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Tag: Andrew Wyeth

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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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Putting yourself in the frame

The Fog Warning, 1885, Winslow Homer, 30 Ă— 48.5 in., courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In our narrative painting class on Monday, Bobbi Heath told us about a man who didn’t want anyone in the dinghy in his painting. “I want to be able to imagine myself in it,” he said.

In addition to portraiture, there are several ways in which one can approach the figure in painting, including:

  • A specific individual serving as an archetype, as in Mary Whyte‘s paintings.
  • Through a vague, implied, incomplete or anodyne figure, as in Andrew Wyeth‘s Trodden Weed or Winslow Homer‘s The Fog Warning, above.
  • Through objects or settings that suggest an imminent arrival, as in that empty dinghy or George Stubbs‘ A Saddled Bay Hunter, below.
A Saddled Bay Hunter, 1786, George Stubbs, 21 3/4 Ă— 27 3/4 in, courtesy Denver Art Museum

It’s one thing to paint a pretty picture. It’s another to blur the line between the audience and the scene, to paint something where the viewer can step into the frame and build a relationship with the work.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is important to art history because of its use of landscape, its sfumato and its anatomical accuracy. That doesn’t explain its enduring popularity. Mona Lisa resonates because we engage with her.

The subject makes eye contact with us, with a rather penetrating gaze. She’s not demure, she’s not dreamy, and she’s not dressed to advertise her femininity, wealth or power. (As an aside, I’m sure this is why we get the periodic daft theory that it is a concealed self-portrait of the artist; after all, what mere woman could be that self-assured?)

Mona Lisa invites you to have a parasocial relationship with the subject. That’s a modern term for a one-sided relationship with a person we don’t know, usually an influencer, celebrity, or fictional character. We project attitudes, values, and beliefs onto them, just as we project them onto Mona Lisa.

The Allegory of Painting, c. 1666-1668, 47.2 Ă— 39.3 in, Johannes Vermeer, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum

The word ‘voyeur’ wasn’t created until a few centuries after Johannes Vermeer was painting. His intent wasn’t to titillate in that modern sense, but to create the kind of genre paintings that were so popular in his time. However, his perfect drafting and the subtle interactions of his figures make us feel like we’re looking through a peephole. That drags us almost violently into his paintings.

Edward Hopper picked up where Vermeer left off. Works like Hotel Room or Room in New York leave us feeling almost as if we’re peeping toms. It’s unlikely that in the early 1930s, that was Hopper’s intention. Incandescent lighting was just becoming widespread in New York . Hopper was fascinated by it, and by the jewel-like, illuminated scenes it created through city windows. But art has overtones that shift and change over time, regardless of the artist’s intentions.

Hotel Room, 1931, Edward Hopper, 152.4 Ă— 165.7 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, included under fair use exemption of the US Copyright Law and restricted from further use.

In Hopper’s paintings we come full circle to the same incomplete or anodyne figures of Winslow Homer or Andrew Wyeth. If the woman on the bed in Hotel Room was detailed and realistic, she’d be almost unbearably vulnerable. Stylizing her preserves her, and our, dignity.

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Monday Morning Art School: what’s the point of a three-hour painting?

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Near the wonderful, loose Andrew Wyeth watercolors at the Farnsworth Art Museum is a small room dedicated to his painting practice. You are surrounded by his careful investigation of details, compositional sketches, and studies. “When I was painting Christina’s World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn’t a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself,” he said.

Edward Hopper, who mined similar veins of alienation as Wyeth, was known for meticulously storyboarding his major paintings. He drew thousands of preparatory sketches. A comparison of one of his final sketches for Nighthawks with the final painting shows just how important his drawings were in cutting things down to the bone. He used drawing to shake off the burden of representational reality.

Failed attempt #1 at Chauncey Ryder trees. I’ll go back up the hill and try this again if it ever dries out. Dialing back the chroma will help.

Modern plein air painting

On the flip side, there’s contemporary plein air painting, dashed off in alla prima technique in a matter of a few hours. I love plein air painting myself, but a recent conversation with a student had me wondering about its lasting value. She is frustrated with her local painting group, which never works more than two or three hours. “What’s the point of rushing like that?” she asked me.

There are hundreds of plein air events in the United States every year, each of which has around thirty juried artists, each of whom in turn produces 5-10 works per event. That means the art market is flooded with tens of thousands of paintings from these events alone. Not all of them are good. I’ve produced more than my share of duds.

These events create a commodity that’s affordable to a middle-class audience. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s what drove the Dutch Golden Age of Painting, which gave us Vermeer, Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Failed attempt #2 at Chauncey Ryder trees. Boring composition and I made a messed up stew of the buds on the branches.

But it’s equally true that mass movements give us our share of dreck. The paintings done at plein air events are often safe (read ‘boring’) and dashed off without a lot of thought. That’s because plein air events are a production grind.

Loose brushwork has become the norm of plein air painting. But there’s no law that says that plein air must be quick, or that loose brushwork is the apotheosis of outdoor painting. These are just tropes of our times. Leaning into them too heavily just makes you a copier of other people’s ideas.

This start I like. Luckily, it’s steps from my house, so I can revisit it the next time there’s a break in the rain.

Go outside and take your time

This spring in the northeast is miserably cold and wet. I’ve painted outdoors just twice. Out of the three things I did, the one I like is the least-finished (above). In the other two, I was tinkering, trying to feather trees like Chauncey Ryder. Everything else in my paintings suffered. I don’t care; I’ll wipe out the boards and try again.

I have my eye on another stand of trees, small spruces. I want to see if I can mimic the soft brushwork of Anders Zorn in them, since to me he’s the only person who ever painted baby evergreens convincingly.

“You’re going to confuse yourself with all this mimicry!” Eric Jacobsen chided me. Well, no, because I don’t really want to paint like Ryder or Zorn. I want to figure out how they did this specific soft-focus thing on trees. I could never do this if I was still rushing around churning out three-hour paintings at events. The cost of failure is too great.

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Monday Morning Art School: preparation

A drybrush in ink by a young Andrew Wyeth, courtesy American Artist Magazine

James Gurney somehow unearthed a 1942 copy of American Artist Magazine that included an interview with a young Andrew Wyeth on his technique. Wyeth, in his later years, became schtum about method and his estate is highly restrictive about images. As a teacher, this is frustrating. Students could learn much from studying his method and work, even if they have no interest in painting like him. He was one of the principal realist painters of mid-century American art.

This interview was done when Wyeth was a callow 25-year-old, before Christina’s World catapulted him into superstardom.  At that age, he painted watercolor in quick wet washes, into which he dropped or drew off color as needed. “Wyeth’s practice is to skim off the white heat of his emotion and compress it into a half hour of inspired brush work. He is the first to admit the presumption of this kind of attack, and is ready to confess that it fails more often than it succeeds.”

A sketch of a young spruce clinging to a rock. I plan to paint it.

That fast, emotional attack was the influence of abstract-expressionism, and a way to separate himself from his famous illustrator father, NC Wyeth. Even then, it was a far cry from Andrew's studio work, which was intentional, deliberate and labored. That was a function of his chosen medium. Egg tempera is transparent and thus suitable for working in glazes (indirect painting). Layers are laboriously built up, starting from a grisaille that gives definition to the whole.

Wyeth ultimately moved away from the pea-soup approach to watercolor, employing more dry brush and deliberation. That’s hard to see in the limited information available on the internet. I often suggest to students that they visit the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland specifically to look at Wyeth’s watercolors.

The Farnsworth has been as tight about sharing images as the Wyeth family themselves. But they have recently gotten better at putting their extensive collection online. You can find some gems there, including preparatory sketches for Wyeth’s paintings.

The same spruce, in a photo. Why would anyone find this compelling?

In that 1942 interview was the image at top, with the caption, “Wyeth often makes rapid ink sketches like this, on the spot, and then does the watercolor in his studio.” That’s the money shot right there, because Wyeth was employing a traditional technique of painters—creating a greyscale or notan sketch of the subject first.

Wyeth’s method ultimately involved lots of tinkering with the details in the form of sketches and alternate layups for his paintings. What I want my students to see is how much effort and thought he put in before he ever picked up his brush.

On Friday, I watched my workshop students’ kit while they went off to Corea Wharf for lunch. (There was no sacrifice there; I’m not a fan of lobster.) A small spruce, about two feet high, has audaciously laid claim to the top of a granite outcropping. It caught my eye. There can’t be more than a gallon or two of topsoil there. What there is, is poor.

I quickly drew a small sketch of these rocks with the idea of doing a painting later in my studio. Because Ken DeWaard’s voice was nattering in my head, I also took a reference photo. The sketch catches the curve that attracted my eye; the reference photo is completely anodyne. Nobody would choose to paint from it.

I really do follow that same procedure with every painting: sketch, grisaille, color.

Perhaps at age 25 we are in touch with our internal frenzy to the point where we can say something useful without thinking too much, but there comes a time when our minds start to self-regulate. There are variations, but the process has traditionally been something along the lines of sketch-value study-final painting. Without that, we’re left with what Wyeth observed long ago—we fail more often than we succeed.