Betty Ballantine, 1919-2019

Legendary publisher Betty Ballantine died last Tuesday at age 99. She also served as my editor for Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, and my model for the character Norah. (Her middle name and her mother's name was Norah.)

She and Ian have been hailed for their contribution to popularizing paperbacks and for nurturing science fiction. But they were also champions of visual books for adults. They were responsible for the Peacock Press series of art books in the 1970s, featuring the work of Frank Frazetta, Froud/Lee's Faeries, Carl Evers, Frank McCarthy and James Bama.
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New York Times obituary of Betty Ballantine
Wikipedia on Betty B.
Entrepreneur article about the Ballantines contribution to publishing
Previous posts
Ian Ballantine
Origins of Dinotopia: The Illustrated Book and the Ballantines
Deleted Scene from Dinotopia

When is a Painting Finished?

Ruji asks: "I was wondering do you have any advice for someone who can't seem to make their art look finished? Seemingly no matter how much time, effort, or detail I put into an image I can never seem to make my art, from gesture to final, look done. I'm unfortunately self-trained and this is a huge problem that has vexed me for the past 11 years that I can't seem to find an answer for by myself, no matter how much I study the fundamentals."

Left: Mary Cassatt, detail (link to full image)
Right: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, detail (link to full image)

Ruji,
It's impossible to give you a personal answer, since I don't know anything about you, your art, or what your goals are. So let me address the broader question of finish.

Finish is a very subjective quality in a painting. One artist may want to make the painting appear like an illusion of reality. To that artist, a painting is finished when the illusion betrays no visible brushstrokes. Another artist, wishing to preserve the energy and dynamics of the surface, may regard a work as finished with a lot of loose brushstrokes preserved.

But both of those qualities are superficial. Finish is more than facture. What really matters in making a work finished is whether your inner conception is fully realized. Does it communicate the feeling you wanted? Is it convincing, disturbing, exciting, restful, or compelling?

If not—if it's sort of ordinary looking—it may be that your problem is not how the painting was finished, but how it was started. Maybe you need to spend more time in the early stages sketching and planning the work, getting the reference lined up, and knowing exactly where you're headed. The resulting painting may still take some struggle to be born, but hopefully with that preliminary work accomplished, the final painting will come together and it will tell you when it's done.

Charcoal study by Sargent for "Heaven" mural
in the Boston Public Library.
Efficient, concise, and a means to an end.

You also mentioned that you can never seem to make your gesture sketches look finished, either. That seems like a contradiction in terms. Isn't a sketch unfinished by definition? We owe this predicament to our contemporary art culture, which makes a fetish of the sketch, and elevates preliminary studies as completed works worthy of exhibition. We've all seen those drawings from contemporary ateliers that are very laborious, but deliberately leave a foot or an arm in the linear construct stage, which strikes me the same as a carpenter leaving the clapboards off one side of the house.

If you're doing a preliminary study, move fast, capture the essentials, and leave it. Like the study by Sargent above, a study should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

There's nothing wrong with exhibiting your sketches, but I would caution against being overly conscious of making "sketchy" gestures, and instead focus on capturing as much truth of nature as you can in the time available and let the strokes land where they may.

John Banvard's Mississippi Panorama

In 1840, John Banvard was obsessed with the idea of painting the largest picture in the world, so he got to work on it.

"He acquired an open skiff and began making sketches of the entire Mississippi River, shooting game for food, and painting and showing pictures en route. Finally when he had finished his sketches he retired to Louisville where he transferred them to canvas, making a panorama. The picture required three miles of canvas Surely this was the largest picture in the world!"

Banvard's panorama was made up of paintings stitched together into a long scroll that could be advanced by a set of cranks and gears on the side. He took his work to London, where it inspired other artists to create panoramas.

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Quote is from "Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others, From the Beginning to the Civil War" by Richardson Wright
Interactive Website with Expandable Closeups

Wikipedia on John Banvard

A Snow Pile Behind the Supermarket

There's a big snow pile behind the supermarket, with a view down John M. Clark Road in Kingston. The sun is rim-lighting the white snow, and the shadows are blue.

I like this view because it includes the deep perspective of the road going back to the vanishing point.

(Link to video on Facebook)

Here are some questions on Instagram and Facebook:

Noa Katzir asks: "How do you keep the water and colors from crystallizing and freezing?"
Luckily it was nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit, well above freezing.

M. Hopper asks: "How do you choose what you're going to paint?

All my supermarket parking lot sketches are done under a strict time constraint of about 50 minutes. That's the time it takes my wife to do the food run. I look for a subject that I can paint in that time, and one suited to the visual ideas I want to explore. For the previous painting, I was interested in conveying a smoggy atmosphere. This time I was interested in the light on the snow. 

SpaceLion asks: "What kind of sketchbook did you use?"
Gurney: It's a Pentalic Aqua Journal, which has good paper for water media.

ValeoftheRose asks: "In Color and Light you say it's better to mix grays using only opposite colors rather than black and white, but that just makes brown. By grays did you just mean browns or is it because I'm using only CMYK and white of low quality gouache? I think you mentioned in the book CMYK is not great for painting?"
There are a lot of different issues raised by your questions. The colors packaged as CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) in paints are usually convenience mixtures, which means they're made up of a couple different pigments. They can be helpful for painting color wheels, but for actual paintings I think you're better off just using the pigments individually and getting to know their properties, because in painting we're not limited by four printer's inks or by the graphics displays on our computers. Instead we're limited by the actual chemical pigments we're using. In this case I used ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, and terra rosa, plus titanium white.

Grays and browns are both fairly neutral in chroma, but browns are usually warmer. The reason for mixing grays out of complements instead of black and white is that you end up with interesting variations and partial mixtures. If you mix your colors with two or three tube colors, you can get exactly the color you want, as long as it's within the gamut. I would suggest that you use a small number of tube colors on a given painting excursion, and that you experiment with new combinations.

Charley Parker says:  "One thought: speeding through the drawing and wash phases with time lapse doesn't leave that much out, but It might be helpful if you would slow down to normal speed for things like the split-bristle brushwork — a less common technique — to give a better idea of how it's done."
Good point, Charley. I'm limited here by the 1-minute constraint of the video for Instagram. But I'll be doing a somewhat longer version for YouTube, and I can slow some of the clips down a bit to show more of that split brush technique.

Bouguereau Exhibition Opens Today

A major exhibition of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) opens today at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

"Bouguereau and America showcases more than forty masterful paintings by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). The exhibition explores the artist’s remarkable popularity throughout America’s Gilded Age, from the late 1860s to the early 1900s. During this period, owning a painting by the artist was de rigueur for any American who wanted to be seen as a serious collector: the artist’s grand canvases brought a sense of classic sophistication to newly formed collections. Their chastely sensual maidens, Raphaelesque Madonnas, and impossibly pristine peasant children mirror the religious beliefs, sexual mores, social problems, and desires of that period. Moreover, the exhibition offers an opportunity to examine how society’s perspectives can shift over time."

Catalog: Bouguereau and America
192 pages, Yale University Press, 10 x 12 inches----

Exhibition: "Bouguereau and America" at Milwaukee Art Museum: February 15–May 12, 2019
The exhibit continues in Memphis (June 22—Sept. 22, 2019), and San Diego (November 9—March 15, 2020.

Creating People Who Don't Exist

Have you ever seen this person before?

There's no chance of it because she was just created by a computer.

A new website called "This Person Does Not Exist" uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to make a new face from scratch, a face that no one has ever seen before. 

Each time you refresh the page on the website, an entirely new face appears. The software outputs a variety of ages, ethnic backgrounds, settings, and lighting scenarios, and the faces are specific, not "average" or generic looking. 

And each one seems relatively consistent and logical, but if you search long enough you'll find problems with ears, jewelry, hair, or glasses.

The creator of the page is Phillip Wang, a software engineer for Uber, who wanted to demonstrate the potential of GANs.

This technology will transform many aspects of computer graphics, such as video games, visual effects, and 3D modeling, and it has more unsettling implications for generating convincing false news, sham celebrities, and fake art.

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This Person Does Not Exist

Read more on Inverse: 'This Person Does Not Exist' is the Best One-Off Website of 2019

James Sharples, Traveling Portrait Artist

James Sharples was born in England and trained in France. He came to America in 1798 and built a portrait business by traveling from town to town.

"His mediums were crayon and pastel. Seeing that the market for his wares was scattered, he devised a special cart that would comfortably hold his wife, two boys and a girl and their clothes and food and his painting gear. It was drawn by one large sturdy horse." (Source)



"In this menage ambulant he travelled all over the country, going from town to town, and city to city. In each city he would obtain letters of introduction to people in the next city—military, civil or literary worthies. Sharples would present the letter, beg the honour of doing a portrait for his 'collection,' and, if this was granted, he would set to work."



"And he was a good artist. He could manage to make a faithful likeness in about two hours. Having seen himself so faithfully portrayed, the sitter, of course, was easily induced to buy the picture. The charges were $15 for a profile and $20 full face."
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Quotes from Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others, From the Beginning to the Civil War, 1927.

Jonah Asks about Process

 Jonah asks:
"I was just curious about your personal approach as a creative towards developing an abstract idea and constructing an outline into a complex, detailed, finished product. I'm not a visual artist, but I'm currently a college student who enjoys producing electronic music as a hobby."

Hi, Jonah,
My approach varies depending on whether the final product is an illustrated book, a video, a magazine article, or a single painting.

For example, my step-by-step process for painting a realistic image of an imaginary scene is outlined in my book Imaginative Realism, and it involves research, sketches, maquettes, models, and photo references, all completed before I attempt the final painting.

I've found that following these planning steps leads to the best results and saves time. More importantly, taking all those steps helps me through moments of doubt that inevitably accompany the middle stages of creating something. Almost every project goes through a phase where it looks ugly or trite or uninspired. Having a process, and trusting it, keeps me on track and gives me the best chance to deliver on the potential of the original idea.

I'm not sure what the process is for creating electronic music, but if you haven't already done so, I'm sure you'll figure it out. Study the process of the electronic musicians you admire, and follow it until you have developed your own methods.

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on Amazon: Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Online: James Gurney interview with I-Wei Huang

Painting Smog — Six Secrets for Creating Atmosphere

(Link to YouTube)

It's time to paint that parking lot in Kingston, New York. It was a nice clear day, but I added warm, smoky air to add more atmosphere and depth.

Six tips for creating depth

1. Face the view into the sun.

2. Limit values to: a) light areas (sky and highlights), and b) dark areas (everything else).

3. Save darkest dark to a few small areas in the foreground. 

4. Raise the value of the darks. 

5. Gradate the color of the darks from warm colors near sun to relatively cool colors at edges.

6. Eliminate detail in the dark silhouettes. 

Materials

The paint is casein in a Pentalic watercolor sketchbook. 

Richeson Travel brush set:  

Water cup 

Homemade easel 

Tripod

Canon M6 (time lapse, video, and stills)

Video tutorials and books:

Casein Painting in the Wild  

How to Make a Sketch Easel (DVD):  

Color and Light: A Guide for Realist Painters 

Anna Airy's Industrial Art

Anna Airy (1882-1962) painted plenty of genteel portraits and delicate flowers, but she also portrayed gritty industrial scenes, and that's what I want to feature in this post.

Anna Airy, Shop for Machining 15 inch Shells

She was born in Greenwich, London in 1882. Unfortunately her mother died soon after she was born. Her father, an engineer, supported her interest in art.



At age 17 she enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art. Slade offered art classes to men and women working in the same classroom, unusual at the time. Teachers such as Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer encouraged a form of Impressionism founded on good drawing and accurate perspective.

Anna Airy, An Aircraft Assembly Shop, Hendon

In 1914 she was one of only four women artists commissioned by the British Government to work as a war artist. She focused on portraying the activity inside the munitions factories, where female workers were crucial to the war effort.

She often labored under dangerous conditions. In painting a shell forge, she faced the extreme heat of red-hot shells. "No matter where I stood," she said, "I'd have some rolled to within a few feet of me. I never felt such heat." The ground became so hot that her shoes were burnt off her feet.

Anna Airy, A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory,
Hackney Marshes, London, 1918

The men of the factory floor rigged a shield of corrugated metal to protect her from the heat, "but the red hot shells would be rolled right against my screen —which acted like an oven, with me inside! Often, too, the shelter would fall over and send me and my easel flying."

Anna Airy 

She wrote two books: The Art of Pastel in 1930 and Making a Start in Art in 1951, and she exhibited in the Royal Academy Exhibitions and the Paris Salon for many years.
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Anna Airy  on Wikipedia
Online article: The First World War Art of Anna Airy, Imperial War Museum
Online article: War art: Shop for machining 15-inch shells
Thanks, Blair Updike for your article in the Portrait Society Journal

Related post: Heinrich Kley's Demons of Krupp