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When Paint Feels Like Light
Robert Brackman once told a student: “The problem with your painting is that the colors feel like paint. They need to feel like light.” The idea that Brackman was getting at is this: we want our paintings to feel like the sensations of light that move us so that we don’t need to refer to something else for their meaningfulness.
The Great Painting Puzzle: “It Was Dull!”
At the turn of the last century, plein-air painters understood this principle. The best example is Monet who said, in effect, “some painters paint the tree, the house, the boat, I paint what is between me, the house and the boat”…..So if we want our paintings to have that sense…of conveying the energy of outdoor light, we really need to learn to see and feel atmospheric color.
What We Can Learn From Remarkable Artists
No one in this collection of art makers, unlike Warhol, Koons, Hirst, and many contemporary artists, uses the activity of art making to realize some end external to the activity such as private gain, power, or wealth, for example. Instead we find that it is in the process of doing, of articulation, that there is intrinsic value. While the selling of books, music, paintings may be a business, the activity of making art clearly is not for them nor can it be.
Painting as Description or Expression?
There are artists whose paintings describe the subject they are painting and there are others where the subject is merely a prompt or point of departure. This is not to say that the two types of paintings do not merge in some cases. But, for our purposes, the distinction is a necessary one if I am to provide you with a way to make paintings that have more to do with being alive than they do with achieving a likeness.
Painting Large En Plein-air
In the studio, the painter stops when the copy is finished. Out of doors, I stop when I’m finished – when I’m caught up and carried away and then brought back down.
The Problem With Koons Is Not The Banality Of “His” Work
Koons and Hirst and others like them are but faces on a relatively new but misunderstood art system regime that has essentially killed off the artist as unitary author…..We ought not to accept art system arrangements because we have inherited them nor should we accept the authority of people who just happen in our time to hold power. One thing that working as a unitary author does besides providing a source of self-worth and fulfillment is that it incentivizes independence.
What You Don’t Know About Authentic Impressionism
A brief summary of the story of the painters who became known as the French Impressionists and what makes their work distinctive.
Head Studies, Not Portraits
From the 1860s into the 1930s, a period that might be called the grand tradition of painting, the task of visual artists was to respond to visual sensations….Painters did not do portraits, as such, where the task was to achieve a likeness if not a visual expression of the very personality of the model. Instead, as Cèzanne inimitably advised, “Paint the head as you would a door knob.”
Not Incidental But Foundational
He emphasized “sincerity” and scoffed at artists searching for “success” saying that, “If [a painter] is concerned with success, he works with just the one idea; pleasing people and selling. He loses the support of his own conscience and is dependent on how others are feeling. He neglects his gifts and eventually loses them.”