*disclaimer* This post will only be interesting to you if you’ve tried to travel with your painting gear and/or like to paint outside.  Or are interested in that sort of thing.

Packing your painting kit for a trip away painting is never ‘easy’.  Generally speaking, easels are unwieldily, paint tubes heavy, things leak, and finished paintings can arrive scratched or damaged.  That said I’ve gotten used to it over the years, and come up with systems that work for me.  This year though, things have changed a bit- we have a 7-month old, and he requires a lot more gear than I do.  Traveling with a stroller and diaper bag puts things in perspective when you’re packing. So I needed to put a bit more thought into my kit this time.

We’ll be away for a month and I was able to bring with me my whole portable studio- paints, brushes, medium, palette knives, 24″ brushes, spill proof turp jar, rolled canvas, canvas panels, canvas pliers, canvas tacks, tripod easel, cigar box, palette/canvas lights.  Without overage fees.

About the easel first- If I don’t have the space to bring a box easel I use what is often called the Italian Field Easel.  It’s a steel tripod easel that is inexpensive, lightweight but very sturdy, and most importantly gets up to my eye level.  As long as you buy the steel version, these are very long-lasting easels, and have a sturdy middle portion from which you can hang your backpack or a bag of rocks from if it gets windy.  They make aluminum versions, I broke a new one 7 days into a 10 day painting trip in Spain years ago.  I always buy the steel one now.  The only steel one I’ve ever broken while painting was from thermal shock high in the alps.

Here’s a link to Blick – they’ve started making a version of the tripod I use.  I got one on sale the other day for 29 dollars.  You really can’t beat that.  It’s slightly lighter weight than the version by Richeson, but I’ve used the Richeson ones for years-  That’s probably the one I would recommend, but it weighs a pound or two more.  Either are slightly too large for my suitcase, so I cut the mast down an inch or two with a hacksaw to get it to fit.

I like the design of the pochade box/tripod systems I’ve seen, though to be honest, I don’t really like being limited by the tripod.  I paint standing most of the time- At my height, to get the painting up near eye level either the tripod mast or mounting starts to wobble.  It’s bearable but annoying, especially in the wind.  What I really dislike is that when you raise a pochade box on a tripod you raise the mixing area as well.  In short, what I want is to have my palette area near my hand, and painting near my eye.  I hate painting hunched over.  Makes sense, no?

For years, my smallest/lightest kit has been my cigar box setup- just a reinforced empty box of cigars that you can get for free from a tobacconist.  Someone figured out how to attach them to the tripod easel in the studio, and there it was, a cigar-box-easel setup that costs nearly nothing, and worked better than the very expensive pochade box I had just bought.  Marc has a nice in depth post about his on the blog, with pictures of how they attach to your easel or how it looks on your lap.  My friends and I all built them in the old studio in Florence, and they’re a great piece of kit as they are long lasting and only cost your time and the price of hinges and screws.  I built my first one in 2009 and it finally got half crushed during my trip to Russia last year.  Here it is:

As you can see above, my old box setup worked fine, but I never liked having such a small mixing area- even for small sketches.  Also (like the modern pochade kits), this limited how large I could work outside- besides the mixing area, the painting size maxed out at 16×20″/40x50cm.  That’s a good size, but I do paint larger than that outdoors at times.

Below is my new cigar box- its smaller than the old one, but has a much larger mixing area as both the box bottom and lid are used as a palette.

This is the whole new kit put together– the lights are the Mighty Bright Duet 2 lights, with 2 LEDs in each stem

Here’s the new box, hand for scale.  The tape covers the outside edge of my palette cups, which I cut a hole for and put through the box.

As you can see bottom left in the photo above, this box has a different mounting system- my friend Joe Altwer had them made, it affixes to the easel with a winged screw like the easel’s mounting brackets.

Closeup of Joe’s box mounting bracket glued and screwed into place

This new small box design leaves double the palette space for mixing and frees up a lot of space on the mast- it can hold 24×30″s as easily as as 8×10″s.  I really like Joe’s solution- super simple, and probably inspired by the trucks on his skateboard.  Here’s a link to a clip of Joe skateboarding (that is not Joe with his tongue out), and here is another link to Joe’s website.  I think he may end up selling similar boxes on his site at some point, I know he was selling his boxes in Florence last couple of years.  Write him an email and ask.

This is much more about finding a functional, lightweight kit that works for me than being frugal or anything else- and there are some beautiful lightweight kits on the market, they just don’t exactly measure up to what I want.  It is still worth mentioning though- this new box setup cost me in parts less than four dollars at home depot the other day, and maybe a couple hours of my time.

Some of the panels I brought with me this trip.

The other thing that weighs down your bags is your supports, of course.  To find a lighter solution, this fall I bought a used dry mounting press for making canvas panels.  Having your canvas mounted makes travel a lot easier – for years, I had been making them with LineCo acid free glue in the states or ph-neutral wood glue in Italy, but often you’d end up with bubbles or the canvas adhering the the table.  It’s not a perfect system.  Dry mounting canvas solves those problems- making them myself offers me a lot of options: I can mount to acid free Foamcoare or Gatorfoam if I need to pack light, and Aluminum DiBond if I need something that could survive a nuclear blast.   Some of the panels in the above picture are foam core or lightweight birch, and altogether that stack weighs much less than my gesso panels.  This system also quickly uses up all the spare odd shaped pieces of canvas around the studio and the panels I had laying around unprimed.

The only thing that I was concerned about was the amount of paint I was bringing and if anything was going to put me overweight it was those- also, I’ve had them take tubes before.  As usual, I got one of their notes stuffed in my bag and they ripped apart my bag of paint, though thankfully I haven’t found any paint on anything.  Yet.

Links to this sort of stuff-

This is a link to Vincent Giarrano’s cigar box pochade boxes.  Different than what I wanted, but very nice design/build.

Here is another link to someone making a modern pochade/tripod setup out of a cigar box.

This is a YouTube video on dry-mounting canvas.

BEVA 371 is the glue that restorers recommend for mounting canvas to rigid supports.  Make sure to get the 2.5mm glue, not the 1.0.

David Gluck and Kate Stone’s post about making mounted panels.  David was nice enough to answer a couple of questions about what size press to get last year.

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You may have heard, the Boston area is getting much more snow than usual this year.  The constant school closures, utter failure of MBTA service and occasional no-driving advisories from the Governor means people are just about overwhelmed with cabin fever this time of year.  We’ve had a ton of snow and just not a lot of blue skies.

It is winter though, so some of it’s to be expected.  Since moving back to New England, winter’s become probably my favorite season for painting outdoors, and to be honest, getting outside to do something is just a great way to keep your spirits up.   Painting keeps me looking forward to more snow rather than dreading it.

As I write this there is a current blizzard warning with potential for thundersnow and hurricane force winds, (edit- the thundersnow happened) so I thought this would be a nice moment to put down some of my thoughts about painting outdoors in the winter.  All of the winter paintings in this post are by painters I admire, things that people might find inspiring.

The above is by Frederick Mulhaupt (currently at Vose Galleries).  Very well recognized in his day, but he was more known for his port scenes, and I’ve always found beautiful his  jewel like frozen Gloucester Harbor paintings.   As you can see in the detail above, he was able to sneak a lot of delicate broken color into his snow, making the snow glimmer with light.  This is a point worth making- by actually spending the time outdoors, you begin to observe opalescent shifts in color that are imperceivable to a camera lens or even, really through a window.

Painting is difficult, and its a lot more difficult to paint if you are uncomfortable.  It’s taken me a few seasons, but I now paint very comfortably even in very cold weather.  Here are some thoughts on bits of gear and general advice for painting in the winter that’s made being outside bearable.

About Clothing-

Here’s the good news about painting in the cold- clothing these days can keep you very warm, and painting outside today you’re almost certainly going to be more comfortable  than artists painting outside at the beginning of the last century (fashion wise, note Fritz Thaulow’s fur lined jacket above-  pretty snazzy).  The ubiquitous synthetic moisture wicking long underwear these days is miles better than the cotton thermal stuff we wore when I was a kid.  Keeps you warmer and much less sweaty.

That said, unfortunately most winter ‘activewear’ is just that- clothing designed to go and be active in the snow- to ski, snowboard, hike, climb, whatever.  They are meant to be breathable, and for your body heat to rise as you wear them.  They are expressly not made to go stand still for hours and hours in the snow.  The good news is that there’s an outdoors activity that does basically the same thing as painters, standing still for hours on end in nature – hunters.  I’ve gotten a lot of good advice on gear at stores like Cabela’s or Reny’s up in Maine when I explain that I need stuff to keep me warm standing still : they get it.  Incidentally, Reny’s and Cabela’s are two of the cheapest, best quality stores for outdoors gear I’ve come across.

Here’s a list of what’s working for me.

• a Hibbard Mitten is helpful.  It’s just a heavy sock on your hand doubled over with a hole in it- that way you stick the brush through and can manipulate it with all your fingers. Here’s a post on Marc’s blog about the Hibbard Mitten.  Almost every older painter in New England talks about using them (Nelson White often does a Gammell impression “If you’re going to paint outside in the winter you mustn’t forget your Hibbard Mitten!”), though it’s written about very few places online.  The wool sock is a happy compromise for your hand-I can’t paint wearing gloves any more than a guitarist or pianist could play wearing them.  I will wear a glove on my left hand, and a hibbard mitten on my right when it’s cold.  That said, I work more expeditiously just painting with a bare hand when I can stand it, and that’s often what I do.

• You need good boots.  After your hands, your feet are the hardest thing to keep warm.  I’ve been using the Sorel Caribous, my feet are very warm with them all day.  Timberlands are not gonna cut it, you need something with a fleece or wool liner.  Unfortunately, they are huge as moon boots and near impossible to drive a standard transmission car wearing them.  But they keep your feet warm.

• I used to wear scarves, but they’re more trouble than they’re worth in the winter, the wind will blow your scarf across your palette, getting paint everywhere.   Now I use a tube shaped fleece neck warmer, which I can pull up over my face if it gets really cold.

• Good quality long underwear- I shelled out extra for the ‘cold weather’ rated Under Armour and they’re worth every penny.  They’re thicker than the common sort, and really do keep you warmer.

• Windproof pants.  I use some lined Columbia snowboard type pants, or flannel lined jeans if it’s not particularly wet out.  It’s great if they will tighten at the bottom and tuck into your boots.

• When your boots don’t keep your feet warm, a surface to stand on.  I’ve used a panel, cardboard, or even the floor mats from my car keep your feet insulated from the snow.  This can really keep the feeling in your feet for another hour, just by separating the bottom of your boots from the snow or ice.

•A good painting hat is key, I use a brimmed one with long earflaps that wrap around my chin.  Mine is similar to the one Aldro Hibbard is wearing in the photo below, but with longer brim and flaps.  I do not yet have a furry jacket, though I would love one.

The above is a small, quick study of Aldro Hibbard’s for a larger picture.  I had the good fortune to see it with the below painting at the Rockport Art Association a couple of years ago.  Unfortunately, one image is a bit oversaturated and the other sepia toned, but you get the idea somewhere between the two.

On Materials-

There’s an important rule to remember in the winter- as anyone that’s spent time in a Tuscan kitchen in the winter knows, oils eventually do freeze.  Painting at low temperatures, your paints will start to stiffen up noticeably, flowing more like wet sand or dirt than butter.  Logic would follow that you need to dip more often in your medium to get the paint to flow, but if you’re out all day, your oil can congeal.  This is a problem, especially if your canvas has the smallest amount of moisture on it, the paint just won’t stick to it.

Fortunately, your spirits do not freeze.  To keep the paint mobile I remember reading that painters would mix a drop or two of kerosene (not a spirit that we would use these days) into each blob of paint on their palette before going out, lowering the oil to pigment ratio.  I’ve tried it, but I find its easier to just keep the paint as is and use a much more diluted medium in the winter (less than one part oil to spirit) and often, I will paint with mineral spirit or turpentine alone.  At below freezing temps that will almost work like a medium normally does.  If I’m out all day, undiluted oil or my more viscous mediums thicken up until they are nearly useless.  Here’s some wisdom from Hibbard himself : “Having previously visited the spot and composed the picture mentally and memorized the impression it made on me as well as possible, I set up the easel… and during the first day make a layout on a large canvas. This is painted very thinly with plenty of turpentine, almost a watercolor technique with colors that approximate the probable final scheme”.  That way one can sketch rapidly, and layer thicker paint on once back in the studio.

It’s a good idea to keep a small pliers in your kit in the winter-  metal expands when it cools, and it can be really hard to twist a wing nut to close your easel leg at the end of the day.  I’ve learned this the hard way.

Isaac Levitan’s ‘March’ is one of the great examples of the variety of contrasts you see in the snow.

Willard Metcalf’s ‘Cornish Hills’

 

Ideally, in the winter I like to paint on a blue sky, clear day.  Not only is it a lot warmer to feel the sun, the patterns of light and shade on the snow create all of the dazzling effects of color in the images above.  As you can see, the snow is almost never pure white, but shifting shades of colorful greys.  Glare is a big issue on these bright, clear days- and not just for your eyes; the snow reflects intense amounts of light onto your canvas, making your colors appear far brighter in tone than they are.  It’s something to be aware of.

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I spent a few days teaching at the end of last month at The Florence Academy of Art’s branch in Gothenburg- one of the most comprehensive materials workshops I’ve done to date.  These students were particularly hungry for information, asking questions that kept us going into lunch or after class each of the three days.

As a student, one of the more immediately gratifying aspects of learning to paint was finding out more about the materials; it changed the way I looked at pictures.  To put it in simple terms, it gave me a heightened sensitivity to paint textures and canvas types, glazing, scumbling and scraping.  It’s stayed with me- now that I have far less time on hand to make my own materials, it’s still given me a better sense of what I want out of a tube of paint, how to deal with sinking in, or ‘simply’ how to fix a big hole in a painting (the holes I’ve fixed recently thankfully have not been on one of my own).  I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to study all this materials business in depth starting  years ago, and in turn it’s gratifying to share what I’ve learned with a group of hungry art students.

Schools like the FAA are intense.  There’s a lot of pressure on the students to produce work across the board at a very high level consistently; and I remember how much pressure I myself felt when getting to the end of a term.  I was happy to see the class well attended, full of students willing to get their hands dirty on their very last day of the trimester no less.

It was a lot of work; exhausting- both for jetlagged me and the students, and the students did literally get their hands dirty.

These days, traditional painting materials are an (unfortunately) overlooked aspect of a student’s education.  Part of this is because of the ubiquitousness of modern, mass-produced materials- why make gesso when you can buy something in a tub ready made that’s called gesso (the answer is that those two products have very little in common, and that traditional, homemade gesso is actually far easier to manipulate).  The other issue is that even at schools like the Florence Academy, where the founder (Daniel Graves) is implicit in the importance of learning to exert control over your materials during his technical lectures, time is limited.  People feel there just isn’t enough time to make paint yourself.

Much like how in learning to cook, your perspective about making materials changes with some practical experience.  Making your own food seems like a positively Sisyphean task until you’ve learned how to properly chop vegetables, organize your workspace and clean up as you go.  This is no different.

The truth is though, I’ve found that running this as a hands-on workshop to be the most effective way for the students to internalize the information, retaining it far better than lecturing and taking notes alone.  Also, as a perk, the students all get to go home with panels or canvases, handmade paints, and carefully cleaned linseed oil.  Everyone likes that part.

Below, I attach a rough outline of the material we covered over the course of the workshop.  Should give an idea of what one of my classes is like-  It was an huge amount of information-  the materials the students made in three days I made over the better part of a year when I was learning this stuff.

Day 1

I start with a long talk about why hand-made materials are relevant in our modern time.    We talk through the differences between the vegetable oils that are used by the oil painter, the way they behave differently based on their distinct characteristics.  Some discussion on pigment history and basic discussion of the desirable archival qualities of an oil painting.  Lecture is ~2 hours.

•I mull a small amount of yellow ocher and ultramarine blue to show the individual rheological characteristics of each pigment in oil

•We begin the process of ‘cleaning’ 2.5 liters Cold-Pressed Linseed oil

•Demonstration of how to make paint ‘feel different’- we make paint longer, shorter.  Discussion on ‘branding’ and common fillers used by modern paintmakers.

•Together, we began making Titanium White and Ultramarine Blue.  More talk on paint behavior, and how to stabilize pigments in oil so they don’t separate in the tube for storage.

•Demonstration of how to properly tube oil paints for storage

Here are students and faculty discussing the washing of the linseed oil

Above is one of our batches of Ultramarine Blue (commonly thought of as one of the trickier pigments to ‘grind’ by hand)

 

Day 2

This day’s morning discussion is focused on Supports- advantages of rigid vs. flexible supports whether linen/cotton/polyester/jute or panel.  Preparing paper for painting or drawing.  Discussion of metal supports, mounting canvas to board.  How to properly cook and test strength of rabbit skin glue.  Some discussion on mediums and varnishes.

•Continued group ‘cleaning’ of 2.5 liters Linseed Oil

•Cooking animal hide glue.  Discussion on the differences between natural hide glues and modern replacements

•Discussion of differences between different types of canvas/panel, when to use either type

•Demonstration of sizing Linen stretched on stretchers, sizing paper with glue or varnishes, and sizing wood panels

•Demonstration of mounting unprimed Linen to panel with size

•As a group, we begin cooking a batch of traditional gesso – discussion on the difference between traditional gesso and the acrylic stuff that is commonly called ‘gesso’ these days

•After demonstrating technique, the students begin applying their first coats of gesso to their panels

•Throughout the day, continued mulling of large batches of Titanium White and Ultramarine Blue, ~1kg each

our animal hide glue

Here I’m demonstrating mounting raw linen on stretcher bars

Mounting raw linen to panel

 Dry-mounting pre-primed (or painted) canvas to panel

Day 3

Shorter morning discussion on finishing our gesso panels and paint.  Some discussion on varnishes and mediums.  The students and I come up with a plan for their finished batch of

•Finishing ‘cleaning’ our batch of Linseed Oil

•The students do the final coats of gesso on their panels

•Demonstration of application of gesso ground on our mounted linen panel

•Making Oil Grounds – Application on our stretched canvas

•The students finish mulling our large batches of oil paint

•Demonstration of dry mounting primed linen to panel, mounting unstretched paintings to board

•Together we use the leftover gesso ground to make a gesso-oil-emulsion ground by emulsifying bodied linseed oil into our ground.  Demonstration of application of this semi-flexible ground on stretched canvas

Here’s a shot of us making our oil-emulsion gesso ground: emulsifying sun-thickened linseed oil into a half-congealed gesso ground

We made nearly 50 panels and canvases, around 15 tubes of ultramarine blue and the same of titanium white, 2.5 liters of carefully washed linseed oil, and plenty of leftover grounds and canvas.

If you’d be interested in having me come to teach a hands-on materials workshop at your school feel free to contact me using the form above.

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This coming Friday, April 24th, I have a show opening at Sloane Merrill Gallery here in Boston.  

It’ll be a mix of work on view-some local paintings of New England, a few of the snowscapes from this past winter, and a few paintings from Greece.  My commission of the Dalai Lama from last year will be borrowed back for the opening as well.

I’ve been consciously exploring how to apply American Impressionist aesthetics and color to modern subject matter, and this show will be highlighting that aspect of what I’ve been up to.

The opening’s from 6:30-9:00, come out and say hello.

Edit 05/07/15:

Click here for a short article ‘Modern Impressionist’ on my show in Fine Art Today, Fine Art Connoisseur’s online version

Click here to link to a recent post on my work at Charley Parker’s art Blog, Lines and Colors

And here are some high-res images of the work at the show:

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“The quality of a reproduction is of the greatest importance. In an original work of merit there is a subtleness of treatment- a certain feeling which, if captured in reproduction, places the finished piece within the realm of art itself.”

– Pietro Caproni, 1911

Years ago, museums, schools and galleries were not filled exclusively with originals, they exhibited large collections of copied (referred to ‘cast’) sculptures.  These days, it’s not common to display reproductions alongside original works, but for anyone that’s seen the cast sculpture collection in the Victoria and Albert museum in London, you know what massive weight a collection like that can have.  Ancient Egyptian obelisks and columns right next to Michelangelo’s David and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  Collections like that used to be more common, and there were sculpture houses dedicated to the careful reproduction of important works of art for pleasure and study.  Perfect copies of Ancient Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and 19th Century, all standing right there next to one another.

For the first time, I recently went out to visit The Giust Gallery here in Woburn, Massachusetts- and brought a group of my students with me. It’s a special place, as inheritor of the Caproni Collection; one of best-documented, successful and well-known American reproduction houses, it’s one of the only remaining reproduced sculpture collections in America.  Here’s an excerpt on the history of the collection, from the book The Historic Shops and Restaurants of Boston by Phyllis Meras- I found it on google books, but looks like you can get a copy of the book for around 9-10 dollars.  It’s also got a section on Vose Galleries, which is the oldest gallery in the states, and like Giust, another family-run business.

The person that was handed down Lino Giust’s collection is Robert Shure; an artist that has done many public and private sculptures and monuments in the Boston area, and works with the conservation and restoration of many of Boston’s historic sculptures.  He was kind enough to spend time with us, explaining not only the unique history of his studio, but many of the current projects that he is working on.

Above, Shure is showing us one of the original Caproni Collection catalogues, from which plaster casts were once ordered.  Below, a placard outlining some of the lineage of his sculptural training, and the cast collection’s.  Before Giust, or Caproni, the collection was once called the Francis Chickey Company- an americanization of Francesco Cicchi, the tuscan artisan that started the company.

Being at their space felt awfully familiar after all the time I spent at the Florence Academy’s Drawing program.

Above, one of Shure’s assistants is showing is the molds they use- below, a couple of shots of their plaster curing room.

For anyone in New England, I would really recommend going out to visit and see what they do.  The allow students to come and draw, and keep aside some ‘seconds’ that they sell to students at discounted rates.

The collection is huge, and you can order many more casts than these from Giust’s recently redesigned website.  There aren’t many places in the world today that you can buy a full-sized Nike of Samothrace (I’m saving my pennies).  That said, they are still rebuilding the collection after it had fallen into misuse and disrepair after Modernism had eclipsed the attention a collection like Caproni once received.  The work that Shure is doing at Giust and Skylight studios does not only preserve a bit of sculpture, it’s an important piece of shared cultural heritage.

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I have two upcoming courses in Landscape Painting-

Boston– June 26-28th Click here for information about a course I’m teaching in Boston. This class is organized by the Academy of Realist Art Boston, and will meet on the Esplanade each day.  This class is one day longer, and will be more intensive than the one I taught for them in 2014.  9:00-1:00 each day, $350.

Vermont– August 1-2nd One of my favorite places to paint in New England.  Click here for info on another Landscape Course, August 1-2nd, this one organized by Middlebury Studio School. Last year’s class was great, many students painting the stunning Middlebury Falls.  I love painting in Vermont.  9-3:00 each day with an hour break for lunch.  $265  Image below from last year’s class.

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I’ve written before about what I think is one of the larger issues affecting the current ‘traditional’, ‘representational’, ‘classical realist’ or whatever you want to call it movement: the utter accessibility of (often poor) reproductions of paintings.   I remember pre-internet, paintings had to be sought out and researched in person at museums; in books, large and small.  Reproductions weren’t better, they were most often worse, but there was an immediate understanding that you you had to see the painting in person to ‘get it’.  As everyone says now in this globalized world, it felt more regional than today- when I met an artist from another area I looked forward to discovering whatever obscure hometown heroes they might have, and how the historic painters had affected the current taste in painting and sculpture.  When visiting another artist’s studio the trip to their bookcase was often more educational than seeing their paintings.

Today, taste has gone more global.  Through the influence of blogs and online magazines, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, books and print magazines about art – and (perhaps most notably) the advent of the ‘art convention’ we are beginning to arrive to a sort of global taste; modern masters, tastemakers of our day who set the standard of how swathes of students aspire to paint.  This in itself is not a bad thing- except the students often have no contact with them except seeing their work reproduced online, or perhaps if they are fortunate, a workshop which lasts a few days.  This is a marked difference from how people learned to paint and draw in the past.  Sculptors are lucky.  There is no argument that a sculpture can be adequately judged by a photograph.

As concisely as I can muster, the issue in a few words is this: in my experience, the work that looks good in a photograph may often look weaker in person.  Work that does not necessarily speak to you in a reproduced image sometimes, just positively glows in the flesh.  Of course, there is no set ‘right or wrong’ taste, so in eliminating this crucial step in our appreciation of painting we can cheat ourselves out of finding the peculiarities of our own personal attractions in paint.  We look at more images in a day than someone 100 years ago saw in their lifetime, but we see most of them on iPads and cell phones.  A painting that looks ‘painterly’ online may only look like a block-in when seeing it in person.  And so on.

Today, competitions are judged from low quality JPEGs.  Galleries solicit artists based on their online persona and perceived picture quality.  On social media, artists can amass thousands of fans in a matter of weeks.  The combined effect of this becomes a veritable marketing machine.   Thus, the marketing machine in turn validates the artists whose work presents well in photographs.

Let me try to drive this point home with some images and close ups.  The other day I visited a show called ‘The Boston School Tradition’ now up at Vose Galleries on Newbury St. in Boston.  The show is full of paintings by artists I admire, many works new to me, fresh out of private collections onto the market.  These are some of my own ‘hometown heroes’.   When I was a little kid I had postcards by some of these painters on the wall in my bedroom.  This Paxton was on my wall for years.  It’s my favorite painting by him.  I am not including Paxton’s images in this post- to be frank, the paintings in the show look better online than they do in person, so that wouldn’t really illustrate my point.

Winged Figure 36×35″ Frederick Bosley

The above by lesser known Bostonian Frederick Bosley, is a nice painting.  Nearly Abbott Thayer like in theme, Whistlerish in design and color arrangement, seen in person this painting is a master class in the context of the late 19th century-20th century boston academic impressionist continuum.  From the above image, however, I know many today may gripe at awkward drawing in the neck, arms and hands, the lack of focus on the face and simply put, they may swipe right past it on their iPhone screens.  Look at the below details, though (the above is a professional image, I took some closeups in the gallery):

This is a painting in which every passage of paint is meaningful.  There is no ‘use big brush here, small brush there’ trickery, no magic medium, only a bold, calligraphic use of unabashedly thick paint and color to describe very soft delicate forms.  As he explains his subject, it’s as if he’s written poetry, not an essay.  In my eyes, the greatest tool the painter has is the optical illusion of something that appears real slipping into an abstract arrangement of beautiful bits of color when observed up close .  But I’m fully aware, that may not be to everyone’s taste.

The Blue Kimono 25.25×30.25″ Frederick Bosley

Here’s another Bosley. Professional image above from Vose’s website, couple of closeups below.

You can really see the influence of Tarbell and Benson in Bosley’s work.  He took over for them at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts after they left.  Here are a few of their paintings below.

My Daughter Josephine 48.5×36.5″ Ned Tarbell

 

Blue and Gold 26.25×26.25″ Frank W Benson

I marvel today at how well educated people are about painters; hard to imagine that everyone now is aware of who Antonio Mancini was, or that Isaac Levitan is becoming a household name in the plein air painting community.  Of course, these things come in waves: speaking with older painters, say Daniel Graves or Charles Cecil who were painting throughout the 70’s, they’ll talk about the rediscovery of Meissonier- or the fact that no one knew who Sorolla or Zorn were.  Paintings can live a lifetime in the stacks of museums before they become relevant again, brought back to the public.

Technology has brought some amazing things to painting – a less obvious one, perhaps, is the adherence to universal vocabulary: few (if anyone) called a one-shot oil painting ‘alla prima’ many years ago, that was a term reserved for fresco technique.  Here in Boston, the older painters still today use the french term ‘au premier coup’- however no one used the french term ‘plein air’, it was just painting outside or landscape painting to them.  Now both ‘alla prima’ and ‘plein air’ are basically universally used.  I find these little developments to our syntax interesting, and they are very much the result of our immediate forms of global communication.

One thing has not changed, however- painting still absolutely needs to seen in person to be experienced, and I’m afraid people are slowly forgetting this.  The discussion repeated ad nauseam in schools, painting studios and interviews is whether or not an artist uses photography in their work- rather than what the collective influence of high-resolution photography is doing to our appreciation of paintings.

For me, visiting an exhibition of lesser-known paintings like this is hugely important- in order to find your own masters, you have to see the works up close…and you’ll make discoveries.  I had never heard of Bosley before this show.  Benson did few still lives but in my eyes, he was the best out of the Boston school group- far better than Elizabeth Paxton who is known as the still life artist in this group of painters.  But make your own decisions, you have to get out there to find your own hometown heroes.

Below a few more images from the exhibition.

Portrait of Edith, the Artist’s Wife 24.24×20″ Joe DeCamp

Our Nanny  24.25×20″  Joe DeCamp

Schooners Sailing in Winter 20×30 Theodore Valenkamph

To see all images from the show click here.

If you are interested, Vose Gallery has catalogues of the above exhibition for sale, they are $25.00.  To see it click here to be taken to a PDF of the entire catalogue.

The post Thoughts, and a visit to an exhibition. appeared first on Leo Mancini-Hresko.

View from the Mill, 28×36″ 2013

 

Often, I don’t get a chance to properly photograph paintings until they’re leaving the studio.  I have a toddler, and his schedule trumps mine- when I get to the studio I either have a backlog of painting or emailing to do, and photographing work often waits.  Here are two that I shipped off to their new homes this week.  The above winter scene was one of my favorite ‘New England’ views shortly after I had moved back to the states and was becoming increasingly interested in American Impressionism.  Though it may look rapidly painted, this is a very layered painting, easily worked 20-25 sessions on it.  My wife finally grabbed me and said it was done, and time to stop.  She was right, I still think of it as one of my favorites.

Portrait Sketch of Natalie 24×24″ 2015

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On two Sundays in October I will running a class and artist demonstration at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston- I was asked to coincide my talk and demo with their upcoming superstar show, ‘Class Distinctions in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer”.  Of course, to speak on artists of their caliber, two of my biggest heroes at the museum that I grew up visiting is a huge honor, and I’m very much looking forward to it.  I will have some examples of my work out, a live model from which I will be painting a portrait and a table of materials that would have been used by Dutch 17th-Century painters.  This will be half-talk on materials and process, half demo, and I will be answering questions throughout.  It’s free and open to anyone who comes to the museum on October 11th or October 25th.

Join Leo Mancini-Hresko for an artist demonstration focusing on techniques of 17th century Dutch portrait painters. Learn how to successfully capture the sensitivity and nuance of the subject. Afterward, visit the exhibition “Class Distinctions: Dutch Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer” Gund Gallery (LG 31) and explore how artists represented the different social strata in the Dutch Republic.

Leo Mancini-Hresko studied at the Florence Academy of Art and after graduating in 2005 continued on as an instructor and subsequently became the director of the school’s drawing program for sculptors.  Additionally, Mr. Mancini-Hresko  taught regular courses in plein-air landscape painting and artist materials until leaving the school in 2011. He relocated to his native Massachusetts and now paints and teaches from his studio in an old mill building in Waltham, MA using traditional artist materials, often his own hand-ground paints, prepared canvases and oils.

This is an ongoing program. Come anytime and stay for as long as you’d like.

Click here to be taken to a link on the Rembrandt and Vermeer show

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Received news today that my 2011 studio painting ‘Poseidon’s Temple at Sounio’ has been acquired by the New Britain Museum of American Art for their permanent collection.  The New Britain is one of the only museums today in the states that supports and exhibits living ‘traditional’ painters.  They were kind enough to include a painting of mine from a private collection in their 2013 exhibition ‘A Joint Venture’ and speaking from that, I can say it is a very humbling experience seeing your painting hanging next to your heroes.  I’ll be happy to visit this older picture of mine in their collection sometime, it will be in good company.   Painting is, in essence, trying to connect yourself and place yourself within not only the context of ‘today’ but the historical lineages through which you feel grounded- so a painting being placed next to artists that you consider masters make that concept crystal-clear.

Poseidon’s Temple at Sounion, Morning 35×47″

Painting the monuments is an ongoing project for me- perhaps because I have 2 architects in the family, I’ve always been attracted to painting architecture.  It is surprisingly difficult to obtain permission to paint the monuments in Greece-  Ruins in Italy and Spain can be a bit difficult to gain access to with an easel, but the Greek historical commission has passed some law specifically banning any tripods, probably because of professional photographers coming and using the ruins as subject.  Thankfully, now my Greek is much better and I can hold my own, arguing my way in at times.  Still, if you bump into the right guard they are just so happy to have an artist come and work.

Below is the color sketch that I painted on site- I also did drawings, took photos and just spent hours looking at the thing.  My wife’s grandparents live just down the street from Sounio so I’m able to spend time there when I’m in Greece.  Though it looks a bit rough, I spent three mornings trying to paint this little color sketch, sitting down, with my easel weighted.  I still nearly lost the painting over the cliff at one point.  It was incredibly windy.

Poseidon’s Temple at Sounion, Morning 12×16″

Cape Sounio 11×14″

I was able to make it back to Sounio to paint again this past winter, the above  sketch was the result.  It was in my show at Sloane Merrill earlier this year, perhaps it will become a studio picture as well at some point.

Though this will be the first public collection in America to have one of my paintings, though the Museum of Landscape in Plyos, Ivanovo, Russia has one of my pictures in exchange for my trip there back in 2013.  No idea if it has since been exhibited in the museum there, though I would love to find out.

The post NBMAA Acquisition, Cape Sounio appeared first on Leo Mancini-Hresko.

This week, 32 students (and one small dog) have converged on my studio to study with our first round of guest instructors- Ben Fenske and Marc Dalessio.  The classes are still going on, and I will do a more detailed blog post later, but in the meantime here are a couple of photos:

Marc is in the 2nd day of a landscape painting workshop on the Esplanade, and they have been very lucky with the weather.

Here’s a snapshot of one of Marc’s 2 demos, each running for about 2 hours.

Ben is in the 3rd day of his class, and has been spending each day dividing his time between schematical construction exercises of the features and working from the live model.

Above is a sculpted demonstration by Ben on the planes of the head.

More images soon, after this very busy week in the studio.

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Backlit Docks in Blue Rocks 12×16″

Before being in Boston and organizing the smattering of courses, open studios and dinner parties of the past week, I spent a fun half-relaxed work trip in Nova Scotia with my old friends Marc and Ben.  We were painting for Ann Long Fine Art, whose gallery is in Charleston, South Carolina, but has had a summer home in Chester on the south shore of NS for some time now.  We painted all week, ate well and wrestled with the fog, and had a cocktail party at the end to show the locals our work.

Picton Castle, Fog 16×12″

 

I’d been wanting to get to Nova Scotia for a long time.  Though it feels far, geographically, it is very close- there is an intense history between the historic fishing towns of Gloucester, MA and Lunenburg, NS- a sometimes bitter, sometimes friendly rivalry over the fishing area of George’s Bank- smack between the arm of Cape Cod and the peninsula of Nova Scotia, off the coast of Maine. On a personal note, I grew up with my dad going through bouts of listening to what seemed like exclusively Stan Rogers, drunkenly singing along to ‘Northwest Passage” at inordinate volume.  I imagine he picked up his affinity of NS’ folk music back in the 60’s when he lived in Vermont and invited musicians from nearby Cape Breton to record in Vermont.

Morning Mist, Blue Rocks 12×16″

Docks in Fog 20×24″

 

I suppose what had been attracting me to go to NS to paint, besides the summer fishery subject matter I’ve come to love painting in Maine, was the palpable atmosphere that everyone talks about- and we had plenty of that.   Though we had many sunny days, the fog was often thick enough to cut with a knife.  The above painting started out as a clear, blue sky sunny day front-lit painting, and by the end of the trip I was understating the fog effect in my picture.  C’est la vie.

Chester Boat Yards 12×16″

I’d very much like to get up there to paint again, though next time maybe focusing on Cape Breton or Prince Edward Island.

Ripple Wharf, Chester 12×16″

See Marc’s paintings from our Nova Scotia trip by clicking here.

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The end of August was action packed here in the studio in Waltham.  After we spent time painting together in Maine and Canada, Marc Dalessio and Ben Fenske came down to Boston to teach 3 workshops; Marc taught two 3-day courses in Landscape Painting on the Charles River Esplanade, and Ben taught a 5-day Constructive Portrait Drawing course in the north lit studio.

We also had a little welcome party/get together here, so we could all have a relaxed drink and show the students some of our work from Nova Scotia and Marc’s Cape Cod pictures in the studio.  As an added bonus, Michael and Karyn Harding from Michael Harding Artists Oil Colors were kind enough to come out to speak and show off their wares to our group of students as well.  I hope to have Michael back sometime soon to do a proper talk and demonstration here in the studio.  His colors are great, and I finally picked up a couple tubes of his lead tin yellow, a color I haven’t been able to find for a few years.

Here’s a few notes on each of the classes, and how they were structured:

Ben Fenske’s portrait course was divided into two- a morning and afternoon session.  Each morning, Ben would give a talk and demonstration of exercises in conceptualizing forms, and schematic drawings of the simplified structure of the head and its features.  On the first day, he began with a long talk on perspective and the basic forms we are confronted with: Cubes, Spheres and Cylinders.  Every morning afterwards, he would apply these shapes and concepts to the features- a day on the nose, one on the eye, one on the mouth and ear, and a final day tying it all together.  After Ben’s demo, the students spent the remainder of each morning working one the exercises, referencing 3D sculptures that Ben had made for the course, or casts from my collection here in the studio.

Here is the planes of the nose in perspective

Ben’s Planar Head Demo

and Ben’s more advanced planar head 3d demo

Here are a few of Fenske’s boards from his talks:

Then, each afternoon, after a short demonstration by Fenske, the students would work from the live model, applying the planar construction concepts to their specific facial structure.

Here’s one of the demonstration paintings Fenske did for the group:

Marc Dalessio‘s classes began with the best demonstrations I’ve seen him do.  Often in workshops, the instructor will knock out a quick sketch, almost like performance art, brush moving at a speed much faster than they would normally paint, and certainly faster than a student should try to paint during a course.  A quick demo has a certain ‘wow’ factor, but is counterproductive, in that it sets the students pace much faster than it should.

Marc likes his students to devote as much time to their painting as possible, working on the same sketch over a number of days rather than working only an hour or two- so he didn’t paint quickly to give them the wrong idea; instead, Marc spoke at length and painted more or less at his normal pace.  In both the morning and afternoon, his demo lasted about two hours, and there was still white canvas.  That set the pace for his class, and was a great example in helping the students slow down.

If there was a single concept from Marc’s class that seemed to stand out,  it was the reminder that if you are able to paint precisely, though slow, you will get faster while maintaining precision.  If you paint quickly, but imprecise, that does not lead to eventually increasing your accuracy, only your speed.  Most of the students worked three solid days on their landscapes.

Here are Marc’s demo paintings after touching them up throughout the course-

morning

afternoon

I am hoping to have Ben come back this winter for another construction class, next time focusing on the full figure- and Marc and I are talking about when to schedule his next landscape course in New England.  Head over to the classes tab on my website and join my mailing list to find out first about these upcoming courses (get to it early though, as Marc’s first landscape course filled in under 24 hours)

The post August 2015 Workshops appeared first on Leo Mancini-Hresko.

As an artist, being an armchair art historian has become sort of a hobby.

A couple of weeks ago in the studio I had a long conversation with a group of students about how to go about making a finished painting of a fleeting subject.  The easiest way to understand how to go about making such a painting is to study the genesis of a successful picture, if you can track down all the sketches and studies that preceded it.

When you’re dealing with an uncontrolled lighting situation, you may have as little as 15 minutes to observe an effect, yet we work on our paintings for hours, sometimes weeks, (or in my case, months).  Even on days with perfect conditions, when working outdoors the movement of the sun limits the amount of time you can paint.  Continuing to work for hours outside, you’ll weaken the initial effect that you intended and end up chasing light effects instead of clarifying your initial effect.   Doing sketches for a larger picture allows you to bring those impressions into the studio for long-term projects.  Also, perhaps most importantly, doing initial sketches and studies gives you an opportunity to change the tone and scale, redraw and redesign.

So, in this post, I will attempt to reverse-engineer the development of an important picture by one of my favorites, Isaak Levitan.  Like many of the Russians, his work really stands out to me, probably partially because we weren’t able to see much of it in the west until after the fall of the Iron Curtain.  I remember in the early 90’s the huge popularity of the Russian Ballet, it was the first wave in the flood of the Russian Arts that moved internationally. Books in English and posts online about Russian painters followed.

*Excuse the quality of the images in this post, but they are the best I can find online.  They all look a bit off to me

‘Deep Waters’ 1892 150×209 cm (~60×83″)

 

Nice painting, to say the least.  The issue with paintings of this sort is that they are achieved at a near insurmountable height, an altitude of picture making that most landscape painters today would get the bends from.  There are very few people alive today that can make a painting that is anywhere near this good, but there are a lot of people trying.

This is certainly a studio picture.  It has a very strong sense of design and rhythm, a clear sense of distance from the foreground to the background, and a shimmering, golden light effect.  This was not done outside- at this size, the careful arranging of shapes, study of differing textures is near impossible to do on location.

We know from our studies of old Isaak’s career that he was painting in the Tver province in 1891 and visited the Bernovo estate, which ended up being the estate of a Baroness Wolf.  This is well documented.  As we call it in English,  ‘Deep Waters’, the important final picture above was done in 1892- so a number of studies must have preceded it (at the bottom of this post I’ve included an excerpt from an article that speaks a bit to the significance of the title of this work in Russian)

У омута 1891 25 x 33 cm (~10×14″)

Here’s what I believe is Levitan’s initial sketch, his first foray into the subject of the dam’s division of calm and turbulent waters, the yin/yang diagonal meandering line which remains the theme the final studio picture.  This study was done in 1891.

This is a great sketch, even if the image above is probably a lot  too yellow.  It has the golden light and motif of the final painting, but even Levitan is human, he made what he clearly perceived to be errors in the above sketch.  We know that Levitan also perceived them to be errors, as he changed them for the final picture.

Starting at the bottom left corner, it is very awkward compositionally to have that plank going straight into the corner.  In fact, the whole foreground is a bit too symmetrical, a central triangular clump of grass.  Also, the floating extra log to the right of the dam is a bit distracting, and is sort of creating an awkward tangent on its bottom side.  On the horizon, the two large backlit trees are too central, it’s making the composition have a lack of balance on the top.

Compare this color study and the sketch below:

I had seen this juxtaposition of the sketch and final painting before, but there is still a huge jump in the composition of the final picture and the sketch.  I have been able to track down a couple of drawings which really flesh out the process that Levitan went through.

У омута 32.5 x 24 cm (~10×14″) pencil on paper at the tretyakov

The above drawing further develops the scene, but still retains some of the compositional issues of the initial sketch.   He has moved our view point a few steps over to the left, to address the issue with the plank, and that’s given him an opportunity to explain some of the dam’s understructure- that design will remain to the final painting.  He has fixed the tangent issue on the log to the right of the dam, but it still feels a bit awkward.  He has moved the central horizon trees over, but it still feels overall a bit too centered, equally divided.  See the below image for another pass at it:

by-the-dam-(study) 10.5×16.5 cm (~4×6.5″)

Here we have a small study by Levitan that came up at auction in 2004.  As an overall composition, this one ‘feels’ the most like the final picture.  He’s come up with an entirely new rhythmic solution for the horizon trees, introducing two large clumps on the right that add balance, but also a much needed reflection in the water’s right foreground.  He’s finally just gotten rid of that pesky fourth log, allowing him to concentrate on the movement from foreground to background uninterrupted.

As I hope you can see, all of these considerations played a part in the final picture.  There are a couple other drawings for this I have found online, but I wasn’t 100% sure they were Levitan’s.  There are probably more studies, but this, at least, tells the bullet points in the development of the overall story of the picture

Here’s  a blurry image from flickr which gives you a sense of the color, if not the crispness of the one up top.

Below is another field study by Levitan I saw back in 2008 at the Royal Academy in London.  At the time, I remember being struck by the simplicity of the painting, and its clear, singular light effect.  It was painted on cardboard, or some cheap canvas, I was really surprised to see that the whole painting was one layer, excluding a redrawing of the horizon line (you can see the pentimento as a bluish haze in the below image).

I’ve always wondered why the below study didn’t become another large studio picture, maybe Levitan thought it was perfect as is, an outdoor study, who knows.  He certainly knew what he was doing.

Summer Evening  49x73cm (~24×29″)

Let me close this post with an excerpt from an article by Paul Debreczeny in the Pushkin Review: Pushkinian Elements in Isaak Levitan’s “By the Mill-Pond”

 

“…a new wave of anti-Semitism swept the country, and since he had already had to leave Moscow once to avoid deportation as a Jew, he had every reason to fear renewed persecution. All this caused the mood in his paintings to shift from the lyrical to the dramatic. This shift is clearly reflected in his 1891 picture “By the Mill-Pond” (У омута).”

“By the Mill-Pond” was begun in the summer of 1891, when Levitan and his companion, Sof’ia Kuvshinnikova, stayed at the village of Zatish’e in Tver’ Province. When they first arrived in Zatish’e, there were some rainy days, which they spent reading aloud from a couple of collections of Chekhov’s stories. The story “Happiness” particularly captivated Levitan, and he praised it highly for its nature descriptions. (2) The weather soon cleared up, however, and they set out to roam the countryside in search of motifs for painting. Levitan’s imagination was captured by the site of an erstwhile mill on a small river, where they stopped for a picnic lunch. Remnants of the mill were still visible, and the weir was blocking the flow of the water, forming a deep pond. The Russian word for such a deep pond, omut, brings to mind the saying V tikhom omute cherti vodiatsia, whose literal meaning is “Demons lurk in a deep pond.” (The closest equivalent in English may be “Still waters run deep,” in the sense that silent conspirators are the most dangerous.) As Levitan started sketching the scene, the Chekhov story he had just read, which recounts peasant superstitions, must have been on his mind, and he reported to Chekhov that “some interesting motifs have emerged.” (3) In another letter to the writer he signed himself as “Levitan VII of the Nibelungs,” hinting that he was dealing with the stuff of legends. (4) He and Kuvshinnikova came back almost every day to the mill-pond, which turned out to be on an estate called Bernovo, belonging to a certain Baroness Vul’f.”

The post Thoughts on Process appeared first on Leo Mancini-Hresko.

This past weekend, Stapleton Kearns was kind enough to do a long talk and seascape demo for a crowd of some thirty-odd guests in my studio.  Having seen a couple of his talks, I was very happy when he accepted my offer to come and do one for the folks in my studio.  Kearns is an interesting character; besides having ~40 years of experience painting and selling his pictures, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of art history and a particular affinity for late nineteenth-century century American Impressionism.

Perhaps what he’s most known for on the internet is his blog: he set out to do a post on art every day for a year, and instead continued uninterrupted for over a thousand days, a three-year torrent of information that became the best free resource on outdoor painting on the web.  One of the students that came on Saturday told Stape that his blog changed her life, got her started.  I thought that was touching.  He was also kind enough to bring in a couple of 24×30″ (~65x80cm) recent paintings, so that everyone could get a glimpse of actual finished pictures while watching him sketch and talk.  Paintings below:

Since starting to turn my studio into more of an art center than just my own space, I have been making a concentrated effort to invite guest artists to Waltham who bring something unique to the table: either top-of-their-game artists who haven’t ever taught in New England (Dalessio, Fenske, Oaxaca and Bodem), or in Stapleton’s case, a New-England based artist who is doing something outside of the ‘plein air’ paradigm of today.  Stape does not do 8×10’s, and does not do your standard demo.

Most artist demonstrations you see are straightforward: an artist paints a model that’s in front of them, a landscape or a still life, or paints from a photo.  In each of these cases you can see the subject as well as the demo, and oftentimes these days the artist demonstration is the central portion of the workshop, then auctioning off the demo to the highest bidder.

Stape does not do his demos like that.  He almost always will paint a seascape, from imagination and memory.  His only reference was a lump of anthracite coal (which only marginally looks like a rock, to be honest) and a glass of saltwater which he would glance at and jokingly slosh around while he worked on his wave.

A couple of progress shots and Kearns’ finished seascape demo

Seascape painting is a different animal than studio or landscape painting.  Observation can only get you so far- design, invention, and memory are how some of the best seascapes were done.  If you look at some of the outstanding paintings by Frederick Judd Waugh or William Trost Richards, there’s no way they could have actually set and easel up in that vantage point- they’d be washed out to sea.

Below are a few books Stape recommended- he said there is no ‘one book’, a comprehensive study like John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting (which my friend Marc has somehow put off reading all these years) but that between the below books you could certainly learn a lot.

Stapleton Kearns’ Seascape Reading List:

Here are a few books on Seascape Painting by E. John Robinson

Click here to be taken to Amazon links of Harry Bollinger’s books on painting the sea

Here are a couple of books on William Trost Richards

Click here to see the instructional seascape books by Borlase Smart

This link will bring you to one of the only catalogues on Frederick Judd Waugh

Here is ‘how to paint’ Walter Foster’s book on Frederick Judd Waugh

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I will probably regret opening this can of worms.

Anders Zorn, inventor of the ‘selfie’ 

Easily one of the most common issues of contention in schools of representational painting is the use of photography.  Every painting studio I’ve been to has some version of this discussion, and nearly every online forum I’ve visited has an ongoing argument between some of the members- although folks on the computer are generally more technologically inclined, with that, more amenable to the use of photography to aid their work.  I’ve heard painters deride people’s work far better than their own for using photos, time and time again.  I’ve done it myself- try as I might, it’s hard to divorce process from product.

Some of the ‘atelier styled’ schools of painting out there object to the use of photography, and others embrace it entirely.  I went to a school that completely rejects the use of photography to aid the creation of paintings, but interestingly, many of the alumni and instructors end up using photographs for their work as soon as they leave- and some students and teachers do it half secretly behind closed doors.  I’ve never liked that needlessly duplicitous aspect of their painting process- it seems to me that whether or not you use photos is not the point- aesthetics and the painted image certainly is.  Other schools use photography as a central portion of their educational curriculum- a tool to get unflinching accuracy into the students’ work.

There are a lot of painters out there to whom ‘not using photos’ is a badge of honor, that they can paint a final image using only their eyes, but their final image will make people exclaim ‘that looks just like a photo’; a somewhat uninformed comment which could be considered another badge of honor, or insult, depending on that painter’s personal predilections.

We are surrounded by photographs- they have permeated our collective conscience as ‘truth’ in image.  Paintings were once the truth of image, and people went to exhibitions to see as the painter sees.  Today, you can’t avoid photography- and I take photos all the time, but rarely will paint from one.  I don’t find it enjoyable; I get bored quickly and would rather be working on something else.  I can look at a photo for one of my landscapes, but only if I have already made a finished study of the subject on location, so that the photo jogs memory more than calling for literal interpretation.

For me, the joy of being a painter and draftsman is to translate the 3 dimensional world around you into two dimensions, the selection of what to focus on, include, accent or ignore.  Making something 2d out of something already flat I find to be much less personally gratifying and engaging, and the camera’s instantaneous nature makes it own selection of what information to focus on.  During Stapleton Kearns’ talk last week at the studio, he said something along the lines of “learning to paint from a photo is like trying to learn to swim on the sofa”.  That said, people that are already trained very well in observing the natural world around them can make deft use of photography.

Some of Zorn’s etchings with the reference images

Corresponding Zorn oil painting and photograph, from the Zorn MCMLXXXIX book

Here is the larger point I want to make-

To me, this ‘studio photography talk’ is a distraction from a much larger issue- that the camera’s aesthetic has permeated representational painting in general, through our dedication to the photographic image as truth.   I know many painters who refuse to use photos in their work, that will publicly denounce working from photography, but their work retains a ‘look’ which is ostensibly photographic, as if they’re using their own bodies like a camera.  I don’t think there is anything negative in their wish to render as if they had used a photograph– just that they are striving for a realism that is one and the same with the way the camera sees.   Conversely, I know painters who use photos for each of their projects, going so far as to trace them rather than drawing them out by hand- but their final painting retains a look that is painterly and non-photographic.

The unintended consequence of the ubiquity of the photograph as ‘truth’ is that viewer and artist now often want the image to look just as real from up close as from far away…because of this, there are optical effects in paint that are nearly lost in today’s painting.  You see less broken color, less thick/opaque/transparent paint contrasts, less brushwork that looks mad and abstract from up close (but absolutely glowing real from 15 feet away).

You could hardly have had the development of impressionism without each of these tools being employed.  Today, people call paintings impressionistic if they look kind of messy, not if they are painting a specific light effect.  The public equates highly rendered finish with skill, and of course; galleries take on what they think will sell.  New York galleries are dripping with this sort of thing.  The quick consumption of images on our phones and iPads hardly helps– as I mentioned in a previous post – optical effects in paint need to be seen in person, and do not translate well to tiny screens- what will get the most ‘likes’ is what presents best on a mobile phone.

There is plenty of documentation that Anders Zorn used photographs as the primary reference for many of his etchings, and for some paintings too- so much so, in fact, that the Zorn Museum in Mora has up an exhibition of Zorn’s work as a photographer.  I’d be interested to see that catalogue; just released.  I’ve seen a few John Sargent photographs that he worked up his paintings from -there was a great photograph of a gondolier in Venice next to one of his paintings in the Sargent Watercolors show at the MFA last year- I couldn’t find that image online, but the below image on the left is detail of a stereoscopic image, presumed taken by Sargent, and the corresponding painting on the right- taken from the catalogue of the watercolors show.

This does not discount the incredible skill and draftsmanship that these artists achieved.  These guys could draw better with their left hand than nearly everyone alive today.  There is overwhelming documentation of these artists working from life, but I find these little anomalies of remnants of their photo references to be amusing.  In no way am I attempting to undermine these artists’ works in light of apparent occasional use of photography- quite the opposite- I am trying to make a point about aesthetics; their conscious decision to let brushwork, process and technique be evident throughout a painting.

At the beginning of this post I mentioned the commonality of derisive comments from one artist to another regarding their use of photography-  by no means a new phenomenon- see the below quote from Royal Cortissoz about Giovanni Boldini’s reaction to Joaquin Sorolla’s paintings:

‘I have always remembered with amusement what happened when I went with Boldini to the Sorolla exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery in Paris. As we progressed from picture to picture Boldini seemed suddenly to get into the grip of some hidden excitement and for a time hesitated about telling me just what was the matter. At last he could stand it no longer. “This man must work with a camera”, he said. “They look like so many snapshots.” ~ Royal Cortissoz in Scribner’s (May 1926)

During his day, Sorolla got a lot of grief about photography- I’d long heard that Sorolla painted from photos, but never seen any real photographic ‘proof’- instead I’ve seen an overwhelming quantity of pictures of him at work with his huge set ups and paintings outdoors with a multitude of live models, human and animal.  His father-in-law was García Peris, a major Spanish photographer at the time- and Sorolla’s first artistic job was colorizing photos for him, perhaps where the connection of Sorolla and photography started from.  It’s said that Sargent told his clients that Sorolla painted from photographs- maybe in an attempt to tear down his competition.  Who knows- perhaps someone can link me to something substantial.

The closest thing to photographic reference I found regarding Sorolla is below, and it’s by no means a ‘smoking gun’- though the groupings are similar, the positions, negative spaces and perspective are all totally different.  You could not arrive to Sorolla’s painting without an encyclopedic knowledge of light and color, inside-out awareness of the human body, and certainly spending a lot of time with hot tuna in the sun.  Here is a link to the blog post that I sourced this grouping of images from.

Here is a closing thought:  each of the artists I chose to include in this post were working long after the advent of photography, after the advent of high realism of the 19th-century, after Gérôme, David, Bouguereau, and after the availability of the pocket camera.  Each made a conscious decision to paint in a style that celebrated paint itself, over pure rendering.

Similarly, today it is a conscious decision to let the physical presence of paint feature in an artist’s work- and personally, I hope that the effects of thick/thin paint, glazing and scraping, and the optical effect of broken, opalescent color relating to one another on the canvas return to people’s interest in painting.  The big galleries certainly aren’t interested in showing much of that kind of work today.

Reading List:

Clicking here is a link to the Zorn MCMLXXXIX book

Here is a link to the ‘Zorn the Photographer’ book accompanying the exhibition at the Zorn Museum

Here is a great post from James Gurney on Shiskin, the Russian titan of landscape painting’s views on photography

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I’ve had the pleasure of having Teresa Oaxaca sharing my studio for the past few days- she is running a charcoal drawing workshop out of my space while she is here.  It’s her first trip to Boston, and I’m looking forward to showing her the museums in town.  She’s a big Sargent fan, and we certainly have plenty of Sargent’s best works here.

I know Teresa from Florence, she had gone to John Angel’s school and then transferred to the Florence Academy during her last year.  That always created a quiet uproar in town- when a student transferred it felt like a bit of a statement.  Plus, her work as a student was good, and if anything gets you noticed and remembered in Florence it is certainly that.  Being a hybrid between schools has created some of Florence’s best painters; thus Teresa has gone on to be very well-known in realist painting circles in a very short amount of time.

Here is Teresa’s block-in demo from the first day

 

Her class is going great- Oaxaca’s enthusiasm for drawing is infectious, and she goes around the room quickly, critiquing basically non-stop, taking breaks from talking to students only to demonstrate her techniques in charcoal on paper.  Besides of course trying to get the model’s likeness and general proportions, Teresa is helping the students with their technique: expressivity of line, directional hatching, calligraphic shading, and tonal control.  On a personal note, I very much like overhearing how each of these guest instructors I have brought to town have been explaining concepts that we focus on in my studio- but explaining them in a different way.  It’s great for my regular weekly students to get a different perspective on the same thing.

some of the student work 

Additionally, Teresa has been doing charcoal portrait commission work out of my studio in the evenings.  The below one was accepted by the client last night.  She is here for a couple more days, if you would like her to draw a portrait for you just inbox me and I will set it up.

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2 weekends ago I had a small group of students here in the studio for one of my materials courses- having never done a materials course with less than 15-20 students I was slightly concerned we wouldn’t get as much done as some of my previous courses- click here to be taken to a link on my marathon materials course in Sweden early this spring.

Instead, each of the students worked super hard and we ended up with more materials for each of them out of a 2-day course than I get out of a 3-day course.  We washed linseed oil, cooked rabbit skin glue numerous times and experimented with a variety of glue applications, stretched canvas, mounted linen to panel, cooked a gesso ground, made oil ground for our canvases and made a bunch of hand ground tubes of paint, exploring each pigment and oils’ natural rheological characteristics.  All in all, a successful weekend.

Additionally, having a smaller group allowed me to get some of my own materials done: I made 11 or 12 large linen oil-ground canvases, a few gesso panels, 3 linen canvases mounted to board, and my liter or so of freshly washed linseed oil.

Besides the experience and their notes, each of the students went home with:

• a tube of Titanium White, left long and stringy in a blend of Linseed and Walnut oil

•a tube of long Ultramarine Blue, in Linseed oil

•a tube of Yellow Ocher blended with Raw Siena, in Linseed oil

•four assorted size gessoed wood panels

•a 12×16″ stretched linen canvas with a half-chalk Lead oil ground, applied

*edit* here’s the basic reading list I gave the students.

Max Doerner’s Materials of the Artist.  Great book, this is the first one I really got into.  Very romantic, but not everything in it is useful- that said, it’s my favorite of the bunch.

Ralph Mayer’s Artist Handbook .  This book was the ‘bible’ of materials from the 50s-90s.  Some information now outdated, but excellent overall.

Mark Gottsegen’s The Painter’s Handbook . This is the most recent certainly overall most accurate of the books on materials.   Gottsegen passed away last year- I haven’t ever owned this book but have looked through it many times.

And one of my favorite materials books, because it’s more of a book-

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This past Saturday I hosted a painting demonstration by Ben Fenske in the studio.  We hired a model, and Ben talked through how he approaches a figure painting as he worked for ~2.5 hours.  Like our last demo in the studio, we had a large group, 30something people in all.

One of the aspects of hosting these demos that I really enjoy is that it starts to feel like we are building a bit of community-I like the idea of getting a group of people together to discuss art.  Although I am teaching plenty these days, I am actually not trying to start a school.  The artists that I invite here are all people that I respect, who i wouldn’t mind sharing a studio with for a few days.

Ben will be teaching another course through my studio in mid-March, which will be announced on my website and mailing list next week.  If you’re interested, inbox me: it’s already half-full.

Below is a shot of Ben’s painting and palette at the end of the session:

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Last weekend I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop for Stapleton Kearns, who over the course of the past 40ish years has made his name very well known and respected in the American painting community.  Personally, I was excited to have someone with his experience come teach, Stape has a unique perspective…. after all, he was working outside in all seasons long before the current ‘plein air’ movement made it popular, back when it was just called ‘painting outside’.

Still, it seems most people know Stapleton these days for his work online; he regularly churned out posts on his blog for about three years, rarely even missing a single day of posting.  He wrote about art and landscape painting from every angle, some angles twice.  I’ve often called his blog the best (and free!) online resource on landscape painting, because in my opinion it is.  During the class, we were happy to be able to announce to the students that finally, Stapleton will be releasing a book- curated from both from his blog’s content and new writings, edited into a much more digestible package (the publishers have scraped his blog for content, it runs over 1300 pages, and it’s all there to read online, apparently longer than War and Peace).  If you are interested in updates on the book project you can sign up for the mailing list by clicking here, following this link.  The book is only in very early stages of development, so late 2016/early 2017 I would imagine.  

In spite of the first day’s brisk weather, the pace was set by the seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm for painting and art history that Stape brings, his class ran 12 hours on the first day, 10 hours on the second day, and 7 hours the third.  It really was a bit of a whirlwind of a weekend.

Each morning Stapleton worked on a demo- he started a painting on each Saturday and Sunday morning, and on the third day did a demo that was particularly interesting- rather than working from nature, he worked on the painting as if it was in the studio, turning it into a ‘studio landscape’.  This seems to be one of the most common questions students ask during landscape courses- what do you do to the paintings in between working outside and having them framed, hanging in the gallery?

Here’s a shot of Stape’s demo-  in action on the first morning

Saturday’s demo at the end of the first session 

 

So the demos in Stape’s class are a bit different than what you might expect- he goes to great efforts to make his painting non-literal, but interpretive, leaving out or adding in great swathes of the landscape.  He stressed that observation is but a means to an end- as he says, “You cannot observe design into a picture“.  This raises an interesting point- while many today (myself included) teach outdoor painting based on the optics of light outdoors, teaching the basics of atmospheric perspective as they affect color, Stape prefers to speak on the aesthetics of color and choices that he as an artist would make along the way.

In spite of raising this clearly advanced concept, he repeatedly reminded the students that the first step is for them to learn to copy exactly what they see in front of themselves, either through studying cast drawing and painting, or faithfully representing the landscape in front of them.  That attitude of tackling both the most complicated aspects of aesthetics and design, while being true to the struggles of learning to draw from life allowed us to really talk about art more than just painting throughout the weekend.

The evenings we met to go over hundreds of images of paintings- and eat pizza

 

There were two nights of evening lectures in my studio- the first night, Stape went through a brief history of modern landscape painting, from barbizon to hudson river school, to American impressionism.  Afterwards, a tour many of his own paintings, showing us briefly the sort of work he does in the studio from his outdoor paintings- and for those who stuck around, a brief talk on design as it applies to landscape painting using as example Aldro Hibbard – if you are interested, here is a link to Stape’s blog with all posts tagged ‘Hibbard’

On the second night, the lecture was reserved for another of his heroes, Edward Seago.  Along with talking about his pictures, Stape gave an impassioned summarization of Seago’s career and personal life that I was unfamiliar with.  Again, here is a link to Stape’s blog with all posts tagged ‘Seago’

Nadine and Vaijayanti hard at work, totally surrounded

 

Here’s Stape on the last day finishing his demo from imagination and memory

Bonus shot of the piglets and chickens, only because they were awfully cute.

Reading List:

Here is a link to Amazon with all books tagged ‘Edward Seago’ (I just picked up the new one)

This is a link with all books tagged ‘Aldro Hibbard’

All books tagged on Amazon with ‘Willard Metcalf’

And as Stape said, ‘if there was only one book on landscape painting’ John Carlson’s guide to Landscape Painting would be it.

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