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   One of the surprising things when getting questions from artists and students is the sometimes shocking recognition of how my approach to painting has inevitably evolved over the years. No doubt at some point I was asking similar questions of my teachers, but I really can't recall just when some of those 180 degree turns in my thinking might have come about.  Often someone will ask me to list the order in which to paint various objects within a composition and especially in regard to backgrounds. Although it's probably not possible to shift somebody's thought process in a single email reply, I try my best to at least plant a seed in the direction of getting people to approach observing the subject, less in terms of 'things' (i.e. flower, leaves, background) and more in terms of which notes coming together (colors, values, shapes and edges) will be the most useful in building a strong foundation for the rest of the composition.

    When starting a new painting, my priority is establishing the visual signposts that will help me make comparisons easily --lightest light, darkest dark, hardest edge. In an arrangement of flowers, I will focus on a primary flower or group of flowers and then notes of whatever is touching the edges of that flower. This gives me clear parameters as to how the pigments I'm working with will be capable of translating the subject in front of me, and I then have something solid to relate the rest of the painting to. If leaves are behind the flower, I put in a note of the leaves. If background is behind the flower I put in a note of the background. If both are touching the flower then I will paint both. Whatever will help me establish key notes to relate to is what I paint first. My focus is so much on these initial spots of color, the edges they create, and getting them accurate, that I think I've almost disabled the part of my brain that knows or cares whether, for example, a spot of green behind a flower is a stem, a leaf, a vase, a bottle, or part of the background. If it's there in my field of vision I simply try to get the effect of those 2 notes coming together as closely as I am able, given the materials I have to work with. Once I can see clearly how those initial choices will appear on my canvas, then I have something to define specific shapes with. Spots of color first, objects second. Why? Because if I try to paint what my brain thinks is there and I let it go with it's preconceived ideas, the notes of paint won't have the same sparkle of light, depth and overall unity that I'm hoping to achieve. In a typical start, I indicate some notes of the background as I'm establishing the edges of the objects, but will often fill in the rest of the background toward the end when I have a better idea of what will work best to balance or compliment the rest of the painting.

   Learning to think and observe in this way can also be a game changer in the area of composition. When I'm trying to set up an arrangement, a lot of my attention is on making sure things will read well --- defining enough key areas of the silhouettes to make them distinct and recognizable to the viewer but also planning for other areas where the outlines of the objects are obscured and not so distinct. Those areas where things blur together can always be found where the values are closest. I want every object to be a part of the conversation -- readable enough that the viewer has no trouble telling what they are,  yet connected enough to everything else that they become part of the whole.

"Starting with a note of truth in a picture is the important thing -- the first color you put down influences you straight through. Do not put things down approximately -- you will take a wrong thing and unconsciously key everything to it, making it all false." -- Charles Hawthorne

"The artist must never forget that he is dealing with the entire canvas, and not with any one section of it. Regardless of what he sets out to paint, the problem remains one and the same. With his own creative originality, he must fill in his canvas and make of it an organic whole." --- Nicolai Fechin

As people who know me are aware, I've had my own fair share of challenging moments in my life and this year, particularly this summer, has been quite the speed bump. Not so much for me directly, but a crisis for a close artist friend I've kept in touch with for many years who needed some help. More than a few times, the temptation to fold my tent for a while has seemed like the obvious solution, but in truth there really hasn't been anything to prevent me from getting to the easel other than a severe lack of time, energy and/or concentration. Just that! So I have kept at it when I could, and am glad I did. Although the garden is overgrown and unkempt, the cats are totally convinced they've been neglected and the house has had to get by with an occasional scurryfunge*, somehow the moments when I did make it to the easel have at least sometimes been a surprise in a good way. Granted that isn't a high bar right now. I'm never really attempting to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but rather just trying to beat myself at my own game. Whether anybody else values them or not, those paintings that come out looking believable and accurate, yet also 'blown on in one puff', are the Holy Grail for me. I wouldn't have guessed that anything close to that would have come about during these past chaotic few months but I'll embrace moments of serendipity any time and any place I can find them.  One key I think to getting lucky with my paintbrushes is dropping all expectations of what the outcome might be other than giving my brain a few hours of relief from it's constant chatter. While it definitely helps to have put in decades of practice solving painting puzzles, relying on that alone to carry me through doesn't produce the results I'm after. I'm always still hoping to push the envelope a bit further and uncover a bit of magic.

Stumbling across a silver lining is what I sometimes refer to as 'reframing'. Reframing, in this sense, isn't welcoming the difficulties but rather backing away enough to get a different perspective and allowing for other possibilities and solutions to gain some traction. It works in much the same way as framing/reframing a painting where simply putting the object of one's vision in a different context will bring attention to or emphasize a different area of  the picture plane.

                                                       "Pansies in Amethyst Vase"    oil/linen    12x10 

                                                        This is recent attempt at capturing a favorite subject matter. I was

                                                        pleased with the simple, balanced composition but what was really

                                                        fun was the way I could almost hear the puzzle pieces click into place.

As far as framing actual paintings, I haven't written much on that topic because it's mostly just a personal taste thing. Well, that and a budget sort of thing since frames can be one of the most expensive additions to an artist's expenditures. Although I don't use up much energy trying to push my taste in frames on anybody, I definitely have some objectives I'm going for when considering how to frame my work. Within reason, I've always tried to put as much money into nice frames as I thought I could justify at the time. Many years ago this involved refinishing or building frames from scratch which is more difficult and time consuming than one might imagine, not to mention takes up a lot of room. Just in general, my belief has always been that a lot of gallery owners don't know that much about art beyond what they think they can and cannot sell, but almost all of them can pick out the most expensive frame. Sometimes that is the difference between whether a painting makes it onto the wall or not, so I have always tried to hedge my bets with the best frames I could afford. 

In general I prefer frames that are classic designs and avoid any that are more attention getting than the painting. To my eye, whatever color the frame is tends to bring out or echo that same color in the painting so that is often what dictates my preferences. Since I'm always trying to emphasize the focal point, I usually lean toward whatever color of frame will enhance that area of the painting.

Above are three options I happened to have in my in my frame inventory and all were made by Stephen Barnhill at AUFrames.com. Although any of these would be a solid choice,  I favor the warmer gold and even more so when viewing them in person rather than computer images. I like the way the ochre color brings out the yellow accents in the bouquet and also the subtle notes of purple in the background are more lively when surrounded by the warm notes in the frame.

"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one." -- Stella Adler

* Scurryfunge -- to do a fast, frantic, and often superficial cleanup of a house when you see or know that guests are on their way. 

Recently I received a request from a student to write about frustrations, and looking through my older posts I was surprised to see I hadn't specifically addressed that topic. After all, frustration is something I am deeply familiar with in regards to painting. When I was younger it used to really rock my boat and I suppose it still would if I hadn't realized somewhere along the way how counterproductive it can be to spiral up my own you-know-what.

Still, I can't say I have any grand strategies to overcome the various problems that come up when painting except to maybe be more philosophical about them. While I admit my favorite paintings are the ones where the puzzle pieces just seem to click into place on their own with minimal effort on my part, that's not something I seem to have all that much control over. For sure a good composition is really important and being in practice usually ups the odds of a good outcome. Not being under pressure is a key thing for me although pressure seems to work well for other artists I know. Giving myself too much time isn't great either. The main thing I try to keep in mind is that the more experience I have solving puzzles, the better my track record gets on solving them successfully, or better yet, spotting potential problems ahead of time and avoiding them in the first place. 

There's still a few situations that consistently seem to present a challenge to me. While I like to mix things up and attempt to pull off quirky compositions, a weak center of interest or a bunch of tangents popping up will definitely put a speed bump in my path. Another stumbling block can come in the form of aerial perspective. As a still life painter that typically involves drawing issues that crop up when trying to get multiple ellipses all looking as though they are properly sitting on the same plane. 

Here's a few tactics that have stuck with me over the years to help avoid frustrations:

Not panicking is good; Looking in mirrors or turning the painting upside down can help; If any adjustments need to be made within the center of interest, I start there first; Hiding the painting away for a while is one of the best --sometimes I've kept paintings for years until I took another look and came up with a solution; To help visualize I might tape pieces of colored paper, dried leaves or petals to the canvas to figure out what direction to go next; Making adjustments to the image in Photoshop or some other digital program before trying it in paint can be useful; Hanging a painting up on the wall for a few weeks and noticing it in my peripheral vision to see what areas my eye goes to can sometimes help; Studying the piece and making  moves intentionally with the purpose of trying to solve a problem rather than just diving in and adding things out of pure desperation; To use a chess analogy --sometimes you have to give up a pawn to save a queen; Last but not least, adopting a playful sort of 'wherever you go, there you are' attitude can be a real plus. 

Here are some things I try to stay away from:

Making changes without having a pretty good mental picture of where I'm heading; If possible I avoid repainting any edges that are already well established; I don't worry about drafting-perfect drawing but do try to get objects to look like they are relatively symmetrical and not about to fall over; Above all, I try to never dive back into a tough painting problem when I feel like a lot is riding on the outcome or when I'm in a crummy mood and feeling desperate for a 'win'.

For me the issue isn't so much whether I can figure out an acceptable fix to a problem but whether I can pull off the necessary changes and yet have a painting that looks effortless -- as though it was "blown on in one puff". Very occasionally I've been able to stumble across an ideal solution and that always feels great. The search for a magic bullet to avoid and/or solve all of the frustrations that come up has remained elusive though. Still, sitting myself down and  figuring out what is bothering me has more often than not paid off. Even though a part of me would much prefer to never have such frustrations come up in the first place, I can also see that without some of these challenges to overcome, painting wouldn't be the 'hook' it has consistently been for so many decades. 

                                                          "Bouquet in Milk Pitcher"    10x9      oil on linen

                                                           This image is from about 15 years ago and I pulled it out of the archives

                                                           because I fondly remember it as one of the better 'saves' I've made during

                                                           my years as a painter. Although I don't recall the original composition at all,

                                                           I distinctly remember thinking this one was a sure bet to go in the trash.

                                                           Instead it turned out to be one of those miraculous 'Hail Mary!' attempts 

                                                           that I had enough sense to leave alone.

"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else." -- R. Buckminster Fuller

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."  --- Japanese Proverb

More than anything else, this journey of art seems like one of revealing knowledge about one's self. I don't mean that in a really fixed sense, as in 'I am this.' or  'I am that', but more about what sort of path your curiosity will take you on. The various twists and turns my artistic wanderings have followed certainly involved a bit of 'coloring outside the lines' so to speak.

A lot of the conventional wisdom about building a life centered around art is well documented and there's no shortage of books, articles, and courses on how to make it all happen. Probably that advice does pay off for some people but I'll present my experiences as a counterweight to that approach since in many respects the way I embarked on an art career wasn't planned out and wasn't the usual. Nonetheless it's been sufficient for me to do a little better than muddle along and sometimes it was the perfect path to be on, even though many around me might have questioned it.

 When I first started dipping my toes into the gallery business, I watched how other artists handled things and wondered in awe, how in the world I could ever get myself to model that same behavior. At the time I assumed those artists were the epitome of self-confidence but at this point I would probably say it was more like bluster. I'd hear stories of artists pointing to a wall of another person's work and telling the gallery owner they should take that artist's paintings down and put theirs up instead. Others would stop by a gallery where they were represented and go ballistic if they spotted any of their artwork on the floor. Those tactics seemed to achieve the effect they were hoping for...for a while anyway. It all seemed way past assertive in my book, yet still in the realm of what many people think of as being a savvy business person. Thinking that was the path to success in the art world filled me with angst. I loved painting, but the thought of playing nonstop hardball with the powers that be in the art world felt like it would require a total personality makeover.

Here's how I ended up handling those sorts of gallery interactions ... I didn't. It wasn't in my nature to aggressively confront anybody and it wouldn't have been a good fit for me. What I did all along instead was to paint the best paintings I could and frame them as well as I could afford to. I tried to be on time, easy to work with and have good boundaries --- common sense sort of stuff.  My motto was 'If you don't tell me how to paint, I won't tell you how to run your gallery'. If somebody did anything questionable when it came to dividing up a commission or paying on time, I packed up my paintings and went elsewhere, but that was seldom necessary because I was always pretty careful to do my homework about any gallery I was considering consigning my work with. I wasn't pushy but neither was I a pushover. As it turned out, being reasonable to work with wasn't such a bad strategy after all, since I've had comfortable relationships with the same galleries now for many decades. Eventually I also discovered that quite a lot of art sells off the floor. One gallery I was in for many years conducted business in their home and never displayed work for sale any other way. Paintings were either propped up on the seat of the couch or sitting on the floor and they made it work quite well. At the time I wasn't at all sure I was on the right path though, and if I had always measured my progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, I would have likely given up early on.

Trusting yourself applies in the same way to learning to paint. If you don't have some idea of what your tastes are and the discipline to acquire the skills needed to follow your own creative instincts, then you are likely to get caught in the undertow of conflicting advice on how to become a better painter. While it's important to be humble enough to learn, there's also a certain amount of tenacity and self-awareness necessary to make that knowledge your own and say what you need to say. What a good teacher does for a student is teach them how to teach themselves, with the caveat that a skillful instructor can help speed up the process quite a bit. 

It can seem like a contradiction to keep pushing for more skills as a painter and yet to also hang onto that that childlike sense of creative adventure, but that is the challenge most of us accept. Speaking for myself, all of it is scrambled in there together --- leaning first one direction , then the other, and the balance seems to be different for each one of us. Some people just want to get their paints and go, while others need more intellectual challenge to stay entertained. Although I push students to keep building on their seeing skills, it's more a matter of wanting to give people their money's worth than any judgement on my part about what they do with those skills or how far they go once they acquire them. As long as somebody is putting in the effort and trying to follow their own voice then I'm all for it. By the way, that's how my teachers were with me. They pushed me to go as far as I could as long a I was studying with them, (and to the point of tears sometimes), but never said a whole lot about my paintings one way or the other after I went off and started experimenting on my own. Fifty plus years of painting later, I still very much feel like a student, and am always fidgeting to figure out the way forward.

"We are not here to do what has already been done." -- Robert Henri  The Art Spirit

"The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know." -- Socrates

This month's post was inspired by a question about the reflective horizontal surface where I set up my still lifes. Rather than being a mirror, that's actually a piece of 1/4th inch thick glass sitting on the wooden tabletop of my study stand. The reason for having it there is that I often like to use reflections in the foreground of the composition —echoing the colors and shapes of the objects that are in the arrangement. Rarely do the reflections end up being really obvious in the finished painting however. Notice that compared to the actual objects those shapes and colors in the reflections are more subdued and depending on what the painting needs I might play them down. even more. Other times I will cover the glass with fabric or whatever if I'm wanting a different type of foreground.

Any glass shop can cut 1/4" glass to your specifications but it's also a good idea to have them bevel the edges so they aren't so sharp. Sitting to the back and right side of the glass tabletop I have a shadow box that is made from two pieces of wood paneling put together with hinges in the corner. I have a small rug hanging up as a backdrop but that is frequently covered by one of the various pieces of fabric around the studio which are changed as needed to serve as backgrounds. The shorter leg of the shadow box (to the right in this photo) is usually covered with a dark cloth to cut down on any reflected light bouncing back onto the shadow side of the objects.

The modifications listed above started with a wooden china cabinet I purchased from one of the local furniture dealers. The back side is facing me as I'm working --- painted black with a few screws added to hang canvases on when I'm taking photos of my finished paintings. Going around to the opposite side with the glass doors (photo at top) you can see what would normally be the front of the cabinet, which is where I store a lot of my teapots and other paintable objects. As with most of the other furniture in my studio, I've attached 3" casters to the bottom so it can be rolled around in order to take advantage of different directions or angles of light coming in from the north windows. Another feature I hadn't anticipated is that the cabinet doubles as what is apparently an excellent cat scratching post. While I do have several other spaces for setting up arrangements, this multi-purpose study stand, while not particularly beautiful, has turned out to be one of the most practical and well-used pieces of furniture in my studio.

"Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it once it is found." -- James Russell Lowell

I'll continue this step-by-step series on the daffodils by first admitting to a big OOPS!  When I went back to this painting again I got caught up in working on the background and the finishing process in general and almost had the canvas covered before I remembered I was supposed to be taking photos. There's still a lot of lessons in these next few steps though, so I'll go ahead and post them. The first one below shows the step where I stopped in last month's blog and I'll add some descriptions of how I was handling the background and foliage as I moved toward the finish. At this stage, I had most of the flowers and their edges at a place where I pretty much planned to not touch them again. 

Notice how many of the background and foliage notes are transparent, up against the opaque notes of the petals. This is really critical because playing the opaque and transparent notes up against each other helps to capture a feeling of depth. Also, working the edges back and forth when you have opaque paint up against opaque paint is a terrific way to create mud.

In this step I have the canvas almost covered , beginning to add more opaque passages and starting to consider the entire canvas in a more abstract way --thinking about what areas I might want to play up or down and how I want the viewer's eye to travel around.

There was a time in art school where my approach to a background like this would have been to identify one pigment or mixture that looked closest to that color and try to paint the entire background with that. It was a fundamental shift in my thinking, and my artwork, when I was able to quit simply matching colors and instead aim for the effect I was trying to capture. What I'm trying to do is convey a 3D effect of light and depth on a flat surface that is only 2D. That means recreating the color of the background is merely the starting point. Even if I had a color that was an exact match to the fabric behind the flowers, it's still not likely that alone would reproduce the feeling of depth that I'm trying to achieve. For this reason I might use 4 or more colors to visually describe what I'm seeing rather than just one. (To be clear--- a background that is a flat color with little or no variation can be effective if done well. I'm just explaining what I'm doing in this painting and why I'm doing it.) My objective is to create a background that doesn't come forward and stays subordinate to the flowers yet still has interesting movement and texture.

These are the main colors I was using to paint the background. Mars Orange isn't one that I usually have out on my palette but in this case I decided the painting could use some notes that were slightly lighter and leaned more toward yellow than Terra Rosa. The 2 pigments at the top are very dense and opaque while the 2 options at the bottom are very transparent. 

Most of the opaque passages in the background were put on toward the last when I was more confident about the decisions and felt I could put strokes down without moving them around a lot. There is a mix of brushstrokes, palette knife strokes, transparent areas and opaque areas across the entire painting surface that help to give the composition a feeling of unity. With the foliage, I rearranged or 'borrowed' leaves and stems from other areas to balance the arrangement and create movement. The goal wasn't for the viewer to be able to count the stems but rather to compliment the blossoms and show them off to their best advantage. When the focal point is already established, it's much easier to compare any notes or edges in the background or the foliage to determine if they are stealing thunder from the center of interest.

Yesterday I was trying to decide on a blog topic to write about,  yet at the same time wishing I could find time to paint some daffodils that had just opened up out in the yard. Instead of settling on one or the other, I decided to do a step by step of my painting progress and let the paint strokes do the talking. If I manage to finish this one I'll show the rest of the steps next month. Please note that I am painting from life --- looking at the actual flowers rather than working from the photo which has been posted here just as a reference. As some of the flowers moved or opened up, I included shapes I liked better and also made adjustments to help the overall image read better. This study follows my usual direct painting approach. I'm working with my standard palette, applying the pigments with both brushes and a painting knife. Feel free to write me if you have any questions -- [email protected]. Here are the results so far:

Circling back again to the topic of values, there are certain situations where I'm especially on the lookout for subtle shifts in value. An example that comes up fairly often in my work is painting a white or high key object where there are smaller shapes connected to a main dominant shape. A classic example of this would be a white porcelain teapot with a spout and handle. Once a note of paint has been mixed to represent the areas of that teapot out in the light, there is a strong  temptation is to use that same mixture, not just for the main part of the teapot, but for the lid... and for the spout... and for the handle. Our brains are thinking --'This object is all made of the same porcelain clay and I've matched that color, so therefore the same mixture of paint will work just great for the entire teapot."

A better thought would be ---"This is another one of those areas where I should ignore what my brain is telling me and trust my eyes." When those high value notes for the larger form are employed everywhere, the handle and spout can often end up looking stark and cut-out. This overstating of the secondary forms comes about because we make assumptions and fail to notice that smaller planes, even under the same lighting conditions, won't appear as lit up and reflect the light quite in the same way that bigger planes on a larger form will. It can be just a slight difference, but the larger the shape, the lighter in value it will tend to appear. While I do want the handles etc. to end up looking like a part of the object they are attached to, it's not typically going to be in the painting's interest to make them more attention getting than the larger shape of the main form. Dropping the value just slightly will usually be enough to keep these supporting players from becoming more important than the image as a whole. That's not to say there aren't occasionally compositional situations where I might ignore this principle and place more contrast on a handle or spout, but just as a general rule I slow down and carefully observe these subtle differences, staying faithful to what my eyes are seeing and the principles of physics. In my experience, adjusting the values works far better than trying to downplay an edge that has too much contrast by simply blurring the edges together. I might soften the edges after I adjust the values, but the result will be less tortured and more believable than if I tried to get the same effect by softening alone.

Here is a closeup of the painting at the top of the page, illustrating an example of where I put this lesson into practice. The light is really slamming into the far inside planes of the cup and because it's a larger area the values there are very high key. In relationship to the inside of the cup, the planes of the handle are relatively tiny so they don't catch the light in the same way. At one point I had the values on the handle lighter and with the contrast of the dark areas behind it, the handle was talking too loud and coming forward too much -- so I scraped it down and repainted it. This notation of the subtle value differences also reflects my vision of what I want the story to be --what it is I want to say in my work. I'm always trying to capture a strong feeling of light, depth and form, so I try to keep the viewer engaged in those areas where the form is the most apparent. My intention is to convey the impression of a cup with a handle, rather than a handle with a cup attached to it. That degree of emphasis is important to me as well as important to the mood and atmosphere I'm trying to acheive. 

It's an odd trick of the mind that makes us get caught up in drawing problems and noodle around in areas, which regardless of how well they are done will never stand alone on their own or contribute to the painting all that much. If a flower is painted with really convincing light and form, it really takes so little effort on the part of the artist to make the viewer believe there is a stem attached, so usually my focus will be on the flowers and overall composition rather than the foliage. It's the same thing with a handle.  People generally know that teacups tend to have handles so it doesn't take a ton of work to explain all of that to them. The viewer's eye is going to travel where the artist is telling them to look. Playing down contrast by not over-emphasizing values can often help make supporting areas easier to paint, while at the same time doing the composition as a whole a favor. 

"It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know."  --- Epictetus

While I had planned to write more this month about value situations to watch out for, I've decided to circle back to that topic later and instead let you know about this article recently posted on the Metropolitan Museum website. How Madame X came to the Met tells the story of how, after creating a huge scandal at the 1884 Paris Salon, John Singer Sargent's famous portrait of Madame Gautreau ended up in a museum here in America. The story itself is fascinating enough but at the bottom of the page you will find a link to a terrific video of the Sargent in Paris exhibit I was able to see this past June. Thanks to the internet you can visit the same show minus the crowds, exhaustion and considerable expense of getting there yourself. Not that I would pass on experiencing the exhibit in person but this virtual tour is really well done and the camera zooms in on areas of the paintings that would be impossible to get close to without a stepladder. Enjoy!

                                                                                             John Singer Sargent in atelier  

                                                                  (Adolphe Giraudon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

From the archives: How Madame X came to the Met

Direct link to exhibition tour of Sargent in Paris --

https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/exhibition-tour-sargent-and-paris

" You must draw with your brush as readily, as unconsciously almost as you draw with your pencil." --- John Singer Sargent 

The expression 'value trap' is much more commonly used in the language of the financial world than in the language of painting, yet it can still apply in a similar way. In financial speak the term refers to a stock that has fallen in price and now appears to have a lot of potential growth -- but that potential could very well be an illusion. In trying to capture our impressions of the world in paint, there are situations where notes of light or dark appear at first glance very obvious and easy to see -- a slam-dunk. These are tempting to go for right away but often end up overstated, weakening the illusion of light and shade while also emphasizing contrast in places that don't serve the painting well. These painting 'value traps' are so common that as a teacher I would often look at those areas of a student's painting first to get a sense of how well somebody was observing values and respecting the limitations of their materials. 

As I mentioned in last month's blog, values are far and away the most difficult thing for most people to learn to observe well and definitely the aspect of painting I consider the most challenging to teach. Our eyes fool us in some situations, so learning to watch out for these 'traps' can make the difference between capturing believable light and shade vs. an image with distracting notes that jump around a lot.  Coming up in the next blog or 2 (or as many as it takes) I'll be pointing out some of the situations to watch out for and advice on how to interpret them so that the painting as a whole maintains consistent light and shade.

Above is an optical illusion that illustrates some of these situations I'll be talking about. Although the wide gray stripe in the middle appears to be darker on the left, gradually fading lighter toward the right, it is in fact the same value all the way across. When a value is surrounded by lighter notes it will appear darker and the reverse is also true --- a light spot out in the middle of an area of darkness will appear lighter. The thing to keep in mind is that you can still trust your eyes but you can't trust your brain or your instincts. If you tried doing a replica of this illustration with your paints and related everything correctly, faithfully painting the notes up against another on one side and then the other, the values on either end of the middle stripe would turn out to be very close to each other. Where things get muddled is when the brain is convinced one side is lighter than the other, tempts us to overstate the contrast and then we don't double-check to see if it matches the actual effect in our vision. When a false note get put on the canvas and is not corrected right away, the next note will look wrong up against it so that gets 'corrected' --- and then the one after that, and the one after that. Pretty soon the artist is moving in circles trying to adjust everything to fit in with the note that went off track and then when they slam up against the limits of their materials, hope against hope that a new tube of color will appear in their paint box and pull them out of the ditch.

Working within the value limitations of pigments is key to preserving an illusion of light and form, so slowing down and double-checking every stroke in situations like this can save hours upon hours of grief.

In my workshops I've always started my students off painting pears, and for many of them it was much to their chagrin. One or two pears however, is a ideal study to begin understanding the phenomena described above and eventually those lessons can then be applied to any subject matter. Posted below are some of the examples I created for my workshops to help students comprehend visually what the objective is in terms of values.

Once people acknowledge the value limitations in their paints and then accept the idea that there are situations where the temptation to overplay values is present, painting becomes a lot more understandable. Look carefully at the string of color notes below each pear. The point of these examples is not to notice the differences, but to notice the similarities. In each example the notes on the light side, in the halftone, and on the shadow side are kept distinctly separate. It does not matter one bit whether the first pear is painted with 7 steps in value and the other has a few more incremental value steps with lots of color changes. What matters is that on both pears, NOTHING on the light side is as dark as any note on the shadow side and NOTHING on the shadow side is as light as anything on the light side. There is a strong temptation for most people starting out to want to overplay any small interruption in the form on the light side by making it too dark. These smaller forms or interruptions can often be eliminated or minimized without hurting the strength of the original statement but it takes a conscious effort to do that. Another common 'value trap' is the reflected light within the shadow. Lighter planes can appear in shadow areas due to the primary light source bouncing off the floor or off of another object and reflecting into the shadow side, but these secondary sources of light can't be as high in value as the primary light hitting the object directly. In addition, by their nature, reflected lights are generally surrounded by darker values (the shadow notes, and the cast shadow), so as with the gray stripe illustration above, they will appear much lighter than they actually are in relation to the larger value patterns. A quick double-check by looking in a black mirror can correct any errors before they compound and destroy the larger effect of light and shade. 

Artists like Sargent respected the limitations, and therefore the power of their palette and never sacrificed a step in value unless it was important to the painting as a whole. Because the value range we have is so precious, every value change needs to be considered in this context. Yes, you do want to paint what you see, but you also have to be clear about your objectives. The range of your palette is not going to expand so you have to learn to work within it --- respecting that every value change added will to some degree, diminish the impact of the statement of light. Acquiring the discipline to not jump at every nuance just because it is there, but rather to choose the subtleties that will pay off the most and keep them in context with the big picture is where all the effort comes into play. Just as with anything else in life, individuals will make different choices consistent with what they are hoping to express, so there is no exact formula to follow but developing a good eye and solid understanding of values will go a long way in making those decisions the most effective they can be.

P.S. -- I have disabled comments on my blogs due to frequent spam posts but always welcome suggestions for topics artists would like to hear more about. Please email comments or suggestions to [email protected].

        When most people contemplate what makes somebody's art unique they generally assume it's connected to the brushes or medium ---sometime a sense of color or choice of subject matter. My feeling is that an artist's unique voice is strongly influenced by the way they interpret values. Yes, there it is again...that word that makes students' eyes glaze over! As a teacher, I've often felt like speaking on the topic of values was a sure way to to get everyone headed back over to the coffee and donut table. In terms of creating the illusion of light and 3 dimensions on a 2 dimensional surface though, nothing else you do with your paint will come close to having the kind of impact that careful observation of value relationships can have.

          I sort of understand the bad reputation. A lot of formal art classes start out with lectures about value scales, and students are assigned to complete a drawing using all of the value steps from darkest dark to lightest light. Most people can grasp the basic concept fairly quickly. When the topic comes up a second or third time though, the impulse is to think "Been there, done that. I didn't enroll in another class to go back to square one so can we just move on to something more advanced?"  For those of us however, who are consumed with wanting to know what some of our art heroes were doing, values will never be something you can check off the list and move on from. Of all the aspects of painting that I'm continuing to try to understand better, values are absolutely at the top of the list. I've always felt like if Sargent came back to life and I could get in one of his classes tomorrow, he would probably tell me to work on my values.

          So why would anyone place such importance on this one aspect of color? Simply put, compared to nature and it's range of light to dark, this is where our paints have the greatest limitations. Nature has objects like the sun -- so bright that even its reflection on water or snow can burn our skin or eyes fairly quickly. At the other end of the spectrum, our darkest dark is black, but black paint on a canvas with light on it can't really compare to the darkness of the absence of light in a deep hole. Artists who are compelled to try to depict what we see in the 3-dimensional world are put in the position of being magicians ---trying to cram all of the values nature has at her disposal into a black and white scale that relatively speaking is the size of a thimble.

         This brings us around to another aspect of learning to paint that seems to be underappreciated, and that's the importance of working from life as much as possible. When working from a printed photo, the values have already been compressed into an image with the exact  black to white parameters as our paints, so there isn't the opportunity to observe and interpret in the same sort of way. The artists I admire and study have all made a personal journey out of trying to discover more effective ways to capture this expansive value range that our eyes take in from the world around us. There are any number of ways to attempt to pull off this magic trick and since they can involve almost every other avenue of painting I can think of, the complexity can be all consuming. To give an idea of what I'm talking about, below I've posted an example to illustrate a couple of techniques commonly used to try to pull a little more power from the value range of oil paints.

                                                 This is an example of practicing what is aptly called 'Conservation of Values'  ----

                                                 simplifying the large value patterns in this teapot to preserve a strong feeling of

                                                 form and light. Subtle color shifts are emphasized instead of using value differences

                                                 alone to indicate the changes in planes. The color interest can be an added bonus

                                                 although the objective isn't to create a more colorful effect but to make the form turn.

                                                 By substituting high value tints in place of value gradations, it's possible to compensate

                                                 to some degree  for limitations in value. Another value sparing technique can be

                                                 observed in the highlight area, where the heavier, opaque knife stroke makes it appear

                                                 lighter, while also catching the illumination falling on the painting itself and enhancing

                                                 the impression of light reflecting off of a shiny surface.

                                                 (Please note that if your screen is set to shift to a warmer tone at night, the subtle color

                                                  differences in this example will be easier for you to observe during the day.)

Learning to make value changes only when absolutely necessary frees up our limited and precious value range for the areas where it will count the most. When you can see values well and come to accept the limits of our pigments in this regard, it becomes second nature to always be searching in any way possible to make the most of the range we have and use it to it's best advantage. Nothing you can buy and nothing you can do will make as much difference as this in terms of capturing an illusion of light and form in your work. It almost feels like being a whistleblower to point this out since a huge industry is built around convincing people that the next brush, the next medium, the next class, the next tube of paint or canvas or whatever will be the breakthrough. Spending a few dollars and a couple minutes of time making a low tech black mirror and then learning to use it will get you further. The rest isn't necessarily fluff, but not really all that useful either without the context of solid values. Those aren't just my words though. If you do the research on artists whose work speaks to you and are lucky enough to find some of their quotes on painting or teaching, you will likely find this same theme on 'seeing' running through their advice. It's that simple and that difficult. Seeing as an artist does is a long process and most people need some help getting started. Often the most accessible solution is to find a classical-traditional atelier type of school with a good instructor ---even if that style of painting isn't where one wants to end up. Once you get the hang of paying attention to the way things come together, and the kind of focus required to do that, that same careful attention can be applied to other disciplines of the painting process and you can begin the journey of teaching yourself, which is the whole point. In other words, begin at the beginning and stay at the beginning. Give up looking for a shortcut even if that's the direction the entire rest of the world is going. I can't promise that financial success will follow or that you will feel welcomed into the artist's club, but it will help answer the question we all have when looking at an amazing work of art ---"How did they do that?"

"Only after you have the spots of color true and in their proper relations do you have something to draw with and you can then consider it (drawing). No amount of good drawing will pull you out if your colors are not true. Get them true and you will be surprised how little else you need."  --- Charles Hawthorne from Hawthorne on Painting

"Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements --- values, especially the values." --- John Singer Sargent

"The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you."   -- B.B King

       During the process of creating a painting, there are multitudes of decisions for every stroke of the knife or brush. Take 2 notes sitting side by side: each dab of paint could be lighter, darker, thicker, thinner, more chromatic, more neutral, less transparent etc, etc. The choices before us can encompass the entire range of what our paints are capable of , intentionally limit those ranges, or anything in between. In my experience, as long as the key relationships hold, quite a variety of choices can work well. The same is true for shapes --- wider, thinner, taller, shorter, more rounded, squared off, etc. If every choice is considered in terms of its relationship to the whole, chances are those decisions will result in a painting that has a consistent story to tell.

      The further you get into a painting, the more limited the choices become due to the fact that so many of the options our pigments are capable of have already been employed. That's one of the best reasons I can think of for having a clear concept from the very beginning of what the story, and the center of interest in the painting will be. While there is inevitably more thinking and juggling involved in solving the 'puzzle' at the later stages, if you have to make some tough choices , it seems like common sense to me to make those compromises in areas other than the center of interest if possible. Additional issues that frequently pop up are annoying tangents. repetitive lines, and format constraints. As if all of that wasn't enough to consider, once these spots of paint turn into a symbol the brain can easily identify, trying to view that image again as abstract shapes of color, becomes even more problematic.

         Putting finishing touches on a painting reminds me of construction issues in the area of the country where I live. The traditional method of building a genuine adobe structure has been to use more or less free materials like dirt, straw and water to form bricks that are dried and then stacked.  This method produces walls that are charmingly irregular and give a different sort of feel to the architecture.  Unless one is really into sweat equity though, due to the labor intensive process, what was once the least expensive way to build is now the most expensive. That expense is even more amplified if somebody wants to remodel or build on to an old abode structure since sometimes with older houses the foundation part was skipped altogether. Another issue can develop when cement stucco is used for the outside finish. A cement finish is more durable than traditional mud plaster but it can trap moisture causing the bricks inside to disintegrate. This means that nobody quite knows what they are going to be dealing with when they start tearing into an existing adobe wall, and because there are the constraints of some the original features someone is trying to preserve --- the options to deal with whatever comes up can be limited. This is sort of the feeling I have going back into a painting. More limited options and the possibility of having to tear the whole thing down and start again from the ground up. I think this explains why I prefer starting new paintings and will sometimes put off the finishing part as long as I can.

        Choosing from a more limited set of choices can be an interesting challenge though, so once I get into the creative side of adding to or reworking a painting, I almost invariably find it fun. There are a few rules I try to follow that won't guarantee success, but certainly improve the chances;

1) If the original arrangement has been dismantled, I try to recreate the set up (or at least the parts I want to work on) and original lighting as closely as possible.  After 50 plus years of painting, I'm still convinced that my visual response to nature is going to be more interesting than anything I can invent. That isn't to say I never use artistic license, but rather that I respect it's limitations and generally only bring that out as a last resort.

2) While I'm always studying a problem to try to figure out the best solution, at the same time I'm looking for the least invasive approach that might work well. Generally speaking I don't go back into a painting unless there are already some areas I'm relatively pleased with, so the last thing I want to do is mess up the parts I'm trying to build on. Those initial, spontaneous responses I had at the start of the painting won't be easy to recreate if somehow the reworking effort goes too far.

3)--- I almost never touch an area of a painting that is between wet and dry since that's an excellent way to make a goopy mess. When working on top of dry paint one always has the option to take some medium on a cloth or paper towel and wipe off a stroke that isn't working. I proceed slowly, stepping back and judging almost every touch of paint to see how it fits in with the image as a whole.

4)---A light spray of retouch varnish before resuming work will help, but just applied wet paint will never have the exact same look as paint that has dried already. Often in the past that difference in the look of the surface would really mess me up and I'd feel like an area I had just worked on wasn't talking to the rest of the painting. Over time I've learned to just follow my instincts, do what I need to do and then put the piece away until the more recent paint applications have dried and settled in.

5) ---When making changes I always go first for the ones I'm the most certain I want to make and leave all of the 'maybes' for later...or never. My practice is also to return first to whatever adjustments are closest to the center of interest and then proceed out to the other areas that are supporting the primary story of the composition.

      In general most of my work doesn't go through substantial reworking, but there are often a few places where I'll need to slow down and some finishing touches to do later. My favorite paintings of course are the ones that just happen seemingly on their own  --- those rare moments when everything just clicks into place with little or no tweaking. Early on when I would hit one of those magical states I would be convinced I had finally arrived at a level of painting brilliance that would continue forever. I still always hope for painting days like that, but in my opinion they don't arrive often enough and it's when one least expects them.  Whether the painting really was 'blown on in one puff', took a lot of effort to make it appear that way, or perhaps was a complete dud --- all of it is a part of the learning process and with practice, the solutions to the challenges that inevitably arise become more successful.

"Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again." --- Vincent Van Gogh

"If you want to learn, be willing to be taught." --- Marcus Aurelius

One of the questions I get the most often is 'What palette knife do you use?'. The correct technical description for what I'm talking about here is probably 'painting knife' but since I use the same knives to mix on my palette too, I pretty much use the terms interchangeably. Since I first found a favorite knife to paint with there's been a change in model number and more recently, a 'flex' option added , so I'm going to go over what is is I'm using, why I like this particular knife and how to make sure you're getting the same one if you want to order it.

It was probably a couple of decades ago that I started working a lot with a knife-- sometimes putting on more paint with knives than with brushes. Oddly enough, the smaller and more confined working areas in my paintings are more likely to have been done using a knife. Without resorting to thinning the paint, I'm able to put down small shapes and detail while using as much control as I would have if I were working with a small brush. There's also a lot of scraping going on and occasionally the classic troweling on of thicker paint that people most often associate with knife applications.

I haven't done an exhaustive trial of every brand and shape of knife available, but of the ones I've tried, far and away my preference is for one made by Holbein. Originally it was labeled #10 . When I learned that model was to be discontinued, I bought all I could find and still have a number of brand new ones stashed away. Fortunately the same shape and size was continued under a different name and now is called Holbein MX-03. While many of the art materials I use are fairly low tech and inexpensive, these knives for me are a splurge that is worth the extra expense. Most painting knives are stamped or cut out of a flat piece of metal where the thickness doesn't vary so they have a more limited flexibility. These Holbein standard flex (a.k.a. soft flex) are ground down so that the metal gets thinner toward the pointed end, and this allows for more variety in the way they can be used to apply paint.

On the left you can see one of the old Holbein #10 versions and on the right is a brand new MX-03. These 2 knives have slightly different handles but the blades are identical when new. The difference you see in shape for the one on the left is due to the gradual wearing down of the metal after being scraped across a few miles of canvas. Eventually the edges get more concave and irregular and the point more narrow. The dimensions are 5/8th" wide by almost 2" in length. I've never found any advantage to using one that is broken in vs. brand new although they do get dramatically sharper along the edge and can become almost like razors.

Here are some examples of the 3 basic ways I generally apply paint with a knife. The first is troweling on a thick layer although in my work it is rarely thick enough to be the typical stroke that many would associate with palette knife painting. In the second example I have scraped on the paint. Using the underlying white ground showing through instead of adding white to lighten a color helps preserve the full range of chroma that's possible. The thin lines and dots to the right are done with the edge or tip of the knife. I might use this technique for stems or small highlights. As an example, I would have used the edge of my knife to create the top planes on some of the objects in the painting above. Applying paint using a knife can create a 'shelf' or small build up of paint that catches a bit of the physical light hitting the painting and can help enhance an illusion of form and depth. 

Because some of the effects I'm trying to capture are often very subtle, my preference is to use knife work on stretched linen where the support has more 'give' and the stroke work ends up being a bit softer. One big upside to working with knives is they are easier to clean than brushes. The downside is these knives are expensive (around $55 at the time of this writing) and if dropped they can dent rather easily. I always try to emphasize to students that none of your materials are ever going to magically transform your paintings into masterpieces, but I can also empathize with the enthusiasm to try something new. If you plan on ordering one of these knives like I'm using there is one thing you need to watch out for: With the new line of MX knives, some are labeled either Standard Flex ( Soft Flex) and the MX-03 knife is in that group. There is another knife exactly the same size and shape however that is just a slightly different number. That one is MX-13 and labeled 'hard flex'. It's probably a very nice knife too but will be more like the typical painting knives you are probably already familiar with. The Holbein MX-03 Standard or Soft Flex is the one that will allow easier manipulation of the paint.

Always try to keep in mind that above all else, what will make the biggest difference in your paintings are the seeing skills you develop. The artists I see who truly make progress are the ones who approach learning as a process and focus on that rather than the end result.

"Nothing important comes into being overnight." --- Epictetus

"Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts." --- Pogo

     This past week brought news of the passing of Ned Jacob at the age of 86. He was one of the most gifted artists I've had the good fortune to cross paths with and a legend among his peers. My intention here isn't to summarize his life or present a eulogy but links are posted at the bottom of the page for anyone who wants to learn more about his remarkable life and view his incredible body of work.

     Although I had been familiar with his artwork for a number of years, we first met when I signed up for a figure drawing and painting workshop at the former Branham Ranch near Taos. In this blog I hope to give those who might wonder what that experience was like a glimpse into his philosophy and highlight some of the influence his teaching has had on my own work. As best as I can recall, this workshop would have taken place around 35 years ago so the details are a bit fuzzy now but I feel like much of the substance of what I gained is still present in my artwork to this day.

     In the workshop, half of the day was spent painting figures and half doing quick gesture drawings --- under both indoor and outdoor lighting. This is one of the figure studies I kept and probably represents a few hours of work -- just going for the big spots of color. Due to some degree of color blindness, Ned worked with a tightly controlled palette employing far fewer pigments than I was used to in my still life paintings. The range of colors did serve well for a variety of subject matter, but for someone who enjoys depicting the vivid chroma of flowers it took some getting used to. As I remember, the palette he had us work with was a pretty basic set of primary pigments plus orange --- fairly limited but a great exercise in color mixing. 

     For the oil study above I can still recall this model's sweater was the most vivid turquoise you can imagine -- pretty much Viridian right out of the tube with some white mixed in --- except there was no Viridian on his list of colors and I didn't dare sneak any in. The full chroma Viridian might have pulled attention away from the face and figure though so this more neutral note may very well have worked as well or better in this situation. I don't recall what combination of pigments I ended up using but it looks like mostly Ultramarine Blue with some white, yellow and maybe a touch of orange mixed in. Ned was encouraging about what I did with this study and particularly commented on the model's right hand (to the left in this image), telling me not to go back in and mess with that area.

      As for the drawing part of the workshop that was a pretty intense half day. At least part of the time we were set up outdoors with the model in full sunlight and I don't believe any of the poses were even as long as five minutes. Most of them were 2 or 3 minutes long if my memory serves me right. It was simply practicing catching the gesture over and over, hour after hour. This was what I really got hooked on though and to this day I much prefer trying to capture shorter, more interesting and dynamic poses even though most figure drawing groups consider anything 5 minutes or less to be merely warm-ups. Below are a few examples that probably weren't specifically done in that workshop but in the same spirit of what we were working toward. The idea was that capturing the gesture was everything, and that no amount of detail or tweaking could pull you out if the flow of the model's movement wasn't already there to begin with. Conversely, if the gesture had been captured well, it was surprising how little else was necessary.

    Working on these gesture drawings was so rewarding that a group of fellow artists from Taos who attended the workshop decided we would meet once a week , all day long just to do figure drawings. Somehow that usually ended being in my studio but we managed to keep it going for almost a decade. The influence from this workshop however is timeless -- develop the discipline and instincts to simplify and go for the essence of the subject right away.

    I feel very fortunate to have known a handful of people in the art business who didn't just talk the talk, but walked the walk, and Ned was one of those. His passion for art and love of working from life is both an example and a lesson that I hope will stay with me always.

Marla Brenner put together a terrific online presentation which can be viewed once again through October 2025. If you haven't seen it yet, you should definitely check it out while the opportunity is still available. It's well worth a revisit too!

Ned Jacob, Drawing Inspiration from the World

Sacred Paint -- Ned Jacob  by Sandra Dallas 1979.  ISBN 10: 0913504505 ; ISBN 13: 9780913504505   Publisher: Fenn Galleries, Santa Fe

Obituary -- https://everloved.com/life-of/edmund-jacob/

     As mentioned in the previous blog (Museum Hopping -- July 2025), I recently had the good fortune to attend an exhibit of John Singer Sargent's work. Since I'm always curious what might have caught another artist's eye, I thought I'd write about exactly that -- a few of the things that caught my eye and why I found them to be valuable.

     Being a true homebody, I'm not an easy traveler. Once I get someplace I usually love it but the getting there part doesn't do much for me. Maybe that's why when I do leave home, I want to make the most of it and focus on gathering information I can't get any other way. Through books and websites I can find images of complete paintings to study for composition, etc. that are usually better than any photographs I can take, but especially for works in oil, those images don't always give many clues about the way the paint was applied and the texture of the painting surface. For this reason, when taking photos on my art travels, I tend to concentrate more on details of certain areas and sometimes I purposely try to include some glare that helps to show what the paint surface looks like. Below are closeups of various areas in which I've tried to capture the paint application. At the end of the post I've listed (by number) the name of each painting for anyone interested in searching for the complete images.

.  .  

#1                                                         #2                                                         #3

Some of the brushes, the blades of grass and the highlight on the front edge of the table were created using a 

dry brush technique. This involves carefully dragging the brush in such a way that the paint skips across the

surface. The way Sargent used this technique allowed him to add softer and less abrupt strokes to the

painting than if the same value and color of paint had been applied in an unbroken manner. 

.  

#4                                                        #5

More dry brush strokes are noticeable in the lit candles on the birthday cake. In this instance, the vagueness created by the 

broken paint application helps give an illusion of light, yet avoids drawing the viewer's attention away from the figure.

In #5, the reflected light in the pond looks like maybe a combination of scumbling and dry brush, plus a few thicker areas

where the paint might have been applied or flattened out using a painting knife. 

#6

  I've included this image because every time I see this painting I'm blown away by the

skillful way Sargent was able to paint this hand and dress on top of some thick and very

obvious strokes of dry paint.Clearly whatever was underneath was quite a bit different

than the strokes he put on top, yet he was able to look past whatever image was on the

canvas and brilliantly restate a new 'effortless' impression of the subject. To tackle

an area that fearlessly, when he already had so much time and effort invested in the painting,

shows a level of trust in one's vision that very few artists ever achieve.

#7

Although it may not be easy to see in this relatively small image, this area captured my curiosity

for an entirely different reason. It's a detail of a large group portrait and I was initially drawn

in closer to study the brushstrokes. Once I got up on it though, I couldn't help but notice

about a dozen hairs imbedded in the paint surface within the space of a couple of square feet.

Maybe a dog was in the room or one of his brushes started to implode?

I'd love to know the story on that one!

These were a million thoughts going through my head as I wallowed in the energy of such an incredible body of work, but this should give you a glimpse of some of the lessons I was trying to absorb, as well as the surprises I ran across. If I could be there again, no doubt I would notice entirely different things that would spark my interest. Museum hopping is just the best and as much as I love staying home, a part of me can't wait to go again.

Image #1 & 2 --- "Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife"

Image #3 -- "Madame X"

Image #4 --- "The Birthday Party"

Image #5 --- "In The Luxembourg Gardens"

Image #6 --- "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit"

Image #7 --- " The Wyndham Sisters"

Earlier this month I was fortunate to be doing one of my very favorite things in the whole world --- museum hopping. More specifically, I made the trip to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the 'Sargent and Paris' exhibit which will be open at this location through August 3, 2025. After that it will travel to Paris where it will be on display from September 3 through January 11th of 2026. This will be the first solo exhibit of the artist's work in France, where Sargent's career as a portrait painter began to take off 140 years ago. 

The trip truly exceeded my expectations (which were pretty high to begin with), but as is often the case, there were a few tweaks I would have made if I had some of the information I'll share with you in this blog. While some of these tips will be specific to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a lot of it will apply to any special exhibits and can help you make the most of your time while museum hopping.

To begin with, The Met is absolutely huge and if you head there without a plan you will likely regret it. Often with special shows there are separate tickets for the exhibit but for this location, only an entry fee for general admission is required. This is the largest museum in the US and according to Wikipedia, the 4th largest museum in the world. It was love at first sight for me as a 19-year-old who had just arrived in New York City to study art. After more visits than I can count, there are still many areas I have never explored in this magnificent building and I would love to take a week or more to do just that. There are 2 million objects of art (including an Egyptian Temple) housed at the Met, so making a list of priorities before you get there is a really excellent idea! 

With almost 100 Sargent paintings in the show itself, that was of course my first stop. At any art exhibit where I know a lot of people will be streaming through, my plan for many years has always been the same; get in the door as early as possible and have tickets or entry fees paid for in advance so that it's not necessary to wait in another line. Grabbing a map when you go through the lobby will come in handy though. Then I immediately make a beeline to the very last room in the exhibit so that I can spend a few quiet moments with at least some of the paintings and study them up close before the crowd catches up to me.   

                                      This is how the gallery looked when I first arrived but within about 30 minutes the 

                                      area was already beginning to fill up. Although I had previously studied both of these

                                      paintings individually --- I've always dreamed of comparing the original Madame X,

                                      and the unfinished copy next to each other.

 Eventually I worked my way back upstream to view the first part of the exhibit. After several hours my brain was way past overload, so I wandered off to find my sister and hopefully something to eat. Easier said than done! The museum has 5 or 6 eating spots and much to my surprise the cell service was not good at all (almost non-existent in in certain places) so we ended up eating in different areas of the museum and really didn't connect again until it was almost closing time. (Later I discovered there is free Wifi available, which presumably works better, but we both might have needed to be linked to it.)

After lunch I headed to the American Wing which I was somewhat familiar with from years past. Although it only covers a fraction of the floor space in the building, this wing itself is enormous and spans several floors. Stumbling across an area called "Visual Storage" I was able to follow a diagram and locate several more Sargents plus a lot of other terrific paintings.

                                          Just to give you an idea.... this is the aisle of silver objects in 'Visual Storage'  -- the

                                          ones not on display in the regular museum galleries.

The Visual Storage area is great and I pretty much had the whole place to myself although it should be said that not everything is at eye level and all of it is behind plexiglass. After that it was on to the other rooms where I found more Sargents  -- a total of 11 that were not a part of the exhibit so I assume all were painted after the years in Paris. As always, I was tracking other favorite artists as well so I eventually made my way to the European Painting galleries. This section of the museum covers an even larger area and several more centuries so this is where a little planning ahead will go a long way. The best advice I got from one of the guards was to go to the Met website and search for a particular artist. From there you can see how many pieces of that artist's work they have, whether or not a piece is on exhibit, and if so, what room it's in. Even assuming your phone battery is still charged after taking a bazillion photos and there is a decent connection --- doing this on a small screen would be pretty time consuming and it's far better to save your time and energy for scurrying around looking at art. The guard explained to me that many of the pieces on display are from private collections and whoever made the loan or donation still wants whatever items are from their collection to be shown together as a group. For this reason, you can't assume all of a particular artist's work will all be in one place. As it was I was able to cram about as much into the day (and my brain) as I could but the next time I venture back to New York, I will definitely have a list and a plan for making the most of every minute.

P.S.  -- A final word to those who would love to see this exhibit but the timing or whatever just isn't right --- these Sargent shows are pretty popular and my hope is another one will be coming along again in the next year or two. 

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/sargent-and-paris

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/sargent-paris-years-1874-1884

“Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.” --- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

"My heart is set on not letting myself be forgotten in Paris."--- John Singer Sargent in a letter to Claude Monet

Even though my paintings are considered representational, I enjoy the challenge of creating a compelling visual image that isn't overly reliant on someone's emotional attachment to the subject matter. In order to accomplish this, staying mindful of the the abstract elements that are known to attract the eye is a really valuable discipline. This is the idea behind establishing a focal point at the very beginning of the painting process. Having the habit of initiating key decisions early on gives me solid parameters to relate all of the other notes to, but also forces me to identify the most important aspect I'm wanting to capture in that particular arrangement. This becomes even more  important when working in a genre where the objects can have infinite variety in shape, size, color and value. While it's possible to skate by without a plan or a concept of a plan, I don't like to count on that sort of luck following me around and much prefer to hedge my bets when I can. Once the notes within the focal point are established, I have a better idea of how far I can push the other areas of the composition ,or even more importantly, what sort of information can be left out in order to strengthen the central story of the painting.

 In practice, a focal point really just boils down to a collection of shapes and colors that the eye will tend to go to first. (For the record -- I use the terms focal point, focal area, center of interest and center of attention pretty much interchangeably.) Leaving aside the different considerations when it comes to composing with figures or animals, there are fortunately some fairly easy to remember guidelines for making sure an arrangement will have a compelling center of interest. Lightest light, darkest dark, hardest edge, brightest chroma and detail are all attention getters, and everything else being equal, gathering all or most of these strongest statements in one area will produce a compelling center of interest.These more extreme notes are also the ones that are easiest to see and therefore to get on the canvas correctly.  Establishing a focal point is perhaps the most essential for representational paintings done with a direct painting approach where the goal is capturing a convincing feel of light and depth. Even when it comes to purely non-objective works of art though, I find myself more drawn to images where my eye can land in an area to focus on fairly quickly rather than the attention being evenly distributed across the picture plane.

 A guiding principle to help navigate setting up and painting a composition is essential if my plan is to develop a mental picture of what I hope to accomplish in a particular arrangement. Often as I'm working in the studio, I'm struck by the thousands of options and choices being  considered -- literally for every stroke. Every touch of the brush or knife has the potential to be warmer, cooler, thicker, lighter, darker, more neutral, more chromatic, etc. etc. It's really no wonder where the term 'easel brain' comes from. After many years of painting, a lot of these decisions are on a faster and more intuitive level, but at best still require some intense brain energy and it takes a surprising amount of mental discipline to stick with the original concept and not veer off track.

Although it does bother me to know the odds of making every decision exactly right are not in my favor, that really isn't the point! By keeping attention on the big picture -- the story of the light and the way the large patterns come together -- many of these decisions will become easier and more obvious as the painting progresses. Sticking with the priorities established in the focal point allows the artist to concentrate their energy on the areas that will count the most. In other words, choices within the peripheral areas become more apparent when the supporting players are not in competition with the central concept of the painting. We cannot copy nature, so the best we can do is reprepresent as faithfully as possible the relationships we see, and thereby create an illusion that reflects the message we're attempting to convey. 

 It's very rarely a smooth path all the way through to the finish however. In almost every painting there's a point where I think the piece isn't working and that I'm wasting my time trying to make something happen. On rare occasions this may be true, but so seldom is the whole canvas truly an irredeemable mess that I've come to anticipate these moments of angst and see them as another part of the process--part of the challenge. When the second-guessing comes up,  I just try my best to just stay on track, retrace my steps back to the focal point if necessary and continue patiently adding one stroke after another. What is far more likely to result in a irredeemable mess is when I panic and count on luck, speed or chutzpah to blaze through and win the day. The effortlessness I aim to achieve in my work is more a by-product of the trust I have in the decisions I've already made in the painting up to that point , rather than any deliberate attempt to paint in a bravura manner. 

Western Bluebirds feeding their young. The little ones flew off before I caught a glimpse of them but I have seen the parents visiting the house again in the past few days. Fingers crossed there will be a second brood this year!

"Be Patient with yourself. Nothing in nature blooms all year." -- author unknown

"Well-being is realized by small steps, but truly is no small thing." --- Zeno

      Here in the high desert of New Mexico, spring is finally starting to arrive and some of my favorite flowers to paint are making their appearance once again. Also coming up are the bundles of blue flax scattered around the yard. Although this amazing wildflower does come in other colors (and I recall having some red at one point), blue is the more common color and those are the ones that reappear in my yard year after year. Sometimes it shows up in the middle of a walkway or in the oddest places but I always enjoy the splashes of ultramarine it adds to the garden.

     It feels like an affirmation of some sort to watch the flax reemerge each spring,  since it represents such a critical part of the oil painting process. Flax is synonymous with linseed, so this is where the oil comes from that our pigments are ground in. In other words, the linseed oil in your paint originates from the same place as the flax seed and flax oil you will find in the health food section of your local grocery store. That's pretty much all our artists' oil colors are -- linseed oil and pigment. The correlation between flax and painting doesn't stop there though. While linseed oil is favored as a binder for pigment due to its strength and flexibility when dry, the rest of the plant has traditionally been valued for the stem fibers that are woven into linen --- long prized by artists as a painting support. The irregular yet durable fibers from flax also result in a less mechanical weave which can produce a more varied and interesting surface. Thankfully I don't have to press my own oil or weave my own canvas, but knowing that my art materials originate from these vivid blue clumps of flowers that grace my garden every year, is something I always marvel at.

     Although many people still think of oil paints as being toxic, for the most part it's the solvent used for thinning and cleaning up that's the bigger concern. Much of the bad reputation for the paint itself came from pigments that are no longer in common use such as lead white. For those of you who want to make use of the beautiful richness of traditional oils but have concerns about safety, Gamblin has an excellent page on their website that I am posting a link to below. I always encourage artists to do their own research but basically, unless you are sanding, spraying, grinding your own pigments or using a lot of solvents in a poorly ventilated space, there probably isn't as much to worry about as you might imagine.

     If you're interested in growing flax I'd suggest tossing out some seed in a barren location next to some gravel or pavement. Once it gets going, flax truly thrives on neglect and the occasional rain coming off of a roof in a sunny location seems to suit it just fine. More info on growing flax can be found at https://www.americanmeadows.com/content/wildflower-seeds/wildflower-species/all-about-flax

More info on studio safety  --- https://gamblincolors.com/studio-safety/studio-safety-create-without-compromise/

"Once you've started, you're halfway there." --- Horace, the Roman poet, in his work Epistles

       Usually the most favorable mindset for doing paintings I'm happy with will involve having no expectations whatsoever. Once I've created an arrangement that is visually inspiring and I can't wait to pick up my brushes, my next priority is to try my best not to get attached to any results. It's counterintuitive and not easy to stay in that place, especially as I accumulate more areas I'm satisfied with. I end up having to let go of the results over and over again in the sure knowledge that the best way to bomb out is holding on too tightly. Thankfully, most of the time painting isn't like sports or theater where it's all done out in public with a crowd watching. More often than not, what goes on in the studio is more like the proverbial sausage making that it's really better not to see. Scraping and repainting, removing or adding objects, pacing, staring and a fair amount of recreational eating can all be part of getting to a finished product. To me, every painting is a puzzle I'm trying to solve and even when it's a subject I've painted many times before, only rarely do the pieces all fit together in a seamless fashion. It's exhilarating when that happens, but outside of practicing a lot I don't know of a way to nurture totally spontaneous outcomes that I'm consistently pleased with. As the saying goes --the more you practice, the luckier you get.

       I'm sure I wasn't as fond of the adventurous side of art when I was first learning to paint, although at 16 I'm not sure I had any thoughts at all about what direction I wanted to go. All I knew was that I had found teachers who gave me some concrete steps I could take to achieve the realistic results I aspired to. That isn't to say the outcomes I hoped for came easy, but just that there was some knowledge that put them within reach. The schools I attended followed a controlled and academic approach developed by an illustrator named Frank J. Reilly. You can find more about Reilly and his teaching methods at this link -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Reilly. My first teachers had both studied directly with him but the school he had established was no longer around by the time I began studying painting. In retrospect, it was very fortunate to have stumbled across a method which provided an ideal structure for learning how to observe, and a system for understanding the various properties of pigments.

     In other areas of my life like cooking or traveling, I've always been comfortable with a looser approach so perhaps it was inevitable that I eventually gravitated to a way of painting that left space for more adventurous outcomes. At any rate, looking back on it it feels like the changes in my painting over the years followed a natural progression. Always I've been fascinated with capturing light and form as well as interesting surface textures , and doing all of that in a way that appears effortless. While this was hardly the easiest thing to aspire to, looking back on the way painting evolved for me over the years, I'm grateful I managed to continue listening to my inner voice.

     This brings up an issue I think most people don't anticipate when it comes to the art business or even the non-art related areas of life.It's not the simplest thing to jump into a competitive arena and still keep listening to that inner voice.  As far as I'm concerned, the fun stuff all happens in these unscripted moments of serendipity so the challenge is to maintain a balance between the various demands on one's time and those things that keep painting an adventure. More people involved in the outcome translates into more pressure, so it takes a strong will on the part of the artist to guard whatever creative time and space they need to ultimately achieve the results they are hoping for. Sometimes that effort can seem like, at best, a self-indulgent luxury -- especially when the work isn't going well or feeling very productive.

      While there's a lot of luck involved finding a path and sticking to it, certainly I had my share of detours along the way. Still, what I ended up doing more or less follows the general advice I would give to any student; Find a teacher, or several teachers (preferably one at a time) who can help you become fluent in 'seeing' skills. Some people manage to figure out a way to teach these skills to themselves but a good teacher can often help speed up the process. It's also nice to just have the moral support from somebody who understands the difficulty of what you are trying to accomplish. Once the habit of trusting the visual information and making comparisons becomes established, that is when you can begin the journey of listening to yourself and figuring out how you want to go about expressing yourself using that knowledge. 

"Your style is the way you talk in paint." --- Robert Henri 

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." -- Oscar Wilde

        February being the short month that it is, I decided to repost a blog first published about a year and a half ago. It echoes many of the the thoughts I've had recently though, and hopefully others can find some helpful reminders as well. Looking to examples of artists who came before me is one way I've found to help keep things in perspective when uncertainty becomes more than a bit too much. Many of the artists from the past had lives that were far from ideal, yet they managed to find moments of respite within their creativity. This post  features one of my all time favorite painters -- John Singer Sargent. At the bottom of this page I've added a listing for several exhibitions of his work that will be coming up in 2025. 

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 ART AND EQUANIMITY

(April 27-August 3, 2025) 

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/sargent-and-paris://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/sargent-and-paris

A catalogue for this show is available now for preorder, to be shipped April 29,2025.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588397959/sargent-and-paris/://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588397959/sargent-and-paris/

Sargent The Paris Years (1874-1884) (Same exhibit as above in a different location)

  Musée d’Orsay , Paris

(September 22, 2025-January 11,2026)

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/sargent-paris-years-1874-1884

Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits

Kenwood in Hampstead, London

(May 16 -- October 5, 2025)

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/search-news/pr-english-heritage-announces-john-singer-sargent-exhibition-for-2025-at-kenwood/

       Recently I've been drawing my cats, who in the winter are always begging me to sit with them on the studio floor and play kitty games anyway. Just looking in their direction counts as attention it seems, so when they take a break I grab my pen and paper. The goal isn't to create great works of art or develop studies to work into a painting, but the way I go about it is not only a lot of fun, but also a huge help in keeping my vision fluent in the language of shapes.

      What I'm actually practicing is putting down the negative shapes and not the cats themselves. Anytime your brain can't get out of it's own way there is always another approach to solving a puzzle and from a strictly artistic point of view, paying attention to the shapes around an object, rather than the object itself is the best workaround I can think of. This concept can be applied to virtually anything but in a lot of cat poses, one of the most distinctive and easy to see shapes is formed by the space behind their ears. The easiest shapes to see will always be the easiest get on the canvas or paper correctly so that's what I head for right away.For an in depth explanation of negative shapes and why they can be so useful, check out my June 2023 blog Foreshortening and Negative Shapes. 

                                             Getting the initial shape down correctly is the first step and then it's a matter of relating 

                                             all of the other shapes to it -- ideally before the model moves. Keep in mind that both of

                                             these cats are 'tripods' so it's not necessarily my fault if they don't look normal -- one is

                                             missing a front leg and the other a hind leg.

                                                     .      

                                                On this first image you can see several starts with the shape behind the ears before

                                                Callie settled into a pose. Even though working in this way results in little more than

                                                a simple silhouette, I think these quick doodles capture their moods and gestures

                                                as well or better than I might with a more finished out drawing.

                                              Focusing on negative shapes can be invaluable for working with any object in any medium.

                                              This telescope provided an excellent array of shapes to relate to one another. While painting

                                              has more elements than just getting the shapes right, the practice and discipline of observing

                                              relationships between notes of colors and values is exactly the same as it is for shapes.

Here's a few pointers for any of you who would like to try this at home:

1) To get started, grab a pen or pencil and paper and draw one of the first shapes you see. If the object moves a lot or you find yourself starting to invent things, begin again.

2) Envision a square (box) around the object and make a note of where the farthest points would be touching the sides. (for an illustration of this concept, see the March 2022 archived blog post On Painting Lilies and scroll to the bottom of the page.)

3) Look for areas of contrast that are easy to see and strong geometric shapes like triangles. Anything clear and easy to see will help you get a good foundation to build on. 

4) I can't speak for everyone, but if your brain keeps blathering away about what a dumb thing it is to spend time looking at negative shapes then you are probably on the right track. Just keep going and try not to worry about the results.

As someone who loves logic, I will admit that it doesn't make sense to focus on one shape over another when the line between them is exactly the same. Apparently the reason the negative shapes are easier to see accurately is due to the way we store information. Our brains will usually have some sort of picture image attached to any name or verbal description --like 'cat' for example. Often this visual symbol isn't all that sophisticated and maybe more like a cartoon cat you might have drawn in kindergarten, but it's there nonetheless. Your eye and hand want to do one thing and your brain wants to stick with it's archived image. When focusing on an abstract shape without any name attached to it, there is no preconceived idea in your head of what that shape will be, which makes it easier to see as an artist does and put down the visual information that is actually in front of you. 

"Get your spots in their right place and your lines precisely at their relative angles."  -- John Singer Sargent

This past year, I must have been "good", part of the time anyway, because 2 terrific new art books arrived for Christmas. Since both are ones you wouldn't be likely to find in a typical bookstore, I wanted to offer a brief description of each and info on how to go about getting them for anyone who is interested. 

Fantin-Latour -- Figures Et Fleurs by Paul de Roux.

Books on Fantin-Latour's paintings aren't always easy to come by so it was a wonderful surprise to receive one I hadn't seen. This book is written in French, appears to be a catalog from a show and was published in 1995. It is no longer in print so the price will vary by seller but it contains some beautiful reproductions with exceptionally nice color, and a few of the paintings were ones I hadn't run across before. Not a large book --it's dimensions are 9.25"x 7.75"x 1/2" -- 63 pages with 35 color reproductions. The best way to find a copy would probably be from a used bookseller or by doing an online search of the ISBN number.

The second book is a recent publication but to my knowledge the only way to get a copy is through the Zorn Museum in Sweden.

Zorn's Studio -- The Artist's Materials and Techniques by Emma Jansson  ISBN 978-91-983701-5-7 . Written in English, 151 pages, this book is filled with many wonderful color reproductions but also includes a lot of expert analysis and advanced photographic imaging that reveal some of the specific ways Zorn was able to create his magic. There are photos of his materials and interesting discussions on his use of color, texture, luminosity,compositional changes, etc. Spoiler alert --sometimes the Zorn Palette was expanded to include more than 4 pigments.

Since the friend who gifted me this book is 'internet challenged' I did the ordering online which may sound a bit complicated but was actually very simple and efficient. Just send an email to [email protected] and they will reply with a PayPal link for submitting the fee which when I ordered was between 50-55 US dollars and included shipping. A PayPal account is not required --only a credit card. An email showed up soon thereafter with a tracking number and about 2 weeks later the book arrived via USPS. 

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all." -- Abraham Lincoln

      This is sort of an advanced technique I'm going to talk about here, so if you're in the beginning stages of color mixing, just take this post as an introduction into a concept you can look into further down the road. Basically, I'll be discussing how to use paint in a way that can expand it's limited range, while at the same time using techniques that can make the paint quality more interesting. In other words -- this is all pretty nerdy.

    One of the primary things I try to teach students is exactly how limited our range of pigments are, especially as compared to what nature has to work with. I don't emphasize this because I want people to feel confined in the way they're using their paints, but because I want them to be totally aware of the possibilities they have available and the importance of making informed choices. What people do with that knowledge and whether they use the full spectrum of their paints isn't any of my business, but when I watch students behave as though they have unlimited options left to save the important elements of their painting, when I can clearly see they've already used up the most powerful choices on their palette, it makes me want to cover my eyes and keep moving. Trial and error can be a terrific teacher but the students who can also think their way through some of these pitfalls before they come up are definitely the ones who make faster progress.

     My online self-study course, The Puzzle of Painting, is organized in an identical way to how I've taught my in-person workshops for many decades. I take the 3 aspects of color individually ---value, chroma, and hue -- explain what the limitations are, and then talk about some of the techniques artists throughout time have developed to compensate for these limitations. By far the most limited aspect within our pigments is value, and that's why most representational painters emphasize simplifying value relationships over almost everything else.  Chroma can also be quite limited , especially with the cool red pigments, but aside from vibrant flowers that are prominent in the picture plane, this isn't a limitation that a lot of painters pay much attention to. For more on this topic and how I handle this aspect of color, check out the blog posts on CHROMA.

     Hue in the context of the Munsell Color System refers strictly to a color designation along the color wheel -- red, blue, yellow, green, purple, etc. While it may seem like there are no limits in that area, contemplate the problem of an object of one color --- for example a blue mountain --with sunlight that is close to its complement, warm yellow. I have seen artists simply leave out the warmth of the light source and others who choose to mix the hues together producing a somewhat neutral green, but what if, like the Impressionists, you really want to capture both? Basically , given the nature of our paints, the only practical solution will be putting both warm and cool colors down and allowing the viewer's eyes to visually mix them. In a basic sense, visual mixing is what might commonly be called an Impressionist technique although I've definitely seen examples of artists using broken color long before the 1800's when the Impressionist painters first began shaking up the art world.

Above you can see an example of using 'broken color' to expand the range of what my pigments are capable of, both in terms of hue and value. This is a close up of the highlight on the brass vase in the painting at the top of the page and my goal in using color in this way was to convey 3 things at once --- the sharp contrast in value of a highlight on shiny metal, the warmth picked up by the color of the brass, and the slight coolness of the light coming in from my north light windows. Had I thoroughly mixed these three notes together the result would be a somewhat greenish note and darker in value, which wouldn't have served me as well for the three objectives I had in mind. A mixture like that can end up looking more like a piece of light green tape stuck on a brass vase instead of a convincing illusion of a highlight.

      Painters can have all sorts of motives for employing color changes in their work. Sometimes color will add interest in an area such as a foreground where it might lead the viewer into the painting . Color changes can also help to enhance harmony, or be employed as part of a technique that allows the painting hang together as a whole. I'm sure a lot of people add in variations in color just because it's their personal taste or simply because it's fun. When an artist truly wants to create the strongest illusion of light and form that their paints are capable of though, a solid knowledge of the limits, and therefore the possibilities inherent in our pigments, will be essential.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see” -- Edgar Degas. 

       At some point, maybe a few decades ago, I decided the potential for publicly making a boo-boo is probably less harmful to the creative process than being hyper-focused on what others might think. There was a time I wouldn't have even considered putting out artwork without first getting someone's opinion, and yet today almost nobody sees my paintings until I drop them off at a gallery or post them on my website. For better or worse, they are my creations and if I'm pleased with the results it feels important to stand by that. It's not that I don't stop and question all the way through the painting process but too much second-guessing or too many voices chiming in can certainly spoil a promising start.

      The advice to place such an emphasis on one's own judgement probably sounds contradictory coming from somebody who has done as much teaching as I have, but to me, to believe otherwise would reflect a misguided notion of what teaching is all about. It was my good fortune to have found instructors who understood the goal for me as a student was not to memorize a bunch of rules and techniques but rather to learn how to teach myself.  That was the only real path to finding the answers I needed if I had hopes of doing anything original. At the time I would have been happy to just be told how to imitate what my teachers were able to do with paint but in the long run, a focus on that alone would have been a disservice to both me and them. As painful as it was, questioning and a willingness to make mistakes was an essential part of the process of learning to paint in my own voice. I'm grateful to have stumbled across instructors who had a clear understanding of this and who were patient with my growing pains. 

      Overall, artists are nice and sensitive people but the business can be pretty competitive and egos do get in the way, so over the years I've just learned to be cautious about who I solicit feedback from. I'm also reluctant about giving feedback aside from classroom situations where that's clearly what people have signed up for. Gallery owners, collectors, family, friends, neighbors and even random strangers can be very free with advice on what other people are creating. Cats probably have an opinion too, but mercifully they keep it to themselves. With my own work I typically place more value on input from non-artists because they're less focused on technique or whatever and seem better able to spot errors like unplanned figures, faces or animals. However, in my effort to get into the kind of 'zone' where I do my best and most focused work, painting by committee just has never been a good fit for me. Accordingly, commission aren't something I do either. A lot of artists thrive on feedback and commissions though, so my intention isn't to discourage someone from what's working for them but merely to point out that everybody is different and that's OK. This is more about giving a word of support to those who sometimes feel out of the loop and assure them they're not as alone as they might assume. In reading about some of my favorite painters throughout history, I've noticed there's there's really no shortage of those who were blessed with a quirky independent streak , so I can't think this is a totally bad thing. 

    In conclusion I would just say that feedback can go either way, depending on the artist and how it affects them or the motivations of the person who is offering their opinion. There are times I've suggested to people that they go get their own set of paints and follow the advice they're so certain about on their own painting. Other times I've been grateful I checked with somebody who had a fresh eye and could see something I hadn't spotted. Either way, it's important to acknowledge that pleasing everyone isn't an option and that any creative efforts , no matter how carefully vetted, will involve missteps. In the midst of all the noise out there, it's not always easy finding the right balance, but checking in with my state of mind and whatever it is that keeps me painting has given me the perspective to, above all else, listen to and follow my own path.

"Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.'

I say, don't run with crowds."  --- Robert Henri  The Art Spirit

"It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet."  -- Marcus Aurelius

        Paint quality isn't something every painter is sensitive to (nor do they need to be), but since it plays a role in the way I work and the techniques I use, in this post I'm going to talk about what I'm aiming for when it comes to the finished look of my paintings. Basically I would define paint quality as the surface texture on the painting once it's been completed. This is something I can recall being wound up about way back in school when I probably should have been more concerned with some other important things like values and composition. In art school our paints were laid out in strings of values and all of the mixtures tended to gravitate toward opaque so there wasn't much conversation between transparent and opaque pigments. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure there weren't the same options for purchasing transparent pigments like there are today. Working on cotton duck in layers, everything ended up having more or less the same look to it in terms of the surface. The finished paintings (mine and everyone else's) reminded me of Naugahyde -- a very bland and uniform faux leather fabric that was popular back in the day. Fifty years of innovation has done wonders for artificial leather, but I still don't want my painting surfaces to have that same look.

      One of the things I like the most about a direct painting method is that the paint quality ends up being interesting without me putting a lot of conscious effort into it. Working with knives and brushes, concentrating on shapes and leaving finished strokes as I proceed, results in paint being put down in a way that has an authority I'm not able to replicate when filling in an outline or working in layers. What I'm aiming for is a finished surface that in and of itself is interesting --- so that even if a painting was coated with flat wall paint there would still be a variety of textures that would have some distinct character. It's just part of the puzzle I enjoy setting up for myself and a way to help make every area of the painting interesting, even if not every area of the composition is intended to command equal interest.

Above are a couple of detail images from a recent painting I'm still working on. I took these up close and with a slight amount of glare to illustrate some of the strokework I'm using to create a more interesting surface than the linen weave by itself. There's a mix of thin to thick areas, scraping with a knife, brushstrokes, thicker knife passages and a few areas of smudging. The result is probably thinner than most people would guess with some of the heaviest build-up being 1/8" or less. The areas shown above I consider more or less finished and any additions I make going forward will be minimal. In these examples you can also see a few places where I have deliberately not thoroughly mixed the paint so there are small streaks of varied or more intense color. This is what I call 'Visual Mixing' and I'll be writing more about that in an upcoming blog.

            Of course there are things that can affect the outcome of the paint surface beyond just the way the paint is applied. I've often felt that students in particular place a lot of emphasis on brushes and paints, when finished paintings are often influenced more by the support (canvas or panels) and way they have been primed. This is one of the reasons some artists favor linen over cotton canvas. Because linen fibers are longer, (and therefore produce a stronger fabric), the threads are also more irregular which typically results in a less mechanical weave. My ideal priming is one that has subtle textures not likely to get in my way, yet takes the paint well without requiring a lot of extra effort to modify that texture. I don't try to rely totally on the support and priming to create a nice paint quality but it sure doesn't hurt to start off with something that lends itself well to the end result I have in mind. It's a pretty personal thing for each artist but experimenting to find a surface that suits your painting method, technique and budget can be time and effort well spent. Some of the online art retailers offer small pieces of canvas to try out and that's advisable before buying a whole roll.  One thing I don't recommend is purchasing materials that are so precious or expensive that they're intimidating and the temptation is to save them for when you're a real artist. In my experience, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to spend their way into doing better paintings and there are good enough options to fit every price range. For more on this topic, check out my June 2024 blog post Painting Materials -- Grounds and Supports

“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working." – Henri Matisse