The following is taken from the introduction to my online course: Painting as Enchantment: The Authentic Impressionist Method. The notion of enchantment I employ is one where your work, in this case painting, is an expressive activity, one in which you realize your powers and where you feel larger, and with that sense of empowerment propels you, as Wolf Kahn would say of himself, on to your next painting. The point of painting then is not to make a picture but, as Robert Henri taught, to “obtain an extraordinary moment.” The picture happens along the way.

I thought I would begin by asking a simple question: what does a painter do when she goes out into the field, so to speak, to do a painting? Most people think that essentially a painter makes a copy of what she sees and that there is a lot of natural skill that is required. You will often hear people say, for example, when asked if they paint, “Oh no, not me.  I can’t draw a straight line.”  But for the method I am about to show you, that response is a bit of a category mistake. It would be like saying when asked if you like drinking wine, “Oh no, not me.  I can’t distinguish a cabernet from a merlot.” It makes no sense because the enjoyment of drinking wine doesn’t depend on some natural ability to distinguish a cabernet from a merlot. It depends on whether or not you get a good feeling back from tasting the wine. This method is like that, too. It is about feelings. It begins with getting good feelings back from looking at things but then moves onto a sense of exhilaration in realizing your ability to render those feelings.

I made similar assumptions about painting when I first began as well. But after studying with William Schultz for many years, I began to realize that making a picture of something was not the same as making art. After years of study, I could do the former, but I could not do the latter. To put it as succinctly as I can, making a picture of something does require some skill, but if one wishes to make art, one needs not only to have mastered the notes, one needs to have an understanding of what it means to play the music.

So let us begin by making a distinction: 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.

Descriptive Paintings

Many paintings are primarily pictures of things. With this type of painting, the goal is to make an accurate picture of that thing, a house or flower or person, or whatever. With this kind of painting, the intention of the painter is to make a picture of the subject.  That’s the point of the exercise. In the end, her painting refers to the subject. She, the painter, is not really visible on the canvas because the painting is not about her. Her personal brushstrokes, or desire for flatness or distortion, or her emphasis on atmosphere, for example, are not expressed and are not part of the painting. The painting is about the literal qualities of the subject and the final painting functions as a reference to the subject. The artist, in effect, becomes a human camera who with great skill and materials describes the subject in oil or some other medium. We call this type of painting descriptive because the work is intended to describe the subject.

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, oil on canvas, 58×40 in.

The image above is a famous descriptive painting by John Singer Sargent. It is the Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, painted in 1903. This painting was commissioned by the U.S. government. Sargent was, in effect, directed by the people involved in the commissioning process to make a picture of President Roosevelt. In other words, the painting had to be a genuine likeness or an accurate description of the model. The painting is about the model to whom it refers. Let us compare this approach with a different approach, one that I am calling expressive.

Here’s another descriptive painting:

Edward Hopper,  Hill and Houses, Watercolor over graphite pencil on paper, 14×20 in.

Expressive Paintings

Something often happens after a painter makes one hundred or three hundred or five hundred descriptive paintings. As she gets good at it, she begins to take delight in having mastered the descriptive process and begins to feel larger and more powerful as she begins to enjoy the painting process for its own sake. And before you know it, she begins to put a little flair into the marks she makes. She begins to dance about, so to speak, maybe making that hint of emerald green in the sky more visible, or that almost-straight line curl just a bit because it wants to. We may say that she is feeling more alive as she paints. Getting an exact likeness now is less important than it was before. In fact, the activity of painting becomes a way of not only realizing unexpected feelings but also rendering those feelings. An important shift has occurred: the painting is now more about who she is than it is about the subject. This time her personal brushstrokes are right there for everyone to see.  We call this type of painting expressive because the painting activity is a process in which the painter expresses who she is. It follows too that the subject is merely a prompt to which the painter responds by expressing the feelings that the subject engendered within her. So Matisse, who is in favor of expressive work, will say, “The artist’s job is not to transpose something he’s seen but express the impact the object made on him….”

The painting below, Impression, Sunrise, is by Claude Monet. It is a good example of what I would call an expressive painting. It was painted in 1872. Notice how the painting is not an exact description or likeness of the subject. Rather the subject is a prompt for Monet to express or render his feelings about his visual experience. We don’t say that the painting is a picture or description of the harbor of Le Havre. Rather we say it is a Monet.

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, oil on canvas, 19×25 in.

There was a point at which I had learned how to make rather decent descriptive paintings, but compared to my teacher’s work, and the work of other genuine artists, I felt my paintings, while correct, were, nonetheless, dead on arrival.

That was roughly 40 years ago. I’ve learned a lot since then and I believe I understand better what it takes for paintings to come alive.  It’s basically pretty simple:  for paintings to come alive, the painter must come alive as well. And, it turns out, that the feeling of being alive or of getting a rush as one paints is just about the entire payoff. It’s the reason I paint. The painting is simply a by-product of my becoming.  Another way of saying this is that the process produces the work and your loyalty to developing your gift is to find that process. It took me awhile to find that process and I want to share it with you.

Here are two more contemporary examples of expressive or non-descriptive painting. The first is by Jacques Truphèmus and the second is by Wolf Kahn. Both painters died recently and both lived into their 90s. It is easy to see in these paintings the expression of a personality. And it follows that upon seeing them we would say, “Oh that’s a Truphémus” or “That’s a Kahn.” The subject matter for them was merely a prompt or point of departure.

Jacques Truphémus, Le Café Bellecour, oil on canvas, 18×18 in.

Wolf Kahn, Sycamore, oil on canvas, 52×52 in.

The featured paintings at the top are both by Monet.  The descriptive one on the left (A Farmyard in Normandy) was painted in 1863 when he was 23 years old, while the expressive one on the right (Agapanthus) was painted between 1914-1926.