Revisiting a Plein Aire Painting

The plein air experience is wonderful and invigorating in so many ways, but while each painting is a learning experience, the results are not always inspiring.  I have a studio full of really bad, boring plein air paintings.  Most are simply set aside and forgotten, some are removed from the stretchers and discarded but in a few cases, I'll put one back on the easel to see if I can 'save' it.  I've had occasional success with this "repainting", usually by introducing some new, clean colors, pushing the background back a little more and sharpening detail.  Recently I pulled a painting done at Bodega Bay last year during a trip with Howard Rees and artist friends.  The picture was pretty dull and my inclination was to try my usual repairs.  I wanted to put in some clearer, cleaner lights on the pathway and for some reason I decided to lay in the color with my palette knife.  I've done this on a few other paintings, but to a pretty limited extent.  As I began, I was pleased with the strong clean color and I found myself moving to other areas of the painting.  I decided to emphasize the rough craggy nature of the rock on the left and the knife strokes did that well, while at the same time introducing some streaks of color that added interest and broke up the monotony.  In the trees, I found the knife to be perfect in creating some 'accidents' of light and color that added a lot of interest and energy particularly in the trucks.  Finally the knife work in the foreground created texture and interesting color splashes.  Overall, I felt that the original painting had been transformed from a dull and ordinary oil into something that almost sparkles.  I want to try palette knife painting again soon.  I love the clean colors and sharp edges that are possible.

Books on painting that changed everything for me.

Figure Painting in Watercolor (and Portrait Painting in Watercolor), Charles Reid.  Portrait Painting in Watercolor
I still have both these books.  I wrote my name on the inside covers, but didn't put a date.  My guess is that it was late 1976 when I bought them.  Up to that point, I had never painted nor watched another artist paint.  I had grown up reading the wonderful Walter Foster series of art books on drawing and sketching and all my amateurish efforts where in some form of drawing media.  Charles Reid changed that for me.  His first book, Figure Painting in Watercolor, showed me not only the world of watercolor, but gave me the basics of painting.  I followed his step by step instructions and began my first lessons of art with a brush.  Although after a year or two of watercolor painting, including acceptance in one juried show and a one man show at the Mansion Inn, I set my brushes aside for the next 30 years, I never forgot Reid's love of color and bold expression. 

Portraits From Life in 29 Steps, Howard Sanden.
Portraits from Life in 29 Steps

In 2002, I decided to pick up my brushes once again, and in that year, I found this book.  The first time I paged through the book, I was struck immediately by Sanden's obvious abilities as a portrait painter, but even more, I was enchanted with the bold crispness of his alla prima paintings and demonstrations. I so envy the confidence, technical skill, and freedom that such paintings radiate. (And that boldness was a reminder of Reid's work as well.)  I was also struck at once by the seeming contradictions through out the book. Could someone who looks like a doctor, paints in a tie and lab coat in a pristine, lavishly furnished studio really produce such dramatically rendered work? And then there are the 29 steps mentioned in the title. Twenty nine? Not thirty? Not twenty? And finally, the author's "Pro Mix" paint system seemed a little like a paint-by-number approach. But very soon, I discovered it was something else entirely. 

Mr. Sanden has made me understand the importance of discipline in what I do as an artist. His insistence in following a routine (the 29 steps) and using predicable, tested color combinations (his pro mix system) are part of this lesson. Through out the book, he hammers on the concept, "...marshal all your concentration, alertness, and energy so that every stroke of the brush becomes part of the finished statement....concentrate all you effort upon getting it right the first time..." It took awhile and a number of readings before I begin to truely understand, but now my portraits are dramatically improved because of this approach.

As I paint...and especially as I fail ....I think of Mr. Sanden's emphasis on discipline in the painting process and I know why I missed the mark.  It is a constant struggle -the urge to dabble and fuss is powerful - but I constantly remind myself of his direct and controlled process and my paintings are better and better.

This is a recent portrait, done from a photograph.  It's oil on linen mounted on 16 x 12 hardboard.  My experience with this painting reminded me once again of Sanden's book.  I did just about everything wrong from the start, and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to "fix" things and find a likeness.  I simply forgot his admonition to "concentrate all your effort to get it right the first time."   I think I need to get the book out and re-read it once again.

Books I've Found Worthwhile

In another post on this blog, I talked about two books that changed the way I paint.  I'll leave those two very special books in a post of their own while I talk about other books I find or have found along the way in this post. 

I've just received "Henry Yan's Figure Drawing, Techniques and Tips."  Essentially this is a book on life drawing, primarily in charcoal.  It is 9" x 12" format, entirely in black and white on very high quality glossy paper.  Mr. Yan's work, done in two to 30 minute (or slightly longer) sessions, is exquiste: loose, strong and at times almost impressionistic.  Although I am a fairly accomplished 'draftsman' -  developed during many years in the architectural design field - I have never had any formal art training where charcoal drawing is a fundamental study.  This book has inspired me to try some charcoal drawing at my next life drawing sessions.  Mr. Yan's book can be found at Amazon.  Here's a link, if you are interested.....
Henry Yan's Figure Drawing (Techniques and Tips)

The Angel of Bodie: A Pioneer Story

GhostTowns have always drawn me in.  Frozen in time - even the decay seems to have stopped - they are lonely and full of the debris of lives past.  Who lived here?  What happened to them?  When did the last person leave this place?  The Southwest is dotted with them if you look carefully.  Its vast expanses hide them around this mountain, down this pitted dirt road, out across that prarie.  They are there, waiting. 

This is Bodie, California near the Nevada border.  It's a State Park now so the looting has stopped and the decay has been 'arrested', but it's not flooded with visitors.  Its too far down a dirt road ( nine miles, I think) for many, and the weather is often uninviting.  My Bodie scene is rearranged, but all the pieces I included are there waiting in the quiet, covered in dust in the windy hot summers and blanketed in snow in the bitter winters.  The Angel actually faces the town rather than away from it, and the town is a bit bigger than this too.  I've left out the mine building that dominates the scene.  But this is Bodie as I think of it.  And the Angel tells the story of Bodie as it must have been.  Hard, unforgiving, empty.

Oil on 30"x40" Canvas.

Western Art - Barrel Riding

As in other Forums in WetCanvas, In the Southwestern Art Forum has a monthly challenge.  For December, it's a rodeo theme.  I've always liked so-called Western Art, even though some of the work that falls under this genre can be romanticized pablum.  However, once you get by that, there's no doubt that there are some astonishing artists working in Western Art.  My friend Howard Rees was pretty successful at it at one time as well.  I've always been strongly drawn to the southwest, and the best of Western Art captures that timeless vastness that makes it so appealling. 

I decided to try the rodeo challenge.  The orginal photograph is nicely done, and taken at such a high shutter speed that the movement is totally frozen.  In fact, I think the main challenge will be to put bac in some of the energy and movement that the camera has stripped away.  I'm not quite sure how to do that, though. 

Here's my initial block-in.  It's done on a 16 x 20 linen panel in oil.  The source photo was 8x10, so I gridded it off and copied it to a 16x20 sheet of tracing paper.  I then used conte crayon softened with OMS to make a "carbon" paper which I then taped to the panel and traced.  Next I blocked in the general shapes and values with very thin oil.  I'll let that set up for a couple of days.  Then I can begin restating lights and darks, adding and refining details. 

A second short session.  Some of the forms are beginning to emerge.  Stronger contrasts in the horses body help.  The background eludes me and I've avoided working on it.  I may leave it just as is....

Never one to leave well enough alone, I worked on the painting for a couple more short sessions.  I tried to get some feeling of mass and of the violent motion of the subject.  I'm not sure I did, but I'm not unhappy with the painting.  In the end, I did decide to leave the background alone.  I actually liked the watercolor look of it. 

Sacramento Fine Arts Center is having an "Animal House" juried show for animal themed works.  Since this is the only painting I have that fits that description, I decided at the last minute to find a frame and enter.  Just got word (2/3/10) that the painting was accepted into the show.  No awards, but accepted.

Paint What You See.....

On my painting journey, I've been exposed to so many wonderful pieces of advice that it would take weeks to list them all....even if it were possible to do so. Every topic imaginable has popped up somewhere in my “studies”: in a book, in a magazine, from a workshop instructor, from a fellow artist struggling along beside me, and in many more sources to numerous to list. Of course, not all of the advice has been right for me (it's important to be selective), nor has it all been good or worthwhile. (One well known artist even recommended a particular brand of paper towel in his book. Of all the challenges facing the emerging artist, the dilemma of what brand of paper towel to use never struck me as something to spend a lot of time agonizing over.) But on the whole, I paint the way I do today because of the advice I received along the way. I continue to seek it out wherever I can, and I hope that continues for the rest of my painting life.

But there are two pieces of advice that stand out. It isn't that they are more important than the others, but simply that they meant something to me when I came across them and they still do. I don't think I do a painting today where one or both thoughts don't cross my mind:

Paint what you see

and

Paint the light

"Paint what you see." I come across this advice fairly often in books and sometimes in workshops. I recall once reading Harley Brown, the pastel artist of renown, comment to the effect that it was not necessary for an artist to make exhaustive studies of anatomy, but rather to simply paint what he or she sees. I think his comment was that he didn't need to know about the physical makeup of a horse to paint one....he simply painted what he saw. That makes sense to me.

Painting what you see seems so obvious, and yet it is so complicated and challenging. All of us have learned how to draw something, particularly if we had an early interest in art. From our early years, we learned that a tree could be represented by drawing a green lollipop on a brown stick. Add a couple of red dots, and you had an apple tree! Later we learned how to draw an eye (probably incorrectly) and lips. And to this day I watch emerging artists in workshops look carefully at the model and then look down and draw Cupid’s bow lips, or on plein air trips gaze long and intensely at the landscape then look down and paint a green lollipop. It is so obvious - to everyone but the artist - that they are painting what they think they should see - not what they see. Naturally, the examples are not usually quite that extreme, but the reality is not all that different: they are painting a sort of memorized shorthand instead of what's there in front of them. And so, every time I paint, I remind myself to try, with all my concentration, to paint EXACTLY what I see. Of course, I rarely succeed completely, but I get close sometimes.

And this is where the second piece of advice comes in: "Paint the Light." Maybe this is the more important of the two recommendations because if you really do this, you also are more likely to paint what you see. When I first read this advice (I think it was David Leffel, but I'm not sure.  My apologies! ) it struck me as a little zen-like. I mean, come on!  I'm struggling with what color to use and I'm supposed to "paint the light?" Oh, please! But over time, I've started to understand. If you learn to see something not as a flower pot or as a nose, but as a shape revealed by light and shadow, and if you paint that light and shadow rather that paint your shorthand for a flower pot or nose, you will be astonished to discover that you have painted exactly what you see in front of you. Painting the light is a wonderful discovery. Forms no longer challenge you to replicate them, you don't have to. You just paint how the light rakes across them, how it casts shadows that are sometimes hard edged, sometimes soft edged, you paint areas where light turns to shadow, where darkness turns darker, where bright light is reflected into the absence of light. And when you paint this accurately, you paint just what your eye sees.....LIGHT! Believe it or not, I have actually had the experience of painting something without knowing it, only to discover it in my painting later. This has happened more than once when, painting from a photograph, I carefully painted the light in a particular area, and then only later actually realized I had painted a ‘thing’ into the picture without even knowing it. That’s absolutely true.  I actually painted something and didn't know I was painting it.  To me it is the proof of the “Paint the Light” advice. You don’t even need to know what it is you are painting, if you just paint the light that ‘creates’ it.  Think about that in relation to painting portraits, and you've found one of the keys to finding a likeness.

This detail from Angel of Bodie was done very much with the idea of "paint the light".  I thought there were several challenges in painting this monument: make the angel look like a statue and not just a white figure: make the lettering readable without simply painting it on: and overall, make the lettering and the 'rocks' that form the base to appear to have been chipped from stone.  To do that, I tried very conciously not to paint forms - not to paint letters or rocks - but to paint the effect of the light raking across the monument.  I paid close attention to hard edges versus soft, to difused light versus cast shadow, but really not thinking about those as components, but rather just as conditions of light at that particular point.  I think it worked within the limits of my own abilities.

A Portrait a day.....

Well, OK, not one a day.  Maybe one a week?  Well, let's say at least two a month.  Resources are plentiful even if they aren't all my own.  The WetCanvas site has several on-going monthly "challenges", including some opportunities to copy the Masters.

Here's my entry in the November Monthly Portrait Challenge at the WetCanvas Portraiture forum.

It's oil on 9" x 12" canvas panel.  About two to three hours.


Oil on canvas panel, acrylic gesso.  9x12