Finished... Again

This little yard-side scene was up the road from where we stayed on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. The top image is a reference photo I took for this painting. The finished painting is 24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Although I signed this painting and considered it finished more than a week ago, I just went back into it and added a bicycle to the porch. It's an illustrative detail that may not add anything aesthetic, although I like the way reds and greens play off each other in this painting, along with the complimentary relationship between the maroon and the yellow. But I liked the addition of the bike for some sort of story-telling quality that the detail adds.

And as you can see from the reference photo, I chose to change the color of the shed in the background and lose the bush in the center.

My favorite art books

A number of artists I know collect how-to-draw books and books on anatomy for artists. When asked by other students at the Art Students League, I am happy to recommend the books by Joseph Sheppard, an American painter and sculptor who now lives and works in Italy.

If I am not mistaken, Sheppard was a student of Reginald Marsh. (I believe Sheppard is about 79 years old now.) You can see that there is a liveliness to Sheppard's rendering that seems to have derived from Marsh. But although Marsh taught anatomy and figure drawingand painting, he is not remembered today as a great anatomist. In fact, one instructor at the Art Students League recently recalled that Marsh was fond of saying to his struggling students, "When in doubt, add more muscles." That may be apocryphal but it seems like something Marsh might have said.

Sheppard's figures are much more convincing and accurately rendered. In the 1970s he realized that the anatomy that artists need to learn has very little in common with what doctors and biologists need to learn. Sheppard created a number of books on drawing the figure and, in them, he sometimes uses the term "surface anatomy," meaning the visible clues to anatomy that will be most valuable to an artist.

His drawings, some in pen and ink and others in white and dark chalk on toned paper are works of art that are as enjoyable as art as they are informative and demonstrative.

Yet another book by Sheppard deals with the painting techniques of the old masters. In this large format paperback, Sheppard takes his readers step-by-step through the techniques of Durer, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's fascinating to see how, in each case, the demo painting ends up looking somewhat like the work of the master being examined while nonetheless showing Sheppard's irrepressible animated style as well.

Most of these books are still in print. They are far and away the resource books I value most as a painter.

Smaller sea shell this time

I fear I may be better at starting paintings than I am at finishing them. Or maybe it's just that I have a tough time starting just one painting and working on only that one until I finish. I like getting a number of them going at once. That way if I stall out on one there is always another work in progress on which I can keep working.

Even when I worked in the much faster medium of watercolor I worked this way, sometimes getting as many as seven different paintings going at once. With oil paintings you can just put them aside, for months or years , before coming back to them.

Sometimes the stalling out lasts for months, sometimes for more than a year. The last large one I did (see post headlined, "Finished") was one such case of stalling out. I got stuck in the drawing stage and put it aside for some time. Begun in April, put aside for two months. Then I was able to move it along but still avoided the most complicated and, I thought, tricky part of the painting (the part where the large shell holds the smaller shells. Once I got down to it, it wasn't so difficult and after drawing that part in monochrome on the linen the painting moved almost too fast.

The above painting is more an interior than a still life, which is rather uncharacteristic for me. But I did a drawing of a similar dining room chair (another dining room and another marriage, actually) nearly twenty years ago when my sons were very small, in part because even then I really liked the curvy lines of such chairs.

The blue under-painting will serve as a complimentary color to the surface and true color of the wood and furniture which is more in the orange/brown range.

More old brushes

Last week I wrote about the oldest brush I own, a boar bristle brush I bought 38 years ago when I was in college. It's the second from top in the photo. The three other brushes in this picture are actually in worse shape, and while considerably younger, they are still old bushes.

But I don't throw them out. The one at the top in the photo I used as a broad watercolor bush for a year or more before it began to deteriorate. Now I use it for priming canvas and linen. The two brushes at bottom are nylon or some version of nylon which means they're good for oil or acrilic glazing and they last significantly longer than natural sable brushes (which tend to be expensive anyway.) They go by cute names like sablette, but they are versions of nylon.

As you can see, they don't last forever either. The white handled brush is at least twenty years old but I still use it several times a month along with it's younger cousin with the brown handle. In both cases the nylon fibers have broken and splayed so that the brush no longer holds a cohesive shape. But I still use both for glazing large areas in which I've already built up a number of glazes.

Perhaps I should admit here that I also paint pretty actively with paint rags. That is to say that I apply the paint with a brush but then use a decrepit old paint rag to wipe most of the glaze or opaque paint off the canvas leaving only a trace on the surface. I like building up a color in this fashion but the brush is simply the means of getting the paint on the canvas. It's the paint rag that really leaves the 'brush-stroke' as it were.

The Oldest Paint Brush I Own

I'm pretty sure I bought this brush in 1971 or 1972. When dinosaurs ruled the earth. I still use it and as you can see it's not in terrible shape. As a rule I don't throw out brushes just because they've lost their shape or worn out. They might get demoted to a function that could best be described as scrubber or scumbler, but there is still a use for the old ones.

In the early 1970s I was still in art school at Tulane University's Newcomb School of Art and I was working in acrylic. Soon after I bought this brush I stupidly neglected to clean it after using it with whatever acrylic colors I was using that day. Because it was new -- albeit ruined -- I could not bear to throw it out. So for more than 30 years I kept it with my batch of brushes. Then about five years ago I finally gave it a close look and thought that if I couldn't reclaim it to a useful function I should throw it out.

Today there are a number of very good soaps for cleaning brushes that I'm not sure existed thirty-eight years ago. With patience and repeated gentle washing I was able to return this thing to usefulness.

The brush itself is bristle, considerably softened by repeated washings. Today the manufacturers make a big deal out of boar and hog bristle imported from China. Back then, anything artistic was of enhanced value if it came from France, a land where art was deeply appreciated.

In the intervening decades the wooden handle has mottled noticeably like some sort of tiger-maple. I doubt that Raphael brushes are made in France today and, in fact, I no longer buy 'flats' as these straight edged-brushes are called. But, like owning an antique car, it's still nice to take it out once in a while and put it to work.

Stretching canvas, then and now

I've been stretching my own canvases since the 1970s. In art school back then nobody -- I mean NOBODY -- bought a pre-stretched canvas from an art store. It wasn't some sort of purist philosophy. It was all about money. A pre-stretched and primed canvas was a ridiculously expensive proposition. And it wasn't that we were poor students either. It really was, comparatively speaking, quite expensive.

So we learned to stretch our own. Somehow I managed to get along without a pair of canvas stretching pliers. Because I went away to school I didn't even have a regular pair of pliers at first. For a number of months what I did have were very raw knuckles. Eventually I got a pair of conventional pliers and things got easier. I think the only thing I ever used was good old "cotton duck" canvas which I then primed myself with acrylic gesso.

In recent years I have come to prefer linen as a surface on which to work. Many artists say that they prefer linen because it is archivally more resilient. While that is true, I just think most of us artists are more sensitive to some real textural differences that are of more immediate appeal. Linen is less regular; it has little flaws where the fiber is thicker or perhaps knotted. (Experts will have to forgive my ignorance of the exact nomenclature here.) But that is exactly the quality I most enjoy about linen.

With the proliferation of art supply companies, there are quite a few that sell pre-stretched and primed linens and canvases of varying sizes. I took a close look at the pricing and came to the conclusion that if I bought the materials and did the stretching myself I might save something like 42 cents over the cost of a store-bought canvas. Perhaps the art supply companies are making the most of cheap labor in Cambodia or Viet Nam. But there doesn't seem to be a way to beat their prices in any of the mid-size or small formats.

With larger canvases, it's a different story. For one thing it's more expensive to ship larger canvases even if the manufacturing cost is low. Here at least it still pays to stretch your own.

The secret to successfully stretching a smooth canvas is to work from the middle outward, alternating long and short sides. If you do this correctly, your wrinkles will migrate outward away from the gradually expanding taut area in the middle. The linen being stretched in these photos is stretched on a 36 by 48 inch frame that has been cross-braced. The stretchers and cross-bracing came from a company called GalleryPro and I bought them as I buy a great deal of my art supplies online from ASW (Art Supply Warehouse). I find they have a great selection and nearly always the lowest price I can find. And, no, I'm not paid for that endorsement.

I now have honest-to-goodness canvas pliers. It's a very worthwhile purchase, and not just to save your knuckles. By the way, don't bother getting any other kind except 100% metal pliers. Anything else (ie. plastic) will break and you'll need to replace.

Oh, one other difference between canvas then and now. It is, of course, possible to stretch a canvas too tight. Back in the 1970s when you did this it meant that the canvas might suddenly tear on the frame. Today it's more likely that the stretchers might break. The wood being sold as stretchers is not as good today.

Finished

Finished. Signed. Small differences between this image and the previous posted. Are they noticeable? Perhaps only to me.

Progress is our most important product

Glazing underway. A bit more to go. And lighter areas replaced with more opaque mixtures. It's kind of a shame that the most fun part of the painting is the part that goes the fastest. The glazing is far and away the most satisfying stage of the painting but it tends also to go very quickly, even allowing for drying time between glazes.

Some painters seem to get lost in applying multiple glazes. Titian was said to have done thirty, forty and fifty glazes in one area to achieve a single optical color effect, if we can believe stories from his studio assistants. (He is also said to have painted a great deal with his fingers, but that is another story.) I have not found that more glazes are always better. What is true is that the glazes should be whisper-thin and built up gradually. Sometimes I apply the glaze and then take a cloth and remove perhaps 90% of it, leaving only the remnant of the glaze that has retreated to the crevices in the texture of the linen.

There is a temptation to apply all the color in a single glaze the thickness and consistency of the surface of a candied apple. But the end result is not so good. Believe me, I've tried.

New and large

36 by 48 inches -- that's fairly large both for me and for my little studio. On a medium/rough linen weave. I love the texture and the scale. Monochromatic underpainting with color glazes in a glossy alkyd to follow.

Starting with the highlights

One of the interesting aspects of working on a neutral ground is that, if you choose, you can begin with the highlights. I find this to be a very refreshing way to work. We are so used to putting dark marks on light surfaces that to do the opposite kind of forces me to stay engaged in a way I might not when beginning a painting like this.

This one is large (see comment from my mathematically inclined son on my earlier post) at 36 x 48 inches. And while Chris can tell you why that not only seems much larger than 30 by 40, but in fact IS much larger (by about 44%), for me, it's the practical consideration that in my crowded little studio I can just fit this baby on the easel.