Nothing in a painting is precious because it looks great in and of itself. It must support and add to the painting, or it should be replaced.
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| Electric Glide, by Carol L. Douglas. 24X36, oil on canvas. |
Among my cardinal rules is to never add tchotchkes* at the last minute to try to balance out a bad composition. “It needs something,” is seldom fixed by adding a pine tree or a boat. Rather, you must return to first principles to figure out what’s wrong.
Last week I did the painting, Electric Glide, over several days. I started laying it out on Tuesday, and then spent all day Wednesday dodging electrical storms to get the version I showed you here. Taking a photo and looking at it on my laptop was a real eye-opener; I hated the bottom third of the composition. The water was accurate for the stormy day on which it was painted, but it was turbid, rollicking, and uninviting. It didn’t have the intimate, welcoming quality of an iconic Adirondack lake. Furthermore, the elongated diamond of light I’d invented for the water did absolutely nothing to support the top of the composition.
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| Before I removed and repainted the water. |
If you painted it once, you can paint it again one thousand times. Stop believing your delightful passage is a happy accident; you can and will do great things again and again. Nothing in a painting is precious because it looks good in and of itself. It has to support and add to the painting, or it should be replaced by something else that pulls its own weight.
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| The motion in the bottom of the painting did nothing to support or enhance the motion in the top. It justflattened everything out. |
When I went back very early on Thursday morning, the surface was glassy and flat. This is a telling characteristic of Adirondack lakes, and I knew it would strengthen the painting.
That meant major surgery, which could only be done with a palette knife and patience. I started at the waterline and worked down. This painting was on a canvas rather than a board. My hand had to be light to avoid stretching the fabric. It took many passes to knock it down.
Had the painting been dry, I’d have had trouble making that change. The changes would have produced pentimenti, which are visible traces of mid-painting changes. That’s why it’s wise to keep impasto down until you’re sure you’ve solved the major composition questions.
I did not use any solvent in this scrape-out. It would have created a soup I couldn’t work over, with a risk of damaging and softening nearby paint. Moreover, the remaining watery grey was a great foil for the reflections. I scumbled them vertically over the grey paint and then worked in the horizontals with a large brush.
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| I like doing wet-on-wet corrections with a brush held nearly parallel to the surface of the painting. |
Scumbling is a technique where a layer of broken or speckled color is laid over another color so that bits of the lower layers show through. There are many ways to do this in both oils and watercolors, but, wet-on-wet, my preferred method is to hold a brush almost parallel with the surface of the painting and drag. This prevents the brush from digging in and disturbing the underlayer.
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| Value sketch of a different painting. |
Changing a section or passage of your original design is one response to “it needs something.” The other is to restate the dark pattern. This is where a separate value sketch, on paper, is so important. If you’ve just done your value study as a grisaille underpainting, you can’t refer back to it. If it’s on paper, you can always compare it to your work in progress. If the pattern of lights and darks is gone, you need to put them back in, regardless of what the shadows and sun are now doing.
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| The value structure of the initial underpainting slavishly follows my sketch. |
Still, adding that electric boat in the last hour broke my own no-tchotchke rule. I didn’t do it to balance the composition. That never works. I added it because I was utterly charmed by it.
How did I get away with it, without ruining an already-balanced composition? I lightened the value of the hull, which was very dark, almost black, and tied it chromatically with the reflection of the land mass on the left. Otherwise it would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
*A tchotchke (CHOTCH-kə ) is a pretty, sentimental bauble that serves no purpose. If Granny loves it but a burglar wouldn’t steal it, it’s a tchotchke.