A worn out brush

I wrote last about the importance of clean, sharp brushes. Someday when I am rich and famous I will just throw my brushes away, with my rags, every evening. I would buy my brushes by the gross, in three different sizes.

The brush ( a #4 flat) pictured above is ruined, worn out ( not good anymore). The pro's are rolling their eyes reading this, for they maintain a collection of fine tools. But a lot of people read this blog and most of them are in the earlier stages of their march to artistic greatness.

Now your brushes may wear more evenly than this abraded specimen but the wear happens the same way on a finer scale. The hairs have broken or been worn off in gradated lengths back to the ferrule ( the shiny part). Why its almost like a Mesopotamian ziggurat, or a layered haircut from the David Cassidy period! The same sort of unattractive wear and fragmented deterioration you would expect to find in a broom.

It makes a stroke or line with a chopped up edge, or drag marks at its side. Next to a sharp brush stroke it looks raggedy assed. Rather than acting as a flexible blade, different units of the brush operate in splayed and stiff independent scales or groups. Like a burr that sticks to your woolen sweater in the autumn ( under fading light at fields edge on a hillside in Northern Vermont, with big maples and a 19th century barn and the whole landscape woven into a tapestry of ochers, grays and violet. There's thistles there and sumac) Or imagine an anesthetized porcupine or large hedge hog, gently, kindly, but firmly, attached at its stomach area to a mop handle.

This is a worn brush, an evil thing, but there is something darker still. There are among us men and women (well, I think there are men) who carry with them a collection of brushes in which the paint has been allowed to dry. These brushes are a solid mass from ferrule to tip. They are like a tongue depressor or small pry bar. Obviously these people have to know that the brushes in this condition could never be used, Certainly there is no way they are going to resuscitate one out on location and work with it. But they still carry them, sometimes a dozen or more. They have brushes that once were an inch and a half long worn down to half an inch and totally rigid all the way to its heel. You could hammer one into a phone pole. But they have em, why?

They are not really being honest with themselves, they are engaged in "magical thinking". Or at best a low level simmering resentment, and yes, regret over the lost value of once useful brushes bought at high retail in some big box craft store. I'm not sorry for them, I just can't be.I don't have the time, I have my painting and my commitments. I don't really think about them that much.

Some thoughts on Franz Hals paint handling

I want to pause briefly and look at the brushwork in some Franz Hals paintings. It is this brushwork that made him so popular with the late 19th century painters. Like Velazquez he was studied as an inspiration by alla prima painters who sought to learn expressive powerful brushwork. Above is a painting called The Gypsy Girl. Hals had obviously been looking at Rembrandt before he did this and there is something Rembrandt like to both the paint handling and the subject matter.

Here is a close up of the cleavo-bodice area. Notice that strap where her jumper goes over her shoulder, that is mostly a stain on the canvas, it appears very thin. I am looking at the reproduction, I wish I had the real thing in front of me, but I don't, so I will do what I can from seeing the image on my screen.

The blouse is just the opposite, it is thickly painted, probably partly with a knife. The thinly stained passage and the thickly troweled blouse are juxtaposed, so that each calls attention to the other. There are a lot of very soft edges going on here too. Had he hardened them up the passage would not have worked as well. The soft blur makes the roughly painted passages seem more believable. His lack of detail is partly concealed by the out of focus look of the area. Notice also the play of warm and cool notes in the blouse. That gives a flickering vibration in much the same way that a later painter might with divisionist color.


Here is our gypsy girls head. Notice the edges on the left side of the jaw, and then compare them to the edges on the right side of the jaw. The contrast in edge delineation gives variety to the lines. The softened edges on the left side pushes the softly turning edges of her jaw back into space behind the more carefully delineated lips and nose, which are closer to the viewer and more important to the likeness. See how he has used square brushstrokes to build the bony structure about the eyes. Each plane in there is represented by a geometrically shaped stroke that expresses its unique shape. This was installed into the painting by Hals, not dumbly transcribed from cold observation.. He knew how the structure worked and explained it in a simplified exposition.


The Laughing Cavalier is another tour de force of brushwork. Below is a closeup of the collar and sash. Notice the handling in the sash. There is really nothing there, but it says sash when you look at it from a certain distance. That is part of why bravura handling is so entertaining, A kind of game is going on between the artist and the viewer. At one look it is just splotches and scrapes of paint and the next instant it is an utterly convincing sash. It is paint, it is a sash. Magic!


Below is a detail of the sleeve and what must be the pommel of his sword handle. Look at the rough way that and the cuff below it is painted. All of that detail in the embroidery on his sleeve is an amazing piece of work. I am guessing that did not go down in one shot, but had to be studied out in several overpaintings.

Cleaning brushes

On the last painting trip I took, discussion turned to "how best to clean brushes?" One of the women on the trip suggested that Murphy oil soap was the best way. So I tried it when I returned home. It does seem to work really well, it cleans them quickly and leaves them soft, it doesn't seem to dry them out so they will become brittle.

I am murder on brushes, I don't often wash them, I scrub with them and abuse them with my paper towel. I only use a few. Some day when I am really rich and famous I will just throw them away at the end of every painting day. I do like them sharp and when they lose their edge, out they go.

When paint dries in my brushes, I use professional house painters brush cleaner, but that has to be done outdoors as it is nasty stuff. I used to use Ivory bar soap until I was turned on to the Murphy"s soap.

The procedure is this:

• Pour a dot of the Murphy soap directly onto the brush from the bottle.
• Run it around and around on the palm of your hand ( I wear gloves most of the time and it would seem like a good idea for this too, I was taught to do it barehanded years ago, but it is probably smarter not to grind pigments into the skin of your palms.

• Keep that going until the lather comes out white, indicating no pigment is left in the brush, try to get the paint out of the ferule too (that's the shiny part between the hair and the wood).
• Shape the brush when you have finished so it will dry into a shape that it is supposed to be. NEVER point a brush with your mouth, or hold a brush in your mouth either. Even the little residue of paint in your brush is toxic.
  
• Often in workshops I have students whose brushes are totally worn out. They are useless, when your brushes get worn, replace them. A brush needs to be able to make a clean mark not a fuzzy one. The cost of painting is your time and education, not the materials or brushes. Go ski for a day if you disagree, then get back to me.
  

Sargent and the bravura brushstroke.

images courtesy artrenewal.org

There is another quality of Sargent's handling I want to point out. It is an outgrowth of the broadness I spoke of last night. That quality is called bravura brushwork. Bravura means "great skill" in Italian . Sargent's brushwork is beyond descriptive, it is intended to be beautiful and artful in its abstract appearance. It looks cool apart from its function as a descriptive mark. This young girls hair is a great example of this kind of handling (as brushwork is often called).

Handling doesn't exist in nature therefore;

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE HANDLING INTO A PAINTING!

Handling, at least bravura handling, is artful, it must be invented, or thought up. It calls for translation of the visible appearance into something else. Because of this intellectual effort, this decision making, it is art. Mere transcription is not particularly artful, as skilled as it might be. It is this lack of artfulness that lead a generation before mine to use the phrase "empty technique" incessantly, although they thought ALL technique empty.

Bravura work like this is technique, not empty but art laden. So bravura work is a way of adding art to a painting. There are great paintings that bear not a trace of it, Raphael might serve as an example of that sort of an artist. However there has been an ongoing tradition in painting that did emphasize bravura handling, running like a thread through the weave of our artistic tradition. Below is a Franz Hals that has bravura handling.

Notice the handling in the ruff about the neck of our celebrant here. It is paint, and it is linen, hanging in thick folds and ruffles. The artist is playing a game with the viewer, you see two things at once. At one glance you see abstract shapes of paint roughly troweled on the canvas and in the same instant you see a collar appear out of that seemingly disorder jumble of painted marks.

Look at the blouse this young ingenue is wearing. Here the game is how little can Sargent render, yet still convince you of the realness of the blouse. At a glance there is the blouse, but on closer examination there is almost nothing there. It is there, not there. That's fun to look at and awe inspiring too. The viewer wonders "how did he do that". It looks to have greater velocity than it actually had in the creation. Richard Schmid famously wrote that" loose is how a painting looks, not how it was done". Sargent very likely laid this in VERY deliberately indeed, probably very carefully. But it looks like it was thrown onto the canvas from a hod.

More on brushstroke

I have been writing the last few nights about brushwork. One of the differences between a blog and a book is that when writing a book you can assume that everybody as read chapter 42 before they read chapter 560. In the blog they pick up wherever they please and I am again wondering whether to repeat what I have said before on brush work, or assume you have seen it. What I think I will do is to post some excerpts from previous posts on brushwork so I know that new readers will have seen them. This may make for a choppy post but here they are.
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I am going to list the things that must be considered every time your brush touches the canvas. They are legion. Every time you paint a "note" you need to understand the following things. I am proposing a sort of checklist. However it is long enough that it will take some time for you to be able to automatically apply each of these ideas. But if you start to look for several of them it will help your painting and gradually you can expand your checklist to include all of these. You must consider these qualities listed below in every brushstroke.

• Is this brushstroke in the right place?
  

• Is it in the light or is it in the shadow?

• Is it the right value?

• Is it the right color?

• Is it the the right chroma, that is, is it too saturated or is it too grave ( gray)?

• Is the temperature of the color correct, is it too warm or is it too cool?

The brushstroke you place on the canvas will be one of several kinds. The brush stroke will either:

• Be visible or invisible. If it is visible it will:

• Run with or along the form. Imagine a brushstroke running up the trunk of a tree.

• Run around or across (against) the form, like a ring going around or a plane laying horizontally across the surface of an object.

• It may obscure the form. Think of this as a basket weave pattern, or a flurry of small strokes. You might expect to see this in dense foliage for instance.

• It may be a pointille dot. That is a small spot of paint placed usually as an accent, nearly round or squarish in shape, but not greatly elongated.

• have the edge painted correctly, either hard or soft.
  

All of these brushstrokes work together to form a larger unit called a passage. That's rather like words working together to build a paragraph in an essay.
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A brushstroke can run with, or along the form. Often this is used to show strength, as perhaps in a leg that is intended to look powerful or tensed.The brushstroke may obscure the form. Think of this as a basket weave pattern, or a flurry of small strokes. There are times when an artist wants to describe form and there are times to obscure it.

The brushstroke may be a pointille dot. That is a small spot of paint placed usually as an accent, nearly round or squarish in shape, but not greatly elongated. Usually a painting is not made out of these but they are a decorative accent within a painting.

DO EVERYTHING WITH THE LARGEST POSSIBLE BRUSH.

As many of you know I am strongly influenced by the historic Rockport school of painting. One of the things that characterizes that style is square touch. It is a kind of brushwork. Here is a bit of painting with a square touch by Aldro Hibbard, a master of the technique.

If you look at the painting you can see it is made from square marks made by a flat brush. That gives the artist several advantages. The first is that it gives a structural look. It allows the creation of clear planar representation of the form and the different planes or facets of an object can be painted in different colors or temperatures.

The second advantage of square touch is it gives a kind of pixilation. Rather than smoothing the painting out into a infinitely rendered appearance, the square brush mark is the unit of construction. If something is smaller than that mark it is effectively edited out, thus simplifying the representation. I think it is a powerful and interesting look in a painting and I generally have some degree of square touch in my work. Too much smoothing of the surfaces in a painting can give a slick or flaccid look. In a landscape square touch seems to me ideal for representing the texture and ruggosity of nature. I don't think it is so great for painting portraits of delicate little girls, but outside with rocks and snow and weeds it is great.

Holding the brush

Here is the how to hold a brush. My hand is way back at the end of the brush opposite the furry part. If you hold the brush up at the ferrule you will not develop good handling. This is of the very utmost importance. I see students in workshops doing this all the time.

HOLD THE BRUSH AT THE END WITH NO HAIR ON IT!

Stay back on that brush. Holding it like a pencil, up at the ferule ( the shiny part) makes crabbed and "short" stingy looking strokes. This will absolutely destroy your brushwork!


Above I am pulling a stroke to the right. I can touch the brush to the canvas and take it in any direction. Practice this until you can too.



Here is the stroke going to the left.



Here I am pulling a stroke upwards.I just turned my hand so the heel of the brush faces the sky and pull the stroke in an upward direction.



This is the one that is a little different. I have flipped the brush over in my hand using a really cool looking professional gesture that looks like I know exactly what I am doing. Then I pull the stroke downwards. This is the only time I turn the brush in my hand to a different position.

Laying tile

Here is a way to avoid licking, or "worrying your strokes until they are lifeless. Pretend you are laying tile. Make the tile on your palette and than set it in place on your canvas. When you lay tile you don't shove them around in the bed of mortar. You lay a tile in the right place and leave it alone.

So mix the note, set it in place,
THEN PULL YOUR BRUSH AWAY!

If it is right, no licking or fooling with it is needed. If it is wrong, no amount of fooling with it will fix it. If the stroke is wrong, do one of two things, pull it out with the palette knife, or in practice if it is not too thick, you hit it again with a new stroke that is;

• The right note and obscures the old one
• Adds the missing element to correct the original stroke.

For example you might have the stroke the wrong shape, if you can, add a new stroke that brings it to the right shape that works. If you cut back in with the background and make it the right shape, that works too. But what you don't want to do is try to shove the paint around on your canvas until it is right. The more times you touch a stroke, the weaker it becomes.There is a beauty in the look of a painting that has been fearlessly executed. This is particularly important if you are painting a loose, premier coup painting.

Richard Schmid famously said " loose is how a painting looks and not how it was made".

Bit by a hedgehog and square touch painting

I got bit by a hedgehog today. I was visiting a woman who had the animal in a cage. She indicated it was friendly and handed it to me. It was friendly, but it bit me anyway, and it took a while to let go. I told her that the hedgehog and I were not going to be close.


Here's that location in Vermont again. It hasn't changed much. I am using this location for my next blue night scene. I will post some pictures of my progress for you.

I have made arrangements with the Sunset Hill Inn for the Snow painting workshop. Here is a picture of the inn. It is in the White Mountains in an absolutely spectacular location near Franconia, New Hampshire. It is on a lot of acreage so we don't even have to leave the grounds to paint unless we want to. That means that if your feet get cold, you can run inside for coffee and a warm up by the fire. I can't believe what a great place for a workshop this is. How New England!

I will tell you more about the snow painting workshop soon. The Inn has made us a fabulous rate, because we will take a block of rooms, assuming we get enough sign ups. This will include Breakfast and dinner. A number of you have e-mailed me already. I have not set the dates yet. Lets talk. Some want January, and some want February. Do I do two workshops? What would you like? Let me know. Here is a link to their site.

I am going to talk just a little tonight about "square touch" painting. I got a question yesterday about that. As many of you know I am strongly influenced by the historic Rockport school of painting. One of the things that characterizes that style is square touch. It is a kind of brushwork. Here is a bit of painting with a square touch by Aldro Hibbard, a master of the technique.

If you look at the painting you can see it is made from square marks made by a flat brush. That gives the artist several advantages. The first is that it gives a structural look. It allows the creation of clear planar representation of the form and the different planes or facets of an object can be painted in different colors or temperatures.

The second advantage of square touch is it gives a kind of pixilation. Rather than smoothing the painting out into a infinitely rendered appearance, the square brush mark is the unit of construction. If something is smaller than that mark it is effectively edited out, thus simplifying the representation. I think it is a powerful and interesting look in a painting and I generally have some degree of square touch in my work. Too much smoothing of the surfaces in a painting can give a slick or flaccid look. In a landscape square touch seems to me ideal for representing the texture and ruggosity of nature. I don't think it is so great for painting portraits of delicate little girls, but outside with rocks and snow and weeds it is great.

I plan on doing another reader critique. If you want to be a part of that e-mail me a reasonably sized image of a painting at stapletonkearns@gmail.com put the word critique in the subject line please. I will gather those for a week or so. I am going to limit submissions to landscapes as I feel most comfortable critiquing those online. Portraits, etc, it is best to critique with the model present. I remove signatures from the art I crit and I will not disclose whose art it is that I select.

Also I am going to write an "Ask Stape post for the Fine Arts Views site and I could use some questions. If you have art questions for me please e-mail those in and I will direct you to that post when it happens. Thanks.

Snow painting, Vermont and brushwork

Here is a scene I shot twenty years ago up in Vermont. I am starting a blue night picture of the same location .

Below is a detail of a Hibbard that shows his snow painting technique.

This is just one method he used for painting snow, but I want to talk about this a little. The snow in this picture is divided into the two worlds, light and shadow. The light is pretty straightforward. It is warm and bright, and has a little cadmium yellow in it. All of the strokes that represent the light are angled the same way. toward the light source. Only the planes which face the raking light are illuminated.They are all in the same PLANE.

The shadow is more complex though. It is made of two different values. A deep value and a light one. The light value though occurs in both a warm and a cool version. The warm version seems to include alizirin and the cool version looks greener, perhaps it contains viridian. He uses those different temperatures the way you might expect separate values to be used. He portrays the different planes occurring in the snow with them. By portraying those plane changes through temperature changes, Hibbard is able to CONSERVE VALUES, that means a simplified way of representing the values by using less of them.

He is also making his color "vibrate". This is a form of broken or divisionist color. It is a kind of impressionist method. It is also very "Rockport". The painters from the Rockport school often used the square touch, broken color method of painting.The eye jumps back and forth between the warms and the cools and that gives a feeling of complexity that fools the eye into believing it is seeing nature.

Hibbard is also portraying the forms of the snow by characterizing where the edges of the forms and planes come together. He has accented these meeting places with either darker shadow lines or with a part in the snow revealing the ground between the masses. In the manner of a sculptor, Hibbard is thinking of the snow as a planar or faceted structure. Simplifying it into surface facets defines its place in space and what angle its surface faces in any particular area. Figure sculptors often do the same thing. An overly softened and rounded form is less descriptive of its surface volumes and forms.

The "square touch" for that is the name for this kind of handling, defines the form well. Also Hibbards marks march back into space as the snow recedes from us towards the top of the detail photo. If you squint at it you will see how the snow probably looked at a glance, the structure was explained by Hibbard as he painted the forms before him in the snow. This had to be installed as much as observed. It represents what was before him but is not pure visual draftsmanship. He is painting both what he sees there and he is explaining to us very deliberately the shapes and structure of the snow as it undulates over the ground beneath it.

This exuberantly painted little passage is a tour de force in snow painting. It is also not white!

I plan on doing another reader critique. If you want to be a part of that e-mail me a reasonably sized image of a painting at stapletonkearns@gmail.com put the word critique in the subject line please. I will gather those for a week or so. I am going to limit submissions to landscapes as I feel most comfortable critiquing those online. Portraits, etc, it is best to critique with the model present. I remove signatures from the art I crit and I will not disclose whose art it is that I select.

Also I am going to write an "Ask Stape post for the Fine Arts Views site and I could use some questions. If you have art questions for me please e-mail those in and I will direct you to that post when it happens. Thanks.

Every brushstroke, addendum

Joseph DeCamp, September afternoon image artrenewal.org.

I received several questions over the course of the day about brushstroke and so I will answer those tonight. Questions are in red, my answers are in black.

1) One thing I was wondering about, maybe you could talk about is...You look to nature to get your impression, look up, mix paint, match value and color, double check and fix it. But when you've shifted the value key in your painting to whatever you're working in, say a very low key, won't the value you want on your paper be different from what you see. So is it all relational, when you stress double checking that one note, it's checking it against your interpretation and rearrangement of the value scheme you see in nature and not necessarily against just what you see? So is there any process or technique to 'shifting' from what you see to what you want to express in your painting.

For most of you , you will be painting the scene in the key it appears to you. I mentioned in an earlier post that I paint in a lowered key. I am automatically transposing the picture in somewhat the same way that a pianist might read a piece of music and play it in a lower key. Because I do it so often I might as well see it that way. I drop it into the lower key without even really having to think about it. So when I look up to double check I see the note and say to myself, I represent that with this. Its a system of correspondence.

If I drop all of the notes the same amount and they all stay in the same relationship to each other. I can still be true to the actual value relationships of nature. In practice though I often put in the highest lights up in the higher key. That gives me a look of light breaking through the painting.

There is no reason for you to start doing this. It is a personal way of doing things and you want to learn the broader knowledge from me rather than how I personally have modified the ideas in my own work.You don't want to take on my stylistic idiosyncrasy.

All sort of possibilities come from making decisions on how the painting should look rather than mindlessly transforming yourself into a meat camera. Decision making makes painting complicated, changing subjects paintable. Even just simplification requires decision making. You have to OBSERVE, THINK, AND THEN DECIDE.

2) When painting outside and you lock in your values and colors first then as the light changes I'd imagine it gets quite hard to not be caught up in what you're seeing. How do you go about relating it all back to what you had seen?

There's the skill that isn't learned in the studio, how to deal with the changing light. I don't follow it throughout the day. I plot my lights and shadows and pretty much leave them alone. The trick here is to make a a picture, rather than transcribing nature. You can decide how the picture should look, and stand by that. You can't decide how nature should look and stand by that, as it is always changing. The trick then, is not to be copying nature to that great an extent, think of what YOUR picture should look like.


Joseph Decamp image artrenewal.org.

This is a fabulous head. Frank Ordaz is doing a series of posts on painting heads in his blog.. There are some valuable tips in today's post over there and I am sure his subsequent posts will be excellent as well. You can click on the link, Being Frank in my side bar and you will magically be transported all the way across the nation to sunny California.

3) I wonder if you could tell us occasions when these numbered types of brushstrokes should be used---when such brushstrokes are favored by you for example, to achieve a desired effect?

There are two paintings on this post. Both are by the same artist. The lovely portrait of Sally is painted in a more smoothed out refined manner. It does still has brushstrokes in it but they are adapted to the painting of a young girls face. The picture of the early autumn trees is painted in a bold sort of stroke that you probably wouldn't choose for a delicate portrait. I like to paint leaves in little rice like brushstrokes. I like to carve the contours of the earth with larger strokes perhaps from a #4 bristle. I like to paint snow in large planes and pull them together when they are all wet, to do that I like a # 8 or 10.

For clouds and skies I like big flats like a 10 or 12. I can get a bunch of different strokes out of the same brush depending on how I push its blade into my canvas. I can draw with the tip turned sideways or make a broad "slab" by using the flat of the brush.

I like to make sort of lifting, upward curving stroke for fine clouds. I use a #1 flat to paint the branches of trees, where they get finer I use a rigger, when the tips of bare branches blur against the sky I use a #4 to get that. Years of experimentation have made it so I use a number of different strokes to get the look of things out there. If there is one rule to remember though it is this;

DO EVERYTHING WITH THE LARGEST POSSIBLE BRUSH.

That will give you a facile look and make your brushwork look bold and more expressive.

4) I like visible brush strokes for the most part. But having a soft edge on a nice juicy brush stroke is very tricky. If you soften the edge with a finger or another brush, it ruins the boldness!
Is there a good way to get a compromise?

Well there is a trade off there. With practice you should be able to soften a brush stroke a little with a bristle brush without ruining the bold look of it. Some times you can soften just one side or one end of a stroke. It may be that you will decide to leave them hard. But that can be dangerous. Many times I have had a passage that I just couldn't seem to get the way I wanted it , I softened it up and viola. it worked. Hard edges can get you in trouble, a lot more often than soft edges. For most learning painters hard edges are already a problem for them. I suggest you soften the whole thing up, and then selectively restrike some important strokes and leave those hard.

Your brushwork is like your handwriting. If you do a lot of painting it will automatically develop as you find how YOU like to do things. I wouldn't worry overmuch about developing a style of brushwork. That will just happen in time. Do try to use your brushwork in the most descriptive way you can and stay away from the little brushes. Particularly riggers. They will give you riggermortis. Also hold those brushes by the part of the handle opposite the part with the hair on it. That long handle is there to give you power through leverage. Just like on a shovel. Dont hold it way up by the ferule like a pencil. This is important . Don't choke up on that brush handle, it will ruin your brushwork. You want to swing the brush with your arm not your fingers.

I am going to return to the subject of brushwork, using a different approach in some posts yet to come. So you will hear more about these ideas down the road.

The next few posts are going to be on a number of small ideas that will only take a single post to express. I hope.

Every brushstroke 5

• The brushstroke may obscure the form. Think of this as a basket weave pattern, or a flurry of small strokes. There are times when an artist wants to describe form and there are times to obscure it.The Monet above is painted with a "woven" brushstroke. The shimmering strokes dissolve the edges and give the whole thing a gauzy mysterious beauty. By reducing the focus and subordinating the detail Monet gets poetry, The Monet above has almost no edges at all. Had he tightened it all up , the painting would have been matter of fact.
  

Treatment is nearly everything. There have been great paintings made of grapes, and bad paintings made of gods.

• The brushstroke may be a pointille dot. That is a small spot of paint placed usually as an accent, nearly round or squarish in shape, but not greatly elongated. Usually a painting is not made out of these but they are a decorative accent within a painting.

Here is Vermeers, Lacemaker, courtesy of the worlds largest online museum artrenewal.org.
Pointille is always pointed out in Vermeer, he used it extensively, but plenty of others have as well. It is because of these that some contemporary critics have suggested Vermeer used a camera obscura. That's a sort of primitive camera that captures an image for viewing but not onto film. Perhaps he did. But you can't make a Vermeer by acquiring a camera obscura. Pointille are great for accents. sparkle on water, jewelry, and eyeballs. Pointillism is the practice of making an entire picture out of pointille. Don't.

As I am writing this I realize there are still some sorts of brushstrokes to mention, for instance the slashing quill like brushstroke that Sargent sometimes employed. Here's an example of that in the foreground of his painting of Paul Helleu sketching with his wife.

image:artrenewal.org


Oh, and I suppose I could throw in a Seago, for its dragged dry brushstroke over a rough ground that I have pointed out before. Click on it and you should be able to see it large enough so you can see that dragged stroke. I did a number of posts on Seago that go into that in depth. I love that guy!

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com
EVERY TIME YOU PUT A STROKE ON THAT CANVAS, YOU HAVE TO STOP AND CONSIDER HOW THE EDGE SHOULD BE HANDLED!

I have written extensively on handling edges and you might want to go back and read those posts. But the important thing to get from this post is the idea that you check your edges as you make your brushstrokes.Automatically. Develop the habit so you dfon't have to remember to do it.

Here is the checklist. Every time the brush touches the canvas you must think about the following things.

• 1) Is this brushstroke in the right place?
  

• 2) Is it in the light or is it in the shadow?

• 3) Is it the right value?

• 4) Is it the right color?

• 5) Is it the the right chroma, that is, is it too saturated or is it too grave?
  

• 6) Is the temperature of the color correct, is it too warm or is it too cool?

• 7) Should the brushstroke be be visible or invisible?

• 8) Should the brushstroke run along, across, or obscure the form?
  

• 9) Is the edge painted correctly?

Perhaps you might print that out and tape it to your easel. Try to learn to use this checklist. It will seem like a lot at first, but it will soon become second nature. It sounds harder than it really is.

Well that's enough of that! I will start something new tomorrow.

Edward Seago painting from: Edward Seago, the vintage years by Ron Ranson, available from Amazon .

Every brushstroke 4

Rembrandt, Self portrait image:artrenewal.com

Tonight I will continue with the series of posts I began last week.Every time the brush hits the canvas there is a list of things you need to know. I started the checklist several posts ago and if you want to catch up,go back and read those entitled Every Brushstroke.

The next point on the list is;

• Will the brush stroke be visible or invisible? There's the big division. I am not going to spend much time talking about invisible brushwork, it really is a lack of brushwork. I can't show you a picture of it because it is invisible after all. For most of you studio guys invisible is the norm. I can hear you thinking, I don't see any brushstrokes in nature. Outside though, the game is different perhaps there are no brushstrokes, but there certainly is a sort of pixilation. All of the leaves and branches and grass and patches of dirt etc. in the natural world appear as a fabulously complex myriad of dots of different colors like a tapestry. All of those dots are changing all the time, sometimes gradually sometimes rapidly. Pixilation is not the only way to capture the look of nature, but its a good way. It is what Monet and the French impressionists discovered. However there are plenty of passages in Hudson River school painting that have the same technology. A brush stroke is a pixel. It can be a big one or a little one, a slab, like in an Edgar Payne, or a grain of rice shape, like in a Willard Metcalf . I often joke with my buddies that when I lay in a painting that I am throwing hamburger sized chunks.

The point of all of this is,when that brush hits the canvas, you have to know what shape the stroke you are going to make will be and how it will relate to the form that it expresses. Brush stroke is a powerful tool for expressing form, that is the volume and planar structure of an object within your pictorial space. Since they are a construct, they have to be thought up and installed.

When you start thinking and installing, you are making artistic decisions. That leads to style. Brushwork is an element of style.

Below is a Metcalf showing a rice like brush stroke

• A brushstroke can run with, or along the form. Often this is used to show strength, as perhaps in a leg that is intended to look powerful or tensed. Sometimes a painter will build tree trunks using vertical strokes. They tell nicely against a ground painted in horizontal strokes. Look at the vertical trees on the right side of this Hibbard.
  

Here's a detail. See the brushstrokes running up the trunks of the trees? It gives a wooden look. Incidentally you probably wouldn't do this to the leg of a beautiful young woman. It would look, well.....wooden.
The kerchief that Rembrandt is wearing at the top of this post above, and the planes of his face are painted with strokes that run with the form and show its planar structure. Below is a Hibbard. Look at the snow in the lower left hand quadrant of the painting. You can see Hibbard building the forms of the snow.

with his brushstroke. See him defining the surfaces of the snow as it turns towards the light, or faces upwards towards the sky. Do you remember me talking in a recent post about walls and floors? Here is an example of that logic.The next thing a brushstroke can do is run around or across (against) the form, like a ring going around or a plane laying horizontally across the surface of an object. Here's an example of that from the Hibbard.

The Rembrandt up top has brushstrokes running against rather than with the forms of the muscles of his face to the left of his nose. That Rembrandt incidentally is a great example of building form with an expressive brushstroke. it looks like it was hewn with an axe.

It is generally best to lay your strokes against the form if you can. It almost always looks better. I guess that's because it shows the breadth ofobjects, and isn't as obvious a way of doing things. So to review, when your brush hits the canvas you need to know if that stroke is going to run with, or against the form.

More of this tomorrow, and then we will take all of this up a level, and talk about passages and what they contain.

Hibbard images from: A.T. Hibbard, Artist in Two Worlds by John L. Cooley
available through the Rockport Art Association, Rockport Massachusetts .

Each brushstroke.....

Here's a Metcalf painted about a hundred years ago in Cornish Flats, New Hampshire. This is also where I painted today. I got up early and set up in the field you see in this painting and worked there most of the day. I love finding sites used by my artist heroes. I will do a post or two this summer showing a few of those places. I will show you the artists painting and what the site looks like today. However I have a different agenda tonight. I am going to talk about the building blocks of a painting.

I am going to list the things that must be considered every time your brush touches the canvas. They are legion. Every time you paint a "note" you need to understand the following things. I am proposing a sort of checklist. However it is long enough that it will take some time for you to be able to automatically apply each of these ideas. But if you start to look for several of them it will help your painting and gradually you can expand your checklist to include all of these. You must consider these qualities listed below in every brushstroke.

• Is this brushstroke in the right place?
  

• Is it in the light or is it in the shadow?

• Is it the right value?

• Is it the right color?

• Is it the the right chroma, that is, is it too saturated or is it too grave ( gray)?

• Is the temperature of the color correct, is it too warm or is it too cool?

The brushstroke you place on the canvas will be one of several kinds. The brush stroke will either:

• Be visible or invisible. If it is visible it will:

• Run with or along the form. Imagine a brushstroke running up the trunk of a tree.

• Run around or across (against) the form, like a ring going around or a plane laying horizontally across the surface of an object.

• It may obscure the form. Think of this as a basket weave pattern, or a flurry of small strokes. You might expect to see this in dense foliage for instance.

• It may be a pointille dot. That is a small spot of paint placed usually as an accent, nearly round or squarish in shape, but not greatly elongated.

• have the edge painted correctly, either hard or soft.
  

All of these brushstrokes work together to form a larger unit called a passage. That's rather like words working together to build a paragraph in an essay.

This seems like a short entry, and perhaps it is, but there is a whole lot there. I would call it concentrated. If you commit these lists to memory it will help you as you consider your work I will elaborate more on this and talk about what a passage should contain. I will begin to show the different sort of brushstrokes over the next week or so.

Self autopsy

I think I will do a little dissection tonight, I will attempt the dangerous and difficult self autopsy. Which must of necessity be preformed entirely without anesthesia. Below is the painting I showed you yesterday.

This painting was started last fall on location in northern Vermont. It is a 16x20 which is a common size for me. Often the squareness of a canvas is relative to the distance portrayed in my work. For instance I would tend to paint a forest interior or a street scene on a squarish canvas. I would usually paint a broad vista on an elongated canvas. So it is a little unusual for me to be painting a scene this large on a 16x20 but I brought a whole lot of them on the trip, in part to force myself to work that size. I will sometimes do things like that to jar me out of my usual ways of doing things. I would have known instinctively how to put this on to a 24 x 36 .

There are a series of receding diagonal lines in this painting. Their slopes pretty much alternate, each one balancing the previous with a thrust in the opposite direction. These wedges are a common landscape tool and lots of artists use this device. I invented cloud shadow in order to darken my foreground . That is also a real traditional device. Here's an example of another painter using it.

This is of course a Jan Van Goyen courtesy of artrenewal.org. It is really not so much about the shadowed foreground itself as it is about setting up for the swath of light across the center. If it were not bounded by darks it would not seem to be a light. Out in that band of light I have my subject matter, the barn etc..

In a diagonal band including that barn is everything important in the painting. This is the stage and the barn and the house and the little cows are my actors. The shadowed foreground and the mountains in the distance are just gathered about this band to set it off. Notice that I have placed the band not in the middle of the landscape part of the painting, but starting more than halfway up. If I had placed that band across the center of the landscape it would have looked static. The level of detail and resolution is greatest in this subject area the edges are a little harder and of course I have some reds in that barn roof which beckon the eye to that area. I have kept them as understated as I can, no louder than what it takes to do the job.

Arranged in my decorative subject matter band, like a string of pearls are a number of objects having great variety of shape and size. The house is turned for instance at a different angle than the barn and the trees are rounded shapes offsetting the geometric squarness of the architecture, sprinkled across the whole is an arrangement of little fence posts, and cattle and illuminated tufts of grass that are rhythmic accents. As I said before, almost everything in this picture is going on within that band.

Here is the balance scheme of the painting. It is a classic too. The area of interest is balanced by the broad but more empty shape to its left. The more interesting shape, the barn sits closer to the fulcrum while the larger field shape sits further from the center. This gives the painting a balance of asymmetrical parts. Again very classical.

Below is a close up of the right foreground showing the visible brush stroke. I like to ride the line between brushstroke and the look of "vision" Its a painting , its a scene, its a painting, its a scene. At a short distance away it melds into the image but up close there is brushwork. I like the restraint of that . Rather than being really about the brushwork or totally a representation, the painting dances along that line in between. There is broad brush work but the thing is still resolved to a pretty high degree. It is not loose in a conventional sense but the hand of the maker is visible. Brushwork is an element of style. I sometimes joke that I am the worlds tightest impressionist!

Here is a shot of the foreground in detail so you can see the brushwork in that. Below is a detail of the sky.

The sky at the top of the painting and the foreground of the painting are far more loosely painted than my middle band of detail. They are really accessories and I don't want them to be too assertive and compete with my subject.

I am up to the same balancing act with my color also. I use fairly saturated color but I neutralize it with compliments or surround it with other colors that keep it from being too assertive. I am after a middle course with my color too. Its not really, really bright but not really grave either. Again I like the beauty of the restrained color. When I go in the museum almost all of the paintings made today seem vulgar in their coloration.

Vulgarity is the enemy, we have plenty of vulgar out there already, particularly in the art world. Lets rebel! We could have some class for a change. Now there's a cutting edge idea.

Endless information on edges, pt. 3, continued

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com

Above is an example of a painting by another great landscape painter, Edward Seago. 1910-1974 I apologize for having cropped the right hand side of the picture slightly, although for our purposes here it shouldn't matter too much.As I am sure you have noticed I champion a lot of lesser known 20th century artists. I have every book on him I can find. They are all British and till now, out of print.

Seago used to be absolutely unknown in America but that is evidently changing. He was very well known in England, and was collected by the royal family. Seago sold out shows routinely. Although he was very successful financially, Seago was ignored or dismissed by the art press of his day. Perhaps a little like Norman Rockwell, he was thought of as lowbrow, I guess. Time has raised our brows some. He lived and worked at the low ebb of traditional painting. I will tell you the story of his somewhat tragic life tomorrow.

There are now two available books on Seago,
Both are full of excellent color reproductions.

1.

Edward Seago by Ron Ranson (Paperback - Jan 28, 2002)

Buy new: $29.74

17 Used & new from $20.00

Usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.

(3)

Other Editions: Hardcover

2.

Edward Seago: The Vintage Years by Ron Ranson (Paperback - Aug 28, 2003)

15 Used & new from $24.70

Other Editions: Hardcover

They may be had through Amazon .I wouldn't be surprised if studying these books radically changed how you approach landscape painting. Ron Ransom is himself a painter and has spent many years studying Seago, so his notes on the paintings are useful in contrast to so many art books with good plates and dim commentary.

Seago was a master of handling and edges, and design, he could do it all. However I will begin by talking about his edges, because that is the subject at hand, isn't it? Lets look at this detail of the piece.


Seago has done something I briefly mentioned a post or so back. You see it done with the branches of trees, by a lot of landscape painters but Seago uses it all over his paintings. That is the dragged paint application you see in the branches on the right hand side of this detail. Now this painting is 22 by 36 so what you are seeing is pretty big, so Seago is a loose painter. Real brushy too.

Look closely at the branches there and notice something else. They are dragged over a texture already existing on the canvas. That texture is not part of the brushwork or impasto of the day that Seago painted that branch over it. He has pre-textured the canvas. In a future post I will describe several ways of doing that. What this does for Seago is it gives him a way to soften or obliterate his edges and he uses it everywhere. It is one of the "secrets" of his technique.

If you click on the top image you will get a larger view of the painting and can see this crumbled brush stroke is all over the painting. So long as he kept out of his medium, this edge was automatically "softened". He had to thin his paint to get a hard edge such as that on the houses in the middle of the painting. Notice how the bright one with its gable end facing us, is layed in with a knife. Crisp.

The whole foreground is just big overlapping brushstrokes of different colors but the same value. That also gives edge control. He throws in a couple of accents and the viewer does the rest. You can almost watch this picture painting itself.
Tomorrow I will dissect this painting some more, particularly how the various means of controlling edges have aided Seago in controlling the viewers eye.