Branch control

Here is a painting I have showed you before, but I wanted to show something of mine that had snow, and trees in it. There is something about that photo, it looks better at some angles on my screen than others, you may have to scrunch down or sit up a little more for it to look its best. I haven't any idea why.

I wanted snow in the picture because I want to remind you that there are several spaces left in each of the snowcamp workshops. I had one filled, so I scheduled a second, and then several people from the first filled workshop moved to the second. So there are a couple of slots open in each. I am sure you remember the post where I described the inn, and you can see that here.

I am continually restrained by what I can readily teach in medium of the blog, I am not complaining, its amazing what can be done. The reach of this medium is extraordinary. However there are a lot of things that it doesn't do as well, either because I have to show something in real time, with nature next to it, or I have to tailor what I say to an individuals need. I can't for instance, teach drawing very well on the net. I can teach the ideas of drawing, but I can't sit next to a student and say, you have got the side of that house too blue and the line of that roof looks off to me. Some things must be taught one on one, I think. There are things that I can show you in the field that I am unable to type into my laptop and post. I know its inconvenient to leave home sometimes and there is some expense, but I can save you years of screwing around, try me. Heres the sign up page.

I am going to begiin writing about painting trees, I am writing this organically, that is, rather than writing it all, shuffling it into the best order and then publishing it, I am writing and publishing a piece each day. I hope it comes out in an orderly fashion, but my guess is it won't, so bear with me. Some day this will be a book and then I can go back through it and in hind sight see better how it should have been presented.

The picture above is about evenly divided between snow and trees. Most landscape paintings (except in some desert places, or urban scenes) are tree paintings. There must be about a dozen or more different trees in that painting going from left to right. Every single one is different. Some are pines, some are birches, some lean one way, and some another. They have different volumes and are different colors.

But they all are observed, and they all are simplified. There is usually way to much shrubbery and twig haze out there. If I put every stick and branch in I am going to to get a cluttered and obsessive look. The old saying you can't see the forest for the trees is a good warning for the landscapist. You want to characterize the interesting and the essential and "prune" out the repetitive and the unnecessary.


Here is a Hibbard , look how few branches there are on those trees, just enough to carry the story, if he had put in none, it wouldn't have been believable, but he has stripped them way back. If you go look at most of Carlsons work here and here you will see the same thing. Can we call it branch control? I was with a friend once who was painting a big many branched tree that stood on its own at the edge of a field. He was having a hard time with it and lamented that it looked like a goddamned octopus.

So lesson one of the tree series is this, branch control. You have to simplify trees (and almost everything else ) to paint them well. In order to do this, it is good to have some idea of their structure and how they are built. I will begin a series of posts on that tomorrow.

A Gil Elvgren dissected a little

Here's our Gil Elvgren painting again. I want to talk about the lines and the thrust of those lines that carry the eye through the painting to where Gil wants you to go. The "punchline" here are the thighs of our lovely teacher who has inadvertently exposed them while escaping from an obnoxious amphibian. I live in the town that produced Pam Smart, compared to Pam, our teacher is pretty innocent indeed. Can you imagine this girl seducing a student and then manipulating him into shooting her husband? Never! This is a nice girl in an unfortunate situation. Lets try to respect her dignity as we examine the means of its destruction.

Here is the main line of the figure. You can't get much more classical than that. Formal. Bouguereau would recognize this line. It is springy, and that gives action and rhythm to the teachers pose. If that line had been straight our teacher would have been stiff and the painting would have been static. That springy line implies a compressed energy that wants to uncoil. Look for coiled lines within figures and trees if you want to get life and movement, invent em , if need be.

Here are the lines in this picture that drive your eye to the exposed thigh and pink mystery area. Each of those lines is the edge of a form that has a thrust, that is it directs our eye in a particular direction. Even the frog is on his way there. This is an absolutely perfect example of eye control. Elvgren compels the viewer to travel to his "punchline".


Here are the rhythmic curving lines in the figure. They echo and repeat one another , that is repeated with variation all around the figure. They also oppose and balance another across the figure. For instance the curve of the legs is the reverse of the curve of her raised skirt on the other side of the figure. The curves of the arms are opposite one another on each side of her abdomen. All of this slightly concealed geometry underlying the image gives it a designed look. We see that at a subconscious level and are pleased by it in a different way than the randomness of a snapshot or real nature . It is a human and not a mechanical creation, this tableau.

Here overlaid on the previous curved lines illustration are the straight lines in the painting. These lines set off the curved lines. The two sorts of lines are in a dialogue with one another. The curving lines are dominant, as they should be, they describe the subject, the straight lines are subordinate but "show up the arcs of the curved lines". Just as it is good to have a spot of a real dark value to get a sunlit piece to light up, it is good to have a set of straight lines to make the curved lines of a figure "work"
The straight lines and the curved lines dance together in this painting, each underscoring the attractive qualities of the other. None of this happened by accident by the way, in fact.........

NOTHING GOOD GETS INTO A PICTURE BY ACCIDENT!

and furthermore

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING!

I am steeling myself to do a series of posts on tree and their drawing, it is going to require me to do some illustrations, that I hope can be kept simple, but it is going to be time consuming. However I know what I want to say and it is something I have worked with a lot. I have said that this blog is a rehearsal for a book, the next series on trees is the kind of thing I would like to rehearse the most. So watch for that, it should start soon. I may have to do it in short posts, we'll see.

Popular in the 60's, Gil Elvgren

Gil Evgren was an American illustrator who did what was called the 'cheesecake" style of illustration. I am including his work here because he was popular in the 60's and before, but more because I want to show his work on my blog. This seemed to be a good place to do it. His command of the figure was excellent and his rhythmic and stylish drawing is similar in a way to the Heinrich Kleys I showed the other day. There is a good series of posts going on over at the underpaintings blog that you should go see here. There is a web site devoted to his art called gilelvgrenpinup.com where I found these images. You can go there and see a whole lot more.

I hope you are not scandalized by these somewhat risque images, however I AM willing to live with it if you are. Think of them as figure painting and look for the qualities of fine art in them and I think you will get my point. These are very well done. The expert on Gil Elvgren is Louis K. Meisel his extensive site is here. Born in 1914, Elvgren was a phenomenally successful illustrator and probably the finest "pinup" artist who ever lived. He worked for all the major magazines of the mid twentieth century such as the Saturday Evening Post and for the biggest advertising clients, like Coca Cola. He was best known, however, for the pinup art he did for Brown and Bigelow, a Minnesota company best known for their calenders.

His art is in the tradition of Howard Chandler Christie and Charles Dana Gibson ( I know, I know, I will blog about them some day too) and is pretty tame by today's standards. I don't think it was really out of the mainstream then either.

I will break out some of the qualities of the piece above. First of all it is irresistibly good natured. There is none of the cynicism or graphic nastiness of pornography. The story is absurd, this teacher, has jumped up on her desk chair to avoid an attacking gift frog, in the process revealing her legs and some sort of primitive lingerie apparatus from the pre Peggie Lipton era. The teacher's body is in a nice pose, with the body as a big "S" curve, using the head turned to look at the oncoming amphibian, completing the "S".

The whole picture is up in a high key with the only dark notes clustered around the exposed drumstick area. The green skirt, the black tops on her nylons and the dark cast shadow on the blackboard to her right, all draw your attention to the punchline. The cowgirl up top has the same device, the only big dark in the painting, the leather chaps, provide strong contrast behind the legs and accidental pink lingerie display and exposure mishap vignette.

Notice how simplified all of the lights are. Early in this blog, many months ago I railed against overmodeling, or dirtying up your lights. Here is a great example of the results that can be had by keeping your reserve over on the light side of the figure. The thighs, the white shirt and her face are all kept simple and clean. Elvgren used photo references to do his art, as do most, or maybe all illustrators, but he knew how to get a fine art look, rather than just copying the values dumbly. Anybody can use a photo, not having the photo use you is the hard part.

Notice the warm shadows on her legs, between the upper leg bicylindrical section, on the side of the face and in her hair. You see a consistent unifying value and color temperature. Warm paintings are usually preferred to cold ones. Life is warm, death is er............cold. A painters trick for bringing a portrait or a figure to life is to heat it up, particularly in the shadows. It is a convention but it works.

The two apples hint at other figurative characteristics.

Believe it or not, tomorrow I will return and further analyze this painting. I want to draw some lines on it in photoshop and discuss Elvgrens use of form, see you then.

Alton Kelley, popular in the 60's

Happy New Year! Here I am sober and tapping away at my blog. I will probably be in bed at midnight. Tonight I want to eulogize Alton Kelley. Alton was one of the best known of the psychedelic artists who borrowed from Mucha and a few other 19th century sources. The Grateful Dead skeleton above is his best known piece and I have a big sticker of it on my paint box. It is a great piece of design. There was a 19th century etching by Edwin Sullivan that was its source material.

Alton Kelley died on June 1 2008 on the same day as Bo Didley, a musician for whom he had created posters. Born in Houlton, Maine and after a stint building helicopters in Connecticut, he moved to the Haight. Together with his collaborator, Stanley Mouse, Kelley began designing posters for rock concerts.

The poster below was influenced by the old illustrated labels on fruit boxes that were still common at that time. Robert Hunter incidentally was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. It seems obvious now that the smoke has cleared at the end of the Rock and Roll era that the Grateful Dead were the greatest American Rock and Roll band. They sold more concerts, did more tours, and sold more music than anyone else. Their fans were the most involved, following them from city to city as they toured. I have been a proud fan of the Dead for many years.

On a long painting trip to the deserts of West Texas I was compelled by a young traveling companion to listen to WAY too much Wagner. At a small town record store I found an excellent "Dicks Picks" reissue of a classic Dead concert. I turned him on to the Dead which he enjoyed somewhat, and I told him their history, particularly about how Jerry Garcia started out playing bluegrass and the effect that had on their music. My friend is a portrait painter and travels the world to do it. He was hired to paint the family of an English lord. That evening he was staying with the family and enjoying an adult beverage, when the lord turned to him and asked, "Do you enjoy the Dead, young man?" Later my portrait painting friend thanked me for setting him up to expound on the bluegrass influence on the Dead's later oeuvre.

Above is a psychedelic poster that borrowed shamelessly from Mucha. Incidentally that typeface is called Armenian. It was a favorite of the psychedelic poster and album cover designers. I first saw it on the cover of the first Quicksilver Messenger Service album, you remember, the one that had Pride of Man on it? Several of the original printed posters on this page are still available from

http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/alton-kelley/memorabilia/?fpr=7&ra=0

They are valuable and highly collected now of course.

In closing, tonight was to have been the end of this blog. My blog was a New Years resolution. My intention was to write a post every day of the New Year, and I have . I have done 350 some posts in a row without missing a single day, well I had Lori Woodward guest write one day when I was just too sick to do it. I actually started it a week or so into the New Year as it took that long to get the site designed and learn how to operate it. I do intend to continue, as I have a lot of things I still want to cover. But when I run out of stuff, its over. I am not going to continue to write when I no longer have anything to say. Happy New Year and thanks for being out there reading this.

Also there is a new "Ask Stape" over at Fine Arts Views here is a link to that.