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Part of my mission as a painter is to search for the beauty in the commonplace and ordinary. This simple scene had a beautiful cool light resulting in warm and cosy shadows that fit the subject perfectly. And it invites you to take part in it, so please have a seat!

Simple and rustic or not, I did preliminary studies. A series of notans (shown larger here, they really are tumbnail size), to find out where to place the darkest darks:


The last one is closest to what I did in the actual painting.

Then I made a quick sketch that took just one hour, to see how it all worked in colour. (Number 1 below.) Number 2 shows the blocking in of the masses, on the sanded paper Fisher 400. I've chosen colours that in some cases are complementary, as I wanted the wall and the table to be 'quiet' and not loud.

In 3 the colours are nearing what they will eventualy become, and 4 shows the painting nearly done, but still needing work and development of details. The cupboard within the wall will get some trimmings, and some things will be pushed darker, and others lighter.

I swear the chair with all its negative spaces took as long to paint as the rest of the picture!

The finished painting can be viewed as a larger image by clicking this link that will take you to my website.

Venturing into a new medium -- Oil Pastels! Very interesting to see how they behave differently than soft/dry pastels. They are more like oil paint, although they do not dry completely, but keep a waxy softness that nevertheless hardens a bit.

I did my own interpretation of a reference photo provided by the oil pastellist Wendy Manning, following her teaching of how to make a watercolour underpainting and then gessoing it with a transparent acrylic medium for applying pastels on top. I must say I'm hooked, and I will continue to explore Oil Pastels, together with my usual soft pastels.

This painting of a friend may be thought of as a portrait, but I designed it as a figure painting. Well, a half figure. I put all emphasis on the graphic form of the light grey of the beret and shawl, and that shape includes her face and hair.

I painted it a month ago, but would not put it on my site until Karin had gotten the painting, as a present for her 95th birthday!

This is a landscape if found really exciting to paint. It is almost like a great outdoors hall, with the steep near vertical cliffs, and the smooth 'floor' of the water. It was also a challenge to make grey cliffs out of the bright colours of my pastel sticks. No actual grey has been used, only prismatic colours.

But, colour isn't all, not even to me. First, there is Design. I made a large number of Notans (really small thumbnail sketches) to map out the darks and the lights. I'm continuing the study of Notan, as it is a very efficient tool.



I know they look just like a jumble of spots, but if you look closely, you can see that I've used 4 values (paper, light grey, mid grey, black) to test different ideas. The big dark cliff has been extended upwards, or cropped. The very bg cliff has been very light, or mid grey. All cliffs have gotten different heights in different combinations. There's been more or less sky visible, and as the sky was an arrow-shape, I decided early on to let the lighted part of the cliff that vanishes in distance have lost edges with the sky, so the arrow would point to the area of interest, which is where the river bends around the cliff. Tricky thing was to try to subdue the fg brightly lit cliff on the right, and the dark to the left.

I've tried to make the masses of value connect, or at least point to each other (as with the darkest darks). There is a flow of lighter and midvalue from sky to left side of the river (vaguely an s-shape), bridged by the exclamaition mark ! of the far away lit cliff.

Those 30-seconds studies led to this underpainting:



As I was working on Fisher 400 artist's sandpaper, I could layer a lot, and there is no need for a fixative.

The rather 'wild' colours of the underpainting get subdued as I layer on them, but they are what sets the quantity of light, and that is kept through the whole painting process.

See a larger version of the finished painting here.

Does a painter need drawing skills too?

Painting in the manner of modern impressionism is a very different approach from drawing (at least the way drawing is usually taught). You certainly need some drawing-skills, but what is most important is to learn to judge relationships (which of course one does in drawing too). Painting with colour involves relationship of colour, of value, of relative warmness/coolness of colour, brightness/dullness, etc. And you go from large to small, 'sculpting' shapes and form with colour. A flat underpainting is sculpted into seeming to have a three-dimensional shape, by adding colour to what you already have on paper/canvas.

Small to big
There are several methods of drawing, and most of them involve drawing edges as lines, and then shading to let value create form. Drawing, one exercises a careful attention to details, right from the start. Certain schools advocate drawing one eye carefully, and then spreading out from it, using the completed eye as an anchor against which one measure the rest of the features.

Big to small
Painting goes from general large shapes to successively smaller corrections. So the thinking is sort of the other way around. No bogging down in details at the outset, volume before details, details almost an afterthought.

Excellent book on drawing
Some teachers teach another method of drawing that is compatible with, and very similar to, the thinking behind painting. One such very good teacher is Carl Purcell, who gives a great course in his book “Drawing with your Artist’s Brain”. See it at Amazon.

Old “truths”
The academies of the 1700s and 1800s really hammered in what they perceived to be the truth -- "you can't paint if you can't draw". So students spent one to three hours on drawing before allowed to paint. This is still taught as a truth.

Need to know
There are other schools of thought. One that I'm particularly fond of is: "you learn what you need to learn when you feel the need to learn it" -- and then you yourself actively search for the knowledge which makes sense in the context of the whole, and which improves your ability to 'say' what you want to say with your art.

Would you?
Let’s say you’re fascinated by colour and feel a burning desire to paint. Would you really want to spend 3 years only drawing in graphite or charcoal before being allowed to use a brown and a white too? Or would you like it better if you were to get a box with gorgeous colour, experimenting, playing, and painting. When you discovered that you don’t know how to draw an oval, and that you really would like to be able to paint a portrait where the person is recognizable as a human being – would you then feel motivated to learn good drawing skills? I ask, because it is not a given. We have different methods and manners of acquiring knowledge and skills. What I’ve described is my personal preference.

Certainly
In this method of painting that I work with, we often start with a simple “skeleton” drawing, consisting of the outlines of the silhouettes of the largest masses, divided into light masses and shadow masses. Monet didn’t even do that, he just went in straight with loosely scribbled colour, searching out the shapes. But oh yes, drawing skills are still needed, and are intrinsic to painting skills.

 

 

1600s, the Baroque Dutch still-lifes 

Vanity

During this period, still-lifes got detached from figures and portraits, but they kept their highly symbolic meanings. The Dutch reveled in a form of still-life called Vanitas or Vanity, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”, says Ecclesiastes, who despite his gloomy outlook still bothered to write his thoughts down for the posterity he didn’t believe would heed his words.  And it Latin it is: Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, hence this kind of still-life is called Vanitas. These paintings often depicted a human skull, which some researchers think is a still version of The Dance Macabre – Death as a skeleton dancing through a world suffering from bubonic plague. Together with the grinning skull, or grouped in various ways, there were often candles that had just been snuffed out, empty glasses, dried ink-horns, an hourglass with the last grains of sand falling. Later, objects like wilting flowers and rotten fruit and flies, got introduced. And the very ripe cheese mentioned in chapter one! The general message of these Vanities was that life is short, and transitory, all flesh is hay, and will be dust. As in this skull Vanitas painted by Pieter Claesz in the 1630s, where even the pages of the book have faded:

 

It is said that over a hundred painters focused solely on Vanities and other still-lifes in the Netherlands during the 17^th century.

Flowers as symbols

Even the Dutch flower still-lifes had each flower carrying a symbolic meaning. The sunflower, for example, always turns its ‘face’ to the sun from morning to night, so it became a symbol of faith, or, later, blind love. Today, only a few people have studied the symbology of these paintings. An example of a floral, by van der Ast, 1622:

 

The above still-life depicts tulips, which were extremely expensive at that time. The economy in Holland collapsed as a result of a tulip-bulb hysteria. Nothing new on the stock market... A painting of tulips lasted much longer than the actual flowers, and their beauty could be admired for many years, indeed centuries.

Trompe l'oeil

The variety of still-life that is called trompe l’oeil (French for “fool the eye”) was born in the Netherlands around 1650. Samuel van Hoogstraten is said to be the inventor of trompe l’oeils:

There is a cute story about Rembrandt’s students painting a life-looking gold coin on the floor of the studio, and the hilarity when the revered master bent down to try to pick it up. I think it tells something of his personality – the students and apprentices dared to make pranks.

Of course an artist’s paraphernalia just had to be painted in this manner. Here is a trompe l’oeil of a Vanitas and some miniatures being painted, by Cornelius Gijsbrechts 1668:

 

Thanks to paintings like these, we can see, in exquisite detail, how their brushes looked, and their easels and palettes, and that they indeed used mahlsticks. We also see parts of the process of painting a miniature. I was fortunate to see this large painting in real life just a couple of weeks ago. The illusion is nearly perfect. Even the Vanitas painting is subjected to time and decay, as a corner of it is coming loose and is hanging down over the painting, showing us the stretcher bars behind. Clearly wooden panels were out as a support.

Genre still-lifes

Still-lifes didn’t have to have a strong symbolic meanings, but could be ‘nice paintings’, with distinct genres: kitchen table, market, breakfast table, etc. Here is a “light meal” of the breakfast table genre (but it could be eaten whenever you felt peckish during the day), by Floris Claesz van Dijck:

 

Imagine that you live in the 17^th century, with no colour television, no glossy magazines. How would you react to such luxurious painting as these Dutch still-lifes? Probably hugely astonished at how anyone could paint something so lifelike, and you’d feel like you could reach out your hand and touch the objects, and sink your teeth into a grape.

To own a still-life was all the rage. And it virtually exploded in the next century, the 1700s.

To be continued.

 

 

In this painting I've explored what a fairly large grey area does to enhance the glow of light. I also worked on the composition, to put the rusty old truck in a harmonic spot that is visually interesting.

I'm heading towards including more evidence of human activity in my landscapes. I figure there are signs of bovine or equinine activity too, as the yellowed grass is cropped short. But what does a city-girl know about agriculture... it could be mown and harvested, too. What caught me was the distinct shapes and the beautiful autumnal colours.

Charlie