01 Oct 2010
I think I’ll let this demo video by Austin Texas painter Carol Maine do all the talking today. She’s a wonderful artist and (I’ve heard) painting instructor.
The painting is titled Healthy Competition.
She’s been doing a small painting every day since October 5th, 2006 – sharing them on her blog and selling them on e-Bay. She finds and brings out the poetic possibilities of a still life like there’s no tomorrow.
Cogent painting instruction to be had in absorbing the watercolors of Wendy Artin, an American artist living in Rome. “She’s very unusual because she doesn’t sketch her subject first,” says Adele Chatfiled-Taylor, president of the American Academy of Rome in this engrossing 2002 video.
Wendy Artin, Arts and Minds, documentary film by Julie Kucaj of Bravo Television, Canada 2002
“She watches what the light creates in her composition and she paints that effect,” Chatfield continues. “In other words, She doesn’t even paint the figure. She paints the effect of the light on the figure.”
Or to put it another way, Wendy paints shadows to reveal the form in the light. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and getting the effect is hard, Artin admits in her interview.
She made the most of a privileged upbringing, working ceaselessly at her drawing. “From candle-making to calligraphy, music dance and art, my parents put us in all the classes, bann4ed the television, took us abroad, taped up our drawings,” she writes on the articles page in her website.
“By junior high I was drawing live models in neighborhood living rooms and statues in the Museum of Fine Arts with Andy Serbick; in high school the highlight of my week was the muscular overlays in Anatomy with Joe Capacetti at the Museum School; I stayed awake late nights drawing.”
She earned her B.A. Magna Cum Laude in Fine Arts and French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and her MFA in Painting, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
For a couple of years she studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. She’s painted in Guatemala, Mexico, London and Rome.
Last year, spectacular shows in Paris and Boston featured Artin’s watercolor studies of the classical architecture – walls, statuary, columns, bas relief sculpture, etc, — of ancient Rome. In these exhibits, her confident flourish and attention to detail, even minutae evoke the bravura of John Singer Sargent watercolors —without Sargent’s rainbow of hues because she’s working with monochromatic palette.
Still with blacks, gray and sepia tones and palpable textures, she adds color to her classical subjects and their theme of timeless, man-made beauty.
These plein-air works are abstract celebrations of sharp focus photographic precision and the paint and paper (which she uses for the light.) It’s a heady mix.
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Mark Mitchell also hosts the How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator blog.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin painted during an exuberant time for the arts in France. Painting instruction was the official function of the Royal Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which then championed the lavish “history paintings” of artists like David and Ingres.
At the other end of the artificiality spectrum – the frivolous, bubbly, vaguely erotic and sometimes melancholic pictures of Rococo painters like Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau.
And then, somewhere in the bourgeoise middle, alone, far away from fantasy, in the kitchen was Chardin.
Nothing glamorous, sybaritic or pleasure-seeking about him. But charisma? Yes — in his timeless oils and pastels. His work included still lifes ( fruit, game game animals and birds, kitchen utensils) and “portraits” (children, mothers, cooks, scullery maids, Mme. Chardin and sometimes himself — themes not usually found in le grande hysterical paintings or the Rococo bonbons.
A self taught artist, Chardin was still accepted into the Royal Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture where he held leadership positions for pretty much the whole of his long life. Although his style seems more at home in 19th and 20th century realism than in this oddly swooning, enchanted era of French art, his contemporaries “got” his honest vision and superior technique. They liked how he sculpted form in the light with d thick, piled brushstrokes alternating with thin, glowing glazes.
And not just the Academy, but critics (who called him “le magicien”) and many collectors in the expanding new middle class. Even the aristocracy noticed the attention Chardin lavished on the plainest objects and surfaces. King Louis XV himself was a fan.
It’s a comfort to know how the last century of the Old Regime approved of Chardin and his humble scenes that were “simple, even stark” (to borrow adjectives from Wikipedia.)
The more prosaic and everyday the theme, the happier Chardin seemed to be with it.
He was like the Parisian expression of the Zen Buddhist principle, Wabi Sabi.
His work exerted a pull on later, more modern painters such Henri Matisse. Edouard Manet, and Paul Cezanne, who were mesmerized by what they (held to be) the abstract nature of Chardin’s compositions.
About 200 paintings are known to exist — many of them replicas of one another, which Chardin apparently didn’t mind doing.
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Mark Mitchell also hosts the blogs Painting Instruction Central and How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator.
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31 Aug 2010
Learning anything involves a certain amount of thrashing about – it’s as true for taking salsa dance lessons as it is for submitting yourself to painting instruction.
Before you can daub in that “happy cloud” to borrow from the Bob Ross vernacular, you have to weep and gnash your teeth a bit. But then you can improvise.
Aurora, Illinois painter Lisa Gloria flies through a floral still life in this time-lapse video. It’s good to remember how present moment forward action drives the activity of painting.
I remember feeling flummoxed trying to paint a still life in a painting class one time. The oil paints and I were not playing well together.
It was one of the first classes in an eight week course– and decades since I’d wrestled with oils in college. Then as now, I was lost in contemplation of the task that confronted me. Instructors seemed determined to “hold something back” on process.
My work, banal and boring, taunted me from its easel perch. I knew I must have missed some essential introductory step on navigating the canvas surface with these gloppy opaque paints. How was one to recreate all of the visual information of that arrangement with this crude, stinky media?
The instructor even shrugged at me at some point, as if he was reading my troubled mind.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said ignobly (it seemed to me then.) “You either get it or you don’t.” So now I was the abject student of a taciturn Zen master.
The Koan was simply not revealing itself and he was unable to give much, if any, of it away. I would have to experience the “crash through” by myself.
How I labored to put in my correct shapes and fill them with the right colors! Surely the task was not supposed to feel this mechanical or burdensome.
One day I felt pushed forward by someone or something not in the room and I suddenly knew the right feeling for laying in the paint with palette knife and brush. (It’s a bit like playing with cake frosting.)
I could now enjoy the spontaneous ride, the riff, along with its accidents and I saw, if not light at the end of the tunnel, the possibility of some happy clouds in the sky.
The next painting was easier. I discovered the deliciously safety of painting darks into the scumbled burnt sienna ground, knowing that I could come back and sculpt in those mid-tones with lighter — as well as darker colors.
As classes continued, exercises turned into quiet celebrations of form and light.
Now, interestingly, the instructor felt more free to come around my easel and offer critiques and suggestions.
Dread and tedium had given way to engagement, just as the Chinese proverb reminds us: “What starts in boredom ends in fascination.”
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Mark Mitchell also hosts the How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator blog.
To learn a secret about how to draw anything better, click here.
28 Aug 2010
To learn to paint pictures, don’t study nature — study paintings. That was the strange bit of painting instruction advice offered up once by Impressionist painter Jean-Auguste Renoir .
I don’t have the exact quote, but he believed that painters could learn more from
wandering in the galleries and museums than they could in the fields and forests.
It seems counter-intuitive. Though nature influences a picture, it’s just one influence. The others are the design elements and principles, which certainly have their origins in nature but have nothing to do with the literal subject of a scene.
In this video watercolor master Frank Webb talks more of values, layers and ”the mother wash” than he does about the boats and beach.
If we define painting as creating an experience, a visual experience of life in a two dimensional space, how “realistic” must this experience be?
The answer to that lives within a wide range –,from the plein-air work of the Toronto based group, Painter’s Drift, who tackle the wild landscapes wherever their river rafts take them, to the artificial vignettes of 18th century French Rococo painter Francoise Boucher. Bourcher, whose work had its own kind of bubbly perfection said he he had no interest in painting from nature because it was “trop verte et mal eclairee” (too green and badly lit.)
Whatever low regard he had for the outdoors, Boucher painted “real” enough, providing enough “nature” for us to recognize his subjects and scenes.
But, like the Impressionists and Frank Webb and so many other great painters, Boucher was mainly interested in the grammar of painting that would enable him to deliver the most enjoyable experience to the viewer. He knew he had to charm the viewer into co-creating the scene with him.
On that note Frank Webb demonstrates how he chops his picture space into dark, light and mid-tone patterns. He washes in shapes that overlap their subjects. He colors outside the lines to pull his pictures together. He turns “real” a bit on its head — for a more joyful and meaningful composition.
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Mark Mitchell also hosts the How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator blog.
To learn a secret about how to draw anything better, click here.
