safety studio post

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

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.

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.

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.

Another little trick I know 5

Toward the end of a painting day it is often useful to know how long you will have to continue painting before the light fails. I love saying "when the light fails" it is so old timey and romantic sounding. Long ago I  used to tell One lovely young woman that I would meet her "when the light fails".

 Here is a way to tell how long you have before dark, this is an old woodsman's trick. Hold your hand out at arms  length. Then place your hand below the sun  with the bottom of your hand on the horizon, or that line of trees, or whatever the  sun intends to drop behind. You might need to use both hands to do this if the sun is still high. Count how many fingers there are between the sun and the horizon. You can figure on fifteen minutes for each finger. In the picture above I have 45 minutes before the sun drops behind that row of trees.This works no matter how large or how small your hands are, I suppose because the length of your arm varies somewhat in proportion to the size of your hand.

Here is a trick for keeping your white (or whatever color) fresher overnight.

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Put a tuna fish can upside down over that pile of color and it will be less likely to dry out overnight. If  paint drying overnight is a big problem, you can always put your paint in the refrigerator. That won't hurt it at all. You might want to make a special box for it if you do this routinely. That will keep the paint and your cottage cheese separate. In the winter I often  throw the palette in the trunk of my car when I am done working for the day. Even if the night is very cold the colors will rapidly warm up again in the heat of my studio.

 I have the attention span of a goldfish. A goldfish has about a two second memory. All day they swim around their little bowl muttering "I think I've seen this before... I could swear I've seen this before,
I think I've seen this before". I have a case of ADD that would kill an ordinary man, I am a human whippet, I am so easily distracted. 

  So, I keep a kitchen timer beside my easel. When I am having a problem staying focused, I work timed hours. I set the timer and no matter what happens I work for an entire hour. If the phone rings I will ignore it. I don't do this all the time but when I am against a deadline or there are lots of distractions I set my timer. Evidently people with jobs have similar systems involving timeclocks and scowling supervisors. To be self employed you have to have the discipline to oversee yourself, no one else will.

Is this next item a painting trick? Maybe not. but it is a useful survival habit for gaunt bohemians and hipsters with uncertain incomes.

STARVEPROOFING!

Every time I sell a painting I go to the grocery store, there I make a point of buying a selection of imperishable food items, along with my regular grocery purchases. I buy things like tuna fish, soups, spaghetti sauce, noodles. canned soup, you know, stuff that will patiently wait for a long time to be eaten. This has saved me from hunger many times. These days my income is always sufficient to feed me, but there have been times when it was not and I went hungry. I still practice this habit out of caution, in these uncertain and tenuous economic times you never know. I could live for a month or longer without buying groceries if I had to. If you belong to Costco  or Sams Club, that is a great place to shop for survival rations. I usually have a case of soap around and enough dish detergent and household cleaning products to carry me through an extended period of financial misfortune. I feel safer knowing that I have a well stocked larder, just in case.

I do this with art supplies too. I buy my paint by the quart or five big tubes at a time. I could paint for months without resupplying. Paint won't spoil and I feel comforted knowing that it is there.

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I have a few spots left in the Minnesota workshop to be held in Stillwater, Sept. 15 through the 17th. 
I am excited to be teaching in Minnesota, where I grew up. I like the prairies and hills there. Minnesota has great oak trees that are fun to paint. It is often a low horizon sort of a place, reminiscent of my hero Seago or Dutch painting. Perhaps you would like to join the group? I can save you YEARS of screwing around. Workshops are a lot of fun and I enjoy teaching them. I am  pleased to announce two special guest stars for this event, Mary Pettis and Kami Polzin, both are well known Minnesota plein air painters and will  join us out on location.

 Each day after painting we go out to dinner and I draw on napkins and teach design skills from my laptop. So this is the most intense  program possible. It runs from breakfast until after a late dinner. You will be exhausted at the end of each day, I promise. I will work you like a borrowed mule!. I only have three days with you and I want to cram as much into that time as I possibly can. There is a lot of camaraderie and I am always sorry when work shops end. Below is the link  if you would like to sign up or learn a little more about the work shop.

http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/search?q=Minnesota+Workshop+Fall+2012


The same is true of my New Hampshire workshop in the White Mountains. I am down to only a few spaces left so let me know if you would like to come.

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.The fall color in the White Mountains is legendary and people come from all over the world to see it. 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.Sign up here;

http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2012/05/workshops-for-sale.html

Another little trick I know 4

Here is a  little trick for stretching canvas. When I start stretching a canvas I put a staple in the middle of each side. As you can see above the tension is uneven around that first staple. Before I drive the next one, I grab the end of the canvas up at the corner and pull it taut. I still have the canvas pliers in my other hand pulling the canvas as you see above. I pull it just as hard as I can.

I grab the canvas up there at the corner and pull it so that the canvas is tensioned not only across the stretcher but along it's length as well. It would help to be an octopus to do this. I release the hand up at the corner and use it to hold the staple gun to drive the next staple between the initial one and the corner. I space my staples about two inches apart. I do this for the first two or three staples on each side. That little tug helps prevent buckling or an uneven tension across the length of the side I am stretching.

I thought I would throw this in here too. This is a reprint from a previous post, but it certainly falls into the little tricks category

There is a trick to pouring from a new can of solvent. For years every time I did it I got turpentine all over. Then someone showed me how to do it. The trick is to turn the can over. Pour the solvent ACROSS the top of the can, like in the grainy cell phone picture above. You will need to hold your mouth just right for this to work, but try it, no more turpentine filled shoes!
There are about a million little tricks in painting.

 Above is pictured a device that sits on my easel. It is just a couple of stretchers screwed to the top and bottom of a length of 1 by 10. What it does is elevate the painting I am working on. I am 32 feet tall, so almost all easels are too short for me. I can't crank them up them up high enough to comfortably work on smaller canvasses, This one is an 18 by 24. The other thing it does is allows me to put a larger canvas on the easel quickly by removing this "easel stilt" rather than having to adjust the height of the easel itself. Notice that I have a half sheet of luan plywood sitting on the easel behind my painting. This allows me to tape my reference photos or inspirational reproductions of relevant master paintings next to what I am working on. It also eliminates the distraction of seeing whatever is behind the easel around my painting.


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I have scheduled another workshop in the White Mountains for the autumn color season.  This is a first, I have never done a fall workshop up there. It should be a great time to paint the Presidential range from the Inn overlooking Franconia Notch. If you are interested, click on the link below and it will give you all the information about signing up. I limit the workshops to 10 participants, that keeps them a workable size and they almost always fill up so if you want to come, sign up before it is filled.

 Fall Color Workshop  September 8th through 10th


 This is the Sunset Hill Inn in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for about three 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, it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside.

 This will be the first fall workshop I have done there and I am thrilled. I love teaching workshops anyway. 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.The fall color in the White Mountains is legendary and people come from all over the world to see it. 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. 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 am going to add a new exercise this time on color mixing.
• 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. The other is unpacking  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite artists of mine.
• I promise I will work you like a borrowed mule.

If you have never seen autumn in New England this is your chance to paint the most spectacular fall color in America.The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars, I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I won't give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits. If you don't intend to come, don't sign up!
It is nessasary to stay at the in . However in the past several people have asked if they could stay with their brother in law or pitch a tent a nearby campground. If you want to do that, it's OK but you will have to pay a flat fee of 150 dollars to the inn for the use of their facilities. That fee will include your breakfasts, lunches and one dinner.The link to sign up is below;

http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2012/05/workshops-for-sale.html

Another little trick I know 3

I don't paint much with a knife, well sometimes, but..... I scrape with my knife a lot. I like sharp tools, in my workshop, I like my brushes sharp, and I sharpen the edge of my palette knife too. I use the sort of knife that has an offset blade. I get mine from Jerrys Artarama and I buy the  Liquitex knives. I expect there are fancier knives out there but these work for me. I have snapped off way too many cheap knives where that offset neck meets the leaf shaped blade that were made by the Chi-Coms . The Liquitex knives seem to be of a better metal and I haven't had that problem with them. I like to scrape the surface of my canvas to take the surface down to  a smooth finish before resuming working on a dried canvas. I use an alkyd medium so my paintings dry quickly. The alkyd (Liquin) that I add to my medium makes the paint a little rubbery too and that makes it scrape well. I can slice the ridges and pentimenti from my canvas better than if I don't use an alkyd medium.

I use a sharpening stone from the tool department of a hardware store or big box vendor. I put a little sharpening stone oil on there and hone the edge of the knife that will be doing the work. As I am right handed that would be the left hand edge as viewed from the top. I work it until it is fairly sharp. I don't need or want, a razors edge, that might cut me as I work with it, but it is a lot sharper than your  palette knife.  Give it a few quick passes on the backside of the cutting edge to remove the hook like ridge that builds up there after honing the working edge. Just a couple of passes will do that.

My sharp palette knife takes the painting to an almost glass like surface even if there are ridges of paint left from yesterdays ministrations. Often I will hold the tip of the knife blade pinched between my fingers and bend the blade into a scythe shape to slice off an individual ridge of paint.

I slip a little Masonite panel behind the canvas to protect it if I have to scrape over where a there is a stretcher bar. If you don't do this you will leave a mark on the front that will show through your paint as the knife chops into the surface when it encounters the hidden stretcher bar beneath.

I went seascape painting this last week. I escape all the summer greens by heading to the water . Here is a a video of that. I take a lot of these little movies, they are better than still photography for studying the action  of the surf. This is from my Sony Cyber-Shot camera not a digital movie camera. It will take a long enough video to catch the entire action of a couple of waves.

Another little trick I know 2

Here's another little trick and it's a great One! I went to an artist's party in Rockport years ago. I was with a group of  younger artists sitting and listening to Paul Strisik. He described this trick for cutting down a roll of linen. He used a band saw, but I use a chop saw (that's an electric miter saw, Stardust)

I put a pen mark on the roll to mark my cut, and WHACK!

 I chop a roll down so  that I can stretch canvases the same size with virtually no waste. This roll was cut to 27" so that I could stretch 18 by 24s or 24 by 30s. I allow 3" so there is selvage to turn over the stretchers. I open this truncated roll on the floor and place the assembled stretcher on it. Then I draw a line about 3" above the stretcher and cut that much off with a scissors. Easy. No waste either.

 Here is the finished product. Another advantage is that the roll now fits into a suitcase. I throw a few stretchers and a canvas pliers and staple gun in there under my mink, and I am ready to go. When it is time to fly home again I take the paintings off the stretchers, and wrap them back around the roll. Since I use Liquin when I travel, the painting are all dry except for the last days work. I usually give that to whoever put me up on the trip or have a local confederate mail it back to me when it dries.

Some painting tricks I know 1

At the workshop this last weekend a student suggested that I should write a series of short blogs that would be about "tricks" of the trade. They suggested a series to be entitled 100 painting tricks. I am not sure I know a hundred of them, but I do know a few. So I will do some  and see how it goes....

I tube my own paint which I get from RGH ( link in my sidebar)  mostly by the quart. For years I have been carefully labeling the tubes. But they always get so painted up in my box that I can't read them anyway. So I don't even bother anymore. Now I squirt a little paint from the tube and mix it with Liquin on my palette. Then I paint a stripe about the neck of the tube using a number 4 flat. It is quick and easy. Then I stand them upright in a corner of my box for a day or two till they dry. Now I can identify  the tubes without all of that cumbersome reading.and they look really cool too.

Even if you don't tube your own paint, if you have a messy paintbox like I do, this might be useful to you. Incidentally that is the fabled pornstar pink there in the back row.


The Rockport Art Association in Rockport, Massachusetts is presenting an enormous show of over a hundred paintings by Aldro T. Hibbard which will run from October 6th until November 11th. There will be a full color catalog available too. Here is a painting by Aldro, one of my heroes.

 Hibbard has been long neglected by the museums and art establishment, this is the only show in many years of his work.There are few opportunities to see his art, and the best of Hibbards work will be there.. If you have never seen his paintings other than in reproduction you will be amazed.  My teacher, R.H. Ives Gammell counted him among the ten greatest American landscape painters and I agree.

Science light!

This is a shot of my easel showing the rack I have sticking out from its mast. Here is where I hang my lighting. When I built the studio I installed an outlet at nearly ceiling level, which is switched from beside my easel. I put in the outlet and the rack rather than a fixed set of lights because I wanted to be able to experiment and change my lighting from time to time. Usually I work only by natural light from my large north windows. However this time of year when the days are so short or when I am in vampire mode and staying up all night, I need to have science light!

There have been a lot of different combinations of fixtures hung from that sad, embarrassing flap above my easel! For a while I liked the idea of using the same kind of halogen track lighting that my galleries had. But I was unhappy with the way my color looked the next morning when I saw what I had done in the cool remorseless light of day.

When I have tried to paint under incandescent light or ordinary florescent tubes my color is way off too. Usually the pictures look dull or lean too far towards one color cast or another. I have never really worked too hard at achieving studio lighting for night painting, and I am too cheap to invest in fancy lighting for that. But last week I decided that I needed to get better light, as I have been working in my studio a lot at night lately.

With all of the people who read my writing I am sure that someone is a lighting engineer, and I know one guy on the Cape ( who often serves as the volunteer scientific adviser to this blog) who is a physicist or something. They all know lots more than I do and will probably weigh in on the scientific side here but I will summarize briefly what I know,with no equations. The people who deal with this for a living throw around formulas and equations that make my head hurt. I'm a high school drop out, I am hiding from mathematics.

• daylight is about 5500 Kelvin ( a measurement of color temperature) That actually varies as the light from a north window is quite cool and morning light would be much warmer.
  
• Most commonly available florescent tubes and also incandescent bulbs are far warmer than that .
• Any bulb or tube can be labeled "daylight" and not be suitable for painting.
  
• CRI ( color rendering index) is a measurement of how well one can judge color under a particular light. This is a real important number when buying your lights.
• So when you shop for studio lighting you are going to have to go florescent and look for a temp of about 5500 Kelvin or somewhere near that. BUT very importantly, you will need to find bulbs that have a CRI of 90 or above.
• Ordinary household florescents have a CRI as low as 70. That's why you look like a corpse under them. It's the lights, you don't really look that bad.
  
• There are expensive "full spectrum bulbs that can be found online that will meet this test and claim to cure you of the "winter blues", (seasonal affective disorder) if you have that go see a doctor or an herbalist. These lights are no doubt very fine, but I am too cheap to buy them. They are called "full spectrum" bulbs because they produce all of the different colors of light needed to judge your color.

Home Depot ( or your local big box retailer) sells lots of different fluorescent tubes. Most of those are far from being acceptable in the studio. But a few are. I just picked up a couple of sets made by Philips that seem to work fine. A purist or a scientist might tell me that the expensive bulbs sold by Tubes R' US might be better, and perhaps they are, I don't know because as I mentioned before, I am too cheap to find out.

Since I last bought tubes the bulbs have wizened down to a thinner size so I picked up a set of those and a shop light nest to house them. They seem to be noticeably brighter than new tubes in the old style dimension. I now have four florescent tubes about three feet over my head as I work. The new style bulbs are 22 watts and the old style are 40 watts.

Either way, they seem to be fine so far and I can work under them at night and my paintings don't look radically different by daylight. Four bulbs and a two light fixture ( I had one fixture already in inventory) cost me under fifty bucks. That leaves me with money to spend on cigars and Moxie, and maybe I will have a candy lunch!

Palette knife customization

Above is an ordinary palette knife. I have been breaking these frequently enough that I needed to come up with a better solution. The first one of these I bought about forty years ago lasted me twenty years, the second, lasted perhaps ten years, the third about a year. Recently they have been breaking in a matter of weeks. The last one I bought broke the first day I used it. The part that breaks is where the tang (the wire neck that runs from the handle) is soldered to its spatulate blade. The second problem with these is that the tang, being round, breaks free from whatever glue holds it inside the handle and begins to swivel. That makes them useless too.

There are better palette knives made by Liquitex that have a flat one piece tang and a larger handle. They don't have a round tang that can become loose and turn in the handle during use and there is no weld where the tang meets its blade. Since I am 32 feet tall and weigh over 1600 pounds, I like that bigger handle too.

Below is one of those knives, the blade is huge, about 4 1/2 inches long. I like to clean my palette with it and use it for tubing paint, but it is really too large to use mixing piles of paint while I am working. This knife costs about six dollars, so it is inexpensive. These Liquitex knives are available through Jerrys artarama and many other places.


I put one of these knives in my bench vise and using an airplane shears, and a tin snips, available at any hardware store, I cut it down. First I drew on the blade with a felt tip pen the new profile I wanted, then carefully snipped it down to that profile. Next I touched it up with a file until it was smooth. I wouldn't want to use a grinder to do this though, I am afraid I would take the temper out of the steel blade if I heated it up too much. You want to be careful to keep your hand from slipping into the blade as you do this, of course.

Below is my custom palette knife with flat tang and power-grip handle. the reshaped blade is now three inches long. Of course you can create any shape or size blade you want this way. I think I have solved that problem and expect the new knife to last for many years.

On a roll

Two woodpeckers of indeterminate specie.

Traveling and painting big art can be a problem. I am painting some 24 by 36's and 24 by 30's.
Here is how I do that.

I carry only one set of each size stretcher. These are the oversized, "professional" stretchers that are about the size of a mans wrist. I like those for bigger paintings as they don't "bow-tie", that is, contort inwards at the middle. The lightweight stretchers are less than ideal for anything larger than an 18 by 24. I carry a box with several sets of large stretchers knocked down , a roll of canvas in its fiberboard tube, a stapler and canvas pliers.

In the morning before I set out to make a large painting I assemble and square a set of the stretchers and mount the canvas on them. After I have finished the painting outside I leave it in the sun to dry. This works particularly well in the desert of course. But I also paint with an alkyd medium, usually Liquin, so I get quick drying times anyway. By about the second day the painting is dry to the touch. I then pull the staples out from it's perimeter, and take the canvas off of the stretchers again.

Often I carry a second tube, from a mailboxes store, but on this trip I have only the tube with my canvas in it. I lay the painting out on the ground, or the top of a large bear proof steel storage box
and gently roll it, painting side inwards, back on the roll from which it originally sprang. Now I have my stretchers back for use on another large painting.

I have done this many times and have never had any problems resulting from rolling the paintings. It may help that they are still newly painted and very flexible, I don't know. When I get home I will put all of them back on stretchers of the correct size and then finish them in my studio.

This system allows me to carry only two sets of large stretchers and paint as many big paintings on a trip as I like, without having a car full of enormous paintings to protect all the way home from the abuse of travel. Sometimes I have stopped at a UPS store and bought a tube from them, which they sell in many sizes, and mailed the rolled paintings back to myself at home. Works great.

I don't paint any small pictures, a 16 by 20 is about as small as I like to work so this enables me to avoid having to do the pochade box (pronounced pochade ) miniatures that many traveling artists make. I need full sized paintings for the galleries and I don't want to make them in the studio from sketches and photos, I want to actually paint them on location. I get better results that way, and show the original art rather than studio made versions art in my exhibitions.

The return of the Take-it-Easel

I am sorry to post late today. I flew in to Boston late last night from Minnesota. You probably got up late anyway. Here is today's post.

I am pleased to announce the resurrection of the Take-it-Easel. This is the Gloucester easel that I have used for years. For you hardened outdoor painters this is a great easel. It doesn't blow down in wind and you can paint enormous canvasses on it. This easel has been unavailable for a few years and I have been asked so many times "where did you get that easel?" Now I have an answer.


"top">The Chicoms are producing a version of this easel that is sold through the major mail order catalogs. I recommend this easel and not those. The commie easel won't work out of the box, it is put together wrong and is not built to last a lifetime like the Take-it-easel. Although it can be worked on, and made serviceable it is never going to be the "Cadillac" that the real thing is. Tobin Nadeau, whose family has been making this easel for years has set up a new workshop in Vermont and begun building them again, using American Maple. That is what you want. He has redesigned the leg mechanism and that seems like it will work well too. This is a workbench built, handmade product, made in the USA with craftsmanship and care. If something breaks or you have a problem with it, they will fix it.

Tobin is going to produce a STAPLETON KEARNS SIGNATURE MODEL! That will be tricked out just like mine. Call him and ask for that. It is an ongoing project and I expect to tell you more about those as they come on line.

I was asked about mediums for outdoor painting in the winter I like to use Liquin but I think the same medium that you prefer for the rest of the year should be fine. I don't use a particular medium for outdoors. The writer who asked me that said they had had a problem with Kamar varnish. I didn't even know that K-Mart made a varnish! I recommend a gloss damar retouch or final varnish. There are lots of new high tech varnishes out there, some that thin with rocket fuel or who knows what. Damar is the old standard and can easily be removed or painted over. It is simple, time tested and reliable. I would however, not spray it onto a cold painting

Some questions from e-mail answered including one on studio wall color.

1930 Dusenburg. Could any car have been more elegant?

1979 citivan built by citicar. Looks like a doorstop, it matters what stuff looks like.

I will answer a couple of my e-mailed questions tonight.

"Stape; Love your blog, and find it generous, crisply-written, betrays not a hint of egotism and is always encouraging. But it looks like a ton of work, and the selfish bastard in me has me wondering why you do it, considering your busy schedule as painter ,teacher, entrepreneur, spouse, what have you. From their timedates, your blogs look like the last conscious thing you do at the end of what must be an exhausting day. I’m no spring chick, and am pretty sure we’re roughly the same age. At midnight, or whenever you find time to write your blog, I’m fast asleep!"

It is a ton of work and I do it the last thing every day. Sometimes I am exhausted. Here with bullets is why I do it.

• Remember when I wrote about Earl Nightingale here. Earl talks about the importance of being a leader in your field and working towards being an expert in your field? The blog is part of that. I have to study to write it so it is a learning experience for me too. The economy has made it harder to make it as an artist, Doing this blog is part of my adjustment to that reality.If you want more out, put more in.
  
• Last time I looked, I had 39 comments tonight thanking me for doing the blog. I get thank you notes every day in my e-mail, I like that, it is affirming and I will work for praise. I like to feel useful and valued. That is I suppose a little shallow, but I am hooked up that way.
• I am a natural pedant, I like to pontificate and the blog gives me the opportunity to be a blowhard and get away with it. I talk all the time, it seemed like a natural fit,
  
• I do know a lot of esoteric art stuff, having spent a life studying it, starting as a child. I knew the orders of furniture before I knew the facts of life. I didn't marry until I was thirty five because it took that long to find a woman with cabriole legs and ball and claw feet.
• When I was a younger man I found amateur artists irritating because they didn't know much about art. At some point I figured out that since the art schools and the media didn't teach it, it was wrong to fault them for something that I could have told them. The onus was on me to tell them what I was disappointed that they didn't know.
• I was taught to paint by Ives Gammell who was raising up a pack of Jesuits to change the art world. This is my contribution to that end. It is my way of having an effect on the art world rather than just grousing about it in bull sessions with my fellow artists.
• I will die. I have seen a lot and known a lot of artists, that should be documented. I have been a fly on the wall so many times and it would be irresponsible not to set it down.
• I post the blog at whatever time and then go back in and reset the timedates for the next day. That means that when people wake up and read it with their morning coffee it bears that days date. It is published late at night but is dated for the next day.
  

Here is another:
"We recently converted our garage into a studio for me and I'm faced with choosing the wall and ceiling colors.
I saw something online about painting studio walls dark grey to cut down on glare: http://www.sadievaleri.com/blog/2010/12/22/faq-winged-victory-cast-and-studio-wall-color.html
However, I'm not sure this is the best idea for my space because it doesn't get much natural light anyway- Just two skylights and a small south facing window in the door.
I'll be using the space for painting as well as my office.
Any suggestions?"

You said your space is a little dim, if you need to maximize the light I suggest Linen white. It is a WAY off white and my studio is painted that color. It is close to ivory. Pure white is too much, linen white seems about as close as you can get without it being too antiseptic and having too much glare. That should maximize your light. If you have plenty of light, I would go further still off-white towards a gray or dove color. I would avoid a strong color as it would affect your painting by being an ambient bias in the color of the light in your studio. Rubens had a dull red color in his studio and I painted a gallery that color once. It was a nice space and I was happy working in it. Remember the floor is also a reflective surface and you want to take that into account also, if you have a dark floor, that will absorb a lot of light and make your studio darker. I have an oak floor which is very dark and that is one of the reasons my northlight studio has off-white walls.

Odds and ends

Hi Stape,

First, I'd like to say I love your blog. Thank you for taking the time to teach young painters a thing or two about how to be a pro. All of the questions I've been struggling with you have answered for the most part on your blog. Thank you so much!!!

I have a 2 part question to ask you. I was reading your post about making a morgue of paintings from magazines and books and it sounds like a great idea. However, I can't seem to bring myself to cut the images out. I have issues of American Art review from 1998 until now and I love going through and reading the articles. What are your thoughts about this?

And I guess this is a more important question: Do you photograph your paintings after you varnish them or before? Do you photograph them yourself? Do you recommend any photographers?

Thanks again!

Best, (name redacted)

Dear redacted;

I cut the magazines up because I would never be able to find the paintings I want to see if I left them all in the magazines. I order them by periods and geography. Also if they are open in my studio when I am working, putting them in plastic sleeves protects them from flying paint. Here is the link about building a picture morgue.

About photography. I used to have many of my paintings professionally shot, particularly if they were going to be reproduced. That was in the day when I used 8 by 10 transparencies. They were expensive, and like color slides one of a kind, unlike a photo from a negative that could be printed out in quantity.

Today digital photgraphy has made things much easier. I shoot my own photos. I usually do that outside, but not in direct sunlight. The best thing about digital is I can open them in photoshop and "tune" them. I have the small version of photoshop, photoshop express. It is enough for my needs.
I try to shoot the paintings before I varnish them. It is hard to shoot a freshly varnished picture without getting glare, or hotspots. I am not an expert photographer and I have a very inexpensive camera. I shoot everything on the blog with it though. I have also shot my own paintings for advertisements in national magazines.

In the comments I was asked;
Question: what did you mean by "you cannot observe good design into a painting?"
I am confused by the term "into". I read it first as "in a painting", but that didn't sound right either.
Clarify?


What I meant was that design is a human construction and can not be copied from nature. You use decision making to add it to your painting. Design is a decision making and not a transcription process. No matter how carefully you copy that which is before you, you won't end up with a designed painting. Design is a construct, a geometric armature upon which you build your painting.

Packing for a painting trip on an airplane

Above is another painting I made for the Charleston show, at the Ella Walton Richardson Gallery. This was painted from a beautiful spot on Kiawah island. I studioized it some though.

I was asked a few questions about packing for travel by airplane and I thought that I would write briefly about that. The last major airplane trip I did was to Venice. I took a Pochade (pronounced pochade) box. Mine is an Easy L with which I am happy, but there are other good boxes out there also.

Into my suitcase I packed;

• The Easy L
• A light tripod in a cloth bag with shoulder strap
• A backpack, empty
• I cut a roll of canvas into 20" lengths with my chopsaw. I could then cut 16 by 20s or 16 by 24's out of that. That went into the suitcase. Also about ten 8"by 10" primed Masonite panels.
• two sets of 16 by 20 stretchers and 1 set of 16 by 24 stretchers, also a staplegun and staples and canvas pliers and screwdriver.
  
• A couple of cigar boxes full of paint.I downloaded on Gamblins web site the specs on paint showing that it was not flammable or dangerous I included this in the box with the paints.
  
• Brushes and medium cans.
• No solvents.
• Two softcover and one hardcover book on Edward Seago.

I also carried my small camera and seven days changes of clothes. I wore a light jacket. I did sink laundry with dish detergent and hung my clothes up to dry in the bathroom. One time I went to a laundromat.

When I landed in Venice I found a good art supply store where I bought alkyd medium and more Titanium White. I found a hardware store where I could buy mineral spirits.

I stretched three canvases, two 16 by 20's and one 126 by 24. I used lots of Liquin so I had fast drying times. When I had painted on the canvas I took it off the stretchers and put a new canvas on them. Then I rolled all of the canvasses around the tube on which I had brought them. On the last couple of days I painted on the panels. I separated them with little U shaped metal staple thingies I found at the hardware store, taped around them and wrapped the whole show in paper.Because I painted those panels the last days the canvasses I did were dry and could be rolled. With my Liquin I was getting 24 to 36 hour drying times.

I have a plastic tube made for skis that telescopes. I can use it to take a Gloucester easel on an airplane. There is room in there for a roll of linen also. It looks like a rocket launcher. Security thought it was a gun case. When I opened it for them they didn't know what it was.

I wil probably be unable to post tomorrow as I will be on the road.

I met a great young artist tonight. He is Marc Delessio he opened a show at the Ann Long gallery tonight. He is very 19th century classical in approach, and studied and now teaches at the Florence Academy, that is headed by Charles Cecil, who was a student of R. H. Ives Gammell, although he was there just before me.Here is a link to Ann Long gallery

Fixing a punctured canvas

Here's another picture from the Charleston show, that opens tomorrow night on Broad street at the Ella Walton Richardson gallery. Behind me is Fort Moultrie, site of a revolutionary war battle. And to my left is Fort Sumter, whose bombardment began the civil war, or the war between the states as they prefer to call it here.

I received an e-mail from a reader explaining that he had accidentally shoved a brush through a painting and wondered how he could fix the hole. There are several ways to do it. One is to reline the canvas. I will go into that another time. You can do it yourself, but it is difficult and takes more skill. I will cover the quick and dirty way to do it.

I am assuming that the hole is smaller than a penny, if it is bigger, this method begins to become more difficult. This method will also work on a three corner tear. First smooth out the canvas in the area and clean up any ravelings that are hanging about the hole. Then cut a piece of canvas, hopefully of a lighter weight than the one you are repairing. If you haven't got something lighter use a piece of the same canvas, you may have to take it from that which I hope you are in the habit of leaving turned over on the back. Cut an attractive patch from that, I cut a rectangular patch and then clip of the corners at a 45 degree angle so it looks a little slicker. If you have a pinking shears use those, that gives a nice look too. This is important to do neatly, if someone sees the repair, they will accept it only if it looks neat and professional.

Glue the patch behind the hole. I have used a number of kinds of glue. I have used fabric cement and an industrial glue in a tube. Carpenters glue should work too. Let that that dry completely before continuing with the next step.

Now fill the hole from the front. I like to use a mixture of flake lead and liquin but you can use titanium white or even spackling compound or wood filler, this IS the down and dirty method. When that is completely dry, sand it lightly with a fine paper. If you are sanding the lead filler, wet the sandpaper with mineral spirits so you don't breathe the dust. You may want to don a mask for this.

Don't do this around your kids, don 't do it you are pregnant, don't do it if you are a wellness dweeb or living all natural. In fact, oil painting involves lots of toxic chemicals and you need to be aware of that and exercise caution. Sanding paint can generate aeresol dust and that is never good, So be careful about that. I wet sand for that reason, and I wouldn't sand down a whole canvas, only the ocasional small area. When I do, I breathe through my ears.

Feather the edges well so that the filled hole is level with the painting around it. This must be done very carefully so it doesn't show. You may have to fill and sand twice, try using a palette knife to fill the hole, that works well. When that is done and dried out paint it with liquin ,let that dry and then varnish it, It needs to be completely sealed. Varnish it several times, it absolutely has to be sealed! Then retouch varnish the whole painting to bring your color up so it looks like wet paint, that will help you match the area.

Now inpaint the patched area, If you were a restorer you would carefully match the colors and only inpaint the patched area, but since this is your own painting you will probably find it easier to repaint the entire passage. If you are an impressionist with brushwork, painting opaquely this is not a big deal. If you are painting enameled surfaces in glazes, you are going to have a much harder job.

I have done this successfully many times. If you work with care and precision you should be able to get a nearly invisible repair that will last the life of the painting. Now listen up! What I am about to say next is important. This is to repair your own work or possibly the work of a friend only. Do not do this to an antique painting of value. A real restorer should be called in to work on anything that has age or value. Also you cannot inpaint on an antique painting the same way as you can on your new one, it will darken over time. To paraphrase Joshua Reynolds.........

DO NOT HELP TIME DESTROY EXCELLENCIES WHICH YOU YOURSELF WILL NEVER RIVAL.

Building a crate

Above is a worksheet for designing a shipping crate. This was designed by my clever wife. I posted this some time ago here. I needed to build a crate today, so I photographed the process, for you. I began by filling in one of my crate maps that makes it easy to do the math, and avoids the screw ups that for some reason are really easy to do building crates. I then took it to my local big box retailer, and had them cut to the right size for me the two pieces of luan plywood and I found two eight foot 1 by 3's. The whole show cost me about twenty five dollars.

I threw them in the back of my car and when I arrived home I took them to my basement workshop.There is the crate map filled in and sitting on the luan.

Here I have cut the 1 by 3's with a handsaw. I could have used my table saw or chop saw but since they were small and I only had four cuts to make, it seemed easier just to do it by hand. Elapsed time, perhaps ten minutes. I did this by marking them off with the luan, no tape measure.

Here is my battery drill , I have put the luan onto the sides and ends with ordinary drywall screws. This makes a real tough package and it looks neat and professional. With all that is moving around the country this week I want my painting protected on its journey.

Below is the crate ready to accept the painting. I suppose it is twenty minutes of work . I am no carpenter and this is a crate, not a Sheraton highboy. But it will do for my purposes.

The painting I am shipping is a 30 by 40 and it is on oversized stretchers. If I had a frame the box would have to be deeper but since this is just the painting the depth is only 2 and 1/2 inches which is the width of a 1 by 3.

Tomorrow morning I will put the painting into the box and and secure it with some packing materials and screw the top on, again with drywall screws. I called my favorite shipper, ADCOM at 1.800.622.1147, but they told me, as I suspected that they could save me lots of money on a group of crates but not as much on one. So I called FEDEX and arranged a pickup with them for tomorrow. I like to use express shipping for paintings. They are valuable and I think they get better handling.

Tomorrow, back to 18th century etchings.