A few weeks ago, Conchitina and I traveled to Madrid to visit museums, especially the home-museum of Joaquín Sorolla. Sorolla has been a favorite of mine for sometime. It is always amazing to walk about the studio and home of someone like Sorolla and see many of his paintings up close. I was not disappointed.

I do not wish to go through all the museums or major artists we saw. Picasso’s Guernica, for example, was, for me at least, spellbinding and is something I’ll write about on another day. What I do wish to point to now are examples of the things that I find very relevant for us plein-air painters today. So let me start with one impressive fact: Sorolla, as far as I know, was and remains the world champion in painting huge paintings in plein-air.

Here’s one example (featured image above), dapper dress mandatory. Sorolla relied on models, both of the two and four-legged variety. Consequently, he used his family regularly, with many beach scenes involving his wife and children, which today, especially in the context of small book-accommodating reproductions, give his work a “chocolate-box” feeling. In person, however, one gets the feeling of how raw, obtrusive, and immediate his brushstrokes, layering, and color are – altogether apart from the subject. In the painting above, I was struck by the scale of the horse, the visceral sense of its weight, its belly seemingly swelling out of the canvas. But let me begin with his drawing.

These gestural drawings were often in preparation of works in oil. Note the fluidity and simplicity. I wish I could do that!

Sorolla’s drawings are totally playful, mind and body are fused. A freshness and immediacy is in evidence throughout. When I look at this kind of thing, I also can’t help wonder, with the appointment of Tracy Emin as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts for example, if the sense of mystery and magic that seems to course through Sorolla’s drawings and so much of art at the turn of the last century hasn’t been entirely purged and thus made forbidden by today’s high-flying art world gatekeepers.

In the detail to the right (click image above to enlarge), we find that in areas where the light strikes the subject, the paint is very thick or impasto, helping to kick back light to the viewer so that the paint feels like light and not like paint. Note the brushwork. Sorolla is transcending the subject or getting past the facts. The subject is merely a prompt for Sorolla to express, then realize and complete himself.

In the above (click image to enlarge), I am showing you details taken from two separate paintings inserted. Notice the layering. In the detail to the left, Sorolla has scumbled foliage over the column and left it. You can see past it into the layer below which in turn has open or raw canvas coming through.

Similarly, in the detail to the right, notice how much canvas (which is not white but a light-to-middle beige color) is left open. Whether or not one leaves areas of the canvas, ground, coming through as Sorolla does in many of his later garden paintings (which while totally complete, are really just underpaintings), the lesson is clear: do not plug up the surface with the final layer.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Allow the viewer to peer down into the layers. Be playful. We are not making pictures of things that refer back to subjects. The subject is merely a prompt to which we respond by breaking down our visual experience into sensual pieces which we then put back together. The method I teach does this for us by re-integrating the pieces as we stay in the moment continuously. The process produces the work. That is its virtue.

Okay! Put away your pads and pencils. It’s time for a surprise quiz. Below are three paintings (click image to enlarge). Who did them?

 

 

 

 

My take away is two fold:

1. Training in traditional methods trains one to see, how to manipulate color and values, how to achieve harmony, or more simply, how to paint. It is the gateway to originality.
2. Once you have mastered a traditional method (I’m not 100% certain about when actually but I’ll stick with mastered)- or at least when it genuinely feels constraining (as opposed to difficult or stress inducing), toss it out the window and create a method that is best suited to expressing your originality.

To see the answers, click here.