Mead Schaeffer

Mead Schaeffer (1898-1980) was a Golden Age illustrator whose work evoked a lush world of drama, intrigue, and romance. His early oil canvases are reminiscent of N.C. Wyeth, Dean Cornwell, and his teacher, Harvey Dunn, which makes him a grand student of Howard Pyle.


In his paintings for the 1928 edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, he distinguished himself with his carefully composed shapes of tonal values, his handling of light, and his treatment of color.

In his long career, his style evolved with the times, becoming more photographic and more concerned with contemporary themes. He was good friends with Norman Rockwell, who lived in the same town of Arlington, Vermont. 

He was active during World War II as a war correspondent, and several of his 46 Saturday Evening Post covers showed men in uniform.

Schaeffer will be one of the artists featured in an upcoming exhibition of "Harvey Dunn and His Students," at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, November 7, 2014 through May 30, 2015. Works by Dunn's students include Dean Cornwell, Harold von Schmidt, Saul Tepper, John Clymer, Lyman Anderson, and James E. Allen. More info from the Rockwell Museum here.

More good news for Schaeffer-o-philes is that the current issue of Illustration magazine has a feature on Schaeffer with 57 color reproductions, along with a biography.

Preview the Mead Schaeffer article in Illustration magazine

Schaeffer is featured in one of the chapters in the book Masters of American Illustration: 41 Illustrators and How They Worked by Fred Taraba

Wikipedia on Mead Schaeffer

Previous GJ posts that mention Mead Schaeffer

Harvey Dunn and His Students at the Rockwell

Last week we visited the Norman Rockwell Museum to see the exhibition "Masters of the Golden Age: Harvey Dunn and His Students." 

  

Dunn was a vital link between Howard Pyle's teaching and a generation of story illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration. The exhibit includes a room showcasing Dunn's students, including Dean Cornwell, Harold Von Schmidt, Mead Schaeffer, Saul Tepper, and Dan Content. They produced big canvases brimming with color, character, and drama.

For example, here's a painting of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Mead Schaeffer (from the Kelly Collection of American Art). The head is lit from above by a greenish light, shadowing the brows, and the bright yellow / white slash of light behind is applied boldly with a painting knife.

Dunn's precepts were forthright and positive, leaving no room for weak or tentative handling. He emphasized the same kind of mental projection that Pyle advocated. For example:

Everything must be positive. Never in doubt.
Put yourself in the picture and the situation.
To eliminate takes a great deal of study.
A man cannot lie unless he knows the truth.

Two of the rooms show the work of Harvey Dunn himself, and the work is beautifully presented by the museum staff. His students made a life cast of his face and hand, and those are displayed in a vitrine in the show.

You can watch archival footage of Dunn painting on YouTube at this link.

Unfortunately, even though I came to the show wanting to love his paintings, I found them less inspiring than the work of his students. Although many of Dunn's initial ideas had epic potential, the execution often suffers from awkward drawing and heavy-handed paint application. 

We found a letter in the museum archives where Tom Lovell summed up the problem: "Harvey Dunn could draw when it suited his purpose—all the "old ones" were well drawn. Later he became more crude in drawing and value."

This crudeness, I believe, comes from skipping over preparatory steps and proceeding directly from idea to the finished canvas. Many of the Golden Age illustrators produced such a volume of work on such short schedules that they often dispensed with preliminary steps. Illustrators who neglect those stages are more hit-or-miss, producing work that is often sub-par.

I think the consistently high quality of the work of Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, and Tom Lovell results from the thoroughness and professionalism of their intermediate stages: sketch, color sketch, figure study, charcoal comp, etc.



We finished the day visiting the Museum archives and the classrooms with Patrick O'Donnell, a game designer and teacher. He's doing a program called "Art in Motion" where he demonstrates drawing for families who visit the museum. He'll be doing it again on February 13.
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"Masters of the Golden Age: Harvey Dunn and His Students" will be at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts through March 6, 2016
More on Mead Schaeffer on Illustration Art
PDF of Dunn's teaching "An Evening in the Clasroom"

41 Illustrators and How They Worked

A long-awaited new reference book on American illustration has just arrived. “Masters of American Illustration: 41 Illustrators & How They Worked” documents the life and work of a select group of Golden Age illustrators.

It’s a whopper of a book: 432 pages, 9 x 12 inches, and hundreds of high-quality color reproductions. Tipping the scale at six solid pounds, it’s enough to knock the wind out of anyone who tries to read it in bed.

The book was lovingly compiled by illustration historian Fred Taraba. It compiles the “Methods of the Masters” articles that Mr. Taraba wrote for the magazine Step-by-Step Graphics from 1989 to 2001. In this respect, it resembles its 1946 predecessor “Forty Illustrators and How They Work,” which was a compilation of biographical articles that Ernest Watson wrote for Art Instruction / American Artist magazines.

The book leaves out the most famous illustrators, such as Howard Pyle, Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth. The author admits that the lack of these big-brand names made it hard to find a publisher at first, until the project was championed by Dan Zimmer, publisher of Illustration magazine.


But plenty of ink has already been spilled on the headline illustrators. American illustration had a very deep bench. The people featured in this new collection, such as Saul Tepper, Mead Schaeffer, Pruett Carter, and Alice Barber Stephens, well deserve the attention.


Unlike a lot of art books, where long-winded writing crowds out the art, the pictures occupy plenty of page space, and most of the images have never been seen before. In the case of virtuoso John Gannam, for instance, we get to see not only his finished paintings, but also tearsheets, studio photos, thumbnail sketches, and color studies. The attention to working methods makes the book a useful tool for art students, and for illustration enthusiast who want to peek behind the curtain.

Subjects include: Constantin Alajalov, McClelland Barclay, Walter Baumhofer, Harry Beckhoff, Rudolph Belarski, Wladyslaw T. Benda, Walter Biggs, Franklin Booth, Austin Briggs, Arthur William Brown, Margaret Brundage, Charles Livingston Bull, Gilbert Bundy, Pruett Carter, Matt Clark, Walter Appleton Clark, Will Crawford, F.O.C. Darley, Joe DeMers, Albert Dorne, Robert Fawcett, James Montgomery Flagg, John Gannam, Edwin Georgi, Earl Oliver Hurst, John LaGatta, Andrew Loomis, Orson Lowell, Neysa McMein, Wallace Morgan, Rose O’Neill, Herbert Paus, Edward Penfield, Coles Phillips, Garrett Price, Norman Price, Mead Schaeffer, Alice Barber Stephens, Saul Tepper, Jon Whitcomb, and Coby Whitmore.

The price of $44.95 is also inviting to any budget-conscious student. You can buy it directly from Dan Zimmer at Illustrated Press (with free shipping), from select retail outlets, or from Amazon. The book will be officially unveiled at ComicCon later this month.

Masters of American Illustration: 41 Illustrators and How They Worked
The Illustrated Press, where you can preview the whole book  

Shapewelding

The best pictorial compositions are simple. Simple shapes are easy to recognize and remember. Busy pictures with lots of little separate shapes have less impact. My own work stands improvement in this area, so I’ve been trying to figure out how the masters did it. Below: Mermaid, by Howard Pyle.



Achieving simplicity doesn’t always mean restricting yourself to just a few minimal forms, like one apple against a blank background. You can have plenty of elements or figures and still have an uncluttered picture. The trick is to cleverly arrange the elements so that adjacent tonal shapes fuse together into larger abstract patterns.



According to Charles DeFeo, Howard Pyle used to say, “Put your white against white, middle tones (groups) against grays, black against black, then black and white where you want your center of interest. This sounds simple, but is difficult to do.” The picture above is by Mead Schaeffer, a grand-student of Pyle through Harvey Dunn.

You can unify shapes by losing them in an enveloping cloud of shadow, and the light areas can spill over into each other. The Lincoln picture below is by Pyle.



This automatically sets up unexpected larger shapes with great abstract beauty and expressive power.

To my knowledge there’s no word in art theory for this idea, so I would like to suggest the term “shapewelding.”



Shape welding shows up not only with Howard Pyle and the Brandywine School, but also with academic painters like Bouguereau (above). All these artists were clearly thinking about shape welding, but I don't know what they called it. The only word I’ve run across to name it is the French word “effet,” which in the academies meant the large overall pattern of light and dark.

Maybe someone reading this blog will know other terms that have been used by artists to describe this principle.

Army Art Collection

This painting by Mead Schaeffer is part of the Army Art collection, which is stored in a large warehouse 30 minutes outside of Washington, and is rarely seen by the public.

Many of the paintings were made by servicemen on duty who were an eyewitness to dramatic world events. Others were commissioned pieces for posters and other publications.

The collection also includes a few Norman Rockwell originals.

Lots more photos at Buzzfeed: Benny Johnson--Inside the Army's Spectacular Hidden Treasure Room

Thanks, Tex/Ed

Harvey Dunn at the NRM

An exhibition of the work of Golden Age illustrator Harvey Dunn has opened at the Norman Rockwell Museum. 



Dunn grew up on a South Dakota farm and studied with Howard Pyle. He became an artist reporter in World War I, and then spent the balance of his career as an influential story illustrator and teacher.

The exhibition includes work from throughout his career, as well as paintings by some of his noteworthy students such as Dean Cornwell, Henry C. Pitz, Mead Schaeffer, Harold von Schmidt, Frank Street, Saul Tepper, John Clymer, Lyman Anderson, and James E. Allen. There will also be public talks by experts on Dunn.

They'll be showing the little film I put together using footage by Frank Reilly. (Link to Video)

Dunn said, “We think of art as sort of a flimsy thing,” he said, “but do you realize that the only thing left from ancient times is the art… The Greek statues that are armless and nameless are just as beautiful today as they were the day the unknown sculptor laid down his hammer and chisel and said, ‘Oh, hell, I can’t do it!'”
The exhibition will be up through March 13.
NRM presents: Harvey Dunn and His Students

Masters of Illustration to be rereleased

If you missed the chance to buy a copy of Masters of Illustration in 2011, it's too bad because it was one of the best books on illustration history and it went out of print fairly quickly. Used copies cost more than $170.

The good news is that it will be rereleased via a Kickstarter campaign that's taking off like gangbusters.

The book is based on articles for Step-by-Step Graphics written by historian and dealer Fred Taraba. From 1989 to 2001. Taraba wrote about many of the great illustrators that were overlooked in the classic book from the mid-1940s Forty Illustrators and How They Work.

Some of the illustrators included in this volume are Andrew Loomis, John Gannam, Mead Schaeffer, Al Dorne, and Robert Fawcett. The book is beautifully produced, with high quality scans of the original artwork, plus documentary photos about each of the illustrators' life and process.

Previously on the blog: "Masters of Illustration: 41 Illustrators and How They Work."

Limited Palettes

Every Sunday I’ve been sharing some thoughts about color, and today I want to touch on limited palettes.

When we were in grade school we all envied the other kid who owned the giant-size Crayola set. In the art store we still ogle the all the delicious colors.

But it’s a good idea to limit the range of color pigments or the “palette” that you use on any particular painting. There are at least four good reasons to limit your palette.

1. If you have all the colors squeezed out around the edges of your mixing surface, you might tend to use them all in a single picture. I present my own book cover illustration, called “Glory Lane,” as a negative example. I did this painting as an experiment in bad taste. This is what happens if you use every color in the spectrum and fill the whole canvas with details. Visual cacophony!

2. If you construct a picture out of fewer colors, the resulting mixtures are more likely to be unified and harmonious—and more interesting. Every color you mix is automatically related. It’s easier to convey a mood or to explore strange realms you wouldn’t normally choose. Magazine illustrators in the 1920s and 30s were often required to paint in two-color palettes, like the black and orange painting above by Mead Schaeffer. The two-color discipline made those old illustrators into very resourceful colorists.

I painted this head study in a sketch group with just a blue and black and just a hint of warm. I wouldn’t have tried this color scheme if I weren’t forced to by a limited palette. Below is the actual color of her forehead, the warmest the colors ever get in this scheme:

3. The third reason to limit the palette is to force yourself away of color mixing habits. If you have colors called “flesh tone” and “grass green,” you’ll probably reach for them when you’re painting skin or a lawn.

It’s a good idea every once in a while to leave of all your browns and greens in the cabinet and mix them from the primary colors instead. The legendary background painter of museum dioramas, James Perry Wilson, never used browns or black because he wanted to keep his mixtures more pure. There’s nothing wrong with black or brown or green, but you should know how to mix color without them, too.

You can make color wheel tests to preview the range of possibilities with limited palettes. Click to enlarge and see their component colors. Painting from one of these limited sets is like writing music for a string quartet instead of for a symphony orchestra.

4. The final reason to consider limited palettes is that they’re portable and you can save money. In fact you can paint almost anything in nature with just four or five colors. There are a lot of limited palettes that still give you a full range of mixtures. Below: a plein-air painting I did in Windham, New York.

One simplified palette that I particularly like for landscape painting in oil is from John Stobart in his excellent book, “The Pleasures of Painting Outdoors.” He recommends:

Cadmium Yellow Light, Winsor Red, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue Deep, Permanent Green (optional), and Titanium White.

You can get a good “black” from Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine. This is a good palette to use in miniature plein air kits, like thumb boxes. You can paint almost anything in nature with Stobart’s six colors.

Sometimes, like a madman on a crash diet, I like to jettison even more colors from this already spartan palette. Here’s a painting that I did with just White, Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna, and Winsor Red. Doing without green or yellow was a challenge, but I enjoyed pushing the limits.

Here’s another painting with just black, white, and burnt sienna. I starved myself from blue, yellow, and red. The reason was that I just wanted to think about form, not color.

There are lots of other formulations for limited palettes, both for oils and watercolors, but that’s enough from me. Your turn. Please chime in.