Mildred Butler

Mildred Anne Butler (1858 - 1941) was an Irish painter who specialized in images of nature, farm life and gardens.

Mildred Anne Butler, R.W.S. (1858-1941) Flowers by the roadside

She was associated with the Newlyn School and became a member of the Royal Academy in 1893.

Mildred Anne Butler, R.W.S. (1858-1941)
A cockerel and hen in a cluster of marguerites
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour with scratching out
10 x 6¾ in. (25.5 x 17.2 cm.)

She painted outdoors from life, a practice that was unusual at the time.

Mildred Anne Butler, Studies of birds

She did quick studies of animals and flowers in watercolor, but she also painted in oil.

Mildred Anne Butler (Irish painter) 1858 - 1941
Willow by the Water's Edge, s.d. watercolour
36 x 52.2 cm. (14.17 x 20.55 in.)

In 1857, The Athenaeum wrote: ‘The young lady knows how to look at her subjects with the eyes of a well trained artist.’

The Wanderers, Mildred Anne Butler, 1898, Ireland, watercolor
Location: Dublin City Gallery, 53.3 x 36.2 cm

Much of her early training came from her father who documented the exotic plants and animals he found on his travels.

Mildred Anne Butler

Butler's life and work was mostly centered on her family home in Kilmurry, though she traveled to England and France as well.
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Mildred Anne Butler on Wikipedia

Godfrey Vigne: Saved by a Sketchbook

Godfrey T. Vigne (1801-1863) was a wealthy lawyer who happened to be an artist as well. He resolved to travel to the dangerous territories in the western Himalaya, entering Kashmir, Ladakh, with forays into Tibet and Afghanistan. All these regions were little known to Westerners in those days. 

Accompanying him was another intrepid explorer Alexander Burnes of Scotland. 

The Kuzzelbash of Kabul, Watercolour, Afghanistan, 1836, 
Pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour, Victoria and Albert Museum

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"Vigne got himself out of tight spots by drawing pictures, usually for alarmed villagers or angry chieftains, who would swing from 'fury to a chuckle' on seeing their faces rendered in watercolour. 'I put them in good humor by scratching off two or three caricature portraits, and distributing a little medicine.' As war brewed, Vigne escaped unnoticed; the flamboyant Burnes was later cut to pieces by an angry mob."

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Quote from "Explorer's Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery and Adventure," 1986.

Godfrey T. Vigne on Wikipedia

Bonington's Tiny Watercolor

Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828) did this plein-air watercolor at a small scale: 7½ by 6inches or 19.4 by 15.2cm., about the size of a paperback book or a travel guide.  

The subject is the Castello Estense, Ferrara, and it was painted in 1827. That makes the section below about the size of a business card.

There's some rubbing out to lift out that texture on the wall. Near the top of the detail are some diagonal scratches with a fingernail or brush handle. He uses some white or body color. In the top white rectangle, he came in later with some blobs of darker tone. Some of those lines are extremely fine and careful, including the white mullion on the gray window.
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Link to Sothebys listing

Thanks, Matt McCleer

Cleaning Out Gouache Brushes

Rafal asks: "I wonder how do you deal with brushes used with gouache when painting on location. Is it easy to clean them with water later?"



Answer: Yes, Rafal, you can reactivate gouache or watercolor that has dried in brushes and clean them thoroughly when you get home, because the gum arabic binding agent will always be water soluble.

Still, it's preferable to rinse out brushes while you're on location. For that I like to have a pint-size open vessel of water hanging from my easel to serve as a rinse-out tub. If you can't avoid coming home with brushes caked with gouache I would suggest gently soaking them to loosen up the dried paint, and then clean them with gently warm soap and water and a gentle hand soap or brush cleaning fluid.

With casein, Acryla Gouache, acrylic, or oil paint, though, you really have to get your brushes clean on location or immediately afterward.
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Olana Eye Shows Famous View

Olana, the home of landscape painter Frederic Church has installed a  live skycam on its tower. Called "Olana Eye," it lets anyone stream the famous view of the Hudson River at any hour and in any weather.

Frederic Church, The ‘Bend in the River’ from Olana,
c. 1870-73. Oil on academy board, 10 1/16 x 12 7/8 in. 

Church frequently painted the view looking southwest from his tower.

Frederic Church, "Winter Sunset from Olana"

Typically his sketches were small and rapid oil studies, capturing fast-changing effects of light and weather. His paint application is relatively thin, working to finished effect from top to bottom and from background to foreground.
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Link to Olana Eye

Complementary Color Scheme

Arthur Guptill said, "A rich effect can be obtained with only a limited palette. A warm and cool combination affords the student the best approach to his color problems, especially as they relate to outdoor sketching."

Greta Bridge by John Sell Cotman

In his book on the history of watercolor painting, E. Barnard Lintott said, "For a young student there cannot be a better way of entering upon the study of water colour than by rigorously banishing all but two colours from his palette. It is the best and surest way to the study of full colour. The colours should be a cold and warm one; cobalt blue and warm sienna—or Prussian blue and burnt sienna—are two combinations which lend themselves to a great variety of treatment."

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More about painting in complementary colors on m Gumroad tutorial "Color in Practice: Black, White, and Complements."

Quotes comes from Color in Sketching and Rendering, p. 71.

Where can you learn how to do botanical art from life?

When I dropped out of art school, my learning curve accelerated, because I gave myself the kind of assignments I really wanted, such as trying to understand botanical forms by painting them from direct observation on living plants.

As far as I knew around 1980 in Los Angeles, no art school was teaching botanical painting from life, so I had to figure it out on my own.

View this post on Instagram

Botanical studies from life in gouache. #gouache #botanicalart #sketching #sketchbook

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart) on Jun 5, 2020 at 11:03am PDT

(Link to Instagram post) These studies became part of the book "The Artist's Guide to Sketching, 1982.

Other resources
Now there actually are a couple of schools devoted to the artistic study of plants, though of course at the moment they're closed with the Covid-19 precautions. One of them is in New York at the NY Botanical Garden, and another is in Denver at the Botanic Gardens. The Rhode Island School of Design has a Nature Lab, from which students can borrow specimens to study.

Video tutorials
"Gouache in the Wild" (Download on Gumroad)
“How to Make a Sketch Easel” (DVD)
Flower Painting in the Wild
More info on gouache gear
Gouache Materials List
Watercolor Materials
Books
Color and Light: A Guide for Realist Painters:
Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist
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Fishermen

The guy holding the pole caught a fish. He says he doesn’t eat fish and gives them all away.

Fishermen on Santa Monica pier, 1981

I made this sketch on location at the Santa Monica pier using a brush and ink to capture the late-afternoon edge lighting. Regardless of the local color of each form, I rendered anything in shadow as black and left anything illuminated by the sun as the white of the paper.

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From "The Artist's Guide to Sketching, 1982

Art and Van's Illustration Techniques

The illustrator team Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman painted glamorous cars set in posh backgrounds, and their art was reproduced in magazine advertisements in the 1960s. 

Their teamwork started before beginning each gouache painting.

According to Hemmings Motor News: "The men would each travel with their cameras, bringing home thousands of 35-millimeter slides. They would then sort them to find the most promising backgrounds. In the meantime, Art would take hundreds of photos of the feature cars at GM's Tech Center: 'I used the turntable and cherry picker to capture different angles, and took most of the photos I'd use for one year in a few days. We would match a car's view and a suitable situation-it was all carefully thought out. We'd then do a pencil sketch of the background, indicating the shape of the car, and figure out what the color scheme would be.'"

The element of the car interacted visually with background, picking up reflections on the hood of the car, and sometimes you could see through the windshield to the scene behind. How did they get foreground and background to interact?

"If Art's car was to be placed on Van's background, he painted in opaque watercolor gouache on one-ply Strathmore art paper. 'If I was working on a convertible or a car with a detailed background, I'd often only do the body, cutting along the windowsill with an X-ACTO knife. I'd turn the car over and sandpaper the edges to a knife-point so that they wouldn't show on the background-then I'd rubber-cement both surfaces, and paint the roof or other details right on Van's background.'"

"Art's willingness to adapt his technique earned them great acclaim. 'We came up with a different way of rendering the paintings," he recalls. "I started cropping part of the car out of the picture, making it too large to fit the page...they had impact. Clients liked how single-page magazine ads usually showed a side-view of their car, but they were paying for 'X' square inches of space and using only fifteen percent. My idea was to show a larger front view, cropped-the near headlamps look the same as the far ones, anyway.'"



Read the rest of the Hemmings Feature about Art Fitzpatrick, by Mark J. McCourt 

Thanks, Mike Geraghty

Bearded Vulture

Anyone who thinks predatory dinosaurs don't look intimidating with feathers should have a look at the bearded vulture.

Bearded vulture, photo on Imgur Via @41Strange

The bearded vulture feasts mainly on bones, which it digests with the strong acid in its stomach. They acquire a reddish tinge either from the blood of a carcass or reddish dirt, which they're instinctually attracted to rubbing into their feathers.

However these carrion feeders have been known to be good human companions in captivity.

Photo via Mental Floss and 41 Strange

Thomas Littleton Powys, the 4th Baron Lilford (1833-1896) raised a couple of bearded vultures at his home estate and found them to be "tame and perfectly harmless; indeed, with the exception of a few playful attacks on trousers, gaiters, petticoats and boots, I never heard of any malice on their part towards any living creature."

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More at Mental Floss and 41 Strange: