Each stage of the painting process is an opportunity to exit our ordinary realms of perception and functions as passage to that realm of enchantment where we feel larger and more alive – and yes, with any luck, possessed!
There are 5 stages one moves through. The first, Composition (in charcoal) is wiped off when one is certain that one is on the right track, in terms of composition, and wishes to move on to oil…..The four remaining stages are an oscillation between line and color, in oil, where one moves from a very light study that emerges from the white canvas, to a darker interpretation of the subject. In this way, the painting, always complete, slowly unfolds and affords the painter a good deal of control over what she wishes to say.
The notion that there is a “mood” or “extraordinary moment” or “state of being,” often described as a “thrill,” a “rush,” childhood “innocence,” or a sense of feeling “larger” that enables a painter to feel “more intensely alive” or “see beyond the ordinary,” has been talked about by painters for quite some time…….Henri goes so far as to suggest that entering into this mood makes art “inevitable.”
The wonderful thing about painting from nature is that one is able to feel the liveliness and energy of the world in which we are born into and surrounded by, if only we take the time to examine the thing we are looking at with a degree of interest. If we slow down and open ourselves to nature, nature responds; it suggests things to us, reveals specificity that we all too often do not notice. This is what is meant when Robert Henri says, “Don’t draw a line, draw an inspired line.”
We all know that good painting is not just about technical virtuosity. I believe that good paintings are those that genuinely move people in unexpected ways and this, in turn, requires that the painter be moved in ways that most people are not, that liberate us in some way. It is in this realm of painting, of feeling intensely alive, that I think Renoir may have something to teach us.
Tonality refers to the sense of atmosphere achieved in a painting……tonality is not just one color sprinkled about. The tonality consists of “ishes,” that is, greenish, pinkish, purplish, etc. colors. They are veils of atmosphere and they are moving. This is something that a photograph simply cannot capture.
…my painting, while correct, was dead. Way too literal. I realized, as time went on, that I would have a reasonable chance of creating something that is alive if I were alive, if instead of seeing water, mountains, and sky, I saw a tangle of line and color only, as would a visual artist opening to the music of visual sensations.
Now, the Impressionists, before they were free to be who they were most, met in cafés (as in Café Guerbois, drawn by Manet above) and talked politics and art in order to get clear about what they had to do in order to block the aristocracy, the Salon elites, and gain control over their work. It is simple as that. One of the points I am making is that today only a tiny slice of art that is made is considered important by powerful people and that art is designated as important precisely because it helps tell a story that advances the interest of those who are often thought of as the “better people.”
The key word here is stories. Artifacts of culture authorized by the elites of history are intended to tell very specific stories. The essential reason elites in Paris freaked out over the Impressionists, for example, had less to do with their artistic innovation than it did with their disobedience; which is to say, that by refusing to paint images of Napoleon heroically marching about, or aristocrats looking noble, or religious images suggesting the order was a moral one, the Impressionists were, in effect, saying, “Go justify your own hierarchy. We quit.”
Cézanne and company had precursors, of course. Fed up with the power of the Salon over who and what was exhibited, Courbet was the first to bolt, setting up his own independent pavilion where he exhibited only his own work….Then of course came the biggest break of all: a group of painters, known as “the intransigents” organized independent exhibitions over a 12 year period (1874-1886). The intransigents, of course, would later be known as the Impressionists. The need to be free to respond to sensations, it seems, was congenial to a way of exhibiting that was independent.