Fixing a painting

I rarely ever go back and fix my paintings. In fact, more often than not, I wipe them off with turps and just start over. There have been a few times when I let something dry only to regret it later, because I really couldn’t live with what was on the canvas. When that happens, there are really three choices.

The first obvious choice is to do nothing. In this case, the painting will usually lay around until I either give it away or toss it in the bin.

The second choice is to sand it down and prime over it. This is messy but at least I get to re-use the surface.

The third choice is to try and fix what’s broken. Sometimes this is fixing something small, like bumping shadows around, but sometimes it’s something a lot harder, like softening edges. Since I normally paint direct (wet into wet), I don’t have a lot of experience with softening edges after paint is dry. I generally treat situations like this as learning experiences. It either goes well and I fix it, or it goes poorly and I learn something (and then bin it).

Of course there are other things that can go wrong with a painting besides the paint. I’ve had stretcher bars crack, so re-stretching is a thing. I’ve had canvases be a tiny bit too large or just slightly out of square, so re-stretching and sometimes “editing” is in order. These kinds of changes are a little scarier since I am usually happy with the painting itself and I don’t want to ruin that just to sort out some structural issue.

All of this is an opportunity to learn though. The more I paint, the more mistakes I make and the more I learn. All I can do is keep painting.

Surfaces

I’ve been experimenting with different painting surfaces lately, so I decided to do a bit of reading on them. I’ll try to summarize some of what I learned in that research, and also share my own thoughts on the surfaces I’ve experimented with.

Let’s start with oil painting in general. The origins of painting in oils are a little hazy and somewhat complicated. There are Buddhist murals dating back to the 7th century that were done on stone walls and apparently contain oil. There are references in Europe from the 12th century for using oil to make paint but the usage is unclear, and it never took off for common use. So, we generally credit Jan Van Eyck in the 15th century with the origin of painting in oils — at least as a general purpose medium for creating art.

Prior to this, historical art (at least in the west) was primarily done in tempera or fresco. Since fresco is painting into wet plaster, there’s not a lot of choice as to what surface you can use. Tempera is not flexible when dry, so choices were still limited to rigid surfaces in theory (but if you look around on the internet now, you’ll find tempera works on canvas, paper, vellum, pretty much anything). Historically though, master works in tempera were likely done on rigid panels or walls.

Oil is flexible when dry and can be painted on almost anything. Of course, most surfaces need to be treated before they can be used to paint on or the oil based suspension medium will damage the surface. This is called “sizing” (etymology of this term is unclear), and it’s usually some sort of glue — historically made from animal skin. Applying a size protects the surface from damage, but it may not be pleasant to paint directly onto glue. For wood panels, the glue would be mixed with some sort of plaster or gypsum or marble dust, and possibly a whitener. This is what used to be called “gesso” and was only used on rigid surfaces such as wood panels. (Note: modern “gesso” is typically just acrylic primer.) Since gesso itself is rigid and cannot be applied to a flexible surface like canvas, when a canvas is sized it is commonly also primed with a base layer of paint. Historically this would have been an oil base with a whitener — likely lead. Modern primers for artists are often made with alkyd resin and titanium.

Other historical surfaces include copper and canvas. Canvas became popular in Venice due to availability of sail cloth, but is also the most reasonable surface for really large paintings. Even murals on walls are subject to changes in the surface of a wall but canvas is flexible so the flexible oil based suspension medium is well suited for it. Canvas is also light compared to other surfaces making it easier to transport.

Modern surfaces include all of the historical surfaces listed above (including paper and vellum) and add newer surfaces like aluminum, MDF, canvas boards, nylon, and probably others. People fall in love with a particular surface for its unique characteristics, whatever they are. People who paint on copper love the luminous quality it has, wood panels can be ultra smooth, etc. Finding a surface that works for me was going to be a bit of an experiment, but would never include every option. So I narrowed things down a bit with the research I did. Metal surfaces suffer from ionization which weakens the paint film, and are expensive and way too smooth for me. So, metal supports are out.

I tried paper, but it needs to be stretched on another support and it has a very “thirsty” surface. I didn’t like it. I tried boards in the past, and again recently. There are different “tooths” available in pre-primed panels. I tried the ultra smooth tooth, and it was horrible for me. I tried a heavy tooth, and it was way too rough (lots of little bumps with light and shadow all over the place). I then tried medium tooth (probably should have started there) which felt OK, and I thought it would work out but was still inferior to canvas, from my perspective. The benefit of using panel boards is that they are thin and are easy to carry in wet carriers for traveling with a painting after it’s done (plein air painting or workshops, etc.). Since I rarely need to carry wet paintings around, this isn’t a big issue for me right now. If a get into plein air, it may be something I need to think about, but even then, I’d rather figure out a way to carry around wet stretched canvas than to switch back to using panels.

So, I’m back to using canvas. In terms of what type of canvas, I prefer fine linen. I’ve used cotton (and still have some raw blankets around, so I’ll keep using it until it’s gone), but fine linen has the best tooth, stays out of my way, and just works for me. I don’t ever feel like I’m fighting with the surface when I paint on linen. I was definitely fighting the panels and the paper. I often use pre-stretched canvasses, mostly because I have so little time to work in the studio. I’d rather spend that time just painting instead of stretching and prepping surfaces. Although when I do prepare a surface myself, I really enjoy the process and feel a kind of connection to the surface in a way that doesn’t happen with pre-stretched canvas.

Maybe I’ll revisit this sometime, but for now I’ll keep painting on canvas. In the future, maybe I’ll spend some time in a future post on pre-stretched vs. home stretched.

What to paint

For the majority of my journey into oil painting, I’ve been primarily focused on learning how to paint. Since I paint representationally, that includes things like drawing in proportion and mixing colors, etc. I’ve taken workshops for portraiture and still life to help with the learning curve, and I think it has helped. But, what I seem to run into all the time is finding subjects I’m really excited about.

Take still life, for example. I don’t think the world needs yet another painting of fruit or flowers. But, painting fruit and flowers is a great way to learn fundamental skills in oil painting. (Note: if you love paining fruit and flowers, you should absolutely do it! But since I don’t, I wouldn’t be doing it to scratch my artistic itch. I’d be doing it just to “do it”.)

I know there’s validity to the thinking that it doesn’t matter what you paint as long as you paint it well — even something banal can be lit in such a way to evoke drama and beauty, etc. I’m sure that’s true. But given an almost infinite number of things to light and paint with beauty and drama, why not pick something of interest to you?

This is where I’m at. I’m painting every weekend, and I have a lot of material from places like UPsplash to use as references. I won’t get better at painting by not painting, so I’m going to paint what I have. I’ll even do more still life work. I’m thinking of maybe doing a book series, but it may turn out to be boring, so we’ll see.

So, while I’m going to keep on painting, I’m also going to try and work on finding more interesting things to paint, and find more interesting ways to “see” them (lighting, composition, etc.). I’ll try to work on the drama and beauty in the lighting of the subject as well as finding subjects that scratch my itch.

Artists

Have you ever seen a movie about John F. Kennedy? Most people my age would say they have seen more than one. But there’s one in particular that stands out, and that’s J.F.K. by Oliver Stone.

I bring this up because even though there are many movies about Kennedy, this is not just a J.F.K. movie — it’s an Oliver Stone movie.

Oliver stone isn’t just a film maker, he’s an artist who makes films.

I don’t just want to be a painter, I want to be an artist who paints. Art is a life long endeavor.

So, what about craft? skill? These are the things I seem to occupy myself with the most. I want to paint “better”, which is completely subjective. It ties in with art though. If I scratch my own itch and I’m true to myself (instead of full of myself), then I’m creating art. In order to do that (to my own satisfaction) I need to develop my craft.

The only way to get better at painting is to paint, so I’ll keep painting.

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.

Painting from photos

I recently did a painting for my wife. She asked me to paint some horses and gave me a calendar with a bunch of horse photographs in it. The photo she chose was very dramatic with very intense colors. It looked like an HDR photo. I understand why she liked the photo, but as a reference for an oil painting, it was problematic.

Most art instructors will tell you that painting from life is the best way to paint realism. I’m sure this is true because you see everything yourself — no camera or printer is limiting value range or interpreting color differently. But painting portraits from life has some difficulties, especially animals. So, we resort to using photographs. But the quality of the reference photo has a big impact on the final painting.

I’ve seen youtube videos of people painting horses and even dogs from life, but the results are … not what I’m trying to achieve. So, how do we choose a photo to paint from? I have friends that want me to paint their animal and show me a photo taken with their phone. These are usually nice to look at on a phone, but make for very poor reference photos to paint from. They are usually not in full focus (“boca” is a huge problem with photos as references for paintings). The colors are usually enhanced, which is very different from how things look in real life. And the lighting is usually not very good (hot spots or generally poor exposure settings).

The same is true for human portraits. Glamour photos are not good painting references. Trying to explain this is sometimes tricky. I usually just tell people if the photo is over exposed or the colors are enhanced, the painting will look too illustrative (like a cartoon). If the focus is too shallow, I’ll have to imagine what should have been there to make up depth and realism (imagine a photo where the nose is in focus but the eyes aren’t).

So, why not paint people from life? Surely they can sit still, right? Well, I usually spend a minimum of 20 hours or more on a portrait (not a sketch). This would require somebody to be available to sit still for hours a day over a few days — in the same clothes. The kind of people who want a portrait done don’t usually have that kind of time or temperament.

I prefer to take my own photos as references for a portrait. But, I realize there are going to be times where that’s not practical and I’ll need to rely on a photo reference from a client. I plan to work on writing up good guidelines on how to take a reference photo for a painting and share it with people who want me to paint their animals — and hope they’re able to pull it off.

Brushes

I just got some new brushes. They’re fancy and a little expensive, but I tried them out before committing to the purchase and I really like they way they handle and keep their shape. I paint almost exclusively with bristle filberts. The brushes I just got are 90% natural hog’s hair and 10% synthetic. Like I said — fancy.

But what is the real value of a brush? I mean, I’ve painted what I think is my best work with cheap bargain brushes that were flat (instead of the nice round filbert shape), splayed, etc. I’ve painted some of my worst with expensive high end brushes. So, why bother with the fancy stuff?

I think most artists will tell you that it’s got nothing to do with how expensive the brush is. It has to do with how the artist uses it. My cheap brushes are still in my rotation. For about 90% of what I paint, they’re fine. In fact, they’re great! It’s that last 10% where getting better spring and a true shape makes it just a little bit easier to get the effect I want. It doesn’t mean my paintings will improve with my new brushes, but my enjoyment of the process will.

Learning to enjoy the process regardless of the results is one of the secrets to success in just about anything.

The Color Of Light

We talk about light temperature and light color in art and photography circles. We often have either an incomplete or incorrect understanding of it, even if we utilize it effectively. So, not being a scientist, I did my best to try and understand this and will attempt to explain what I found. I encourage any actual physicists to weigh in and offer corrections.

Light is the word we use to refer to that part of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that our eyes can see without special equipment. That word “spectrum” is important. It refers to electromagnetic waves within a range of lengths or frequencies that the acronym I learned in school corresponds to, “ROYGBIV”.  I sometimes see this written out like a name, ROY G. BIV. This stands for “Red”, “Orange”, “Yellow”, “Green”, “Blue”, “Indigo”, “Violet”. Nobody knows why indigo is included, so just ignore it. At one end of the spectrum is violet, at roughly 400 nanometers in length. At the other end is red, at 700-780 nanometers in length.

These lengths can be converted to frequencies, which describe how often the wave peak crosses a point of observation in some time period at a fixed speed. This is usually a wave at the speed of light crossing a point of observation in one second, and we call it “terahertz”. The longer the wave, the fewer peaks of a wave at a constant speed will cross the point of observation, and therefore the lower the terahertz. The lower the frequency, the less energy a wave has, so longer wave lengths have less energy than shorter ones. This means blue, at 450nm, has more energy than red, at 700nm.

So, we can describe this in terms of nanometer lengths or terahertz frequencies, but we can also use kelvins as another way to label the energy of these waves. Kelvins are interesting and I encourage you to read about them, but to simplify, they are a measure of heat (or energy) that are rooted at absolute zero and have the same magnitude as celsius degrees. That is, zero kelvins is roughly equal to -237 degrees celsius. Kelvins are used to measure “the relative temperature of light as defined by the total radiative power per square unit”. So when we talk about light temperature, especially now that we have compact fluorescent and LED light bulbs with variable temperature, what we are really measuring is the energy (frequency, a function of the wavelength, etc.) of the electromagnetic waves emitted from the bulb.

We know that “blue” shifted white light has a temperature of greater than 5000K while “red” shifted white lite has a temperature of less than 2000K. This follows what I learned in school, ROYGBIV. Red light waves are longer than blue ones, and therefore have less energy. This also explains atmospheric perspective and its effect on light temperature. Red light has less energy than blue light, so over long distances, red light drops out, then orange and yellow, and finally green. We’re left with whatever blue or violet remains.

Note that the use of kelvins for measuring the temperature of the color of light seemingly contradicts what artists usually say about the “color temperature” of paint. Blue paint is cooler than red, etc. In terms of electromagnetic waves, blue light is higher energy and more kelvins than red. I sometimes hear people refer to flames to describe this: the blue part of the flame is hotter than the red. This is true, and tallies with this discussion of kelvins as a way to describe the energy of electromagnetic waves. See my earlier blog post about why this has nothing to do with the color temperature of paint.

Now, nobody needs to know any of the science to mix colors or paint well. It hasn’t helped me paint better landscapes. If we paint what we see, we can forget about all of the physics and just paint. This is the reason why the “primary colors” we use as artists are correct in our context, even though physicists use a different set of colors as primary. Their primaries are correct in their context, which is measuring electromagnetic waves. Our context is smooshing colored paste together to get the effect we want.

Here is an example of color temperature from one of the old masters, Rubens, who often used “cool” highlights and “warm” shadows.

The Duke of Buckingham.

Here are two examples of color temperature from Church. Note that in the first, Church uses warm highlights and in the second he uses cool. In both you can see the effects of atmospheric perspective in the distant mountains.

Twilight In The Wilderness

The Heart Of The Andes

This is just my attempt to demystify the terminology we use, and since I’m not a physicist, it’s likely I got some of this wrong, so don’t take my word for it. If this interests you, do your own research and share it!

Hopefully, somebody finds this interesting or entertaining. Either way, I’ll just keep painting.

A Compass And A Map

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Navigators use different tools to get where they’re going, depending on what they need at the time. An experienced navigator might be able to use only a compass. A less experienced navigator in the same situation might need a map.  A non-navigator might need turn by turn instructions.

This is true for, say, traveling from New York to Chicago by car, or Trenton to Philadelphia on horseback. Though there could be times when even an experienced navigator needs to refer to a map, or an experienced driver might run into traffic or a road closure and be well served with turn by turn directions to get back on track.

But what about navigating life? Or education? Learning music or painting?

As a beginner, needing structure and more explicit guidance in learning a new craft or subject is likely very useful. As we gain experience and develop skills, we might feel like we need less prescriptive guidance and prefer a more general approach. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever get value from stronger guidance. It depends on context.

When first learning to paint, I felt like I needed a lot of explicit guidance and there really wasn’t a whole lot around. I wanted somebody to tell me how to hold a brush and how to physically mix one color with another to get a third color, how to load a brush with paint, how to apply it to the surface correctly, etc. How much paint should I use? Should I use a brush or a knife?

I needed a map. Actually, I needed turn by turn directions. Now, I mostly need a compass but there are times when turn by turn directions would be a big help.

So where do aspiring artists go for guidance? Often, it’s the internet -- specifically, YouTube. While there are a lot of great artists on YouTube, the actual guidance one gets there ranges from turn by turn instructions without any context, to barely more than a compass without sufficient practical guidance (a map) to be useful to beginners.

Studying with an art instructor in person, through workshops or classes, can certainly help. It depends on the instructor though, and not everybody has a local art instructor they can work with. Still, in my experience, it’s the most effective way to get what you need, no matter your skill level. Even in this case, it’s important to stick with one instructor, if possible. If not possible, stick with one method or approach. That’s the best way to get the best understanding of The Thing You’re Learning and not get distracted by All The Other Things. There’s a lot of different approaches to learning and teaching how to paint. They can all be fun, but learning them all at once isn’t likely the most fruitful approach.

There are now more online art schools and ateliers that may be able to bridge the gap between YouTube and live workshops. I don’t have any experience with any of them, so I can’t comment on their effectiveness. But as long as you can ask a specific question and get a specific answer, they’re probably a lot better than watching a video alone. Just try to be aware of what you need at any given time, and ask yourself, “do I need a compass or a map?”

Sometimes, I think I need a map when a compass would do. Sometimes I stubbornly stick with my compass when a map would make things so much easier.

No matter how I get where I’m going, though, I try to focus on the journey.

Day Job Blues

When I was a young man, I was a working musician. I always had some other job, just to help pay the bills, but my priority was always music. Then, quite on accident, I got a “real job”. It was a job with benefits and good money, and I was torn as to whether or not I should take it. I knew it meant a shift in priorities. I even remember telling my family about the job where they all congratulated me but when I told my musician friends, they all said some version of “sorry to hear it” because they too knew it meant a shift in priorities.

All these years later, I don’t regret the decision, but I occasionally lament not being a musician. Now that I’m painting again, I find I’m very defensive of my painting time. However, every now and then my day job bleeds into my painting time. It’s got to take priority for many practical reasons, but I still lament not being able to paint whenever I want.

Temperature

In art circles, we use terms like “temperature” to mean something totally different than the common meaning. We’re not the only ones — lighting uses the kelvin scale to measure light temperature, which is also different from the common meaning. But in art circles, we’re not even internally consistent.

Have you ever heard of a “warm blue” or a “cool red”? Most artists generally refer to “relative” color temperature without explicitly saying (or sometimes without knowing it). Any shade of blue is certainly cooler than the “coolest” red. But a warm blue (ultramarine) is warmer than a neutral blue (cobalt blue?) or a cool blue (pthalo blue?, cerulean blue?, prussian blue?). The same is true for any primary. The relative temperature varies by how the neutral hue is biased.

Ultramarine is biased towards purple. Cerulean is biased towards green. And so on. The same is true for reds and yellows. Red can be biased towards its secondary neighbors, as can yellow. It gets a little confusing when we start comparing temperatures among some of these though. Is a red biased towards orange warmer than a neutral red? Many artists would say yes.

If you use a limited palette, with just one blue and one red and one yellow, you save yourself a lot of trouble trying to find the warm red vs the neutral red because you just have red. I like to keep things simple, so I usually only put one red on my palette, one blue, and one yellow. If I want to warm up my yellow, I add red. If I want to cool down my red, I add blue. And so on.

Maybe I’ll expand my horizons one day, but for now, I like it simple.

Under the weather

In a pandemic, “under the weather” can be a call to panic. What if it’s covid? Imagine hoping for strep?

The actual weather may not help. Do you have the chills because it’s cold outside? Are you feverish or is the heat set too high? Do you take ibuprofen for that headache or stick with acetaminophen/paracetamol just in case?

The new normal is still a work in progress.

So am I.

Good Intentions

“If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am not for others, what am I?” - Hillel the Elder

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” - Augustine of Hippo

“If you had everything you ever wanted, where would you put it?” - George Carlin