“I mean by a picture, a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a better light than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms are divinely beautiful.”The quote is from Sir Edward Burne-Jones. His painting "Love Among the Ruins" (1894) is in the collection of the Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton, link.
Here's a pencil portrait of the Irish fiddler Larry Reynolds, drawn while he was performing with Seamus Connelly in 2003.
The most important thing to keep in mind is to try to keep the light areas unified, without being interrupted by too many dark accents. And the dark regions should be mysterious, like an ink cloud from an octopus, swallowing up light accents into its enveloping shadow.
The early Daguerrotype photographs had this quality of enveloping tone. They're like a bathtub into which someone has poured condensed milk in one area and India ink in another, with the two principalities blending and merging into each other.
Yesterday was the Seventh Annual Great Rhinebeck Paint Out. It was a crisp sunny day, a little past peak fall color, with a temperature around 40 degrees F. I'm a wimp, so I had full long underwear. I'm using an Open Box M pochade box.
First, here's a photo of the motif: a view to the east of the village of Rhinebeck. It's a very busy subject, but I like the strong leading lines of the road and the soft gray mass of trees in the center.
I started on an 11x14 sky panel, oil primed with a blue gradation. The blue color helped in two ways. First I had an approximation of the sky color already established with dry paint, so I could work delicate detail over it. Also, the blue was a nice complementary color to lay beneath the warm autumn-colors.
I oiled up the sky with Liquin to make it more receptive to overpainting. I put in some light feathery cirrus clouds, and a pale glow along the horizon. Then I started softly stating the dry branches. and other details against the sky.
At this stage I needed to figure out the overall light statement. At first I planned to put the foreground in shadow, but that left the middle ground too busy with competing interest. So I established an illuminated foreground, shadowed middle ground, and light distance. This gives a feeling of passing clouds and draws interest to the activity of the far intersection.
I carried the lines of the road to that vanishing point you saw earlier. For lines like this I used a mahl stick to balance my hand.
Here's the finished painting "Light at the Crossroads." The 3 o'clock deadline was looming, so I scrambled to resolve the unfinished areas. On the left side, the houses are stated fairly broadly, which in the end probably helps accentuate the confetti of the intersection.
By 4:00 it was hanging at the event space. It's behind the light, next to the painting of Vanderbilt I did with Erik Tiemens last summer, reworked on the spot last week with fall colors. A painting by Keith Gunderson is below mine.
The new Illustration Magazine features a special issue devoted to the work and career of Mort Künstler. The article by Stephen Doherty follows his career, ranging from paperbacks, pulps, adventure magazines, Aurora model kits, slicks, and his recent work illustrating events from the Civil War.
A paint-out is an event where professional artists gather on-site in the morning to create a painting, which is framed and auctioned in the afternoon. It's the closest thing to tightrope walking or improv theater in the painting business.“Should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of), there will be an end of the art in poor old England. The reason is plain: the manufacturers of pictures are then made the criterions of perfection instead of Nature.”
Constable's complaint seems foolish, but it contains a grain of truth. There is a risk in loving art so much that we forget to look at Nature. Art based only on other art ends up being mannered and derivative. The great breakthroughs in art have come from the intense study of the real world through the artist’s own eyes.
But one should never let the treasures of the museum pull harder at the heart than the living truth of the world around us. As Longfellow argued in his famous sonnet "Art and Nature," (translated from Francisco de Medrano), the “works of human artifice” are like a mere garden, tiresome in comparison to the eternal and infinite grandeur—the “free and wild magnificence”—of the river and the meadow.
You can just add thicker oil paint, as I did on this detail of Waterfall City from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. In this case the paint is applied with a palette knife.
In some previous posts noted below, I covered "prextexturing," where you add the texture first before final painting and then paint relatively thinly over that base texture, and glaze into the pits.
But what are your choices for this pretexturing? Here's a test with an assortment of materials. At the top is acrylic matte medium, modeling paste, and gesso, mixed together in various combinations. Acrylic paint is OK to use in the priming stage, before beginning the oil layers, but never add it over the oil, or there might be adhesion problems.
In this post I’ll tell you a little about how I did the painting. I originally bought this skeleton model as a general studio reference tool, just to be able to check what a person’s bones would look like from a particular angle.
The sketch above shows how I set up the skeleton, along with an actual human skull, next to my drawing table.
I tried various color sketches until I arrived at the muted color scheme. Then I found some photos of sailiing ships, treasure chests, and cannons to toss around on the deck.
A cannon shot has broken through the railing at right. His right leg is held together with a strip of cloth, and his missing left leg is replaced with the end of an oar, whittled into a simple hinge for his knee. He is a skeleton that refuses to die.
Before the concert, we had supper at a Dominican restaurant along with our friend Barry Klugerman (above), who was kind enough to hold still for a few minutes while I sketched his mug. I always like talking to Barry because he's a real expert on early book illustration.
