John Carlson, Cheerleaders and Downloaders

Above is a new painting, another one of the starts from the Charleston trip ready to go to the Ella Walton Richardson Gallery there. This was painted with several earth colors and Prussian blue. No cadmiums, ultramarine, cobalt, alizirin or viridian. The last painting I posted was so dreadful I am hoping this will help me redeem myself somewhat.

This is the landscape painters bible, and has been reprinted over and over. The edition currently available is from Dover and can be had from Amazon.com for an extremely reasonable price. If you are painting landscapes and you don't have this book, you need it. If I could only recommend one book on learning to paint landscapes this would be it. I put alink to it at the bottom of the page.

John Carlson 1875-1947 was a legendary painting teacher associated with the Woodstock School of Art in Woodstock, New York.

I have this theory;

NO ONE CAN TEACH YOU TO DO ANYTHING IN PAINTING, THAT THEY CAN'T DO THEMSELVES.

John Carlsons' book is so good because he was an excellent painter. Sometimes I look through the art sections of the local mega-bookstore and I see many yards of shelves that are laden with "how to" art books. When I pick them up I am usually disappointed because they are written by light weight painters, and often they are aimed at people who are only interested in the most general information and a soothing manner.These books never really confront their readers with the vast amount of arcane information it takes to paint even passably well . ( I am however willing to do just that, please stick around and I will, gleefully .)

Carlsons book touches at least briefly, on nearly every important concept in landscape painting. This is a book that must be studied, line by line sometimes. I have read it many times and every time I do, I see something new in it that I missed before. I have recommended this book many times and have had students come back to me saying they found it "too hard" to understand. This book does have to be studied, but it will reward the painter who does. The book tackles difficult ideas and explains them carefully, but they are difficult ideas just the same.



Above is an example of one of Carlsons paintings. Here area few of the chapters' titles to give you an idea of this books depth and scope.

The mechanics of painting

Angles and consequent values

Design, a pattern of differing values

Color

Trees

The extraordinary and the bizarre

Linear perspective

Aerial perspective

As you can see this is serious stuff. There are so many books out there with titles incorporating the phrase "Free and Easy" . The last thing painting has been in my experience, is easy. I have however lived a life of exceptional freedom, but I am guessing that's not what they mean.

I have identified several different kinds of teachers. There are the cheerleaders and the downloaders. I am obviously the latter. Cheerleaders get you up and feeling good, they get you out of your lethargy. They will tell you your art is great. The best of them mean it too. There is an enormous market for such teachers and for many folks they are just fine.Cheerleaders don't need to be fine painters, and they don't need to impart much knowledge. They do need some other qualities, they need to be kind, nurturing and loving.
Those qualities aren't a dime a dozen either, I am not denigrating the cheerleaders, for the overwhelming number of students this sort of teacher is best. And I sure can't do it.

The downloaders are a far smaller group. They" download" lots of information because they value it, have it and think their students need to know it. They value this information for its utility and not the ease with which it can be learned. Downloaders are best for serious students. They produce pretty much all of the really capable painters and the most driven students seek them out. That's why when I meet a professional painter, they were usually, but not always, trained by one of a handful of teachers in a small number of ateliers or institutions. The names of those teachers and places keep cropping up in the resumes of successful painters.

Downloaders are often quirky or difficult and idiosyncratic. Many are legendary for their thornyness, my own teacher Gammell comes to mind. ( I am actually wicked nice by the way.) If you need some one to inspire you to work at your art, the downloader type is not for you. They take it as a given that you are working at your art. They usually teach fewer students, more things, and have art careers of their own to attend to, so they a will limit their teaching to the motivated .

John Carlson was a downloader and you will have to work, to take on what he is teaching. Now you could find, I suppose all of the information in bits and pieces and stated in other ways in other places. But it would be lots of other places. You might also need to have discussions with a number of artists now long dead. This is hard won information from the generations already in their graves given to us breathers. Did you imagine it would be like reading an Archie and Jughead comic?

Tomorrow I will be soothing and reassuring, maybe I can find one of those baby animal pictures that Linda likes so much.......Stape

An inauspicious begining

Above you see my very first outdoor painting. It looks pretty rough, as it spent years rolled up
and forgotten on the bottom of a pile of early Stapleton Kearns art in a portfolio. Here's the story that goes with it.

The year was 1975, and I was living in the Fenway studios in Boston. I was studying with R.H. Ives Gammell, and I had spent the winter in the studio, drawing casts and the figure. It was an extremely rigorous program. I had several years of art school behind me, but the Gammell studio was a whole nother thing.We worked really, really hard.

When the spring came it was Ives' habit to move to his summer home up in the Berkshire mountains, near Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Ives had a compound there that had a studio and living space for himself and in a separate but connected wing two studios and living space for two students. I was the number three student, so I didn't get to go.

I was sharing a studio in the Fenway building with another young painter named David. David had grown up in Gloucester and had been influenced by what was then one of the few active art colony's devoted to outdoor painting still in existence. His father was a painter and David had painted outside a lot. He is now a well known artist around New England.

David suggested "lets spend the summer, street painting in Boston!" I had never even seen anybody paint outside. I knew Monet had done it and I had seen pictures of impressionist painters at their easels. But very few people were painting outside in the 1970s. In fact we never used the phrase plein air, although we did know it, WE painted outside

David and I went to the old Hatfields color shop on Boyleston street, now long gone. I bought a French easel. I think it cost over 200 dollars. That was a very expensive easel. They were then a rare and very specialized piece of equipment. "Real artists", art school professors and various serious painters would come up to me in those days to ask me about my easel. Many of them had never seen one. Its hard to believe that today you can buy one at a discount store for less than the price of a decent bayonet.

David and I set up our easels along the Charles river on this gray , dreary, and foggy day, and he gave me a lesson, beginning with establishing the key of my picture. I was so excited. It was a life altering moment for me. I knew immediately that this was the kind of painting I would spend my life doing. The hook was set real deep. I have been out there pretty much ever since. I have painted thousands of landscapes.

I would get up every day that summer and take my easel out onto the streets of Boston, to the Fenway or up on the cobbled streets of Beacon Hill and paint. Robert Douglas Hunter who was then the president of the Guild of Boston Artists and a lifelong mentor to me, would come out to my location once or twice a week and patiently give me a lesson. He charged me nothing. I remember him teaching me one day up on Beacon Hill and looking at the painting I had made, Hunter said that he thought I had a natural ability for landscape painting. I was so proud. I have never forgotten that moment, or all of his time and effort that he generously gave me. I am a professional painter largely because of Robert Douglas Hunter, and I am grateful .

Neither David or I had any money to speak of in those days and we lived on next to nothing. We would try to sell our paintings off the easel to passers by. I always asked for........15 dollars.
I seldom got it. When I did though , it was party time.

Controlling your values

Here is a painting by Sorolla, the upper figures display the same lowered values of which I spoke yesterday. Sorolla has left himself lots of room above the value on those boys backs, to place that bright highlight and have it really ring. Look how dark he has made that wet sand reflecting the sky. I suspect that he dropped the value of that to get the boys to tell against it.

Its hard for me to imagine the two together, but in 1914 Hibbard actually visited Sorolla in his studio in Spain. Sorolla told him a studio was a good place to smoke, and the museum was a good place to take a walk. I no longer get to smoke. I can still walk.

Below is another Hibbard, also of his beloved Vermont. I would like to point out several things about this painting. The first is that it has very little atmospheric perspective. Now it's got some, I admit, but look at how dark that distant hill is.

There are lots of paintings out there where the distance dissolves into a high key blur. That's fine, but it's not the only way, and it gets to be repetitive if every painting in a show does that. This picture has a crispness and an authority, and keeping the "punch" in the distance is part of the reason why. It also allows Hibbard to give you a greater area of the canvas in saturated color, rather than stepping on his color with white or gray blue to get recession into the distance. I will bet if I had not pointed this out, you would not have noticed it, because it works just fine. Its absolutely amazing the liberties you can take with nature that will go unnoticed by the viewer.

Hibbard gains another advantage with that ploy. Because he has kept the value of those distant hills low, he can paint the yellow trees in front of them so they are bright by comparison, but low enough in value so that he can fill them with lots of color. If he painted them all full of white they would not have that rich color. Remember white will kill your color if you aren't very sparing in its use. Also the color of those hills behind them is pretty much the compliment of the yellow orange foliage so it really looks sweet in front of them.

Where I am going with all of this is;

although you worked hard to learn to state your values accurately, there are times, particularly in landscape painting when you will want to state them artistically. They are subject to the decision making process and are a tool of design like any other.

It took me just a minute to type that. It took me a long time to figure it out. Always be looking, thinking and CHOOSING.

Below is a detail of the brushstroke in the foreground of the painting. Notice how besides being a sort of exciting shorthand for what they represent, they also show the form of the land that they describe.

They pretty much all run away from the viewer and into the painting, but they are all at somewhat different angles. They are all different colors but they are all close enough together in value to stay as a whole. He has thrown accents and a shadow into this big area of light. Notice also that big pyramid shape at the bottom pointing us up and into the rest of the painting. None of this stuff just happened. It was all put there deliberately.

Try to do more than stand in front of the landscape and ask "what does it look like?" ask yourself. " what can I do to it?"

"Aldro Hibbard,N.A. Artist Inn Two Worlds" by John Cooley, only available through the Rockport Art Association in Rockport Massachusetts.

Some observations on Hibbards key.

Above is the Hibbard from Bar Harbor. There is all kinds of stuff going on in there . I will begin by talking about the brushwork in this piece. Below you see a detail of the lower right hand corner.


Here is an absolutely masterful passage. Take a moment and study this rock, there is a major principle or two that you can learn here. The whole thing is made out of a visible and unusual brushstroke. But it also has a characteristic you might not notice, because the passage works so well.

Hibbard has dropped the "key" of the lights in this painting. That is, he has transposed its values down an octave, like you might on a piano. That gives him two things, richer color, and better ability to describe the form.

The color part is I suppose obvious but here's the deal. In order to paint in a high key it is necessary to add a lot of white into your color. And

THE MORE WHITE YOU USE, THE LESS COLOR YOU HAVE!

Using lots of white bleaches out your paintings, giving them a chalky look. So go easy on the white. But the major reason Hibbard has this passage keyed down is this. He can describe the forms of these rocks in color that has some strength to it, and then place his bright highlights well above their value. If Hibbard had painted those rocks as bright as they would have been in the sun there, he would not have been able to do that.

I will again return to my example of the lead guitar player. Say he is out there playing with his amp turned all the way up on ten. When the time comes for his big solo, he reaches back to turn up another notch, but he can't. He is ALREADY playing with the amp turned all the way up.

So if you are painting a passage like this full of white, when you want to throw a bright highlight you can't, because you have left yourself no room above the passage, in your values, to use for your highlights.

This is a particularly common fault in today's plein aire movement because of our contemporary preference for "bright " paintings. We paint our interiors with colors made with lots of whites' and that has effected our taste.

Gloucester artist Emile Gruppe actually used zinc white which is more transparent in order to not "step"on his colors so much. This was not such a big problem with lead white, and before the second world war pretty much everybody used lead white. Today we all use titanium which is a great white, but it is very opaque and will make your color chalky if you don't take care to keep that from happening. There are a lot of chalky paintings out there.

Look at how those brushstrokes lay on the surface of that rock describing it's surface. There is no blending and there is plenty of variation in color also. Remember me talking about sliding a ring from your finger across a painting. If you did that to this painting there would always be several colors within it.

This is an interpretation of what he had before him. He transposed the appearance of nature into his language of brushstrokes. He didn't actually see the brush strokes. That means he didn't paint what he saw.He processed what he saw. When you hear people say every artist "sees" thing differently, they don't really understand this. Other wise the cubists would have been unable to drive.