Confounding color and value in the landscape.

Hey Stape:

 Here's a plein air painting I did the other day. Maybe you could critique it for me? I call it "The Road Home" because it reminds me of  driving down to visit my mother. How I miss her larder and Ganesh cones.

 "Rusty" Phenolphthalein

Rusty,  you are 

CONFOUNDING COLOR WITH VALUE!

You have failed to make a clear statement of your lights and darks. Look at the Metcalf below.  Do you see the clear pattern of lights and darks?

or how about in this Gruppe? Squint, that will make it even clearer.

Your painting looks "mushy" because you are making notes of the same value in both your lights and your shadows. Look at your mass of trees at the upper left, and compare it's value with the lower right hand corner that is in the light, common notes. You are including in your lights and your shadows notes of the same value.

I see  this fault in students work routinely. When a note is deeper in value, the student responds not by dropping it's value, but by increasing it's saturation. Conversely, they respond to highly saturated colors in the light by painting them low in value. I have wondered if part of the fault lies in our language. In the everyday world we use the word "bright" to mean both high in value and full of color. We might say that a white room with many windows is bright, and then reject a screaming yellow color for the walls as "too bright". We do the same for the word "dark", a room could be too dark if it lacked light, yet we also might refer to a  paint scheme as "too dark".

The easiest way to understand the difference is to think of a black and white photo, that is a pattern of values. Color doesn't appear. Color and value are both interrelated and hold hands in public. But they are two separate qualities that describe a note on your canvas. On gray days the values may grow very close together, but the division remains, even if the only deep shadow is in your pockets.

When we paint the landscape outside one of the most important tasks before us is to delineate the light and the shadow. This is drawing, even if it is tonal and not done with a pencil. It could be done in black and white, it is not a function of color.

"Rusty", look at your painting, see the nearest shadow crossing the road ? It shares values with the field in sunlight to it's left.

Above is your picture again. Below, I have strewn red dots across it noting where the same  middle value notes occur. That value is laced through both your lights and your shadows.

It is essential to use a different set of values to represent your lights and shadows. Imagine a deck of cards, with just two suits, dark cards and light cards. Now deal them into two piles on the table before you, dark cards in one pile and light cards the other. Sorting the lights from the darks in a painting is similar. There are two piles, light and dark. No card fits in either one, each card is either one of the light cards or one of the dark cards. Every time your brush hits that canvas you need to know, is this note in the dark or is it in the light?

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Durham, North Carolina

I am teaching a workshop in Durham, on November 1-3,  Here is the link to that. 

I have a medium sized class, so there is room for a few more. Smaller groups are more like going on a painting trip together. There is time for lots of individual attention. I looks like there will be good fall color there too. This will be the last workshop for a while for the faint hearted, your next opportunity will be the dreaded SNOWCAMP.

Value suppression , the apearance of nature and the" big look"

I have been frantically painting trying to get this years blue night picture out the door for a printing deadline. I have made one of these every year for about thirty years. Here I am though, lets see.................


A reader on the comments page recently asked me:
Please help my confusion on values. I have read and been taught to not use the full spectrum of values because it weakens the painting. Their instruction has been to narrow your values to three no more than four value groups by compressing the values together. By doing this you make a stronger pattern of shapes that holds together, especially from a distance. Please clarify. Looking forward to your response.

This is a big question and I may need more than a single post to answer it.

1)  There is the appearance of nature in light as it sits before you. I think I can readily discern and express about ten different values outside. Before the cast, as an atelier student I was taught with ten values. In practice I use maybe one or two less than that if I am trying to the the look of nature. When I teach, I generally try to point out the difference between nature and the students work. Most of the students I meet in workshops are struggling to get the image successfully and halfway accurately onto the canvas. That is the first skill that a student needs, transcription. This is not necessarily art, it is a skill and anyone can acquire it with some hard work.

Until a student has this ability it seems important to me, to help them "see" nature more clearly. I talk a lot about design, arrangement, color etc. but if I neglect to steer students closer to the look of nature I run the risk of teaching them "how I do things" rather than broader skills they can use themselves. So when I teach I would only suggest to the most advanced students that they paint their values any differently than they see them.

That artists who work in reduced numbers of values agree there are more values than they use seems clear, as they speak of compressing or limiting their values.

2) It is possible, perhaps desirable, to reduce the values in a design to get more unity of effect, a broader look and a clearer assembly of shapes. Usually the effect is one of a stronger, simpler arrangement. But, this is a lens  through which painter looks at nature, and not the appearance of nature itself. Compressing values, means to change them to something else, hopefully more desirable artistically.

This is a design method, and as such, a convention, a personal choice. That's OK, it is art after all, and the art lies in the choices we make about how  the painting will look more than in cold transcription. Below is a sphere with the parts of the light labeled on it.
The sphere above has five separate lights. A tree in light or a head or figure will generally need five separate values to explain itself. Where these five different values come from on the value scale, whatever size (but ten for the sake of this explanation) can be chosen and they could be derived from the middle of the scale or one end or even spread across its length from Stygian darkness to unalloyed white. I find it difficult to work effectively with fewer than five values. I  sometimes will design pictures using three premixed values, but when  I make that into a picture I feel the need to add a few more values here and there. Even this five value system precludes the representation of halftones. Each halftone (modeling in the lights) would add a separate value to the list. I don't present all of this to discourage the practice of suppressing or compressing values. This topic arose out of my listing problems that plague workshop students. I would suggest that the artist should first be able to render in  a full and not a truncated panoply of values before reducing their number.

4) I didn't hear the idea of compressing values until perhaps fifteen years ago, no doubt because of the enormous and beneficial influence of Richard Schmid. I learned something similar in the Gammell Studios though. It was  called the "BIG LOOK". The idea was this....Not to  cut up your big shapes with lots of varying values or details within them. One was to keep their shapes big, or uncluttered. Shapes of similar value would be  conjoined and darks or lights deliberately linked. All of these plus suppression of  detail gave a broader simpler look. Gammell often derided what he  called "looking into the shadows" that is allowing yourself  to refocus your vision  and examine separately from  the lights   the value  changes and detail within the shadows. That is the shadows  would be mistakenly painted as they appeared when examined individually and not as seen  in relationship to the entire scene including the  lights. This was seen as the enemy of the big  look.

Some thoughts on the challenges facing today's workshop participants.

Demo painting from the Canton Mississippi workshop

Well here I am again, it's been a while! I have been traveling all over the country teaching workshops since last I posted. I went on tour, like a rock band. I have been in the White Mountains, Minnesota,  Newburgh, New York and Mississippi and God knows where else. I can't even remember all of the places I have been. Most were three day gigs, but some were five days. I met a lot of students and had a lot of fun. I like doing workshops, and I love meeting the students. The workshop scene seems to select for an enjoyable group of participants. I run twelve hour days in my workshops, so I eat dinner and often breakfast with the students besides painting with them all day.

I think I will write about what I have seen out there. There seem to be common problems that many students have, and recently I have been aware of how most of the students have the same things to learn. I get a broad range of students in terms of ability and experience, from beginners to demi-professional, so some of them don't have these shortcomings. Most of them do. Remember, I am not talking about you, or anyone you know, I am  talking about those "other" people who are far away. The common problems are these: (let me chamber a few bullets here)

• Failure to express the full range of values in the scene before them. Most of the students seem to paint in a few middle tones. I always seem to be telling them, "when you look out there, you see a dark and paint it a dark value. When I look out there, I see a dark and ask myself, which dark is it? I have several to choose from." The students use a single generic dark and a single generic middle tone, etc. They command too few values to explain that at which they are looking. I have been telling them this ;:" Did you learn to read from the Dick and Jane books? " (for you younger readers, Dick and Jane were drab children who said things like "look Jane! see Spot run! Run,run run. See Dick run!!" Spot was a dog. Dick was once a common male name. Jane was a girl's name then, much  like Krystle or  Brittney might be today). he teacher went up to the blackboard and wrote a list of about ten words on the board before she even handed out the book. You had to know about ten words to read even this simple story. The authors of this sorry tome couldn't tell even its banal story without at least ten words. They couldn't write the book with only say... five words, they needed at least ten. If you imagine your value scale to be words you will need about 10 or at least six or seven anyway, to tell the story that is in front of you in the landscape. You students don't have enough words (i.e. values) to tell the story of the landscape in front of you. I suspect that the best cure for this problem would be cast drawing under the eye of a master, but that is atelier training and most people just can't leave their real life behind and do that. I am trying to come up with a systematic approach to curing this problem, I do have an idea. I will get back to you on that.
• Inadequate paints and equipment. I see lots of mangled brushes, I pick them up and say "this was once a brush!" I will often see a student with two dozen brushes, none of which is in usable condition. They are as stiff as tongue depressors and worn into a point. I see a lot of hues too. Those are colors made for the student market that pretend to be the pigment but are not. Some cheaper pigment has been substituted for the necessary color. Usually this substitute is  pthalocyanine plus some other pigment. I have seen a student with a pthalo pretending to be their ultramarine, their viridian and their cobalt, all on one palette. Half of their colors are really just one pigment, pthalo. I have seen whites with the consistency of joint compound and faux "cadmiums" no more powerful than fruit juice.These students have defeated themselves before they even touch their shattered, frizzled bristles to the paint on their palettes. I also see easels that wobble every time the student makes a stroke on the canvas, weird contraptions made of balsa and recycled aluminum that rock from side to side in the slightest breeze.They look like they were manufactured by someone who had heard of easels but had never actually seen one. A decent easel is going to cost more than a toaster at WalMart, that's just a fact of life. Pharaoh taught the Israelites you cannot make bricks without straw.
• Bargain canvas. I have seen students working on hyper absorbent canvas that sucks the life out of their paint. It is like painting on a loofah. The brush, instead of gliding sweetly over the canvas, scratches along like it is painting on sandpaper. You can buy a prestretched canvas at Michael's or Hobby Lobby for three dollars, but you shouldn't. If the gas it took you to drive to the store in your 25,000 dollar automobile cost more than the canvas you bought, you ought to walk there and get something that will actually work.
• A lack of knowledge of the history of painting. Students are constantly telling me about the artists they have read about in American Artist or some other magazine. Most of the time I have never even heard of these artists and when I see their work I am disappointed. I tell workshop participants that I  never look to living artists as my models. These students  know only contemporary painters, many of indifferent ability. To make good paintings it is necessary to know what the great artists of the past have done. If you told me you were learning to play guitar and I asked you what you thought of Chuck Berry and you answered "who?" I wouldn't think you were going to get very far.The great artists of the past dwarf  ALL living artists. I  know of no contemporary artist who is the equal of a Rembrandt or  Rubens. It is absolutely essential to get up on the shoulders of the dead to see beyond the ordinariness of the art of our own time. Very few artists today could have cut it in the nineteenth century. We do a great job with technology and plumbing today, but our ancestors painted better. If you want to paint well read the classic texts and have giants for your heroes.

I will write more on this in the next post, I need to get some sleep.

A little about Nicolai Fechin

I was in Minneapolis this last week and returned to the Museum of Russian Art. If you live in that area, or are passing through Minneapolis, this is a wonderful museum  It shows a collection begun about twenty five years ago by Raymond E. Johnson, a Scottsdale, Arizona art dealer. Johnson bought an enormous collection of Soviet era art during the time when Gorbachev was thawing relationships with the west. About ten years ago the museum acquired a Spanish Colonial style church in south Minneapolis. After renovation and some inspired redesign of its interior space the building became a splendid display place for the largest collection of art of it's sort in the country. At 5500 Stevens Avenue South  in Minneapolis the museum is conveniently located. It is right at a the Diamond Lake Road exit on 35, that's the main freeway from the airport to downtown. If you fly in, the museum is right on your way as you go into the city and it is about fifty feet from the exit, so for a traveler, getting there is really easy. Unlike many city museums there is a free parking lot across the street and admission is reasonable. I make it a routine stop when I am in Minnesota, which is frequently.

I love the art of Levitan, Repin and Shiskin etc. but this museum is about the period after those artists, the era of what we once called "boy loves tractor" art, or social realism. Until just a few years ago Americans dismissed  this painting as propaganda and illustration for the evil empire. However Russia maintained the systematic and historically driven training of painters that was discarded by most of the rest of  the world. Many of these Soviet period paintings are very fine. They range  from impressionism to a sort of Norman Rockwell gone Marxist style.The level of technique is very high, higher for the most part than what was going on in this country.

I bring up this venue because they are currently displaying a large retrospective of the work of Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955).  This show runs until January 20, 2013.  Fechin was trained in St. Petersburg under Illya Repin, one of the finest Russian artists at the turn of the 20th century. In 1923, after the Russian  Revolution and the death of both his parents from typhoid fever, Fechin emigrated to America. Himself a  victim of tuberculosis, he ultimately moved  to Taos, New Mexico. Before antibiotics the dry air of the desert was often recommended as a cure. The last part of his life was spent in Santa Monica, California. He was successful financially as both a portrait painter and with his figure painting.

Above is a painting from the show. I hadn't seen many Fechin paintings in real life before the show and knew them from the one commonly available book on the artist.

  Fechin was a master draftsman but what really makes him special is his paint handling and his color. The painting above is typical of his work, the  head is rather smoothly painted and the rest of the painting is very broad and is full of various textures and rugosity of paint. Here is a detail of the painting above.

The paint is troweled on and only assembles into the little girls dress at a distance. The level of abstraction is higher than in a Sargent. This passage is thick and  highly textured. Notice something else, this painting is cracked, Fechin used zinc white which is brittle and prone to cracking. Nearly every painting in the show  showed a fine craquelure. I don't believe these  paintings are going to fall off their canvasses anytime soon, but they are not very old as paintings go and most of the art I have seen of their age has not cracked. There is a warning here for anyone who would choose to work in zinc white. Painters use zinc because it is much lower in opacity than titanium and they feel that it lets there color show more, rather than "eating'' it. That is true I suppose,  but at least when worked thickly, the price to be paid is cracked surfaces. I have seen a lot of Emile Gruppe paintings done with zinc and they don't seem to be cracked, but they are painted much  more thinly, usually in one shot and only a single brushstroke thick.

Here is another detail. Look at the rough texture of the hair and it's contrast with the smoothly modeled  flesh. I  think this is exciting painting and very effective. There is another thing going on here too, look at where the hair meets the face, most painters would soften that edge by stroking along it with a  brush,  possibly  a sable. But Fechin has used the broken surface of the paint to get his softened or minimized transition at the edge. There is another crack right through the cheek of this portrait.

Fechin has laced wonderful accents of bright color into the background here. There are violets and a cold blue and and other notes  dragged over his rough underpainting or ground. These  colors look like jewels because of their contrast with the dark and unsaturated passages onto which they are placed. The grave notes activate the colored notes by comparison. Again the rough surface gives him a soft edge and keeps those bright notes subordinated to the larger passage. Notice how just to the right of the eye he hardens the edge to indicate the abrupt  plane change and the bony zygomatic cage surrounding the eye. I have written a lot about Edward  Seago. Seago used a textured ground and got a lot of his subordinated edges the same way. 

Up close this handling or treatment is more interesting that a more matter of fact presentation. 

It is in this handling or treatment that the ART lives, not in the choice of  subject matter.

  Up close this thing says PAINT, from a  normal viewing distance it says NATURE.

Above is a painting by the late Leroy Nieman. Here is a painting with bravura handling of thick paint that is nowhere near the equal of the Fechins. It is a matter of taste, the Fechins  are beautiful and elegant, the Nieman of Miles Davis has heightened cheese content. This may serve well in a magazine illustration, but it is not fine art the same way the Fechin is. The comparison of these two paintings could serve as a test of sensitivity to fine painting. The Fechin is a waltz of both restrained and grave color contrasting with the accents of saturated  notes. Together the graver and colored notes in the Fechin are beautiful and balanced. The Nieman is all saturated color and looks vulgar.

ALL COLOR IS NO COLOR!

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Hudson River Workshop

with special Guest star Garin Baker

 The workshop will start on Saturday, October 13 and run three days through Monday the 15th. It will be held at the Carriage House Art Studios in Newburgh, New York. Well known and highly skilled artist Garin Baker will be our host and special guest star. If you live in the city or Westchester or maybe New Jersey this workshop should be within easy striking distance  for you

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I am going to add a new exercise this time on color mixing.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is unpacking  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite artists of mine. I will also  do a little presentation on the Hudson River school and their techniques.
• I promise I will work you like a borrowed mule. 
• I can save you years of screwing around

There should be some autumn color by this time. This is getting into the best time of the year to paint outside. This is sacred ground to American landscape painting. The early history of American landscape painting was written on this ground by  the Hudson River School.. I will talk a little about their working methods and show some examples of this art as well. You can sign up by going here.

Another little trick I know 4

Here is a  little trick for stretching canvas. When I start stretching a canvas I put a staple in the middle of each side. As you can see above the tension is uneven around that first staple. Before I drive the next one, I grab the end of the canvas up at the corner and pull it taut. I still have the canvas pliers in my other hand pulling the canvas as you see above. I pull it just as hard as I can.

I grab the canvas up there at the corner and pull it so that the canvas is tensioned not only across the stretcher but along it's length as well. It would help to be an octopus to do this. I release the hand up at the corner and use it to hold the staple gun to drive the next staple between the initial one and the corner. I space my staples about two inches apart. I do this for the first two or three staples on each side. That little tug helps prevent buckling or an uneven tension across the length of the side I am stretching.

I thought I would throw this in here too. This is a reprint from a previous post, but it certainly falls into the little tricks category

There is a trick to pouring from a new can of solvent. For years every time I did it I got turpentine all over. Then someone showed me how to do it. The trick is to turn the can over. Pour the solvent ACROSS the top of the can, like in the grainy cell phone picture above. You will need to hold your mouth just right for this to work, but try it, no more turpentine filled shoes!
There are about a million little tricks in painting.

 Above is pictured a device that sits on my easel. It is just a couple of stretchers screwed to the top and bottom of a length of 1 by 10. What it does is elevate the painting I am working on. I am 32 feet tall, so almost all easels are too short for me. I can't crank them up them up high enough to comfortably work on smaller canvasses, This one is an 18 by 24. The other thing it does is allows me to put a larger canvas on the easel quickly by removing this "easel stilt" rather than having to adjust the height of the easel itself. Notice that I have a half sheet of luan plywood sitting on the easel behind my painting. This allows me to tape my reference photos or inspirational reproductions of relevant master paintings next to what I am working on. It also eliminates the distraction of seeing whatever is behind the easel around my painting.


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I have scheduled another workshop in the White Mountains for the autumn color season.  This is a first, I have never done a fall workshop up there. It should be a great time to paint the Presidential range from the Inn overlooking Franconia Notch. If you are interested, click on the link below and it will give you all the information about signing up. I limit the workshops to 10 participants, that keeps them a workable size and they almost always fill up so if you want to come, sign up before it is filled.

 Fall Color Workshop  September 8th through 10th


 This is the Sunset Hill Inn in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for about three years and it is the ideal location.  Because I have taught so many workshops there the inn keepers have learned what painters at a workshop need and they are now practiced at hosting my workshops and making sure we have what we need to operate without any distractions or responsibilities other than painting.There is a broad rear porch that overlooks the mountains so we can still paint outside no matter what the weather does. The lower level of the inn  is ours to store our paints and canvas so we don't have to haul it all to our rooms and it makes a good place to teach too. The view of the mountains is spectacular and in the fall it will be even better. The inn takes good care of us. We have our own private dining room too. They handle  our meals and even bring us lunch so  we can work all day uninterrupted. The inn is one of those big old historic affairs from the 19th century and is homey and informal. Most of the rooms have gas fireplaces, it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside.

 This will be the first fall workshop I have done there and I am thrilled. I love teaching workshops anyway. Everyone is always excited to be there and hang out with the other artists. It is like a three day party. We go from breakfast until bedtime. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.The fall color in the White Mountains is legendary and people come from all over the world to see it. In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn. We don't need to leave the grounds of the inn  to find great subject matter so their is no problem with hauling easels around or caravanning cars to daily locations. We just walk out the back door and the whole Presidential range is spread out before us.

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I am going to add a new exercise this time on color mixing.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is a history of White Mountain art so you can see what the greats of American painting did with the same landscape we will be painting during the day. The other is unpacking  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite artists of mine.
• I promise I will work you like a borrowed mule.

If you have never seen autumn in New England this is your chance to paint the most spectacular fall color in America.The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars, I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I won't give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits. If you don't intend to come, don't sign up!
It is nessasary to stay at the in . However in the past several people have asked if they could stay with their brother in law or pitch a tent a nearby campground. If you want to do that, it's OK but you will have to pay a flat fee of 150 dollars to the inn for the use of their facilities. That fee will include your breakfasts, lunches and one dinner.The link to sign up is below;

http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2012/05/workshops-for-sale.html

Restarting a stuck painting

Sometimes a painting gets stuck, sometimes you realize it is going backward rather than forward or at best it scuttles sideways. Here are some tips to get a painting out of the doldrums and moving again.

•  Restate your lights and darks. They can get tentative and mushy as you work on a painting 
• Soften your edges, often your edges are all that is wrong with a painting, are they too "hard"? Often as we work on a painting we make our edges harder and harder, rather than keeping control of them. Uniformly hard edges damage the cohesion and flow of a painting and give a naive or primitive look.

 A HARD EDGE HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY. A SOFT EDGE REQUIRES INTENT.

• Look at the painting in a mirror. Often mistakes you have grown accustomed to seeing will jump out in a mirror image. Hold a small hand mirror up to your forehead so you can look up into it, then look at the painting upside down and backwards. Our eyes get tired and begin to accept errors that we would otherwise spot. That's is one of the reasons why painter can so easily spot an  error in someone else's painting. A mirror will give you a fresh eye and often a mistake you have grown accustomed to seeing will jump out at you.
• Turn the painting to the wall and don't look at it for a few days. This is the same idea as the mirror. It often is a shock to return to a painting days later and realize what you had been looking at without seeing.
• Look at the painting upside down, another way to get a fresh eye. Again you may see some errors you had missed.
• Get the books out. Find examples of master painters ( ideally dead master painters) and research how they handled the same problems that you are confronting.
• Take a photo of the painting and view it the size of a postage stamp. Often errors, particularly design errors will be easier to spot in a reduced image. There are such things as reducing glasses. They look like a magnifying glass but do the opposite. Billboard painters used to use them, but you can still buy them online,  here   They shrink what you are viewing . It is like running back about a hundred yards to view your painting. This does about the same thing as looking at a reduced photo .
• Ask yourself "what can I take out? Are there things in this picture which are extraneous? Are all the items in this picture really serving the collective?  If not, purge em!

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 If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains. I can teach you a whole lot, and probably save you years of screwing around. Why torture yourself ? Don't get left behind! You are worth it! Everyone's doing it. Act now.


I have been developing a series of painting exercises to teach root skills. I have a bunch of them now and am adding them into the workshops. I set my easel up in front of the class and lead them through a painting exercise that will clarify either a skill, technique or principle. I will be presenting one of these each day at the July workshop.

Plein air painting idea 6

Tonight's idea is that you can work outside longer on a painting than most people think. I am often asked "How can you paint a scene when the light is changing so rapidly?" Bullets please.

• Gray days don't change very much, you can paint all day sometimes. I used to prefer sunny days and I guess I still do, but that constant light on a gray day does have an advantage.
• .When I set up, I spend the first hour or so drawing in transparent paint. I work out my design, hunt down possible gremlins and get the tricky drawing parts understood, usually in a monotone. I have been known to do this for an entire session, and then come back a second day and work in color over a full finished monochrome painting from the day before.
• After that hour I will work for about two hours in full color, the light changes over a two hour period but not THAT much usually. That is the "primetime" part of the session. I push myself to work quickly and efficiently. I am careful not to get hung up working and reworking a single passage, that is easy to do. Hopefully I spotted all of my gremlins in the first hour's lay-in stage and am not confronted with a passage that slows me down. I make a point of working all over the canvas and trying to keep the entire painting marching along as a whole.
• After your two hour primetime, you can still work another hour or two by concentrating on the things that the light has not changed. For instance, the things that were in the shadow may still look the same. I have a record on my canvas of what the scene looked like before the light changed, and if I follow that I can still feed information into the painting so long as I don't rearrange my pattern of lights and darks. I don't want to "follow" the light as it changes..
• Try to put your shadow shapes down and leave them alone. Don't keep going back and lengthening them over the course of your session. If they really look better later in the day, by all means change them, but don't chase them all day long on autopilot. THINK about what you are doing.
• I have no problem returning to a painting a second or sometimes a third day. I wouldn't go back out on a sunny day picture on a gray day, but if it is sunny again, I like getting a second day, particularly on a 24 by 30. There is no law that says a painting has to be done in one shot. Monet didn't do that, and his pictures were OK.
• Lastly and MOST IMPORTANTLY

IF YOU HAVE A STRONG PREVISUALIZATION OF WHAT THE PAINTING SHOULD LOOK LIKE, YOU WORK FROM THAT AND ARE NOT ENSLAVED TO THE CHANGING APPEARANCE OF NATURE BEFORE YOU.

If you are slavishly copying nature before you, when the light changes you must either change your picture with it, or go home. If you are making a picture, and you have an idea of what it should look like, then you will be far better able to deal with the changing light. 

Plein air idea 5

Emile Gruppe

Tonight's idea is plot your large abstract design and impose the drawing from nature on that. 

If you are in the early stages of learning to paint the landscape, I think you should paint as closely what you see as you can. That is the root skill. You have to be able to reproduce whatever scene is before you, dispassionately and accurately.When you have learned to do that, the next step is to learn to impose a geometric order beneath the surface of representation and detail. There is an abstract painting beneath a good landscape painting. The painting is a set of lines and colors that set one another off. It is an arrangement of varied shapes with rhythm and movement.


TRY TO CREATE A PATTERN OF INTERESTING SHAPES.  PRESENTATION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN INFORMATION. THE ART LIVES IN THE PRESENTATION AND NOT IN THE NARRATION OF THE  PARTICULARS OF THE STUFF OUT IN FRONT OF YOUR EASEL.


In order to get this to happen I would remind you of last night's post on pixel size. If you lay the design in using large chunks or shapes, those can be manipulated to relate in a beautiful way with one another. They might be linked into chains of attractive shapes. They might be balanced across the picture plane from one another, or they could be strung across the middle of the painting like a string of pearls.

There must be infinite groupings of large shapes that are possible. Nature before you will suggest the main masses, but the abstract geometry is something you install into those shapes you have first recorded. A little extra time spent perfecting those big abstract shapes now is likely to make or break your painting. It is easy to make a strong design look good with a minimum of "finishing" but a poor design can be tricked up or have detail pasted all over it and still not really make a pleasing painting. It is the subterranean geometry hidden just behind the facade of realism that makes a painting work.

Once you have the big design in a few masses worked out you can install all the drawing you feel you need from nature onto this armature. In a landscape you can push things around a lot.You can bend things to fit onto your abstract design. A tree can just as easily be a little further to the left or a house can be further away, etc. The real elements of the picture can be subordinated to the abstract arrangement without the viewer being aware that you have done so.

The abstract arrangement IS the painting. Try to value the design over the representation. This will help you to make artful interesting pictures rather than matter of fact descriptions of the scene before you. Aim for poetry, not journalism. There are plenty of accurate paintings out there, not so many well designed ones. The longer I paint the more it is about design.

Plein air, idea 1

   Carl Peters, Crossing the Bridge

                  

The blog is morphing into more of a magazine. It used to be an encyclopedia, but I feel like I have laid out the basic information I set out to record. I seem to be writing "articles" rather than entries now. I am getting very close to a thousand posts. The whole thing has been stream of consciousness anyway, and stumbles along with no particular system or order. It is all very homemade. Do you think this blog would look better with more commas? Some day it will all get edited and put out on Betamax.

I intend to do a series of brief posts each limited to an idea to keep in mind when painting outside. Tonight's idea is previsualization.

When you start a painting outside, the greatest predictor of success is previsualization.

  That is, if you have a clear picture of what the painting is going to look like finished, when you start, you are most likely to "win" that day. Usually the best paintings are those where you proceed directly to your result. The painting will look fresher and less labored that way. Also, time is often short on location, and time spent reworking or struggling with a passage is subtracted from your end result.

 It is seldom enough to set up your easel and say "that looks good, I will paint that". Almost no view is perfect, and even if it were, to make art and not just transcription it is desirable to have a "treatment" in mind. At the very least you need to have an idea of how you are going to deal with the gremlins that pop up when a picture gets rolling.  Look at the scene and ask yourself "what out there is going to bite me?" Try to think of solutions to the problems before you even touch the canvas. If you can envision what the finished picture looks like, really close your eyes and see it, you may spot those gremlins and also the opportunities for design, color and handling before you.

I have been painting outside for almost forty years, almost all of my pictures are "professional", adequately observed and rendered. But some are lots better than others, the weaker ones are simply "matter of fact", that is, they look like the place, alright, but they are not interesting, much less poetic. So for me previsualization is usually "what am I going to do to this thing to make it look cool?"

IT IS NOT WHAT IT IS A PICTURE OF, BUT HOW IT IS A PICTURE OF, THAT IS IMPORTANT!

That would make a great neck tattoo wouldn't it?

A Carl Peters from Alterman galleries

So don't just dive in and start painting, a little up front contemplation may save you a lot of worry later. Close your eyes and imagine what the painting will look like finished. Try to imagine every part of it and every passage as it will be in your finished work. This is a developed skill. Most people think more in words than pictures, and you will probably imagine yourself having a much clearer idea of the finished picture than you actually do. Happens to me all the time.

Sometimes I will imagine a clock face on the surface of the canvas and then go around the hours and ask myself "what goes here? what goes there?

The highest form of previsualization is a thumbnail sketch, more about those tomorrow.

Reworking a failed passage

Sisyphus, by Titian

As those of you who read my blog already know, I fight like hell to get my paintings to work. The more you learn about painting, the harder it gets. Eventually it will become too hard for me to do at all.

IT ONLY MATTERS WHAT THE PAINTING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE, NOT HOW LONG IT TOOK OR HOW HARD YOU HAD TO WORK TO MAKE IT!

Sometimes a passage (or area) of a painting just doesn't work. Here is one of those. Its time to give this One a second chance! This is a group of rocks in the middle of a seascape. After struggling for days with it, finally I decided to rip the whole thing out and have another go at it. It was time for a fresh start. Because I worked a long time trying to get these rocks right, I built up a lot more paint than I wanted. Above is the failed passage, that has been sand papered down. I wanted to get the surface back to flat and level so I could start over and not have pentimenti (ridges from the previous brushstrokes) visible under my newly applied paint.

First I scraped the surface with the side of my offset, leaf shaped palette knife to get as much of the paint off as I could. Then I sanded it until it was flat with 80 grit sandpaper. I wet sanded it by dipping my sandpaper in mineral spirits. Then I finished it off with the 150 (sand paper with a higher number is finer). I think I get better results wet sanding, but also I don't want all the dust from my pigments flying up into the air for me to breathe, if I wet sand the painting that doesn't happen. I wear nitrile gloves when I paint so I didn't get the resultant toxic slurry all over my hands and abdomen.

I had been trying to just " invent" the rocks, something I am sometimes able to do. It wasn't working for me this time so I needed to hire a model. Above is my "model". Those are two pieces of anthracite coal picked up from an old railroad bed in Vermont. I have a box of about twenty of these and I use them for just this purpose. I have sprayed them with krylon to give them a little more reflective surface. Anthracite coal looks a lot like ocean rocks, it has facets and unusual shapes. I can look at it and use those shapes to create rocks in a seascape that don't look too "man made". It is necessary to simplify them or only use some parts of them, but it really helps to imagine the forms and the different planes turning against the light.

I have a clamp light with a 40 watt "daylight colored" bulb in it at the same angle I want my light to be hitting the rocks that I intend to paint. This little tableau is on a wooden shelf cantilevered out from the wall right next to my easel at just below my eye level ( I am 32 feet tall, and weigh over 1600 pounds).

Below are the rocks, redux. I have elongated the rock on the left, I needed it to fit into a particular area of the painting. I have also thrown some color in there, sometimes the coal looks great painted it's actual color, but in this case I wanted a red-orange Cape Ann granite.


Perhaps if I ever get this painting finished I will post it so you can see how it comes out. I still have a fair amount of refinement to do on this area, but you can see what I am up to.

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There is still room in Snowcamp. The first session is filled but the second still has a few spaces. If you would like to come you can sign up here. Snowcamp happens at a big old wooden inn high on a ridge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The inn overlooks the Cannon Mountain and the Presidential range. We paint outside just out the back door of the inn so if you get cold you can run inside and warm up by the fire. The Sunset Hill Inn takes good care of us and everything we need is right there. I park my car and forget it while I am there. Snowcamp is a three day total immersion experience that runs from breakfast until well after dinner. It is a great way to meet other painters and learn how to work outside in the winter. Snow painting is my favorite thing, and I will show you some of the tricks I have picked up in my about 30 years of painting it.

The surface of an Edward Seago, examined

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com

Above is a painting by Edward Seago that is full of bold impasto. What a fine One it is! As you probably know Seago is one of my heroes ( the others are Aldro Hibbard, Willard Metcalf, and Jeff Beck) If you click on it you will be able to see some of the different textures and thicknesses of paint he used. I will unpack what, in my opinion, he did in various parts of this picture.

Seago texture his canvasses before he painted on them. Here is a link to a post about that. In the passage above, Seago has dragged the branches across his sky, already textured by his ground. It looks to me like he did this with a knife. The rough ground grabbed the paint unevenly from his knife. This had to be done ONCE! This method doesn't admit for much correcting or alteration.
He added the larger branches with a brush, a sable rigger ( sometimes called a scriptliner) would do that nicely. Notice how he allows interuptions in those lines of the branches made with a brush. That makes them look of a piece with the rest of the dragged looking passage. Had he drawn those too carefully and consistently they would have looked too different from the knife work around them and pointed out the paucity of the means used to produce the spotted foliage and twigs against the sky.

Above is a passage from the middle of the painting. I wish I could get better details to show you but this is what I have to work with. The house there is heavily loaded paint, mostly white with a little ocher added to it. Notice how loose and barely suggested everything in this passage is. Seago has made a point of putting a dark contrasting value in the line of trees behind the buildings. the contrast makes the passage pop and draws our eye there. Seago wanted to be sure we didn't miss the buildings down at the bottom of the field. He also dragged his brush strokes across the rough ground in the warm red tree that is just above the white gable of the house. This softens his edges in a different way than a painter would do on a smooth surface by pulling colliding edges together with a soft touch of the brush. Although the mechanics of arriving at that demephasized edge are different than more common methods, the result is about the same.

Here is a passage from the foreground I believe it was mostly painted with a large stiff bristle brush. You can see the marks of the individual hairs in the strokes. That gives it a striated grass-like appearance. Seago varies his paint application in order to best describe the particular texture of the elements of the landscape. He was a very fast and fluent painter and the ability to do this was developed over many years. He spent his early career painting society portraits and horses so his draftsmanship was impeccable. Usually loose painters that are good, have started out painting tightly.

LOOSE HANDLING WILL NOT DISGUISE WEAK DRAWING!

Say, that might make a dandy neck tattoo!

Here is the sky, here Seago is pulling strokes from a large bristle brush over his textured ground again. See the darker clouds soften because they are dragged across the sky beneath them. Seagos ground, besides being rough was absorbent, He added gesso ( real gesso not the contemporary acrylic counterfeit) to the lead mixture that he used as a priming so that his thirsty ground sucked in the wet paint and allowed for rapid overpainting in a way that a normal ground would not. The rough canvas aided him in his ability to work rapidly.

Here is a bit of the distance from the left hand side or the tableau. This is thinly painted, see how the ground shows so clearly through it? Seago is varying his paint thickness for two reasons. Firstly to give the illusion of distance and less resolution, thinner passages tend to drop back from a roughly handled fore ground. But the other and perhaps more important reason, is to provide contrast to his roughly painted passages. In order for some passages to look rough it is most effective to have them share the canvas with thinly painted passages. The thinly painted passages heighten the effect of the thick ones by contrast, just as a spot of dark near a light passage will draw attention to the brightness of that area.

Above is the immediate foreground. It is very thickly painted. See the rough crudeness of the paint? this was probably troweled on with his knife and gives the illusion of texture to the field's freshly turned earth . Seago has thrown some directional signals in there too, the furrows encourage us to follow them deeper into the middle ground of the painting.

WHEN YOU PAINT A PASSAGE, BESIDES THINKING ABOUT COLOR AND VALUE ETC. IT IS IMPORTANT TO DECIDE HOW THAT PASSAGE WILL LEAD THE VIEWER. WHAT IS ITS THRUST? HOW WILL THE EYE LEAVE THE PASSAGE AND WHERE WILL IT GO NEXT? YOU SHOULD BE IN DELIBERATE CONTROL OF THAT!

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A view from the back yard of the Sunset Hill Inn

As many of you know, each year I teach a series of workshops called Snowcamp at a historic inn up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The first session is filled but I do have spaces left in the other. This is a course in winter painting skills and open to all levels of expertise from beginner to self important semi professional.

The Sunset Hill House, a charming old wooden hotel from the days before automobiles, takes care of all our needs including meals served in our own private dining room. Because we eat together, the workshop is a total immersion experience from breakfast until evening. We get a lot done on that schedule. We also get the opportunity to meet and befriend fellow painters.

I teach the workshop right outside the enormous back veranda of the inn, or under that if it is actually snowing. There is no need to carry equipment any distance and if you get cold you can run inside and warm yourself by the fire. If you would like to be there this year here is the link to sign up!

Surface and impasto

Images courtesy of artrenewal.org They have become a login site. For 14 dollars you get access to a lot of hi-res images. I have downsized these and cut details from them, those on the site are much larger. I believe the library of images they offer is worth the small investment and would encourage you to join. I receive no kickback, funding etc from them or anyone else who I recommend over there in the side bar, well, except for RGH paint who gave me a quart of white once.

I want to talk about surface in this post. There are two main sorts of surface, enameled (as it is sometimes called) ie. very smoothly painted without ridges or areas of deliberately roughened paint, and an impastoed, or 3D surface where the artist has intentionally allowed the paint to project from the surface to carry his illusion. Great painters have fallen into both camps.

The head at the top of the page is a detail of a Raeburn. He has used the thickness of his brush strokes which follow the forms of the sitters face to express the structure there. Until the early twentieth century painters worked with lead white. Lead white comes in a variety of handling qualities from ropey or stringy, to liquid and flowing, to crumbly and dry. The most common was an unguent and easily manipulated version such as you see in the painting above. One of the few drawbacks of flake lead (other than its toxicity) is that it becomes more transparent as it ages. Knowing this, artists would often load their whites ( paint them thickly) to make sure they retained opacity over time. However this gave an added benefit, these thick lights contrasted with the thinly painted shadows and a heightened dimensionality appeared. The artist gained another means to express the illusion of volume and dimensionality on his flat surface that an enameled surface didn't give him.

Painters who work over canvases with carefully transferred drawings on them tend to work very smoothly. Often they are coloring in or glazing these drawings in transparent veils to make their paintings. This is an academic approach. Painters who use impasto tend to paint directly from nature. They drag paint here, load it there, or use a palette knife to create the illusion of texture and form by various kinds of manipulative paint handling.

Below is an example of Rembrandt painting a sleeve. He was perhaps the greatest manipulator of impasto. The globs and striations in the paint surface appear at a distance to be the brocaded details of the material. In the upper left of the detail is a good place to see that. Incidentally, this is some of that crumbly look I spoke about earlier as opposed to the more liquid handling in the Raeburn above.

Art is what the artist brings with him to a painting. It is not found in nature itself. Art is man made and the result of an artists decision making process. It is not resultant from observation or accident, but is deliberately installed through intention.

The use of impasto requires the artist to make decisions about the nature of his paint application and its the varied effects he wishes to obtain. It cannot be more than inspired by nature in front of him, it must be invented. The same sort of passage can be painted absolutely smoothly to great effect as well.

Above is a sleeve and hand painted by Ingres. It has great complexity like the Rembrandt yet it is smoothly painted. In the hands of a master either approach can result in triumphant verisimilitude. I don't mean to say that one approach is better than another, however the use of impasto does require an additional set of decisions for the painter to make about how his surface will look.

Here is a detail of Rembrandt's' Hendrickje bathing. The impasto emphasises the simplified and broad planes with which Rembrandt has described the forms of his subject. The use of impasto and the expression of form are entwined and work together to further the artists purpose. More on this in my next post.

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I also received this e-mail:

"I, of course, noticed that you've ceased your superhuman habit of daily posting. I've grown so fond of spending evenings scouring your archives. Your blog is the art instruction I didn't receive back in the sixties/seventies, and your views and wonderful humor have become a comforting light in my search to improve my paintings. I've looked for a post that might explain your absence, but haven't found anything. I hope you are well, and that you'll be back soon. Thank you, for all your generosity and the effort you've put into what you have produced for us".

I have backed off to posting about once a week for now. I may return to greater frequency but I need to do this for a number of reasons which are:

• Unspecified and serious difficulties in my private life.
• A need to concentrate on my painting, I have to get my inventory up, which is off partly due to the unspecified difficulties opaquely alluded to above, but also because I have been making such difficult studio paintings, seascapes and such that take forever. I am much faster out on location than in the studio.
  
• The blog was intended to be a one year project and instead extended to a thousand posts, which are archived and available should anyone want to read them. It is an encyclopedic "book" of what I have learned over the years I have painted. It should be useful to many who are looking for that information ( or perhaps slant is the better word ) which is hard to find in the mainstream art world.
  
• I have written most of what I set out to write. The technical and design posts most importantly. I don't want to become repetitive. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There are lots more posts I can write and will, but they are more time consuming and difficult. The Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas are a great example of that. I will do more of those but each one takes about 20 hours. They are worth the time and a lot of fun to do, providing I have the time to use doing them.
• The blog will continue, but as I said above, I will have to keep to a reduced schedule for now. I do want to be useful. Thank you all who have continued to follow along.