Thursday, April 23, 2015
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Accident
I mentioned in the previous post that I made a mistake while painting a nude--I mixed up the wrong color and used it anyway. I could have said that I changed the color on purpose, or that my subconscious made a choice that differed from my conscious choices, but that would be respectively a lie and a cop out. No, I was trying to mix a color and miscalculated the amount of the various pigments.
That said, I depend a lot on mistakes. Sometimes a brushstroke goes down the way I expect it to, and sometimes it emphatically doesn't. Some of those "wrong" brushstrokes get worked back into the painting, but some of them, a lot of them, turn out to be right.
A lot of the time I don't know what I'm doing. My conscious mind is thinking: What do I see? What is that shape over there? What's its color? What's in front of it, what's behind? How does the light hit it? What direction should I paint in? How thick or loose the paint? Meanwhile my hand makes motions with the brush and I see stuff appear on my canvas.
That said, I depend a lot on mistakes. Sometimes a brushstroke goes down the way I expect it to, and sometimes it emphatically doesn't. Some of those "wrong" brushstrokes get worked back into the painting, but some of them, a lot of them, turn out to be right.
A lot of the time I don't know what I'm doing. My conscious mind is thinking: What do I see? What is that shape over there? What's its color? What's in front of it, what's behind? How does the light hit it? What direction should I paint in? How thick or loose the paint? Meanwhile my hand makes motions with the brush and I see stuff appear on my canvas.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Representation
An imprimatura is an easy way to unify the color composition of a painting and emphasizes light and shadow, but I prefer to paint alla prima on a white ground in oils. This is more challenging, I think, and forces you to think coloristically.
I was at a figure session the other day, a new one for me, and it was a three hour pose so I brought my oils. There are three basic rules to oil painting: alway paint from the back to the front; always put down the shadows before the lights; feel free to ignore the first two rules (the rules of watercolor are the exact opposite: you paint from the front to the back and you put down the lights followed by the darks).
So I had finished my initial drawing on the canvas (I use Cerulean Blue; it's a cool, weak pigment that tends to blend in with later painting and I find it's easier to warm up a cool painting than cool down a warm one) and begun the delayed gratification part of a painting: the background. The model was leaning on a column in front of a bare gray green wall. I mixed up a color which was redder than the actual color. This was carelessness on my part rather a deliberate choice. I was eager to get to work on the figure and so didn't spend the additional time to fix the color.
But this got me thinking. When I paint a portrait or a nude, the first thing I do is paint the environment the subject is in. I don't just paint a nude; I paint a nude inhabiting a certain volume of space, in a certain place, at a certain time. The same goes for landscapes., especially for landscapes. A landscape is first and foremost an enormous volume of Newtonian space, populated as it may be by trees, mountains, water, and air. It is perhaps a hundred cubic miles of space, directly apprehended and converted to pigment and oil.
The atmosphere is a concrete element in landscape painting but it exists as well in the portrait, the nude and the still life. None of them can exist except in the context of a three dimensional environment.
Representation is the depiction of colored volumes in space.
I was at a figure session the other day, a new one for me, and it was a three hour pose so I brought my oils. There are three basic rules to oil painting: alway paint from the back to the front; always put down the shadows before the lights; feel free to ignore the first two rules (the rules of watercolor are the exact opposite: you paint from the front to the back and you put down the lights followed by the darks).
So I had finished my initial drawing on the canvas (I use Cerulean Blue; it's a cool, weak pigment that tends to blend in with later painting and I find it's easier to warm up a cool painting than cool down a warm one) and begun the delayed gratification part of a painting: the background. The model was leaning on a column in front of a bare gray green wall. I mixed up a color which was redder than the actual color. This was carelessness on my part rather a deliberate choice. I was eager to get to work on the figure and so didn't spend the additional time to fix the color.
But this got me thinking. When I paint a portrait or a nude, the first thing I do is paint the environment the subject is in. I don't just paint a nude; I paint a nude inhabiting a certain volume of space, in a certain place, at a certain time. The same goes for landscapes., especially for landscapes. A landscape is first and foremost an enormous volume of Newtonian space, populated as it may be by trees, mountains, water, and air. It is perhaps a hundred cubic miles of space, directly apprehended and converted to pigment and oil.
The atmosphere is a concrete element in landscape painting but it exists as well in the portrait, the nude and the still life. None of them can exist except in the context of a three dimensional environment.
Representation is the depiction of colored volumes in space.
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