Fri - March 5, 2004

Color Roughs


They are a way for you to nail the color scheme of the painting you're getting ready to produce. The color rough can save you loads of time in the final paintings. If you are serious about your color rough you won't have any guess work in the final.... They are very gestural and should just point out the color scheme, the overall color harmony in the piece to come.

Of course the color of your work should convey some kind of mood and emotional backdrop in keeping with the story you're illustrating.

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JOHN SINGER SARGENT'S PAINTING NOTES


Painting is an interpretation of tone.

...Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.

...Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.

...The thicker your paint—the more your color flows.

...Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements—values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.

...The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.

...You begin with the middle tones and work up from it .... so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

...Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.

...It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.

Naples Yellow Yellow Ochre Ochre dew (English Red) Red Ochre, Vermillion Ivory or Coal Black Prussian Blue.

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NOTES ON ART


No matter how hard you try to put a message into your work it will be misconstrued by the person viewing it. No two people will arrive at the same conclusion, thus your statement or intent is lost. If you really want to say something do it with words, and, even at their best, words are easily misconstrued.

The most that Art can hope to do, maybe what it does best, is to raise more questions than it answers. The work can convey many things, emotion prime among them, but for a piece to be successful it must evoke something from the viewer. However, the viewer must bring something to it as well. No one comes empty handed and each viewer brings his/her own baggage along with which to try to understand this picture.... This is not to say that someone who, for the shock value inherent in the subject, paints dead babies in a jar is successful because it evoked rage from the viewer or whatever. The test would be if, after the shock value wears off, does the piece still demand a response from the viewer, then we will know if it does indeed succeed. But if a painting or a drawing just lays there and pulls nothing from us, then it has failed miserably.

The finest paintings, the ones held in the highest esteem by our society, are constantly revealing new secrets, new facets of their construction to us. We find something new in their textures and surfaces, even the subjects and the moods each time we view certain pieces and these stand alone as exemplary. And each person walks away with something entirely unique to their eyes alone. Everybody interprets the piece in a way that they understand and can perceive.... Maybe they have more questions, maybe they have more answers, maybe they only walk away with a sense of well being. Whatever they walk away with, the painting has succeeded to communicate, to move them.

...I would stand in front of his paintings and wonder why people thought he was so great.

...Then, one day, I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was wandering through their Impressionist wing. I had spent considerable time in front of the “Joan of Arc” by Bastien LePage, the Pissaro’s, and had worked my way to the Monet’s, when I was riveted to the floor. I found myself standing in front of one Vincent’s oils, a landscape of several trees and a swirling luminescent sky.... I was totally overcome, so consumed with sadness and sympathy that I couldn’t stop my eyes from welling over with tears.

The saddest realization for me is that there are so many people, artists, who have never been moved by art like that. They have never had an emotional epiphany with a piece of art, a communion of sorts, a bringing together of two wills, two hearts.... It’s not that I don’t respect them for wanting to be artists, for taking that first step into a world that demands so much communication with the individuals emotion and demands the exhibition of their personal inner views.... If you answer no to all of these and yes to the last then maybe you are in the wrong place, maybe art is not for you.

Art isn’t something that you dabble in, though many do and that’s fine, but serious artists do not dabble.... You must constantly wrest emotions from deep within yourself and pour it all out on the empty canvas or paper or bronze before you.... They pull various bits and pieces of their emotional past and present out of themselves and set it up for display, in the hopes that we will suspend our disbelief, drop our guards so that we, too, can feel the pain, the rage, the sadness, the happiness. They, as does Art, teach us how to feel, to see. They show us that it is okay to show our feelings, that it is okay to feel sad, to cry even. As much as they reveal themselves, artists and their art reveal much about ourselves as well.

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OIL PAINTING NOTES


OIL PAINTS (whatever brand you prefer, student grade is fine.)

...I love their consistency and their pigment-to-oil ratio especially.... Holbein paint is fairly stiff, but has good coverage. Rembrandt tends to be fairly oily and buttery, great for more translucent painting effects.

You can tell how much pigment a tube of paint has by the weight.... One will have more oil or binder, the other will have more pigment..that's the heavy one.

...This is a list of colors I use (You don't have to use these, but it might make it easier to manage if you do.)

...Black: I mix my black using Prussian Blue (French Ultramarine Blue can work in place of Prussian), Alizarin Red and Indian Yellow in equal amounts. If I want the resultant mixture to be warm I push it with more Aliz, if I want it cool, I push the Prussian.

The benefit of mixing my black is two-fold: It's a mixture of colors, not just a dead, flat black. If other colors hit the black the resultant grey is a colorful grey, a beautiful addition, not an eyesore — no mud results from the accidental intermixing.

MY "NICE TO HAVE AROUND" COLORS (These are ones I like but don't necessarily "need."

...BLOXX There's a whole pile of greens and earth colors that Bloxx makes that I can't rattle off the top of my head right now.

...I like the smell, I like how it reduces the paint.... Some use hardware turpentine (which is cheap, but is especially pungent.), others use Permtine, Turpenoid, and various of the other "Odorless" turps. I do not like the odorless stuff because it doesn't seem to reduce the oil but rather break it up into granules.

...I use mostly flats and filberts, with the rounds being for finer detail work.

I would prefer you stay away from stiff bristle brushes as you'll be fighting with the brush as it pulls up what you've already put down.

...I have used Liquin, Venice Turpentine, Linseed Oil, etc. They all have their advantages and their drawbacks.

...For my larger works I prefer to stretch my own canvases.... I like making the various choices as to stretchers and linens, etc. I prefer linen over cotton duck because of the imperfections in the linen, they make for a more enjoyable painting experience for me.

...To stretch a canvas: I fit the stretchers together then lay the frame over my unrolled canvas. I cut the canvas to fit the four sides of the stretchers, roughly three- to-four inches beyond the strips. Using a staple gun I'll place one staple through the linen into the center along one side of a strip. I'll repeat this on the other side, pulling the canvas with canvas pliers.

...What you should see is a diamond formed by the stress pulls in the center of the canvas.

...Stapling one or two staples on either side of the last set of staples work your way on first one side, then the opposite, until the canvas has been stretched. In each instance, pull the linen taut with the canvas pliers, then staple.

When I'm done I like to staple the extra linen to the back of the stretchers, and fold my corners and staple those as well.

...A rainy day is especially good for stretching canvases as the linen has a higher moisture content and as the rain stops, the linen becomes even tighter.

...So I prepare a pile of canvases as once and put them out in the sun to dry.

...I enjoy this stuff because it allows me to "surface" the linen adding texture.... I also love the way the paint slips and slides on the surface of the Underpainting White.

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Artists to study (new expanded list!)


But for those who did not take notes, here's some of the names — though the list continues to grow (more to come).

...Some of the two lists overlap as several of the artists were adept at more than one discipline.

...Rembrandt, Jan Vermeer, Eugéne Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Diego Velásquez, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Honoré Daumier, Francois Millet, John Constable, Camille Corot, Francisco Goya, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Winslow Homer, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Paul Gauguin, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Edwin Austin Abbey, Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth, Harvey Dunn, Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Lucien Freud, Odd Nerdrum, Jules Pascin, Nathan Olivera, Fritz Scholder, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish, Dean Cornwell, Mead Schaefer, Odd Nerdrum, Brad Holland, Gary Kelley, Mark English, Edward Hopper, Edwin Dickinson, Fritz Scholder, Marshall Arisman, Frank Brangwyn, Russell Chatham, Frank Duveneck, Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Robert Rauschenberg, Matisse, René Magritte, Burt Silverman, David Levine, Skip Liepke, Milt Kobayashi, Robert Weaver, Emil Carlson, James Ensor, Franz Klein,, Emil Nolde, George Bellows, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, José Clemente Orozco, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Anders Zorn, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst Barlach, Lovis Corinth, Odilon Redon, John Berkey, J.C. Leyendecker, James Bama, Robert McGinnis, Alphonse Mucha, John Allen St.

Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Winslow Homer, James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Kathe Kollwitz, Leonard Baskin, Jeff Jones, Pierre Bonnard, Edwin Austin Abbey, Jules Pascin, Edgar Degas, Frazetta, Harvey Dunn, NC Wyeth, Howard Pyle, AB Frost, Daniel Vierge, Edvard Munch, Heinrich Kley, Lyle Justis, Bernie Krigstein, Alex Toth, Jack Davis, Joseph Clement Coll, Franklin Booth, Angelo Torres, Hokusai, Yoshitoshi, Hiroshige, Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, John R.... Frost, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Olaf Gulbransson, Otto Blix, Franz Masareel, Billy DeBeck, Rico Lebrun, Leonard Baskin, Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, Dino Battaglia, Jacques Tardi, José Munoz, Nicolas DeCrecy, Bob Peak, Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles, George Herriman, Winsor McKay, Joe Kubert, Bill Mauldin, Frank Miller, Chester Brown, Will Eisner, Frank Robbins,, Lisbeth Zwerger, Harvey Kurtzman, Bruce Bairnsfather, Wallace Morgan, Kerr Eby, Moebius, C.F.

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Harvey Dunn — An Evening in the Classroom


This is a transcription of Harvey Dunn — An Evening in the Classroom in PDF format.... I have separated ideas a bit, but have left any misspellings as they were originally printed.... There is great information in here, worth reading over and over.

Posted at 06:14 PM     Read More  

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