Four Videos

Here are some videos that I thought you might enjoy.

(Video link) When you see a black and white image, is it a black and white image of a color scene, or a color picture of a scene that really is black and white? 

(Video Link) Chris LaPorte describes how he created his epic pencil portrait of a marching band.

Thought of You - Making Of from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

(Video Link) Animator Ryan Woodward discusses the inspiration and the making of his short film "Thought of You." If you haven't seen the original film, you can see it at his website. Thanks, Melle Ferre.

(Video link) The story of recreating the circus poster that inspired John Lennon to write one of the great songs on the Sargent Pepper's album. Link to the video here. Thanks, Roger.

Sparkle Secret

 
Here's a plein-air study of kids frolicking at the  beach by Peder Krøyer. The bits of foam seem whiter than white because in a way, they are.


(Detail of above) By applying the white as a very thick impasto, it sticks up above the rest of the paint, and even casts a little shadow underneath. Since most paintings are illuminated from above, those globs of paint catch a highlight that's actually whiter than ordinary white paint applied flat to the surface of the painting.
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Thanks, Timothy Adkins for the photo.

Alex Ross Exhibition

An exhibition of the comic book art of Alex Ross will be opening on Saturday, November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

"Paintings and sketches from his early career from projects like Marvels and Kingdom Come will be included, as well as works from more recent projects, such as Justice, Flash Gordon, and Green Hornet. Showcasing the heavy influence of American illustration and Pop Art on Alex Ross, works by Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, Andrew Loomis, and JC Leyendecker will be included. Works by Lynette Ross, the artist’s mother and an artistic inspiration, will be featured, as will Myths prints created by Andy Warhol, featuring many of the subjects of Alex Ross paintings, including Superman, Uncle Sam, and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz."

The exhibition ends February 24, 2013.

Alex Ross will appear at the Norman Rockwell Museum on Saturday November 10, 2012 from 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm. Commentary at 7 p.m. Autographs (limit of 2 – 3 items per person) with the artist to follow.

Heroes and Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross

Part 6. Durand’s Legacy

(Last in the series on American landscape painter Asher B. Durand)

By the time Durand died in 1886, the taste for landscape painting in America had moved away from the carefully rendered epic visions of nature that were dominant before the Civil War.

The vogue for Impressionism brought a new interest in painterliness and design as subjects in themselves. Plein-air work, once regarded as a means for gathering raw material, was now accepted as a finished mode of art, replacing the imaginative creations of the studio.

Through it all, Durand’s work never fell from favor. His fundamental belief that truth to nature was the foundation of all beauty echoed down through generations of the artists he influenced, and it serves as a standard for the revival of realism in our own times.

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Asher B. Durand 
Part 1: Durand on Location

Part 2: Durand's America
Part 3: Durand's Letters
Part 4: Durand's Subjects

Part 5: Durand's Color

The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) 
The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

Part 5: Durand's Color

(Continuing the series on American landscape painter Asher B. Durand)

In Durand’s paintings, the colors are understated and the technique is restrained, never showy. “Waste not your time on broad sketches in color,” he advised.

"One must not “fix the attention of the observer on the nice mixture of pigments rather than the sentiment of his work....all the best artists have shown that the greatest achievement in the production of fine color is the concealment of pigments, and not the parade of them; and we may say the same of execution. The less apparent the means and manner of the artist, the more directly will his work appeal to the understanding and the feelings.” When the technique becomes so conspicuous that it asserts itself as the principal feature of the picture, “it is presumptive evidence...of deficiency in some higher qualities.”

These “higher qualities” took on an almost religious aspect in Durand’s writings about art. He believed that the artist is privileged to see “through the sensuous veil, and [embody] the spiritual beauty with which nature is animate.” By cultivating “childlike affection and religious reverence,” the act of painting from nature becomes more than a mechanical process: in Durand’s view, it is a form of spiritual devotion. 

“The external appearance of this our dwelling place,” he wrote, “apart from its wondrous structure and functions that minister to our well-being, is fraught with lessons of high and holy meaning, only surpassed by the light of Revelation.”

Durand reflected on the appeal of enduring masterpieces after taking a voyage to visit the picture galleries in Europe in 1840. He described the measure of greatness as “sober, quiet tone, depth and mellowness, transparency and glow.” A well-painted picture “draws you into it—you traverse it—breathe its atmosphere—feel its sunshine, and you repose in its shade without thinking of its design or execution, effect or color.”

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Tomorrow: Durand's Legacy

Asher B. Durand 
Part 1: Durand on Location

Part 2: Durand's America
Part 3: Durand's Letters
Part 4: Durand's Subjects
The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) 
The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

Part 4: Durand’s Subjects

(continuing the series on Asher B. Durand)

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) would often select a small group of forms from within a complex scene and study it to the exclusion of its background detail. His son recalls that “finding trees in groups, he selected one that seemed to him, in age, color, or form, to be the most characteristic of its species, or in other words, the most beautiful."

"In painting its surroundings, he eliminated all shrubs and other trees which interfered with the impression made by this one. Every outdoor study...was regarded as a sort of dramatic scene in which a particular tree or aspect of nature may be called the principal figure.”

Durand’s form of realism was not a slavish or “servile imitation,” but rather a refined sensibility, guided by feeling, that sought to identify the characteristic form of specific varieties of trees, rocks and clouds while still attending to the minutiae of the individual subject. 

He drew a distinction between imitation, which satisfies only the eye, and representation, which satisfies the mind’s conception of ideal form. He conceded that a perfect copy of natural forms like flowing water or intricate foliage was impossible, but that the attempt to achieve it helped the artist develop methods that could be brought into service in recreating those forms back in the studio. 

Close examination of Durand’s original studies reveals that he did not necessary follow the practice of completing an entire scene la prima in one sitting. He typically painted foliage passages over a dry sky background that had been previously applied, and often worked for at least two consecutive sittings to accomplish his more detailed studies, probably executing the tree and the landscape at two different locations. 

Tomorrow: Part 5: Durand's Color

Asher B. Durand 
Part 1: Durand on Location

Part 2: Durand's America
Part 3: Durand's Letters
The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) 
The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

Part 3: Durand’s Letters

(Part 3 of a series)
Durand articulated the principles of his art in a series of influential articles called “Letters on Landscape Painting,” published in The Crayon magazine in 1855.

Taken together, these writings are the most complete expression of the philosophies of the Hudson River School, and provide valuable insights for today’s painter or collector. Art historian James Flexner describes “Letters” as “one of those rare documents that summarizes the spirit of a group and a generation.”

Durand wrote that direct study from nature was the ideal way for the artist to transcend the limitations of tired compositional formulas, providing “the only safeguard against the inroads of heretical conventionalism.”

He defined conventionalism as “the substitution of an easily expressed falsehood for a difficult truth.” He advised students to begin with a thorough familiarity with the pencil before graduating to paint, and even then, to develop a mastery of foreground objects in strong light and shade before attempting atmospheric distances.

The goal in plein-air work, according to Durand, was to render nature as faithfully as possible, and to “scrupulously accept whatever she presents him, until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity, and then he may approach her on more familiar terms, even venturing to choose and reject some portions of her unbounded wealth.”

He addressed the limits of artistic license by saying that the artist “may displace a tree, or render it a more perfect one of its kind if retained,” but the placement of elements in the middle ground and the “characteristic outline, undulating or angular, of all the great divisions, may not be changed in the least perceptible degree, most especially the mountain and hill forms. On these God has set his signet.”

Tomorrow: Part 4--Durand's Subjects 

Part 1: Durand on Location

Part 2: Durand's America

The book The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) is one of the few places where you can get the full text of Durand's Letters on Landscape Painting.

Also: The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

Part 2: Durand’s America

(Part 2 of a series) Several of Durand’s colleagues, including Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, and Jasper Cropsey, crossed oceans and continents in search of ever more exotic subjects to paint. By contrast, Durand believed that the best motifs could be found in one’s own country. “Go not abroad in search of material,” he wrote, “while the virgin charms of our native land have claims on your deepest affections.”3

John Durand remarked that his father enjoyed the wilderness regions in New York State and New Hampshire “before railways had penetrated to their recesses, where only a few scattered inhabitants could be found.” He recalled that his father spent all his leisure hours “devoted to painting from nature."

"He set his palette before leaving his house in the city and carried it, with a home-made easel and camp-stool, to his favorite sketching-ground...He was ever ready to rough it over corduroy, muddy, or sandy roads, in stage-coach and on buck-boards...whenever the colors or forms of rocks, trees, or mountains answered his search for the beautiful.”4

Best known for his painting Kindred Spirits, which portrays Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant standing together in a Catskill clove, Durand produced a body of landscapes ranging from mossy forest interiors to quiet streamscapes and pastoral farm scenes. Most scholars credit Durand and Cole equally as the cofounders of the Hudson River School, America’s first unique tradition of painting. 

After Cole’s death in 1848, Durand was acknowledged as the leader of the movement, serving for sixteen years as the president of the National Academy of Design, where he set aside a special room for the exhibition of nature studies. Durand’s work, including many of his so-called “transcripts from nature,” was the focus a major retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago.

Linda Ferber, curator of the exhibit, has described Durand as “one of the earliest American painters to give up conventional compositional models based on European prototypes and to paint directly in response to what he actually saw in nature.”5

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3. Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting. Letter II,” Crayon 1, no. (10 January, 1855), 34.

4. John Durand, The Life and Times of A.M. Durand, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894. Reprint. New York: Kennedy Graphics, 1970.)183-84.

5. Linda Ferber and William Gerdts. The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites
. (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1985), 254. 

Books: The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

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Part 1: Durand on Location

(This is part one of a series on the American landscape pioneer Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)   based on an article I wrote for Plein Air magazine in April, 2005.) 

In June of 1837, Asher B. Durand and his friend Thomas Cole departed on a sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks of New York State. They had carefully planned for the excursion, packing camp stools, umbrellas, and easels, and assembling a list of oil colors that included Antwerp Blue, Mummy Brown, and Asphaltum.

Collapsible tin paint tubes had not yet been invented, so they had to decide whether to grind pigments on location or to transport prepared paint in small pigskin bladders, which were prone to breaking open or drying out.1 They brought along provisions of sour bread, salt pork, and ham, supplemented with fresh trout caught along the way.

The Schroon Lake expedition was a turning point for Durand, for it shaped his resolution to leave successful careers in engraving and portrait painting and to concentrate exclusively on landscape painting. Cole was already established as America’s premier landscape artist and had made some early experiments with plein-air work. But it was Durand who became the most enthusiastic early champion of painting from nature in oil.

According to fellow artist Daniel Huntington, Durand “was a pioneer in painting carefully finished studies directly from nature out-of-doors.”2 Other early landscape artists of his day—including Cole— “made only pencil drawings, or, at most, slight watercolor memoranda of the scenes they intended to paint, aiding the memory by writing on the drawing hints of color and effect.” Cole believed that “time [should] draw a veil of memory” over the common details of a scene in order to achieve a poetic sensibility in a painting.

Durand, following the earlier example of Constable and Corot, became deeply engaged by the challenge of working in oil outdoors in what he called “The School of Nature.” He went “directly to the fountain-head, and began the practice of faithful transcripts of ‘bits’ for use in his studio.” His custom was to spend two or three months each summer traveling with artist friends in the Catskills, Adirondacks, or White Mountains, gathering studies in both oil and pencil that would be used as aids to the memory when developing finished compositions during the winters in his New Jersey studio.

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1. Eleanor Harvey, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830-1880, (New York: Harry N. Abrades, 1998), 33.

2. Daniel Huntington, Asher B. Durand, a Memorial Address by Daniel Huntington. New York: The Century Association, 1887.

Tomorrow: Part 2: Durand's America

Plein Air magazine

Best books on this topic: The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

Wikipedia on Durand

Mucha Documentary

(Video link) This six-part video about Czech-French artist Alphonse Mucha documents his rise as a poster artist, his voyage to America, his gigantic Slav Epics, and his long-lasting influence as a designer.


Episode 2
Episode 3 (at 7:40, a glimpse of his sketchbooks)
Episode 4 (at :50, an explanation of his gridding and tracing)
Episode 5 (at :57, a view of his personal pastels, never exhibited until the 1990s.)
Episode 6