If You Like Pissaro

1870 Road to Versailles at Louveciennes

I have always enjoyed studying the work of artists from the past, and I assume most people with an interest in art do the same, but I particularly like to follow the changes over time as an artist finds him or herself, responds to the movements of the time, becomes more confident, etc.  Pissaro has long been a favorite of mine, and now we have the chance to see much more of his work gathered in one place than I have seen before: Poul Webb, an artist in the UK, has a blog on which he gathers and presents the works of a variety of artists, posting day after day until he has exhausted his resources, and if you are interested in checking it out, his website is http://poulwebb.blogspot.co.uk.

His current series of posts focuses on Camille Pissaro,  and he intends 21 posts in total; the first two posts are up and ready to view.  One of my first impressions (no pun intended) is that Pissaro tended to lean on a couple of compositional crutches: he loved the road or lane or path leading into the picture, and nearly always he inserted figures to give a sense of scale, populating his work with people going about their everyday business.  He also seemed to like having the dominant mass descend from the upper left corner of the painting at an angle toward the lower right, and then leveling off somewhat below the horizontal center on the right.  I find this in painting after painting in his earlier work, and you can see it in several of those I have posted below.  Often he used both tricks in the same work.  But that minor observation aside, I enjoy seeing his growth over the years as he finds his voice.

1874 South Norwood, study

1871 All Saints Church, Upper Norwood

1856 Women Chatting by the Sea

The above painting, done when he was 26 and living in St. Thomas, reveals that he was skillful at an early age, and had already developed a part of what would become his signature style.  But he was hundreds if not thousands of paintings away from discovering the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism for which he would become famous.

1859 Houses by a Road

1864 The Banks of the Marne

Now I need to confess that the reason I chose to post the works of someone else is that I have done no work of my own over the past month.  I took on a project of a different sort that demands 12 hour days of me, six days a week, and I am exhausted and stressed and looking forward to a time in the near future when I can return to a more civilized life style that allows me a bit of leisure.

Why do we paint?

Fields at Luscher Farms

As we were sitting in the shade on a warm almost summer day, our eyes focused on our paintings, but our minds free to converse, my friend and painting mentor, Randall asked me why I wanted to paint, what it was that I expected to get out of it, or something to that effect, as he sees me struggling with my self-education.  I responded with something about how I am such a literal person and need to learn the fundamentals before I feel able to express myself more competently.  I'm not creating Art, I'm "practicing."  And while that is a dodge, an excuse that I frequently use, it is also based in truth; I don't have a cranky art instructor critiquing my work and telling me to tear it up and start over, so I have to play the cranky part myself.  But assuming my practice does result in acquiring the skills to paint what is in my heart and mind, then why indeed do I want to paint?

Annie Dillard, in her book The Writing Life, does a good job of pointing out what it is we seek in Art.  If you substitute "painter" for "writer" the following might apply:

Why are we reading, if not for the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?  Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?  Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms?  Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?  What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?  Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love?  We still and always want waking.  We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

It is so hard to explain what grabs us when we see a painting that reaches out and touches our hearts, but whatever it is, Randall has it is spades: his work is so poetic and filled with the emotions Nature has evoked in him.  I aspire to reach just a bit of that ability, and so I practice.  Some of that practice is of the human face, in all its subtlety.   Here is the latest effort on that front:

Red-headed Mystery Woman

Sometimes a face is just a face, with the person behind it a mystery.  Certain features evoke feelings about personality traits, but are they necessarily accurate?  Large wide-set eyes suggest innocence, but might they not hide a scheming nature?  A long hooked nose is something one would have to become resigned to (unless plastic surgery were an option) and we tend unconsciously to assign certain assumptions to those with extraordinary facial features, don't we?  One more face for the tally.

Entirely off subject, I had to hire a crew of arborists to remove a standing dead grand fir in the back yard: it was 120 feet tall, had died two years ago, and I was concerned that when it finally fell it might hurt or kill someone, so I had it removed piece by piece, a harrowing job for the guy who had to climb it.  Now the ospreys will have to find another perch from which to survey the lake below for dinner.

The Sketchbook

I find myself in a motel room in Tennessee with time on my hands, and though I have no recent painting to share, I did pack a sketchbook in case I found the time to use it on this trip.  I keep several sketchbooks around, large ones, small ones for the car, some for finished drawings and portraits, some for thumbnails or color studies.  It might be better to use only one at a time so that it is easier to track progress, but the one I brought along has been used for marker value drawings, studies for paintings, etc. and I thought I would share a bit of that today, an excuse for a post.

The two sketches above were done in watercolor, feeling out ideas for larger paintings, and they were done very quickly; my objective was to see if I liked the overall look.  I don't believe either one was carried on as a painting.

Sometimes I just like to work on drawing, especially portraits.  I am still working on my goal of doing 10,000 faces in order to get better.  When I do something like the above (if my recollection is right, it might be a study from a painting by Ilia Repin) I am working on learning to quickly get proportion right, building confidence in translating without distortion.

These two were done with markers, and the goal was to evaluate composition and value.  I did later work these into paintings, and the work done in the sketches helped make the final result stronger.  This particular sketchbook is 98 pound paper, meant for mixed media, and still the markers bleed through, so it's important to sketch on only one side of the page.  In my opinion, it's helpful to have a variety of sketchbooks, some better for pencil, others better for charcoal, still others for watercolor.  The problem I have is trying to use them all often enough.  It's one thing to pull one out for some preparatory work when building toward a painting, but I wish I could do better in sketching in the field, just for the practice in seeing and drawing.  In fact, that's where I'm headed right now, out to find some subjects for study.

Happy sketching to you all!

On Seeing

"It is harder to see than it is to express."  Robert Henri

There is probably little argument that one of the biggest challenges facing a painter is to see the subject in a way that will allow him or her to translate the vision into the two dimensional space.  Too often the mind carries preconceptions that are attached to images, and thus, when we sit down to paint the tree before us, often we end up painting the tree that is in our mind, the tree we first drew as children - big solid brown trunk, round green leafiness.  It takes effort to focus enough to see the changes in tone, to detect slight temperature differences, or to recognize that some lines are lost and blend into another element.

I have spent months of study trying to acquire better vision for painting, and I recall moments when suddenly it became clear to me: driving down the freeway I would marvel at the tonal changes in the passing trees, the delicate differences that made them real; I witnessed how dark were the areas of wet pavement, how sky-like the flections.  I imagined mixing the color to match what I was seeing.  This seeing went on for miles, almost a hallucination of sorts, though I assume hallucination to mean seeing something that is not there, rather than seeing what is there but what most people don't really see.  But like driving while hallucinating, it was probably not the safest way to navigate a vehicle down the highway, and I try to do it less, unless I am alone on a long straight road.

But trying to see has become an exercise I work on frequently, and though I have lately been caught up in business that does not allow me the time or leisure to paint, I thought that on my latest trip I would take along my sketchbook and use the idle moments for some drawing.  It did not happen.

I found myself in southwest Iowa in mid-March, and I was surprised that winter still dominated the land; it was cold and bleak, with no budding trees, no spring flowers, no green to be found.  At first I tried to think of a word that would best describe the color I saw, and the closest I came up with was "dun".  A very bland, dull color, sapped of life by the hard winter.  Undulating fields of cornstalks chopped off near the ground, dead and beige and unremarkable.  Every little farm had its silos, iconic in a way, and I thought they might make a good subject.  But as I drove I found there were few places to pull off the road, no public parks or areas set aside for recreation: do Iowans just drive like hell through the snowstorm and get where they are going, all business and no pleasure?

At any rate, I tried hard to turn on my "vision" and found that it was unavailable to me.  For the life of me, I couldn't see the beauty that I was certain surrounded me.  I took a few snapshots as a record of my journey, but I was surprised by how uninspired I was.  Perhaps it was a reaction against the lingering winter.  More likely my mind was too preoccupied with another sort of vision, a seeing for the truth in numbers, a cataloguing of physical properties of the real estate I was investigating.  The demands on my vision were great - "see" as much as possible in a very short time, and there was no room left for shifting the vision to the other sort required for painting.  I think the resources of the mind are limited sometimes, and yet I was surprised by how little choice I had in the matter.

Upon my return I pulled up my photos from the trip, and with a little enhancement the richness of the colors jumped out at me: there was color there all along, and I had been unable to see it.  I hope that in future trips I will be able to see it while there, but in a sort of apology to the beauty that is Iowa, I present at a minimum these photographs as a testament to color.

Two Writers

It has been a long while of no painting at all, and I miss delving daily into the Art Spirit, attempting expression, trying to learn the basic skills of value and temperature and composition and line.  I didn't want to stop; in fact, it feels as if a part of me has been imprisoned and is doing hard time, marking the days on the wall of the cell.  Life has intruded and work demands my attention in a way it hasn't in several years, and I am surprised to find that my brain has switched into a gear that does not allow for Art.  All hands are on deck for other kinds of thinking, analytical and exacting and fixed, and there is no impulse to create, nothing but the drone of numbers.

Finally I had to insist that I take an hour, a brief respite in which to squeeze out some paints and quickly scribble out something, anything, just to free those cramped muscles for some exercise.  Those very few of you who actually wander into this blog to see what I may have been dabbling at will know that I enjoy trying for passing resemblance in small portraits, and here are two more dead writers, with a small scrap of their work to accompany:

Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu'as-tu donc ce matin?
Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes,
Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint
La folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.

Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin
T'ont-ils versé la peur et l'amour de leurs urnes?
Le cauchemar, d'un poing despotique et mutin
T'a-t-il noyée au fond d'un fabuleux Minturnes?

Je voudrais qu'exhalant l'odeur de la santé
Ton sein de pensers forts fût toujours fréquenté,
Et que ton sang chrétien coulât à flots rythmiques,

Comme les sons nombreux des syllabes antiques,
Où règnent tour à tour le père des chansons,
Phoebus, et le grand Pan, le seigneur des moissons.

My poor Muse, alas! what ails you today?
Your hollow eyes are full of nocturnal visions;
I see in turn reflected on your face
Horror and madness, cold and taciturn.

Have the green succubus, the rosy elf,
Poured out for you love and fear from their urns?
Has the hand of Nightmare, cruel and despotic,
Plunged you to the bottom of some weird Minturnae?

I would that your bosom, fragrant with health,
Were constantly the dwelling place of noble thoughts,
And that your Christian blood would flow in rhythmic waves

Like the measured sounds of ancient verse,
Over which reign in turn the father of all songs, 

Phoebus, and the great Pan, lord of harvest.

(from les Fleurs du Mals)

Then one afternoon - the rain had stopped but the clouds had not broken and it was turning cold again - it was about dusk and we were galloping along an old road in the river bottom; it was dim and narrow under the trees and we were galloping when my mule shied and swerved and stopped, and I just did catch myself before I went over his head; and then we saw the thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb.  It was an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet.

(from The Unvanquished)

Winter Scenes

I've never painted a winter scene with snow before, though I have admired them for years, and have wondered about the subtleties of warm and cool colors so near white that they make us see the snow folding over the landscape.  After a hike up Gales Creek in the coastal range, I thought I might give it a try; I was struck by the muted colors in the stand of alders along the creek, the hazy background forest, and the vibrancy of the moss in the soft light.  This is more like a preliminary color study, trying to find values and temperature contrasts to see if I like it as a painting, but it seems that I need to find a way to avoid painting all those trees as they fade into the background.  Either that, or I need to acknowledge that this might take quite a while, and is not something to be attempted standing out in the cold.

John Carlson, of course, was a prolific painter of snowy landscapes:

Is Indigo Blue or Purple?

color study, 7x7

I took the puppy for a walk this morning, hoping to wear her out so I could have more time to do the things I'd like myself, and the sky to the west was a deep, rich blue that I would call indigo, though when I searched the web for definitions, I was surprised to find many people who believe that indigo is really nearly purple:

I have always thought that indigo was a deep blue, slightly toward the red scale, the name derived from the natural dye used on the original Levis.  More like this:

Needless to say, my color sketch didn't quite catch a true indigo, either.  Working from my fast-fading memory of this morning's sky, I veered a little toward Prussian blue and not really fully Ultramarine.  Maybe cobalt would have been a better place to start.  Still, the quick sketch managed to catch something of the mood of the tree line on the crest of the rolling field.  I think I ought to assign myself the task of gathering visual memory on my morning walks and then committing it quickly to color studies, in order to improve the feeble memory that operates now.

Kayaking the White Salmon

White Salmon - 24x30 oil

Working from a decades-old black and white photo printed on copy paper, I tried to introduce color in a way that maintained the feeling of cold beauty.  Flowing water is a tricky thing to paint, since any competent boater will be able to tell when it is not true to nature; the most important skill is being able to "read" the water, knowing where to place yourself so you end up where you want to be down river, using the map printed on the surface of the moving water.  

The Artist at Work

For no apparent reason, I thought I would take a look at artists working in their studios.  Maybe I'm just trying to work up enough motivation to get in there myself.  It's pouring down rain and will continue to do so for at least another week, a sleepy puppy is at my feet, needing a walk, but not in this rain, and it seems like a quiet, dead time in December.

So if you are interested, bored maybe, see if you can identify all these fine folks at work:

Compared to this, my studio is spotless.

Runner up in the messy studio contest.