Circular designs

A month or so ago, I told a story about painting out in a blueberry field and how bizarre the terrain was there. One of the readers asked if I would show a picture of the painting. I could only find an image on a greeting card, I photoshopped that, but it is still a lousy reproduction, but here it is just the same. In believe I painted this one in 1989, it was shown, that year at the biennial show at the National Academy of Design. I told a story about that here.

The reason I dragged this picture out here tonight is that I was looking for an example of a different sort of composition. You have seen me stringing pearls and balancing masses. And you have seen the diagonal designs, if you have been with this blog for awhile. This painting is built around a circle. The lines in the painting carry us around the circle in a clockwise direction. The springy lines of the birches and the rocks at eight o'clock are all arrayed about that circumference. The center is relatively empty.

The painting is a weird shape, its a 26 x 29, (that's a Metcalf size) so it is nearly square. Circular compositions are usually most suited to squarish shapes . You can use this design on an elongated canvas like a 24 x 36 but it is less natural. Square canvases almost set up the great circle route on their own.

When I have worked in this square and circle format, I have tried to design my canvas so that it holds the viewer as long as possible. This circle composition lends itself to that. Sometimes I think of it as a vortex into which I try to suck the viewer. If you "spin em" for even an instant you have got their attention. They won't be aware on a conscious level of what you are up to, but they do get pulled in, when these design are working.

For those of you who are recent arrivals to this blog, part of what I am teaching here is the idea of design as an armature on which you hang your painting. Paintings, good ones anyways, operate on a concealed geometric arrangement. They are not random, but arranged. If you copy a photograph, you will not get an arranged design. Your design will be random and probably arrhythmic as well.There are people who believe they can shortcut the learning curve by copying photographs and thus avoiding all the difficulties of freehand drawing. The idea of design doesn't really occur to those artists. They select, rather than arrange their designs. Rather than arrange, they crop.

However, a great percentage of the buying public is charmed by these copied photographs. They stand before them and exclaim "it looks just like a picture" they marvel at what they think of as the consummate skill of the artist. And they will buy those paintings too. Every gallery I know of has one of these painters, and they are frequently among the best sellers in the gallery. They incidentally all paint just alike, they paint just like a photograph. All that varies from artist to artist, is that at which they have pointed their camera. I have written about stylelessness, vision and photography here.


The details are being finalized for a workshop to be held the weekend plus one day, either Friday or Monday ( so it will be a three day workshop ) of the 19th of September in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. September will be beautiful in the rolling hills of southern New Hampshire. More on that soon.

That oughta hold ya.

Some readers questions answered, more or less

Corot, Le torrent Pierreaux image from artrernewal.org the worlds largest online museum

I want to open this post by speaking a little about my upcoming critique for readers. About every six weeks or so I have invited readers of this blog to e-mail me images at stapletonkearns@gmail.com. I will photoshop your name of off your art and I will not disclose who did any of the paintings.

So many questions were posed in the comments today that I will answer some of them tonight in this post.

I know a lot of artists like to underpaint with burnt umber, but I think it is responsible for a lot of "drying in" It occurs to me I have never talked about drying in, so I will do that now. All of you have painted in watercolor and noticed that when the water evaporated the color of your painting changed. The colors seemed less saturated. You may not be as aware of it, but oil paintings do the same thing, perhaps to a lesser extent or more slowly, but it can still be a problem.

Fancy art and fashion magazines are printed on a coated paper. Its real important that they have the best possible images. The scandal sheet newspapers at the grocery store are printed on uncoated newsprint. Newsprint is cheap, but being uncoated, it doesn't produce as colorful or crisp an image. The difference is gloss. A gloss surface reflects more of the light that hits it, hence you get a brighter more colored picture. When a watercolor dries the surface is no longer glossy and so it no longer returns as much light to the viewer as it did when it was glossy and wet.

In an oil painting if the surface loses its gloss in an area, that area will appear dull, that is called "drying in" Usually the oil will have dropped down into the painting leaving less in the top layer to provide gloss and give the rich look it had when you first painted it. Usually this is remedied by varnishing the painting. That restores the gloss to the surface and fixes the problem. At least for a while.

My experience has been that a few colors seem to cause this drying in more than others. Watch out for burnt umber and ivory black. Both of these pigments seem to have an ability to dry out the passage in which they are used. You might find that although you varnish the passage some time later the problem will reappear. Both are traditional colors and artists routinely use them, but I have had drying in problems with both of them.

I was also asked:
I have also heard that one should mix their colors as little as possible. Mix two colors together at most and only three if forced. I think it was Rubens who said (in regards to mixing) "do not torment your color." Have you found this to be true? Or in other words use your color clean and unaltered as possible .

Put the note down and leave it alone. If you don't like it, repaint it, or throw more paint down on to it. You can't worry the paint into a picture once its on the canvas.

That is what is meant by tormenting your color I think. It is also a good idea to keep your colors to mixtures of two pigments, or at the most three. First of all you should be able to get almost any color with a mixture of that few. If you keep adding different pigments they start canceling each other out in complicated ways. I usually don't talk much about mud, ( I like to paint mud ) but that's a recipe for it. Too many pigments in a mixture. You need to watch out for that.

But there is another important reason to keep those color notes simple. You will often need to hit that note again. If it has two colors in it you stand a good chance of matching it. If it contains four, you might never figure out the right combination to make it again. Simply made colors are repeatable.

What are your thoughts on some landscape painters first covering the canvas with a layer of red - as the final painting will be rendered in many greens and the undercoat of red will help with vibration.

I think that a red ground makes sense in the studio. Outside I think it is a liability. Particularly if it is low in value. A low value ground will effect the way you key your painting. It may cause you to misjudge your values. I think mechanical systems such as this for relieving greens are OK occasionally, but quickly become formulaic. Watch out for method driven ways of doing painting. If you want your greens to look some particular way it is best to paint them that way rather than relying on a system to get them there. Someone will now e-mail me an example of a fine outdoor painting that has been underpainted in red. The problem with all of these sorts of systems, is that when they are part of the toolkit of a master painter, who uses them only occasionally, they can do wonderful things. But in the hands of the everyday amateur they quickly become tricks and conventions. Painting is always harder than that. I have known teachers who have given students a cookbook full of methods which promise to cure what are actually far more difficult problems than can be dealt with so simply.

1) how about raw umber? Does that fall in the same category as burnt umber and the idea of dirty color?
No raw umber doesn't seem to be as problematic.

2) what about using quick dry alkyds for an underpainting?
Alkyds are excellent for underpainting. I am an oil alkyd painter myself. I don't buy alkyd paints, but I use an alkyd medium. I think alkyd is great stuff.

3) acrylics as an underpainting and then painting over them with oils? 4) just want to be clear..do you mean to suggest spending 40 percent on plein air as well as studio underpainting? So glad to hear your 40 percent idea, I have recently been spending more time on my studio under painting and considering spending more.
Acrylics can be used as an underpainting below oil. But I can't imagine doing it outside. When I spoke about 40% I meant in an outdoor painting session. In the studio with limitless time, you use as much time in the underpainting as is required to do an EXCELLENT job.

5) I have been doing a raw umber, wipe away the lights underpainting for years. Two years ago I started including underpainting white and selectively painting on some of the wiped away light passages. I feel this gives the lights with the underpainting white a more textural and built up start. It also follows the idea of thicker paint in the light and thinner paint in the darks, whereas just a wipe away does the opposite (thicker paint with darks and thinner with the lights). Your thoughts on this?
Again I want to be careful to separate studio practice from the race of trying to get a painting on canvas as the light changes and the tide rises on location outside. In the studio using underpainting white is fine, outside it would be better to go after it in the John Carlson big poster shapes approach, rather than work opaquely.

The whole key to underpainting outdoors is to keep it transparent

You can do a transparent underpainting, and then when you go into it in full color, load your whites and keep the white out of your shadows and you will have achieved the transparent shadow effect. I personally don't work that way. and I think it is too mechanical. Some fine painters did do that, but I think it is more of a studio thing.

Would it be safe to generalize by saying cool underpainting for warm light, warm underpainting for cool light?
No, I think you need to analyze what effect you will get by using a warm or cool underpainting based on what the painting seems to call for. Again I think "how- to systems" are inherently flawed, we all want so much to have open and shut answers but they are crippling. You have to always be thinking and planning.

Also, I am guessing burnt umber is not a problem if it is completely dry?
You guessed wrong. OK maybe if it is bone dry and you varnish over it and we are talking about a studio painting, but I still don't like the stuff. How about trying burnt Sienna and ultramarine?
Those two work real well together and if you want to you can control warm and cool .

The details are being finalized for a workshop to be held the weekend plus one day, either Friday or Monday ( so it will be a three day workshop ) of the 19th of September in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. More on that soon.

About underpainting on location

Above is the underpainting I did for the Ducktrap picture I have been discussing.

I want to open this post by speaking a little about my upcoming critique for readers.About every six weeks or so I have invited readers of this blog to e-mail me images at stapletonkearns@gmail.com. I will photoshop your name of off your art and I will not disclose who did any of the paintings. I am getting sent a lot of figurative art and I am not sure how to handle that. I could be a great help to you if we were sitting together in front of the model and I could point out the discrepancies between your rendering and the model. But I don't feel I can do a very effective critique on a figure or portrait online.

That I can do it with a landscape is sort of a trick,and it surprised me that I could. Because I can't see that which you are painting, I can't address your drawing. But I can go after design principles. So when I have done online crits it is not really a full teaching exercise, I merely flag design errors and suggest solutions. So I may crtitique a figurative painting or two but I am much more likely to crit your piece if it is a landscape. I feel a little bad about that, as I know a lot of you are looking for help in that area. But I have been able to do this blog because I know the subject matter I am covering well. And I will stick to that which I know the most about. This blog is a rehearsal for a book, and I think there are many fine books on figure painting and I don't feel like I am the guy to add to that number. I do feel I can write a good book about landscape painting . Having said that of course, many of the ideas I trot out here are useful for other sorts of painting and I do try to be useful to more than just landscapeists.

In a comment yesterday I was asked; "Why do you not use white in your underpainting? The 19th century French artist Eugene Carriere said to always use white in the underpainting, but he was more a tonal painter then a colorist I just can't remember why he said to use it."

I don't use white because it slows me down, I can take things in and out with a rag dipped in mineral spirits . If I adds white it locks me in and makes alterations harder. The point of the underpainting is for me to plan the painting. While he and I are both using the word underpainting we mean by it different things. His is really a grisaille or dead color underpainting. The important thing though is, he will let his dry before painting over it. Thats a big deal. If I had wet white under my darks and everywhere else on my painting it would be getting up into my paint and causing a lot of problems. if I was doing those complex academic paintings in the studio I too would use a white in my underpainting.

OK. I want to talk a little about what can go under that painting and what different approaches might yield.

THE PURPOSE OF AN UNDERPAINTING IS TO SEPARATE THE PROBLEMS OF DESIGN AND DRAWING, FROM THE PROBLEM OF COLOR.

• It is sometimes nice to wipe a light tone, often warm on a canvas before you set to work on it. An thin bit of ochre or burnt sienna, laid on with a rag and turpentine no white! It is better to judge your colors against and it gets you started out warm. Paintings should generally be warm. Life is warm, cold paintings are often unwelcoming and depressing. Like that death thing.
  
• Ultramarine, or cobalt violet, are good to underpaint a landscape with because when you are drawing you are delineating the darks. Outside they tend to be violet and cool. The lights, that you will not be putting in, but leaving behind will be warm.
• Burnt Sienna is a great color for underpainting and if it gets up into your other colors it usually looks good. It is particularly nice under skies.
• I cant imagine underpainting in a cadmium. the bright color under some passages would be a real annoyance. Alizzirin would also be a poor choice as it is an unstable color and is also going to be a problem if it gets up into your color.
  
• I think that burnt umber is not so good for underpainting. I know it is a traditional enough way of doing things but it is a bit "dirty" in color for the look of the light outside. If that "dirt" starts getting up into your paint you will have a problem with keeping your painting looking clean. Also Burnt umber seems to suck the oil out of other colors placed onto it, and that can give you dull patches in your painting.
• In have been known to spend a whole day working out an underpainting and then coming back a second day with opaque paint and color.I really get into a lot less trouble with a good underpainting under my work. However I only do underpaintings about half the time. I have other ways of starting a painting.
• I would recommend putting about 40% of the session into the underpainting. It may seem like a lot more work , but it will save a lot of aggravation later.

More tomorrow. Been a long day.

Design ideas in the Ducktrap river painting

Tonight I am going to talk about why I made some of the decisions I did in the painting above. For those of you long term readers of this blog, this will be a review for you. However there are a lot of new readers and I would like to talk about these ideas again for them. I will also present a link or two back into the blog where I have dealt with these same ideas in greater detail.The location is the mouth of the Ducktrap river, in Lincolnville Maine. You can see I have changed a lot of things to make a painting out of this place.

The first problem was the shoreline. that strong diagonal didn't lead into the painting, It takes the viewers eye to abruptly and slams them into the frame at the left. But there was another problem also. I felt that all of that water was rather uninteresting and the brightness of it drew attention away from the area in the middle distance that I wanted the picture to be about. I have painted along the Maine coast many times and I have experience with how the shore looks at low tide. Just because it happened to be high tide when I was painting, doesn't prevent me from changing it to a low tide.

The photo above doesn't show it but the sun came out several times and lit that area around the house. In order to make that area light up, I need to surround it with contrasting darks. If I shone a flashlight at you on a bright sunny day, you might not notice. If I shine a flashlight at you on a dark night, you are sure to see it. It is bright by contrast with its surroundings.

In order for something in a picture to light up, it is necessary to put in a dark against which your light can contrast.

So I painted all of that mud of low tide relatively dark. When I painted the middle in a high key it now lit up.

I did the same thing with the color. I used some bright yellow and reddish notes in that illuminated area, in order to get them to show up, I painted the surrounding area grave (lacking color).

In order to appear very colored, an area has to be compared to a nearby area that is not.

A wise artist I know, once told me "all color is no color" You need some greys and somber colors to mobilize your color.

Here is a detail of the middle of the painting. I have used counterchange to make those figures stand out and to make their relationship to their background more dramatic.Long term readers of this blog are rolling there eyes no doubt, about me going off on counterchange again. But it is on the list of design ideas I am trying to present in this blog. There is method to my madness, I am trying to sell you some simple ways to make deliberate choices affecting the design of your paintings. Counterchange and framing lights with darks and arranging my details across the middle of the painting are all examples of schemes I can impose on nature.

Look at the little guy on the right. His white shorts stand out brightly against the mud flats, his torso, although darker than his shorts is in front of a distance passage that is darker, and just a little higher, his head is dark against the illuminated passage behind it. The values in the figure are manipulated so that they are always contrasting with the background behind them

The detail above shows another element of this design. The trees across the middle of the painting are all hooked together into one big shape and it all sits in front of the lighted area. Like a window we look through, or one of those silhouettes that our colonial ancestors used to prize, cut from black paper and mounted on a white field. This dark aperture contributes to the effect of light, that I get in the middle ground. There's that contrast thing going on again.

Here's another thing going on in the design. A lot of the little lights and darks and interesting details are all dancing across the painting in a band. The rest of the painting is made deliberately less interesting than this focus area of the painting.This is my climax, the rest of the painting sets things up so this "string of pearls" works. That link will take you to a previous post where I explain the string of pearls concept.
I am tired now, aren't you? More tomorrow. I will talk about underpainting in a monotone called grisaille