sizes I like 16 by 20 for the small ones and 24 by 36 for the larger. Oh yeah, and two squares, hows about 16 by 16 and 26 by 29 (Metcalf square). Also some 9 by 12's for the reception area, maybe half a dozen.
First you stretch up a big pile of canvasses those sizes, many more than you will need and stack those in one corner of your studio, ready to go at a moments notice.
Can you afford to buy your frames today? Or will you have to wait for your income tax refund? I expect to average 300 dollars a frame, the big ones will cost more, and the 16 by 20's less, but that isn't a big budget for professional quality framing with closed corners. We can go cheap on the 9 by 12's later, but the 12 pictures in the show will cost about 3,600 dollars to frame. I would order them now, framing takes a while and something might screw up if this is on a tight deadline, so better call your gilder and get on that now. Then you can try the paintings as you make them into their frames to see how they look. Incidentally with canvas, paint and a few other costs like gasoline, you are already on the hook for at least 5000 dollars.
One nice thing about having a year, you can have pictures from several seasons, rather than a whole show of only winter bridge scenes. I am assuming you are going to go to the locations and actually make these pictures and not work from the file photos at the Peoples Community Center. That's what most people would do, and it's quick, but it stands almost no chance of being a really great show, and you want that, because you want to have a career not just a show. This show needs to be great!
Next weekend, you throw the rottweilers in the back of the International Harvester Travelall, grab a notebook and go visit the bridges. There are probably more than you can do in a day, probably that will take three days. At each bridge you find a location or two and scope out the best angles. Write those things down in your notebook, one bridge per page. Better get a picture of each possible view also.
You better pick out two of those bridges for this months paintings too, if you can get the first half dozen done in the first four months, you might make that deadline. For sure you have to get ahead of the schedule a bit. You don't want to be in a position of having a show only three weeks away but you still need three paintings. That can't be done. at least not well.

The Hudson River bridge project

2011-06-30T21:06:00.005-04:00

Here's a letter from a reader:

A friend of mine is embarking on “painting the Hudson River Bridges,” all 11 or 12 of them. I will join her for several. I agreed more from companionship and friendship than artistic curiosity. However, I do want to do a great job. Question to you- Where do I begin? How to make it interesting when the focus is the bridge. I guess I feel a little overwhelmed dealing with the expansiveness of the Hudson, challenged foreground, etc. Any tips are welcomed.

..............................Regretta Snackfood

Dearest Regretta;

That sounds like a great project. Your friend will have the work for a show when she is done. She could call it "The Bridges on the Hudson", or maybe a little print on demand book with some text from the artist on the bottom of each page about the bridge. You intend to do only a few of them, so I will address my suggestions to your friend, who for convenience sake we will call Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver. You can use these ideas for the fewer bridges that you do, but I am imagining what would have to happen to get a varied and interesting show out of the larger series of paintings.

If I were Xanthippe, I would have in mind from the outset making each of the paintings a stand alone and individual work, yet have a common thread running through the entire group that knits them into a unified presentation as a group. Bullets please!

I would take a look at where the show is going to be held, and figure out how a dozen or more paintings could fill it's walls. I would hope to group them in arrays of three or four, but the size and shape of the walls of the gallery or Starbucks will make that decision for me somewhat. It is nice to know this upfront when you can.
She could do a series of small paintings all the same size and that would be the least work, but a more interesting show would have groups of paintings containing a large picture, probably an elongated shape like a 24 by 36, and several medium sized paintings. I would also include at least two square or nearly square paintings in the mix, one large and one small.
I don't think I would do any small paintings, or perhaps better, hang them in the next room or add them to the series as a subgroup. I think that having some of the bridges presented as very much smaller and less important pieces would detract from the unity of the show. It might be good to have a half dozen small paintings to bring the number of pieces up from twelve to eighteen. That's enough pictures for a full show, twelve is a little thin.
Having the small ones might make you some sales anyway if the red dots don't show up, you may sell a few little ones and have some succor for all of your time and effort if the collectors don't sweep in and buy the big ones. In our current economy that might happen. Things is tough out there.
You could tie all the work together with a unified coloring system or treatment of some kind, but I think I would just make em and respond as best to each location as I could. My own style would probably be enough to make the show look "of a piece" letting some be more colored or dramatic and others have a quieter mood.
The really big impressive bridges like the George Washington (love that guy!) go on the big canvasses and the less interesting bridges go on the smaller canvasses.
Some of the bridges are going to be a lot less interesting, I don't know them all but I imagine a few of them are pretty plain I would do vignettes of quirky closeups or interesting angles on those. That should hopefully deal with that problem, rather than just showing them in a matter of fact way in a ll of their ordinaryness.
It would be good to get some architecture around some of the bridges and some broad expanses of open river and sky in some others. I hope the Newburgh bridge is on the list.
I would frame them all in the same moulding using a larger version for the larger paintings. Black is hip right now, it is New York and the subject, industrial.

Painting in a green world

2011-06-30T00:10:00.000-04:00

A photo from my archives of a woodland pond in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire

I think that summer is the hardest season to paint outside. It is just way too much green for me. I do some green paintings, but I don't want to make a whole seasons worth of them. One or two in a show is fine, but a whole room full of green paintings is not. I have crashed a lot of paintings in the greenness. I always think I won't do it again and every year I make at least one painting that is nice but too green.

I am not the only landscape painter to feel this way, lots of them have and there are some strategies to avoid the problem. Here are a few that come to mind.

If you must paint in a green hell, try to vary the greens and tone them down too. A green plus red is called olive, Savor those the more red you can smuggle in their the better often. The violets in the shadows aren't green either so they also serve as a foil. Ask yourself would I wear this color? There are colors in paintings you wouldn't wear, but with the greens the question is more relevant.
Historically artists have turned their backs to the green. Many of the art colonies of America started in seaside towns. Artists who painted the hills of New England in the fall and winter painted the harbors or surf in the summer. The ocean is a great place to be when it is too green out there.
Woods and fields can be a nightmare, but in the evening the lengthening light and the gathering darkness begin to drop the saturation of some of the green. In the late hours lots of too green places become paintable.
Gardens are great place to paint in the summer. They are green but if you have flowers, paths, shadows or evening light, there are endless good garden pictures to be made. Most people who have fine perennial beds are flattered and will to allow an artist to paint their gardens. I have knocked on strangers doors.
Try to look for big shapes that aren't green, such as a colored house or a yellow field or gray out buildings, any thing that you can use so that at least an important part of the canvas isn't painted green.
Another solution is to cripple your ability to mix green. Restrict yourself to an earth color palette or at least mix all of your own greens from ultramarine. If you are restrained in the presentation of the greens in a landscape rather than literal, usually better paintings result.
Beaches with people in swimsuits and lolling indolently under big colorful umbrellas are a great subject. I do not mean take photos there and use those in the studio, no friends, I suggest you set your easel up on the beach in the sunlight.
Sometimes it helps to stain your canvas with a warm earth color before painting, you might rub it down with burnt sienna and a little solvent, using a paper towel. The influence of that wet layer of sienna particularly if it gets into the notes layed onto it can be a welcome modifier when things go green.

Sorry to miss a day there. I am as is so often the case, way overworked. I have a deadline I must meet on a big painting and I am traveling all over. I am glad to know I will be home for a while. I have a studio full of half finished paintings and I want to hole up with them until the green fades or more likely I go to the sea. Painting surf is a great way to avoid all of that green too.