Painting Trees - IV

Craig Nelson demonstrates painting negative spaces in trees

More on painting trees! In class, I've particularly emphasized using the negative space to create the shapes of the trees. (Remember how we talked about "sky holes"?) Here's a YouTube video by Craig Nelson demonstrating that – Painting Negative Spaces in Trees and Foliage.

Craig Nelson using an "egbert," or long filbert, to paint foliage

He demonstrates using a particular kind of brush - an "egbert" – also called a long filbert. Notice how very long and slender the bristles are? It gives a delicacy and flexibility to the brush strokes that he is particularly looking for.

Nathanael Provis makes sure you never use a fan brush again

And if I haven't already discouraged you from using a fan brush to create generic-looking foliage, here's an artist who may help you see the light... See Art Disasters 3: How to Paint Trees - artist Nathanael Provis. Be sure to watch all the way to the end - you don't want to miss his rant on fan brushes. (Note: he is using oil paints, which dry much more slowly than acrylics.)

Jackson Pollock dancing with the brush

Hans Namuth's photograph of Jackson Pollock at work

Inspired by Jonas Gerard's dancing to paint? (If you haven't been introduced to Jonas Gerard yet, see my post from December 7, 2009, Dancing with the brush.) We are lucky to have film of Jackson Pollock painting, too – see examples at Jackson Pollock 51, which you can see on YouTube.com. Although he did not paint with the same sense of joy you can see in Jonas Gerard at work, he worked spontaneously, dancing with the brush (or stick) and paint.

Ed Harris, from his film Pollock

The scenes of Ed Harris as Pollock, painting in the film Pollock, are wonderful to watch, too. Here is a scene on Youtube.com – the clip is called Jackson Pollock dancing colors – he is painting his first monumentally large piece, after having torn out the walls of his studio in order to fit the canvas. Harris gives the viewer a good sense of the visceral, subconscious, dancing quality of the act of painting as Pollock practiced it.

It makes me want to get out a very big canvas, and dance....

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings and teaching have influenced an untold number of painters; who began teaching at U.C. Davis in 1960, and continues to teach there once a year though he is nearing ninety; and whose thoughtfulness, wisdom, love of painting, and endearing modesty shine through in his interviews, is profiled in these three videos.

Thiebaud first became known for his paintings of pastries – of rows of cakes and pie slices, but he has also painted series of still lifes (such as lipsticks), portraits, San Francisco cityscapes, and Sacramento Delta landscapes.

Wayne Thiebaud - CBS Sunday Morning gives a good sense of how Thiebaud never felt his success was predestined – and how hard he worked to get people to look at his paintings – as well as a good overview of his life and work. He says in it, "If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective." His good humor is clearly evident.

As the interviewer says, "His voluptuous oils look like buttercream on canvas. You don't just want to look at his pictures, one critic said, you want to lick them."

Artist Wayne Thiebaud at 87, a U.C. Davis video, presents interviews with Thiebaud, his colleagues, and his friends. Here, he says about painting, "It is pain and pleasure. Matisse says the best thing when he says, work is a paradise, but you have to know how to enter that paradise."

In KQED Spark – Wayne Thiebaud, the painter describes his process, saying, "So a lot of the work depends on problems. It can be a problem of color, a problem of light, a problem of space. Painting really can be a kind of miracle, 'cause it's a totally unnatural act. It ain't natural to make three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. It's strange – but wonderful."

"The movements in the picture needs to be there. The sequence of light needs to be considered. Have you included various kinds of light? Have you included, let's say, glints, gleam, glow, so that the light is like the life of light in its range. If it doesn't have a lot of this visual experience, then we run the risk of boring people."

"In a way, what keeps you going is the thrill of experimentation and expectation. That's what you do as a painter – you live on hope... that next picture."

Wayne Thiebaud's work can be seen until July 3rd, 2010, at the San Jose Museum of Art, in the show Wayne Thiebaud – Seventy Years of Painting. The talk he is scheduled to give April 1st has been sold out for over a month, but the museum plans to videotape it.

Painting with knives - Charles W. Hawthorne

Charles W. Hawthorne, detail of The Bath – Portrait of Emelyn Nickerson with Baby, 1915

Charles W. Hawthorne (1872 – 1930) was an influential American painter and teacher. In 1899 he opened the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which became an important American art school, and where each summer he taught plein air painting.

Charles W. Hawthorne, detail of The Bath – Portrait of Emelyn Nickerson with Baby, 1915

Some of his paintings from the nineteen-teens were lovely, luminous portraits using a lot of scumbling, such as you can see in these details of The Bath – Portrait of Emelyn Nickerson with Baby, from 1915. Many of these are portraits of common people, often doing ordinary things – not society portraits. In some portraits from this time you do see lines looking as though they were created with a palette or painting knife.

Charles W. Hawthorne, White Church, 1920

But by the 1920s, Hawthorne was using palette and painting knives to a much greater extent. Because of his influence as a teacher, he popularized their use. Here you can see how he used palette and painting knives to paint White Church; Town View, Provincetown; and Willows, all circa 1920.

Charles W. Hawthorne, Town View – Provincetown, 1920

Notice the broad, flat strokes of white for the building, and the wide, dark strokes of a fence below, contrasted with the narrow reddish fence posts and lines of the trees and tree branches, all looking distinctly un-brushy?

Charles W. Hawthorne, detail of Town View – Provincetown, 1920

Notice the interesting texture and feeling of spontaneity? Painting and palette knives can allow you to paint more quickly and spontaneoudly.

Charles W. Hawthorne, Willows, 1920

There is a local-ish connection here, too. Noted colorist Camille Przewodek, who lives in neighboring Sonoma County, studied with Henry Hensche, who was a student of and assistant to Hawthorne, and who continued teaching in Provincetown after Hawthorne's death. Although it may be tough to see a connection with these paintings, it is clearer when you see the colors Hawthorne began using later in the 20's. You can see more of Hawthorne's work here, at www.the-athenaeum.org.

Painterliness

Rembrandt, detail of self portrait from 1661

"Painterliness" refers to a quality of brush strokes, in which the brush strokes are highly visible, often looking thicker and tactile. It is contrasted with painting that is more linear, with a highly modeled, more controlled use of form, in which you don't see the brush strokes.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665

Rembrandt's work, especially his later work, was painterly (see the roughness? the obvious brush strokes in this detail of a self portrait?); Vermeer's was not. In Vermeer's paintings it is often difficult to see the stroke of the brush at all.

Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890

Van Gogh's work was painterly – the brush strokes here are even more obvious, and an important part of the painting as a whole. French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau's work was not – his intention was to eliminate the brush strokes and give the appearance of what we would now call photo-realism.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Portrait of Gabrielle Cot, 1890

One method is not better than the other – they are simply different ways to approach the process of painting.

You can find out more about the origins of the term and the idea of painterliness here, at Wikipedia.

Beautiful brush strokes: seascape by Alex Perez

Painter Alex Perez's beautiful brush strokes, from his online master class video

Chilean landscape painter Alex Perez, perezarte on YouTube.com, made a series of videos of his painting process, forming a master class. They are particularly wonderful for studying his mastery of brush strokes. He explains the variety of brush strokes he uses as the painting progresses – each stage of the painting having different needs.

Each video runs between seven and ten minutes, so watching them all takes a chunk of time, worth it if you are able to do so. He is very generous with his explanations and demonstrations of different kinds of brush strokes, the palette he uses, his compositional decisions, and everything else associated with the process of the painting.

If you only have a little time, be sure to watch Painting demonstration "Master Class" with Alex Perez, Third session part 3 of 4 – the painting is about halfway to two-thirds of the way toward completion, and here we really see the mastery of Perez's brush strokes, and the way he dances them across the canvas. Notice how he holds his brush, often turning his hand backwards (see the image above), saying, "Remember the trick that I use, with the side, with the back of the hair, to give this sensation, this effect of falling water...."

If you are beginning as a painter, it's important to remember that this is one of the later videos in the process, preceded by working out the composition and blocking in the big shapes. Here, in a still image from Painting demonstration Master class with Alex Perez, painting session 2, Part 3 0f 3, you can see how he has drawn the basic composition, and is now blocking in the big shapes. Taped to the easel shelf you can see the photo he took and cropped to the size of the canvas.

If you have a little more time, and want to particularly focus on brush strokes, I'd next watch Painting demonstration "Master Class" with Alex Perez, Third session part 2 of 4, Perez demonstrates how his customized filberts allow him to create beautiful dancing strokes. He also discusses his palette, which is something like an expanded historical palette. Remember that he uses oil paints, which give him much longer drying times than we have with acrylics. You can get that longer drying time by either adding retarder or slow drying medium to your acrylic paints, or by using Golden's Open Acrylics, which have a three to four day drying time.

He is clear that what he is doing at this point is still "nothing in detail – only, the second coat, play with colors, lighting, shadows...."

Painter Alex Perez with the completed painting, "Las Salinas beach rocks"

In Master class, painting demonstration by Alex Perez, "the final session," Perez gives the final touches of color and light, demonstrating more of the sensitivity to the brush strokes that we saw in the earlier videos.

Alex Perez demonstrates how he customizes his brushes

If you have more time, or are able to come back to it later, in Painting demonstration Master class with Alex Perez, painting session 2, Part 1 0f 3, he shows how he alters his brushes, making customized filbert shapes out of round brushes, so as to get the right shapes and flexibility to his brush strokes. If you are dissatisfied with any of your brushes, you might consider trying something of the sort – although you might try it first on inexpensive or very old, worn-out brushes to experiment.

To return to an earlier stage, in which Perez uses another kind of brush stroke, in Master Class with Alex Perez, Third Session - Part 1 of 3, he has completed blocking in the big shapes of color, and is refining the shapes further, coming in with more complex colors. "So I use a kind of broken, short brush strokes, to give, as I say before, much interesting... shapes." He continues to explain and demonstrate clearly how he blends the brush strokes, changing from short, choppier strokes to a smoothing, rhythmic stroke with a clean brush, followed by a kind of caressing stroke, as he blends in new areas of color and smooths the edges of the cloud and sky shapes.

"One of the most important things is to give rhythm – the rhythm of the brush strokes, the rhythm of the composition," he says. It is a treat to watch the rhythm of his brush strokes as he paints. You can view his website at http://www.a-perez.com and his blog at http://perezart.blogspot.com.

Scumbling

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), Titus at His Desk

Here are two very different portraits, by Rembrandt and by Modigliani, that each use the technique of scumbling. Rembrandt's is a portrait of his son, Titus.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), detail of Titus at His Desk

To scumble is to drag a dry brush with opaque or semi-opaque paint across another dried layer, and color, of paint, in such a way that allows you to see the color underneath. Often, as in these paintings, lighter colors are scumbled across darker ones, which creates beautiful light, drama, and texture.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920), Maud Abrantes

Scumbling allows you to transition, beautifully and subtly, between light and dark passages, or between colors. Notice how it creates an almost pearlescent appearance in Modigliani's portrait of Maud Abrantes?

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920), detail, Maud Abrantes

By scumbling lightly over the darker underground, Modigliani created beautiful areas of shadow, particularly on her neck.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920), detail, Maud Abrantes

Using a thin undercoat allows you to use the texture of the canvas, as you scumble across the top, as you can see clearly in this detail.

Don't limit yourself to painting light colors over dark ones – this technique is useful with any color or value combination.

Karen Lynn Ingalls, detail, Sunset Meadow

Here is a detail of clouds at sunset from a painting of mine. Although the colors and values are more subtle than the examples above, layers of scumbling created the hazy color transitions and feelings of light and dark in the clouds that I wanted.

More on painting with Jerry Fresia

In a short two-minute YouTube video that I think you will enjoy, On Painting, painter Jerry Fresia talks a little more about how he paints.

"When I look at something," Fresia says, "I do not see houses or boats or water. I see color – the colors of my palette. I see the world through those colors. I squint to simplify, and look at relationships...."

It's a concept that can be a little difficult to understand when you are first beginning painting. As the camera pans the surface of a painterly image of a boat, he tells us, "This is not a boat… it's purple and pink and green and blue."

If this is new to you, try it out. Look at something nearby – can you see it as color and shape, instead of as a specific object? Try it a few times, looking at different things. If you're having a hard time with it, try looking at something upside down. Do you suddenly see colors you didn't notice before? This is a critical skill for a painter to develop.

He is very clear about the necessity of suspending judgement as you paint. If that critical voice in your head starts talking to you, send it out for coffee – it won't help you create. As he says, "This is not about results – it's not about objects. It's about brush strokes, the human touch of paint upon canvas."

Jerry Fresia's other YouTube videos are well worth looking at, too. When you view this video, you will see them listed under More From FresiaStudios. His home and studio, and their Lake Como setting, are incredibly beautiful. He teaches workshops there, too. You can find out more about him, his paintings, his studio, and his workshops at www.fresia.com.

Jerry Fresia's Painting Class Video

Painter Jerry Fresia, who moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to a wonderful castle on Italy's Lake Como, demonstrates his painting process in the YouTube video A Painting Class on Lake Como, Italy. It's a great time-lapse glimpse of how a painting is constructed.

He begins by sketching his composition in charcoal on the canvas, then rubs it out, and paints in the basic composition. Notice how the composition is clearly indicated, but that he does not need to draw specific detail. This stage is all about making a beautiful structure upon which everything else will depend.

He follows with an underpainting (he is painting in oils). Notice the gorgeous colors he is mixing, and the subtlety of shadowed areas that will influence what comes on top of it.

After painting some of the lines in again, he comes back in with color, and brings the painting to completion. This is the point at which he gets more specific about colors and smaller details – not before. As you watch the video, notice his brushwork, too, and how each brushstroke is created by the movement of his whole arm.

Be sure to listen to his explanation of his painting process as you watch the video – he teaches clearly and well.

You can find all of Jerry Fresia's videos by going to www.YouTube.com and typing in his user name, FresiaStudios. He teaches workshops at his beautiful studio – and you can learn more about his paintings, his studio, and his workshops at www.fresia.com.

Making Brush Strokes, with David Leffel

Perhaps the most important thing for a painter is to learn how to use the brush – which is different from using a pen or pencil. One of the best introductions I've ever seen to learning how to use the brush, and to make brush strokes, is that given by David Leffel in this video, "David Leffel Painting Workshop - Making Brush Strokes," on YouTube, from a DVD painting workshop set from the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art.

Notice that he uses the brush's long handle, holding it further out, and holding it differently than he would a pen or pencil. He describes how you use the brush as akin to how you see - that if you want to see the way an artist does, you need to learn to use the brush as an artist does.

It's a wonderful explanation. If you'd like to watch a little more of David Leffel, David A. Leffel Art Instruction Video - Painting the Portrait: Portrait of Lewis is a good place to continue. He continues talking about brush strokes, as applied to the painting of a portrait, and shows how he begins a painting. As he says, "In order to understand how to finish a painting, one must know how to begin a painting." Beginning a painting determines everything.