asjjfrkmokfjgpydipudatrefajarq!

Here's another of mine from Maine a few summers ago. I have no idea what it has to do with the discussion at hand, but I always start of with a picture and I thought this would do. I have been talking at length about getting light in paintings and this one seemed to have some light in it.

I was feeling a little tentative about the title too. I hope I can be more precise in the post itself. I am slowly getting my new computer set up. Its a 64 bit computer running Windows Vista, so I had to throw my old copy of photoshop express away and I am waiting for the new version to arrive. But other than the lack of photoshop I am pretty much up to speed.

I want to touch on a number of things some of you have asked me and I want to throw out another idea or two about light.

Here's our Sargent again (from artrenewal.org) Look at that sunlight across the ground in the middle of the painting. The color of the light is described by the color of the shadow as well. Sargent has painted the shadows the green we would expect the grass to be, sort of the local color, he has painted the lights a bright yellow. As I said last night Sargent had a lot of little effects he liked to use. Maybe it really looked that way, but I doubt it. If you paint the shadows the local color or a cooler version of it, you can make the lights almost any color you want. . That is, if you keep the value up, in the light Value is a part of drawing and you need to get that right. But you can hang many different colors on that scaffold.

A reader asked;
Would you say that avoiding piecemeal work is the same as making sure you have a focal point with all else subordinate to it?

While that is a good thing to do, I mean something else when I speak of avoiding piecemeal observation. I remember when I was first told about this it seemed impossible to me. I couldn't get the idea for a while but the phrase "paint the hands the way they look when you look at the head, paint the head the way it looks when you look at the hands". was the key for me. Now I say that as a sort of a zen statement, rather than as advice for portrait painters. It is a bit of an exaggeration. But the idea is in there. If you are seeing the totality of nature, the "big look" you see both the head and the hands at once rather than first one and then the other. You paint the hands the way they look when you are doing that, rather than the way they look when you look at them alone.

When I am painting I am not laboring to do that, but I am careful to avoid giving some part of my painting a rendering that makes it a little separate painting on my canvas rather than a part of the choir singing the hymn which is my larger painting. If you have one singer whose voice stands out completely above the rest of the choir, you have to train her to keep her place so the choir sings with one voice rather than an cacophony of different voices.

A professional artists who reads the blog, suggested this;
A field of grass is a field first; you should be able to capture the color and tone of the whole before you add a single blade of grass. That seems to be another way of getting at the same idea, sometimes called breadth of vision.

I start out with a shovel and I finish with a needle. I think I got that from Ives Gammell. If all of this is confusing I apologise. I will continue to think about this and maybe I will come up with some more ways to describe this sort of seeing. For it is a way of seeing and not a drawing method.

Another reader asked me about whites ; I did a post on whites and my favorites, here is a link to that, Ta-Da.

• I almost never use white straight out of the tube I always add at least a little bit of some other pigment to it. That helps keep my whites looking less chalky and it gives a little more characterization to the high key notes.
  
• the brightest note you can make is not pure white, it is white with a little bit of cadmium yellow light or pale in it.
• every drop of white you use is a drop of color you don't.
• adding white may take you to the value you need to describe something in the light,but it will not give you the color of something in the light, generally in the landscape you will need a warm yellow- red color, that is very high key, but still perceptible.

Jan Steen, Woman offering oysters. (courtesy artrenewal.org)

I think in retrospect, that may have been just the right title. asjjfrkmokfjgpydipudatrefajarq! Kinda catchy.