Alla Prima

I paint in what’s often called “direct”, or in one layer. Sometimes this is called “wet-in-wet” painting. This is not necessarily the same as alla prima, which is usually painting in one sitting rather than over many days. However, because of my current situation, I generally only get to paint on weekends, so doing a “full” painting over several days isn’t really an option. So, I’ve been painting in one sitting, for the most part.

I also paint what is generally called “representationally”, rather than “non-representationally”. This just means I try to paint in such a way that my painting is meant to look like the subject. Sometimes people mistakenly refer to non-representational art as “abstract” but the way I paint is actually quite abstract. In fact, most representational art is abstract to some degree.

What I’ve noticed though, is that now that I’m painting in one sitting, my painting is not only “looser” or more abstract, but it’s more illustrative. This is a term to describe a lack of realism. My paintings turn out to look a little bit “cartoon-ish”. When I paint over several days and really take my time, the realism is of higher quality (usually). When I try to analyze what’s going on with my alla prima “cartoon-ish” work, it looks to me like the highlights are off. The apparent values are a little too high key in too many places.

I wonder what’s going on with this. I don’t mind the looseness of the paintings, but I’m struggling with why painting in one sitting pushes me to get these values wrong. Some of the time the values aren’t even that wrong — it could be the values would be fine but the highlights are not proportional (too much highlight in the wrong spot). I think I’m having trouble with what some people refer to as “seeing through the illusion”.

Painting representationally, or realism, requires seeing through the illusion we all rely on every day to make sense of what our eyes tell our brain is in view. This illusion is how we perceive things in three dimensions, for example. We rarely ever need to break down what we see in such a way that we can separate out the parts that imply distance or a a rounded edge, but that’s what our brains get as input and what we use to piece together the information we get from vision. We may use other senses to help with judging things like distance (sound, touch, etc.) but all our eyes provide in the way of sensory information is (mostly) reflected light. Our brains do the rest.

In order to paint realism, seeing through the illusion so we can identify the way color changes over distance, or how light strikes a surface to illuminate the form, is very handy indeed. Maybe in order to paint faster (in one sitting) I need to learn how to “see faster”, or see through the illusion better. There are many artists who paint alla prima and still manage to have great values and not suffer from the “too illustrative” problem I’m having, so I need to figure it out. Painting more would certainly help, but that’s the problem that led to this in the first place.

Anyway, a bad day painting is still a pretty good day. I’ll just keep painting.