On Painting The Sun: Monet’s Choice

If you paint the sun, you are always confronted with a specific choice: you either have to try and establish the correct value relationship by making the sun very light on your canvas or you must go for the color, in which case the value relationship will be incorrect but the color relationship will be closer to the truth. The reason for this is simply that the highest value pigment we have is pure white. (It is unlikely we would even use pure white because a glob of pure would look “chalky” or artificial.) Once we add color, say a tiny bit of cadmium yellow light, it would look somewhat more real, but then the brightness or value would be diminished by that tiny amount. And if we were to then mix in small amounts of cadmium orange or maybe vermillion, we would probably get closer to the actual color of the sun, particularly if it were low in the sky, but at the same time the value or brightness would decrease even further. Such is the nature of paint as compared to actual light, or energy. So the choice is either to go for the value, white with a tiny bit of yellow (which would be the highest value color note we could make), or to go for the color – a hot orangey-red color, perhaps. It’s one or the other. But both are impossible. Let me use Monet’s famous Impression Sunrise to illustrate this point:

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the left is the actual famous painting and on the right is the same painting but in black and white. Notice how the sun in the black and white version practically disappears. What this means is that in the actual painting (in color), the sun is the same value as the darker blue colors. In other words, Monet has sacrificed value in order to get the color. Let’s see what it would have looked like had he done the reverse, if he had sacrificed color in order to get closer to the proper value relationship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the image on the left I have replaced Monet’s orangey-red sun and its reflection with white and a tiny bit of yellow. Notice that in the black and white version on the right, the sun is the brightest thing in the sky; the value relationship is relatively correct. But in order to get closer to the correct value, the richness of the color is lost.

Here’s the point: there is no way to get rich color and high value with paint. It comes down to choice. Some artists (George Inness comes to mind) have made wonderful paintings where the sun is bright but weak in color. Monet, however, always seems to have gone for the color.

My Big Fat Warning!

I am hopeful that this type of blog provides some food for thought. But I hesitate in writing this sort of thing because the information also feeds a mechanical process that becomes a formula. It is fine, if not necessary, to have knowledge in the back of your head, but when you are painting, the process must be driven by the feelings you have as you become one with nature, when you resonate or vibrate with the light that is absorbing you, and you it. So it would be unwise to go out and say, “I’m going to approach it the way Monet did as opposed to the way Inness did.” Rather, wait until you get there. Open yourself to seduction. Will you get lost in the warm volcanic vermillion of the sun’s warmth or will you surrender to the bright dancing notes of a sparkling sun? Formula picture making is so 9 to 5.

There Is No Avant-garde

If I paint ten paintings, I generally keep about 3 or 4. That’s it. Most don’t work out. I think the reason for this is that it is just plain difficult to get into that other dimension where I’m not making pictures but where I just get swept away. There are times when I really do believe that I have forgotten how to paint. So I have to remind myself: don’t paint pictures; let what is before you act as a prompt. Respond. Realize your feelings as you make the marks. Get it through the color. Get beyond the facts. Trust in your creativity. Let go.

 

 

 

 

Then one day I’m out there painting and I sense that it’s coming back to me. I remember. In fact, I think I’m growing, getting better. It goes on like that. Up and down. Up and down.

I mention this because I think it is worth restating particularly for young artists who feel an inordinate pressure to do something “that is cool,” “heavy,” “dark,” or “challenging.”  There is something to be said for big, dramatic breakthroughs – the advent of abstraction for example, and/or the subsequent return to figurative painting in the Bay Area Figurative movement where Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff, Oliveira, Neri and others used big, simplified, almost abstract strokes of color to express who they were. But for the most part, we would do well to drop the term avant-garde and to stop thinking in terms of art movements generally. So much of the “it has never been done before” shock-of-the-new during the latter half of the 20^th century was contrived, top down, investment driven efforts to turn junk into iconic art products.

Does anyone out there remember Fabian? He was a teen idol who came after Elvis. Well, he didn’t exactly come after Elvis. Because of Elvis, record producers wanted to cash in on the creation of a second Elvis, so they discovered Fabian. I guess you could say he was okay, but like most 20^th century art “movements,” he was totally manufactured.

You don’t have to sprout wings and fly about your studio to do something “that has never been done before.” It has never been done before if it is new and refreshing to you.

Many years ago, I went outside to paint for the first time and did two little 8”x10” landscapes. I brought them in to show my teacher, Bill Schultz. He made some supportive comments, suggesting one was more “successful” than the other. Then he said, “I’m glad to see that you are going outside and starting small. Now, after you do two or three hundred of these, go on to 9”x12.”  I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

The image at the top is a detail from the image on the left. The people at the café were moving about. How was I to paint them? I had no interest in a literal interpretation. I was more interested in loving what I saw simply as visual elements. So if I saw a flash of blue, I made a mark to try and get the color and didn’t care much about anything else. I think it works.

 

Duchamp vs Brackman

One can get a sense of the direction painting has taken by comparing early 20^th century artists Marcel Duchamp, born in France, with Robert Brackman, born in the Ukraine. (Brackman, as many of you know, immigrated to the US and was my teacher’s teacher.) A story I often tell of Brackman, through whom our method passes, is that he spent seven years doing nothing but underpaintings. A serious student was he to be sure. Duchamp, we are told, essentially became bored with painting, preferred applying himself to chess, but not before he decided, in effect, to play games with the art cognoscenti, of whom he was the proverbial darling and advisor. Duchamp, as you know, contributed to human achievement in art by exhibiting such “ready-mades” as the snow shovel (exactly like the one you would buy in a store) and, perhaps more famously, an ordinary urinal, dubbed The Fountain in 1917.

Duchamp, as either genius or pawn, remains a central figure in 20^th century visual art. Again Marquis: “Duchamp opened the door – even the museum door – to art featuring feces, urine, and other bodily fluids; to art based on junk recovered from the city dump; to art involving cadavers and maggots; and to art with aggressively sexual themes. Artists who display their own naked or provocatively clothed bodies may also point to Duchamp. In short, the avant-garde art of the late twentieth century flaunts impropriety, defiance, messiness, and snickering disdain for the vast majority of museum-goers.” [2]

While I greatly admire Brackman’s work, it doesn’t “send” me. His subject matter and compositions seem too traditional, even old fashion in a way. More importantly for my taste, he carried his paintings too far. They appear too finished. This is especially true if one only sees his work through old reproductions. However, I have seen his work in person and in person one can feel the emotion that his complexity of color and finesse of line exude. His sense of tonality is positively haunting especially in his pastel drawings, as in the one above. And I have seen work of his that was “unfinished,” where the verve or “glamour,” as he would call it, jumps off the canvas. When he was 86 a student said to him that he (the student) noticed more color in his work; Brackman’s response was that this was because he (at 86) was beginning to see more color. No clever stunts. No success by scandal. And, a bored painter he was not.

One of his greatest strengths was also that of an inspiring teacher. Like Robert Henri, with whom he studied, he understood the painting process as well as the spirit of art and used concision, drama, and wit to get students to understand. I used to hear my teacher recount endless studio stories that both informed and made you laugh. This one, which is more about Brackman’s temperament, is instructive nonetheless:

One morning Brackman received a call in his Connecticut studio. “Hello, Mr. Brackman. I’m Peter Worthington. You may not remember me but I studied with you many years ago. And I have a favor to ask – and, of course, I will be happy to compensate you for your time.”

“You see,” Worthington continued, “I’ve just been appointed first violinist of the Boston Symphony and tonight my friends are throwing me a party. And I was thinking how interesting it would be if I could do a little still life of my violin and have it there as part of a musical tableau for tonight’s party. Now – I remember that you used to break the painting process down into stages and I was wondering if you could walk me through the stages, once more, over the phone.”

Brackman replied: “Well Mr. Worthington, in fact, I do remember you and it is so ironic that you should call at this very moment. You see, tonight my friends are also giving me a party and just before you called, I was thinking how nice it would be if by tonight I could play – oh, let’s see – Brahm’s Violin Concerto. Could you please walk me through that over the phone?”

“I don’t think that is very funny Mr. Brackman.”

“Neither do I.”

 CLICK!!

I saw this diagram one time where the history of painting was presented as a tree with all these branches first emerging from a trunk and then from one another suggesting that one art movement begot another and so on. Duchamp was a major branch, of course, with all these smaller branches coming out of it. Interestingly, Brackman was considered important enough to be one of the branches too; but he was represented as one of the dead ends, a branch that virtually no one takes any more. Pretty accurate diagram, actually.

 

A Nice Failure

I often envy non-plein air painters and then again I don’t. At times I wish I could stay in the studio, close the doors, put on beat-up comfortable clothes and paint without distraction. No dragging my easel and supplies out to wherever. No being on the spot. No being so vulnerable. And yet, a thousand times over, I end up choosing to paint outside, in the midst of the activity of a community and of course in the midst of the air, vibrating colors, wind, smell, sounds that cohere and somehow draw me into an another dimension. Let’s just call it a rush. It’s the reason why I paint. I really don’t think about the results of the painting as I do it. The canvas is a kind of magical surface that when I mark with a brush, I am propelled into this other dimension.

Lest I sound like a loony bird, take a look at the much heralded right brain pathway that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor (whom I referenced in our last newsletter) has described and others have identified as part of the creative experience:

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now….it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me…in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

Hoping, thus, that my credibility has been enhanced, let me explain more about the rush dimension, as it were, that painting delivers to me. It is in this space I become more, I grow, I feel larger, and, most importantly, I am able to see and feel more deeply. But here’s the problem: the rush isn’t easily accessible. I may go out 5 times and only access it once or twice. Or there may be just moments, a few minutes here and there, where I feel I’m in that “zone.” And is very often the case, the feeling of having a deeper experience seems to slip away much like those nice dreams that we try to re-enter upon awakening.

The photo above is of a painting (that measures 4 feet by 2 feet) that failed largely because I could not sustain the dream-like feelings that had brought me to the point to when the photo was taken (just after my second time out or after about 3 hours work). During that second time out, I felt as though I was lost in a good way or maybe I should say captured by the totality of the plein-air experience. To the non-painters among you, it means that the color/space/atmosphere was practically drug-like. The boats and trees were no longer boats and trees. Instead they were just color, melting, moving, vibrating, and lush. I felt alive, happy, joyful, intense, visually articulate and wanting to converse, wanting to be touched by the swirling rose and yellow and green energy around me, all in a sea of innocence, wonder, pleasure, and enchantment.

When I got back to my studio and put the painting down and stepped back, I gave myself permission to assess the thing critically because I was no longer in the process. I said to myself, “Yes, it’s working. All those feelings come back to me. It’s alive.” The drawing seemed off balanced. But no matter, I wanted to give it another shot. I wanted to push the thing forward, to make it express, somehow, more vitality and more mystery. But (and this is a big “but”) pushing it meant that I would have to find an experience that was actually richer and deeper in some way than the experience that had brought me to where the painting was at that point.

Allow me to articulate this thought carefully: pushing in this sense means to push oneself further, to strain or reach further. Feeling and seeing more richly, however, does not come about by simply looking more intently. The particularity of any given feeling, when I paint, arises out of an expression of who I am in the moment that I am making choices. A writer may choose one word or a series of words from a vocabulary of 100,000 separate words, for example. In my case, as a painter, I must choose a very specific color and a way of applying the color, also from thousands of possibilities. That is how I express myself as a painter. I must act, I must choose. My choices will differ from someone else’s. That is why a painting will be called, if it is sincere, a Monet or a Renoir or a Smith, Jones, or Fresia.

Notice how the process unfolds. The brush stroke may begin out of something shadowy and inchoate within me in that I have a sense of what I want to do, but it is unclear really: some alizarin, with some white and a little bit of cobalt blue and I want to use a broad long stroke, let us say, to express that set of inchoate feelings. But in that very moment when my choices are made manifest on the canvas, in the very moment of making the mark, the feeling is clarified and made real. This is what is meant when Cézanne or Monet said – and they said it often – that they were struggling to realize (to make real) particular inchoate feelings as they paint.[1] I become determinant in a particular way precisely because (in any given moment) I choose a color or line or whatever, make the mark and – swoosh – realize a feeling that in turn permits me to see just a little bit more.[2]  In order to push the thing forward, then, I would have to realize deeper feelings by making strokes that themselves would have to be part of that realization. Or to put it another way, I would have to grow that much more in order to get to that new place of seeing and feeling.

At my designated time to go out again, however, it was cloudy for several days. Then it rained. Finally, when the sun had returned, I went back out. But the humidity was gone. The air was crisp and dry. Everything was a slightly different color: the visual whole was just something altogether different. Not hugely different but enough. It was like buying that great bottle of wine only to find that it wasn’t the same, it disappointed. Or, it was like seeing a friend, who for some reason is distracted, and the evening falls flat. I simply wasn’t moved.

So I was confronted with a problem. Do I paint and try to catch a new rush? Or should I wait for that magical day to return with exactly the right weather and colors? Experience told me not to wait but to move forward with the new day, to find something else that felt magical and to weave it into what was already there.[3] Bad decision. My friend wasn’t the same. The wine was sour. Whatever life had existed in the painting seemed to get buried beneath a layer of uninspired miserable strokes of paint.

So what can we take away from this experience? Maybe the most important lesson is that the activity of painting has more to do with growing a tiny bit than it does with making a picture. Pushing ourselves and feeling that extra new bit of power (the enhanced ability to see) explains the thrill. Some of you may be thinking, what if I tried to fix the painting or go back to the studio and resurrect the old one somehow? Sure, I could have done that, but that approach turns on an entirely different understanding of what it means to paint. That would be the picture maker for whom the pay off comes from an external measure, “the result” or “the sale” or “the approval by another.” Contrast this approach to the one I’m outlining here where the payoff is in becoming more complete by virtue of one’s expressive choices and where the pay off is always in the moment of creativity.

That’s what was nice about that failure. For a few hours I was becoming more able. I was becoming more me. There is no painting to show for it, now. Just the photo of something that was what it was at a particular moment in time.

Perhaps it wasn’t a failure after all.

Tips and Tricks!

It’s that time of year when I sit down and put my order together to replenish my supply of paint. I hate to tell nasty little secrets out of school, but it is difficult to get decent art supplies in Italy; at least if you do the kind of painting that I do. The market just doesn’t exist for plein air types or neo-Impressionists.

So I thought it might be useful to respond to the question, what brands and why? And if you read to the very end, I have a great tip for you. I have a sure fire way of keeping the paint on my palette from drying up.

It seems to be the case that with many decent painters, the number of paints (as in colors) one uses diminishes over time. Kevin MacPherson, for example, uses just primary colors – more or less.  He’s not alone. I often envy painters like that. How easy it must be to order paint, not to mention dragging supplies out to the field. However, I am moving in the opposite direction: the more colors and choices the better.

If I were rich, I would hire a number of art sherpa’s to carry around a palette of about 100 colors, all piled up in huge amounts. I would like my palette to look like a gelato stand, a variety of flavors dripping with abundance, inviting, seductive, very nearly begging to be tasted, eaten, consumed. Not only would such a palette look amazing and delicious, there are just so many incredible colors that some manufacturers make that, I believe, cannot possibly be duplicated by mixing primary colors. And as a rich guy I would spare no expense. I would buy brands like Old Holland, Maimeri, or Schmincke Mussini. Old Holland, I think, is the top of the line. Some colors are to die for. Super expensive, too. One of these days I’m going to splurge and just buy about 20 tubes, each a different color, each 150 ml, each goopy as can be, and just have at it. Or maybe not.

What I can afford are Rembrandt and Gamblin. For the money, they are darn good. So I use those two brands primarily. For white I use Classico because I can get it easily in Italy. And white needs to be extra goopy given that I use tons of it, probably 10 times as much as with all the other colors combined.

“Student grade” paint is precisely that; they are for students. Very practical. Very cheap, synthetic and the cobalts and cadmiums (which are the more expensive colors if you buy the real pigments, tend to gray down when mixed.) Synthetic cadmiums and cobalts will say hue as in cadmium orange hue. In this context, hue means fake. But what the heck, they’re super cheap. And you can still make decent paintings with them. And there are many student grade brands, one as good (or as lousy) as the next. Winton, Amsterdam, Daley-Rowney Georgian are examples.

As far as brushes, I use, and will only use, flat filberts rounded tips. Utrecht makes the best inexpensive version of these brushes: 209-F. If you don’t have access to Utrecht, I would suggest going on-line to see what kind of brush I am talking about and then possibly finding it somewhere else.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, you heard the tips. Now for the trick. I am not about to reveal to you the secret of secrets (actually I did hear one student say they had heard of this but only one) and for all you entrepreneurial types out there, this your chance; I only ask that you give me a cut. As you know, if you don’t paint everyday, the paint on your palette dries up. Good-bye expensive paint. This will contribute to you using lesser and lesser amounts and then your paintings will go downhill from there. You’ve heard of the saran wrap trick, the freezing trick, well forget freezing and saran wrap. That’s for amateurs.  Now – drum roll please! – here’s the real trick of tricks: keep your paints underwater. That’s right, you’ve heard it here first – probably.

There are many ways of doing this, of course. One way is to use a plastic (plexi) or glass palette and keep the thing in a tray/kitty litter box, and keep the palette under water. When you want to use the palette, just take it out, shake it off and give it a minute to dry. Or, because I like wood palettes, I use a palette knife to scrape off each color onto a strip of plexi (about 3 inches by 20) and then put the strip of plexi into a tube (PVC with cap) filled with water (or in a tray filled with water). Same thing. When I paint again, I pull out the strip of plexi and transfer the paint to my palette. Always fresh and perky (except for the ultramarine blue – don’t know what’s wrong with ultramarine blue pigments, still usable but not so perky).

So go out and buy the best paints that you can afford. And waste not.