A Meditation on Genesis for Painters
If Only: Creating Where You Are
Drawing Buildings in Two Point Perspective
By Patrick Fanning
Seven Steps to Creating more “keepers” and fewer “studies” en plein air.
I’ve heard several experienced painters say that their best
landscapes, the ones juried into the big national shows, are invariably painted
in the studio, never outdoors. Nevertheless, these same experienced artists are
all enthusiastic plein air painters.
What explains this apparent paradox?
The fact
is, if you can train yourself to paint decent pictures outdoors—actual
“keepers”—your studio painting improves too. And painting outdoors is one of
the great pleasures in life. Here are seven steps that have helped me paint
more plein air keepers:
1. Use the same gear indoors and out.
When you’re
outdoors, use the same high quality paints, brushes, paper or canvass that you
use in your studio. Don’t use flimsy, miniaturized equipment or cheap, student
grade materials when you go out to paint. If you use tube colors in a deep well
palette in your studio, take it with you outdoors. If you insist on Arches 300
pound paper for your studio paintings, your plein
air work deserves no less.
Set up your palette and water and
brushes in the same layout, indoors and out. Use the same easel, a TV tray,
stool, or shade umbrella so that you can duplicate your studio setup as nearly
as possible. You will paint better outside if your favorite materials are in
their usual places. If you paint standing in your studio, paint standing
outside. If you paint with music at home, bring a portable disk player.
Improvise
the amenities you can’t bring with you. For example, you can’t plug in a hair
dryer outdoors, but you can start up your car, turn on the defroster full
blast, and dry a watercolor on the dashboard.
2. Practice.
Go out at least one day a week. Don’t wait to be motivated.
Don’t wait for nice weather. Don’t wait for your vacation. Don’t wait for your
friends to join you. Don’t be too fussy about where and what you paint. Get
outside and put brush to paper. Consider plein
air painting a spiritual practice, like meditation or yoga. The most
transcendent experiences arise from those times when you don’t feel like it,
but engage in your practice anyway. Approach painting outdoors as a continuing
process, and the product will take care of itself.
The more
you paint outdoors, the more “keepers” you paint. Experience outdoors makes you
more comfortable, relaxed, and focused. With time you become quicker, more
perceptive about what’s special on a given day, and less dominated by the
subject matter.
3. Stick to one big idea.
This is
always good advice, but especially on location, where time is often short and
conditions changeable. You can’t count on the time or concentration to do five
things at once. Decide on the main thing that attracts you to the scene, figure
out how you want to render it, and ruthlessly eliminate, simplify, or
subordinate everything else. Stay on the scene until you’ve put the big idea
down on paper. Then you can go home and finish in the studio if necessary.
4. Plan as if for a studio painting.
Don’t take shortcuts outside that
you wouldn’t take inside. Do all the good things you know you should do: Use
some L shaped finder frames to crop the scene in different ways. Move mountains
and trees and buildings around to improve the composition. Make several
thumbnail sketches until you get one that really excites you. Then make
another, larger value study that truly nails down the darks, medium values, and
lights. Make color notes as if you were going to take them back and do the
painting entirely in the studio. Take photos for later reference. Don’t start
painting until you have fully analyzed the scene and planned your painting.
5. Find a looser style.
You need to evolve a style loose enough to allow you to get
a sizable amount of paint onto the paper in a reasonable amount of time, with
some margin for error. If you have trouble painting loosely, go out a few times
with small sheets of paper, one big brush, and only two or three colors. When
you want to achieve photo realism or subtle effects requiring exact moisture
control and split second timing, stay in the studio.
6. Finish everything you start.
Disaster is a great teacher. When
you stray from the big idea and everything turns to mud, keep going. Take every
plein air piece as far as you can
before you give up on it. If the soft edged, high key scene you planned isn’t
working out, go to brighter colors, harder edges, and darker shadows. If it’s
too fragmented and splotchy, glaze over large areas to consolidate details into
larger shapes. If you’ve lost the whites, you can lift, scrape, use opaque
white paint, or intensify the darks to near-black to get some contrast. Take
the whole mess home, scrub it off in the tub, let it dry, and start over. Use
gesso to white out the areas that don’t work, or switch over to acrylics or
pastels entirely. Taking each piece to the end teaches persistence, adds to
your repertoire of techniques, and forces you to take your plein air pieces seriously.
7. Intend to paint a keeper.
Take a hint from new age
athletes, millionaires, therapists, and spiritual advisors who will tell you
that intention affects performance.
If you go out intending to paint keepers, you mostly will. On the other hand,
you’ll never be satisfied with your plein
air work if you constantly tell yourself, “This is just a color study…I can
always start over in the studio…It’s only a plein
air piece…It’s too cold, windy, hot, humid, etc. to do decent work
today…I’m just out here to sketch and get ideas.”
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By Patrick Fanning
Last election day, I was thinking about modern
rituals of passage in which one comes of age. As a citizen you come of age when you stand up to be counted by casting
your first ballot. As an artist, you come of age when you feel compelled to
take a personal stand on these three issues:
Color vs. Tone. Are you a Rembrandt who sees value first and color second? If so, you
carefully prepare your three-value sketches in black, gray, and white before
painting. You tend to agree with teachers who say that if your values read
well, it doesn’t matter what colors you use.
Or are you a Van Gogh who sees color first and value second? If so, you use color in a more emotional or intuitive way. You are more likely to charge right into a painting, adjusting color notes as you go. You model form by hue changes as much as by value changes.
Flat vs. Round. Are you a realist who rigidly adheres to the rules of linear and atmospheric perspective in order to achieve a sense of deep space in your picture? If so, accurate drawing is important to you. You delight in manipulating shadows and highlights so that two dimensions mimic three. You organize your pictures to lead your viewer from the foreground to the middle space, to the background, and back again.
Or are you more of a cubist or expressionist who purposely distorts reality in order to form a two-dimensional composition in a flat picture plane? If so, you study design instead of drawing. You are always looking for ways to tilt up receding planes and flatten the space of your pictures. You think of composition more as a matter of areas of interest, varied edges, masses, lines and paint quality.
Personal Meaning vs. Communication. Are painting mostly for yourself? If so, you are probably more of a spiritual seeker who is in it for the flow of creativity, the calm of meditation, or the quiet thrill of insight.
Or do you paint to show your pictures, to communicate your thoughts, feelings, and experiences? If so, you are more likely to exhibit and compete and sell your paintings.
In a college course on the history of science I learned this very satisfying mouthful of pseudo-intellectual babble: “Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s a misquote by that great obscurantist Sigmund Freud of a much more transparent statement by a German natural historian named Haeckel in 1868: “Ontogenesis, or the development of the individual, is a short and quick recapitulation of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to which it belongs.”
Haeckel was referring to the way the fetal development of mammals seems to parallel the evolution of all life on earth. The fertilized mammalian egg first resembles a single-celled amoeba, then a multi-celled sponge, then a jellyfish, then an amphibian, then a reptile, then finally becomes recognizable as a mammal.
So what does this have to do with our stand on the three big issues of color, depth, and meaning in our paintings? It’s pertinent because we belong to the tribe of painters, a large and distinguished phylum stretching back through a long history of artistic evolution. The evolution of art affects us, even if we are no more aware of it than the embryo is aware of natural history. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny--we will each tend to repeat the evolution of art in our own painting.
In other words, if you start as a tonalist like Rembrandt, over time you will tend to become more of a colorist like Van Gogh. If you start as a colorist, you may flirt with tone from time to time, but you’re likely to stay a colorist.
Likewise, devotees of depth effects are often seduced into flatness over time. But those who practice the flat arts of design-dominated picture construction are likely to stay in Flatland.
And many a spiritual hobbyist who only paints for herself finds that as her painting matures she is collecting art show prospecti and daydreaming about mats and frames and little red dots. However, once you start selling your paintings, you are unlikely to go back to exclusively private creation—the twin joys of communication and remuneration are too delicious.
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3. A Meditation on Genesis
for Artists
by Patrick Fanning
Throughout history devout painters such as Michelangelo and William Blake have referred to God as the Original Artist. I can see God on day one of creation, striding into the void like a painter into his studio, picking up his brush and painting a vision of order imposed on chaos. In my mind’s eye God resembles Leonardo da Vinci, only much taller and not as affected by gravity or politics.
Since I’m always interested in tips from the masters, I consulted the bible recently to see what I could discover about the old boy’s methods. I was especially interested in a question that has plagued bible scholars for thousands of years: “was the Yahweh of Genesis an oil painter or a watercolorist?”
In the spirit of Martin Luther, I’ll let you be the judge for yourself. Here are the first four verses of the Old Testament: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
It goes on from there to tell quite a long, complicated story. For artistic purposes, the most important stuff is in the first four sentences. But what mysterious sentences they are! You can see why people have differing interpretations of the bible.
God started with darkness first and added light, like an oil painter. That much is undeniably clear. But you can argue that everything was void at first, nothing really happening, until he created light. Then it was all light—like a blank piece of watercolor paper, on which he began laying in his first washes while saving his whites—separating the light from the darkness.
Or was the primeval light more like a coat of gesso, over which he could have used acrylics or egg tempera or wax encaustic? My original either-or question, asked in all naïve humility, has metastasized into a labyrinth of possible heresies that make the entire Reformation seem like a middle school debate over the relative merits of Coke and Pepsi.
So I’m stuck in my reading of the bible. I can’t get past verse four. I feel that until I know, in my heart of hearts, the Original Artist’s primary medium, I can’t make sense of later, lesser biblical issues such as Mosaic law, predestination, the divinity of Christ, transubstantiation, apostolic succession, or the legitimacy of the apocrypha.
In my darker moments I have considered adopting a postmodern, neo-crypto-agnostic view of creation as a purely abstract conglomeration of found objects that only superficially resembles a universe in the minds of its beholders. But this doesn’t account for the obvious genius behind the analogous color scheme of the Grand Canyon, the brushwork in the painted desert, or how water and light consistently interact in gratuitous beauty.
I pray daily for enlightenment.
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4. If Only: Creating Where
You Are
by Patrick Fanning
How often do you have an “If only”
attack? You know the refrain: “If only I could spend more time in the studio…
If only I could get away to Italy or France or the desert to paint… If only I
didn’t have my day job, my kids, my spouse, my health problems.”
Last
August I had to drop everything and attend a five-day psychology conference in
Washington DC as part of my previous profession in publishing. I had one free
morning to visit the Corcoran Museum, but the rest of the time I was in
windowless hotel conference rooms, thinking “If only I could fully retire from
this dreary scene…If only I had time to see the National Art Gallery…If only I
could spend a month here doing cityscapes.” Boy, was I grumpy!
Fortunately
I brought my sketchbook along and saved my sanity by sketching in idle moments
on street corners, in hotel lobbies, and while waiting for meetings to begin or
end. On the plane coming home, I flipped through the sketchbook and realized
what a jerk I was!
During
the five uninspiring, distracting days, I had created a pretty decent drawing
of a gothic church dwarfed by a parking garage, two different compositions for
an entry into an upcoming show, a class lecture outline, notes on John Singer Sargent’s brushwork in “Oyster
Gatherers,” and a page of carefully drawn tropical plants from hotel lobby
planters. This is more creative work than I might have accomplished at home in
five days. I had actually benefited artistically from the odd moments of
enforced idleness and unfamiliar surroundings, however “uninspiring” or
“distracting” they were.
I
realized that the “if only’s” are a trap that blind you to the creative
opportunities at hand. The truth is, if you are an artist, you create stuff
right where you are, out of or in spite of the dull junk of daily life. As the
zen masters say, “wherever you go, there you are.” And there you must do your
art.
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By
Patrick Fanning
Rectangular Objects such as buildings or boxes are generally a light
value of their local color on the lit side and a darker value of the same color
on the unlit side. However, the unlit plane is darker and cooler at the edge
where it meets the lit plane, and lighter and warmer elsewhere. This “plane
change accent” is often a very subtle
effect, but it is worth exaggerating in your paintings. It makes the light look
brighter and heightens contrast where you usually want it, at form edges.
Round or cylindrical objects such as balls, poles, and mountains also
exhibit a plane change accent, called the “core of the shadow.” It is most
easily seen in a strong side lighting situation. Since the plane change is
gradual, the shadow is soft-edged.
Unlit Planes have
color variations due to reflected light. For example, the unlit side of a gray
skyscraper is usually bluish at the top where it picks up light from the sky,
and brownish at the bottom where it picks up light bounced off the ground and
surrounding buildings. Likewise, there is often reflected warm light under eaves and on porch ceilings.
Cast Shadows
outdoors are usually darker and cooler than the unlit side of the object that
casts the shadow. Cast shadows are not just black or blue. Observe carefully
and you’ll see that they have color. For example, car shadows on a sunny day
are warm brown/gray under the car where they are reflecting the chassis, and a
cooler blue/gray beside the car where they are reflecting the sky. Finally,
cast shadows are darker and harder edged near the object casting them. Further
from the object, shadows usually get lighter and softer of edge.
Rendering Exercise. Paint a
white cube, a ball, and a cylinder on a light table top with strong side light
and a dark background. Experiment with differing light sources. Put different
colored papers under and alongside the shapes and see what happens to the color
and value in the shadows.
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6. Drawing Buildings in Two
Point Perspective
By Patrick Fanning
- Lightly draw the eye level line: an imaginary horizontal line at the level of your eyes. Note that when the observer and the building are both standing in flat terrain, the eye level line will be very close to the horizon line. But this is not necessarily the case, especially in hilly country or when you are significantly above or below the building.
- Put dots at the left and right vanishing points, where parallel lines appear to converge. Note that you may have to extend the eye level line beyond the side margins of your paper.
- Draw the vertical line representing the corner of the building nearest you, estimating how much of it is above and below the eye level line.
- Lightly draw lines from the top and bottom of the vertical line to the vanishing points on both sides.
- Draw two new vertical lines to represent the end of the right and left walls that recede from the corner nearest you. Estimate with sighting the relative width of the two walls. These verticals should fit within the perspective lines you sketched in the preceding step.
- For complex buildings with wings or bays, continue with the next closest corner, working outward from the two first walls you have drawn (not illustrated). If you get confused about which vanishing point to use, remember that every wall that is parallel to the right wall will use the same vanishing point as the right wall. Every wall that is parallel to the left wall will use the same vanishing point as the left wall.
- Draw gable walls as simple rectangular walls first. Connect the corners with and “X.” The peak of the roof will be directly above the middle of the “X.” Sight with a pencil to estimate how high to place the peak.
- The ridge of a roof recedes to the same vanishing point as the wall to which it is parallel. Draw roof lines lightly, as if there were no overhanging eaves at all.
- To be strictly accurate, the line describing the rear edge of a gable roof should converge on a third vanishing point way up in the sky, far off your paper. In practice, you can make it parallel to the front edge of the roof.
- Enlarge three sides of the roof shape to indicate the overhanging eaves, observing vanishing points.
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To
Create a Step-by-Step Painting Plan
By
Patrick Fanning
Your value sketches become step-by-step painting plans when you annotate them. Below is a value sketch of Nick’s Cove on Tomales Bay in northern California.
The circled numbers refer to notes made in my sketchbook on site and later in the studio. Since this was to be a watercolor painting, the first note refers to the lightest area, the second note to the area one step darker, and so on to the darkest darks:
1. Pale Windsor blue sky & water.
2. warm ochre sand—through area 7.
3. Hookers green & Quin gold tree mass. One big shape with soft edges on top and sky holes & magenta modeling below.
4. Dark hill shape merges with trunks. Glaze magenta over greens
5. Buildings—exaggerate atmospheric perspective. Multicolored but muted by weathering. Use different complementary pairs. Strong side light gives hard edges/strong contrast in foreground. Figure with fishing pole and tackle box at center of interest.
6. Strong, multicolored darks under buildings. Good rhythm of repeated verticals, diagonals and Xs.
7. Wet sand in medium dark wash, with vertical reflections lifted and wiped out.
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8. Painting Through the
Stages
By Patrick Fanning
Paintings go through stages just like children growing up.
First there's the conception and gestation phase, when there really is no painting yet, but the baby is coming and there's a gleam in Daddy's eye. I prepare a canvas or stretch a sheet of paper, make value studies and play with compositional ideas like an expectant mother musing over baby names or picking out wallpaper for the nursery.
For me the painting is born with the first brush stroke, which gives me an emotional rush akin to childbirth--the creation of something alive where previously nothing lived. Fortunately the birth does not involve physical pain--just the emotional discomfort of having to stop fantasizing and actually get to work. The painting's infancy is a glorious time, because it's just one simple wash or a few strokes on the canvas. Nothing has gone wrong yet, so anything is possible. All is potential, hope, promise. This painting could win first prize at a big international show, sell for thousands of dollars, and shower its proud parent with reflected glory.
Soon the infant becomes a crawler and then a toddler. This is a lonely, frustrating stage when I'm stuck home alone in the studio with a painting that isn't developed enough to articulate what it wants. But it sure wants something, and it screams at me until I figure it out: "More blue! More Green! No no no!" I still get flashes of deep affection for my painting, but I'm beginning to doubt that this messy rectangle that looks like dirty diapers will ever amount to something.
Then my painting begins to talk to me, fills out into recognizable human proportions, shows a few flashes of brilliance and inspiration. This is the elementary and middle school phase, which is full of challenges, but at least I and my painting are making progress, pulling in the same direction.
Just when I begin to relax and think I know what's what, my painting enters its gawky, adolescent stage. Pimples pop out all over and my little darling becomes an awkward, sullen mess, slouching there on the easel with a definite attitude that says, "Don’t tell me what to do." I secretly hate my painting and wish I could just give up. How could it do this to me after all the lover an care I've lavished on it so far?
After an eternity the painting makes it to young adulthood. Amid the excess and chaos there are hints of grace and virtue and charm. My correcting strokes become lighter and less frequent. I spend more time observing and thinking, less time fixing and intervening.
And slowly my painting enters maturity. It's balanced, harmonious, with just enough rough edges to be interesting. This is the time to stop. This is the time to kick it out of the studio and let it live life on its own. If I hold on, if I keep painting, I run the risk of pushing the painting into a premature old age. It will become stiff, rigid, and mannered--less interesting with every additional, unnecessary brushstroke.
With luck, before this happens I will have turned my attention to other paintings waiting to be born or stuck in an earlier, awkward stage. Ain't parenthood great?
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9. Designing Color Schemes
People like some color combinations better than others. Peoples’ visual likes and dislikes have been analyzed and codified into a set of ideas called the elements and principles of design. Color is one of the major elements of design, subject to principles of design such as dominance, unity, and contrast.
You can figure out pleasing color schemes by applying the principles of design. For example, the principle of dominance suggests that one color should be dominant in a painting. So you could pick one color like blue and use it for everything, varying only the value and intensity, as Picasso did in his blue period. This would be a monochromatic color scheme. It has maximum dominance and minimum contrast.
The principle of unity suggests that very similar colors will be pleasing together. You could use yellow, yellow-orange, and orange together; or blue, blue violet, and violet. Variations in the value and intensity of these colors would give you plenty of room for expressing a wide range of color effects. This is an analogous color scheme, high in dominance and unity, low in color contrast.
The principle of contrast suggests that combining very different colors will add interest. You could use colors opposite each other on the color wheel such as blue and orange. Colors opposite each other on the wheel are called complements, so this would be a complementary color scheme. If you make sure to have mostly one color and use the other color for emphasis, you can have the best of both worlds: color dominance and unity combined with exciting color contrast.
Or you could use three colors spaced evenly around the color wheel, such as red, blue and yellow. This would be a primary triadic color scheme, the most commonly used three-color scheme. Or you could pick three other colors, such as orange, green, and violet. This would be a secondary triadic color scheme. Or you could pick colors in between the primaries and secondaries, like yellow-orange, blue-violet, and blue-green. That would be a tertiary triadic color scheme. What if you picked a primary blue, a secondary orange, and tertiary yellow-green? I guess that would be a primary/secondary/tertiary mixed triadic color scheme. What if the blue was a low intensity color like indigo and you substituted burnt sienna for the orange and threw in a fourth color? Who knows what to call that scheme—patchwork?
Using lots of different colors is the most difficult color “scheme” to pull off successfully. Ironically, it is the approach most often attempted by amateurs and careless professionals.
Monochromatic Analogous Complementary Triadic Patchwork
Color Maps
The conventional way of describing color schemes on a color wheel can get complicated. It’s confusing and not really very accurate or informative.
Another approach is to think in terms of color maps on a color disk.
If you examine a large number of successful paintings and map the colors used on a color disk, you find that they don’t fall neatly into the patterns above. Each painting has its own territory, its own color map. The map may circumscribe one area on the disk like a continent, or appear as two or more islands of color.
Two important lessons emerge from all this: first, the simpler the color map, the better the painting, since you have a better chance of color unity. Second, the smaller the area of the map, the more color dominance and the more feeling, since emotion is communicated by color above all.
When you start thinking of color as a design consideration, it makes more and more sense to carefully limit your palette to two or three colors for each painting.
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by
Patrick Fanning
In my previous career as a publisher of psychology self-help books, I followed research on performance enhancement to find out how people learn new skills and improve old ones. Some of this research applies to us as painters.
In 1999 the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a review of all the scientific literature on performance enhancement of the previous decade. They wanted to determine the very best methods for training military and civil service employees. Their findings are a kind of Consumer Reports on what really works for improving learning and performance.
Although learning how to field strip an M-16 or program a computer for the Post Office seem quite different from learning how to paint a watercolor, it’s amazing how their top seven principles of performance enhancement apply to the fine arts as much as they do to the practical arts:
1. Practice. Repeat skills until they become second nature. Continued practice after the point of being skillful, called overlearning, improves performance further. Practice over time results in longer retention than massed practice at a single time. Mental practice and visualization are nearly as helpful as actual practice.
2. Modeling. Watch individuals who are skillful and imitate their actions immediately afterwards. In other words, take a workshop.
3. Seek Intermittent Feedback. Although practice on your own is most important, you will learn faster if you get a critique from an expert from time to time.
4. Seek Challenge. When your skills become well practiced and almost effortless, it’s time to take on bigger challenges, set higher goals, seek a more advanced teacher, etc. Don’t become complacent.
5. Build on Success. Seek an appreciative audience, give yourself credit for performing well, and learn from your successes as well as your mistakes.
6. Make Rewards Contingent on Performance. People learn faster and perform better when their successes are rewarded promptly. (This is no doubt true, but it’s a difficult arrangement to set up in the fine arts.)
7. Reduce Anxiety. Anxiety interferes with performance because it competes for attention with the skill to be learned. Relaxation and meditation techniques that reduce anxiety work well to enhance performance.
This is a long article with
lots of pictures, so it’s on a separate page.
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Last updated 12/1/06