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Tag: learning to paint

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Monday Morning Art School: how important is drawing, anyway?

Toy Monkey and Candy, 6×8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

I sometimes have students tell me, “I hate to draw!” What they usually mean is that they’re afraid of drawing. Part of this is because of the lie our culture tells us about drawing, that it’s an innate skill rather than a learned discipline. These students worry that when God was handing out the talent, they were elsewhere. That’s a horrible misunderstanding of how drawing works.

As with language, we all have different fluidity with drawing, but very few of us can’t do it. I once did an experiment where I taught Dr. Amy Vail to draw over her protestations of incompetence. “I thought measuring was cheating,” she told me. If you are not mentally handicapped and you have an interest, you can learn to draw.

Dish of Butter, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Modern art must take part of the blame here

Much 20th and 21st century art has the knack of looking like the artist can’t draw, when the exact opposite is true. Ann Trainor Domingue uses simplified forms of people and boats but don’t be fooled; I’ve sailed with her and she draws beautifully. That simplification is the endpoint of a lifetime of drawing, not its beginning.

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Painting is drawing

What drawing-resistant students don’t realize is that painting is just drawing with brushes. It’s easier to understand some of drawing’s principles in graphite than in messy paint. Fixing mistakes is a lot faster with an eraser than a scraper.

Feeling the relationship between the brush and the pencil makes for better, lighter brushwork. They’re two variations of the same basic tool.

Think of drawing as the grammar of art, and color as art’s vocabulary. Just as with language, many of us understand grammar intuitively, but we need education to lift it to its highest level. We all start with some vocabulary, but that expands with reading and study.

That’s not to downplay the mysterious part of the brain that makes language and art possible. It’s just that we all have the basic tools imprinted in us.

In art school, students spend a year on the fundamentals of drawing and color theory before they ever start painting. In a way, this mirrors our natural experience of picking up a pencil or crayon long before we discover the brush.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

But I don’t have a lifetime to learn to draw!

I don’t expect you to spend a year drawing an extremely foreshortened skeleton. But understanding measurement, perspective, and shading will make your painting better. I’ve written innumerable posts on drawing-just go over to the box on the right and type in “how to draw” and start reading.

But reading isn’t enough. You must practice. The good thing is, drawing is easy and cheap. I like Strathmore’s Visual Journal and a #2 mechanical pencil. If you want more refinement, my readers and I recommended fancier products here.

Stick two pencils in the ring binder of your sketchbook and toss it in your backpack or purse. Pull it out whenever you have fifteen minutes to kill. The ‘news’ on your phone will remain unchanged whether you spend that time scrolling or drawing, and you’ll have something to show for your time if you draw instead.

Drawing from life is better than drawing from photos (because it’s more difficult) but any drawing is good practice. Just a few minutes a day is all you need.

Drawing is my personal refuge

I may not always make it to my easel, but I can always draw. Even a few moments with my sketchbook clears my mind, gives me ideas, and makes me feel creative again.

I’m watching a close friend struggling with early-onset dementia. She may not remember what she told me last week, but she can still draw beautifully. A habit of sketching and drawing has given her a vocabulary independent of words.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Your daily rejection

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478, oil on canvas.

Eric Jacobsen sent me a cartoon. A little boy is drawing on the kitchen floor. “Thank you for your submission,” it reads. “We regret to inform you that your work was not selected for the fridge.”

The late great real estate columnist Edith Lank was eulogized in her hometown newspaper yesterday. “She understood that the way to get to 100 newspapers was to write to 500,” said her son, Avrum Lank. “She wrote letters and letters and letters. Her father told her to paper her the walls of her bedroom with her rejection letters.”

We hate rejection, but it’s a fact of life in the arts. The disappointment varies. I don’t have much emotional investment in most national shows (except that the entry fees chip away at my bottom line). But when I was rejected last year from a local event I’ve done many years running, my distress was brutal.

Michelle Reading, oil on linen, 24X30, $3478

Process your emotions

‘It happens to all of us’ or ‘jurying is subjective’ wasn’t that helpful at that moment. What I needed was my utterly loyal pal who said, “They must be total idiots.” We both know that isn’t true, but there was time later for self-analysis.

I once received an incredibly nasty newspaper review. In retrospect, I wish I’d saved it. It is so rare for an individual artist to be trashed in a group show that I must have hit a nerve somehow.

At the time, though, I was in a slough of despair. I called my friend Toby and cried on her shoulder. That’s the normal human reaction to rejection. What’s important is what we do after that.

Rejection is a part of life

Some artists reject the hurly-burly of the marketplace entirely. That may be less scary now, but ultimately it means no growth. We experience rejection when we push limits.

Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1087 framed

Don’t get wrapped up in your disappointment

We’ve all heard the expression, “Get back on the horse that threw you.” The longer we dwell on a failure, the bigger that failure looms. There’s a national show I coveted. I was rejected the first year, when a friend was the juror. After that, I applied every year, knowing the odds were stacked against me. Imagine my surprise when I was accepted.

Healthy habits help us surf over bad times. After I was done crying at Toby, I took my daily walk, fed the kids and sent them off to school, and went back to my studio. The rhythm of my day had a soothing effect.

Pinkie, pastel, ~6X8, $435 framed.

Rejection doesn’t define you

The art market is huge. There are times I look at work and wonder, “who on earth would buy that?” And yet, almost every idea has a corresponding following. If that show or gallery doesn’t love you, someone else does.

Learn from the experience

I recently kvetched at Colin Page that the last time I painted something I liked was in 1990. This is the season where we’re applying to upcoming shows and suddenly nothing in our portfolio pleases us.

Later, sorting paintings in my studio, I realized this throwaway comment was a red flag to myself. In 1990, I was shooting pictures of my work with an SLR. Today I use my cell phone. What I don’t like now is the bad quality of my photos, not the work itself.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Bare naked in the middle of the street

The Dugs, 8X10, Carol L. Douglas, $652 framed.

This fall two of my students threw together their first commercial art shows. Karen in San Francisco sold out. That’s an unusual achievement; I’ve never done it and know few artists who have. Karen kept her prices low and invited everyone she knows, she told me.

Mark is doing a studio show as part of a holiday walk of artists in Austin, TX. On Saturday I asked him how it was going. “I’ve sold a few things,” he said.

Sea Fog over Castine, Carol L. Douglas, 9X12, $869 framed

Neither of these painters are lifelong artists who secretly nurtured genius until their Big Reveal. Mark has been painting for about two years. He started with me when I started teaching on Zoom during the pandemic. Karen came to me from Bobbi Heath’s beginner class some time last year. Both are at the phase where style and technique are starting to gel. Importantly, both are realists who understand exactly where they fit in to the continuum. How, then, did they muster up the courage to put their work out there?

Karen was motivated by space. “I had all these paintings hanging around,” she told me. That’s why I did my first show decades ago, and the result has been a career in art.

Mark told me he’s not doing it to make money, but to improve as an artist. “You need to push,” he said. “Put yourself out there, bare naked in the middle of the street. Paint in public, sign up to sell, create an Instagram account. The pressure of being seen makes you strive to do better and exposes you to artists who are better than you. You will also be surprised and comforted at seeing those who are not.”

River Light, 11X14, Carol L. Douglas, $869 unframed.

(Note that I said nothing about ‘talent’ here. It’s a spurious concept that has little to do with excellence. Genius, as Edison said, is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.)

Vulnerability is never a comfortable feeling. I’ve sometimes felt totally outclassed at shows, like a duffer who was accidentally admitted into the presence of the Big Boys. That leaves me feeling tiny and elderly and unimportant. But when I get past that, there’s almost always something I can learn from the other painters there. The trick is to drop my own defensiveness and look at their work with an open mind.

The irony is that there are very few painters who don’t also experience that insecurity somewhere, because there will always be painters who are ‘better’ than we are. I know an artist with a reputation for cockiness. I saw him over the summer at an event that’s outside his usual sphere. He was palpably nervous and uncomfortable.

Inlet, 8X10, Carol L. Douglas, $652 framed.

We all harbor the secret belief that we’re geniuses, and the cold hard light of the public square exposes all our weaknesses.

It’s true that the marketplace often rewards mediocrity and conventional thinking. That’s the story behind the 1863 Salon des Refusés, which inadvertently legitimized Impressionism. Think of all the horrid art you’ve seen in hotels and doctors’ offices. There’s the Thomas Kinkade phenomenon.

However, the marketplace is also an intelligent voice of criticism. People buy art that speaks to them. If the public square doesn’t reward you at all, you need to improve your communication skills, either with a brush or in words.

“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success,” Edison also said. There are limits to that kind of thinking in fine art, but he wasn’t entirely wrong.

How have you conquered your fears and put your work out there to be judged?