Oh,Hello!

Waiting for spring 24 by 30

Oh, Hello! This blog was to have been a one year effort that stretched to about three years. I wrote a post every day for nearly a thousand days, setting out to write down everything that I had learned over the years that I thought a painter should know. It was a specific project, and I did it as well as I could. I wrote it all out and gave the information away. Even though I seldom add to it now, I occasionally check my stats and see that there are a whole lot of people still reading it, so the blog is out there being useful. I am painting away  as always, and have volunteered to sit on the board of the Guild of  Boston Artists, which will be a new project for me. The picture above was done on one of many snow painting trips to Vermont this winter with my friend T. M. Nicholas. I fooled with it for a few days in the studio too.

Recently T.M. and I were talking about finishing pictures in the studio. That method is typical of the past New England painters we both admire. We both photograph every location, and agreed that it was a useful practice in case we lost the light or didn't get down far enough into the painting to remember if there were returns on that gable or not. But neither of us really look at the photos much, we invent a whole lot of what is on the canvas, or at least simplify it. Then he said something that made me think, he said....when I am working in the studio

 I AM TRYING TO FIGURE OUT

 WHAT THIS PAINTING NEEDS!

What I think he meant was that when you have a photo, you have lots of information to draw on, but when you work without looking at it, you get a different result. Rather than transcribing from your photo when you look at the painting,you are asking yourself not what goes here, but what does this painting need? The idea is that in the studio you add art, not necessarily information. The answer might come from the rest of the picture. Perhaps the painting needs more weight here, or this line needs to lead this way. Sometimes it is about the pattern of shapes or the harmony of colours. Often it is the "treatment" that you are applying to the subject. When my paintings fail (I have quit painting on panels because they are too hard to throw away) it is seldom because they lack for information, but because they are matter of fact

What your painting should look like might come from your emotional intent, such as "I want this painting to be joyous" or" I want this picture to be lugubrious and sodden". You can put feeling into a painting, but it will come from within you, not from your reference photos.

But most importantly, when you are working out of your head and not from a reference the decisions you make are more individual. It will give your paintings a personal look. What you make up, eliminate or invent will be unique to you in a way that photo references are not. This will give your paintings more style. They will look more like they were done by you, rather than anyone else.

.Information is not art! The artist selects from the myriad bristling details and uses those which advance his intent and discards those which do not. That selection is called simplification, or sometimes breadth. We forget the little details and remember more about how the place made us feel. My best paintings often look remembered, rather than observed. Using photos often leads the artist to an accounting of the particulars of a scene and away from invention. Invention is personal. That which you invent in your paintings will give you your own unique style, that which you transcribe will be comparatively neutral. So most of the time I am in the studio, I don't use references at all. Now and then I will check some element in my photos but the general look, effect and handling come from me and not my references.

I should probably qualify all of this a bit by saying that this is grad-level stuff. I have taught a whole lot of workshops and spent most of my time in them drawing attention to the appearance of nature before the flailing student.The first skill that must be acquired is the ability to represent the scene before you with accurate drawing and color.You absolutely must get that DOWN, gotta have that! It is also important to make lots of outdoor studies in order to build a mental library of  what nature looks like and how different conditions and lighting effect that.

 I suggest you work on paintings in the studio out of your head as much as possible. Your paintings will be more individual and expressive. This is the key to making paintings that are uniquely your own. You want the viewer to look at your work and recognize in it your "style". That will come from putting yourself into your paintings, when they look at them, there you are!



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WORKSHOP

There is only a single workshop on the docket at this time. It will be in Kent, Connecticut on August 23 through the 25th. and is sponsored by the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury. Kent was one of those old impressionist art colonies from the late 19th to early 20th century. This is the southern end of the Berkshires, I guess, and is in what is called the Connecticut hill country I have researched the paintings that were made there and it looks to be a promising place to paint. One of my favorite Metcalfs was painted on a visit to Kent. 

Here is the link to sign up

About finding landscape subjects

Rembrandt, Adoration of the shepherds

 I get a lot of e-mails from readers, and I guess they are a big part of my reward for writing the blog. It is nice to hear from people who have read it. I have received a lot of Christmas e-mails and New Years greetings from blog readers, thank you all. I try to reply to them all briefly, but some do get by me.  I received this e-mail the other day.

Stape;
I just finished reading your blog, its taken me close to 2 years!  It took so long because I tended to savor it.  Some days reading just one post, other days reading a couple.  Its been a fantastic insight into the life of an artist.  I really have learned a tremendous amount, and it has helped steer me in directions for further study. --Thank You.

  I would really like to know how you pick your spots for doing plein air.  Is it just one thing that grabs your eye?  A bunch of things that you move around on your canvas?  Does it matter that much since you are designing your painting anyway?  

This may sound trivial to you, but I have a devil of a time trying to find a good spot.  I think I want everything to be perfect.  Inevitably, I spend a good first half hour or more just walking around trying to settle.  And then, once I am half way thru painting, wishing I had picked one of the other spots.

 ----------------a reader

 

 I have written so much, I think I have written about that too, but the blog is a giant labyrinth of over a thousand posts and even if I have written about that before it is a good suggestion for a post just the same. 

There are few if any perfect locations. Those that do exist  must be out west. Every location I find in New England has SOMETHING that resonates with me, but they all have problems. I too used to drive for hours trying to find the "perfect" place, I haven't for a long time. I joke with my painting buddies that I feel it through my feet when I am  in the right place, it is somewhat a matter of intuition. I think that I register the feel of a place. I know there is something there. A lot may be wrong with the scene, but there is a "feel' to it. But, I do have New England, a very special place, to work with. I have New Hampshire, the coast of Massachusetts and Vermont at hand which are very evocative and American. Pure nature is good everywhere though. A couple of trees and a field is really all you need to paint a fine landscape.

The important thing is not to be subject driven. Look  for collections of shapes that work well together, rather than the perfect group of objects. Try to feel the scene. be aware of how it makes you feel and then think about how you can amplify that to make  the viewer respond to it. I often feel a quiet wistfulness or nostalgia in some places, even when I have never been there before. Some seem  haunted, others are triumphs of natures beauty and  make me feel the joy of being alive and out in nature. Some places have great architecture or a historic  interest. The important thing is to develop a sensitivity to the POETRY of place. But mostly I look for interesting collections of abstract shapes that work well together. I look for design possibilities. I have painted thousands of landscapes so I am aware of set ups that have bitten me in the past. Those are problems that I have run into before that I know are going to be hard  to resolve.

Thinking design makes lots of places paintable. I used to paint with some old guys who are now dead. They would stroll out into a location and set up their easels and I would wonder "what the hell do they see out there?"I was looking in front of them, rather than at them, for the secret.

THIS IS IMPORTANT...... You bring the art with you into the landscape. Maybe out west in Montana there are perfect places to paint, but in the rest of the world, what makes the picture, arrives with you. It is in your excitement, your intent and your empathy.You have to be looking from the world of art at the actual world, not looking at the world for art. A painter with lots of art flowing in their veins can make a fine painting in the most ordinary of places. 

There is a knack for choosing spots, I am sure it is a developed skill. The master landscapist finds subjects in places the rest of us would walk by without recognizing. Besides being on the lookout for attractive arrangements of shapes, a good landscapist knows ways to deal with the imperfect designs presented to him. If there is something in the landscape that seems to offer a possibility, the practiced painter probably has discovered a way in a previous painting, of dealing with that problem. A beginner looks at the landscape and asks " What does it look like", a more practiced hand asks "what can I do with this?" Here then, are some bullets;

• Ask  yourself, what is there that is appealing to me about this place? what could I make here?
• Think about how you would say that in paint, not how you would copy the look of the place, but how you would express it in the language of paint.
•  Develop a tool box of solutions for dealing with the problems in the landscape before you.To do that you must of course learn to recognize them.
• Know what direction you are facing. As the day lengthens the sun is going to move and that is going to present either opportunities or problems. You will need experience and perhaps a compass to do that. 
• Look at lots of historic paintings. It is very useful to have a mental library of how great painters who came before you dealt with similar scenes. It is useful to know how others  have handled the problems with which they were also faced.
• Keep a couple of different format canvasses in the trunk of your car, "maybe that scene would work on a long rectangle instead of this squarish 16 by 20 I planned to use? maybe I need a vertical canvas?"
• Simplifying is the root of design, maybe the scene before you is too fractured and complex, would it work better if you left out something, or reduced it into a few simpler forms?
• Read Edgar Payne! (Composition of Outdoor Landscape Painting) Learn about design stems, sometimes knowing that will give you a way to impose a design on a scene that doesn't quite work.
• Try to be empathetic. See if you can become attuned to the "feel" of the landscape. This is sensitivity. Cultivate that.
• Read Emerson.
• Make thumbnail sketches. The first thumbnail you do will be the obvious and  often lackluster "take" on the scene. After you have done a few you might hit on something more creative. It is like returning several times and taking a couple of more runs at the project.
• Find a place that has lots of possible pictures. Monet did that with his garden and those radioactive haystacks.There are locations, like grand views that offer up for the painter but a single subject. There are others from which you can pull a hundred different paintings."What if I stood over there?" There was a stream through the snowy woods near where I once lived in Maine, that I painted over and over.When I didn't want to search for a new location or drive too far, I always went there.

You won't  learn this in a single season, you have to make lots of paintings. That would be true of anything you want to learn to do, incidentally. People develop  the ability to do things through repeated effort.

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I have scheduled another Snowcamp, a winter painting workshop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Snowcamp is the most fun I have all year!The workshop  is held at a rambling, late 19th century inn,  The Sunset Hill in Franconia, New Hampshire which is very romantic and old timey.The workshop will be held January 26 through 28.The inn is the perfect place to do a class and the scenery is fabulous. The White mountains are spread before the inn like a movie set. 

 

It might be cold, but the inn is right at our backs as we work, so we can run inside by the fire and drink more coffee if it becomes too much. The views from the inn are so stupendous there is really no reason to leave the grounds, so we don't lose any time to driving to our locations. At lunchtime the inn brings our sandwiches etc, right to us. The inn has helped me do workshops for years now. They even provide us with our own dining room, where we can eat together around a big round table every night.  I do a talk  on art and design while our dinner is prepared by the inn's chef. 

The workshop is very intense! It is as intense as I can figure out how to make it, in fact. We will run very long days from breakfast till evening. I try to cram as much information as I possibly can into three days. That's a short time, I always wish I had three months. I do a demo every morning  and then in the afternoon the students paint and I  run from easel  to easel doing individual instruction. I can save you YEARS of screwing around!

If you are coming from far away, many have, it is easy to fly into Manchester airport. That is a full sized regional airport serviced by several carriers. You can rent a car there and be at the inn in an hour and a half. Boston Logan Airport is another hour to the south, but may save you a connection. 

If you have never painted in, or been to New  England, it is a very special  part of  the country and the White Mountains, where the workshop is held are both beautiful and historic. There is much here that hasn't changed since the 19th century. I am  originally from Minnesota, but I have been in New England  for about 30 years. I love the special feel of  the place and New  Hampshire is a very authentic part of  it. Besides New Hampshire has no sales tax .

If you are interested, please click here.

Premix the color of your light

Sanford Gifford, Kauterskill Clove

Light has color, as a landscape painter you need to identify what that color is (or what color you are going to use) in a painting. Often the light is warm and butter or honey colored ,late on a sunny day. But on a gray day it might be cool or even silvery. There are situations when the landscape is suffused with red light. It is very useful to mix the color that is in your light and have a pile of it on your palette. Most of the colors of objects in the light will be effected by it. You can feed this color into whatever the light is hitting. This is useful for two different reasons. One it saves you having to mix every color in the light from scratch. You can inject a mix of the local or apparent color of the object with your light mixture and get pretty close to its illuminated color. This saves a lot of mixing time on location and clearly communicates what is in the light an what is not. On a sunny day I am going to expect to mix a red and a yellow into a lot of white to make the color of the light. What red and which yellow can be adjusted depending on the look of the day and what you have on your palette.

Above is a painting by Sanford Gifford that is suffused with the color of the light. Her has pretty much used the color of his light to paint everything that takes light from the sky. If it turns towards the sun, it gets the yellow mixture into its' note.

Here is another Sanford Gifford with golden light. One of the things that routinely happens in nature is that the color of the shadow is, or at least contains, the complement of the color of the light. So a golden sunset will call for blue or violet shadows. If you have the color of your lights it is easy to come up with an opposite color to add to your shadows. The complement of the light will form a major part of your shadow note and can be fed into those to establish the shadow color.

When I paint outside I have a pile of paint that is the color of my lights, I use it for underpainting the sky to get light in that, and I use it to more easily and swiftly create the color of things in the light.

I don't really make a shadow color, but I am always aware of what it is. On a sunny day I like to feed cobalt violet into my shadows, so  that functions as a premixed shadow. I also like to throw ultramarine and burnt sienna at my shadows, by varying the mix of the two I can control my color temperature there. Burnt sienna is great for heating up shadows, particularly in their reflected lights. I like to heat up my deepest shadows. the darkest accents work best if they are fiery hot. Often I am installing this because I like the way it looks rather than because I have observed it.

Having a standard color laced into my lights tends to unify a painting. rather than a mosaic of unrelated colors the lights are "coded" through by a constant note. If something out in nature has an interesting color that doesn't conform to this system I am free to disregard my  systematized light. But generally the light does have a color and that influences every surface it hits and determines the shadow color too with its complement.

The Sanford Gifford above was painted using a systematic color for the light. This painting was no doubt done in a studio from a drawing made on location, or a painted sketch. He did not stand out in the field with that canvas matching the colors of a sunset. He invented it and imposed it onto his drawing. Gifford "fixed" a color for his light and used it through out his painting.He got a believable light effect and the painting is suffused with his light color that he has sown into the entire  tableau.

Easel-tweak!

 I had to buy yet another French easel this year. I have owned over 1400 of them now. My first was the best made, it was a Julian and I bought it in about 1975. I painted outdoors on French easels for many years until switching to the Gloucester easel. I used to kill a French easel every season in my Rockport period. The wind did most of them in. The easel would start to "sail" and I would hold it down and then  put a rock in the back of the box. You know, in those tray shaped compartments amidships for brushes and stuff.

If the easel lifted off again I would add a bigger rock, or maybe two. I was working on the coast a lot, and there was plenty of both wind and rocks. Sometimes, however, even though I had lots of rocks in the back of the easel it managed to lift into the air and hover briefly above the ground. Then the when the wind dies a little and  the easel crashes down with its stone driven load on those little skinny Bambi legs, splintering it's femurs. So I have bought a bunch of French easels from different manufacturers with varying quality.


I have bought half box easels, the smaller French easels that are too narrow. But the folding palette baffles me. How do you keep the paint from running through the crack right through the middle of the palette? I need more carry space than that anyway.

I bought the Soltek. I took it on a painting trip to Paris, they were new then and nobody there had ever seen one. It looked like the lunar lander. I set it up on the street in Mont-martre , and all of the Eastern European street artists had to come and examine it. It works pretty well, but I had a leg freeze up because of sand, I believe, entering it's sensitive inner mechanical elements and confounding them.

I tried a Gloucester easel about once and  have used it outside ever since. At least unless I must travel on an airplane (and sometimes even then) or set up in very crowded places. In a crowded city a big Gloucester easel becomes a traffic hazard and dorks always trip over it's legs. Inside, the Gloucester easel is just way too big, and it's feet with their little steel spikes, slide on the floor rather than pierce it's surface. I use mine inside for demonstrations but it is not ideal for an inside easel. So I use French easels too.

 I have seen and examined dozens, probably hundreds of easels belonging to students at my workshops and have seen a lot of easel problems. I have seen easels so badly made they almost cant be made to stand up reliably. And they all shimmied and wiggled when I painted on them. The French easel design has a weakness. An Achilles heel. The metal hinge between the upright standing "easel" part that holds the painting, and the box part where the drawer lives. These two flat pieces of metal are held with screws or sometimes rivets into the sides of the easel carcase where it is thin and delicate. They inevitable strip their screw holes and then the whole upper easel is no longer a stable platform on which to paint. You want an easel to be stable, no flopping around, that is very bad. I dislike pochade (pronounced "pochade" ) boxes because they are not stable. or at least mine never are.

This time I bought the Mabef easel. It got good reviews on  various blogs and forums and I wanted to get the best quality easel I could. You can get a french easel for the price of a good belt at discount shopping warehouses now. But they are not well enough made to withstand the abuse of day in day out use. If you just want to just talk about painting, they would be fine. I like the easel, it is well constructed, and the hardware is precisely made. But the little tweak they have given the traditional design is what I want to show you. Those of you with French easels know that the back leg (that leg which is alone out there and furthest away from you) folds back at a hinge articulating it's middle, like a knee. This collapsed leg then folds up into a slot along the bottom of the easel.On the Mabef easel the rear leg is attached to the side of the box, just like it's two front legs, rather than springing from its undercarriage or loins.

I photo-shopped the picture above to remove the handle so you can see this little assembly. The reason this is good is that it means that all of the legs sporing from the easel at the same level, or distance from the ground. This is important when you want to use the easel sitting down, something I am likely to do when traveling. The other French easels I have owned didn't do this very well. When they kneeled that back leg was a slightly different height than the rest, and it was difficult to get the box to sit level. The Mabef bracket above solves that problem.

So I am recommending the Mabef easel. It is not one of the less expensive easels, actually it is one of the most expensive French easels,  but it seems to be of excellent quality and is thought fully designed.

Plein air palettes.

My discussion of additions to a three color palette prompted several readers to post their palettes. I thought I would post mine as long as we art discussing them. Mine is actually a little on the large side. h
Here it is:

Titanium or lead white 

cadmium lemon yellow
cadmium yellow
yellow ocher

cadmium red light
quinacridone red or permanent alizirin
burnt sienna

ultramarine blue
cobalt blue or Prussian blue
cobalt violet

viridian
 ivory black

I have a warm and a cool of each hue, I have a yellow and a red earthcolor. I have viridian which helps making all those greens and I use the prussian for that too. And I have black, I could probably live without that and often do, and lastly I have cobalt violet my favorite landscape color. I draw with it and use it for lay-ins and it is great to modify greens and make shadows. I use the Gamblin, it seems like it is reasonably priced for its quality. I also carry a premixed color of my own  I call pornstar pink that I use to feed red into my greens and skies.


Zan Barrage submitted asomewhat smaller more straightforward palette ;
the permanent rose is quinacridone, of course.

How about a cool and warm of the three main hues?
Cdm Yellow Light
Cdm Lemon

Perm. Rose
Cdm Red Light

Cobalt Blue
Alt. Blue

+
A couple of earth colours



Jeff contributed Sorollas palette. Gee thats almost the same as mine, less an earth color or two , this is a more chromatic or pure colored palette.

cobalt violet,
rose madder,
all the cadmium reds,
cadmium orange,
all the cadmium yellows,
yellow ochre,
chrome green (since replaced by permanent green light),
viridian,
Prussian blue,
cobalt blue
French ultramarine.
In both cases, he used lead white

I will be back and expound on palettes some more gotta hurry tonight!

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If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains.

Plein air idea 12

Tonight I am going to talk about what you need on your palette and how one might expand a small palette. Many painters today work with three color palettes. It has become very popular over the last ten years or so to work with a small palette comprised of ultramarine, permanent alizirin and cadmium yellow.This palette is an excellent way to learn to make color notes and it gives a unity to your color. Almost every note has a smidge of one or both of the other two colors. But there are some drawbacks too. There are a lot of colors in nature than you cannot hit with this palette, and it is hard to vary your color temperature without a hot and a cool version of each hue. If you wanted to enlarge your palette from the three listed before, how might you do it?

Well, there are a couple of answers to this. It depends on which way you want your paintings to go, bright and "modern" looking , somewhat restrained and historic, or the "full old master". The first palette expansion would push your color to greater brightness...it is basically a Gruppe palette. To our three color palette we make a few exchanges, We lose the ultramarine and add pthalo or Prussian blue. Then you add a couple of cadmiums, maybe three or four if you like, your cadmium section of the palette could contain cadmium yellow lemon, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red light, and cadmium red medium. To the three color palette you have added a string of the entire range of cadmium hues. The pthalo is fed into the various cadmiums to produce a lot of varying notes in nature. The pthalo and the cadmiums together have lots of punch and the light passages can be very colored, the pthalo can also serves as the root for some rich violets. This palette usually gives a more contemporary and clear colored look. You can mix the earth tones off this palette and they have rich variations in them, as their mixtures are varied.

The second suggestion, and where I usually hang out, is the more traditional palette. That would take the original three color palette and add a few earth colors, burnt sienna and yellow ocher. These are grayer and "dirtier" than the cadmiums but they are very useful in getting the colors of nature which tend to be a little grayed out anyway. A second blue, perhaps cobalt, and  viridian green would expand your ability to make nature's colors. The burnt sienna fed into shadows gives a nice complement to the lights and the warm shadows give a more traditional look than the strong violet shadows of a rawer impressionist look.The cobalt and the viridian are nice to have when painting skies. Of course the viridian is a good precursor of many common greens in sunlight.

 The third option that comes to mind is the "full old master". To our three color palette, we add black, yellow ocher and an earth red like Indian red and maybe the viridian. This gives a more serious and restrained color. Seago painted with such a palette. I like to trot out this palette for moody things and gray days. It enlivens a grouping of paintings or a show to have a few pictures painted with a graver palette. This palette too installs a color unity almost automatically. You will find your paintings are more formal and many pleasing color schemes can be had that use grays, russets, dull ochers etc. You can make paintings the color of 500 dollar suits. A great many people like to select paintings in this kind of color for their homes. And Wyeth painted in tones that this palette produces well. Like the limited palette, though, there are a lot of colors that you cannot hit with this palette. That is good in that your painting will have color unity, but bad if you want to get the true observed color of things.
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 If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains.

Plein air ideas 11

Tonight I will talk a little about color and landscape painting. I meet a lot of students and tyros who want to learn to work in color rather than in drawing. They believe they can "specialize" in color and avoid learning drawing, as it interests them less. But color needs a scaffold beneath it .Well, in landscape painting or figurative art anyway. There were color field abstract painters who did no drawing and of course, Pollack, but in traditional figurative painting that seems to be the deal, because:

COLOR IS A DECORATION YOU HANG ON YOUR DRAWING!

Here are some bullet points regarding color in the landscape:

• Favor value over color. Value is a part of drawing. If you get the value right you can "inject" the color into that.
• It is better to overstate your colors and then temper them with their opposites than to try to push color into an under-colored passage. The first gives a more complex color. The color that you toned down is still there percolating through the note (I know someone is going to ask me about that, I have written on complex and inominate colors before in this near 1000-entry blog. It is searchable.)
• Color can express turning form through space. The volumes and planes of an object can be expressed using varied color.
• All color is no color! In order for a color to really look strong or its brightest, it is necessary to contrast it against a desaturated or grave color. A painting without any grayed or subordinated color is not going to be more colorful than one that has those grave notes.The graver notes "activate" the highly colored ones.
• Try not to make a mosaic of unrelated color...the colors in a painting are related to one another like the notes in a song. There are harmonies, chords etc. There are also discordant arrangements that make the viewer's teeth hurt.
• Control the temperature of your colors. If you paint your lights warm, your shadows will probably be cool. If you paint your lights cool, your shadows will probably be warm. The juxtaposition of hot and cool notes gives exciting vivacity! 
• Out there in the working week, on location nature is generally in grayed or toned down notes, with occasional flashes of clear bright color. Unless your painting is at least a little bit grave, your flash of clear bright color will not "tell" against it.
• Envelope is the color imparted to an entire scene by the lighting. It is a note that is sown throughout the entire painting. Tonalism is an exaggerated form of envelope. Envelope can be the glue that holds a picture's color together and thereby avoids the dreaded "mosaic" of unrelated color.
• Three color palettes are fun, and a great way to learn color mixing. On the other hand, you don't get good control over your color temperature. There are a lot of notes before you that you must approximate rather than "hit" using a severely limited palette. Ultramarine, permanent alizirin and cadmium yellow light make a basic three color palette.
• I find yellow ocher and burnt sienna to be essential when painting outside. An awful lot of the notes I see (or want) are made from or tainted with the dirtier earth colors.
• Beautiful color is beautifully arranged and stated color. That is not the same thing as the greatest possible amount of chroma, anymore than the greatest volume is a factor in the quality of music. A lot of things about painting are more complex than you would expect going into it.

If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains.

Plein air idea 10

I got a comment the other day asking me to better explain what I meant by the word "footlights". I used it in passing to describe the foreground of a painting. One of the great temptations when painting outside is to show everything from your toenails to the zenith. But it often causes a problem for the viewer. Below is a quote from a post in the archives. You can read the entire thing  Here

"If we only had our eyes set one above the other in our heads, we could see the picture at a glance. But since our eyes are paired side by side we must "lift" our eyes to travel from the foreground to the middle and background assembly area. This unpleasant 'lifting" of our eyes bothers our attention spans, and in that brief unconnected synaptic instant in which we are transferring our vision upward to the middle ground and beyond, our whole concentration is lost!"

We generally focus our vision in a narrower band than that, across the center of a view. If the painting makes the viewer feel like they have to move their head to view it you will probably lose them. It is better to begin your paintings foreground  further away from your feet. Just as in the theater the play doesn't begin in the row ahead of you, it happens fifteen rows away from you and it begins with the footlights at the edge of the stage. It is almost always more effective to place those footlights a good stones throw into the view before you.

There is another advantage to doing this too. Al of that close up detail is much more difficult to handle, the really close stuff in a painting can be assertive with its bristling curlicues and pork rind excrescences. The whole bottom third of your painting might get filled with writhing baroque detail overwhelming the viewer on his way through to reach the middle ground where the action takes place.

LOTS OF PAINTERS HAVE REDUCED THEIR FOREGROUNDS TO BROAD OPEN AREAS WITH A MINIMUM OF DETAIL.THE VIEWER EASILY TRAVELS THROUGH THE SIMPLIFIED VESTIBULE OF THE PAINTING ON HIS WAY TO THE INTERIOR.
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If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire would you please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains.

Plein air ideas 9

I have taught plein air painting off and on for twenty five years , maybe more. I forget. Over the years, and particularly recently, I have noticed I am teaching the same things over and over. There are a handful of faults that I see every time I teach. Let me load some bullets into my clip and here they are;

• The painting is in all middle values with the contrasts so suppressed that the painting has no punch.
• The values of the lights are confused with the values of the shadows. The lights are not consistently brighter than the shadows.
• No attention paid to color temperature. The picture is executed with no regard for which notes are hot and which are cool. This is particularly true with painters using three color palettes, which don't lend themselves to the expression of color temperature.
• Drawing is haphazard or done without much care or delicacy.Often this happens to painters who value velocity or brushwork over drawing. Usually painters with studio backgrounds, or better still, atelier training seem to have a better grasp of drawing the landscape.This is a failure to look very closely at the landscape.
• Designs that are overly symmetrical or too"stock" usually that means big tree on the left balanced by a field on the right. 
• An uncomfortable closeness to the nearest objects in the painting. The footlights are set in to close. They are painting everything from their toenails to the zenith.
• A line which seizes the viewer in the foreground and directs them into a collision with the side of the frame rather than into and through the picture
• An underpainting in a hideous and assertive color that poisons every note laid on top of it. This is usually explained as something a previous teacher ( who was REALLY good!) had insisted was the only way to do things.
• every color in the painting is as bright and saturated as it can possibly be painted. A lullaby played on kettledrums and air raid sirens.
• A cursory "that's good enough" effort without a real intent to create something special. The painting is banged out in a short period of time and without much reference to nature or an attempt to design or bring anything personal or original to the presentation.Usually this is cured by developing an awe for the wonderful work of some deceased artist who becomes a yardstick against whom the fledgling tyro can compare themselves.

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I am going to be teaching a workshop this july in New Hampshire. Check it out here.

Plein air, idea 8

Levitan

You should establish your key early in the lay-in. "Keying" a painting means deciding where on the value scale your lights and darks will fall. A painting might run from an inky dark to a brilliant light, or the whole painting might be high key, that is, few or no darks. The whole painting takes place at the top of the value scale. A low key painting contains only lower (darker) values and few light ones. How a painting is keyed is your choice. You can choose to match the notes of nature in front of your easel or you can transpose  up or down to a higher or lower key.  Often a painter keys a landscape by spotting a few of the darkest darks and the lightest lights. Where the horizon meets the sky is a big contrast and if recorded early will set up the key for a painting.Your key might include only the top end of the value scale, the middle or the bottom or the entire range of values.

The painting above is in a low key. The darks are strong and rich and the values of the water and sky are only high in comparison to those darks. If you isolated a spot from the water or sky on a white field they would be surprisingly dark.

John Singer Sargent

  Above is a painting in a very high key. Almost every note is mixed with white and there are few darks, only enough to set off the bright notes. Often the key is strongly suggested by nature as it must have been for the Sargent above. But the artist can choose to key the picture his own way if he wants to.

A high key gives a look of brilliant light and an ethereal shimmering feminine quality. A low key gives a look of power and drama and a masculine quality. In a high key painting the color notes lose a lot of their chroma because they are so mixed with white. High key paintings are probably more saleable. The old masters generally painted in a low key .

 In a low key painting the notes are full of rich color as there is more colored pigment in each note than white. Just as transposing a tune down an octave on the piano gives it more richness and color, transposing  a passage in color down an octave gives a richer deeper color.

If you paint on a dark ground you will often inadvertently end up with a lower key. Painting in a high key is a lot easier on a white canvas. When high key color is weak it is chalky. When low key color is weak it is murky and "too dark".

Of course a painting can also run the gamut, that is, it can be keyed not to a section of the value scale, but to the entire value scale and have all of the values from ink to pure white on the canvas. That is probably the most common key in practice. You get a lot of those on sunny days. It is nice to know how to raise the key of a painting a little when you are out on a gray or dark day. Keying up a rainy day or gray day picture can save it from being lugubrious.

Plein air idea 7

Tonight's idea is this. Drawing in the landscape is often about sorting. We sort the spots and shapes in front of us into two piles,  THE LIGHTS AND THE DARKS.  Every time we make a mark on the canvas that represents something in front of us, we sort it into one pile or the other. Just like sorting the laundry. This thing is dark, this one is light. Everything goes into one of those two piles, the lights or the darks.

THERE IS NO OTHER PILE. EVERYTHING EITHER GOES IN THE LIGHT PILE, OR IT GOES IN THE DARK PILE. THERE IS NO "MAYBE" PILE.


 Every time your brush touches the canvas you must know absolutely what pile the note goes in.



A painting is best when either the lights or the darks are dominant. That is, the painting has discernibly more area that is dark than is light, or it has more light area than dark. An equal balance of the two is static looking.  A relatively small number of large shapes makes the best painting because a simple design carries better than a fragment complex one. 


To reduce the number of separate shapes, it is good to link your darks together when you can. A simple arrangement of a few darks and a few lights in an artistically unequal arrangement is the best start for a successful painting. If you don't have a strong simple arrangement, it is best to wipe out your start and try again. Without the foundation of a sound and attractive design, you can add detail and finish all you want and your painting will never be first rate. A strong design and a simple effective pattern of lights and darks should be the goal of your lay-in.


Once you have established that pattern of lights and darks, hold to it. As the light changes, our pattern remains pretty much the same. Don't follow the light, not unless it does something really interesting later in the day, but then only that change and then leave it alone.The forbearance and discipline to leave your original statement rather than changing it all day long takes practice. But if you don't learn this, your painting will crawl across your canvas as the light changes and you will be chasing a  will-o-the- wisp that you can never catch...until suddenly the sun drops behind the trees and you are startled, confused and defeated.

Plein air, idea 4

Idea number 4 is controlling your pixel size. You can grab that big brush and make your picture out of larger pixels!  I could call them  brushmarks or sense units, they are bricks you are using to construct your lay in. If you are laying in your canvas with a large brush it is possible to make only large generalized marks representing nature. If those marks are all .......say,  the same size as a walnut, you would be working in walnut sized chunks.

If  you were working like Willard Metcalf, that is in small rice-like strokes, you would have thousands of strokes on your over-the-sofa sized oil. If  you are making a brushstroke the size of a walnut, that number might drop to a couple hundred or so. That sounds like a lot of pixels still, but it is a manageable amount of decisions over a fairly short period of time. Little tiny marks make for a slower lay in. It slows you way down when you have to corral  ten thousand little marks instead of a few hundred.

This is plein air, the clock is running, and it is nice to make a painting in one shot if you can. When I lay in a canvas I try to make no marks smaller than a walnut. I make bigger marks than that, maybe, but not smaller. I would do this over a simple line drawing in very thin, transparent paint, roughing out the largest elements of the picture and having a rhythmic flow. I, personally, do not want to be arrhythmic. Once I looked at whole show of my paintings and realized "Oh NO! they are arrhythmic!" I  have since tried to make sure my paintings had some rhythm or flow to them.. I see a lot of arrhythmic pictures out there. Looks "square".

Imagine these pixels or marks, as tiles, ordinary tile like you put on a wall. You mix those tiles up on your palette, out of paint, and then lay them onto that over-the-sofa sized oil. It would also be handy to mix up a pile or two of colors which recur frequently in that rank of two hundred walnut sized pixels.

If I lay tile onto my canvas in big pieces, often I am doing this in transparent or monotone. I like to keep lay ins thin, I often have to push a painting around a bit at first to get it to work. As I said last night, white is a problem if you plan on making any errors.

I should add that if you are painting five by sevens, this doesn't really apply to you. I guess I am speaking of working much larger, as I do as a matter of course.You can use a larger brush and apply the same technology, but my experience has been that that this works better on a larger canvas.

The beauty of this "big chunk" lay in is that it keeps your picture "big". You are painting "broadly". It is hard to get hung up in any detail when you are using a number 10 flat and making chunks the size of calling cards. Can you cover an over-the-sofa sized oil with only a hundred strokes? You could work in hamburger sized chunks! You might cover the whole canvas with forty of them. Forty good decisions and there is your painting, on the canvas, wanting only for refinement, with a smaller brush here and there.

When you have completed this big stroke version of the painting you can always drop detail onto the big lay in you have made. Or you could select some characteristic details and distribute them as accents on your painting. Usually it is good to subordinate the details to the larger shapes upon which they ride. I guess that's another post though.

Plein air, idea 3

No picture again tonight. I am on a primitive borrowed computer and it won't agree to do that. Tonight's idea is to make haste, slowly.  One way to do that is to keep the paint transparent until you are as far into the painting as possible. That is.....stay out of your white.As long as you are working transparently you can shove your "start" around all you want. The instant you add white to the painting it is locked down. It is far harder to make an alteration. Building up too much paint early in the process makes things harder. It is easier to manipulate thinner paint layers.

When we are laying in a picture on a white canvas we are generally delineating the darks and leaving the white of the canvas behind for the lights in the earliest stages of the drawing. Mostly you start out by placing your shadows, they are what is usually darkest before you in nature. Keeping these shadows transparent often looks better than having them opaque. Your may load  lights with white, but it is usually good to keep your shadows thinly painted if you can.

Another way to more gradually "find" your painting on the canvas is to keep your picture "soft" in that transparent color. . Until you really know what is happening all over the canvas it is best to keep the painting fuzzy, like an underexposed  photo.  Opaque paint is far more likely to give you hard edges  Also, if you go too hard on your edges before you are really sure of your drawing, you will respect those lines out of relationship to their real accuracy. If you keep things fuzzy for a while you will be more likely to willingly correct a shape that is off. Both this and the transparent paint suggestion are alike. They are ways of withholding too much commitment earlier in the painting process. It is best to add commitment later rather than too soon. This will help you avoid careful finishing one part of a painting  and then discovering that passage is in the wrong place ever so slightly. If the passage is just ghosted in you will happily move it. If you have worked it up already you will be tempted to leave it wrong.

EVERYTHING IN A PAINTING NEEDS TO BE RIGHT.  ONE UNCOMFORTABLE PASSAGE RUINS THE WHOLE PAINTING. A PAINTING IS ONLY AS STRONG AS ITS WEAKEST LINK. IF A SINGLE PASSAGE IRRITATES THE VIEWER, HE WILL REJECT THE ENTIRE PAINTING.



An orderly and careful approach to a layin will save time correcting problems later. It is easier to not make the mistakes in the first place tan to correct two or three interlocking mistakes in a half finished painting later.

Plein air idea 2

Sorry, I an writing this with a connection that  is too weak  to put up a picture. Imagine if you would, a picture here. The picture is of half a dozen or so tiny sketches done with a thick pencil line  using a chiseled   edged carpenters pencil with a soft lead. Each of these drawings is about the size of a playing card and are all drawn on a ringbound sketchbook of good quality paper.

Thumbnail drawings are the highest form of previsualization. They are little practice paintings of the subject before the artist in the field. Each of the thumbnails has a different "take" on the subject. It either stresses one element of the scene over the others, or it is a simplification of the masses  presented in a large attractive design.
Often the last two are more resolved versions of one of the previous entry's that seemed promising.

There are several advantages to doing this.

• you will have a better large design because things done small often look good "blown up" in scale. They often look simpler, which is almost always good..
• You will have examined different "takes" on the arrangement.One thumbnail might emphasize one part  of the landscape,a different thumbnail, a different aspect. Looking across a farm scene, one thumbnail might make the painting about the barn and the copse of trees around it, and the other might subordinate the farm buildings to the larger valley scene in which they are set.
• You will hopefully have encountered the hidden gremlins waiting to be a problem in the painting later on. Instead of being ambushed you may have said "this is a great view, but it has a big problem! What am I going to do about that? "
• Here is the big one though. It is often easy to show up on a location and paint the  "regular" arrangement of the subject, or perhaps just that inflicted on you by an awkward or overly symmetrical  static set of shapes before you in nature. Your first thumbnail was probably that arrangement, the one that would show what was present before the artist. One of the later thumbnails  progressed from that to a more creative arrangement or simply AN ARRANGEMENT .It's not the first picture you would have shown up and made. It is more like what you would have made the third or fourth time you painted the location.

I look at doing thumbnails as a chore, I do them sometimes. I went through a long period where I did them for every painting, I don't do them often now. I probably would be better off if I did, lots of really great landscape painters did thumbnails, but I can also show you a lot of fine painters who didn't. I have made a whole lot of paintings. I would recommend that you thumbnail things for a year or two and decide whether it is something you want to do. You will learn a whole lot about arranging your paintings by doing this.

What is plein air?

An antique tool for pleining air

I will be participating in Paint The Town, an event in Cranford, New Jersey, the 5th through the 10th of June. The organizers asked me if I would write a short description of plein air painting for them.

Plein air painting is landscape painting done on location, that is, outside. People today are accustomed to seeing painters with their easels out painting, but in the long history of art it  is a relatively new phenomenon. Until the mid 1600's, landscape was merely a background for figures. As landscape gradually became more popular, painters made reference sketches out doors, usually in pencil or chalk, but a few actually took their palettes outside and made colored sketches. These works were studies, or rehearsals for paintings that were later made in the artist's studios. They were never intended to be finished works of art and were rarely exhibited. But the artists enjoyed showing them to each other and would sometimes exchange them as gifts.

In the nineteenth century, as landscape subjects grew ever more popular, artists relied more and more on carefully observed studies done on location. In the eighteen seventies a group of French painters led by Claude Monet began to make  paintings outdoors that were the finished work themselves. The  recent availability of paint in tubes rather than ground in the artist's own studios provided a new portability to the artist's equipment. Colors unavailable before could actually match the appearance of nature in sunlight. This group's name, the "impressionists" was first  used as an insult, and was taken from the title of a Monet painting "impression, sunrise". The impressionists' discoveries produced radical bright colors and purple shadows and revolutionized landscape painting. The old brown gravy that served as the air in paintings a generation before disappeared, replaced by a  sparkling and colorful freshness. The new painting was valued for its spontaneity and visible brushstrokes, the handwriting of inspiration.

Impressionism swept the art world and an international movement  began. Artists spent summers painting together in art colonies scattered throughout the world. As modernism became the dominant art philosophy after World War I, more and more painters returned to the studio and plein air painting gradually became a rarity. In recent years, however, there has been an explosive revival and  thousands of easels are set up before nature every day, plein air painting is again an important part of our culture.

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 Monet's impression sunrise



 Because of the popularity of paint outs and plein air competitions, organizations have set rules for what is and what isn't plein air painting. These rules specify how much of a painting must be done strictly outside, whether the work must be done in a single session, or sometimes, in a fixed amount of time. Because of the nature of these events, they had little choice, as the occasional artist would try to cheat the system by bringing paintings made at home from photographs to exhibit as plein air paintings.Within the context of organizations devoted to plein air and particularly in competitions intended to be "fair" those rules were necessary and appropriate.


When I am in an event that is billed as "plein air" I accept the rules of the event's sponsors because that is the condition of participation. I don't, in fact, usually refer to myself as a plein air painter, but as a landscape painter. I think that outside of those venues though, a painter should do whatever it takes to get the best possible image on the canvas, be that repeated sessions before the motif, or additional work in the studio after the fact (something I do a lot myself).

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I am planning a couple of summer workshops here in New Hampshire at the Inn on Sunset Hill. I will announce course descriptions and their dates and as soon as I get the details worked out.

Henry Hensche speaks

Henry Hensche (1901-1992) a demonstration portrait done outside in direct sunlight

I get a lot of interesting stuff sent to me because of the blog. This is one of the most interesting. A former student of Henry Henshe sent me a transcript of a video made showing Hensche teaching. Henry Hensche was a revered Provincetown, Massachusetts teacher who was himself a student of the legendary Charles Hawthorne. Hawthornes book is a classic and is one of the texts that impressionist painters read.

Hawthorne died relatively young and Hensche took over "the Cape School" and ran it every summer for many years. Over that time hundreds (if not thousands) of students passed through his hands. Hensches influence was enormous. He was one of those few men who had a proven reputation for producing painters.

I never studied with Hensche but I knew many people who did. I spent part of a summer in Provincetown studying with Robert Douglas Hunter, who had been a student of both R.H.Ives Gammell and Henry Hensche,. That would have been about 1975, I think. Hunters studio-home in the summer was in an old barn in Provincetown that he had been lent by Gammell. It had been Gammells summer digs for many years, but Ives had recently built a summer compound in the Berkshires near Williamstown, Massachusetts. Half of the ancient and enormous barn was Hunters and the other half was Hensches school. He held classes in a sunny patio behind the barn so I was able to observe his students at work.

Hensche taught a doctrine of color and required his students to work with a palette knife. They carefully mixed the colors of blocks and simple objects in dazzling sunlight being sure to represent each of their planes with a different hue. I wasn't interested much in this method at the time as I was totally enamored with Dutch 17th century painting.

I was invited to witness Hensche do a demo painting one afternoon in the yard of his home. I watched him paint a head like the one at the top of the page. It was an amazing performance. I tried to "be there" and remember as much as I could.

I also saw a show of charcoal portraits by Hensche at the Guild of Boston Artists, in the mid 70's,
his drawings were superb, the structure of the heads was so solid. I never particularly liked the color thing Hensche was into, but his drawing was solid and that is what impressed me, because I had received a Boston school training that focused more on direct visual draftsmanship rather than the expression of planar form. I wish now I had studied with Hensche for a summer to learn more about the expression of form through planar construction. I have worked for years to get as much of that as I could into my work, remember;

FORM CANNOT BE "SEEN" INTO AN OBJECT OR COPIED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH, IT IS A CONSTRUCT CREATED BY THE ARTIST TO GIVE UNDERSTANDING OF SOLIDITY AND STRUCTURE.

The following is from Phillip St. John who has allowed me to share it with you. At the bottom of the page is his information so you can get a copy of the video if you want to learn more about Hensches methods. I must add a disclaimer here, I am not a devotee of Henrys approach and do not necessarily agree with all that follows, but Henry was an enormous influence on a whole school of painters today and anyone who wants to paint outside in sunlight would be well advised to listen when Henry speaks. A lot can be learned from listening to the "Old Ones"
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Script for portions of Hensche video

This is a copy of the words of Henry Hensche in the film “A Look At The Way We See and Paint.” If you’d like to know more about the dvd of the film, click here.It isn’t a book with a logical flow, but a compilation of random thoughts and teachings Henry promoted, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve added some parenthetical inserts for clarity.

You may have difficulty hearing Henry’s voice on the video. This video isn’t a professional production, more like a labor of love.. This script was originally produced back in the day when VHS players had counters on them. I’m including the counter markers, partly for whimsy, partly because many may still have the players.The video/dvd was originally on 16mm film, then transferred to VHS, then to dvd, now it is going to be offered over the web, at a reduced cost, as soon as I can figure out how to do it. I still encourage you to turn it up. I’m in the process of re-editing the show which is easier due to modern technology.

I have also copied Henry’s voice, word for word, so that you could get a feeling for the way he spoke. It isn’t the prettiest reading, but it does carry the flavor of his speech better than cleaning up the syntax would, in my opinion. I’m putting his words in color and possibly make comments on what he said.

0007 “We are seeking today the reasons for why we are living and what the purposes of life are.”

[From here to 0201 is better audio, myself as narrator.]

0201 “Well, if you are interested in the art of painting, it’s not very difficult to comprehend, it is the art of seeing. And the way you see things is the way the painter creates the illusion of reality. What a painter does is simply make it his business to see more accurately and (0211) more precisely than the layman.”

“Then you are dealing with the human being, wherever there is human affection, there portraiture will last. Because everyone that lives wants images of those they love. That’s why portraiture is done, and for that reason you can buy pictures, you can buy paintings. You want (0220) them around because a painter has taught himself to see more beautifully or truly, which is the same thing, and through the painter, through the painting, people begin to see nature.”

“Seeing is a process of having an image come on the retina. Then the mind analyses what comes out of the retina. It is the mind’s analysis, and the quality of that analysis (0233) that makes the difference between a good painting and a bad painting, or an erratic one. Now the art of translating that, that is, what you see visually, you have to learn. And that’s what they call the physical aspect of it, but the real thing, the learning about seeing and understanding what you’re looking at, and that is the analytical process.”

0246 “Hawthorne (Charles W, was Henry’s beloved teacher) was the greatest painting teacher in the world. He made a technique of teaching, first himself, and then through the method, teaching others to do what the Impressionist movement had done, that is, Money, especially. What had Monet done? Well, he revolutionized the art of seeing. (0279) When Monet came along with the new colors that were added by modern chemistry, around 1860 and 70, then so-called Impressionism was born. Monet now had the pigments to express many more color combinations and especially the bright ones. And he simply applied the use of these colors to expressing (0289) the greater variety of color effects that everybody had seen but nobody had been able to create the illusion of. And this is the core of why Impressionism has come into existence. Monet couldn’t have happened until the time when modern chemistry added the new pigments. The ancients couldn’t of, if the had wanted to.”

0300 “New students should keep studying the units until they are so accurate that they tell the onlooker, the layman, or anyone who looks at it, at the study, what the light effect is. In other words, we’re trying to get a morning sunlight effect here. And that’s done by the units of the color being reasonably accurate. Once you understand this, you’ll realize that units are the more important thing. It’s the (0314) beginning and the end of things. As Hawthorne said, “in the beginning as a student, you make the units crudely because you don’t know anything else. Then you get more knowing, you spend (0319) a lifetime elaborating the variations and drawing and concepts of ideas, and composition ideas”. But in the end, when it’s all said and done, lie he, Hawthorne said “you don’t look at a picture unless, from a distance, it stops you through its main masses.” So....if you lose the central theme of an idea, and lose yourself in the details and lose the sight of the ….......of the big concept, whatever it may be, in painting it is the big color note.”

0334 “The finer painter simply raises his or her visual perceptual sense to a very much higher order that the ordinary one. So this gives you a clue too, to the function of a painter in society. His main function is first of all, to teach people how to see the visual beauty or truth of the visual world, that’s his basic function. And it’s done through colors, through color combinations of different (0346) intensities and depths in a certain color scheme that creates the illusions of reality. When it’s on a high level, and above their experience, then man uses these descriptive words like beauty, aesthetic, quality, and so forth. There is no great painting, no fine painting, that hasn’t got a great color quality.”

“Here is the idea that Hawthorne taught, see, that the sum total of the masses, should, in color, should express the light key in which the things are seen. (0361) He solved the problem of how to develop color sensations from crude sensations to one of great refinement. Hawthorne respected anyone that wanted to study the truth and the beauty of life and things. And he thought it was the most wonderful thing to pursue, to add to the sum total of beauty for the world. So, what you do, you start at the beginning of your life with the crude masses, and make endless studies until those masses express the fundamental truth. (0378) He not only made you feel that you were just as important as anybody else, but you hd to earn it, you had to study. And he was also very kind about the understanding of things. He didn’t judge you by your immediate studies, he judged you by the rate of (0386) growth you made. You learned something about, as Hawthorne said, the glory of the visual world (woman interrupts: “You will learn something!”) Yes, The reason for that is, the theory, the teaching principle is right. So, in other words, he was a true American. If you believe this is not the age for the few rich, for the few endowed with money, this is the royalist and feudalistic concept, that only a few are chosen to be the great painters of the world.”

0398 “He felt that everybody should be endowed with possibilities of growth and each one that want to pay the price should have the right to that development to the fullest of their being, and everybody could and can. He drew through class lines, he didn’t think it was just for the few, it was for the many, for everyone who wanted it. And who is there to restrict anybody in saying that they don’t want what is beautiful and good? Who doesn’t want a good picture? Who doesn’t want to understand the use of it? Who doesn’t want to practice some art form? It’s (0412) the development of their senses that makes the difference between animals and human beings. This is another quality the man (Hawthorne) had and he felt it, and believe me, they loved him for it, so see, because he opened up vistas.”

“Hawthorne, my teacher, put that up in a teaching form, what Monet did in practice, so that everybody could learn to grow, to appreciate the quantity and quality of color sensations.”

Then he, the artist, had a function. (0426) You see, he gives the people looking at it a visual experience that they wouldn’t get without the help of the painter. And then through looking at the painting they’ll transfer that experience into visual observation. And then they’ll learn to see nature more attractively and more truly and that gives you everyday life greater pleasure which you wouldn’t have because you hadn’t developed that faculty without exercising it through observation of good paintings.”

0445 “The art’s deal with the eternal things, with the universal things that man never gets beyond. Each generation should grow in appreciation of what the Greeks contributed to the world. We start from abysmal ignorance as children to the enlightenment of the greatest thinkers of the age. So it is a greater truth. So in a real sense, it is very odd, most painting has been practiced for centuries on the earth. It wasn’t until the last hundred years that (0458) the dominant descriptive power reached its fullest understanding, and also in practice. Now we have a very rich language, in color.”

“Impressionists used it to express visual phenomena, in the landscape painting, were the ones that really did it. And now it has effected not only indoor painting and landscape, but all painting; indoors, the figure, as well as out.”

0470 “What is the purpose of art in society? When you have an answer to that, and that’s a philosophical one, then you know what techniques to teach. But they’ve turned it around, they’ve turning techniques, like a written language and they’ve got nothing to say with them, and this is the dilemma that they are in.”

0478 “And the first thing that realistic painting should tell the story of, is the light scheme in which these things are seen. which all objects are seen, which holds true indoors as well as outdoors.”

“That is modern art, that is modern expression, this which deals with reality, you see? When the sun is out, the indoor color is entirely different than on a gray day, when the sun is in. It’s the dominating thing in visual observation. The third thing man did was start with a line and then fill it in with a color. Now we start with a color, then make the shape. And the edge is the last thing we worry about.”

“Painting is simply arresting some effect of nature, holding it before man so there it is for eternity, as long as the (0449) painting lasts, I mean, to share the delight of the visual experience the painter had.”

“Let’s call it philosophy, but a belief that the goodness of man, his love for each other, his love for the earth that he lives upon, from which we come, to which we go. As Hawthorne said, “Let’s add something to the sum total of beauty to the world.” I’m not going to add to the bankruptcy of things. I believe (0551) in America being full of wonderful people with great goals, but they don’t have a voice in things. Real America isn’t heard. These boys and girls that are here (at the Cape School), they are the cream, they are what I consider....the better. They’re the cream on which, if they, if my little effort, my puny effort, if I can’t instill in the the love of what I believe so much, if I can’t instill in them the willingness to fight for it, that is in (0524) producing beautiful work, and having the fortitude to stand up against all the idiocies, then I’ve failed. But so have they. I’d like to believe that, this is the horizon, these are the horizons that American youth is looking for the leadership of great ideas. What are they? Who are they? Who are these? I challenge anybody to a debate on these matters.”

0535 “Painting should deal with the universal things that everybody can understand. The thing that distinguishes a civilized man from a savage or an animal is exactly what which the arts deal with. And the arts deal with human souls communication with each other and understanding what the past believed in and actually the arts deal with the very essence of human faith and love.”

0546 “Through the painter’s eye he gets educate, through the painting, which he has done, that’s the way it works. That’s the function of a painter. To teach people to see that truth, and then you arrest it. A painting is nothing but a still picture of some phenomena of nature (0556) that thrilled, something that they got a kick about, that’s what a painting is. Someone has such enthusiasm about a view they saw, that they felt it so deeply, that they wanted to register it, first of all for themselves and because the had the great enthusiasm, it becomes a landmark of human visual experience, if it’s on a higher order of perception.”

0565 “That sort of thing that children have, they really get excited about something, about what they are doing, and this same thing should be developed in grown people. When that’s not there anymore, that excitement, or growth of discovery, then we’ve become set in our ways. We develop formulas in which there is no life in them.”

0576 “Most education today squelches that creative desire, creative art, if you want to put it that way. Creation is a matter of being fresh in your vision, and not the manner of putting down things that follows see? The desire of loving the truth more and getting excitement in painting the visual beauty of the world.”

0585 “When the arts don’t serve the purpose of making people, man, a part of the rhythm of the visual world, if a painting doesn’t play its proper purpose, when human beings don’t love, what we call by love means understand reality, the visual world the good Lord gave us, as the Christians say, the paradise, which is a Persian word for garden. If you don’t love this garden, how the hell do you expect (0595) to go into paradise after we’re dead? God is not going to give any Christian a chance of the entrance into a paradise if he doesn’t appreciate the one he has got right under his nose. The painter is the vehicle, and the priest through which he learns to see. He’s the teacher of mankind to see this wonder. Maybe for some people this doesn’t mean anything (0607) but the best way to find that out is to blind yourself, and you find often in newspaper clippings, when people have suddenly gotten sight back, how wonderful it is whatever they look upon, there’s nothing unimportant. Hawthorne put it so beautiful, “Everything under light is beautiful.” Cause it’s true, the charm, the enchantment of human vision, this is what poetry deals with, through color and shape and then, line. (0617) [Applause]

0621 “It (art) deals with eternal things of human relationships. From now until doomsday, as long a man lives on the earth. God help us if he doesn’t love the beauty of a spring day, and enjoys being in it.”

0627 “The thing that makes visual art entrancing is the constant change from one light scheme to another, sometimes it’s very dramatic. When it’s dramatic you can see it; you can see the importance of it, furthermore. If you wake up early in the morning and could sit in the same window and watch it and (0634) remember every change and have a camera click it at every so many intervals and then look at them after you’ve got the print of it , you’d be surprised at not having changed the pattern, how the color scheme would be entirely different. Well, that’s the core of visual art, and that’s the core with what painters should deal with primarily and first (0643) of all.”

0655 “The enchanting visual aspect of nature, in a foggy morning, if you’ve ever been here in New England in the fall, you see the veil of fog laying in the valleys, you hardly see a tree (0661) you hardly see a thing, but it’s enchanting. Even the Chinese noticed that. In their art centuries ago when a mountain suddenly appears out of some clouds. When you see it here, if you’re too dumb to see it, and if you don’t think that’s of any value, God help you. If he doesn’t love the richness of the summer with its fruit and the peace of the fall after the (0671) vegetables and things are stored and you have a celebration, and glorify this event. And one of the loveliest things of that kind was when a draftsman by the name of Stephen Crane in England, and he made a frieze celebrating the fall, when girls, women, and men, in the frieze dancing, you know, like people, peasants do, there’s a health of people in the field. I know we did in Illinois (0684) when we got the corn in and the wheat all in the barns, they threw a party and we had a lot of fun. We had some beer and we drank, women cooked wonderful meals. We sat around and boasted and kidded each other and had really fun together. And then this was celebrated by Stephen Crane in a kind of a frieze. That’s (0694) the kind of thing to celebrate. Those are the eternal things. We all shared it together.”

“In order to do this you have to get busy and study, now to see. And do it on a much higher level. Otherwise, it is foolish, and you are foolish if you think you should (0701) get response from people. But that depends on what level your goal is. The great people, the people that are really interested in living, what they try to do is to grow and to keep growing throughout, to the end of their lives.”

0710 “Painting, the study of nature’s visual phenomena, has kept me sane I think. Given me a lot of delight, selfish delight in a way, but it’s a delight that other people share and want.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and felt a little of the inspiration that Henry exuded. It’s available as a dvd, here’s a link to read more about it, along with ordering instructions.

Phillip St. John 606 436-8785 email

Below is a link to a website devoted to Henry and his teaching.

http://henryhenschefoundation.org/