Leave out anything that distracts from your composition. This is a luxury that painters enjoy over photographers. Once your eye finds the focal point of your painting, everything else must be subsumed. I try to go with my first impression and start to work rapidly on the elements that made me want to paint my subject in the first place. Some painters plan with all sorts of conventional composition formulas in mind, but I find this stultifying. When I was a professor, I couldn't lecture from notes. If I did so, my class became deadly boring. I needed a free exchange of ideas to discover the truth of my lecture. And new truths undoubtedly. When I go out to paint, I try to turn off my thinking processes and paint according to the vigor of my first impression. Pierre Bonnard said something like a painting well composed is already half painted. I know for certain that no amount of gorgeous color can make up for a poor composition. My compositions come about by the same dialogue that directed my former lectures.
When I am preparing to paint, I will walk about until something directs me to question its insistence that we communicate. Once I am in from of this bully or seductress, whichever you prefer, I try to feel what it so compelling. This is my composition because my focal point has announced itself. We enter into dialogue. My task becomes to make its surroundings cede to it, this marvel that wants to reveal itself to me. Paul Cezanne talks about painters being able to discover things never before seen in Nature. This intimate dialogue between the painter and his subject is unique, pulsating with life if he allows his own nature to respond fully in an idiosyncratic way.
If you have difficulty finding a focal point, try thinking of your painting as an experiment in memory. Look intently. Close your eyes. Try to recall with your eyes closed what was your strongest impression. Do this twice more and three is the charm. Then, open your eyes and try to paint with vigor your first impressions without stopping to think. Hold nothing back. Make mistakes. That's why we have palette knives--to scrape off the effluvia of enthusiasm.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Green, the Devil's Color
Green, the Devil's Favorite Color
When you first try to paint out of doors, you’re apt to be overwhelmed by the life buzzing around your ears. If it is summer, the season when most of us first venture out, and you live in a verdant spot like Delaware, you’re apt to feel awash in green. A notion of the demonic nature of ‘green’ has been around since the Middle Ages, when poets and preachers often made this association. Think of all the demons you’ve seen represented in green. Any painter will tell you green is the devil’s color because it is the hardest to control. It also seems to leave the most permanent stain on any article of clothing.
You quickly learn that painters have used many methods to exorcise the evil spirit of green. After you return from your first adventure in the field, you will undoubtedly begin pouring over all the art reproductions you have at hand to see what other painters have done with this seemingly ubiquitous color. That all the leaves on your first tree are not the same color and certainly not a color that comes directly out of one of your paint tubes is a real revelation. When you begin to study paintings, you see that the leaves on trees may not even be green, even in the most faithfully representational landscapes. In the traditional landscape of Italian or Dutch Masters, you might see blue trees in the distance. Among the Impressionists, you will see myriad blues, greens, and yellows, even hints of pink or lavender, as they reach for luminescence. Among the Expressionists, you may see red looping boldly on the side of the tree closest to sunlight. In fact, you will understand that even if you are trying to copy exactly the scene before your eyes, you cannot paint all this verdure merely as shades of green.
Green was my first preoccupation when painting 'en plein air' and like St. Anthony, I rolled round the floor of the Universe while green howled mightily and tried to snatch my soul. But if your painting doesn't reflect the epic madness of this struggle, it will be a sad lifeless affair. Now when I go out, I'm prepared to use any weapon in my arsenal to slay the demon, especially various shades of red. The most useful bit of instruction I was ever told was that red and green mixed, make the darkest black, even darker than the black that comes pure from the tube. If you want to make green dance to your tune, slap some red beneath it, let it harass it around the edges, bleed through, or drip a gaping wound.
But, of course, green is not the only problem that the 'plein air' painter must address. The next hardest thing is what to put in and what to leave out.
When you first try to paint out of doors, you’re apt to be overwhelmed by the life buzzing around your ears. If it is summer, the season when most of us first venture out, and you live in a verdant spot like Delaware, you’re apt to feel awash in green. A notion of the demonic nature of ‘green’ has been around since the Middle Ages, when poets and preachers often made this association. Think of all the demons you’ve seen represented in green. Any painter will tell you green is the devil’s color because it is the hardest to control. It also seems to leave the most permanent stain on any article of clothing.
You quickly learn that painters have used many methods to exorcise the evil spirit of green. After you return from your first adventure in the field, you will undoubtedly begin pouring over all the art reproductions you have at hand to see what other painters have done with this seemingly ubiquitous color. That all the leaves on your first tree are not the same color and certainly not a color that comes directly out of one of your paint tubes is a real revelation. When you begin to study paintings, you see that the leaves on trees may not even be green, even in the most faithfully representational landscapes. In the traditional landscape of Italian or Dutch Masters, you might see blue trees in the distance. Among the Impressionists, you will see myriad blues, greens, and yellows, even hints of pink or lavender, as they reach for luminescence. Among the Expressionists, you may see red looping boldly on the side of the tree closest to sunlight. In fact, you will understand that even if you are trying to copy exactly the scene before your eyes, you cannot paint all this verdure merely as shades of green.
Green was my first preoccupation when painting 'en plein air' and like St. Anthony, I rolled round the floor of the Universe while green howled mightily and tried to snatch my soul. But if your painting doesn't reflect the epic madness of this struggle, it will be a sad lifeless affair. Now when I go out, I'm prepared to use any weapon in my arsenal to slay the demon, especially various shades of red. The most useful bit of instruction I was ever told was that red and green mixed, make the darkest black, even darker than the black that comes pure from the tube. If you want to make green dance to your tune, slap some red beneath it, let it harass it around the edges, bleed through, or drip a gaping wound.
But, of course, green is not the only problem that the 'plein air' painter must address. The next hardest thing is what to put in and what to leave out.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Francis Bacon on Painting
To paint is not to illustrate reality, but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation.--Francis Bacon, interview 1985
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