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.

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.

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.

Are you peeking at my underpaints?

There's a conscious effort on my part here to create some interesting colors and optical effects by laying in some complimentary colors as underpainting. You can be the judge as to how successful this is when I'm finished.

I did this kind of underpainting in the composition at top. You can see traces of the orange underpainting peeking out from beneath the pale blue surface on which the two shells sit.

Ready for Spring

In preparation for the warm weather, plein air painting and, in particular, for a trip we are taking to Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May, I've been priming small canvas and linen panels with gesso toned a neutral gray. The advantage of working with toned surfaces is that one can go as easily toward highlights as toward shadows.

In fact, I found that once I started working this way it was more fun to start with the highlights. If the top two panels look like a different shade of gray, they are: those two panels are linen that came from the art store already oil primed white. Because they're oil primed the toning in gray has to be oil based as well, so that's a different mix.

I still tend to tone these things a bit too dark. One doesn't really want an exact 50% tone. It should be a little toward the light side ideally because all the subsequent glazing later on will tend to darken the canvas anyway. But at worst that will gie it all that warm, old master look.

Almost finished

I still need to adjust the highlights in the smaller shells. And that cone shaped whitish shell in the lower center is still too bright but I'm fairly happy with how this has gone. A little more work and it might be signature time.

The Portrait Project

For lack of a better name, seven of us are calling this the portrait project. We study at the Art Students League in Manhattan on Saturdays (myself, Claudia Monaco, Helene Balzarini, Michael Elsasser, Kurt Tatum, Myung-ja Chun, and Kevin McCaffrey) and we have joined together in a project in which we will each paint self-portraits and portraits of at least two others in the group. We each drew a random portrait assignment and we will each also paint (or draw) a portrait of at least one other in the group.

Most of us met six years ago while studying in Sherry Camhi's figure and anatomy class at the the League. We are all roughly middle-age and most of us returned to fine art after working on the fringes in areas like advertising, design, art direction etc.

In these two cases, I sketched the figures in charcoal and then began the underpainting in terra verte, a weak green pigment. I'm working on canvases primed in a neutral gray. In the case of Claudia's portrait, as is often the case for me, I found the charcoal drawing in some ways better than this underpainting. The charcoal makes her look younger than she is, but seems to capture the contours of her face better.

The first glazing for each of these two is a mixture of a great deal of yellow ochre with just a bit of vermillion. According to Jonathan Janson, this is the color Vermeer used for his skin tones. Janson's Essential Vermeer website is a real treasure for those who enjoy Vermeer and Rembrandt. He also has a self-published book, "How to paint your own Vermeer." Although the book has a good deal of valuable information, one quickly sees the pitfalls of self-publishing and why we need editors to keep authors on track. (Sequences of entire pages are repeated, sometimes only a short distance from their first appearance.)

Problems I see with the two portraits above: I need to keep my eyes in the self-portrait from becoming too cartoon-like. Claudia's portrait needs a background and more of a setting.

The members of the portrait project have given themselves a year for this project, after which we will begin to look for a venue in which to exhibit.