Old plaster picture frames and a couple of little tricks I know.

this years blue night scene, I think this is the 33rd year I have made one of these.

Stape, is this sort of frame of any value to use for paintings?
........................... Myrtle Durgin

Here is what I think on 19th century plaster frames. THEY SHOULD HAVE NO DAMAGE! Repair is time and skill intensive. I know you are about to ask if you can do it yourself.  It takes a gilder  to do that. It would take you months to have that skill, and years to perfect it.  I have done some gilding and been married to a gilder. I have repaired and restored several old frames and helped do some more. You can do endless scut work. There is lots of sanding and fine dust , wear your mask! and breathe through your ears! .

 To be worth investing the time  and extremely high materials cost, the frame has to be sold for serious money but it is a long way from that now,.
To repair that frame properly is a big job. You could just do the amateur  Sculpey and dab method, Everybody thinks they can do it, just like painting! Then the only market for the frame will be the flea market or  roadside cooperative antiques and collectibles hive. That's where things go that are "almost right, or pretty good!" Please don't imagine that your first foray into frame restoration will come out "finest kind". People work a long time to master this little known trade. The nice folks at the Society of Gilders will be delighted to teach you how to do this, by the way.

Badly repaired, the frame will be a white elephant. Eventually someone will put a mirror in it. Now I know you are thinking."well OK, but I could just put some stuff on there and metal leaf it, or maybe spray paint it some and it would be alright, I'll put it on one of my own paintings. It COULD be a valuable frame, but then it needs to real gold!  Probably about 500 dollars worth or more, that's just a guess. Metal leaf, you know, the stuff they put on the Chi-com frames? That won't give that look you need. Worse still, would be the gold spray paint the owner of the distressed frames you have pictured recommends, while making  spraying motions with his hand, and saying "you know".

I restored some old frames in the early eighties when quality old frames were more commonly available. I had some very excellent old frames, but they were arts and crafts style original frames not the sort you are contemplating. I wish I had them now. The Beal family kindly gave me what had been Reynolds Beal's old frame stock from their cellar, an awfully nice gift to a struggling young artist. These were wide Whistler frames with both the cap as big as your bicep and a three inch liner, with fluting in there by the rabbet. They were  in big sizes in excellent condition and most of them in gold . I suppose they were from the nineteen twenties. I used most of them myself and sold a few to a dealer.

If you had an arts and crafts era frame, of the the sort I described above, it might make more sense. Here's why, the market, at least in my experience, prefers simpler frames. They see the floral plaster frames as being fussy or too fancy ( note; this is not a matter of  they shouldn't think that way, rather an observation that they do) I have never had much luck trying to sell my paintings in decorative frames of that sort. There are some exceptions, if you are working in a Hudson River school style the floral plaster frames might be OK. Very classical figurative stuff might work in a decorated plaster frame as well. But in order for them to sell for anything more than a dorm refrigerator, again, they need to be finest kind. Artists who routinely make sales, present their work in quality frames. If the buyer has a little problem with the frame, most of the time the sale is  over.


Here is a system for making repeatable batches of color.

 Sometimes I need to make a pile of color and record how I did it. Then I can make more later if it runs out before I have finished the painting. I used this method to make the blue color that pervades most of the blue painting above. Using my ruler I make several lines on my palette. I then put one inch increments on those lines.

I squeeze out so many inches of each color along my lines, right from the tube. In this mix I have three parts of white to five parts of umber. I make a point of jotting down the ratios of the colors I am mixing. In some instances I might have three lines bearing different pigments.

 

Then I mix them together. If I don't get the exact note I need I will return to one of my lines and add another inch of one color or another.

Once I have made the quantity of the note that I need, I preserve it by wrapping it in saran wrap. It will last for months that way. When I need a little more  I open up the little saran wrap package and transfer some  to my palette with a CLEAN knife.

 

 Sometimes the ferule of my brush will glint annoyingly under certain kinds of light. I wish they made the ferules a dull gray but they don't, so I wrap a little duct tape around them as shown above. It usually comes off in a day or so, but it solves the problem for today.

Tonal landscape drawing

A snowy road near Rochester, Vermont

Oh, here I am!  I have been traveling, teaching workshops and always painting. I get e-mail routinely, asking as civilly as possible, "wheres the next post? That makes me feel useful. Here it is.

When last I wrote, I talked about confusing color with value. I see that a lot when I teach. Students add color instead of lowering the value of an object. The shadow side of a green tree becomes greener, not darker in value, the deepest shadows down within the tree become greener still.

I have just finished teaching half a dozen workshops in New England, Mississippi, and in North Carolina. As I taught those, I kept in mind that I wanted to find a way to make the idea easy to grasp for my students. Here is what I think might work.

Many of you have programs on your computer like Photoshop, or photo correction programs that came preloaded into your computer, or installed by your digital camera as part of its software package. There are two adjustments always offered, there are zillions more besides including one that makes your photo look like it was done by Monet, well sort of. But, the one above is important, this slider controls lightness and darkness push the slider one direction it gets darker and the other it gets lighter. This slider is controlling values.

Below is the second important control offered you, this is for saturation, or the amount of color. Like the slider above, if you push it one way the colors become more intense, push it the other way and they become less colored or grave. This slider doesn't make the colors darker or lighter, just more or less colored.

Confounding color and value in the landscape.

Hey Stape:

 Here's a plein air painting I did the other day. Maybe you could critique it for me? I call it "The Road Home" because it reminds me of  driving down to visit my mother. How I miss her larder and Ganesh cones.

 "Rusty" Phenolphthalein

Rusty,  you are 

CONFOUNDING COLOR WITH VALUE!

You have failed to make a clear statement of your lights and darks. Look at the Metcalf below.  Do you see the clear pattern of lights and darks?

or how about in this Gruppe? Squint, that will make it even clearer.

Your painting looks "mushy" because you are making notes of the same value in both your lights and your shadows. Look at your mass of trees at the upper left, and compare it's value with the lower right hand corner that is in the light, common notes. You are including in your lights and your shadows notes of the same value.

I see  this fault in students work routinely. When a note is deeper in value, the student responds not by dropping it's value, but by increasing it's saturation. Conversely, they respond to highly saturated colors in the light by painting them low in value. I have wondered if part of the fault lies in our language. In the everyday world we use the word "bright" to mean both high in value and full of color. We might say that a white room with many windows is bright, and then reject a screaming yellow color for the walls as "too bright". We do the same for the word "dark", a room could be too dark if it lacked light, yet we also might refer to a  paint scheme as "too dark".

The easiest way to understand the difference is to think of a black and white photo, that is a pattern of values. Color doesn't appear. Color and value are both interrelated and hold hands in public. But they are two separate qualities that describe a note on your canvas. On gray days the values may grow very close together, but the division remains, even if the only deep shadow is in your pockets.

When we paint the landscape outside one of the most important tasks before us is to delineate the light and the shadow. This is drawing, even if it is tonal and not done with a pencil. It could be done in black and white, it is not a function of color.

"Rusty", look at your painting, see the nearest shadow crossing the road ? It shares values with the field in sunlight to it's left.

Above is your picture again. Below, I have strewn red dots across it noting where the same  middle value notes occur. That value is laced through both your lights and your shadows.

It is essential to use a different set of values to represent your lights and shadows. Imagine a deck of cards, with just two suits, dark cards and light cards. Now deal them into two piles on the table before you, dark cards in one pile and light cards the other. Sorting the lights from the darks in a painting is similar. There are two piles, light and dark. No card fits in either one, each card is either one of the light cards or one of the dark cards. Every time your brush hits that canvas you need to know, is this note in the dark or is it in the light?

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Durham, North Carolina

I am teaching a workshop in Durham, on November 1-3,  Here is the link to that. 

I have a medium sized class, so there is room for a few more. Smaller groups are more like going on a painting trip together. There is time for lots of individual attention. I looks like there will be good fall color there too. This will be the last workshop for a while for the faint hearted, your next opportunity will be the dreaded SNOWCAMP.

Like driving an aircraft carrier

Have you ever driven an aircraft carrier? Me neither. But, I'll bet, out of my blog readership, somebody actually has. For the sake of metaphor here, lets assume our ship is about the weight of an anvil that size.

 If you want to make the aircraft carrier go, you step on the accelerator, and then in about an hour or so, the thing starts to move. Once you get it going though, it will ride along mightily over "old ocean's gray and melancholy waste" till you reach your destination. It takes a long time for that much mass to slow down, so if you want to stop in about an hour, you better hit the brakes now.

My job is lot like that. After I make the paintings, I put on a different hat. I am the owner of a micro business. A McDonalds is small business, I have more in common with a tradesman of the olden days, like a furniture maker. I am a cottage industry, a microbusiness. I make a small amount of expensive objects in a simple workshop, alone, I sell them to a small group of clients who  enjoy and can afford fine art. I work with dealers, clients, and a little promotion to sell the art and get it out into the world at a faster clip than the world is removing money from my pocket. If at the end of this month for instance, I have enough money to pay my bills and maybe buy a sofa, it is not because of what I did this month. The decisions and work that made that happen, were mostly made several months ago. If I am not in the black  the mistakes (or more likely misjudgements) were usually made months ago. If I go through a period where I am not hitting it and the pictures are not as good as they should be, several months from now that is going to show up on my ledger.


I am probably slower at production than lots of other artists, I discard at least half the paintings I start outside. I work on those I keep, sometimes only a few hours, or sometimes for weeks before they are ready to go out the door. Back in the early eighties when I was selling paintings for eighty five to one hundred and twenty five dollars, I tried to make one a day. I made and sold stacks of paintings, most of them very small. I had a tiny little art gallery in Rockport and didn't show many other places (there weren't many other places to show, in those days). I had more inventory then, but still sometimes I would be in a crises when that ran low. As  I have developed more expertise and a small following I have been able to raise my prices. I don't have a lot of inventory, I destroy my old paintings  that haven't sold, unless I really believe in them, or I see an obvious flaw that I can rework before sending them out again into the marketplace. I deal in newly made paintings, or at least paintings made over the last year or two. I  don't make carloads of art anymore. I make fewer, and far better considered paintings.

 If you are asking serious money for your art, a lot is going to be expected of you. There are many fine and tempting things that the limited number of art collectors in my price bracket might prefer to my latest daub.The paintings need to be as good as I can make them, my life actually depends on that. If I don't sell paintings I will eat snowballs this winter.They need to look like they are well worth buying at that price point.

Many single paintings can be finished and out the door quickly enough, and a request from a show for a single piece is sometimes easy to manage. But more commonly I need to deliver paintings in groups of six or so, because that is about the number a gallery needs to make a presentation. Less than that and a gallery is probably not stocked well enough to sell my art. Often that group of paintings need to be of a special sort or area, like South Carolina, or Maine. I have to travel to that area, make lots of paintings then return home and finish them, discarding the weaker or stymied efforts as I go. That's not something I can do quickly, it takes planning and lead time. And after all of that, it might be months before the paintings are sold, maybe a year or two sometimes. Unfortunately some will not sell, and the knackers must come to the farm. To add complexity to my inventory management, the Maine pictures cannot be sent to South Carolina if they remain unsold. Thankfully, if I am patient, there are few of those.
Often a gallery is seasonal and I might be stocking them in anticipation of a coming busy time a few months out.

So months out, I have to plan what I am going to make and where it is going to go. It is only sometimes possible to capitalize on a sudden opportunity. Most of the big deals and events are on the chart and planned for months in advance. I have to choose carefully which galleries I stock, because I can't do that many.  I can't be in all the shows that I would like, particularly not shows for which I must hold a painting long time prior. If I get invited to be in a show, the gallery will usually want an image a month or even several months before the show opens. I try to give them the best painting I can.Then I have to hold that picture until the show, not let one of my galleries have it. After the show,which might run a month, or several,whether the painting is sold or not, I am now about three months into the project. If it is sold the gallery will wait a month to pay me. That pushes the cycle on that piece out to four months.

What this means is that in my art business, this month is mostly determined by what I was doing about three months ago, and I am today working toward sales that I hope will happen several months in the future. Although there are the pleasant surprises when a gallery calls and a sale has been made suddenly or a client e-mails me ready to buy a painting, most of the time it is like driving an aircraft carrier. If I want to be making money several months from now the efforts have to begin now.

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Canton, Mississippi

Gee, I hope you all know I am doing a workshop in Mississippi real soon, October 18th 19th and 20th, if you want to come and paint the beautiful street scenes of historic Canton with me go here to sign up!
I have taught this one before and it is a splendid place to paint. Canton is not too far from Jackson, which has a major airport. Below is a demo I did last time I was there. In the evenings I will lecture from my laptop over dinner, I am rolling out  new and improved versions of my evening presentations.

Durham, North Carolina

I am teaching a workshop in Durham, on November 1-3,  Here is the link to that. 

 I like being in the South, Its a lot different than New England, ( I have become such a New Englander) but I have been in the South many times and I always enjoy the southern culture, food, architecture and history. Late fall should be a lovely time to paint in North Carolina.

 

My little studio and a line of tape on the floor.

My studio measures eleven by twenty feet. That's big enough for me. If I were doing portraits or  figures I would need more space, but for what I do it works just fine. I start all of my paintings outside, the studio is where I operate on them when they come home.

My  studio is a miniature version of one I had in the seventies in the historic Fenway Studios building in Boston. The studio is the former garage next to my house that I have reworked. I removed a roll up door on steel tracks and closed up the hole where it had been. The garage had a cement floor and bare wooden studs for  walls.There was a low ceilinged second floor above. I removed half of that and kept the back half as a loft area for my stretchers and failed paintings. The front half of the room where the easel is has a 14 foot "cathedral" and dormered ceiling. There is another set of small french windows set into a dog house dormer above the window in the photo, so I have lots of light. The studio is wainscoted in dark wood, extra high, and has oak floors. The floors take a real beating because this is a workshop. The windows are true divided lights and also stained dark walnut like the rest of the woodwork.  The walls are  linen white. The walls go up so high that all that white  counterbalances the dark wood and keeps the studio from being darker than the inside of a cow.

For me, a north light studio is essential. The studio is a big light box, like a camera, there are no other windows on the sides of the studio so the light only comes from one direction. North light is unvarying over the course of a workday, any other direction and the sun will strike into your studio. That would mean that if you painted a still life, the shadows on the objects would move over the course of the day. Under north light they do not. I don't paint still life, but the glare of full sunlight streaming through  a studio window makes it hard to work. I want soft, cool, and even natural light. Late in the day I do get a little direct sun beaming in, and I take a break as the bright  parallelograms cross the walls behind me.

My easel has a simple homemade rack sitting on it that has a 1"by4" extension six feet long. I can place two 24" by 30"s next to one another, The rack takes the level of the tray of the easel up about 2 feet, I like that because I am tall. Also sitting on the tray of the easel is a three by four piece of plywood to which I can tape photos of paintings that I find inspiring, or references.  Above the easel on arms of carefully selected #3 pine hang several fluorescent fixtures. I prefer not to  paint under artificial light. Sometimes I have to work at night to get things done, so I have them.  Studio lighting can be set up much better, but I get by with this. I don't want to mount any light fixtures on my window wall, it wouldn't look pretty.

Here is a closeup of my taboret, the table on which a painter sets his palette when he works. Mine is a very heavy homemade cabinet full of drawers, upon which a key grinding machine once lived in a Maine hardware store. Steel casters allow it to be shoved about as needed. I want it to be heavy so it is stable. On one side of the taboret is a hook where I hang the backpack I use outside, so whatever I keep in that bag is close at hand.

My open paint box is on the sideboard behind me. I have only one palette and paintbox. When I come in from outside, I take the palette out of the box, and set it one the taboret. The dozen or so drawers on the right hand ( not visible) side of the taboret hold paint that I buy in quantity and tube myself. That adds weight too. The top of the taboret is heavy oak and will withstand great abuse. I use it like the bench in a woodworkers shop when the palette is removed.

On the floor is a cheap rug from Home Depot which I replace every few years when it gets too splattered with paint to be presentable. On that rug about five feet away from the easel is a piece of masking tape.

 I paint from two different points in my studio. 

If I am doing small or tightly detailed work I stand right at the easel. I almost always work standing. But when I am finishing full sized paintings that I have started outside I stand back from the easel on the taped line. I observe the painting from this point, I mix the note on the palette beside me, and then I walk up to the easel and make my brushstroke(s). Then I return to my distant observation point again. Doing this causes the paintings ideal focus to be out about five feet from the canvas. That makes a big difference in the way a painting looks and helps me keep a more impressionist look in my pictures.

I have found I get better results if I stand back from my easel. I get a broader looking picture if I work from this distance. It also seems quicker to me, I do try to use the largest brush I can and at that distance working in bigger marks is easier. It really does make a big difference in the way a painting looks. The distant viewing station gives a more impressionist and looser look than standing right at the canvas.

Mediums and historic wisdom from rock and roll

Black Moumtain  Stapleton Kearns 24 by30, 2006?

I threw a few fall images of my own into this post.

Here is an ask Stape question, I received recently. I suppose I am repeating myself , but many readers have not read the archives and for them this is a magazine rather than a book. The blog is searchable via the little box up  in the left had corner of the page. But with over a thousand posts the archives are so vast that even I don't really know where things are back there. It was intended to be an exposition of everything I had learned in my time in the painting world, or my corner of it, New England traditional painting.

Arthur D Shroudpak, of Minot, North Dakota asks;

So what should I use for a medium when I’m painting outdoors ?

and

Is there a preferred brand of paint ?

Stape ........

I think you will want to use one of two mediums, either an alkyd like Liquin, or a varnish, turpentine and oil mixture often called VTO.

The ideal medium is probably no medium. Many of the painters of old New England had only a small cap of oil on their palette. To make many kinds of paint strokes though, it is nice to have the paint thinner, slipperier and more mobile.That is usually why a painter uses a medium. Varnish and oil mediums were pretty much standard practice for many years and artists often use them today for that reason. Their long and common use justifies confidence in their  permanence. When I was a kid we all mixed our Grumbacher paint. or Permanent  Pigments with Taubes Copal medium, which is an oil medium although made with the now scarce copal varnish. If you buy a bottle of copal medium today the small print on it's label will tell you that it contains not copal but alkyd.

  VTO medium is 1 part damar varnish, 1 part linseed or stand oil, and 4 or more parts turpentine ( not mineral spirits!). It has a little more glow than  an alkyd medium and  but it is slower drying. .It is easy to make yourself and Utrecht or Jerrys Artrarama can sell you big bottles of the damar varnish and stand oil very inexpensively. Get a plastic funnel and a big glass jar with a screw top like mayonnaise comes in and make a years worth of medium in about five minutes. This is a good medium for cheap Yankees too. Buy it retail in those little bottles and it will be more  expensive than The Glenlivet.

Or you might choose an alkyd medium, these are very common and promote quick drying and reduce "sinking in" problems.  Liquin is one brand name and Galkyd is another.Alkyd is an oil, often soybean, that has been modified with acid and alcohol. It dries insoluble, at least in artists thinners, resilient and a little rubbery.It makes a very tough paint film BUT it looks slightly different and I think not quite as "rich" as a traditional medium. Alkyds usually add a satin finish that has less glow than a VTO mixture.Some formulations are shinier than others but none have that deep luster of an oil medium.

Recently I have been using the VTO  rather than my usual alkyd medium. I am trying to use a lot less medium too.

There is no preferred brand of paint.

IT'S NOT IN THE PAINT!

 I use a lot of RGH (link in my sidebar) but I buy many of colors in quarts and tube them myself. All of the professional brands are fine, such as Winsor Newton, Rembrandt, etc. Every paint maker also produces a lower priced "student" brand. Those are absolutely unacceptable. If you want to know which colors I use , that's behind us about a thousand posts somewhere. Search "materials for a workshop".

Owls Head Light, Stapleton Kearns, 30 by 40 about 10 years ago.

I have a friend who is a rock and roll guitar hero, Kim Simmonds, founder of the band Savoy Brown. I enjoy talking to him, our "jobs"  have a surprising amount in common, and the discipline of daily practice and creation are very similar for each of us. Kim paints too, I don't think I actually know anyone who doesn't. Kim has a lot of stories, he started his band in London in the sixties. I want to share with you something he told me recently that I think has a lesson in it for painters.

Kim was at the home of John Lee Hooker .many years ago. Evidently John Lee Hooker's California home was a crossroads for musicians and lots of them visited and played together there. Someone asked Mr. Hooker "what do you think of so-and-so? ", another hotshot guitarist? And John Lee Hooker answered;

 "I LOVE him! LOVE him! I'm a big fan of his, and he's a big fan of mine!"

This was a standard response for him evidently. It is positive,witty and self promoting all at once. I am adapting this reply for my own use. I am frequently asked what "I think of another painter". I try  to always give a positive and nurturing reply . When I was young I used to blurt out exactly what I felt that artists shortcomings were, it's easy, everybody has em! It made me look small, and it served an insult to a stranger who might someday repay the favor. It usually disappointed my listener and it might have taken the bread from the mouth of a brother artist.

When you are out in the field with your painting buddies, say whatever you like. But in a professional setting, I think it is better to promote any artist who is mentioned to you. People will judge you on your work and form their own opinion of you. Dismissing another artists work won't make your listener like you and usually does the opposite. I believe this to be professional behavior. Knocking another artist (well except for Alex Katz, who is sure to survive it ) should be avoided

 When you are dealing with the public, that is a business setting and not a personal one. By "with the public" means when you are painting out in the field and someone approaches you, or when you are doing a demo or at an art gallery or event. A plein air paintout would qualify.You are there to get paid, not to feed your self esteem, educate the public or take the other guy down a notch. People want to like an artist they do business with, and if they feel you are jealous or negative they might not. I have a hard enough time getting people to like me anyway, being abrasive and all.

What goes around comes round seems a hackneyed phrase but it is appropriate here. In the long run, you will receive about the treatment from your brother artists that you dish out yourself. Sometimes people will hear that you had a good word for them or  promoted them heartily, they never forget that.

When next you are asked what you think of another artist, if you know their work at all, I suggest you answer:

WHAT A GREAT PAINTER!  I LOVE HIS (OR HER) WORK. I'M A BIG FAN OF HIS AND HE'S A BIG FAN OF MINE!

Stapleton Kearns 218 by 24 2010

Chromium thingy?


Here is another picture of last weeks chromium colored device . Someone guessed it as a paper towel holder. But it is a 2.50 cent toilet paper holder from Walwart that is supposed to hook onto the tank and beari an extra roll. That's a little to nakedly utilitarian for my bath, but it is a handy and cheap way to hang paper towels within easy reach of your easel.

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Leaf Season workshop

September 23-24-25

The Fall workshop filled weeks ago now and I have received a bunch of e-mail  from people who would like to have come. So I am scheduling another fall session. .. I have scheduled this workshop midweek rather than across a weekend to secure room availability. Inns are busiest in the leaf season in New England . Peak fall is a beautiful time of year here. Notice those mountains behind the inn in the picture below. I can't wait, it's going to be so cool!

This is the Sunset Hill House in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for  years and it is the ideal location.  Because I have taught so many workshops there the inn keepers have learned what painters at a workshop need and they are now practiced at hosting my workshops and making sure we have what we need to operate without any distractions or responsibilities other than painting.There is a broad rear porch that overlooks the mountains so we can still paint outside no matter what the weather does. The lower level of the inn  is ours to store our paints and canvas so we don't have to haul it all to our rooms and it makes a good place to teach too. The view of the mountains is spectacular and in the fall it will be even better. The inn takes good care of us. We have our own private dining room too. They handle  our meals and even bring us lunch so  we can work all day uninterrupted. The inn is one of those big old historic affairs from the 19th century and is homey and informal. Most of the rooms have gas fireplaces, and it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside. It is necessary to stay in the inn to take the workshop.

I love teaching workshops. Everyone is always excited to be there and hang out with the other artists. It is like a three day party. We go from breakfast until bedtime. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.

. We don't need to leave the grounds of the inn  to find great subject matter so their is no problem with hauling easels around or caravanning cars to daily locations. We just walk out the back door and the whole Presidential range is spread out before us.

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I will also teach how to most effectively "hit" the color of nature outside.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is a history of White Mountain art so you can see what the greats of American painting did with the same landscape we will be painting during the day.  In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn. The other lecture is unpacking out  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite painters of mine.
•  I will work you like a borrowed mule.

 The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars. Sign up here. I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I wont give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits.

 Lodging reservations must be made with the inn who will provide a discounted room package deal to my students, it is absolutely required that you stay at the inn to take this workshop. Well, actually, if you must stay off "campus" call them and they will arrange a day rate for you which will cover your meals etc. Here is the Sunset Hill House web site

A truncated sub-palette and a chromium mystery device

A demo painting done in front of a class on the Hudson River near Newburg, New York 16" by 20"
(disclaimer, only the sky was done with three colors)

 

Above is a shot of my palette.  I have mentioned in previous posts how although I have earth colors and a warm and a cool or each hue, I sometimes work in only three colors. Some landscape painters work in a red, yellow, blue, whiiich is a restricted (or chromatic) palette. They have no ochers, siennas, black or umber. I don't paint entire pictures this way very often, but you can, and it gives a lot of color harmony to a painting.It is possible to mix lots of different color notes from a palette like this.

 However you  trade the ability to strongly characterize nuances of the color before you, for color harmony.

 There are some advantages though.

•  It is easy to make a "note" again for a second time, and rapidly, because there are only three possible ingredients in each mixture.That can save a lot of mixing time.
• One of the "keys' to design is simplification. Simplifying your color means imposing a system or order on your color choices that will effect how the painting looks. There are lots of different ways to artistically choose your colors  and many far more sophisticated than this one. But a chromatic palette is sort of "set and forget", you use the palette, you get the "look".
• It is relatively easy to learn your way around the combination of three pigments (plus white). I spent a year on a three color palette perhaps twenty years ago and I learned a lot about color doing it. 
• I like to use a chromatic, three color palette for things that are high key, like snow, skies and surf. Varying amounts of all three colors in each note can gives a great deal of subtly.I will use the trhee color palette for a PART of my painting,.
• If you are traveling real light, there are only a few tubes to put in your pack, not a dozen.

The most common three color palette today seems to be cadmium yellow, alizirin and ultramarine. My own three color palette is cadmium yellow light (not lemon), cobalt blue (clearer and bluer than ultramarine) and quinacridone red ( permanent rose, or permanent alizirn) Genuine rose madder is very pretty and gives a  lovely restrained tonality to mixtures but it is quite expensive. I don't set my palette with only the three pigments in practice, but I do remember that

 embedded within my full palette is a smaller chromatic one.

Below, I have mixed each pigment with white and made three piles of paint all about the same rather high key value. I would use these if I were painting a sky or snow perhaps.

Above, from mixing pool between my three pigments, or three pigments plus white  I can pull variations of all the possible colors.

Below I have a lower key version of the same thing.  I am still using some white but I am making darker, or lower key notes. Each of these notes derived from the original hues is composed of only two colors, like red and yellow or yellow and blue. These are the secondary colors, (at least those we can make on our restricted palette). I am making these samples with a palette knife, by the way.

 

 It is when the results of the notes we have made in the last photo are combined that we begin making that vast  array of more complex colors that are  frequently encountered in the landscape. Most of the colors outside come from this range, slightly to very stepped down colors with the occasional splash of something very colored (or high in chroma or saturation).

Olives, ochers, siennas and various russets, oranges and golds are created with these tertiary mixtures. They contain some amount of each of the three original pigments.

 Above is a sample of sky painted with the palette above. Except for a few touches of the white and ultramarine mixture in the undersides of the clouds it was painted with the three premixed colors

 

I can save premixed pigments easily and cheaply by wrapping them in cling wrap. They will last for months that way. If I am making a picture where I need a constant supply of a premixed note, I will make a pile of it and wrap all except for a small amount left on my palette. Notice a second pile of blue made with ultramarine on the left there. I sometimes add that to get the darks on the bottoms of clouds and the darkening of the sky as it nears the zenith. Ultramarine is heavier and redder than the cobalt, but I also mixed it to be a little lower value than the others..

  

Whats this?

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FALL WORKSHOP

I have two remaining spots in my fall workshop October 26 through the 28th. That is a Saturday through Monday.

This is the Sunset Hill House in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for  years and it is the ideal location.  Because I have taught so many workshops there the inn keepers have learned what painters at a workshop need and they are now practiced at hosting my workshops and making sure we have what we need to operate without any distractions or responsibilities other than painting.There is a broad rear porch that overlooks the mountains so we can still paint outside no matter what the weather does. The lower level of the inn  is ours to store our paints and canvas so we don't have to haul it all to our rooms and it makes a good place to teach too. The view of the mountains is spectacular and in the fall it will be even better. The inn takes good care of us. We have our own private dining room too. They handle  our meals and even bring us lunch so  we can work all day uninterrupted. The inn is one of those big old historic affairs from the 19th century and is homey and informal. Most of the rooms have gas fireplaces, and it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside. It is necessary to stay in the inn to take the workshop.

I love teaching workshops. Everyone is always excited to be there and hang out with the other artists. It is like a three day party. We go from breakfast until bedtime. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.

. We don't need to leave the grounds of the inn  to find great subject matter so their is no problem with hauling easels around or caravanning cars to daily locations. We just walk out the back door and the whole Presidential range is spread out before us.

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I will also teach how to most effectively "hit" the color of nature outside.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is a history of White Mountain art so you can see what the greats of American painting did with the same landscape we will be painting during the day.  In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn. The other lecture is unpacking out  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite painters of mine.
•  I will work you like a borrowed mule.

 The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars. Click here to sign up.  I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I wont give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits.

 Lodging reservations must be made with the inn who will provide a discounted room package deal to my students, it is absolutely required that you stay at the inn to take this workshop. Well, actually, if you must stay off "campus" call them and they will arrange a day rate for you which will cover your meals etc. Here is the Sunset Hill House web site

A demonstration from 1968 by Emile Gruppe

Gloucester is America's oldest seaport, over it's long history it has lost 10,000 men at sea. It has a long art heritage too. The harbor there is a beautiful and inspiring place to paint. Most of the artists came  to paint the fishing boats and wharves. Many famed artists have lived or worked in Gloucester seasonally. Fitz hugh Lane 1804 – 1865 ( who recently changed his name to Fitz Henry Lane) lived there, John Sloan, Frederick Mulhaupt, and Edgar Allen Poe, and Marsden Hartley summered there. There are paintings of Gloucester by almost everyone who matters in American art history,  Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf worked there, other painters who have been attracted to Gloucester include, Winslow Homer, Frank Duveneck, Cecelia Beaux, Edward Hopper, Robert Henri and Maurice Prendergast, William Launt Palmer, and John Twachtman.

Emile Gruppe 1896–1978 was a Gloucester painter who remains a hero to New England painters and has had an enormous influence on the plein air painters of today. His unbelievably rapid execution and sure sense of design made him an enormously successful and productive painter. Born in Rochester, New York he was the son of a painter-art dealer who immigrated from the Netherlands at the start of World War I. Gruppe's father was a painter his brother was a sculptor. Rockport and Gloucester are both on an island at the tip of Cape Ann, Gloucester the larger of the two towns is where Rockporters go to buy anything more than a souvenir T shirt. Gloucester is the seaport featured in the Perfect Storm. The old wharves and fishing boats, now virtually all gone, were usually the subjects of Gruppe's art. Gruppe had a gallery which is still operated by his talented son Robert, who carries on the families'  style of painting. The gallery was, and is on a spit of rock jutting into Gloucester harbor called Rocky Neck.

Just next to Rocky Neck on Gloucester Harbor is the North Shore Art Association, founded in 1922. Gruppe routinely did artists demonstrations there. I always wished that I could have  seen one, but I didn't get to Cape Ann until about five years after Gruppe's death so I never had the opportunity.

A week or so ago I was painting on a street in Watch Hill, Rhode Island  and was approached by a man who excitedly shook my hand and told me how he had enjoyed reading my blog. Introducing himself as Al Kohnle, he mentioned that his father had been a friend of Emile and that he himself actually went out painting with Gruppe once. Then he told me about seeing Gruppe do one of the legendary demos at the North Shore, and that he had photographs he had taken at a Gruppe demo in 1968. When he voluntered to e-mail me copies of them I asked if I could share them on the blog. He graciously said that was fine. So far as I know these have never been reproduced anywhere and have only been seen by a few people. I am thankful to him for their use and am excited to show you what this legendary painter looked like in operation.

Here is Gruppe with his blank canvas, to his  left is a sketch that he brought with him and taped up on the wall as a reference. He has no photographs strewn about. His reference is reproduced below as well as I could pull it out of the photo using Photoshop.  I believe it was done in charcoal.
Note the rhythmic quality in the somewhat blurry reproduction of the sketch. Gruppes paintings are full of looping S curves and sinuous lines. If you squint at this and look at it through your eyelashes you will see the big simplified shapes that  are the armature upon which he built the painting.With such strong artistic geometry running under the image, the amount of detail he needed to add was minimal.This was a two hour demo by the way.

Thanks again to Al Kohnle for providing these for us to see.

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FALL WORKSHOP

I am again doing a Fall workshop October 26 through the 28th. That is a Saturday through Monday.

This is the Sunset Hill House in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for  years and it is the ideal location.  Because I have taught so many workshops there the inn keepers have learned what painters at a workshop need and they are now practiced at hosting my workshops and making sure we have what we need to operate without any distractions or responsibilities other than painting.There is a broad rear porch that overlooks the mountains so we can still paint outside no matter what the weather does. The lower level of the inn  is ours to store our paints and canvas so we don't have to haul it all to our rooms and it makes a good place to teach too. The view of the mountains is spectacular and in the fall it will be even better. The inn takes good care of us. We have our own private dining room too. They handle  our meals and even bring us lunch so  we can work all day uninterrupted. The inn is one of those big old historic affairs from the 19th century and is homey and informal. Most of the rooms have gas fireplaces, and it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside. It is necessary to stay in the inn to take the workshop.

I love teaching workshops. Everyone is always excited to be there and hang out with the other artists. It is like a three day party. We go from breakfast until bedtime. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.

. We don't need to leave the grounds of the inn  to find great subject matter so their is no problem with hauling easels around or caravanning cars to daily locations. We just walk out the back door and the whole Presidential range is spread out before us.

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I will also teach how to most effectively "hit" the color of nature outside.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is a history of White Mountain art so you can see what the greats of American painting did with the same landscape we will be painting during the day.  In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn. The other lecture is unpacking out  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite painters of mine.
•  I will work you like a borrowed mule.

 The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars. Click here to sign up.  I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I wont give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits.

 Lodging reservations must be made with the inn who will provide a discounted room package deal to my students, it is absolutely required that you stay at the inn to take this workshop. Well, actually, if you must stay off "campus" call them and they will arrange a day rate for you which will cover your meals etc. Here is the Sunset Hill House web site