Oh,Hello!

Waiting for spring 24 by 30

Oh, Hello! This blog was to have been a one year effort that stretched to about three years. I wrote a post every day for nearly a thousand days, setting out to write down everything that I had learned over the years that I thought a painter should know. It was a specific project, and I did it as well as I could. I wrote it all out and gave the information away. Even though I seldom add to it now, I occasionally check my stats and see that there are a whole lot of people still reading it, so the blog is out there being useful. I am painting away  as always, and have volunteered to sit on the board of the Guild of  Boston Artists, which will be a new project for me. The picture above was done on one of many snow painting trips to Vermont this winter with my friend T. M. Nicholas. I fooled with it for a few days in the studio too.

Recently T.M. and I were talking about finishing pictures in the studio. That method is typical of the past New England painters we both admire. We both photograph every location, and agreed that it was a useful practice in case we lost the light or didn't get down far enough into the painting to remember if there were returns on that gable or not. But neither of us really look at the photos much, we invent a whole lot of what is on the canvas, or at least simplify it. Then he said something that made me think, he said....when I am working in the studio

 I AM TRYING TO FIGURE OUT

 WHAT THIS PAINTING NEEDS!

What I think he meant was that when you have a photo, you have lots of information to draw on, but when you work without looking at it, you get a different result. Rather than transcribing from your photo when you look at the painting,you are asking yourself not what goes here, but what does this painting need? The idea is that in the studio you add art, not necessarily information. The answer might come from the rest of the picture. Perhaps the painting needs more weight here, or this line needs to lead this way. Sometimes it is about the pattern of shapes or the harmony of colours. Often it is the "treatment" that you are applying to the subject. When my paintings fail (I have quit painting on panels because they are too hard to throw away) it is seldom because they lack for information, but because they are matter of fact

What your painting should look like might come from your emotional intent, such as "I want this painting to be joyous" or" I want this picture to be lugubrious and sodden". You can put feeling into a painting, but it will come from within you, not from your reference photos.

But most importantly, when you are working out of your head and not from a reference the decisions you make are more individual. It will give your paintings a personal look. What you make up, eliminate or invent will be unique to you in a way that photo references are not. This will give your paintings more style. They will look more like they were done by you, rather than anyone else.

.Information is not art! The artist selects from the myriad bristling details and uses those which advance his intent and discards those which do not. That selection is called simplification, or sometimes breadth. We forget the little details and remember more about how the place made us feel. My best paintings often look remembered, rather than observed. Using photos often leads the artist to an accounting of the particulars of a scene and away from invention. Invention is personal. That which you invent in your paintings will give you your own unique style, that which you transcribe will be comparatively neutral. So most of the time I am in the studio, I don't use references at all. Now and then I will check some element in my photos but the general look, effect and handling come from me and not my references.

I should probably qualify all of this a bit by saying that this is grad-level stuff. I have taught a whole lot of workshops and spent most of my time in them drawing attention to the appearance of nature before the flailing student.The first skill that must be acquired is the ability to represent the scene before you with accurate drawing and color.You absolutely must get that DOWN, gotta have that! It is also important to make lots of outdoor studies in order to build a mental library of  what nature looks like and how different conditions and lighting effect that.

 I suggest you work on paintings in the studio out of your head as much as possible. Your paintings will be more individual and expressive. This is the key to making paintings that are uniquely your own. You want the viewer to look at your work and recognize in it your "style". That will come from putting yourself into your paintings, when they look at them, there you are!



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOP

There is only a single workshop on the docket at this time. It will be in Kent, Connecticut on August 23 through the 25th. and is sponsored by the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury. Kent was one of those old impressionist art colonies from the late 19th to early 20th century. This is the southern end of the Berkshires, I guess, and is in what is called the Connecticut hill country I have researched the paintings that were made there and it looks to be a promising place to paint. One of my favorite Metcalfs was painted on a visit to Kent. 

Here is the link to sign up

Variety of shapes in a John Carlson painting

Well, here I am again. Thanks for reading my blog. I have been writing less frequently recently. Mostly now, I do it to remind people it is all still here. I have written over a thousand posts and said most of what I wanted to say. Still I can add a little , and elaborate upon or refine some things I have taught. I have been doing this for years now, funny how the time does slip away. There is a whole art education to be found in this blog, please search back and study the myriad posts here. If you  start at the beginning and read forward, the blog is cumulative and progresses from basic to advanced, well, it wanders a bit too. Maybe you will find the woman giving birth to rabbits or the suggestions for neck tattoos. The wrenching, action packed tale of Dirk Van Asserts is a gripping page turner, ripped whining from the pages of real life and is sure to please the whimpering feckless naif, the mincing poseurs with their quivering soft abdomens, and the crudely failed, and casually avaricious  alike.

One of the important keys to designing successful landscapes is variety of shape. That is, every shape should be unique and different from its neighbor. Making repeated shapes gives a static and unnaturally symmetrical look in a landscape. Making ordinary, unconsidered shapes makes average paintings. Dynamic shapes make exciting paintings!

  People have a tendency to make repetitive shapes. It takes a deliberate effort not to. I was with a student the other day who had used repeated circular forms, all about the size of a silver dollar arrayed across his canvas. As soon as I pointed them out to him he blanched, and saw them immediately. If you don't have someone to point out the repetitive "pet" shapes in your paintings, a mirror will help you find them. But checking to see that your shapes are interesting and varied will do a lot to improve your paintings. You have to be "on" this always, watching for relapses into ordinary default and uninspired shape-making.

I make a point of "policing" my shapes. That is. I stop and carefully examine what I have done, looking for areas the same size, and repeated intervals. Intervals are the spaces in between things, sometimes they are called negative shapes.

The painting above, by John Carlson is a great example of beautifully designed negative shapes. Look at the spaces between the trees, do you see how each one is different from the rest?

I  have outlined the spaces in Photoshop and upped the contrast to make to them show. Each space occupies a different sized area. Look at how different they are, each one is of an obviously different volume,  some are flat bottomed against the snow and some end in points at their bottoms. Notice that the pointy bottomed Ones end at different levels in the painting, they don't all uniformly run to the base of the trees   I have marked these Delta and Lambda on the figure below.

 The rhythmic springy curves are arrayed in pairs, each side of the "box" formed by the negative space relates to the line across from it.

Here is the center section of the painting with some letters and arrows. Look at the two lines marked B, see how they relate to one another. The two lines have a dialogue. They are not observed separately, but work together like the sides of an arch. The same happens with the two lines marked A.

This painting, I think, was done in the studio. But if it had been observed, the artist didn't observe one side of the "negative box" and then the other as separate  entities He used the two of them to bracket the shape in between.

Look at the top of the picture, there are five spaces or apertures between the trees. Each distance or interval is markedly different from the next, no two distances are the same. This is the sort of thing that is designed into a painting rather than observed. The artist has "bent" nature to get more expressive and unique shapes. This gives a more exciting look and holds the viewers attention a little longer. It takes more time for the viewer to process all of these unusual and varied shapes than it would repeated and similar shapes. The longer you hold that viewer the better., Your painting may hang in a gallery with a hundred other pictures. You want to transfix  that viewer as long as possible, and charm them, if you can, before they move on to that next artwork.

Looking at the positive shapes for a minute, look at how the trees are deliberately grouped. Their are three units of trees here, Number 1 which consists of two trees, number 2, a single tree, and number 3 of three or four trees. Each of these groups has a different number of trees in it and a different "weight" and volume. That's three big shapes and each of those is markedly different from the others. This is great variety of shape.

I like to show Carlson's work because he so clearly designed his shapes but below is an Inness, doing the same thing. See the intervals and the variety in those three trees on the right? they are all about the same width, but they are each a unique height and carry branches that distinguish them and make each of them individual. This makes the Carlsons seem a little heavy handed and obvious in their design, so subtle is Inness. Notice how the right hand pair of trees rhythmically complement each other. The same swaying curve appears in both, albeit at different heights.There is a correspondence between the two sets of lines there.The lower half of the middle tree relates to the tree to it's right, the upper half  relates to the upper half of the tree to it's left. This is  visual poetry.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOPS

 I am teaching a three day workshop in Cranford, New Jersey in a couple of weeks. The workshop is now about half full and I have space if you want to come. This is part of a plein air event called "Paint the Town". As usual I will be running long, sometimes twelve hour days, we will meet for breakfast, work all day till the light fails, and then go out to dinner. At dinner I lecture on design from my computer screen, wave my arms and draw diagrams and incomprehensible glyphs on napkins.
I get a lot into a three day workshop, as much as I can, I push real hard.

 I can save you years of screwing around and promise you will leave with new ideas that will help you improve your painting. All levels of ability are welcome. I particularly enjoy helping those students who are trying to get across that line from strong amateur to professional.
 Here is the link for that.

Some thoughts on Isaac Levitan

 A reader sent me  some pictures by Isaac Levitan  (1860 1900) and asked me if I would comment on them. Levitan was a Russian painter who specialized in the landscape. Over the last decade or so there has been a  growing appreciation of the Russian painters in America. Prior to that, the only one I knew much about was Ivan Shiskin, who I only knew from obscure books printed in Russian.

The painting above "A day in  June" was made in 1895.  Despite this academic background this picture shows, at least to me, the influence of the impressionists. I don't know if this was painted outside, but it has that look. Like many of the "academic" painters of that era he learned from the discoveries of Monet and the French impressionists. Much has been made of the rejection of the impressionist artists by the academic painters of the era, but that is only part of the story. Some of the academics rejected forever the impressionist ideas, but many did not, and within a generation almost all of the academics had added impressionist working methods to both their work and their teaching. Many became hybrids of the two schools of thought. There was too much good and useful there to be ignored. The French impressionists complained " they shoot us, but then they go through our pockets"

When first I examined the painting above I was perplexed by its' design. I didn't seem to have much organization and the strong lines leading diagonally into the picture seemed to lead the eye to .....nothing in particular. I knew the thing worked but I couldn't see quite how. Here was my initial idea of its' design.

But, as I studied it longer I began to suspect how the thing worked. It was a vortex, a circular design. Below is an indication of that.

 

A Vortex design creates a circular trail about the canvas for the viewer to follow. Levitan has concealed the device particularly well. He has also used that odd straight cloud in the center of the sky that conceals his means. At first glance it seemed so isolated and quirky, but it is a segment of the vortex, as is the sky incursion into the line of trees to the right and the trunks of the birches. The iridescent and beautiful flowers sprinkled across the fore ground puzzled me for a while too. But as I examined them I found they too had directional signals buried in them. Below is a diagram

showing that.

Levitan concealed his design carefully, so that initially the painting appears to have the unedited naturalism that nature presents to the plein air painter. But a careful arrangement is concealed beneath the "random" look of the painting.

 

 This painting "At the Lake" is very different form the one above. It looked at first glance like a luminist painting done in naturalistic color to me. Like the luminist painters, for instance Fitz H. Lane or Sanford Gifford, it has stillness and contemplative quiet. Below is a luminist painting by Sanford Gifford.

Below I have drawn some explanatory hot pink lines on the Levitan

The "leads" in the painting carry the viewer about the painting in a "Z" but unlike a luminist painting, the leading lines are more rhythmic then in a painting of the generation before. See how many of the lines are in arches?  Those sectioned lines swoop in waves through the foreground and out into the distance in repeating parabolic curves. The boats in the foreground show the use of repeating arched lines. Note also the downward arch of the distant pines and hill leading down to the waterline. The nets at the foreground left are also scalloped across their bottom in decorative rhythm. Like in the painting above, Levitan gives the initial impression of the the random and truthful appearance of nature, but conceals beneath that veneer an artful geometric skeleton.

Levitans' allocation of space is not unusual but I will point it out. Artists try to allocate their lights and darks in paintings into an artistic, but unequal balance. Levitan has given 2/3 of the space to his lights and 1/3 to the darks. The same area covered by both would have made a static design. He has then accented those darks with some small lights. The darks and the lights are arrayed into two large and clearly unequal portions rather than scattered all over the canvas.

 

Here is our painting again, unaltered. I wanted to point out something about the color. Note Levitans depiction of the light. Rather than getting his light effect from radically different values, although his lights are a slightly higher value,  he does it through color temperature shifts. His shadows are cool and his lights are warm. I suspect he did this to avoid chopping up his landmass with too many differing values and preventing it from being read as a single large shape. That and it looks cool. The whole painting is keyed higher ( painted in a lighter value scheme) than a typical academic landscape of the preceding era, also an adaptation of impressionist methods by Levitan.

He holds back his darks for accents within his shadows, like in the overturned boat in the foreground. That gives a luminosity and the appearance of soft luminescence to his shadow areas. Those dark accents decrease in size as they fall away from the foreground and into the distance.

I remarked above how at first glance the painting looked like a luminist painting. But here is a closeup showing another crucial difference. This painting has handling. Luminist painters concealed the hand of the artist. Their paintings had an enameled look devoid of brushwork. This painting however, has brushstrokes and impressionist variety of separately stated  color notes within the forms. That is particularly observable in the roofs of the 19th century trailer park and the blue (how impressionist is that?) shadows in the distant trees. There are no transparent brown shadows in this picture as one would expect to find in the work of an academic landscapist of a generation before.The handling in the water is impressionist as well, with its "wiggly" brushstrokes instead of transparent downward dragged brushstrokes that would have been in a more academic type of painting.

Here for comparison is our Levitan (painted in 1893) and then below, is a little section of a Thomas Moran from 1864. I am comparing an American painter with a Russian, and I have no idea whether Levitan knew anything about Moran, he might well have not, although Moran was shown in international exhibitions. I show them for contrast in intent and handling and not because the two are historically related, they are not.

The Moran contains a zillion tiny carefully painted details, the Levitan is broadly seen and painted. There is a sophistication in the Levitan treatment that the Moran is without. Levitan has suppressed the detail and given a simpler and more artistic treatment to his subject. The Moran ( I do love Moran....but) is full of bristling  detail that makes the picture a conglomerate of separately observed parts. The Levitan presents itself as a one single unified picture. The Moran seems a little primitive next to it, a little naive. It was this fault in the work of the Hudson river school painters, who were essentially landscaping pre-Raphaelites to fall quickly from favor after a generations time of glory. Oddly, Moran survived this crash, but most did not. With the rise of the Barbizon school, the tonalist movement, and later impressionism, the careful Hudson river school rendering fell sharply out of favor.

The myriad thousands of carefully observed, insistent and hectoring details made their paintings fascinating when you stick your nose in them, but less artistic when viewed in toto. For all of the effort made by the earlier generation of painters to capture every jot and tittle of nature, the Levitan is far more natural and convincing. This attention to endless detail tended to make the earlier 19th century artists into view painters, delineators of particular, grand,  and relentlessly specific views. The broader way of seeing that came later made sentiment and the mood in painting more their subject. Levitan and his generation often needed only a simple field and some trees as in "A day in  June" to make a picture. For them it was more about emotion and evocation than about presenting a careful and awe inspiring transcription of some scenic view.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have several workshops in the offing. For instance there is;

SNOWCAMP MINNESOTA!

This workshop will take place March 9 through the 11th near between St. Paul and Stillwater. When last I taught in Minnesota several in my class asked if I would do a Minnesota snowcamp, so here it is. I have made it as late in the year as is possible to get a little milder weather and I hope there is still snow. I think there will be, but if there isn't, I will still hold the workshop but I will call it Stickcamp.

This will be a transplanted version of the yearly Snowcamp I do in New Hampshires' White Mountains. I will teach the methods of painting snow including color vibration and the planar structure in snow and the landscape itself. I intend to emphasize the idea of form in the landscape rather than a purely visual approach. I will show how to express the convex outward bulging forms that express the structural "bones" of the landscape. I think this gets ignored by some plein air painters today and taught less than it ought be. I will also show you how I build the color structure of the snow using color laid over color to assemble the structure of the snow.

There is no need to stay an any particular lodging to attend the workshop and it will be an easy commute out from Minneapolis or St. Paul. The price of the three day workshop will be three hundred dollars. As per usual with my workshops I run a twelve to thirteen hour day and try to cram as much into the three days we have as possible. I make workshops as intense as I possibly can. We will meet for breakfast and then move to the painting site and work until dusk. Then we will meet for dinner and I haul out my computer and lecture on design and other aspects of landscape painting while we await our meal. If you live in, or can visit the area I hope you will come. To sign up, click here!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will also be teaching in Lafayette, Louisiana from March 22nd to the 24th . You can contact Maria Randolph to sign up or get more information.

 mtrandol@gmail.com  cell phone (337) 257-0678,

 Here is the information copied from their website;

Don’t Tarry! Sign Up Now for Stapleton Kearns Plein Air Workshop – Mar 22-24

Makes no difference what kind of painting media you prefer. If you have ever been interested in plein air (in the open air) painting, please don’t miss this unique opportunity to take a plein air workshop in style with all the amenities of home—and dinner—and most importantly, with a fantastic internationally renowned artist and teacher. Sign up today!

LAFAYETTE ART ASSOCIATION PRESENTS

PLEIN AIR WORKSHOP

With Renowned Landscape Artist

STAPLETON KEARNS

MARCH 22-24, 2013

This Lafayette Art Association sponsored ‘outdoors’ plein air workshop will feature the talented teaching professional from New Hampshire, Stapleton Kearns.

Stapleton is a professional landscape painter who will fill your workshop experience with valuable techniques, ideas, and methods based on a classical impressionist approach.

This excellent workshop is open to all media areas, not just oil painting, because primary plein air painting rules concerning colors, value, lighting, etc., are essentially the same. This is not only an oil painter’s plein air workshop, although that is Stapleton’s chosen media, and all media painters are welcome to learn and enjoy!

The 3-day workshop will be conducted on privately-owned land in Cankton, LA which is approximately a 20 minute drive from downtown Lafayette. There is a cabin on the property with bathroom and kitchen facilities.

So don’t tarry and let this opportunity slip away, There are only a few seats still open so call now and register to get your name on this select list!

Click for more info… Contact the Lafayette Art Association, Lafayette, LA at 337-269-0363 

Controlling M-Faces

Above is a Sargent watercolor of Venice. I have written before about unity of effect and subordination of detail to the larger masses in which they are contained. In this post I want to show what happens if you don't control your emphasis. To do this I have messed up a few fine paintings using Photoshop.

Where you put your emphasis is desperately important in picturemaking. You might have intended to say "building with some windows", but instead said "building with some windows" by not subordinating the windows to the facade of the structure. Below is the same Sargent with the windows and details in the building exaggerated.

 

The building is no longer subordinated to the Gondolas in the foreground. It fights with them now for our attention . The picture no longer clearly tells you where to look, it is beginning to have two subjects rather than one, the boats. In the upper version the gondolas are dominant, in the lower they no longer are. This is a matter of emphasis. Just as in a stage play there is a star or lead role and there are supporting actors, if one of the supporting actors gets self important and begins blocking or outshining the lead he has to be chided, if not eviscerated by the director.

You as a picture maker are the director and it is important to keep the actors on your stage in check, lest they steal the show from your lead and distract the audience from the story that you want to tell. 

IF EVERYTHING IN A PAINTING IS OF EQUAL IMPORTANCE, THEN NOTHING IS IMPORTANT!

When making a design it is usually a mistake to give everything an equal emphasis, although it might be good in a blueprint or a schematic drawing. Part of a design is deciding what is important and what is not, what is the dominant, and what needs to be subordinated to that. Often this is about keeping your masses "big". That is, not chopping up every shape into an assemblage of the smaller shapes within it.

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

 Above is an Edward Seago, I know I post a lot of his paintings but he is a great hero to me.  Below is the painting again, after my tender ministrations.

I have overemphasized the detail in the buildings behind the pointy feet children. It throws the whole thing out of whack.  Seago  subordinated the windows and doors beautifully to the larger and more important shape of the building itself. I have reversed the polarity, now the details are more  assertive than the larger form upon which they ride, and the unity of the painting has been destroyed. The building, formerly a supporting actor, has taken over the stage like a girl in the chorus line naked with a traffic cone on her head.

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

 Here is another Seago, and below is my damaged version.

I have exaggerated the windows in the ocher colored building on the left, and lightened the contrast in the group of boats at center. Now instead of quietly occupying that side of the painting, the building is too assertive. It is stealing the show from the boats which were the artist's intended focus in the painting. Now the boats lead you through the painting to the building.

Every element you put into a painting has to be appraised for it's importance. Ask yourself "is this object important or should it be subordinated to the whole, so what is important can shine?" Sometimes during a critique an artist will hold their hand up to block from their view a part of the painting. When they do that it is usually because some element  has been overstated and is interfering with either the balance or the unity of the painting. You only get one subject per picture, if you try to have two the picture will fail. It has a problem I call "one for each eye" There must be

 one dominant subject and the other forms must be subordinated to that.

How you set your emphasis is a matter of your personal choice, and when you make choices you are making art. There are cameras that are made to be left strapped to trees in the forest to shoot pictures of passing wildlife. When the unwitting animal steps into the machines vision, it takes a picture. The machine is not an artist. It makes an image, but no decisions as to what that image will look like. Transcription is only accounting. Noise is not music. Like form, or arrangement of shapes, emphasis is a design decision and a human imposition of selective order onto nature. Nature in itself is not art, art is the product of a human decision about how to portray nature. This explains entirely why so little truly great art is currently being produced by the deceased.

Simplified designs in iconic paintings

Winslow Homer, Fog Warning   The Museum of Fine Arts Boston

I write often about design. Design is what I call that part of  painting which is neither color or drawing. I prefer the word "design" to the word "composition" because it implies deliberate  and thoughtful human action.

YOU MAY CROP TO, OR FIND A COMPOSITION, BUT YOU MUST  ARRANGE TO DESIGN!

 I have been playing with some images in my Photoshop program that divides everything into either a black or a white pixel. Looking at paintings that way is rather like squinting at them, which is something I routinely do. Like squinting it eliminates all the detail and reduces them to their basic value structure. Simplification is the root of design. There is a concept in Japanese art called notan

 ( I will smugly let you assume I know my way around Japanese art). Arthur Wesley Dow 1857 –1922 who was from Ipswich, Massachusetts wrote an influential book published in 1912. In it he discusses Notan. That is the use of  simplified arrangement of the dark and light in an image. The book is a classic text on the subject of design in painting.

  Below is Winslow Homers painting above reduced down to only two values.

Not all   fine paintings are as reduced as these but I think many iconic paintings are. They have a big and very spare design. Like the ability  of great orators to succinctly say something with a few words that stays on your mind, these paintings make a bold and unforgettable statement without many complicated and busy shapes. Brevity  is  eloquent. The Homer has a  big dark of a somewhat bizarre shape (the pointed shapes of those clouds is so strange!) accented by a slash of light, the fish.  The clouds look eerie as befits a dangerous development in the weather for the Gloucesterman in the small boat. Those spiky shapes say threat. Homer has played the lights and darks in the water close enough together that it remains one big shape. Had he pushed the lights and the darks there further apart he would have destroyed the unity in the big shape of the water. The sea remains a single shape decorated with variation rather than a  collection of different and separate shapes. Subordinating value changes within an area preserves the large shapes and yet still allows for the variations necessary to convey the drawing.

 

Here is a favorite Rembrandt of mine, A Woman Bathing, from the National Gallery in London. This is likely Hendrickje Stoffels his housekeeper who became Rembrandts lover and common law wife. That was a scandal that sorely affected his standing in Amsterdam.

Below is  the reduced version.

It is a big, somewhat complicated, but single light shape against a dark field. Not much question as to where we are supposed to look and what the subject is here. There is enormous bulk and solidity in this figure. It has weight and mass. The picture also has the earthy humanity for which  Rembrandt is famous. The impossibly rich darks contrast brilliantly with smash of light on the simple gown she raises to a nearly indecent height. Only the shadow of its hem hides her underneathies from our prurient gaze.

 

Here is Bougereau's Nymphs and Satyrs belonging to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.  I understand this is now on loan to the Metropolitan in New York. I have always felt they had a weaker Bougereau than was fitting given the superlative quality of their collection and their place as the premier American museum.

This painting reduces down to a diagonally placed oval anchored at one end by the  female wonderful figure that counterbalances the struggling satyr.This oval is an intricate rhythmic collection of shapes silhouetted against the darkness of it's background Evidently, according to myth Satyrs fear water.

 

Above is a Dean Cornwell, a great American illustrator, and  below is it's reduced version.

This design is a loop of intricate shapes, dark against a light background. Notice that each of these shapes is totally different from each other. That gives it the maximum visual interest, as opposed  to  repetitive quickly read too similar forms. All of those darks are  linked by  the way. You can  place your finger on it anywhere and trace its entire circumference without lifting your exploring digit. If you divide the picture at the center the weight of the two halves balances. The largest most bizarre  and alluring dark shapes surround the man in the chair at the middle left, as he is the main actor in this drama and Cornwell wanted to make sure you knew that.

 © The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery 

Here is Edward Seago again, a superb designer. This thing could be a  Franz Kline it is so abstract.This is a powerful and arresting design, brutal and like the harsh world of the arctic  where it was painted. The bold and aggressive design carries the story as much as the rendering of the objects.There must be only about three different values in this painting. This thing is boiled down to it's essentials also.

Again, all of the darks are linked. Notice the white negative spaces, they  are each different in area, giving maximum variety to their shapes.

Here is The Hundred Guilder Print by Rembrandt You can squint at this and see it's simple arrangement also. It is really a big dark field with a pointed wedge of light extended into it. Within that doorstop shape is a triangle at whose apex is the figure of Christ.

Here is an early 20th century etching by Edward Blashfield (1848-1936)  an English artist. The Breaking up of the Agamemnon. This is an example of the use of bold shapes in design. There was a great revival of etching in that era and in the better works of that day were great examples of design. I have studied them to learn their moves. I guess I should do a post on etchings of that period. Perhaps I already have, I forget, I have written so much.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have scheduled another Snowcamp, a winter painting workshop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire . Held at a rambling late 19th century inn.  The Sunset Hill in Franconia, New Hampshire which is very romantic and old timey.The workshop will be held January 26 through 28.  I have done this for a few years now and it is my favorite workshop of the year. The inn is the perfect place to do a class and the scenery is fabulous. The White mountains are spread before the inn like a movie set. 

 

It might be cold but the inn is right at our backs as we work so we can run inside by the fire and drink more coffee if it becomes too much. The inn has helped me do workshops for years now. They even provide us with our own dining room, where we can eat together around a big round table every night.  I do a talk  on art and design while our dinner is prepared by the inn's chef. If you are interested, please click here.

Diagonally receding perspective in a landscape

I generally don't show a lot of my own paintings on this blog. But today I will do that. I have a design lesson that I can teach using it. This is a new painting that will be in the New England Landscapes show at the Old Lyme Art Association.

• The painting is a 26 by 30, so it is by most peoples plein air standards, rather large. I  don't make my paintings by enlarging small studies in the studio, the paintings I exhibit are started on location, and then finished in the studio.
• I  painted almost all of this one outside in one shot. I worked on it in the studio for only a few hours.
• Virtually the entire painting was done using a number 10 flat, a big brush. That brush was made of nylon and came out of a package of 10 that cost 9.99.
• In the studio I only worked on the top and bottom of the painting. I invented the shadow shapes on the left and leveled out the foreground  field which actually  dropped down to the right. That dip that I removed gave a sagging line across the front of the painting and took the viewer downward and out of the painting at the right hand corner, rather than allowing the observer  to follow the line of bushes back to the  barn.
• In the illustration  below  you can see that I put the foreground shadows  into the lower left hand corner and the line of the bushes  is over on the right hand  side of the passage. We look out from the shadows on the lower left, across to the line of bushes over on the right. This  was not observed but INSTALLED into the image.

• I have arranged , that is, forced the elements of the landscape into a diagonal recession back into the picture plane. The nearest planes are on the left and as they go away from the viewer they are behind the first plane and to the right. The receding planes are "stacked obliquely into the picture plane.

 

•   The  receding elements of the landscape are not stacked horizontally back into space, and progressing like a frieze, level with the bottom of the canvas from one side of the painting to the other. The elements are arranged  to progress diagonally back into the painting starting in the lower left. Each of the elements of the painting are arranged on diagonal lines, so that as they recede into space they also march obliquely up and to the right.
• I  did this because it is more dynamic than the somewhat static arrangement based on receding horizontal lines.
• But it also does another thing, it embeds the perspective more deeply in the drawing. Each layer of the scene is more visibly behind the layer in front of it. I sure hope what I mean is explained by the planar boxes drawn on the illustration above, when I explain this in person  I am able to make chopping movements with my hands and wiggle my eyebrows up  and down.

•  I did the same thing in  the sky, see how the clouds recede backwards into space diagonally as well.

 Above is an illustration of the planar boxes as they would be arranged receding not as diagonals but one behind another parallel to the bottom of  the image.

That wasn't easy to explain, I hope you caught that!

Mystery

One of the qualities a fine painting might have is mystery. Using soft edges and or close values an artist can hint at what is in his picture rather than describe it fully. Painters do this a lot, some more and some less. The painting above by Soren Emil Carlson has a lot of mystery. Primitive painting, like colonial folk portraiture virtually never does. Here is an example of that, from the Fruitlands museum in Harvard Massachusetts.

Everything in this portrait is carefully delineated without much selection.The entire image is presented with the same amount of clarity. This is common in primitive paintings and is one of the things that the academic or traditional training of a painter diminishes. Here is a grandma Moses.

I suppose in passing I will mention that.....................................

CHARM IS THE ONE QUALITY THAT WILL REDEEM A PAINTING BEARING ANY OTHER FAULT

Charming though it may be, the Grandma Moses was painted with no thought for lost and found passages or mystery. There is no awareness of varied hardness or softness of edges.

Below is an Inness that has lots of mystery.

Below is a detail from the Inness above. Notice all of the blur and suggestion in the hillside and distance. There is a kind of magic in a passage like this. We see it and know what it is but the representation is poetic, not a laundry list of unnecessary details. Poetry is evocative not matter of fact.

I find paintings with no mystery sort of annoying. All of that bristling detail gets tiresome and over insistent. Below is a Richard Estes with no mysterious passages at all.

And below an Alex Katz;

Whats the deal with Alex Katz anyway? And below, a Gilbert Stuart self portrait.