Sargent watercolor techniques: Five observations

This is the last weekend for the Sargent Watercolor exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

 

The show combines the best watercolors of the collections of the MFA and the Brooklyn museum, along with a few oils.  

We saw the show a couple of months ago, but beforehand, we visited behind the scenes with conservator Annette Manick (second from right. That's Richard Scarpa at the far left, Garin Baker, and Jeanette).

Annette Manick showed us swatches made with the actual pigments recovered from paint tubes in Sargent's paint kit. She also made a number of test swatches to experiment with some of the unusual techniques that Sargent was known to use with his watercolors, such as wax, gouache, gum arabic and oxgall.

In the back of the show catalog, Manick goes into great detail about these painting methods. I think this represents an exciting new trend in art history scholarship. Conservators, working closely with art historians and practicing artists, are trying to reconstruct the practical methods of artists from the past.

Here are five quick observations that struck me again and again as I visited the show.

1. Unlike many of the British watercolorists who believed in using purely transparent pigments, Sargent used gouache whenever he needed it. This passage of a white dress has opaque white in the bright lights and in the open shadows. He often lays down a spot of white gouache and then, after it dries, he goes over the spot of paint with transparent colors to keep the gouache stroke from jumping out of the paint surface.


2. He used wax as a resist to give a scintillating effect. Here he first laid down a yellow green base color, then stroked it with wax, which resisted the brownish later layers.


3. In the dark passages, Sargent stays away from black, and generally mixes bright blues with browns at the same value. You can see it dramatically in the lower central area of this detail.

4. Sargent was incredibly daring, taking huge risks with big brushes at every step of the painting. It's not just pure boldness and freedom, though, because he's also deliberate and considered, too. I can just picture him thinking, waiting, or planning, and then diving in with an apparently reckless move, cursing under his breath all the while.

5. He defines only what he wants to define, and leaves a lot quickly stated. There are no individual hairs defined in the beard, nor are the lips defined with a strong line between them. The result of this simplicity is that the eyes, with their sparkling highlights, really grab the viewer. This informal portrait is called "The Hermit" "A Tramp." It was really painted from a fellow artist who posed for him.

The exhibition will continue through January 20
Thanks to Marc Holmes and Greg Shea for the closeup photos. Marc has a great blog post with more Sargent watercolor insights. 
Catalog of the show 

Sylvia doll prototype

This one-of-a-kind doll prototype was made in 1997 by the Hasbro toy designers for a proposed Dinotopia toy. 

She is the red-haired character Sylvia in ceremonial costume, with a coronet of flowers and a tiny handmade vest that fastens in the back with Velcro. Her dress is a crinkle cotton gauze made to look like pleated linen, with gold trim. We liked the way she is dressed in a timeless and modest way, and her face has a sweet smile.

This is not a reconfigured Barbie doll; it's completely unique and original, custom made for Dinotopia.

Although the Dinotopia toy line never went into production due to reversals in the movie project at Columbia, Hasbro's toymakers made a beautiful group of proposals, and their marketing people were excited about the prospect of that rare thing: a toy line designed for both boys and girls.
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Sylvia appeared first in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time in 1992.
Thanks, Michael Stone and Robert Gould.

Dr. Seuss documentary

Here's a documentary on Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, author of zany classics like "Cat in the Hat." (link to video) The quality isn't great on the video transfer, but it's an interesting view of what inspired him and how he approached writing and illustrating children's books.

...and if Dr. Seuss isn't your cup of tea, you might enjoy this 1987 BBC profile of Robert Crumb, made seven years before the more famous Terry Zwigoff documentary.


At 52 minutes in, don't miss the video of Crumb trying to do a plein air painting on a freeway onramp.

Article on painting blacksmiths

Check out the new issue of International Artist magazine, hitting the newsstands about now.

Garin Baker and I wrote about how we painted together inside a blacksmith shop at Old Sturbridge Village. Each of us discusses our inspiration, design strategy, materials, challenges, and working process.

The same issue (#95, Feb/March 2014) has features on Jeremy Lipking, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Ellen Eagle, and Aaron Westerberg, plus a chat with the faculty of the 2014 Art of the Portrait convention, which I'll be attending again this year in Washington.

International Artist was voted the #1 magazine by GurneyJourney readers.
Previously on GJ: Painting in a Blacksmith Shop

You must begin!

Frank Netter, the dean of medical illustration, offers universally useful advice in this archival video:

"There's nothing quite as frightening as a blank piece of paper in front of you, and you know you've got to put a picture on it. And you can sit there and look at it all day long and puzzle 'How should I begin? Where should I begin? What shall I do about this? And you'll never get a picture done. You must begin! You must make some strokes. You may throw it away later. But you must begin to paint!"

Frank Netter's book: The Netter Collection of Medical Illustrations: The Endocrine System: Volume 2, 2e (Netter Green Book Collection)

Thanks, RobNonStop

Christine Lavin

I sketched Songwriter Christine Lavin from my computer screen while she and Julie Gold performed a record-breaking live webcast on Concert Window just a few minutes ago.

Watch Nanci Griffith sing Julie Gold's song "From a Distance."

Successive Contrast

Stare at the muli-colored circle below for about twenty seconds, and then look at the center of the white circle at left. Complementary afterimages should begin to bloom on the white circle. The blue sector at the bottom becomes yellow. Green changes to magenta, and cyan changes to red.

Repeat the same experiment, staring first at the center of the multicolored circle for twenty seconds. This time shift your gaze to the cyan circle at right. Perhaps you will notice that the afterimages now change your perception of each of the cyan sectors. Which sector appears the most intense version of cyan? 

Most people report that the strongest cyan appears where the red sector had been. This is called successive contrast. When you look at an object of a certain color, your eyes adjust or adapt to that color. The resulting afterimage affects what you look at next. 

This is why providing strategic areas of complementary colors helps enliven a color scheme. In this painting by Thomas Moran, for example, the strong chromatic effect of the orange cliffs is heightened by the proximity of complementary colors at close values. 

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From "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter."

Before you can see the light....

Colored pencil, watercolor, and gouache.

Dutch masters paintings deconstructed

Michael Mapes recreates 17th century Dutch master paintings by assembling hundreds of small objects pinned to a board in a kind of holographic exploded view.

Some of the objects are photographic prints of the entire painting, which are attached to the backboard with insect pins, or set inside test tubes, bags, or gelatin capsules. The effect is a faux scientific presentation that deconstructs the big image into a mosaic of parts, while those parts are also entire in themselves.Via BoingBoing

Henry Patrick Raleigh, Illustrator

Henry Patrick Raleigh (1880-1944) was an American illustrator whose drawings of society life defined the Gatsby era.


He began as a newspaper sketch artist on the west coast back in the era when artists were needed to quickly record news events. Some of his early illustrations resemble those of F.R. Gruger, another illustrator who started as a newspaper man.


As a result of that experience, he was extremely prolific, creating about 20,000 illustrations in his career, at a rate of about 800 per year, almost three drawings per day. He had an excellent visual memory and worked almost entirely without models or photo reference.


Even in those days, a single illustration could pay as much a s $3500, so he was immensely wealthy, traveled a lot, and lived like a celebrity.

As color printing entered the magazines, and drawings were replaced by paintings, he tried to introduce washes of color into his own work, but he never liked painted illustrations. He wrote:

"Illustration is distinct from painting, and I vigorously oppose the encroachment of the latter on my chosen field. Line drawing is the one appropriate fundamental medium for illustration, as it most nearly harmonizes with the linear effect of the printed page. Painting, in its purest form, is primarily emotional, whereas illustration is necessarily more rational, more expository. Each has its legitimate sphere of influence, and should be restricted to that sphere."

By the 1940s, his work had fallen out of step with art directors at the major magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. The glamorous life evaporated. In failing health, without having saved money for his retirement, and without steady work, he took his own life.


The new issue of Illustration magazine has a comprehensive article on Raleigh written by his grandson, who has built a big collection and created The Henry Raleigh Archive.

Images in this post from Illustration Art and Jim Lambert's Pinterest
You can preview or purchase the Raleigh article at the Illustration magazine website
The Henry Raleigh Archive
Maybe someone reading this post can start a Wikipedia page for Henry Patrick Raleigh and Frederick Gruger.