Flowers are great to paint. I love painting them. But, and this is a big fat BUT, if you are not careful, they will quickly destroy the artistry within you. Let me explain.

I should alert the reader that I am writing from an Impressionist point of view. So let us recall some basic principles of Impressionism. Virtually to a person, they were explicit in their condemnation of the literal, which is to say, their paintings were not intended to be stories or social commentary (despite the gazillions of books to the contrary. The tendency is to assume that all realism is a kind of photo-journalism; hence, it must be literal. Or the converse, that if it is not literal, one must paint out of one’s head. Students of Impressionism would do well to pay more attention to what the artists themselves said. Pissarro lamented, for example, that most people only see the “subject” in his paintings. Monet talked endlessly about his need to convey his feelings. “We paint not to paint the subject,” Cèzanne reminded everyone, “but to realize sensations.”

So here’s Principle Number 1, so often articulated by Monet: Don’t see the thing before you. Or to put it another way, there are no flowers, just line and color that become prompts for us to respond to emotionally and realize feelings in the moment that our brush touches the canvas. If one loves flowers and wants to paint flowers, one is already in trouble because one will try like crazy to make a picture of flowers. So challenge Number 1, when you paint flowers don’t see flowers.

The second challenge in painting something that one is so focused on is that one is apt to neglect everything else. Principle Number 2: there is no such thing as background or tabletop or vases that play supporting roles. There are none of those things. There are no supporting roles. There is just line and color. Every square inch of a canvas ought to look as though the painter was fully involved with that square inch. Challenge Number two: everything else in the painting ought to reveal a fascination and an infatuation equal to the blasted flowers.

Principle Number Three: We are artists so do not paint what everyone else can see, ie, the obvious. Degas said that we don’t paint what we see but what we make others see. Okay, everyone can see the beauty in a sunset or a young child and, you guessed it, the “beautiful colors” in flowers. So what is an artist going to make the viewer see beyond the obvious? Challenge Number Three: say something about flowers that most people don’t see, and about that which moves you.

Let me give you some examples. First, I will show you some of my work (not the best example but it’s handy) and then I will show you some images by Monet.

The details on the left were taken from the image above. I chose these to show you that I was not seeing flowers as much as color and movement. In other words, I didn’t draw with the color but placed bits of various colors on the canvas as I engaged the subject emotionally, not seeing flowers, not looking for results but just enjoying my vision and moving through the process. Notice also that I have left parts of the canvas open in order to kick up that sense of light.

In these details I wanted to show that I did find other parts of the subject matter fascinating, certainly as fascinating to me as the flowers. Wait, there are no flowers! You see, and this brings us back to Challenge Number three: I am saying to the viewer, I want to  make you see the beauty of the cloth and the colors of the grass and the reflections and colors in the vase: they are not separate from those red and white things in the vase. It’s all alive. It’s all dancing. And it’s all there, available to everyone. But if you think you are painting flowers, you will see none of it.

Now let’s go to a real painter and look at details of some of his work. Okay, Claude, you’re on:

It’s pretty obvious. Monet isn’t seeing flowers but realizing feelings. He’s intensely alive, which comes first, and so is his work, which then follows as a by-product of the experience.

Second, you can see even in these details how he is enamored with everything around the flowers. No supporting roles here. It’s all one thing. And it’s in virtue of his non-literal approach that he is showing us something we may not have seen had we been standing where he was: flowers are movement. They are swirling around, dancing, along with everything else.

I hope you don’t misinterpret all of this as instructions on how to paint flowers. You paint flowers the same way you would paint a nose or water or pavement on a city sidewalk. You see, painting is not about the subject matter. Painting is an activity where one lets go in her own particular way, realizing feelings that only she, as specific individual, could possibly realize given her age and experiences and needs. Yes there are techniques to learn, a craft to learn, but if you were only to get very good at those things, your work would look competent and probably boring. Painting is about learning new ways to be free and by that I mean new ways to be more you, more sincere, even if that means marching to your own drum.

Let me leave you with Monet’s thoughts that make contact to what I’m trying to suggest here:

“Paint as you see nature yourself. If you don’t see nature right with an individual feeling, you will never be a painter, and all the teaching cannot make you one [emphasis added].”

The post On Painting Flowers appeared first on - FRESIA.

Often I will hear someone say, after looking at a painting of mine, “I love your palette.” The underlying assumption is that were someone else were to use my palette, the colors in their paintings would be about the same. Not true. The colors that one sees in a painting are the colors that that painter sees or makes up.

In my case, I paint only the colors that I see. So if one were to like the colors in any given painting of mine, a more appropriate comment would be, “I like the colors you see.” Were I to use a different palette with different colors, I would still try and mix the colors I see. So here’s point number one: in developing a palette that will work best for you, choose colors that will make it easier for you to mix the colors you see, or make up – if that is what you do.

My palette is similar to that of Monet’s (although I use more colors). The colors are called prismatic because they are, more or less, the colors of the rainbow or the colors that compose natural light.

Brands That I Use

Were I rich enough to afford my first choice, I would use Old Holland. They are creamy and the variety of choices is extraordinary. However, the brands I do use, Gamblin and Rembrandt, are quite good. They’re not too expensive and they are nice and creamy too. I do not use student grade brands, like Winton or Georgian. Student grade brands aren’t bad but they substitute synthetic pigments for the more expensive ones like cobalt or cadmium, hence the much cheaper prices. So for example, if you mix a Winton cadmium orange hue (hue means fake) with a little white and do the same with Gamblin cadmium orange, the latter will retain that sweet pureness, while the Winton will gray down a bit.

Thoughts on Specific Colors

As time goes along, I often discover colors that I can’t do without. I once copied, in a museum, a haystack painting by Monet – right in front of me – and discovered emerald green. I really thought that I couldn’t do without it, but now I really don’t use it that much. Now one of my favorite colors is cadmium lemon yellow (not shown on the palette above). I find that I can kick very light and bright yellows up a notch with lemon yellow, more so than if I were to use yellow light. Wolf Kahn introduced me to quinacridone. Again, it isn’t that because I love a color, independently of what I see, that I use it. It’s just that after having mixed a little quinacridone with white, I almost stopped using alizarin to get that rosey veil of atmosphere that I seem to see everywhere. Whereas alizarin is a very cool red, quinacridone is slightly lighter and warmer. Hence, the rosey veils that emerge from quinacridone seem to sing a little more.

I stopped using cerulean blue when I discovered Sevres, made by Rembrandt. It has that rich “sky” blue quality that trumps cerulean. (Note: as nice as these rich, pure colors are, I rarely use such colors without mixing. I wouldn’t want to lift my subject matter out of an atmospheric haze, even when I’m painting in the studio. Sometimes in the bright sun and up close, a little dab of such colors will, indeed,  “do ya.”)

Sometimes, I will substitute sap green for viridian, if I need something more earthy and less transparent. But one can get those dark warmish greens, too, by mixing yellows with ultramarine blue.

Dioxin purple is the best purple, but like purple passion statements, must be used sparingly if at all.

Cobalt blue? Can’t live without it – and it is expensive too. But necessary. No skimping when it comes to cobalt. Other than white, I probably use more cobalt blue than any other color. Don’t ask.

White must be goopy; in fact, the goopier the better. Grumbacher used to make a “soft-white” – I think they said it was for underpainting, not sure why, but it was super goopy. Hard to get though. Permelba is okay. In Italy, I have found a brand that is rather cheap (Classico) – student grade probably, but sufficiently goopy to have become my default titanium white.

And lastly, my new love affair: vermilion. Good-bye cadmium red light, hello hot-orangey-red. Where have you been all these years?

Mediums

No. I never use mediums. I use paint thinner to clean my brushes. That’s it.

Keep It Clean

The one thing that it seems most painters do is not clean their palette. Yuk. I couldn’t possibly begin a painting if my palette looked like a pizza. I generally place my colors on the top border of my palette or on the side as well (from cool to warm), depending on the size and shape, but each and every time I stop painting, I scrape off the mixing area with a palette knife and then, with some paint thinner, wash off the remaining paint so that my palette, when I return to it, has that nice middle value warm-gray patina. That way, as I mix colors, I can more easily judge the value of the color I am mixing and its relationship to other colors.

Brushes too: I clean each of them, as I paint. No pizzas. No gunked up brushes in my hand or in the tray. No rags dangling about with fifty million colors oozing and bleeding, just waiting to mess me up.

Order and cleanliness are all part of palette and brush protocol.

And goopiness. Don’t forget that.

The post Thinking About My Palette And The Paint I Use appeared first on - FRESIA.

This is the third blog in a three-part series: one of the thoughts that I have been suggesting, implicitly perhaps (as so many other artists have), is that the “subject” of a painting is never the subject (at least it ought not be),[1] that painting as an activity is the expression of self and, therefore, a process of self-realization, a process of “becoming.” This process at its best, therefore, is joyful given the sense of fulfillment one feels as one realizes one’s powers and unique shape – and yet it is always fraught with degrees of torment given that it is a kind of rebirth, where one keeps shedding skins, keeps growing. So we find, for example, Monet’s most important teacher, Eugene Boudin, explaining his love of painting skies this way: “To swim in the open sky…what a joy.” And then he adds, “…and what a torment.” To understand what Monet is doing we must probe further this linkage between exhilaration, triumph, and joy on the one hand and torment on the other.

One of my favorite insights of Robert Henri is relevant here: “The drudgery that kills is not half the work that joy is.” I made mention of the Henri quote to a friend (a non-painter) once, as we were sitting at a café on the shores of Lake Como while we were both sipping prosecco (the Italian version of champagne but not considered hoity-toity in the least.). The weather was perfect, the day glorious. My friend, seemingly with great ironic pleasure announced, “I’m feeling rather joyful right now and I have no sense of working, let alone a sense of drudgery. ” Somewhat deflated, I responded, “Well, there’s joy and then there’s joy.” Unimpressed, my friend smiled back at me and ordered another prosecco.

I was trapped by the very language we shared, a language that has but one word for all the possible kinds of joy one might experience. Let me then make a distinction that American English, at any rate, does not admit. The joy of which Henri speaks is not the joy that arises when we are passive and something pleasurable happens to us: sitting in the sun and drinking prosecco, or going shopping, enjoying a grand meal, or receiving gifts; rather it is the kind of joy that comes from not only acting in the world, but a kind of acting we might call resistance,  a clarifying of who we really are. Our true shape, our unique spirit or being comes into clarity when we push against our surroundings, when we “let the world know and feel who we are.”[2]

This isn’t easy. When we push against what surrounds us – a kind of  “putting ourselves out there” – we are not only made more visible, we are made more vulnerable. And yet, this is the stuff of creative expression. This is what Manet meant when he reminded us that “one must risk oneself entirely and anew each time.” Yes, of course we make paintings. But let’s get the order straight: more fundamentally when we paint, we are making ourselves, allowing that song from within to be heard. The paintings follow.

Okay, back to Monet. Take a look again at his own descriptions[3] of what he is feeling as he goes through the process of painting:

 I get disgusted by what comes too easily at first try, I am literally driven mad by the need to render what I feel.

I am feverishly engaged in what I am doing, and every evening I am eagerly waiting for the next morning to do still better….

It was all bad. I have erased what I did…the approach was wrong, the feeling was wrong too.

I have been working every day on the two same canvases and yet have been unable to achieve what I wanted, it will have to come but with what pains and labor.

I always want to do better…and yet I simply cannot, I keep trying.

I have been working on fourteen paintings today….If I were living in Rouen, only now would I start to feel my subject.

I think it would be a terrible mistake to read these passages and infer from them that Monet is simply frustrated, as anyone might be, in not achieving a certain result. Over and over Monet keeps saying how he wishes to “render” his feelings. In fact, he is “driven mad” by this need.[4] But to render one’s feelings is to realize one’s feelings and to realize one’s feelings is to realize and come to know one’s powers, one’s shape, to really begin to see and feel – to clarify – who one is. Thus it follows that if the painting comes easily, there is no real clarification and the feeling is one of  “disgust.” When he says that he must “keep trying” and “do better,” in the context of this intense need to render and realize his feelings more profoundly, he is telling us that for him painting is a process where he, Claude Monet, as a unique being, is emerging. The process is a kind of unfolding. Stated another way, Monet is telling us that his commitment is to become more Monet, to the person he is most.[5]

Monet may paint haystacks, cathedrals, and water lilies but the subject is always Monet. We say “that’s a Monet.” But here is what I’m trying to draw your attention to: that to become Monet is to become Monet as against the values and constraints of the way of life that he inherited. He is not “becoming all that he can be” (to quote that American TV jingle) where achievement is measured in the standard sense, where the institutional set of opportunities made available are adopted or identified with unreflectively. On the contrary, he is explicit: the accepted understanding of what it meant to be an artist for him was “unhealthy.” Were he to have accepted the standard measures of success, he would have had to become less Monet, he would have had to die a little in the process.

I have recounted my own experiences along these lines to students many times. After a decade of rather serious study, I had mastered, as it were, the mechanics of painting that I had been taught. And yet, my work, while correct, always struck me as dead on arrival. My problem, I discovered later, was that I had viewed the act of making paintings much like everything else I had done – or made – in my life up until that time. As a kid, for example, the measure of any work I did that had been assigned to me was the evaluation – by some authority – of the results. Did I do it well or not depended on meeting some unquestioned external standard that I, personally, had nothing to do with. Perhaps it was my father’s judgment of how I cut the grass. My self-worth too was tightly woven into these measures. Ditto with school work. Grades were everything – the feelings I had during the course were essentially irrelevant. Results were everything. Production was everything. My place in whatever hierarchy in which I happened to be implicated was everything. So when it came to painting, I was results-driven, focused on the product, desperate for some measure of approval by my teacher or that implicitly granted by the almighty sale or by the acceptance to a gallery; and from there a new hierarchy would insert itself. Was the gallery a good gallery? Was my way of painting considered by “the experts” to be important or was it (and me along with it) considered passé? Was the job a good job? Would the position be sufficiently worthy of announcing it to friends and family or was it evidence that I was just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill guy that women everywhere would shun? Would my salary be sufficient to purchase the sorts of things that proved that I was not the person I feared I might be?

The threads of a way of life run through us, envelop us, shape us and are largely invisible to us. As those same threads carried over from a way of life organized around ever greater horizons of production and ever more interwoven sets of hierarchies found their way into my process of painting, I was utterly oblivious to the fact my autonomy had been eviscerated. And, frankly, had someone explicitly pointed this out to me, I know I would have shrugged the whole thing off. I mean, why probe such nasty, inconvenient truths? Why rock the boat? Why stop the music and dig around? It won’t help me, right? To hell with it. My little career path was unfolding properly. Yet the cancer that devours one’s personal and independent creativity was, for me at that time, at about stage 4. I had become, to use the parlance of psychiatry,[6] a “production freak.” Well, there you go. I was normal.

Now, to become conscious of all of this, to understand, to cite just one example, that my feelings during the work process mattered – over and against the results or product, what do you suppose I had to do? I had to become aware of all those social threads that ran through me. I had to stop and reflect upon normal ways of doing things. I had to dredge up my assumptions and see if, in fact, they were valid. I had to push against my surroundings. I had to get some distance from the myriad values and expectations that I had inherited and had embraced as my own.

When, for example, I read that Picasso argued that the concept “finish” is an inappropriate category in determining when we stop painting – it’s just fine for making a cake, a car, or a house – do you think that that was an idea “I got” straight away? What was worse was the fact that to pick away at one idea invariably brought into question yet an array of other ideas, each linked to one another, each now percolating up to the surface. There was always a sense of relief as this happened, as in “I don’t have to carry that baggage around anymore,” but at the same time, as I began to slog through the examination of one idea after the other, the more powerful feeling was one of opacity and anxiety. What am I doing? Where does this lead? Am I sure? My family is going to go beserk.

When my teacher implored time and again to not look for results as I paint, that the pay-off comes in the moment of creation, in that moment when one realizes that he or she actually does see more, it was simply not possible for me to respond by saying, “Oh yea, sure. I get it.”  It was not possible to simply become more on the spot, to jettison ways of being overnight. To jettison the ingrained compulsion to get into a good gallery or a good anything,  to disassociate selling from self-worth,  to see the ever present insistence, coming from every direction, to market my brains out as problematic or hollow, as a misdirection, or as a danger, really – is like the drudgery that kills. The transition to a more fulfilling way of approaching painting – that kind of joy -  is unlike the rather quick simple joy that comes swiftly and easily. It is not like the joy of having found a better way, for example, when I dumped my desktop computer in favor of a laptop. The difference for me was that as I slowly grew out of my inherited way of being in the world and into one that was more of my own making, I had to risk putting myself out there “entirely and anew each time.” “To be free,” Henri reminds us, “…can only be attained through the sacrifice of many common and overestimated things.”[7] But to cross all those thresholds! Ouch, the pain, the indignity. Crap, I was no longer normal!

And here we come to the crux of it all: when I was disgusted too with cranking out absolutely correct and acceptable work, I understood, deep in my gut,  that my paintings were dead. I knew at some level that I had to get off the track which had been the track of my life since the first grade, a track I had been moving down breezily, a track that had been delivering to me those wonderful pats on the back for each and every little triumph. In short, I had to slowly but surely stop the music. I had to question. I had to drop out of the great success-competition-be-all-you-can-be-achievement-rat-race. I had to walk through the looking glass, leave that great journey of moving from working-class-ville-to-success and enter into that space where one is looked at – well let’s just say – askance. Oh, the torment. I can still hear my mother saying, “It’s really a shame. He did so well in school.”

*         *         *

“What would make a successful workshop for you?” I ask students when they arrive. “I would like to learn new techniques,” is the most common answer given. Do you suppose that that response is shaped by a culture that rewards innovative technology and efficient production? And when I respond, “It may be more fruitful to learn new ways to be free,”  do you suppose that this competing notion is something that can be readily understood? Or will ever be understood at all?

What impresses me about Monet and his peers is the degree to which they were embroiled in the turbulent politics of their day, the way they met regularly to discuss strategy in the context of philosophy, literature, theater, and the history of their own profession, and how they identified with artist struggles past: “We followed on the heels of the School of 1830,” Pissarro noted in 1900.[8]  I also liked that they were influenced by a new understanding of what it meant to be an artist, one that was articulated nicely by Charles Baudelaire, in his The Painter of Modern Life, an essay that some have referred to as the “philosophical manifesto of the Impressionists.” An artist, suggested Baudelaire, is “a man [woman] of the world…who…wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe.” Artists toward which he felt scorn, instead, were those who were “no more than highly skilled animals…[whose] conversation, which is necessarily limited to the narrowest of circles, becomes very quickly unbearable…to the spiritual citizen of the universe.”[9]

Whenever I see my friend with whom I was drinking prosecco that day, I say, “now remember, the drudgery that kills….” And I stop. And we laugh. It may be a rather elevated or dry or arcane or difficult conversation to jump into, particularly if all we want to do is to slip into a dreamy alcoholic buzz while sitting in the sun. But for anyone who wishes to render their most incredible feelings or realize their deepest creative powers and, thereby, become  “spiritual citizens of the universe,” “drunk” like the child who “sees everything in a state of newness,”[10] then, in that case, it is a conversation that one ought to insist upon having, don’t you think? We are trying to paint our own special poem – the poem of our lives –  after all.

The post What is Monet Doing? (Part 3 of 3) appeared first on - FRESIA.

In Part 1, following a discussion with Mitch Albala,[1] the question arose, why if the results of Monet’s work (particularly within his later work such as the Water Lily series) is so non-literal (see two “water lily” details below), does Monet constantly look at what he is painting (as evidenced by a rare film which can be seen on Youtube). One might think that to be non-literal one might do a fair amount of imagining or working out of one’s head, as opposed to a steady looking or engagement with the subject. In other words, if one’s work is very non-literal, almost to the point of abstraction, would one be painting more in the mode of – say – Picasso or the Abstract Expressionists? Certainly, that’s a possibility, but with the Impressionists and particularly with Monet, I would argue that something else entirely is going on.

But let’s take a look at what Monet has said about his way of painting.

1. Don’t See the Thing as a Thing

He once said to a friend that he “wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint…without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him.” So for example, if you had just gained your sight and you saw the image above, you wouldn’t know if you were looking at Aunt Mary or a plate of spaghetti. It would have no meaning. It would just be sense data. So for this reason, Monet suggests, “When you go out to paint try to forget what object you have before you – a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it emerges as your own naive impression of the scene before you.”

Non-literal, for Monet then, means, simply, don’t see the thing as a thing.

2. See Only Visual Elements

So if you look at a house and don’t see “a house,” what do you see? Well, above Monet says he sees “a little square of blue…and oblong of pink; so he is seeing color, but not the thing (house, boat, person) as a thing. But notice also that often he speaks of a particular kind of color. Again Monet: “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value (emphasis added).”

What Monet is describing here is tonality, the unifying color that bathes everything. This is also known as atmospheric color. One cannot see a house (or anything else) except through the “surrounding atmosphere.” Note also that because the “appearance changes at every moment,” it behooves the Impressionist, at “every moment,” to look again to see what the subject is doing.[2]

Monet calls this kind of steady looking “instantaneity”: “I’m getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but the more I see that a lot of work has to be done in order to render what I’d call ‘instantaneity’, the ‘envelop’ above all, the same light spread over everything the more I’m disgusted by easy things that come in one go. Anyway, I’m increasing the need to render what I experience….”

With his emphasis on the “need to render” what he experiences, we arrive at a crucial point.

3. The Realization of Feelings

We have arrived at what I think may be the most important aspect of Impressionism, but I caution the contemporary reader: remember, that in 1865, just as the Impressionists were grouping together, there were several strands of thought that cohered, ultimately became dominate both in Europe and in the US, and that provide, to a considerable degree, a philosophical foundation for our way of life today. Here’s the punch line:  it is that bundle of ideas, which we have inherited, that the Impressionists passionately opposed. In fact, the way of thinking about creativity that was opposed is now so completely accepted as the new normal, things we simply assume to be true, that it makes it very difficult for us 21^st century moderns to understand the view it replaced.  To fill this out properly is well beyond the scope of a blog, but let me give you an example.

We may think of paintings as having an imitative function (they are pictures of something), as something nice to look at (they are pleasing), or as advancing our understanding (as in conceptual art which practitioners believe communicate extraordinary “content”). And in each of these cases, the artist has feelings about the success, or merit, or value, or worth of the piece in question. We may say that these kinds of feelings – those that depend upon the result – are, therefore, contingent and stand apart from the work. They are separate. This is not what feelings are about when the Impressionists expressed themselves or “rendered their experience.” Let us look at a typical passage where Monet ties together his notion of success, the activity of painting, and his feelings (translated of course)[3]:

“People who hold forth on my paintings conclude that I have arrived at the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination that relates to reality. I should much prefer to have them acknowledge what is given, the total self-surrender. I applied paint to these canvases…bordering on hypnosis…. These landscapes of water and reflections have become my obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.”

It’s not about abstraction (the non-literal) or imagination as such, meaning he isn’t inventing or making things up. He defines success in terms of his ability to express what he feels which in turn is about the total self-surrender, a kind of hypnosis, that occurs within the activity of painting.

So we can see why Monet’s looking is so constant. But the larger point so often lost on us contemporaries who are locked within assumptions that have diverged from Impressionist thinking for more than a century is this: art is all about an expressive activity whereby we come to know our powers and who we are because as we express our feelings about sensations in the moment of making marks, we make determinant and clear who we are. In those moments we expand our existence. In fact, if we take the word “render” to mean “realize” (which would be supported if we listen to Pissarro and Cèzanne), our feelings or our sense of self, as we paint, can not be known before our marks are made. The feelings/experience that Monet describes and wishes to “render” (or convey or realize) are not incidental to the work, or a matter of indifference, but are experienced with joy or pain because in this position of self-clarity, Monet becomes what he has in himself to be and through the act of painting is, therefore, made free.

Let me put it a different way. This is not the “be all you can be” motto of the old US Army ad. In that sense of becoming more, one puts him or herself in tune with an external order, where success is measured by the degree to which one penetrates such an order. This is called “climbing the ladder.” But this is the opposite of what Monet is doing. Monet, since childhood (and many of the Impressionists along with him), had been struggling to realize who he was - as against his surroundings – or the received order. Do you see the difference here? In our way of thinking, we struggle to succeed within an order that we inherit and we have feelings about our work as it contributes or not to that penetration. I feel good about a painting or believe it was successful in that it demonstrates a certain value or level of accomplishment.

Monet (who is engaged in a total self-surrender, who states that his goal is to render his experience) is “obsessed” with discovering a self that unfolds from within him. His realization must be his own. In this respect the Impressionists were “intransigents,” fighting with moral passion against an art system, not unlike ours today, that compelled artists to embrace a self that was an illusory substitute for who they really were.[4]

If all of this seems rather grim to the reader, know this: the unparalleled exhilaration of painting and sense of freedom that motivated the Impressionists also explains their method and the power of their work, work that today continues to move people more than any other art movement in history. Think of it this way: Monet looks, he receives the vibrating, ever-changing sensations of nature. It is as though he looks and is touched in some way. Something within him responds and a feeling in that moment is realized. I say “something” because initially his feelings would have been inchoate. He chooses a color, makes a mark on the canvas by touching it and only in that moment of touching, of expressing who he is,  realizes a feeling, a sense of exhilaration that could not have been known before the touch occurred.

What is he doing? He is touched and he touches back. He is alive. He is free. He is becoming more Monet. And the painting? Oh, that. It’s happening. It follows along. But for goodness sake, if Monet pauses for a moment to look for results, to see if it measures up to something, or if he invents, the spell is broken. To paraphrase Henri, nature doesn’t reveal herself to those who are hell bent on accomplishing “external tasks” ((Pissarro and Manet), particularly those having to do with career.

When we paint for the product, the other, for results, we do not express ourselves but rather an illusory substitute, as I have noted. This point bears repetition because it is this inauthentic self, from the point of the Impressionists, that is a distortion, a mutilation of who anyone is, regardless of whatever outward “success” once may achieve. Hence, such environments and situations ought to be challenged, as the Impressionists inveighed against their institutions, with moral passion.

The Impressionist aesthetic, then, must be understood as an authentication of this passion. But contrary to the work of many scholars (to say nothing of how-to mimicry), one cannot understand Impressionism through a narrow and primary focus on Impressionist paintings. The paintings followed from a journey into a creative freedom that we could describe as becoming (that is, a commitment by these artists to become who they were most).[5] Or to put it starkly, the paintings just happened along the way. It is their journey into a creative freedom, however, that is still both relevant and radical for it still holds out the promise of freedom for the contemporary artist.

In Part III, I will talk a bit about why torment is the underside of joy in this context.

The post What is Monet Doing? (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on - FRESIA.

Recently I had a nice discussion with Mitch Albala, a wonderful painter who knows quite a bit about Impressionism. If you don’t know of Mitch, check out his website, his work, and his workshops. He may be the teacher near you that you are looking for. Also check out his book, Landscape Painting, which is certainly one of the more thoughtful and helpful treatments of the subject.

What prompted the discussion was the manner in which Monet can be seen painting in a Youtube video. In this video we see Monet make a mark on the canvas. He then looks at his water lilies and makes a mark again, and so on, repeating this rapid succession of looking and making marks for quite some time. On his website, Mitch comments:

“Because Monet’s approach to color was so interpretive and imaginative—not at all literal—I imagined that he would have spent more time thinking about the colors on his canvas and less about the colors in front of him.”

This prompted a discussion that I wish more painters could join. Several of the Impressionists have pointed to the wide-ranging and prolonged discussions they were a part of at the Café Guerbois, among other cafes, as explaining the confidence they needed to think and act independently of various power centers. I had a different take on what Monet was doing.

Yes, Monet’s water lily paintings are certainly “not at all literal” but in Monet’s case (and in the context of Impressionism more generally) I believe that he arrives at this non-literal application of paint not out of imagination or thinking. In fact, Monet tells us that he paints only what he sees. The key in understanding what Monet is doing turns on what one means by “literal:” when Monet looks at water lilies (according to Monet) he is not seeing water lilies. This is what non-literal means in the context of Impressionism: don’t see the thing (with a name, the literal) you are looking at. Instead see only visual elements: line, tone, and color.

And why might Monet translate everything he sees into visual elements? Because he is a visual artist and once his field of vision becomes visual stuff (or “sensations”) he is in a position to respond emotionally to what he sees. Or more simply, he is in a better position to be moved. This is the basis of the marks that one might call non-literal. They do not arise out of thought-driven expression, but out of feeling-driven expression, which carries with it that ineluctable, visceral twinge.

The activity of painting, for an Impressionist, is about the “rendering” (Monet) or “realizing” (Cèzanne) of one’s feelings in response to these “sensations” (something that Monet called “instantaneity.”) Pissarro tells us that this is the crux of both of painting and freedom. Hence, the constant looking is not about description – getting the pond with water lilies to look like a pond with water lilies, but about opening oneself to the stream of energy of color that, as Monet tells us, is “ever changing” and then using that surge of feeling in the act of making marks. The looking and the making of marks melt into one, much in the way music and dance melt into one. Monet is getting a rush, a “dream world” as he calls it. The rush is then “rendered” (I think Cèzanne’s word “realized” is a better explanation) through the making of marks.

Here’s the kicker: if Monet had to think and evaluate the marks as he made them on the canvas – imagine or invent them for example – the spell would be broken. There would be no dream world. He would be constantly stuck in a conscious-critical mode. Each mark would be made in anticipation of a result. Whereas Monet is not looking for results; nor does he know where the painting is going. The anxiety of getting it right disappears. He is painting, as he says, as “the bird sings.” Or to paraphrase Casals, he is playing the music, not the notes. He has crossed over into “enchantment” (a word Monet uses regularly) that carries him, unconsciously, along.

There is another negative aspect to this kind of painting that turns on thinking out the results consciously. If one looks for results as one paints, then one is prioritizing the evaluation of the result over the rush that comes from playing the music without consideration of the results. This is called production. And when one produces a product there are always other sets of eyes, other needs, considerations, and schedules that displace one’s own. This is precisely the “tyranny” that the Impressionists inveighed against; which is not to say that Monet didn’t compromise his process from time to time and paint for the approval of the Salon jury. But when he did he was quite aware about the compromise, noting (as I have previously) that when he painted as the birds sing (i.e., not looking for results) the Salon jury would reject it, he believed, because it was “too Monet.”

In Part II, I will explore this a bit further by following closely what are Monet’s own descriptions and explanations of the painting process. In Part III, I will come back to a theme that I repeat, ad nauseum for some I suppose, but which must be repeated because it diverges so completely from the contemporary assumptions that seem to govern painting and that is this: while a picture results, painting is not about making pictures. It is about becoming more of who we already are. Monet becomes more Monet (“too Monet” for the Salon) throughout his career but only when he allows the “rendering” of his feelings to drive the process. Cèzanne becomes more Cèzanne as he allows the “realization” of his feelings to drive the process. Pissarro becomes more Pissarro as he allows his own personal response to the “sensation” drive the process. And the paintings happen along the way, as does the non-literal appearance. Marks that appear non-literal are non-literal because they are very much a by-product of a non-conscious, dreamlike enchantment. Bottom line: you want to be lose and non-literal? Then don’t look for or worry about the results. The descriptive element is only a prompt, a point of departure. The non-literal dimension, the dimension that moves people, that keeps people looking at the thing for years, is about you, is about what moved you.

Painting freely to get down to who you are, as opposed to trying to get specific results for some external end, was the entire point of Impressionism. But while this “becoming” for the artist may be “dreamlike,” incredibly fulfilling, and joyful even, it is also riddled with torment. Or as Renoir put it, the process that contributed to his growth was “a gentle madness.” So in Part III I will explain why this is so, and why this joy, attendant with a kind of torment, defined Monet’s life and the life of so many great artists.

The post What is Monet Doing? (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on - FRESIA.

I am making a few instructional videos to convey the ideas and practices that are part of the workshop I teach. I now have the first video ready to go. It’s not free, so this is a commercial of sorts. But I do have a preview to help you decide if you wish to purchase it. And I don’t think it is very expensive either. I think these videos will be especially helpful for those students who have already taken a workshop and wish to continue. At the same time, I think that there is enough information presented that it may be useful for all painters, but especially those who love Impressionism.

In the first video, I basically explain how I go from the still life on the left, to the final painting shown below. I do not make up any colors. I see the colors. And there is a particular order to the process. It isn’t for everyone, but I think it can help anyone who paints to learn to see more.

I emphasize the phrase “the authentic method” because there are dozens of people who claim to do or teach and write books on Impressionism and after decades of study I simply have to throw down the gauntlet and say, I’m sorry but this is the method.

The method, it needs to be pointed out, is more involved than “the mechanics” or the “how-to” steps. It’s really a point of view about art and painting, a philosophy. In fact, the aesthetic is not the defining characteristic. This is why artists like Manet, Whistler, and Sargent were part of the Impressionist circle (and were invited to exhibit with them) but did not adopt – at least not always or fully – what might be thought of as an Impressionist aesthetic. But I thought it might be appropriate here to give you a glimpse into my early experience with the teaching of Impressionism, back when I had no idea or intent of ever becoming a painter.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I walked into the studio of William Schultz. Little did I know then how the teachings of this man would forever change my life. It didn’t happen all at once. I studied with him for a brief time and then returned in the mid-70s for regular classes. But as much as I was drawn to his work and his teaching, I was, to put it mildly, rather clueless about what painting meant to him, even after years of taking classes.

I really didn’t take it seriously until 1981. I remember the year exactly because Bill asked me to be a “monitor,” which basically meant that I would become somewhat of an assistant. Even at that point, I still didn’t get the philosophy of the approach he taught. Not at all. I really wasn’t ready. I was too busy hoop-jumping in an entirely different field. But I knew enough of the “how to” mechanics to help out. I was so honored that he asked little ole me to assist in teaching that I decided to take painting seriously and from that point to now, I have.

Bill represented the tail end of the studio system of teaching. That is, if some young person had aspired to be a painter, he or she would study in the studio of a master artist. Bill’s primary teacher was Robert Brackman. Brackman studied with Robert Henri (and George Bellows, a student of Henri) and Ivan Olinsky. Henri studied in Paris during the 1880s (and was a distant cousin of Mary Cassatt). And Olinsky studied with John Singer Sargent, who in turn was a close confidant of Claude Monet. By the 1960s, this studio system had been displaced by the university. Henceforth, a young visual artist would seek visual art instruction not within the studio of a master artist, but at an institution of higher learning run by a Board of Trustees, who in turn were part-time representatives of corporations appointed by various governors. A different system indeed.

What was nice about Bill’s studio was the sincerity and love of painting and the reverence for the previous teachers who preceded him. I can remember a zillion little axioms, stories, and admonitions that were passed down from teacher to student across the decades. Here are a few:

Sargent: “Begin with a broom, end with a needle…[and] begin everything, finish nothing.”

Henri: “The point of painting is not to make a picture but to experience an extraordinary moment.”

Brackman: “You’ll make all your mistakes in the first ten minutes…[and] you need to learn how to caress the canvas and to attack it.”

Schultz: “If I can only reach you mentally…it’s about the thrill…not the production…[and] do you know what it means when a human being makes a mark on a canvas? It’s a miracle….From the first stroke to the last be an artist.”

And so it went. I tried to put all of this down in a self-published book, as many of you know. The very fact that it had to be self-published tells you a good deal about Schultz’s studio and his teachings. They cut against the grain. In a fast-food art culture, Bill was slow food. In an art industry with groups like the YBAs¹ being pushed by the billionaire-investor-collectors, Bill’s teachings are disallowed; far too subversive. And can you guess now what the thrust of his teachings might be?

Well, on the actual making-of-a-painting side of things, it was about a way of seeing and feeling and expressing that requires years of study and doing, much like any other pleasurable work activity where the payoff is in the growth and fulfillment that the activity delivers (as in growing-up, or learning a language or becoming accomplished at playing a musical instrument). His philosophy, in other words, undermined notions of production (the manufacturing kind), where one is evaluated by the thing produced. Yippe doo – you win a prize or get a gold star. I can remember him – and he was one gentle, kind, and sweet man – passing by me muttering (he would do this only in front of people he trusted): “Rembrandt, PhD.” We, on the inside track as it were, would all chuckle.

What he meant was that categories signifying hierarchy are blasphemous to art. Until he found a great teacher (Brackman), he was an illustrator but not a terribly accomplished artist. That eventually took Brackman’s guidance and decades of work. He once did nothing but draw for a year because he was frustrated with his line. But here’s the thing: I would hear him say the following over and over and over: “If I can do it, you can do it.”

Bingo. End of story. Nothing could be more true and nothing rocks the art establishment as this rather humble but searing, historically verifiable truth.² He didn’t mean it would be easy for any of us or that everyone will persevere; rather he was saying what so many artists have said: we are all born with the gift to create. Few will get there, but we all start out with the capacity. Which brings us back to the first sentence of Henri’s great book, The Art Spirit, “The province of art, when properly understood, is the province of every human being.”

Art, painting, whatever – is simply a means for each of us to express who we are and in the process discover our power and our beauty. That’s it. Forget all the hoopla – the awards, the degrees, the measures, titles, medals, gold stars. That all junk food. It’s all petty. It’s all worthless.

Beethoven, when he learned that he would eventually become completely deaf and for a moment contemplated suicide, finally pulled himself together and declared, “I shall grab fate by the throat and choke it….Ah, but for art – for art I would live a thousand times.” But why? So he could get a gold star or medal or name in lights?

It’s never about the product or the measure that the product confers on the maker. This is not to minimize great art but rather to suggest that great art follows from processes where the maker becomes more of who he or she already is. If you “can’t draw,” (as Manet said of Cèzanne) then go with the lines in which you invest your feelings anyway (as Cèzanne very much did). Sincerity. That’s more of an Impressionist hallmark (and one that was repeatedly articulated) than was broken color or plein-air painting (think of Degas).

This is what I never understood for decades: it’s about the joy of discovering my power and beauty, not how the results of what I do measure up to some external standard. Ain’t that something! Only then will my work have life and it will have life because I will have been more alive. This is not an insight that is easy to embrace, and truly understand, because while it is tremendously valuable, it calls into question much of what we are suppose to do with our lives in our culture. But if Bill Schultz could do it and if I – the clueless monitor from 1981- can, so can you.

¹ Young British Artists are artists such as Damien Hirst (rotting cow’s head with maggots in a glass box, sliced up shark in formaldehyde) and Tracy Emin (drawings of herself masturbating or unmade bed, stained sheets, and condom as installation) who make works often described by branded art agents as “challenging,” “difficult,” and “important.”

² Remember, the indictment by elites of rebellious artists in Paris circa 1860 who advanced this position back then was primarily that they were “democratic artists” or artists who wanted independence and freedom to be themselves, as opposed to abiding by top-down dictates as to what artists should be and do.

The post The Authentic Impressionist Method appeared first on - FRESIA.

Recently I was looking at an internet video of a plein-air type “paint out.” There were dozens upon dozens of participants. What struck me, apart from the fact that everyone seemed to be doing little paintings (probably 12 x 16 inches), was that each of the painters whose work could be randomly seen in the video seemed to be approaching the painting as a production process as opposed to a process where the results didn’t matter. This was made evident by the fact that one could see in the paintings that a portion of the work was essentially “finished” while the rest of the canvas remained blank.

I have critiqued this approach before (see Complete In Any Stage) but I wish to return to the subject because I think I have a fresh way of explaining what for me is a terribly key axiom: the measure of a painting – like traveling, perhaps, or friendships, love relationships, love-making itself, dancing, conversation, watching a movie, and so many other activities that are life-giving, is the feeling or set of feelings that we have during the actual activity itself. Robert Henri once encouraged painters to pretend that they were dancing a painting. This is my point exactly, but my not so imaginative wrinkle on this is to encourage painters to pretend that they are singing a painting.

Why singing? Because as we paint, which means as we look and discover, we r e a l i z e feelings and a sense of power, a sense of becoming larger, which is the whole point of it all. Another way of saying it is that we must let the energy of light, the sensuality of the experience, to pass through us, much in the same way that singers allow the sensuality of the experience of sound pass through them. To make the point, I have assembled a few YouTube videos of singers (and one pianist, which is the same thing) that to me, at least, demonstrate two key requirements of painting. First: as it becomes supremely obvious that the sound or the music is passing through these artists, so much so that they seem to be transported to a place where their capacity to touch people is in full throttle, we as painters must also allow the sensations to pass through us so that we, too, have the capacity to touch people. Second: they are wholly vulnerable and open. They allow us to see and feel who they are. We must let it all hang out for the world to see. No small potatoes.

So let’s run through my selections and then I shall conclude with comments as to why a standard production process mitigates against that magical universal communication that art, at least for me, turns on. Push aside any personal like or dislike of the music itself. I have chosen varied selections for a single reason only. All the performers are quite obviously moved; no – more than moved. They are captured and they become vehicles for the transmission of a powerful energy. The sensuality of the music is clearly passing through them. They seem to be caught in a spell. And they don’t seem to care that we are watching.

The post Pretend You Are Singing A Painting appeared first on - FRESIA.

Wolf Kahn once told me that an artist must always be trying to solve a problem. Other well known artists have said the same thing this way: once you get good at something, stop and push past whatever it is that you do easily and well. It’s a nice idea. The notion keeps us from getting into ruts, even lucrative ruts that drive careers. The emphasis is not on product but on growth, on becoming more.

My “problem” as it were is that I have competing and somewhat conflictual interests: I love the very late Monet paintings that are symphonies of virtuosity, tangles of overt brushstrokes that make Pollock’s drip paintings look soulless and formulaic. On the other hand, I love work, like the flat abstraction of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, that are virtually without brush strokes at all, except that there are those wonderful layers of inspired scumbling that make the artist visible just the same. Diebenkorn covered a lot of ground, as most of you know, and it is his contribution, along with such artists as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks – and later Nathan Olivera and Manuel Neri – as Bay Area Figurative artist that really help provide me a direction. In their work one can find that powerful blend of simplicity, verve, and sensuality that seems to marry abstraction and three dimensional space.

If there were a contemporary generation to the Bay Area Figurative movement, which first emerged in the 50s and 60s, I would nominate Kim Frohsin for inclusion. She might resist such a categorization but her work, at any rate, also helps me think about “my problem.”

The two images above (mixed media: on the left: ink, stabilo pencil, gouache, paper; and on the right: stabilo pencil, ink, watercolor crayon, paper) are representative of Kim’s aesthetic. As with many of her figure drawings, one can see that she has reduced everything to three values (dark, middle, and light) with the paper left open as the light. Notice also how non-literal everything is. The right foot of the figure on the left, for example, isn’t drawn as a “foot;” rather it is a dark that melts into the cast shadow. Notice, too, how the floor/background becomes a variety of subtle color, not calculated but discovered, that at the same time provides a tonality in which the figure is located. The figure on the right reminds me of Kahn’s criticism of my own work: “your work isn’t messy enough.” Kim’s is messy just right: it seems to be the by-product of a visual exploration, one that suggests that she isn’t looking for results so much as she works, but rather is immersed in a sensual rush that perculates as she converses with what she sees. She not only seems to be exploring but finding, finding bits and pieces, splats and scratches that lie beyond the facts. This, to me, is the mark of a serious artist. The subject is not the figure in the end. The figure was just the prompt, the point of departure. The subject is always Kim.

Check out her website (http://kimfrohsin.com). Look at the way she treats bread and lemons. Notice that her choice of subject (tea bags and fortune cookies) has zip to do with some inherent beauty and everything to do with what she sees and feels visually. Her “airplane” series (as in paper airplanes!) reveals that extraordinary capacity to make visual poetry out of practically nothing (much in the way Diebenkorn could paint a pair of scissors on a table and convey greater depth and mystery than a Renaissance painter’s pieta).

When I lived in San Francisco, I knew Kim. Her work was impressive then. But I had not been aware of what she has been doing this past decade so it was a delight to spend some time with her website and realize that her work speaks to me even more these days.

Kahn was right. I need to get messier. Kim seems to be admonishing me as well: keep things simple. Paint things that most everyone else walks by. Let the struggle show. Nothing like a good problem to keep the whole thing moving forward.

The post Kim Frohsin appeared first on - FRESIA.

 

The post Complete in Any Stage: Go for the Rush, Forget the Gold Star appeared first on - FRESIA.

My primary teacher was Bill Schultz. A student of mine once reported back to me that upon calling his wife, Nadya, in order to obtain a DVD, Nadya exclaimed, “Bill taught Jerry everything he knows.” Well, maybe not everything but Nadya is essentially correct: he taught me just about everything I know about painting. He was a great teacher and a great artist, largely in part because he was one of those artists who was incredibly sincere and who never once deviated from his professed principles.

Once, as I was ranting about one thing or another in my own class, I heard a student say to another with a touch of dread in her voice, “Geez, you have to be so pure.” No you don’t. Perhaps if this student could have only heard Bill speak as she watch him paint, perhaps then she would have gotten the feeling that my ranting could not instill: it’s all about becoming “larger, more powerful, more beautiful” (to borrow Emma Goldman’s phrasing).

Being lifted up, getting into that magical place where it all comes together, where one does indeed feels larger and more powerful – forget the painting – is not about purity; it’s about being free. Bill’s way of saying the same thing might be a little less elevated, but more to the point: “From the first stroke to the last, be an artist.”

So let’s take a look at a demo he did, the painting above. I’m guessing but I would say this painting of a model out of doors was probably about 30 x 24 inches. And he probably worked on this during a two and a half hour morning class, which included a break or two. Below is a close-up of the head where I have marked several areas for analysis.

First, note the black arrows. They are pointing to areas where the canvas is coming through. If you look closely you will find many more. The idea here is that a painting is a series of layers, one above the other. One begins with the ground, which in this case was a white canvas, probably slightly tinted warmer to drop it down in value just a touch and also so that the tint color would correspond to the atmospheric color of the day. On top of that would be the underpainting and on top of that would be the painting. The underpainting does not cover all of the canvas, nor does the painting cover all of the underpainting. This means that one can peer down into the layers and in some instances the canvas itself, or ground can be seen. This way the painting breathes as opposed to being “plugged up.” Look again at the work of the French Impressionists and you will find that most employed this way of getting a feeling of freshness and life from their work.

Second, notice the green arrows. They are pointing to a kind of red-orange line. This is called a prismatic edge. When there is a dramatic break or separation of values, our retinas can’t quite handle the sharpness of the separation and we see a glow of color on an edge. This helps the thing turn. Prismatic edges aren’t always the same color. And please – this gets back to the purity issue – do not make them up. You must see them and to see them you must feel them – this gets back to the feeling larger issue. And while we are going down this road, if you paint from photos, you will never see prismatic edges nor feel them. I could say the same for many other visual elements. If you wish to work in this tradition, don’t work from photos: they positively stunt your growth – unless you are off on some other dimension of which I am not aware.

The image above and the next two images are taken from the same painting. First, let’s look at the image above (detail 1). What do we see? We see that someone, using a brush, in a burst of feeling, has applied paint to a canvas. The paint is in the light so it is somewhat impasto or thick. It is done with authority and expression. As Bill put this stroke of color down – releasing the color as he would say – he was not trying to make a hat. He didn’t even see a hat. He is responding to the sensation of bright light, getting a feeling, making the stroke in a beautiful authentic squish and as he does that, in the very moment that he drags his brush across the canvas, he realizes yet another feeling that lifts him up, makes him feel larger. This is why he paints, not for the results, the painting. That is a by-product. He paints so that he can exercise his capacity to see and touch and in the process, in the moment of creation, he becomes more Bill. That’s the payoff. That’s what painting is all about.

If we look at the image on the left (detail 2) we can see the same approach. If you saw only this image you would not know that you are looking at a nose and a mouth, and that’s the point. As Monet would say, don’t see noses and mouths. See color. That is what is going to move you, not someone’s nose or mouth. The rush comes not from reading with your eyes but tasting with your eyes. And as with the hat detail above, the nose and mouth are painted, not drawn with the color. This is what a painting is, a notebook of feelings for that time where you were captured by what you saw. Notice I did not say that you captured X, Y, or Z – the beauty of the lake, for example. It’s the reverse: the beauty of the lake captures you.

Finally, if you saw nothing but the image below (detail 3) I doubt that you would know that it was someone’s cheek. And again, the reason is because Bill did not see a cheek; he saw color and, therefore, he got the cheek “through the color.”

But notice also the colors he saw: basically blues and greens with what appears to be some underpainting coming through. One can only do this if:

a) one is not looking for results as one paints; otherwise, one would make a “cheek”.

b) one is not painting for a competition or gallery or to please someone (all of which Pissarro called “external” measures); otherwise, one could not be “free…to be himself” (again Pissarro) or herself.

c) one is not painting from a photo; otherwise, one could not feel and see atmospheric color.

Feeling “larger” during and because of the creative process is the name of the game. The painting just happens along the way.

The post Anatomy of a Painting by Bill Schultz appeared first on - FRESIA.