Cinderella Greys

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything large on the easel, and so I’m excited to have this new painting under way, which hopefully will figure nicely into a show scheduled in November.

It began a few weeks back with a fast, last minute sort-of watercolor sketch when the light unexpectedly illuminated the grove of Ironwoods on the right.

light effect/composition sketch 5 x 7″ watercolor

I find it profitable to do the first round of composing in watercolor…I experience the effect and get it under my skin quickly,  and if it doesn’t work, I see it without a big commitment of time, plus I have a sketch for the archives and to pull out down the road when hunting for some fresh inspiration.  I think I use sketchbooks and watercolor somewhat in the same way that a lot of artists have used the camera, which I’m still unable to get enthused over.

Since this was promising, my next step was to return to the location and work up this small oil painting  to see what the possibilities were.

sketch, 8 x 10″ oil

That went well enough and the final painting, shown below,  was begun last week, this image showing the second session’s development

untitled, 20 x 36″ oil on panel

Now that I’m on to the final piece, there’s so much to respond to in this subject…the constant fluctuations of light and color at this beach keep me moving all over the painting, trying to allow the light effect to remain the principal thing;  how it passes across the face of the cliffs and the very real inner illumination it provides the grove of trees.  Textures are everywhere in the lights and halftones, many opportunities to be pretty rugged with the paint itself.  I hope to get some real surface charm into this painting.  But these strange greys are the thing that are making this painting work.

Mysterious, evasive, improbable combinations of cool blues and warm reds that would be unattractive if isolated from the sun-drenched passages that they are joined to, but that perfectly support them when unified.  Maybe I should regard them as the Cinderalla colors of painting…I believe I enjoy dwelling over them more than the obvious, luscious colorful sections.

Two Ideas

Two principals I’ve come to understand over the last few years:

There are no unattractive color combinations in nature.

Crazy thought maybe, but I think it’s true.  I cannot recall seeing any naturally occurring combinations of color in nature that were not somehow harmonious and appealing, though the individual component colors may not be, and often aren’t.

The novice seeks to improve his paintings by adding details. The artist does so by simplifying and refining relationships.

I put that thought out for my students, many (if not most) who are struggling with learning to work with the great generalities in their paintings first.  It finally came to me while laying in a landscape painting and took me a good long while to get it into two sentences, and it probably could use refining.  But it’s true.

Any thoughts?

 

Watercolor/Figure workshop October 6-7, Honolulu Museum School

I’m putting together a workshop on the figure in watercolor for October 6-7.  A powerpoint presentation on watercolor painters and exceptional examples of indicating the figure (my love for Rembrandt’s drawings will be publicly outed!) along with a series of good exercises I’ve developed with and without the live model will round out the weekend. I think it will be very helpful, a game -changer for some, and I’m looking forward to it.

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We needed to come up with an image for promoting the workshop, so I spent an afternoon coming up with this little piece out of my head, which I always find to be a great challenge and a practice that I advocate strongly.   There were a lot of options for subjects, but I eventually decided upon representing the artist being publicly critiqued by a passing dilettante.

This  choice gave me a crowd to show simple background figures, a developed central male and female pairing, the man being rather Boho and the other rather stylish, some color,  and physical gestures/body language to work with.  And most painters can identify with the cheerful, helpful novice that happens to drop by and interrupt everything at the worst possible moment.

The artist looks uncomfortably and unintentionally like myself, so I suppose that shapely woman might be my dear wife Iris, except she won’t go near a bicycle.  Anyway, it’s loose, and it’s done.

The Deer Chaser, Andrea, and Breakthrough Moments

I spent one summer as a worker/apprentice in an authentic Japanese Garden. Japanese Gardens are traditionally equipped with a clever gadget called a deer chaser.  You may have seen one, but often you hear one before you see it. It’s a two-foot tube of hollow bamboo mounted like a see-saw over a stone basin that slowly collects dripping water through the uppermost end.  When the bamboo fills and the tipping point is reached, it empties itself suddenly, coming back to rest with a loud noise, loud enough to startle any deer zeroing-in on the prize azaleas in the garden.

That’s a nice example of incrementalism, and I think you will agree with me that incrementalism is largely how life is lived, and how almost all good change within life is arrived at.

No matter what is going on, I’ve learned that it’s wise and good to consider each day as a one-of-a-kind privilege. Within that day one will have unexpected opportunities for incremental change, and I don’t wish to lose out on them. In reality we each have a limit on how long we have, and no one among us knows the expiration date stamped on our future.

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This little portrait piece was another one of those opportunities yesterday.  It was our last evening with Andrea, the model, and I had been working with students the first three sessions and hadn’t put in any painting time myself with her.  Because I’d done a watercolor demonstration outdoors that morning,  I untypically had that setup with me when I arrived at the portrait class, and I took advantage of that. Even though watercolor is not a great portrait medium, she’s a beautiful model and life is short.  I wanted to take something away that day, make my little mark somehow, improve my skills, connect with fleeting opportunity.

I like the phrase “Nulla Dies Sine Linea”…never a day without a line. I keep that phrase in mind. It’s even the official motto of the Art Student’s League of New York, and a good choice. It says that no matter what else it may be, art is also a matter of our will.

I enjoy “breakthrough” moments as much as anyone when they happen. But I think  they are the result of an incremental process of tiny movements, culminating in a tipping point that only appears to be spontaneous if one hasn’t been watching carefully.

Just keep painting…how many times I say that to myself as the world encourages and compels each of us not to (which is another absolute truth to be reckoned with). I sometimes think that the measure of the artist’s day may simply be how much time was spent thoughtfully with pencil or brush in hand.

Memory work

Some recent work on a piece done from memory/imagination. It’s not where I want it to be quite yet, but getting closer.

It’s interesting to simply pull the image out of your mind’s eye sometimes.

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Untitled, Oil on panel, 12 x 20″.

4 x 6″ study, moonlight

Put some time in on this, searching for the right shapes, colors, and values.  It’s not fixed in stone, but moves me closer to finding what I’m after, and it’s nice to be indoors in the afternoons.  I’ve been in Waimanalo on the beach during the mornings, but that’s a story for another post.

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New moonlight studies

I was excited to take myself on a field trip Saturday, May 5, to head to the high cliffs nearby and take a shot at the spectacular full moon that was promised.

I loaded up my oil painting gear and my small pastel kit and was at the Lanai Lookout on our Eastern shore by about 4:30 PM. Folks were already assembled to watch the much-anticipated moonrise over the ocean, and so I was fortunate to grab a parking spot, and from there hiked with my gear about a quarter mile across the old basalt flows to a high point that I’d decided in advance was a good place to work from.

From previous posts, you may know that I try to define my mission in advance. By this I mean that I decide whether I’m going sketching (looking for a general effect), making a study (fact-finding), or doing a finished painting.  Since this was a sketching trip, I brought small oil primed panels along, as well as pastels, hoping to capture colors that would be of help later. Because of the brevity of the sunsets here in Hawai’i, I already realized that seizing any shapes, except the simplest ones, would be more than I should expect.

As the wind was quite strong on my location, I opted for oil, and I didn’t get anything terribly fancy, but was pleased with having caught the general color mood.  I worked as hard as I could, loving every second of it.  The sketch (9 x 12″) was done with Liquin as a medium, which I rarely use outdoors in Hawai’i, but it helped in this case.  This small piece will serve as an important reminder of the color I experienced for anything I do later in the studio.  DSC_0002

By the time this oil sketch was done, it was too dark for more painting, so I hiked out, loaded up my gear and backtracked in my car to another favorite piece of shoreline about a mile back.  For perhaps the next hour, I sat on the shoreline making mental notes of the rocks, the action of the ocean against them, and the effect of the light, which gradually become much cooler as the evening turned to night.  Drawing was hopeless, but I felt that I had formed a pretty strong mental picture of the values and colors.

The following evening, I returned in the very late afternoon with my pastel sketchbook to make some quick sketches, such as this one. moon sketchbk

I didn’t have the moonlit effect in quite the same manner as the previous night, but had already fixed in my mind what the effect was, and began the following morning to produce this pastel study, 14 x 18″, in-studio from my sketches and memory/imagination.

pastelmoon

This should serve me pretty well if I decide to work up a more involved and larger  painting from the experience.  Right now, I’m able to envision a large pastel or something along the 30 x 40″ size in oil.

Early Morning

Began this yesterday AM, at about 7:00, and am now a couple hours into it.

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untitled 12 x 16″ oil

It’s surprisingly one of the most constantly transitioning subjects I’ve ever painted, which is odd because all of the shapes are as stable as they come. One would imagine I might claim that about the ocean, which certainly doesn’t sit still, but this mountain takes the prize.  It’s the light and color that is absolutely schiz-o  from one minute to the next.

Anyway, I find it as challenging as can be to find the color notes. Because of the difficulty, I again find myself experimenting with a method of organizing my color mixing…creating a large middle tone for for an area I wish to paint (say the mountain) and bring touches of color around this base that can be dragged into it (scrambled a bit); light from above the mixture,  dark from below the mixture, warm from the right side, cool from the left.  It’s a game, but The Idea is to be systematic in adjusting the values and temperatures, which I find gets me using more paint (a good thing for me), and hopefully lends a more decisive and cleaner look to the painting.

This is the idea, if you can make any sense of it:

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The painting surface is one of my beloved homemade lead-primed panels, and it’s perfect for the kind of painting I’m doing, which is tiled-on notes with straight paint over a warm wash.

Can’t wait for tomorrow A.M. to get cracking on this again.

Something in sanguine

DSC_0001 Sanguine seems to be very sympathetic to the rendering of human form, and so many of my favorite figure drawings are executed in it that I enjoy putting it to use from time to time.

Kohinoor manufactures the sanguine crayon I used on this, which I place in a brass holder and sharpen with a beautician’s callous remover.  It’s got a slightly waxy binder, barely noticeable, and  works fine for what I want to do.

My first step is to lay down a light tone with broad and easy strokes, which I rub loosely into the paper (a warm straw-colored Canson Mi-Teintes, the non-golfball-textured side)  with either a bit of soft, unprimed linen canvas or  paper towel, and then develop the drawing working from the outside-in, getting the big outer shape of the head established as best as possible, and gradually bringing the entire drawing along from there.

The longer I can resist adding the features of the face, just working with the underlying forms ( kind of like the look of a nylon stocking over a bandit’s head!) the better.  My own taste is for the drawing to emerge somewhat loosely and casually from the paper, not suffered over to the point of being hard on the eyes of the beholder, if possible. I’ve seen drawings that have that sense of growing out of the page effortlessly, somewhat rarely I admit, and I’d like to get that sensibility into my drawings. I’ve used the term “casual elegance” to try and describe it, but that’s not sufficient.

If I ever get it, I won’t need to explain it. We’ll both know I think.

In the darks, moistening the tip of the crayon slightly gives a richer note.  Removing highlights with a kneaded eraser is the last step. This pose was a little more than an hour, and is carried about as far as I wish to go with it as far as rendering.  I always want to get a better expression though. Any fatigue of the model should never show.