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Monday Morning Art School: searching for meaning in Sedona

Winter Lambing, 36×48, oil on linen, $6231 framed includes shipping in continental US.

I’m in Sedona, AZ, painting in the 19th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival. I’ve written many times about how the question of meaning bedevils me. This place, with its crystals, vortexes, ley lines, and spiritualism ought to be chock full of meaning, but it’s not. That stuff is too glib and superficial for me.

For artists tucked into a corner of the Sedona landscape, it can be relentless. Casey Cheuvront was painting on a rocky promontory when a woman stopped in front of her to give her clients a spiel about the magnetic energy of the rocks. Another guide talked about how we were in a direct line between Cathedral Rock and Airport Mesa, which apparently confers special powers. Meanwhile, I was discussing reincarnation and non-attachment with a lovely gentleman from Princeton, NJ.

Midnight at the Wood Lot, oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Starting with an overarching concept like Sedona’s famous spirituality can easily veer into the sophomoric. That doesn’t mean that art can’t use symbols, metaphor, and allegory to convey deep layers of meaning. It’s just best to avoid the trite.

To me, one of the most important reasons to paint en plein air is to celebrate God’s creation. That has an emotional resonance with me; I am constantly struck anew by the variety and beauty of this world. Can I translate that in my paintings in a way that evokes an emotional response? Only if I paint something that also resonates with my viewers’ experiences and perspectives. Just as I am left cold by new age spirituality, others may be unable to engage with my deep feelings about the created world.

Lonely cabin, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Ultimately, all we have is our own personal perspective. Our experiences, beliefs, and values add depth and authenticity to our creative expressions. That doesn’t mean I need to be overt about my ideas. They color my perception, and those who think the way I do will, hopefully, find my work relatable.

Of course, none of this works without paying attention to the formal elements of design. All meaning rests on technical skill. You may feel something deeply but be unable to communicate that to your viewer because you don’t have a cohesive visual language.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Yesterday, Hadley Rampton and I demoed together at the Sedona Arts Center. It was an interesting way to do it, because our styles are very different, and the audience asked pertinent questions. When I finished, I asked the people watching what I should name my painting.

“How does it make you feel?” a man asked me.

“Oh, larky, I think, because I had a lot of fun painting it.”

“That’s not what it conveys to me at all,” he said. “To me, it’s pensive.”

Sometimes, what you think you’re painting is not at all what comes through. Other times, there is ambiguity or multiple tracks of meaning within the same painting. Viewers derive their own associations, and they may in fact be what you were thinking subconsciously all along. Although I’m having fun at this event, I have some serious matters clouding my immediate horizon.

The opposite of subtlety is intentional storytelling, where you’re crafting a narrative that’s explicit and easily comprehensible. Since a painting is essentially a snapshot that captures a moment in time, you must work to tell the before and after. Narrative painting can convey complex ideas, sometimes better than words can.

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Fallow fields

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

I painted this fallow field in the late autumn. Torrential rain was forecasted starting at midday, so I took off to paint before dawn. That didn’t help much; pour it did, in that kind of deep soaking rain that only autumn can provide.

Same subject, Lisa BurgerLenz

This was an opportunity to test a favorite hypothesis of mine: that location doesn’t matter as much as subject and style. I know painters who jealously guard their ‘special’ painting locations. I’ve always done the opposite. No two painters look at things the same way, and various paintings of the same site will all come out very different.

Kirkwood Preserve is a lovely, rugged patch of fallow fields and old trees, but fearing an imminent washout, we stayed close to our cars. That meant that four of us chose to paint exactly the same view: Nancy Granda, Lisa BurgerLentz, Bobbi Heath, and me.

Four paintings could not be more similar in subject outside a sip-and-paint, and yet they are very different. Even though they’re all roughly the same composition, they each have their own tonal range, level of abstraction, and brush or knife work.

Same subject, Nancy Granda

I am again reminded of the Arthur Rubinstein statement that I quoted on Monday: “Nothing in art can be the best. It is only… different.”

I’m in Sedona for the 19th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival I’m conflicted, because as much as I love Sedona, I adore the northeast at this time of year. As I drove south on Wednesday, I was struck once again by the panoply of jewel tones in which nature dresses our landscape this time of year.

Same subject, Bobbi Heath

The gold tones of this painting pair perfectly with Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, which I featured last Friday. The execution was nearly as dramatic, as we were painting in sheeting rain.

You can buy this painting by clicking through here. I promise you rain doesn’t come with it.

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When life blindsides us

Tilt-A-Whirl, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed. Includes shipping in continental US.

I had an extremely tight schedule this week. I leave for Sedona Plein Air at noon today, and I needed to finish recording video for Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters. I’m a person with one-day, one-week, one-year, and five-year plans, and I’m running behind.

I’m also a list-maker. When my schedule is overloaded, I just drop my gaze and focus on the next task. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Deadwood, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

That’s where I was on Monday morning when we received a phone call that suddenly changed everything. (It’s not my news to share, but we and our family are fine, and that’s what matters.) My carefully-calibrated projections have been knocked sideways.

I needed to start a whole-life pivot while discharging my immediate responsibilities, all the while coping with that horrible buzzing in the head that accompanies extreme stress. By the grace of God, I did it, but it wasn’t easy.

By Tuesday, I was a little more sanguine. “This is not the first time I’ve been blindsided,” I told my husband. The accidental deaths of two of my siblings as teenagers and my two cancer diagnoses were much worse shocks.

The Logging Truck, 16X20, oil on canvas, $2029 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Being blindsided is different from run-of-the-mill bad news. When artist Kevin Beers lost thirteen paintings in the devastating Port Clyde fire on September 28, he had no warning of the disaster that was about to crash down. One minute, he was larking along, and the next, his body of work was gutted.

Being blindsided has an instant physiological effect. Your flight-or-fight response kicks in, adrenaline pumps and your mind races. At that moment, it’s hard to take any action, let alone sensible action.

There are silver linings to most clouds, although they sometimes take years to realize. I often muse about writing a book called “100 Best Things About Having Cancer.” Since it didn’t kill me, my first cancer was liberating. I stopped doing things I didn’t want to do. I finally did something about the psychic damage caused by my sister’s and brother’s deaths. You could say that cancer allowed me to finally be happy.

The day I learned I was having twins was a good shock. However, it had its moments. My husband was in grad school so I was the primary wage-earner. I spent three months on bed rest and was hospitalized for five weeks. I did lots of worrying, and none of my fears came true. We waste a lot of time worrying in this life.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Perhaps it’s true that challenge helps us develop resilience; I don’t know. My personal philosophy is that God has never let me down yet, and he won’t start now. Of course I have my moments just like everyone else; I frequently echo Doubting Thomas in prayer: “Lord, suspend my disbelief!”

Last Sunday, we had a visiting preacher named Gary Bolton. His vision is absurdly large, to plant new churches across Ireland (thereby neatly sidestepping the Protestant-Catholic divide). It would be so easy for him to lose heart and falter, but he’s applying the same logic I mentioned at the beginning of this post: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

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Monday Morning Art School: it’s all in the preparation

The Pine Tree State, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping in continental US.

When I’m teaching workshops and classes, I frequently ask students, “What’s your takeaway lesson here?” Last week my workshop students got a deep dive into two artists’ working method: Andrew Wyeth‘s, through a guided tour of the Farnsworth Art Museum, and Colin Page‘s, from the maestro himself.

“Painting is easy,” Colin said. “It’s the preparation that’s hard.” I smiled, because that’s something I frequently say as well. Wyeth didn’t whisper it from beyond the grave, but his methodology is spelled out in the museum. For his studio paintings, he was a consummate draftsman who made many sketches and paid meticulous attention to detail.

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Students frequently ask me how to achieve loose brushwork. My first question is why they want that, as it’s not a universal value. Rather it’s a question of style. Linear painting is based on line and boundary; the artist sees in clear shapes and outline. Painterly painting focuses on the interactions of masses, shadows, and merged shapes. An example of a contemporary linear landscape painter is Linden Frederick. An example of a contemporary painterly landscape painter is Kevin Macpherson. Neither style is ‘better,’ they’re just different. And there are many painters (including me) who work in the middle somewhere.

When Arthur Rubinstein was asked if he believed people when they told him he was the greatest pianist of the 20th century, he replied, “Not only I don’t believe them, I get very angry when I hear that, because it is absolute, sheer, horrible nonsense. There isn’t such a thing as the greatest pianist of any time. Nothing in art can be the best. It is only… different.”

What is a universal value in art is assurance, and that rests on the back of solid preparation. Rubinstein joked that he was lazy and didn’t like to practice, but he still spent 6-9 hours a day at the piano. “And a strange thing happened. I began to discover new meanings, new qualities, new possibilities in music that I have been regularly playing for more than 30 years.”

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

The same thing is true of painting, as is its obverse-the less preparation you do, the more you’ll fumble in performance. And the more you must redraw, reposition, reset values, or restate, the less immediate and assured your brushwork will be. That’s as true in oils, acrylics and pastels as it is in watercolor.

What does that mean for the emerging artist? At a minimum, you should do a carefully-realized sketch, considered in terms of compositional patterns of darks and lights. This sketch should be moved to the canvas or paper accurately; if that requires gridding, then you should grid. Colors should be tested first for value, and then to how they relate to the overall key of the painting.

Sea Fog, Castine, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US

Yes, I know artists who don’t do these things. They can be sorted into two groups. The first are those who are very experienced. They’ve learned what corners they can cut (which are not the same for everyone). The second are impatient beginning and intermediate painters. They almost always fail in the preparation, and then they wonder why they’re flailing around in the painting stage.

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The Radnor Hunt

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

I had horses as a kid, and I rode, but the kind of riding I did was generally country lanes or along the Erie Canal. My mare, Bess, had been trained to an English saddle and bit, so I rode her on an old hunt saddle. My gelding, Oscar, was trained to a Western saddle, so I rode him Western with a curb bit. Our third horse, Capricious, was too much for me, so I rode him as little as I could. I did do my first jump on him. It was inadvertent. I didn’t see the ditch, he did, and he flew over it beautifully.

I took enough riding lessons that my parents were pretty sure I wouldn’t fall off. After that they left me to get on with it. There was little style to my riding. I had no special clothes or boots. Our horses weren’t shod because we never rode on the road. In fact, much of their lives were spent turned out in our old orchard, where they’d get drunk every fall on rotting fruit.

I do love drawing and painting horses. This is Scout, my friend Roger’s horse. No sense fussing; he doesn’t know how to hold a pose.

As an avid reader of British literature, I always loved the idea of the hunt. However, the closest I ever got to it were the hunter-jumper classes at the Niagara County Fair. In field hunting, the riders are dressed with formal elegance, there’s a pack of baying hounds, and the horses are beautiful, muscular and brave. I always imagined them streaming along tree-lines and taking fences at a full gallop.

So when I had the chance to paint near the historic Radnor Hunt in Malvern, PA, I was thrilled. I would paint the landscape and when the horses appeared I would somehow limn them into my composition.

Few things have been more of a let-down. It was a weekday, so the riders were in ratcatcher, which is a nice enough combination of tweed and tan, but hardly the pinks (which are actually scarlet coats) or black-and-white of a formal hunt. I first spotted the riders as they picked their way slowly down a far hillside and crossed the road towards me. You can see them in my painting as little marks, if you look carefully.

The hounds didn’t seem particularly motivated to start with, and they promptly lost the scent (if they’d ever had it in the first place). Riders and horses trotted around aimlessly, a few taking soft jumps over a drainage ditch, while the huntsman tried his darndest to get the dogs organized. As the false starts dragged on, most riders pulled up in groups of two or three and chatted. Their horses cropped grass. Eventually it was apparent even to me that the subject of the hunt had outfoxed the dogs. They turned and headed back up the hill from whence they had come.

It’s easy to do a gesture drawing of a horse. You go at it just the same way you do with people.

It was hardly a scene from one of Anthony Trollope‘s novels, but I did get a cracking good painting out of it.

Yes, I romanticize horses.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues is 12X16. $1449 includes shipping and handling in continental US. It’s a bargain compared to what a good hunter will cost you, and you won’t have feed, vet or farrier bills. Click here to purchase online.

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Content over conscience

Two students analyzing an Andrew Wyeth watercolor for values and composition.

On the second day of my Rockport Immersive workshop, I took my students to the Farnsworth Art Museum to look at landscape paintings. As you might imagine, the Wyeth family are featured prominently. I want to say up front that I admire NC, Andrew, and especially Jamie Wyeth, who, in addition to having his forebears’ amazing chops, can often make me laugh out loud.

“Before you can paint like Wyeth, you need to learn to draw like Wyeth,” I tell my students.

A current exhibition documents Andrew Wyeth’s relationship with siblings Alvaro and Anna Christina Olson and their ramshackle saltwater farm in Cushing, ME.

Andrew Wyeth spent time at the Olson House from 1938 until immediately after the Olson’s deaths in December, 1967 and January, 1968. Christina was the more famous Olson, as she was the subject for Wyeth’s Christina’s World. A victim of a degenerative muscular disorder, she lived most of her life as an invalid. At the age of 53, she lost her ability to stand, so she crawled everywhere. (She chose to not use a wheelchair.)

The Wyeths summered in Maine and Andrew kept a studio in the Olsons’ house, where he painted the farm, the house, and its inhabitants countless times. He said that he was looking out the window of that studio when he saw Christina crawling up the hill after visiting her parent’s gravesite. Christina, however, was not the model for the painting. At 55, she was no longer in her first flush of youth, so Wyeth used his wife Betsy as his model. It lends a bit of implausible pulchritude to an otherwise bleak painting.

On Monday, we studied figure in the landscape. Photo by our model, Loren Brown.

“The challenge to me,” Wyeth said, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.” Personally, I’ve always thought Christina’s World is a fine mid-century abstraction that had reality superimposed on it. If it has an emotional pull at all, I don’t feel it.

That’s not to dismiss his incredible contributions to art. I encourage my students to spend time looking at his paintings. I stress this because, as I told my flock today, “Before you can paint like Wyeth, you need to learn to draw like Wyeth.” He was meticulous in his preparation.

Yesterday, while looking at watercolors of the interior of the Olson house, one of my students said, “Andrew Wyeth got rich painting the Olsons and their house and farm. Why didn’t he do anything to make their lives easier?”

The Olsons lived in grinding rural poverty. Wyeth’s paintings show unfinished plank walls, or walls with open lath where the plaster has fallen away, or the interior of their barn, untouched by modern agricultural conveniences. They used an outhouse, an unimaginable hardship for a disabled woman.

When MoMA bought Christina’s World, Wyeth became, essentially, an overnight success. There is an unbridgeable gap between that beaten-down farm and the Wyeths’ life in Chadds Ford, PA, so my student isn’t the first person to ask the question. Several sources have written that Wyeth offered the Olson family gifts, but Christina refused any money. How much of that is mythmaking and how much is true, I can’t say. Nor can anyone else, since all the principals are dead.

Talking to Cassie Sano about her figure painting. Photo by our model, Loren Brown.

Even if it is true, there are lots of reasons needy people don’t accept help, including the fear of stigma and loss of pride. Christina Olson could think of herself as Andrew Wyeth’s equal as long as she didn’t accept his money.

There’s no getting around the fact that Wyeth profited from the struggles of a disabled person. Nor did his wealth, built in part on their backs, bring them any relief. The final insult of poverty is that it kills you young. Alvaro lived to 73, Christina to 74. In contrast, Andrew Wyeth lived to 91, Betsy to 98.

That was then, and this is now, and we’re less ethically hazy, right? Every time I see a cell-phone video of a person being assaulted or dragged screaming to an unknown fate, I recognize that there was a cameraman or woman dispassionately filming, not lifting a finger to help the victim. Apparently, cameras without consciences will always be with us.

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Monday morning art school: how do I know I’m finished?

Dawn Wind, Twin Lights, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

“I know it’s not done, but it’s where I stop because I’m afraid I’ll mess up what I have,” a student messaged me. She was painting in a plein air event where ‘unfinished’ and ‘overdone’ were both errors.

“I think you won’t mess it up, and you can always scrape back to this level if you do,” I replied. She was painting in oils, which have the advantage of a partial undo. In fact, that can be the resolution of many problems, because the average of your errors, revealed by scraping back, is often the right answer.

Apple Blossom Time, 9×12, oil on canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

For most of us, figuring out when a piece is finished is an almost-intuitive process that varies from one piece to another. My answer is, “I’m done when I’m sick of working on it,” but that isn’t particularly helpful advice. There are, of course, some objective factors guiding me:

Intention: I often start with a specific idea for a piece. I’ll never realize that 100%, because the human mind has its own ideas. However, I want to know that I’ve at least made my point.

Composition: I’m a bear about understanding the composition from the very beginning. If I haven’t done that, no technique at the end can save the painting. That said, there may be adjustments needed to strengthen my original idea-darks restated, or brushwork softened or made more precise.

Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Technique: Have I built up my paint level to a satisfying conclusion? Is my brushwork fluid? Are there places of rest? Are there passages that just need more energy?

Emotional impact: This is a question that’s best asked in the design phase, but if I finish and it’s just meh, I might need to ask why. If it’s that I have no emotional connection with the work, I will scrape it out. However, sometimes the emotional impact of a piece is dampened by overworking passages, and that is something I can put right. In oils or pastels, I can scrape or brush out the offending passage. In watercolor the solution is usually to start again. The second version of a watercolor is often much looser than the first. (That’s one of many reasons to paint the subject in grisaille before you jump to color.)

My energy levels: I’m not superhuman. That feeling of exhaustion can be the signal that it’s time to quit before I do something stupid. Or, it just might mean I have to come back another day.

Feedback: I rarely ask for feedback, and then only from a very small cadre of fellow painters. However, you may feel you need critique. In the context of a class, that’s important: you should be open to new ideas. At a painting event, you run the risk of chasing back and forth trying to incorporate everyone’s comments into your work. That’s a sure-fire way to wreck a painting.

Church & Maine, 22X30, Cooper Dragonette, Oil on Panel, 2023. This is a great example of a highly-detailed, highly-finished painting that is nevertheless not overdone. (Courtesy of the artist.)

Personal Style: I’m usually a moderately-loose painter. That influences when I consider a work finished. You may be much more detailed and polished. While the technique remains the same, the endpoint differs. A person who is making a highly-detailed painting like Cooper Dragonette‘s fabulous painting of downtown Belfast, above, will take much more time getting the details right.

Deadlines: In some cases, I’m working against external factors like customer-dictated deadlines. I have always found that such deadlines sharpen my focus, but others may find them horrifying.

Endless revisions: Almost every artist has, at one time or another, had a painting in the studio that won’t leave. I’ve had a few of these, upon which I dabbled until flummoxed, only to pull them out again in six months to dabble again. For me, this never ends well; I might as well have tossed them at the beginning.

Ultimately, the decision about when we’re finished is highly individual. It involves technical assessment, emotional connection, and our own unique creative process. As we gain experience and refine skills (which we should do throughout our lives) that endpoint changes.

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A portrait of lost time

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Grain elevators, Buffalo, New York, 18X24, oil and cold wax on canvas, in a handmade cherry frame, $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

This is a portrait of lost time, both my own and my hometown’s. I was born in North Buffalo in 1959; I lived with my grandmother in South Buffalo for my last year of high school. My bus ride took me down South Park Avenue past the notorious Commodore Perry Projects, right through the First Ward where the rebranded Silo City is located. That’s on the verge of being hip, and a state park has made the grotty old waterfront into something beautiful. The nearby area now called Larkinville is a true success story. Restaurants, offices, shops and condos now fill an area that was once a terrifying post-industrial, apocalyptic wasteland. I don’t miss it a bit.

Bennett Grain Elevator, Buffalo, circa 1870, courtesy Lower Lakes Marine Historical Society. Wooden elevators often burned catastrophically. 

Buffalo was built on the back of the grain elevator. It was invented there by Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar in 1842-1843. Before that, grain was handled in bags, which were wrestled off lake freighters (schooners and brigantines) and moved to canal boats to head down the Erie Canal. Dart and Dunbar’s elevator scooped loose grain out of the holds of the boats and lifted it to the top of a tower. It could then be dumped directly into canal boat or rail car, oldest product first. Think of it as the earliest example of cross-docking.

At the start of the 20th century, Buffalo was the fifth-largest city in the US and the largest grain port in the world. Much of the grain harvested in the Midwest was shipped through Buffalo. Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway are separated from the other Great Lakes by Niagara Falls, which meant that lake freighters couldn’t go any farther east than Buffalo.

That problem wasn’t really solved until 1932. The Fourth Welland Canal meant grain could just float right out from Minnesota to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. That was the death-knell for Buffalo’s grain elevators, although their demise was slow.

The Standard Elevator (the one on the left in my painting) was built in 1928. The elevator is unloading a lake freighter while simultaneously loading a canal barge. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

My uncle Bob had a job as a night watchman in Silo City when he was a college student. Whenever I waxed lyrical about the elevators, he talked about the rustle and squeak of thousands of rats along his beat. Uncle Bob and my husband and I canoed up the Buffalo River once. It was completely industrial, with Pratt & Lambert still dumping pigments into the water.

The siloes still crowd the river on both sides, but they’re mostly empty now, a decaying reminder of the past. Only the General Mills elevator still accepts freighters, because they’re still manufacturing in Buffalo.

Buffalo loves its grain elevators but can’t quite figure out what to do with them. I feel exactly the same, but I’m a landscape painter.  I painted the view from the Ohio Street Bridge. That’s the Standard Elevator on the left, and the Electric Elevator and Perot Malting on the right.

Scoopers in the hold of a freighter move grain towards the marine leg of the elevator. What a miserable job that must have been.

My challenge was to illustrate the worn surfaces of the elevators from a distance. I like cold wax medium. It can be brushed or troweled on, depending on how it’s thinned, and it can be burnished, scraped, sanded, or abused in a million different ways once it’s in place. I used it in the sky, applying it in thin, pigmented layers, and then buffed and burnished it so it had the character of the elevators’ own old brick walls.

That’s the Buffalo of my youth, but it’s not the Buffalo you’ll see today, much of which has had a facelift in the ensuing decades. “The reuse projects are really cool but they’re only cool in light of where the city is coming from,” a Buffalonian told me.

Last week I wrote about how you can’t go back and recapture lost memories. This painting is of something that still exists, but in a city that has changed beyond all measure. It’s 18X24, in a handmade cherry frame, and it’s available for $2318. It’s a bargain compared to what an historic elevator will cost you, and sized to fit in a living room to boot. Click here to purchase online.

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Your success does not diminish me

Watercolor and gouache painting by student Mark Gale.

Your success doesn’t diminish me is a lesson that’s taken me a long time to learn. It’s why I can now celebrate my peers’ triumphs without being consumed with envy. It hasn’t always been that way.

Constantly measuring myself against others was depressing. The downside of being a competitive person is that one seldom appreciates one’s own successes. Get a second-place award in a show and you’re simmering because the grand prize eluded you. Hit a benchmark in sales and you immediately start clawing toward the next benchmark. While that spurs you on to achievement, it’s not much fun.

Oil painting by student Lynda Mussen.

Jealousy is rooted in the lie that there’s only so much success out there, and if you take a chunk of it, there’s that much less for me. In the short run, that’s true. After all, there’s only one First Place ribbon in any art show. In the long run, the possibilities for success are nearly limitless. The trick is in starting to see beyond the lockstep track that every other artist seems to be following.

That shift to an abundance mindset has made me, ironically, feel more successful. It’s also helped me become more generous. That ability to give something away fosters more of the abundance mindset – in me. Sharing time and talent creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. That synergy is what gives rise to schools of painting, by the way.

The flip side of this is gratitude. Our intellect, our talents, and the place and time in which we were born all contribute to success, and they are an accident of birth. My great-grandfather was a talented landscape designer, but he was also an immigrant. My grandmother wrote and my father was an excellent artist and photographer. But that was the Great Depression and they were very poor, which prevented them from taking the risks necessary to be full-time artists. As my mother (also the child of immigrants) used to say, “In my day, we didn’t have time to self-actualize.”

Acrylic painting by student Patricia Harrington.

One way in which that Great Depression generation was hampered was in having no models for entrepreneurship. That’s just as true for anyone whose parent has worked in a 9-5 corporate job, and it’s what gives rise to the canard that you can’t make a living in art. Everyone’s path to success is different, but lots of people have been very successful in the arts: as visual artists, actors, filmmakers, animators, teachers, curators, etc.

Your path is fixed only by your ideas and determination, but it does help to have some idea of how to run a business. Beyond that, however, how anyone else achieves success is irrelevant. You’re the only person who matters in your own art career, and you make your own measuring stick.

Oil painting by student Beth Carr.

A person with an abundance mindset has much more patience for the process. That’s critical to developing top-notch artistic chops. Once you stop needing to win, there’s no motivation to produce a one-hit wonder. That in turn stops the painter from trapping himself in a schtick that sells, but which prohibits growth.

Above all, remember that your worth isn’t tied up in your art-it rests in you as a human being. Yes, it’s great to be a competent, successful artist, but that’s hardly the most important thing in life.

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Monday Morning Art School: composition is about light, not objects

Fog over Whiteface Mountain, 11×14, $1087 includes shipping in continental US.

“From now on, I’m gonna stop thinking about composition being about things,” my correspondent wrote, “and start thinking about it as shadows.”

I feel like a deficient teacher, because composition is always about light and dark. Hue, chroma, line and objects may feed into that, but it’s value that makes a composition weak or strong.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 includes shipping in continental United States.

I ask my critique students to analyze their compositions based on Edgar Payne‘s exhaustive list of possible compositions in Composition of Outdoor Painting. (This used book is now so expensive that I can no longer recommend buying it. Check it out of the library.) The idea isn’t to slavishly follow one of his designs; it’s to understand whether you have an underlying design in the first place, and how you might strengthen it.

But these compositional armatures are always about value, even when that value takes the form of an object. There are many times when objects and shadows coincide; for example, a large piñon and some small creosote bushes can combine in a dark triangular mass, because they’re both dark objects usually set against light-colored grasses. On the other hand, sidewalk chalk isn’t going to create any kind of structure against a concrete sidewalk unless the artist thinks about the shadows rather than the chalk.

Quebec Brook, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

By now, most of you have gotten the message that a painting needs to compel on a tiny screen (or from thirty feet) as well from three feet or three inches.

You do this with value. It’s not enough, for example, that an object is at a diagonal; you must make a persuasive shift between light and dark along that diagonal. This is the primary lesson a painter can take from Winslow Homer’s incredible seascapes.

This is also why plein air painters dislike murky grey skies; they make it harder to find compelling shadow patterns.

Composition rests on the following principles:

  • The human eye responds first to shifts in value, and following that, in shifts in chroma and hue;
  • We follow hard edges and lines;
  • We filter out passages of soft edges and low contrast, and indeed we need them as interludes of rest;
  • We like divisions of space that aren’t easily solved or regular.
Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1097 framed includes shipping in continental US.

But I just want to paint what I feel!

Music, sculpture, poetry, painting, and every other fine art form relies on internal, formal structure to be intelligible. This is easiest to see in music, where the beginner starts by learning chords and patterns. These patterns are (in western music, anyway) universal, and they’re learned long before the student starts writing complex musical compositions. In other words, you start at the very beginning.

Music is an abstract art because it’s all about tonal relationships, with very little realism needed to make us understand the theme. A composer doesn’t need little bird sounds to tell us he’s writing about spring. Likewise, the painter doesn’t need to festoon little birdies on his canvas to tell us he’s painting about spring. That should already be apparent in the light, structure and tone of his work.

The strength of the painting is laid down before the artist first applies paint, in the form of a structural idea-a sketch or series of sketches that work out a plan for the painting.

All good painting rests on good abstract design. Take a good look at Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Whatever meaning we’re supposed to take from it, it’s a strong triangular composition juxtaposed with a mid-century curving line.

Still, most realist painters don’t spend nearly enough time considering abstract design, even when they understand the critical importance of line and value. Christina’s World doesn’t rely much on hue for its impact. It’s a washed-out pink, a lot of dull greens and golds, and a significant amount of grey. And yet it was the most successful figurative painting of the 20th century. Wyeth was almost obsessive in his drawing habits; that translates into powerful finished paintings, driven by value.

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