Regruppeing

I received a couple of questions about my last Gruppe post so I thought I would talk about Emile a little more . Here a question;

"Was he thinking about this while painting in the field or do you think he did some reworking later in the studio? There is so much to consider while outdoors that it's tough enough to just get the picture on the canvas. Which brings up another question. Do you think he visited the same location on multiple days? Did he go back out on this One , or did he only go there one time? "

I don't think Gruppe took a painting out twice very often, if ever, at least not as a mature artist. He was an extremely prolific painter and everything I have seen looked to me as if it was done in on e shot. The upside of that is that he designed a lot of paintings and got good at that part of the puzzle. He also had LOTS of inventory which he sold like crazy at reasonable prices. The downside is that his oeuvre was extremely uneven. Emile made some really fine paintings, when he was good he was great. However there are a lot of Gruppes out there that are well.... a little undercooked.

A lot of Gruppes are in the 25 by 30 size range.He was a plein air painter even using the tightest definition. He was a plein air painter to a greater extent than almost any other artist I can think of. I don't think he reworked stuff in the studio at all.

One of the ways he made so many pictures was to return over and over to the same scene. The Baptist church in Rockport or some of the dock scenes in Gloucester were used for subject matter over and over, with varying results. On this page are more paintings of the same stand of birches as the one I posted the other night (that's shown below) Above is a grouping that I believe is probably the same place.

I was also asked whether Gruppe "keyed" the whole painting to the bases of those trees. And I think he probably did. The contrast there and the importance off those areas lead me to believe that he probably started there and used that area as his "punchline" In each of these paintings it seems as if that area is real important.

Here is another picture of what I believe to be the same birches from the other side. This time it's a gray day. But there is again the same emphasis on the bases of the birches and the contrast in value and or color temperature there.

Color temperature usage in an Emile Gruppe painting

Emile Gruppe, probably painted along the Lamoille river in Jefforsonville, Vermont

There are a number of things that almost all workshop students need help understanding. A common one is color temperature. This One can take some work to understand! Their paintings are frequently all of a neutral temperature. That is, they are not selectively making some colors warm and others cool. They often record the hues in front of them as best as they can, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Often they get the value correct (or nearly so), but seldom do they authoritatively state the temperature of the note.

The Gruppe above is a good example of an artist effectively managing his warms and cools. Gruppe has "pushed" the color in this picture. One of the ways he has done this is to characterize the temperature of his various colors. Look at the warm light in the shadows of those birches, and in some passages like the lower parts of the right hand tree has thrown a cool (pthalo) blue in there. He gets a lot of color variety doing that and the painting looks fresh and exciting.

At the top of the painting the cool blue mountains act as a counter point to the warm birches. We see the birches strongly relieved by both the value and the color temperature of those mountains. That strong contrast is dynamic and makes a 'sweet spot" that catches a our eye. He no doubt saw this to some extent, but most certainly he installed most of it, knowing that it would look good. Because......

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE FINE COLOR INTO A PAINTING, IT MUST BE INSTALLED!

Just like design, color that is intentional and deliberate will trump dutifully recorded color. The artist is a poet, not a journalist, or worse an accountant.

Outside in warm light, you can expect the lights to be warm and the shadows cool, with hot reflected lights. If the light is cool ( or you choose to make it that way to suit your artistic purpose) you can expect the lights to be cool and the shadows warm.

Gruppe has chosen to do it both ways in this picture. He may have been inspired by the blue of the sky bouncing into the shadows from the sky itself or perhaps the river. He has played that up to get zing into his color. That made the pictures color more exciting.

Several places in this picture Gruppe has deliberately relieved an object of one color temperature against another of a radically different color temperature.

Above is a detail from the Gruppe that shows him playing this game. At A he has placed the cool shadow of the birch against a hot note of the limpid and Oncorhunchus mykiss infested waters.
At B The cool note of the water meets a warm streak of light defining the edge of the tree. And at C the cool shadow is again strongly contrasted with the hot note in the water. Notice how Gruppe has also painted the thin branches at the top of the painting hot against the cool color of the sky.

Value contrast can give "punch" to a painting, but playing your warms and cools against one another can too. Oh -do- dah- day!

More Seago and minimalism

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com
Last night I wrote about Seagos use of very downplayed, restrained or "minimalist' color. Tonight I want to look at his shapes for the same thing. Making fine shapes is a root skill of design. Sago was a master of this in an era when that skill was common and highly prized. The fine arts arena was dominated by modern abstractionists who, like em or not, often understood well the making of fine shapes . But more importantly the great age of illustration was still going on, it wouldn't really die until the late 60's or so. Those guys really knew how to design and used fine shape making to get elegance, punch and appeal into their work. They had to design well, because their designs had to carry subjects like soap, girdles and kitchen ware that were not compelling images without some very creative arrangement.

While more interesting than a corset or cheese grater, this is still just a street scene and it would not be very interesting if it was presented in a matter of fact way. A straight photo of the scene would hardly draw our notice. Seago has "sold" us the picture with his dynamic treatment of it. The subject of the picture is his bold shapes and creative and expressive color.

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

As I have remarked before, that would make a dandy neck tattoo, maybe with some barbed wire and lightning bolts.

The shapes in the picture above are large, simplified almost to brutality and have great carrying power. Look at the right hand side of the picture. All of the buildings there are simplified into one big almost black shape. There are a few very subdued grey incursions back there, too subdued to break up the large forms, they are just enough to imply some variation in the structures back there. Then Seago hangs that white oval sign right on top of them. That's an attention grabber and an elegant exclamation point in the design of the painting.

Up in the right hand corner the roof top contains another passage made of the same elements, a big dark decorated by similarly reduced gray shapes.

The windows in the central white building are all different. No two are alike.If you squint at the picture you can see the pattern of darks formed by windows, dormers, shadows and lawn dart legged people. Seago is using a decorative pattern formed of deliberately unique and dissimilar shapes to grab our attention and then entertain our eye as we course through the painting examining them. There is a lot of variation for us to perceive and it holds us a long time as we examine them. That is one of the goals of great shapemaking, holding the viewers attention for as long as possible. Badly designed paintings are used up in an instant. We see all there is to see and move on on search of something more interesting. Seagos shapes are wild, unexpected, individual, and interesting above all.

Notice the pattern that Seago throws across the top of the painting with all of the differently shaped rectangular chimneys superimposed on the sky. Look at the negative shapes in the sky, the "lights". Again it might help to squint at them. Each shape of the bright sky is totally different from its brethren. they all have different areas (in the geometrical sense). There is a big One on the right, a small one in the middle, and a medium sized unit on the right. That's variety and Seago made that happen. He installed that! Every boundary of these shapes has a different angle and little chimney pots and the corners of dormers give even more variety and lace like crenelations to the edges of the shapes of the sky that shows through the apertures between those black chimneys.

Though there is a shadow across the foreground it merely decorates the larger shape of the road, not subdivides it into two smaller areas. He has kept the shape of the road BIG. Part of the skill of an accomplished designer is keeping shapes large rather than chopping them up. Variations within the large shapes are subordinated to the larger whole.

Gee, thats was not the easiest thing to describe! I hope you could follow all of that.

Minimalist color in a Seago

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


My friend Renee just posted a bunch of Seago paintings I don't guess I can link to a Facebook page because of the friend thing. I grabbed one, almost at random to write about. It is such a fine one!

Seagos are minimalist, they are from the same time as the stripped down architecture that followed the second world war. They are still traditional painting but they are spare, reduced and simplified to the essentials. They are a different possible take on minimalism. Tonight I will talk about his minimalist color.

Seagos color is reduced in this painting to almost black and white, the other colors are dull and earth colors. He uses very little chroma in any color. They are all desaturated. But they are beautiful in their subtle restraint. He used a simple palette that had earth colors and a chrome yellow (rather like a weak cadmium yellow) vermilion (a warm red somewhat like cadmium red but less strident, it is the color in the lips and cheeks of old portraits ) and viridian He has varied his color temperatures to make them interesting. Good color is not the number of different colors you can use, or their brightness or assertiveness. It is an intelligent arrangement founded on the way those colors relate to one another. The best pianist isn't necessarily the one who can pound the loudest.

Notice the cool color in the light of the house in the middle, the shadow under its eaves contrasts with that by it's warmth. All over this painting dull colors are enlivened by the play of warm and cool hues.

On the first floor of that building are two shops, one red and the other green. They are the most "colored"notes in the entire painting. In most paintings they would look dull and muddy. But every color looks the way it does only in the context of the other colors around it. These reds and greens are surrounded by grays and blacks. Dull as these two shop front notes are, they are gay in comparison to their surroundings. Probably each is partially knocked down by the admixture of the other. They fit together perfectly because grave as they are, the relate to one another.To their right is a third shop, or just a wall, that is made from a pattern of both notes from the other two. There is a progression from a dull red to a dull green to a combination of the two together. That didn't just happen, because as I have said before;

NOTHING GOOD GETS INTO A PICTURE BY ACCIDENT!

Seago made that happen, he decided to make that intelligent and beautiful arrangement because the progression across those tones would be appealing. Most of the viewers would know they liked that part of the painting but not know why. They didn't have to know why for it to work on them, any more than they would have to know what key a tune is in to like hearing it. But the musician who wrote the tune knew and chose that key to make his song "work".

Seago repeats the dull red in that Zamboni ( or whatever that shape is) parked on the sidewalk at the right. The buildings roof has those colors laced into it also. The cool notes in the light struck building at the center contain the green, and the building on the left s a gray containing the red note.The sky has the same dull red dull green pattern hidden there too.

The picture is a black and white warp into which is woven a weft of dull red and green. This is completely arbitrary, he installed those colors. I expect there were some colors actually there that inspired his caprice, but the color in this painting is decorative and not observed. He has made an arrangement of very quiet subtle colors that set one another off, embedded in a field of gray and black.

I think I could probably write more about minimalism in Segos work in my next post because it is in his shapes and design too.