A few images gently critiqued

I have been painting in Maine and will return home today. Then I can take my new, new computer back to the store and see if they can fix it, again. If they do, I will be able to load photoshop and do all sorts of wonderful things that I have had to live without lately. I am going to crit a few images I received, as I have been meaning to do this for a while. I won't be able to draw on them or do a remake version this time, but I can discuss them verbally.


I like this one a lot. Probably in spite of myself. But it has a a lot of nice things going on. I like the design of the tree leaning to the right and how that gives a dynamic arrangement. If that tree had been vertical the picture would have been static and less interesting. The color in the fore ground is "modern" I guess and it is nice and clean and forms a nice color chord. Pretty smart. I could fault it a little as I think it looks a little more like a color scheme for a fabric than a landscape. I also think that long yellow sausage shape in the middle of the painting is overly geometric. The rest of the shapes in the painting are naturalistic, but that one shape sticks out as sort of artificial, and its bright yellow color draws attention to its being out of sync with the rest of the painting. Still its a very pleasing little piece and I am sure it will be happily welcomed into some collectors home.
The vertical piece above could use a few design tweaks. I think that the upright trunks if the trees could be varied more. Some could be lower in value and perhaps one or two might catch some light. The also all begin along a line at the bottom. I think they would look better if some were nearer and began closer to the lower margin of the painting and others further from that margin.
The limbs at the top of the trees are a bit repetitive too, most of them are the same weight and sit alone rather than touching another or better yet being arranged into groupings. When you can, paint GROUPS of things rather than individual things. When you look at a passage, particularly one that has a number of similar objects or shapes, ask yourself "how can I group these?" Grouping things is a design ploy that simplifies passages and eliminates repetitive shapes.

I also think the color in the tree trunks is a little too "brown" This might be a better picture with the introduction of some optical violets and maybe some ocher into those trunks to get variation and a feeling of light and shade. The brown feels too "local color".

This painting is in need of a walrus. That is, there needs to be more of a subject, something that will reward us for looking in there and seeing it. The water also feels a little like it runs up hill over on the right side. There are also two mustard colored ball shapes, one to each side, at the water line, that compete for our attention. I also think things could be delineated a little more to make this picture more interesting. This painting is nearly a design I call a three striper. I have made a zillion of them. They happen when you set up on a lake or other body of water and you have three horizontal bands stacked one above another, the lake, the distant shore and the sky, forming, three stripes. Whenever I am on a lake or similar environment I work real hard to stay away from that.

This next painting has an observed from nature look. That's always a good thing. I can make a few suggestions though. First of all the flowers in the foreground seem to sit on the bottom rabbet of the frame. Watch out for figures or trees or whatever, standing on the frame.

The hole through the trees seems too assertive and looks a little unnatural. I think a few spots of foliage within that cutout window would mitigate that a bit. Also the top border of that aperture is a the same height as the back edge of the field to its right. That sets up an unwanted geometric relationship in a place that should be random and varied. It is whats called a tangent I guess. I should do a post on tangents.

The little pool to the right of that doesn't read as well as it might. It doesn't lay out in space but seems to stand up vertically. There is an unintentional overly symmetrical shape left behind by the darks there, see it?

It also lookas if the horizon line is running downhill. but that could be the photography.

I know this boat. I have painted it too. I think it could use a little more space around it. Also the structure of the wheelhouse is a little vague. I think the plane that contains the front windows is in the shadow, that would be consistent with that square shaped extension of the cabin to its left. However the artist seems to have overstated the reflected light until the shadow area is as bright as the plane in the light. There is a general tendency through this whole painting to confuse the values of the lights and the shadows. Remember, no value occurs in both!

I also think the color of the hull is a problem. Both the shadow and the light are the same color.They are different in value, but not in color. The shadow is not a darker version of the color in the light! It is its own separate color. I did a post about that some time ago, here that is. And here is another relevant post.

Here are some things I do to separate my lights from my shadows.

• I paint the lights in a high value and the shadows in a low value, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights with one pigment and the shadows with a different pigment, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights grave and the shadows highly colored, so you can tell them apart,
• or I will paint the lights highly colored and the shadows grave, so you can tell them apart
• sometimes I will paint the lights warm and the shadows cool, so you can tell them apart
• sometimes I will paint the lights cool and the shadows warm, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I will paint my lights opaque and my shadows transparent, so you can tell them apart.
• sometimes I paint the lights with hard edges and the shadows with soft edges, so you can tell them apart
  
• sometimes I use cool reflected light in the lights and hot reflected light in the shadow, so you can tell them apart.

See you all tomorrow

Materials list for a workshop

Here are the materials you will need for my workshop this weekend. Most of you are not in my workshop of course. It would be huge if you were. We would need about four Greyhound buses. But look at the materials list here and you can get an idea of what I think you should have, at a minimum, to paint on location.

You will need a a french easel, a pochade ( pronounced "pochade") box and tripod, or a Gloucester easel. Aluminum collapsing easels and little wooden tripod easels are generally not steady enough and they won't hold your palette. I don't recommend them.

PAINTING IS HARD ENOUGH WITH THE BEST OF MATERIALS!

In your paintbox you will need:

Titanium White
cadmium yellow medium or light
cadmium red light
burnt sienna
either cobalt, Prussian, or pthalocyanine blue
yellow ochre
ultramarine blue
Permanent alizirin or quinacridone red
viridian or permanent green deep

you also might want, but won't require,

Ivory black or
cobalt violet

a palette of some sort, most easel setups include a palette.

a medium. I like Liquin or Galkyd but if you like an oil and varnish medium that is fine too. You may already be using a medium at home, bring that. Also you will need a top from an olive jar or a small oil cup to put it in.

mineral spirits or turpentine, and a tuna fish can to put that in.

A roll of Bounty or Viva paper towels, all others are inferior. Also a grocery store plastic bag for them after use.

A selection of flat brushes, a couple of #1's, several #4's, a #8 or 10 and a short handled rigger, synthetic or sable, about a #4 . Also a leaf shaped palette knife.

You will need a hat with a substantial brim, a baseball hat works well. A shirt that is a neutral or dark color. Bright colors reflect into your painting and make it hard to judge your color. You will need bug spray and possibly sun screen. I carry a container of Goop, you can get that at Wall Mart or an auto supply store, to use cleaning your hands.

A fine cigar or two, possibly a maduro, box pressed if possible, no White Owls or plastic mouthpieces please.

Several canvases, or panels to paint on. Please no cardboard artist boards they are floppy and impermanent dreadful things. Gessoboard is nice, sourcetek panels are good, clayboard is too absorbent. I think a 16 x 20 is the ideal size. Small canvases bring an added complexity to painting as you need to miniaturize nature to go on them. Don't bring anything larger than an 18 x 24 unless you are a pro.

Dress comfortably, I will be in painty blue jeans and a t shirt. Wear shoes you can stand comfortably in.

Some people like to have an umbrella to shade their canvas, I don't use one, but you might.

A camera, you will want to get a shot of what you are painting because it may save the project later in the studio.

I guess that's it, I will see you at 9:00 in the morning in the parking lot in front of the Cape Cod Art Association. Lets hope the weather is good!

The Commonwealth Avenue years

Tea Leaves, 1909

Oil on canvas 36 1/8 x 28 3/4 in. (91.6 x 71.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC.

Gift of George A. Hearn, 1910 (10.64.8)

George A. Hearn, New York, 1909–1910

I will continue with the personal history for another day, you all seemed to tolerate it well. Maybe about Tuesday I can get photoshop loaded and go back to the critiques. I do have some fine images for that.

Besides the Paxton paintings in that store room there were also a number of portfolios of drawings. We looked through all of those too. In return for my help there that day, I was given a drawing. It was a figure and it was signed and dated. Several years later I sold it to a friend so I could buy groceries. I sold it for a hundred dollars.

Since Paxton was unknown to the public, the Vose gallery chose a group of drawings of hands and did an exhibition of those down in their lower level gallery. I believe that much of their inventory at that time was Hudson river school and other 19th century paintings. Hassam and the few other top tier American impressionists were known then, but Paxton and the second tier were pretty much unknown. The drawings of hands must have been well received because shortly after that they did a major Paxton show. I remember standing in the Vose galleries marveling at the big interiors with figures.

I had a number of other similar incidents happen at about that time. One day a week I was working at the Guild of Boston Artists. That is a historic Boston art institution with a small and carefully selected artist membership. The Boston painters like Paxton had formed the organization in nineteen fourteen. I was what you would call an intern today, although no one called me that at the time. I worked there one day a week, mostly carrying stuff around and acting as a go-fer. Often because Newbury street parking was so horrendous, I was asked to run to the curb out front and unload and bring in paintings from idling trucks or cars, double parked very briefly out front. When the Boston Police showed up they had to move, so it was up to me to get paintings out of the cars and into the Guild quickly. I got to meet many artist members very briefly and receive for the Guild the work of many of its members, some living and some dead.

On one such occasion the estate of A. Lasselle Ripley was delivered out front and I carried it up the several flights of steps to a storage room several floors up in the historic building. There were a lot of those and not all were signed. I had the opportunity to see one in a collectors home years later and remark on it as being a Ripley. Its owner was surprised as it was unsigned. I was able to tell them I had "handled" the estate.

I was also shown a metal paintbox there which I was told had been Winslow Homers watercolor kit. I looked at the tubes inside and marveled at the thought of its being in my hands. I don't know what ever happened to it, and I don't believe the Guild has it now, and I may be the only person who remembers it being there. I was young then and very few of the present living members were there at that time. I have had the opportunity to paw through a number of old paintboxes over the years and get a look at these time capsules filled with art materials from Americas golden age of painting.

Another event I remember was being invited to go with a group of Gammell and Hensche students to visit Caproni and Sons. In the 19th century it was common to manufacture excellent plaster copies of historic sculpture. Not only were they used to teach drawing, but museums displayed them. The Caproni and Sons firm was located on Washington ave. under the elevated tracks . I think it might have changed hands about that time and I believe it closed shortly after this. However I was able to see the big iron molds that into which the liquid plaster was poured to make the sculptural copies . Today most casts are made in soft rubber molds giving an insensitive copy of the original. These iron molds were extremely accurate and we each bought casts to take back to our studios to draw. I remember many of us bought a flayed figure called an ercoche used to teach anatomy. There was also a nice Houdon head of Voltaire that I bought.Those workshops were another oddly preserved set from the 19th century.

Several small events that I hardly noted at the time were to influence my direction later. the first was being invited by my roommate, David Curtis to visit his home in Gloucester Massachusetts. It was the first time that I saw Cape Ann which would later be a home to me for a number of years. The second event was a show of paintings at Doll and Richards gallery, now closed, but then the oldest gallery in America. It was the retrospective exhibition of the work of Aldro T. Hibbard. I had seen a reproduction or two of his work and heard Ives Gammell speak well of him, but seeing a whole room full of them was really impressive. He became and stayed one of my heroes. It is another of those cases where a small event can have a big influence on your life. I could have walked by that gallery without seeing that show and I would probably never have ended up in Rockport, his home, for so many years.

I was living in the apartment on Commonwealth ave, I had a lot of art books and a clock radio, a few pieces of old furniture that came with the apartment , and a dreadful dog I got at the pound and named Rotor. There were a lot of break ins in the building and several other apartments had been burglarized. One day I returned to the apartment to find the front door kicked down, there was a New York city police lock on the door. That is a lock that has a steel bar that descends from the lockplate ( spell check just suggested copulate) at a 45 degree angle to the floor inside. I don't think you can force one open, so the burglars beat the door to pieces and then reached in and unlocked it. After all their effort I would have enjoyed seeing their faces when they did get in. There was absolutely nothing there to steal.The clock radio evidently had too much paint on it to steal. It was one of those that had the flaps that dropped from a rotating spindle to show the time digitally in that time before LCDs . There was nothing in the refrigerator, no TV, only Rotor. I wish they had stolen the dog.

I used to paint in Fenway park often, the big landscaped park next to the Red Sox Fenway stadium. I would carry my French easel there as it was one of the few places where I could paint the natural environment in downtown Boston. There was a small stream that ran through it that had reeds along it and a marsh that could have been far from the city. I was painting out there one day up at the end by the Gardner museum and a street gang slowly surrounded me at my easel. They were real interested in what I was doing and peppered me with questions. It was a relief though, when they went on their way.

I remember also from this era a trip to the Boston Museum with Ives Gammell. He knew that collection very well. He would walk us through the museum and exclaim on the various pieces, often noting what he believed to be changes in them caused by improper restorations over the recent years. He would point at a picture and exclaim loudly how it had been skinned, which means abrading away the delicate glazes in zealous overcleaning.. I am not expert enough to know if he was right or not. I remember standing in front of a small head by Dennis Miller Bunker and hearing Gammell explain why it was such a good piece of worksmanship. He was at that time the only one who had done research on and preserved some knowledge of Bunker. When the Boston Museum many years later staged a Bunker exhibition they began with Ives writings, which were the only scholarship available. Ives was a remarkable guy.

Of course when Ives walked us through the museum his loud commentary drew a crowd of bewildered onlookers who at first reacted with annoyance at his disregard for their contemplative quiet. But when they heard his authoritative explanations of the paintings, they would listen, sometimes following a room behind trying not to look as if they were listening in as Ives lectured his little group of four or five students. The guards scowled at him though. One thing he ranted and raved about, was in retrospect, prescient. The Boston Museum had begun to charge admission. Ives was furious, donors, like his own wealthy parents had given the money to build the museum and its collection, in order that it would be available to all. Ives felt that charging admission was a violation of their wishes and akin to charging people to go to the library. He probably knew that the admission fee would be raised until it was a big investment for the average Joe to walk a family of four through there, particularly if there was a special exhibition for which a second fee was charged.

I also remember going up the many flights of steps to the top floor of the Boston Public Library to see the murals there by John Singer Sargent.I think I went there with Gammell, but I am not sure. Forgotten at that time, Sargent had worked years to create them. They are more valued today. In those days Sargent was only being rehabilitated. it is hard to imagine that as recently as the nineteen sixties he had been dismissed as old fashioned, and an artist of empty technique, by a society that preferred Maurice Utrillo. There were only a few Sargents around I could see, but the daughters of Edmund Boit was hung on a stairway in the Boston Museum. Of course there was also the enormous and magnificent El Jaleo and a few others over at the Isabella Stuart Gardner museum.

Here is a shot of the Sargent murals which are now drawing visitors to what was once a forgotten corner of Boston history. The murals are a history of religion and full of religious symbols from the middle east. The back wall called the frieze of the prophets was much reproduced and admired when first hung the murals. here that is.....

and here is another portion of the murals, The Israelites oppressed.

Gammell who was so irate at the neglect of the forgotten murals would be pleased to know they are increasingly valued and visited today. My kids when showing their friends from away around Boston, always proudly include the Sargent murals in the tour.

A woman I had known years before in Minnesota came to visit me one week, bringing with her a friend named Bonney who I was quite taken with. She was a witty, hip and pale blonde built like Jean Harlow. We began a telephone and letter writing romance after she left again for Minnesota, and I began to feel that I was living an altogether too austere a life far from where I had been raised. This lead me to a decision, that looking back, was probably not a good one, at least from an artistic standpoint. I decided to return to Minnesota.

reproductions from artrenewal .org

Leaving the Fenway studios

I am fighting the technology again tonight. Those of you who follow the blog closely know I have replaced mu old, dead laptop, with an HP unit, it lasted about two weeks before the keyboard stopped working. I took it back to Best Buy, they didn't have another like it, so they gave me a new Toshiba. It is running really badly too. I must take it back on Monday. I have been going around and around with this for about three weeks. How it matters tonight is that I can't load photoshop. So instead of a crit I will do another installment of my personal history. That has been pretty colorful, and there are several installments that precede tonight's. They are here in the archives headed not autobiography,that includes a lot of things, but my chronological history.
When I left off the story I was living in the old Fenway studios and studying with R. H. Ives Gammell.

Studying in the Fenway studios was endless work, not much social life and no amenities, bathroom down the hall and no heat at night. After about two years, it really started to get old. But I was learning a lot from Gammell and it seemed worth the trade off. We students drew lots of figures copied drawings at the Fogg museum and paintings at the Boston museum. We painted along the Charles river and in the Fenway, a large city park.
I sublet my studio from an artist who had long since moved out of the building but still kept his studio. He rented it to me and I never saw him. I just sent him a check every month. The studio was sparsely furnished with a foldout sofa on which I slept, a dresser and a small table and a couple of chairs. One day I came home from painting and all of the furniture was gone. My clothes were on the floor where the dresser had been, and my sheets were on the floor where the foldout sofa had been. After a period of puzzlement and distress, I called the artist landlord, and sure enough, he had come into the studio with no notice and taken all of the furniture for some friend of his. Although I had rented the studio furnished, he felt that it was OK to take the furniture. Without leaving a note. I know its not polite to speak ill of the dead (which he now is) so I will only say that evidentally he was a decent fellow if you caught him sober, and I simply had the misfortune of never having done so.

I no longer felt like I wanted to sublet the studio and I was real tired of living that hard. So a friend of mine, a student of another painter named Robert Cormier, and I rented an apartment a few blocks away on Commonwealth ave. It is a tony address now, but then it was the student ghetto. The building into which we moved was full of music students from Berkleee school of music which was nearby. Now we had a refrigerator and a bathroom and all the comforts of modern life except maybe an elevator. It was a 5th floor walkup. Since the building had high ceilings it was more like a 7th floor walkup. It kept you in good shape anyways.

I was mostly painting landscape by this point, which must have been about 1975. David, my roommate, and I copied paintings at the Boston museum, he was copying Jan Van Goyen and I was copying a head of Isabella Brandt by Rubens. We talked a lot about art theories as art students that age do, and we had both developed a love for painting of the Dutch and of Rubens. As we admired those paintings it gradually became obvious to us that something was missing from the training we were receiving . We were being told that we should paint as much as we could like nature, and we already made paintings that looked more like nature than the baroque art we were admiring so much. That was a real philosophical problem. If the point of art was to paint like nature and we painted, or at least had friends who painted more like nature than the old masters, weren't we better artists than the old masters. We knew that wasn't so........

That realization started me on a road that diverged from the Boston school and to a different destination. It was during this period that Robert Douglas Hunter, who I guess could be called the dean of the contemporary Boston school, spent so much time mentoring me. He would come out to where I was working around the city of Boston and critique my efforts. There didn't seem to be a lot of conflict between what I was doing outside and his teaching, but the link between me and the Boston school method was weakening.

I was driving cabs several nights a week and now had friends who were musicians, mostly guitar players. I began to have a little more of a social life and I was emerging from the cloistered life of the Fenway milieu. I was working one day a week at the Guild of Boston Artists, an organization of which I am now a member. That was also bringing me into contact with older professional landscape painters like Bernard Corey and Paul Strisik. At that point neither of those guys knew I was alive, but I was admiring their work and would later know them both much better. Working at the Guilds classy Newbury street gallery was a real education for me. I am sure I walked away with far more than I gave them in my work there.

One day Robert Douglas Hunter asked if I would meet him there on a Sunday and help him out for an afternoon. At the appointed time I met Hunter,(driving a nice Mercury Bobcat wagon) in front of the Guild. He had one of the Vose brothers in the car with him. We drove across the BU bridge to Cambridge and there, across the street from MIT was an old brick warehouse. It was the sort that they used to letter FIREPROOF on the side in big block letters. We went up the elevator and down the hallway, through an arched brick doorway into a room filled with paintings. It was the estate of William Paxton, the American impressionist. Although he had died long before, his widow had lived on for many years. She had been close to Hunter and in her last years,and when she died, entrusted the estate to him. This was the first time anyone had gone through these paintings in many years. There must have been a hundred of them there. My job was to hold up the paintings one by one, so Hunter and Vose could examine each of them, and know the quality of what was there. Many of the great Paxtons in the museums and books were in that room on that day. Paxton was forgotten then. I had the good fortune to be a fly on the wall for a tiny bit of art history. It wasn't to be the last time either.
more another time...........

Remember to sign up for the September workshop in Jaffrey New Hampshire here.