American Artist Competition

While I'm on the subject of American Artist magazine, I should mention that they're celebrating their 75th anniversary by hosting an exhibition at the Salmagundi Club in New York next year.


The core artists have already been chosen, but they're inviting others to enter via a competition. If your work is in the tradition of the following artists, or if you "consider representational art a significant part of your influence or practice, but are expanding and experimenting in new directions," then this exhibition is for you.

Exhibiting core artists include: Stephen Assael, Bo Bartlett, Judith Carducci, Jacob Collins, Martha Erlebacher, Daniel Graves, Daniel E. Greene, Quang Ho, Everett Raymond Kinstler, David A. Leffel, Sherrie McGraw, Dan McCaw, Odd Nerdrum, Anne Packard, Philip Pearlstein, John Howard Sanden, Richard Schmid, Nelson Shanks, Burton Silverman, Mary Whyte, and Jamie Wyeth.

The competition is limited to USA artists. The fee for entering three pieces is $75. There's a student rate, and there are prizes. Deadline is October 8.
----
About the exhibition
Rules for American Artist Competition

The Cultivation of Imagination

The May issue of American Artist is sometimes here and gone from the newsstands before May even arrives, but you still might be able to get a print copy.

It has a special feature on the art of imagination, with a focus on the upcoming "At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic" exhibition at the Allentown Art Museum, and an article that I wrote on "Howard Pyle and the Academic Tradition." The article begins like this:

One afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware, six of Howard Pyle’s top students were working on their drawings when a new student entered. The newcomer had just been admitted into the select company, and he was eager to prove himself.

He already had some art training under his belt — drawing from the plaster cast and the figure, a grounding in perspective and anatomy. Mr. Pyle set him to work in front of a cast of Donatello’s portrait bust of the “Unknown Lady.”


The next morning, when Pyle glanced at the results of his careful effort, he dismissed it with a gesture. “I don’t want you to go at it that way,” he said. “You are thinking of that head as a piece of plaster.”

Pyle urged him to see beyond the surface, to look for more than mere outline and shading: “I’d like you to think of the beautiful Italian noblewoman who sat for it; of her rich medieval surroundings, of silks and damasks; of courtiers and palaces; of the joy with which Donatello modeled the curve of that eyebrow, the sensuous lips, and the delicate feathering of the shadow over that cheek!”

Pyle asked him to start over, and walked away. The student stared into space, speechless. But his heart was soaring. This was a new sort of language. Pyle, the upright Quaker who painted dashing pirates and bloody battles, believed that what art students need most is “the cultivation of their imagination.”

-----

Pick up a copy or check out the digital edition to read the rest.

The bust shown is actually by Desiderio da Settignano, ca. 1430-1464, Florence.

Photo of Pyle students from Howard Pyle Blog

Vintage streetlight collection

Joe Maurath stores his collection of vintage streetlights in a maze-like museum behind his home in Abington, Massachusetts.

Ever since he was a child, he has always been fascinated by telephone poles, streetlights, and insulators—all the so called “street furniture.” He worked as a meter reader, and he has befriended utility crews, who often given him retired lamps and housings. 

He loves seeing streetlights in their element close up from a bucket truck. “You gotta go up in a truck and look at these in the wild,” he told me. “It’s a whole different world up there.”

He has a special fondness for the “cobra head” style streetlights from the 1950s. I was struck with how big the housings appear when they’re brought down to eye level. They look like weird metallic mushrooms or UFOs.

Here's a Westinghouse OV-25 Separate Ballast from 1963 in the wild. Maurath's collection focuses on streetlights and insulators, but he's also got high voltage signs, switches, and police call boxes. Movie companies rent them from time to time to use in period films.

  

The older mercury-vapor illumination, with its pleasant cool color tinge, has almost entirely been replaced by the orange-colored high pressure sodium lamps. The traditional mercury vapor lamps are friendlier to trees, and they make better economic and environmental sense, he says, because the lamps last longer. 

Mercury lights also have the aesthetic advantage of a fuller color spectrum. High-pressure sodium (HPS) spikes almost entirely in the yellow-orange, and has an abysmal CRI (Color rendering index). “Sodium vapor light at night has that city-crime look to it,” he said. “And it makes the snow look dirty.” Hopefully, the new LED street lights, which have superior CRI, may eventually replace HPS.

READ MORE:

Joe's website: Vintage Streetlights

More photos of Joe's museum

Video comparing color appearance of HPS and LED

More about all this in my book on Color and Light

Previously on GJ: Multi-colored Streetlights

Horse Painting Session

Many thanks to Steve Doherty for mentioning some of our recent outdoor painting adventures in the Plein Air magazine newsletter.


I've hardly told you yet about our impromptu horse painting session. The O.H. R.A.T.S. club (Old Hudson River Art and Truth Society) convened recently to paint horses and donkeys at the Southlands Foundation farm in Rhinebeck, New York.

Garin Baker, Susan Daly Voss, Kevin Ferrara, and my wife Jeanette wanted to try to walk in the hoofprints of some of our equine-painting heroes, especially Heinrich von Zügel and Sir Alfred Munnings. (Thanks, Christoph for finding this amazing photo of Mr. Von Z and his students.)

The farmer, Lenny Miller, posed with Turk, a prize Belgian gelding, while the stableboy Cody held two donkeys. Here's Kev painting Joy. Our session lasted an hour and a half, with breaks for Turk to walk around and blow off steam.

I laid in Turk with his head down munching hay, but then he got full and lifted his head up. 

Garin got so interested in Lenny as a subject that he wants to come back and do his portrait -- never mind Turk! 

The experience was challenging and electrifying— especially with the guinea hens screaming in our ears. Someone once said that painting live animals is the Mount Everest of plein air painting. I agree, and I feel like I barely got past base camp. 

------
READ MORE

Doherty's Plein Air Newsletter
Doherty's article on Munnings
The Southlands Foundation hosts the 4H club. Thanks, Lenny and Cody.

Previously on GurneyJourney:
Joy the donkey
Painting Turk in watercolor pencils and gouache
H. von Zuegel

RISD Nature Lab Workshop

Jeanette and I had a great day yesterday at the Rhode Island School of Design. This art school is famous for its Nature Lab, a collection of 80,000 study specimens. Neal Overstrom, director of the collection, told me that this is not really a natural history museum. The specimens are here to be studied by the art students.  

For our workshop, each student checked out an item from the lab: stuffed chipmunks, a squirrel, sheep skulls, beaver skull, fox skulls, insects, fish, an owl, and a wild turkey. Each of them drew a study of their specimen in watercolor pencils, and then drew them again with an imaginative transformation, either anthropomorphism, a scale change, or a vehicle design using biomimicry.

Most of the students were in Jean Blackburn's scientific illustration class or Lars Grant West's creature design class, so they were primed for this sort of thing.

In the evening, I gave an illustrated talk about the steps I use for making scientific and imaginative illustrations, followed by a 10-minute demo portrait sketch of Jesse.
-----
Thanks to everyone who came to the workshop and the presentation, and to the students and faculty who hosted.
Previous post on RISD, with a tour

Iron Worker

 A couple weeks ago I joined an evening painting group in Newburgh, New York. For the three-hour session, we had a model named Larry who works a day job in Manhattan as a "skywalker," a structural iron worker in high rise construction. I painted him in oil against a simple sky-tone background and cropped him tight to make him look even more imposing.

Garin Baker (left) was the host for the session at his studio, called the Carriage House Atelier. That's Kevin Ferrara with the "brushstache" on the right. Contact Garin if you're interested in his instructed or open sessions. Larry will be there this Thursday in a flyfishing outfit.

Lectures tomorrow and Wednesday in New England

For those of you in the New England, USA area, I'll be giving a lecture tomorrow on how to paint imaginary scenes. The illustrated talk and book-signing will take place at 6:30PM at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island on Tuesday, April 24.
RISD Event

On the following day, Wednesday April 25, I'll be up in Boston to give a similar lecture and booksigning at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. That talk starts at 4:30.
MassArt website

I'll bring a sketchbook and a couple of originals to each event. I'd love to meet you and sign your book if you happen to make it by. People of all ages and levels of ability will get something out of the presentation.

Menzel's Brother

I find this combination of drawings immensely moving and inspiring.


Adolph von Menzel drew his brother Richard in 1848. One of his hands lies flat on a table, the other is closed, with his face resting against it. He has just combed his hair. His eyes are far away in thought. He is patient with his brother's request to hold still for a little while. Richard would have been accustomed to his brother drawing all the time.


Here is Richard again in 1860. He sits sideways on a chair, facing away, with his neck tie sticking out on one side and his hair on the other. He has grown a big mustache and the hair on top is thinner. His cheek seems a bit hollow.

 The third drawing shows Richard on his deathbed in 1865, just five years later. His hair is mostly gone now, his features are sharper, and there is a heavy growth of beard. His eyes are closed and sunken in death. The lines describing the white fringe of cloth move like a seismograph. 

Adolph lived for another forty years after Richard's death. He made these drawings only for himself -- no one saw his portfolios of thousands of drawings until after his own passing.

Magical light effects

Horsetail Fall is a seasonal waterfall on the eastern face of El Capitan in Yosemite Park in California.

For a few days each February, the setting sun lights up the cascade with a bright orange illumination that makes it look like it's on fire.


It's hard for our brains to process the phenomenon as anything other than fire because there aren't enough contextual cues showing the same sunlight on other surfaces.


When you want to create weird and magical evening light effects in painting, it's good to keep this balance in mind: on the one hand, you want the light to be precious and rare, but it has to touch enough different surfaces to give it some context.

One artist who pulled this off beautifully is the American orientalist Frederick Arthur Bridgman. In this magical evening scene, the main subject is lit by a cool dusk twilight, which diminishes as the draped figures recede into the tree shadows. 

We see pinpricks of candles here and there, with just a hint of their glow on the white structure in the middle ground. The warm accent light in the left foreground touches the folds of different fabrics of the woman's costume, as well as the flowers.

He makes the bold choice not to show the source of the light itself, just its effect. The light effect really works because he was careful to set up large areas of mysterious darkness, softness, and shadow in the rest of the picture.

The painting is called "Fête of the Prophet at Oued-el-Kebir (Blidah), 1889.
See more paintings from this era at the blog Underpaintings. 

Starbucks to discontinue carmine colorants

The president of Starbucks announced yesterday that the company will no longer use the insect-based colorant called cochineal extract, also known as carmine dye, in its "Strawberries and Creme Frappuccino." 

The company had moved to the bug-based red coloring agent in order to use more natural ingredients. However, pressure from vegans forced them to reconsider.

The carmine dye is made from the Cochineal insect, which lives as a parasite on cactus plants. It is a harmless natural ingredient, and is already used in many cosmetics and foods, such as lipstick, barbecue sauce, and pie fillings. 

Despite its poor lightfastness, it has been used as a clothing dye and an artist's pigment. Scientists have done tests to find that the red in this portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds was made from Cochineal-based carmine lake.

----
Starbucks announcement
Wikipedia on Cochineal
Color tests on S.J. Reynolds
More pigment stories in my book Color and Light