Letters to Students #5
This 'Letters to Students' blog post is composed of replies to real people who were studying with me at the time. They have been lightly edited, mostly for clarity.
----- Good for you for trying to paint lilies from life and getting some plausible light and shade! Somehow you are managing to convey in your work a feeling of light and that's no easy accomplishment even in the best of conditions.
----- As for how to pace yourself as you work, my theory on learning to paint is that it is best to do both --fast and slow. It's hard to improve unless you slow down and think things through, but on the other hand one gets exhausted with that and the struggle will show up in your work. Many times I recall giving up trying on one thing or another and then deciding to just have fun and move paint around---only to have the very thing I was grasping for pop up on it's own. Acquiring new knowledge is just a sloppy process and it often doesn't feel right.
-----It's always tricky trying to downplay an attention getting area that is physically closer to you than the focal point. One solution is to compose your objects so that nothing in front of your center of attention has a lot of contrast or strong color. When you have arranged objects in a way that their placement is behind the focal point, it's usually much easier to successfully play down an area that is pulling the eye away from where you want the attention to be.
------I have never found glazing very satisfying either. It probably works best when it's something that is done more or less all over so there is a consistency to the paint quality.
'When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow."
---- Claude Monet
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