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Monday Morning Art School: why do we create art?

Art print by Jesse Petersen, available here. Courtesy of the artist.

I just finished presenting at the Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program (SEAD). One of my co-presenters, Jesse Petersen said: “Even if this wasn’t my job, even if I lost everything that I have now, I would always create for myself and share what I do because it is deeply meaningful and the way I process life.”

Our culture says that to do art, you have to be good at it. That’s nonsense. Art doesn’t just allow us to express emotions, ideas, and experiences, it helps us work through them.

“When I have a daily art practice and dedicate time to making art—and it doesn’t have to be good art,” continued Jesse, “I show up better for my family, friends, community, church. I used to think taking that time was selfish, but now I know that just makes me better.”

Art journal by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

Why do we create art, according to received wisdom?

The traditional reasons for making art are:

  • Expressing thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
  • Reinforcing socially-acceptable thoughts, feelings and beliefs
  • Communicating ideas and ideals
  • Expressing beauty
  • Telling stories
  • Recording history
  • Activism
  • Creating community

But these are the reasons for which publicly-consumed art is created. What about the more hands-on, accessible, personal art? It may never have the international significance of, say, Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, but it changes countless lives.

“I used to think making art was a luxury to be done after my to-do list was done, now I realize it’s the first thing I should do,” said Jesse.

Two of Jesse’s art-journaling students attended the SEAD program, and both were motivated to stick around after the program ended. Long after everyone else had left, the three of them sat in the empty theater, making art together. Leslie Barrett and Sharon Gilham are what we call emerging artists, which means they’re trying to ruin a perfectly good hobby by selling their work.

Artwork by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

“I started to do more art when my kids moved out of the house,” Leslie told me. “I had more time. I started to think about how much I liked art in the past. I was very curious about watercolor, mixed media, and books. I work in technology, so it’s nice to come home, relax, and do something for myself.”

“I’ve been creative my whole life but never really trusted I was any good at it,” Sharon said. She works in the hospitality industry, which is a tough fit because she’s essentially introverted. “Art calms me down after a long day at work.

“There are so many weird things in my head that I don’t know how to communicate with words, so this is an outlet for me. I have always been someone a little more guarded about sharing my emotions, and I try to put them into my art. I start with a feeling, a thought, or a color palette, and start the creation from that. It’s almost purely the emotion going into the piece.”

Art journal by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

Both Sharon and Leslie took the SEAD workshop because they have seen a growing interest in their work from prospective buyers. They’re thinking about potential post-retirement careers. However, it’s clear from their conversation that they love the act of creation. As Leslie said, “I don’t try to make anything I don’t have a personal connection to.”

I can’t see why everyone doesn’t want a piece of that. Art doesn’t have to mean painting or sculpture. It could be printing, or art journaling, or photography or quilting. You really should try it.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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What is art made of? Time

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

In a tangible sense, art can be made of anything. Traditionally, it’s created with materials like paint, canvas, clay, metal, wood, and stone. But modern and contemporary artists push boundaries by incorporating unconventional materials like digital pixels, found objects, sound, light, living organisms and waste.

But of course, that’s just the modern way of saying that art isn’t just about physical materials. It also includes the ideas, emotions, and meaning behind the work. So, in a way, art is made of both tangible things and intangible creativity.

Tilt-A-Whirl, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What is art made of? How about time?

Art takes time. It therefore contains time. In fact, you could argue that, above anything else, art is time.

Creation. Yes, there is art that takes three minutes to dash off, but that’s not that common. Far more frequently, art takes years to realize. And even those three-minute sketches rest on a history of other sketches, all of which telescope into that one final work.

“How long did that take to paint?” we’re asked. We answer, “four hours, plus the fifty years I’ve been practicing my craft.” For the artist, all the effort of creation coalesces into their most recent work.

Time as a medium. Many art forms, like performance art, film and music, unfold over time. These temporal arts could not exist without time itself.

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

Time as transformation. Down the street from me is a statue of Rockport’s most famous citizen, Andre the Seal. A few years ago, his marble nose cracked, necessitating some plastic surgery. Paintings crack, sculptures erode, and even digital art is lost as technology shifts. Nothing lasts forever, at least in the form in which it was created.

Time as context. Shakespeare and John Donne may be responsible for much of modern English, but their writing is not always easy on the modern ear. The same is true of memento mori or any other artform resting on symbolism. Can you decipher the objects in Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres? Meaning changes constantly, and culture discards ideas that are no longer relevant.

The time we put into viewing or listening to the art. I spent a long time with the Wilton Diptych at the National Gallery in London, with its White Hart badges and strange prefiguration of Shakespeare’s Richard II:

The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

Yet I don’t remember anything about George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket. It is in the same museum and is a painting I love, but I was tired when I got to it. The time we put into a painting influences what we take out of it.

Grain elevators, Buffalo, NY, 18X24 in a handmade cherry frame. $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

Time and the narrative painting. The challenge of the narrative painting is to tell a story in a snapshot. When we’ve painted them, we’ve frozen time.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Graffiti and creative expression

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

My daughter was in Los Angeles last week. Like so many people who visit the City of Angels, she was struck by the sheer volume of graffiti. Graffiti looks different in different places; it’s not common where I live, but my brother in San Diego regularly cleaned it from the apartment complex he managed.

There are Roman examples of graffiti from 2500 years ago, mostly of the sexual or scatological variety, although the Kilroy was here kind also popped up regularly. If you’re willing to argue that art without words is also graffiti, it’s far older than written language: as old as the oldest cave art.

People do graffiti for lots of reasons, including a desire to mark territory, to shock, to rebel, or to state membership in a group. Then there’s the simple desire to create beauty. I come down firmly on the ‘graffiti is vandalism’ side, but my Australian cousin’s florist shop was proudly decked out in graffiti.

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I think graffiti on a bridge overpass is annoying, but the Viking mercenary runic inscription in the Hagia Sofia is awe-inspiring. Yes, I’m being hypocritical, but ask me again in a thousand years.

There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that an American reporter discovered this inscription on the wall of a Verdun fortress in 1945:

Austin White–Chicago, Ill.–1918
Austin White–Chicago, Ill.–1945
This is the last time I want to write my name here.

If so, nothing could have expressed war-weariness better.

Downpour, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US

Creative expression

Spray paint hit the American market in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that a product specifically designed for graffiti was introduced. America’s youth never looked back. Graffiti was influenced by nascent hip-hop culture. From there it was only a hop, skip and a jump to graffiti’s commercialization. Banksy (whoever he really is) is now a graffiti-millionaire, and global brands use graffiti for marketing. So much for rebellion.

Although there are times when middle-class kids make feints at being graffiti artists, it’s more commonly seen in poorer neighborhoods. There’s always been a gap in lower-income education in the arts, and No Child Left Behind made it worse. Where do you go if you haven’t had the opportunity to learn traditional art? Even I can be seduced by my local hardware store’s paint department, and I have a whole studio of materials to pick from.

That graffiti is a learned art can be read from its stylistic disciplines. There are wildstyle, bubble (bloated), tag, 3D, stencil, streetart, character and many more. Kids are not learning them in art class, but they are demonstrating that the human mind longs for beauty and will work hard at developing the chops to create it. If creative expression is shut down in traditional channels, it will find its way in train yards, empty factories, bus depots, and water towers.

Regrowth and regeneration (Borrow Pit #4), 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

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Monday Morning Art School: how can I sell my art?

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is, how can I sell my art? The answer is different for each person, but it always requires a shift in outlook. We artists create work that’s specifically from our mindset. However, selling art is no different from any other sales. It’s not about us, but about the customer.

Sales is about showing how our product effectively addresses our customer’s needs. It means building a relationship with the customer and addressing his or her concerns. That two-way communication may be transient or evolve over a long period of time. 

Your customer may want to beautify a space, prove something to himself or others, engage with the artwork on an intellectual level, or even just match his wallpaper. All are perfectly valid reasons to buy a painting.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Do you have a strong, consistent body of work?

Your work should be constantly evolving; if not, you’re probably just parodying yourself. Still, you should have a strong, consistent line of development. Somewhere online you should have a portfolio showcasing your best work. This presence needn’t be elaborate or expensive; a free blog host might be sufficient if you’re just starting out. It shouldn’t be scattershot—nobody wants to see your poetry, hand-embroidery, pottery and recipes if you’re trying to sell paintings.

Your website should have a reasonably complete bio and you should have a brief artist’s statement available. You will be asked for it.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Selling in bricks and mortar galleries and stores

Are galleries dead? Certainly not, although they’ve drifted sideways in the past few years. I particularly like well-run cooperative galleries.

The day of cold-calling with a portfolio under your arm is (thank goodness) over. Start by thoroughly researching the gallery’s current exhibitions and artists, including visiting if possible. The gallery’s website may have explicit application instructions, which simplify matters. If not, prepare a cover letter, an artist statement, and a portfolio (with links to the work online and to your social media), and send them by email.  If you don’t hear back, follow up by phone after a reasonable time has elapsed.

But coffee shops, restaurants, and offices may actually sell more work, and often charge no commission at all. Besides my own gallery, I have work in a dental office and a realtor’s office; the realtor has used my work to stage property. The more my work is seen, the higher my profile.

Selling online

If I were starting today, I’d use FASO; Eric Jacobsen, Poppy Balser, and many of my other friends are on it. It’s commerce-enabled and will scale up as you grow. I have known artists who’ve auctioned their work on eBay, but I think that needs a high profile to start with.

Spring Allee, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Social Media

Regardless of how you plan to sell, you’ll need to make a truce with social media. I like LinkedIn and Instagram best right now, followed by Facebook, but I do post on all available social media several times a week.

This is a constantly-shifting landscape, so keep your options open. My student and friend Cheryl Shanahan is fantastic at witty reels, and I want to be more like her. Since we’re apparently keeping TikTok, it’s time to loosen up that part of my brain.

Art fairs

I’ve done art fairs from St. Louis, MO to New York City. They’re a lot of work setting up and tearing down, so I’ve aged out of them. Their great advantage is that once you’ve paid the booth fee (which can be steep) the profits are all yours.

If you do them, diversify your merchandise. For painters, that means offering prints of your work along with originals. Many people attending these events don’t really want to spend $2000 on original art, but they will spring for a nice print.

(I’m thinking about these things because I leave on Friday to present at the Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program. After that, I’m teaching a workshop, below. There are still some openings, if you’d like to join me.)

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Deskilling art

“Pull up your Big Girl Panties,” 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

A lot of my sentences these days start, “When I was a child…” Here’s one: when I was a child, most people had basic sewing skills. They were so fundamental that the government issued free instructional pamphlets to encourage people to sew more. The same was true of canning, gardening, and appliance repair.

Today, why fix or make it when you can buy it for less? Sewing has gone the way of the buggy whip, and unless something radically changes in the world economy, sewing has become a hobby.

Technology hasn’t replaced work; here in the US, those of us who work are putting in the same basic workweek as our grandparents did in 1940. But what we do in that time is very different.

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

Deskilling or changing?

The extended-play version of my wedding album was shot on just a few rolls of film. The photographer was extremely skilled at metering and setting exposures. Today’s typical wedding photographers shoot hundreds of pictures, focusing much more on candid shots. The camera does the technical work and the difference between any two shots in a sequence will be mostly chance.

That doesn’t mean a trained monkey can take your wedding pictures. There remain the questions of composition, visual storytelling and context. None of those can be automated and they certainly can’t be added after the fact.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Deskilling art

A few years ago, most AI-generated images were laughable. They have gotten frighteningly better; there are times when only the context tells us they’re impossible (like these Trump-Biden AI-generated ‘buddy’ pictures). The only thing standing between us and a complete breakdown of factual verification is the integrity of our news sources. Ouch.

I recently wrote a lesson about still life and was looking for an example in hyperrealism. Despite having decades of experience looking at and analyzing art, I could not tell from online images if what I was seeing was painted by human hands or was computer-generated. That means that the only thing the hyperrealist painter has is his or her brush strokes, and I am not certain that AI isn’t coming for those, too.

Hyperrealism isn’t, of course, photorealism—it’s as much an edited form of reality as impressionism. But it’s easier to fake with a computer.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

What this means for the rest of us

Most of us are not interested in the absolute bell-like clarity of hyperrealism. That gives us a little breathing room, but it still leaves the question of why we’re making art, and how we can do it in a way that says more than AI will.

I wrote Monday’s post about funny paintings in part because for the last month or so I’ve been seeing variations on a worn-out theme. These are not-particularly well-painted portraits of politicians spattered with verbiage. Their faces being well-known and the words being obvious, I think this would be very easy for AI to dupe. However, one thing AI seems incapable of doing is writing good jokes.

It’s harder to be funny than to be didactic. It’s harder to be winsome than to be angry. It’s harder to be subtle than to hit the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer. And, yes, it’s harder to think about beauty and logic and proportion than about dogma. So, if you’re looking for job security in the age of deskilling art, be smarter than your average AI image generator.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: the secret to artistic immortality is… fart jokes?

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

He-gassen is a subject first seen at the end of the Heian Period in Japanese art. That’s roughly equivalent to the High Middle Ages in western art, so that’s very old indeed.

He-gassen (‘Fart competitions’) or Hōhi-gassen (‘Fart fight’) could just as easily be translated as the art of the fart.

Detail from He-gassen, unknown artist, Edo period.

The Edo period was a time of economic growth, political stability, and a flowering of Japanese art. To understand the culture of the time, think of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This Edo-period He-gassen scroll is by an unknown artist, but he was clearly well-trained.

This was also an isolationist time in Japanese history, so in addition to the fart jokes, there are westerners being blown home on thunderous gales of gas. There is nothing new under the sun, and that includes political satire.

Four great painters who were also funny

A country brawl, 1610, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, courtesy Christies.

It couldn’t have been easy being Pieter Brueghel the Younger. His father was one of the greatest painters in western history, and Dad died when Junior was just five years old. The son was never the painter his father was, but what connects the two is their earthy, pointed sense of humor.

The brawlers in Brueghel the Younger’s 1610 painting, above, are playing for keeps—nunchuks, a pitchfork, a jug to the head. I can’t decide if the woman on the right is dead or just dead drunk. This is all a bit rich for us lily-livered poltroons of the 21st century; we’d have never survived. We get the moral message about fighting loud and clear, but we’re also allowed a laugh at how ridiculous they look.

The five senses: Smell, 1637, Jan Miense Molenaer, courtesy the Mauritshuis.

Jan Miense Molenaer was a Dutch Golden Age painter who is somewhat less well-known today than his wife, Judith Leyster. His oeuvre was typical for the times: allegory, religion, cozy domestic scenes. He is thought to have studied with Frans Hals and it shows in his quick, easy brushwork. But Smell is not something just anyone would paint. It’s ripe; a subject that resonates with anyone who’s ever changed a diaper.

Venus Rising From the Sea – A Deception, c 1822, Raphaelle Peale, courtesy Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea isn’t making fun of his subject, but of the Puritanical mores of his audience. His twist is that Venus is concealed not with a curtain, but with a pocket handkerchief. His hypothetical, hypocritical viewer could just peep around the side and get his prohibited eyeful.

L A Ring by his Fallen Easel, 1883, Hans Andersen Brendekilde, Det Nationalhistoriske Museum

Hans Andersen Brendekilde was a Dane who was raised in poverty. His social realism painting did much to raise the consciousness of Danes towards the rural poor of their own country. But that is not what strikes you in this portrait of his friend Laurits Andersen Ring. It is, of course, the dratted downed easel, which every plein air painter has suffered at least once. It’s how I learned to swear.

Let’s quit taking ourselves so seriously  

I once showed something I thought was very deep to my high school art teacher. “It’s sophomoric,” she said. I scan a lot of art groups and am daily reminded that there’s a fine line between sincerely-held opinions and mawkishness. We should have beliefs, but nobody can survive on a steady diet of drama. In almost all situations, we need humor. (Where humor fails, as in world war, a high degree of moral intelligence is called for; see Käthe Kollwitz or Francisco Goya.)

Laughing gives us a sense of perspective. It helps us accept our flaws, cope with stress, deal with awkward situations, and makes us more resilient. It puts us in a better mood, which in turn makes us more even-tempered people and painters.

Can you paint something funny this week?

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Business for artists and painting in Sedona

Shadow Fingers, 11X14, oil on Baltic birch, $869 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

First, the business

My friend Dennis used to tell me, “I’m an accountant with the soul of an artist.” That’s all very well, I’d counter, but every successful artist also needs the mind of an accountant. (Luckily, I never believed in that now-discredited left-brain, right-brain malarkey.)

On March 8-9, I’ll be presenting at the first Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program. This is open to Arizona residents aged 18 and over. The two-day intensive covers a range of topics from financial management and marketing to crafting an artist statement, developing work samples and selling artwork online. My part will be accounting for artists, and I plan to make it exciting.

Even if you hire someone to do your taxes, you still need to understand what expenses to record and what don’t matter. You need to be able to track your inventory, and, if you teach or run a gallery, how to protect yourself against liability.

Country path, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, $1,275 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Painting in Sedona

Immediately following the Entrepreneurial program, I’m offering Canyon Color for the Painter from March 10-14. There are still a few seats left.

I’ve taught and painted in Sedona for several years and know great places for morning light, evening light, and all the light in between. We’ll meet on location at 9 AM, work steadily until 4, and then you’ll have the evening to hike, take one of the famous Pink Jeep tours, or try one of Sedona’s many fine restaurants. If the weather is poor—and it almost never is—we can meet in a classroom at the Sedona Arts Center (SAC).

Dawn on the Upper Red Rock Loop Road, 20X24, oil on canvas, $2,318 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

The top five things I love about painting in Sedona

  1. The weather—there is a scene in PG Wodehouse’s Quick Service where the old prizefighter Steptoe is trying to convince his wife to give up on Merry Olde England. “What you want wasting your time in this darned place beats me. Nobody but stiffs for miles around. And look what happens today. You give this lawn party, and what do you get? Cloudbursts and thunderstorms. Where’s the sense in sticking around in a climate like this?”

    He was urging her back to California, but in Sedona it’s also almost always fine. After this winter, we deserve fine.

  2. The scenery—Sedona combines some very brilliant colors: the reds of Bell and Cathedral Rock, the lush greens of Oak Creek Canyon, the sere yellows of the chaparral, and the deep blue of the sky. Because it’s seldom overcast, shadows jump and the light shimmers. It’s just magical.

  3. The people—I’ve known Julie Richard, the executive director of SAC, for a decade. It’s the same with Ed Buonvecchio, my workshop monitor. The rest of the support staff, including Bernadette Carroll and JD Jensen (with whom you’ll have the most contact), are kind and terrifically helpful.

  4. The hiking—There are 400 miles of hiking trails in the Red Rock Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest. Then there are state and city parks. Sedona is a hiker’s paradise, and I swear Julie Richard can tell you about every single trail.

  5. The funny things that always seem to happen to me there—Painting in Sedona has led to extremely funny interactions between the punters and me. I don’t think that’s from ley lines and vortexes, but because in the grand scheme of things, plein air painters are just one more dot on the overwhelming landscape. Come prepared to smile.
Hail on the Cockscomb Formation, oil on Baltic Birch, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

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Bells on Bob’s trail ring

Drifts and gusts at Erickson Field (if it doesn’t blow me over, it will trip me up), 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Today is my 66th birthday. By choice I’ve lived every one of those long years in the far north. I like winter; I hate heat. I was born in Buffalo, NY, which means my blood is an amalgam of snow and beer. So, when I tell you this winter has been a unique pain in the arthritic joints, I speak from deep personal experience.

Can you paint in the winter? Heck, yeah.

Little Tree in the snow, 4X6, oil on archival canvasboard, $217 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

About 25 years ago, I set out to paint every day of the year. I was living in Rochester, NY, which is every bit as tempestuous weatherwise as Buffalo. There were blizzards, there was sleet, there was hail, there were torrential rainstorms, there were line squalls, there were those awful, sticky, still, humid summer days that resolve into thunderstorms. Do you know what my take-away lesson was? I never need to do that again.

That doesn’t mean I won’t paint in the snow if the spirit moves me. Can you paint in the winter? Of course, if you dress right. It’s not quite true that there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. However, my friend Poppy Balser paints outside in winter a lot. To be fair, though, Nova Scotia is milder than Maine. (If you want to try snow painting, my friend Catharine swears by these rechargeable pocket warmers.)

We’ve had a steady snow cover since December and many sunny days, so why haven’t I gotten out to paint? It’s been too frigid, the snow is deep and covers a slick layer of ice, and the wind seems to howl incessantly. While it looks lovely from my living room window, it’s been miserable out there.

We had an awful storm at the beginning of this week, with snow layering on sleet layering on snow. I got a glum text from Ken DeWaard. “I am officially sick of the snow,” he said. “I can’t even push it off the deck.” I felt badly for him until I went outside and realized that the portable garage-tent over my Ford 9N tractor had collapsed. And that was before the 50 MPH gusts hit later in the day.

Baby pine tree in the snow. That’s a different baby pine tree. 9X12, oil on loose canvas.

Bob’s trail

I’m 66 and in rude good health, despite having had three different cancers. I blame this on my lifelong exercise habits. I ran until my first cancer at age 40; I’ve been walking and hiking long distances since then.

I’m supposed to be training to hike around Malta and Gozo in early April. My training regimen meant I should be doing five miles a day now. (All three of my hiking partners are younger, fitter, and possibly better-looking.) But the trails here are deeply buried; over the past week, I’ve struggled to do 2.5 miles. On Monday it took me an hour to push through just one mile. By Monday afternoon, even the dogs wouldn’t go out into that wind.

My mittens, 9X12, oil on loose canvas.

‘Bob’s trail’ is what I call an informal extra loop on my regular ascent, because my trail-buddy Bob first stomped it out. For the past several days, I’ve been pushing uphill on it and then realizing I’m too spent to make the rest of my loop.

Bob and his wife are regulars on these trails. Sometimes they do them on snowshoes. That’s a real blessing, because snowshoes pack the snow down evenly and make it possible to walk in their tracks. “Oh, where the heck are you,” I breathed, as I pushed through yet more snow. And then I realized that they’re in Vietnam, where the temperature is hovering around 70° F.

I guess I’d better go out to the shed and fetch my own dang snowshoes.

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Monday Morning Art School: more on photographing paintings

Cottonwoods along the Rio Verde River, $696 unframed, oil on Baltic birch.

Years ago when I was still having giclee prints made, my lab would bracket different exposures of the work as high dynamic range image (HDR) capture. It cost several hundred bucks a pop and was worth every penny.

Bracketing wasn’t a new idea; what was new was the ability to merge the images into a single HDR output. Today, you and I can do it ourselves, using the free, open-source photo editor GIMP. Even better, most new smartphones have HDR technology built into them. In most situations, that’s all that’s needed. Why mess around with a DSLR when you have HDR technology in your pocket? Just take a couple different exposures (see last Monday’s post) and Bob’s your uncle.

What is HDR and why should a painter care? A single image captured by a camera has a finite value range. Outside that range, tonal information is lost. Deep blues, purples, reds, and greens appear black; palest yellows and peaches look white. It’s frustrating for the painter to spend so much time on color temperature only to have our stupid cameras make our paintings look flat.

That, in a nutshell, is why cell phone photos of our paintings often look better than our DSLR photos. On the other hand, our pricey cameras have much better lenses, so they have the potential for more sensitive images of impasto and other subtle brush effects. If you’re working in watercolor or gouache you won’t care, but for oil painters and pastelists it can make a world of difference.

Adjusting your image with software will cost you detail

At left is the histogram of the unedited image (at top, in its whole form). At right is the histogram of the image edited to ‘look’ like the painting, with gaps and compression, resulting in degradation of detail. And that was a very small amount of correction.

“But I can use Photoshop to fix the color,” you aver. Hah, and double hah. Let me introduce you to the histogram(s) of your photos. There’s a composite one, and one for each color channel. The histogram represents the tonal distribution of a photograph. It shows how many pixels are in each brightness level, from pure dark on the left to pure light on the right. An average-keyed painting’s histogram should be curved, skewed neither to left nor right. A nocturne will be skewed to the left; a high-key painting to the right.

Above I’ve given you histograms of the same painting shot with the same camera. The image on the left is a painting that was correctly exposed under proper light. The one on the right was properly exposed but without using photo floods. I adjusted it in Photoshop to visually match the painting’s color. This is a very small tweak.

The gaps indicate a lack of pixels within those tonal points. That means there are no details at those points. The jagged edges are caused by lossy (irreversible) compression, which also removes data. Neither is good for the sharpness of your image.

Even with all this image manipulation, the painting’s colors are way. off.

That was in the controlled environment of my studio. Now look (above) at the edits that needed to be made when a painting was photographed on a gallery wall. That picture was taken by a professional, but he had no control over the conditions.


That’s the above painting in its real color, with no color editing done. Note the amount of color information lost in the edited version.

The color of shadow affects your photography

Because I had a photo of Cottonwoods along the Rio Verde that I took in the shade in Sedona, AZ, I could compare it to one I took under the photofloods in my studio, using Photoshop’s eyedropper tool. They’re close. But Sedona is about 34.9° N, vs. Rockport’s 44° N. Moreover, that was October. Today in Rockport, the sun will rise to a whopping 35° above the horizon. (It was 20.5° at the winter solstice. No wonder we’re all crazy.) In winter here, shadows are blue or bluer. It’s been a long time since I tried this at home, and it’s storming right now, but I found this old photo I took on my patio on an overcast day. That painting is blue… and it’s not because it’s cold. I can’t adjust that color to normal and not degrade the image.

Shot on my patio in the shaIde on an overcast day in the winter. That’s a cold winter blue right there. And, no, I wasn’t going outside yesterday to reshoot Cottonwoods on the Rio Verde for you; we’re having yet another winter storm.

If you want to take my next session of classes, they start with drawing (one seat left) tonight and painting (four seats left) tomorrow.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Moving from realism to abstraction

High Surf, 12X16, oil on prepared birch painting surface, $1159 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

On Monday and Tuesday, I wrapped up a session of painting classes. I sighed and said, “First I taught you to paint and draw realistically, and now I’m going to teach you to paint and draw non-realistically.”

To the non-artist, this makes no sense. Why go through the laborious business of learning to draw and paint accurately, to then cut out so much of what you just learned? The first step is the journeyman’s and the second step is the master’s.

Sunset over Cadillac Mountain, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling.

There is no such thing as absolute realism in painting. Every style, even the most detailed, is a simplification and abstraction of reality. Even hyperrealism is a kind of abstracted and stylized view of the world. Where you eventually land on the continuum between hyperrealism and pure abstraction is ultimately up to you.

But to have complete control over visual representation in art, you must first understand and masterfully replicate reality. Realism is the starting point from which we launch ourselves into an infinite number of artistic styles.

Sometimes people misunderstand abstraction

Ironically, right after class was finished, I had a brief discussion with Bruce McMillan about a painting he did of two pears tossed in the snow. “Many viewers dismiss abstract artists as lacking the skills of ‘accomplished’ artists,” he mused. “They think we can’t paint reality. I sometimes pause to paint something realistic to remind myself and viewers that painters simply paint.”

In truth, it takes great skill to pare something down to its essentials. I was reminded of this while looking at some devastatingly simple monotypes by Marc Hanson.

Surf’s Up is 12X16, on a prepared birch surface. $1159 includes shipping and handling in the Continental US.

But first, realism

The midcentury abstract-expressionist masters were well-trained draftsmen. Their style intentionally moved away from traditional figurative work. They focused on expressing emotion and the act of painting itself with large, gestural brushstrokes and spontaneous technique.

Learning to draw realistically, even if you plan to be an abstract artist, is valuable because it provides a foundation in form, perspective, anatomy, and the nuances of light and shadow. This grounding allows you to manipulate and distort these elements when creating abstract compositions. Knowing the rules lets you break them. 

Realism gives you a visual vocabulary, along with compositional awareness. But once you’re there, then what?

What’s your style?

“I want to develop my style” is one of the most common things people say to me, and ironically one of the least important. We all have a nascent style from the first time we pick up a pencil. Our mature style is what’s left when all our errors are stripped away, but in some ways that’s a controlled manipulation. We distort and simplify things in our worldview. To do so intentionally takes practice.

The worst thing you can do is chase someone else’s style. There are things you can learn from other artists, things you can control, errors you can overcome, but ultimately, your voice is yours alone.

Forsythia at Three Chimneys, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental United States. You think today’s Valentine’s Day, and you’re right, but it’s also the midpoint of February, which means March is right around the corner, and I may live to see the spring.

Here’s where we jump off the diving board:

As I told someone today, I never thought being an artist was about inventory control. I think these numbers are right.

Zoom Class: Beyond realism to expressive painting—four seats left

Tuesdays, 6 PM – 9 PM EST

February 18, 25
March 4, 18, 25
April 1

This class focuses on design and composition for expressive painting. Students will be encouraged to develop their own personal creative vision while working on refining their artistic skills through traditional studies.

This class is targeted toward more advanced painters who’ve already mastered the basics of paint application. It’s open to students in watercolor, gouache, oils, and pastel. Learn More

Zoom class: design and drawing—three seats left

Mondays, 6 PM – 9 PM EST

February 17, 24,
March 3,
March 17, 24, 31

This class improves on the skills learned in Fundamentals of Drawing. We’ll use a pencil but all of these concepts are transferrable to painting; experienced painters are encouraged to try them in paint as well.

This class is targeted to the learner who has mastered measurement, shading, and perspective and wants to further develop skills in design and rendering. Learn More

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: