Getting the Most Out of Workshops

One of my close painter friends does beautiful work and is represented in prestigious galleries, yet she has taken few if any classes or workshops. This is a very unusual and impressive achievement. Learning to paint well requires personal discipline, endless practice, ruthless experimentation, and the unusual ability to act as your own objective critic and mentor. Most of us cannot summon up the time, energy, or dedication to follow this difficult path. Most of us rely on classes and workshops to jump-start our journey and for refueling along the way.

Workshops provide an opportunity to study intensely with a painter whose work you admire and whose teaching skills, one hopes, are comparable. Unlike my friend, most serious painters have taken many workshops and may continue to do so even after they themselves are offering workshops of their own.

I attend perhaps one workshop a year, always with a painter whose work I truly admire. My goal is not simply to copy the instructor's style, but to become familiar with how they think and work in the hope that I can incorporate some of what they have learned into my own process. With this goal in mind, I abandon my usual way of working and follow the instructor's as closely as possible. After all, I don't need to fork out several hundred dollars to paint like myself; I can do that for free!

Study in Red and Green. I painted this still life during a workshop
with master still life painter Jeff Legg. It is painted in the
manner of Jeff Legg, though not so skillfully. My own
approach would be looser and less detailed, but I was there
to learn from Jeff, not to paint the same way I normally do

I use only the colors and other materials the instructor recommends. If he begins with a value sketch, I do a value sketch. If he prefers a palette knife to a brush, I use a palette knife. If he paints precisely, I paint precisely. My goal is to learn through imitation, and only later to incorporate what seems valuable into my own work.

Most workshops involve one or more demonstrations by the instructor. When I was a novice painter taking my first workshops, I didn't want to sit around watching the teacher paint; I wanted to paint myself. Only much later did I realize that demos were perhaps the most important part of a workshop because only there did you get to watch the "master" at work. By not paying attention, I deprived myself of valuable learning opportunities. When I started paying attention, workshops really began to pay off.

One problem for novice painters is not knowing enough even to know what to look for in a demo. I think that largely accounts for my lack of interest in the beginning. The most skillful instructors are aware of this and take pains to point out what you should be looking for at each step. These steps include choosing a subject, designing the composition, making preliminary drawings and value studies, selecting a color scheme, blocking in the painting, working with middle values, adding accents and highlights, and finishing a painting.

Some instructors approach a demo as if it they were painting in their studio. They offer little explanation as they work and do not welcome questions in the process. Without some guidance and permission to ask even the most obvious questions, the demo becomes a performance rather than a learning tool, entertaining perhaps but not particularly helpful.

The most useful workshops are focused and intense, like a good college class. The painters are serious about their craft and are there to learn. What I call "holiday workshops" (Paint in Tuscany with Steve!) are perhaps more fun but probably not as useful. But so what? Having fun is also important, especially since learning to paint is often so frustrating. A dedicated instructor will make sure that even her holiday workshops are valuable learning experiences.

Socializing with fellow participants is one of the most purely enjoyable parts of any workshop. Although most of you begin as strangers, you quickly settle into a relaxed camaraderie based on your shared passion for painting and your feeling that you are all in the foxhole together. Talking shop is not only fun but valuable. You can learn much from your peers and from watching how they approach their own work.

Among the goals I do not have for a workshop are the following:

• To create a finished painting. That might happen, but I don't count on it, and I am not disappointed if it doesn't. Your most successful workshop just might turn out to be one where everything you did seemed hopeless.
• To impress the teacher. This is a tough one because we all want to impress the teacher, but I try not to succumb to this temptation. It's not my job to impress the teacher; it's the teacher's job to impress me! I pay money to learn from a teacher, not to impress her.
• To see instant improvements in my work. That would be nice, but it's not the way most of us, at least, absorb new knowledge. Typically, weeks or months drag on before we successfully integrate what we have learned into our own work.

What I do expect are:

• An instructor who is well prepared and organized.
• Common courtesy and respect.
• Personal attention.
• Helpful demonstrations.
• Objective mentoring and critiques. 
• Specific recommendations for moving forward.  

Paint the Shapes!

When I first began to paint seriously, I believed, like most novices, that my job was to render the objects before me--apples, people, barns, teacups, whatever--as convincingly as possible. The more detail, the better. Verisimilitude was the goal, and success or failure in my mind were measured solely by the degree to which I achieved it.

This is a worthwhile exercise because it develops drawing skills, and the ability to accurately render both value and color, all of which are necessary if one is to make progress as a representational painter. Focusing exclusively on verisimilitude, however, even at the earliest stages can, in my experience, retard rather than advance a student's progress.

An example from my own background. At least a decade before I took up fine-art painting, I had written and illustrated two field guides to plants and animals.

As part of that effort I created several hundred detailed illustrations, drawn in pencil or ink and colored using acrylics. In later editions, I did all the illustrations directly in Photoshop, like the mushrooms  shown at left. As a result, when I turned to fine art painting, I came equipped with extensive experience drawing and painting accurate representations of complex "objects." What I quickly learned, however, was that my experience as an illustrator of field guides did not prepare me for the much more complicated task of creating even a simple painting. Moreover, I had a difficult time understanding that my most important job as a representational painter was not simply to render objects convincingly but to arrange those objects in visually compelling designs. In this regard, representational painters and abstract painters share the same goal.

As a result of my experience, I expose my own students early-on to the idea of painting "shapes," not "objects." I encourage them to view their apples and boats and wine bottles not as isolated entities but as abstract shapes to be arranged in the picture plane. "Paint shapes, not objects," I cry, as the students, with eyes rolling, forge ahead.

Steve Whitney, Morning, Acrylic

Morning (above) seen as a mosaic of shapes The painting was actually
conceived  in this way, with the main objects on the table overlapping 
to create a large complex shape. The so-called negative spaces around 
the main shape consist of the table surface, tablecloth fall, back wall
and milk carton. The definition of shapes in a painting is always
to some degree arbitrary. What matters is not so much their particular
boundaries as the fact that you are conceiving your painting in this way.

I can tell by student response (and by remembering my own initial response) that some of them, at least, can't quite wrap their heads around the idea. It is, after all, a foreign concept. But until they do, their work will remain amateurish regardless of how skilled they become in rendering individual objects.

Beginning students cease to be beginners when they finally grasp that the real goal of all painting is to arrange abstract shapes in compelling designs, and then consistently attempt to do so in their own work.

Women in Art

Painting pictures began in Western Europe sometime in the Middle Ages as a craft, like making weapons and armor, barrels, roofs, pottery, candles, and so on. The clients were mainly the Church and, secondarily, nobility with both the money and the taste to commission works of their own. Like other crafts, painting was controlled by local guilds, which consisted almost entirely of men and boys, masters and their apprentices. Guess who didn't get to paint?

Most women painters worked in private, but a very few were so gifted or fortunate or both that they enjoyed a measure of public recognition and financial success. Nevertheless, these pioneers even today are rarely accorded the same respect as their better known male contemporaries. The following examples, all from artists born before 1900, show clearly that they deserve wider recognition and greater respect.

Sofonisba Anguissola (1530-1625)
The Chess Game

Artemisia Gentilleschi (1597-1651)
Judith and Her Servant

Judith Leyster (1600-1660)
Young Boy with a Flute

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842)
Self Portrait

Marie Bracquemond (1841-1916)
On the Terrace at Sevres

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
On the Veranda

Mary Casatt (1844-1926)
Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge

Cecilia Beaux (May 1, 1855 – September 7, 1942)
Henry Sturgis Drinker

Euphemia Charlton Fortune (1885-1969)
California Sierra

Today, women outnumber men in every painting class and workshop. Men still dominate the professional scene, but there are thousands of gifted women artists, many who have enjoyed financially successful careers. The sidebar to the right includes links to the websites of a few of my favorites.

Afraid of the Darks

We paint the light by painting the darkness around it. Do not be afraid of the darks. They form the backbone of your painting and provide the context for your lights.

Precept #1
Paint the darks first. Add the lights to the darks. (Watercolor painters, because of the transparency of their medium, usually paint the lights first and the darks last. If you work in watercolor, you nevertheless should plan your darks before you start painting, either in your head or, preferably, in a quick value study.)

Value studies using designer markers

Precept #2
Keep all the darks in your painting, even white in shadow, darker than all your lights.
 
Precept # 3
In complex shadowed areas, you can introduce a variety of darks so long as they are the same value and chroma. This will prevent such areas from becoming dull or muddy.

Who knew sand was purple? It actually is in the right light, but probably not so purple
as shown here. But because the value of the shadow is correct, the effect is entirely
believable. Way Through the Dunes, Oil on canvas.

 
Precept #4
Mud occurs when a dark is the wrong value, temperature, or both. Mud is not intrinsic to any particular color or mix of colors.
 
Precept #5
Do not overemphasize reflected lights in shadow. They fracture your darks and cause them to look unshadowlike. If you must introduce a reflected light into a shadow, make sure it is close in value to the predominant shadow color.
 
Useful Combinations

• Viridian and Cadmium Red Light = dark, neutral; i.e., near black. Viridian is blue with a touch of yellow; cad red light is red with a touch of yellow-the resulting combination therefore contains red, yellow, and blue. Tinted with white, the mixture yields a range of lovely warm or cool grays. You can adjust the temperature of the mixture by letting either the green or the red predominate.
• Viridian and Alizarin Crimson = deep, rich violets. Can be tinted to make a variety of lovely, neutralized lavenders.
• Ultramarine Blue and Yellow Ochre = deep, neutralized green. Excellent for shaded foliage and for conifers. Ultramarine blue has a touch of red; ochre is yellow with a touch of red and blue. Again, the result is a mix of three primaries.
• Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna = deep, rich browns. Can be tilted toward warm or cool tones. In equal amounts it yields a near-black.

Mixing Technique

Put a generous blob of each pigment side by side and gradually mix them together
until you get the dark you want. Don't just plop one color onto the other until you
have enough experience with the mix to be able to quickly judge how much is
appropriate for the color you want.

Mixing Shade and Shadows

In painting terms "shade" and "shadow" are loosely used to describe the side of an object away from the light as well as the shadow cast by the object. The darkest area on an object occurs along the boundary separating shadow from light. This dark is called the core shadow. The lightest part on the shaded side of an object occurs as a reflected light along the edge farthest from the light source. This reflected light is the color bouncing off a nearby object or surface.

The shaded side of an object is normally a darker, neutralized version of the local color of the object. A cast shadow is normally a darker neutralized version of the local color of the surface on which the shadow is cast. Artists, however, often take liberties with these colors, but this should be attempted only when you are able consistently to get the values right using the normal colors.

A quick and dirty recipe for mixing shade and shadow colors. To the local color add a
touch of its complement. For example, to make a shaded red, add a little dark green;
dark to indicate shadow, green to slightly neutralize the mix. The resulting mix
should still read as red, but a darker, grayer red.

White and yellow present special problems. Because white objects are so reflective,
they are almost never actually white, but, rather, pale tints of other colors.
Accordingly, white in shadow is not neutral gray, but a darker version of whatever
tint or tints make up the white in the light.

Yellow in shadow tilts either toward green or toward orange. The direction you
choose should depend on the local color (i.e., whether the yellow in light is warm or
cool) and on the colors around it. Most importantly perhaps, chose the color that best harmonizes with the rest of your painting.

Blue and violet also present additional problems because if you add their
complements you make them lighter. The trick is to make sure you don't paint your
blues and violets in the light too dark.

Shadows gradually lighten as they extend out from the objects that cast them. The
far edge of a shadow is paler and softer than near the object. The darkest part of a
shadow is a thin line marking where the object touches the surface on which it rests.
Cast shadows should have soft edges, even when cast on a hard surface. By "soft," I
don't mean completely blurred, just not knife-edge hard. And that edge increasingly
softens (blurs) with distance from its source.

In this plein-air painting, the cast shadows on the left grow lighter
and softer with distance from the object and also with distance
from the viewer. High Summer Garden, oil on canvas.

Watercolor: The Novice's Choice, the Master's Medium

My first painting class was in watercolor. Of course it was! Watercolor seems to be the overwhelming choice among novice painters. It's easy to understand why.
Fine watercolor paintings are stunning in their vibrancy, seeming spontaneity, and high energy. Playing with the flow of color on paper is intoxicating. Watercolor supplies are readily acquired and, at least initially, cost less than comparable equipment in most other media--a few tubes, a plastic palette a few brushes, and paper. You don't even need a proper studio; a desk or dining room table are adequate for the beginner. Clean-up is simple, and the water is almost free.

Winter Light Near Bayview, private collection

I enjoyed my years learning to paint with watercolors, and I love watercolor paintings by contemporary masters of the medium, such as Alvaro Castagnet, Deanne Lemley, Carla O'Connor, Alex Powers, Charles Reid, John Salminen, and Eric Weigardt. And yet, I cannot recommend watercolor as a first choice for novice painters.


Novice painters face two challenges:

1. Mastering the fundamentals of making pictures, namely drawing, composition, values, color, and edges; and 
2. Mastering the idiosyncrasies of the particular medium one has chosen.

If that medium is watercolor, as it was for me, then the difficulty is compounded because watercolor is uniquely unforgiving of beginner mistakes. Masters of the medium can recover from missteps, using a variety of tricks and techniques. But master painters rarely make bad mistakes, so recovery is usually trivial. Beginners, however, routinely make fatal mistakes that no tricks can resolve.

As a result, many novice watercolor painters are typically tentative and risk averse--attitudes that slow down learning and lead to indifferent paintings that do little to encourage their creators.

I believe that starting with acrylic or oil provides a faster path to competency in painting. Acrylic and oil are not easier than watercolor; they are simply more forgiving. With acrylic, you can paint over mistakes. With oil, you can scrape them off or paint over them when dry. Both media reduce fear and thereby encourage boldness and exploration because one can always recover even from the worst mistakes.

Still, if one loves watercolor and is willing to persevere, the rewards are enormous. I learned to paint mainly using watercolors, and you can too. Just expect to take a little longer than you would using a more forgiving medium.

Marmalade, private collection

It's Just a Painting

Painting is the only art that many people seem to think you can do with no training. No one presumes to pick up a violin and make sounds anyone wants to listen to. No one believes you can dance ballet or sing opera without training. I remember an art history professor who, in response to a student's comment about a Jackson Pollock painting that "anyone could do that," said, "Yes, but he's the one who did it."

On the other hand, mastery of the craft of painting alone  is by itself no guarantee of greatness. Art history is full of painters who display enormous skill but whose work somehow fails to move us. Yes, tastes, which differ from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age, play a big role in our estimations of quality. Even so, we all probably can name a painter whose work, though widely revered, leaves us unmoved.

Painting well is difficult, and competence, much less mastery, typically requires years rather than weeks or months. Someone once said that everyone has a thousand bad paintings in them, and the best thing is to get them painted as quickly as possible. Ideally, that means painting every day. In practice, that means painting at every opportunity. There are no shortcuts and only so much time.

Most artists paint because they must. I am no different. I don't entirely understand this irresistible urge to make images, but it feels a little like magic or alchemy. A painter begins with what is essentially a colored mud or slurry, and with a large measure of hard-won skill, a dash of luck, and a pinch of inspiration, may end up with an object of surpassing beauty, an object that has the power to move those who look upon it. One can never predict when such magic will happen, and when it happens to me, I am at a loss to explain how or why. But the feeling of completion and well-being is so intense at such times that I will continue to paint in the hope of experiencing it one more time. 

For me, the act of making a painting is far more valuable than the painting itself. That's why my favorite painting is always the one I'm working on. Not all artists share this feeling, but many do. As I tell my students, "Don't get too precious, it's just a painting. You can always do another." More to the point, you should!

Why Must I Paint? Why Must You?

There is no other activity in life that gives me so much satisfaction as creating a beautiful image in paint. Creating a beautiful image is one part of the equation; creating it in paint is the other.

Artist with Soft Drink . . . Really!

One can make beautiful images with a camera, and many of the same skills that are required for creating successful paintings are also necessary for good photographs: imagination and a good sense of design being the two most important. But even the best photograph lacks the compelling presence of a painting. Regardless how much technique and darkroom (or digital editing) work goes into creating a fine photograph, the hand of the photographer is never visible. Even multiple exposures and other forms of photographic manipulation do not reveal the work behind them, not in the same sense that the arrangement of paint on paper reveals the brushwork of the painter.

The same is true of computer graphics. Many computer-generated images are beautiful; some are downright amazing. As with photographs, however, the hand of the computer artist is largely hidden, and many of the effects are algorithmically generated. Two computer artists using the same software for creating their imagery can differ in their choice of effects, how they are combined, in what order they are applied, and where in the image to apply them. But once those choices have been made, the computer algorithmically manages the actual rendering. The imagination of the artist is there to view; the hand of the artist is nearly invisible.

This is not to denigrate digital artistry. I practice it myself, using Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop Elements, but however well executed, digital paintings do not carry the same weight and visual impact as their physical counterparts.

"Battle Weary," created in Corel Painter 12

Paintings, like sculptures, exist as unique objects generated by a craftsman. As such, they have presence and weight, which are appreciated only in the presence of the artwork itself. A printed image, whether it be a computer graphic, photograph, silkscreen, or other type of reproduction is not only not unique but does not itself embody the creative act that produced it. A print, rather is an artifact through which we can infer the creativity that produced it. With traditional prints, the original created object from which the prints are drawn is tangible and concrete. With photos and computer images, however, there is no tangible created object. The creativity resides in sequences of ones and zeros within the computer, or within the slurry of chemicals from which the original negative was created.

Painting considered purely as a craft has no special claim to greatness. It is, like whittling, crocheting, or basket weaving, simply a set of skills that humans can learn to do with their hands. Millions of well-crafted illustrations perform valuable functions but are quickly forgotten once they have served their purposes. Whatever it is, then, in great paintings that continue to seize our imaginations over and over again, it is not the product of craft alone. Therefore, a painter does not aspire to craft alone but to some kind of transcendent statement. If the endeavor is to be more worthwhile than, say, playing bridge, it must serve some larger purpose than mere entertainment.

Modernism argued that the statement was everything. Not only was the craft of painting irrelevant to modernists, many or even most went out of their way to hide what craft they had or to avoid acquiring it in the first place. To draw or paint skillfully suggested that you were paying attention to the wrong things.

If one has to choose between craft and content, then I suppose content must win out. But the choice is unnecessary. Craft and content can and still do reside together in the work of many painters. We do not need to settle for painters who have something to say but lack the tools to say it effectively.

What is it that I want to say in my paintings? Nothing obvious, that’s for sure. I have no love for the polemical in art and have no particular message I wish to convey in my work. But I am smitten with the beauty of the world and use painting, I believe, as a way of participating in that beauty more fully. Drawing and painting are my favorite ways of being mindful, of being fully present in and responsive to the world. When I am engaged in making art, I am in an altered state, though not necessarily a blissful one. It sounds corny, but when I paint I feel more “alive.”