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Tag: Monday Morning Art School

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Monday Morning Art School: how to photograph paintings when you’re comically inept like me

The only photo I took last week that filled me with unalloyed joy was this tiny 4X6 of a baby spruce tree. Color, check. Exposure, check.

I am fairly incompetent when it comes to photographing my own work. It’s not from lack of equipment—I have a Nikon D750 digital SLR camera, photofloods, and a Slik tripod that’s so heavy I ought to be able to break my toe before I set my camera vibrating.

It’s the combination of cameras and the ego involvement of my own work that does me in. I exited the film age by tripping over a tripod while prepping a batch of slides for a show submission. Well, that camera was almost obsolete anyway.

Meanwhile, I watch my peers casually lean paintings against trees and shoot perfect images, while I struggle to remember to do it at all.

At any rate, here’s what I know about how to photograph paintings; I’ll try to practice what I preach.

A good cell phone can take a better photo than a bad DSLR, but more importantly, sometimes a cell phone is all you have at hand.

Exposure is OK, color is off, and it looks blurry to me. I painted this while discussing Proust with Björn Runquist.

Don’t shoot your photos when you’re exhausted.

I don’t do anything well when I’m hot, tired, up against a deadline and thirsty. My resolution for 2025 is to photograph things calmly and when there’s still gas in my tank.

Oil painters have an additional complication in that impasto doesn’t always look great when it’s wet; it can be overly reflective. If there’s time to let it dry, that’s an advantage. But when something has been painted for an event, that’s a luxury you might not have.

Shoot your work parallel to the camera lens.

If you can hang your work on a wall, that’s perfect. If you can leave it on an easel pointing straight up and down, that’s about the same, and more practical. Failing that, you want the picture plane to be parallel to the camera lens, so that all four corners of the painting are the same distance from the lens. That results in minimal distortion.

Yes, you can ease some of that distortion in photo editing software, but you can’t do it perfectly, and there are times (like on the ocean’s horizon, or in perspective) when it matters. 

By attempting to fix the bad exposure, I messed up the color relationships, and there went what I liked about this painting. Oops.

Light your work evenly

Guidebooks will tell you to use indirect natural light, but where I live that’s usually too blue. Also, it’s cold outside, and no number of windows cast even light indoors. I use two photofloods at 45-degree angles to my work, and they cast very even, natural light across my paintings.

If you don’t have photofloods, you can rig up paper or fabric screens in front of LED bulbs.

I’ve learned two things the hard way: make sure any shades behind your subject are closed and make sure that any brightly-colored objects in the room are not casting reflected color onto your painting.

Don’t zoom in too close

If you do, you’re in danger of getting fish-eye, especially with a cell phone. Phones and cameras are such high resolution now that you don’t need to worry about every pixel.

I’ve decided to make reshooting this painting my life’s work. It’s such a good painting and for some reason so difficult to get a good shot of.

Don’t use autoexposure

If you let your cell phone or camera choose an exposure for you, you are unlikely to love the results. On my cell phone, I take a couple different exposures and hope for the best. (Ask the internet if you don’t know how to do this for your phone.) On my camera, I auto-bracket.

You don’t need any great depth of field to photograph a painting. If you have a DSLR, set it for a larger f-stop (like f3.5, 2.8, or 1.4). That will give you a faster shutter. That’s the mistake I made on Friday that gave me blurry photos and why I’ll be reshooting all these pictures today. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Once you’ve got an accurate exposure, don’t go into your editing software and autocorrect the levels. Paintings do not generally have 100% blacks and 0% whites, but autocorrection puts those in, as well as averaging out all the values to look like everything else. Who needs that?

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Monday Morning Art School: the golden rectangle and other design ideas

Dawn along Upper Red Rock Loop Road, Sedona, 20X24 oil on canvas, $2318 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“Why do odd numbers of objects in a composition look more ‘interesting’ than even numbers,” my correspondent asked.

“The explanation I’ve heard is that the brain wants to create symmetry, and when unable to do so because there are an odd number of objects, the gaze just continues to move around the composition.  I briefly worked on a sheep farm, and ewes who had three lambs always seemed confused, like they were counting ‘one… two… wait a minute! Let me count again!’”

Carrie, even with twins I was confused most of the time. Sheep, like humans, have only two teats, but no opposable thumbs, and they’re kind of dumb. But back to your question:

“Is a desire for symmetry really hardwired into our brains? Or is this a cultural preference? Or a myth? If our brains want symmetry, then why not give it to them and make symmetrical art? Do people actually look at paintings of odd numbers of objects longer? Do they like them better?”

The short answer is that the brain seems hardwired to like complicated visual relationships.

Home Farm, 20X24, oil on canvas, $2898 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The Golden Rectangle, the granddaddy of all design ideas

That need for visual mystery is the basis for the Golden Rectangle. It resolves to 1.618:1, which is a ratio none of us can parse. Yet it looks pleasing. That’s because it derives from the Golden Spiral and the Fibonacci Sequence, with their perfect squares.

By HB – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114843794

The Golden Rectangle is the first ‘absolute’ design model I ever learned. It has been used since at least the ancient Greeks. However, it doesn’t match up with the aspect ratio of modern canvases, frames and cameras, so we don’t hear about it as much anymore.

The rule of thirds

The rule of thirds never meant that you should have three objects. It divides an image into nine equal parts using two horizontal and two vertical lines. The most important elements of the image are placed along the lines or their intersections. That creates points of interest that are evenly spaced and aesthetically pleasing

It works, of course, but it is by no means the most interesting compositional grid. 1/3, although a repeating decimal, isn’t all that difficult for the brain to parse.

Camden Harbor from Curtis Island, oil on canvas, $2782 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Is symmetry always bad?

Whenever someone tells me you should never put something smack dab in the middle of their canvas, I direct them to the Mask of Tutankhamun. It’s powerful, stately and grand. That’s why Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci used symmetry to such good effect. It’s less popular today, perhaps because we don’t believe in absolutes truth much anymore.

Dynamic Symmetry

Jay Hambidge hoped to capitalize on the brain’s love of inscrutable proportion when he devised his theory of dynamic symmetry back in the 1920s. It’s since been discredited, but pops back up with dismaying regularity.

I learned it from the painter Steven Assael and fiddled with it for several years. In the end, what it taught me was not to put focal points at the edge of my canvas, which I’m telling you here, for free.

Home Port, 18X24,, $2318 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The circle

The circle is balanced in every direction. If symmetry were boring, a circle would be the last word in dullness. Instead, it’s fascinated us from da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to now.

Besides being a model of human proportion, Vitruvian Man is a nod to an ancient math problem called squaring the circle. That was the challenge of constructing a square with the area of a given circle using geometry. 

Ultimately it proved impossible. That’s because of our old high school buddy, π. π is what’s called a transcendental number, which just means it’s non-algebraic and goes on and on without ever repeating. Circles interest us precisely because they can’t be pushed into a square hole (and vice-versa).

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Monday Morning Art School: learning by copying

Cheese Slices, 1986, Wayne Thiebaud, private collection, photo courtesy Mark Gale

“I won’t ask you to do anything I won’t do,” I promised my students recently. That’s cutting into my painting time, but I have several students enrolled in both of my online classes. I’m concerned I’m running them ragged.

Last week I asked my composition and brushwork class to copy a Wayne Thiebaud painting. I’ve been meaning to do it myself because I was curious about how he executes those hints of penumbral color.

Later, I was flipping through Facebook and realized that painter Tim Kelly had just copied Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net. What is so valuable about copying masterpieces that even professional artists do it?

My copy of Cheese Slices, roughly 9X12.

Freed from original thought

Getting rid of the pressure of originality frees your mind to focus on technique. You hone skills without the added burden of inventing something new. You can study, dispassionately, the elements of color and design used by the artist.

Brushwork

I assigned Thiebaud because I wanted my students to get a feeling for his brushwork. That differs depending on the medium. He’s also a great source to understand optical mixing.

The Herring Net, 1885, Winslow Homer, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Color mixing without pressure

By the time I was done with my fair copy, I knew what paints Thiebaud had on his palette. (It doesn’t differ much from mine, it turns out.) Here, Tim was operating at a disadvantage. “This was done from a picture in an old book so it’s likely a chromatic departure from the original,” he said.

There are several passages in Cheese Slices where colors were mixed with a dragging brush. That’s easy enough to do spontaneously; it’s much harder to copy. But the attempt helped me understand the theory behind his color choices.

Tim Kelly’s copy of The Herring Net. “Our living room wall had a reproduction of this painting back in the early 70’s,” he said. “Little Timmy would stare at it often with concern that the guy on the left might fall out of the boat.”

Learning by copying is really reverse engineering

Most of the painting I copied was pretty straightforward. In other areas, there were challenges of blending and detail that surprised me. For example, Thiebaud’s application of impasto was more conventional than I expected, considering how radical the results look.  

These problem-solving skills, of course, are transferable to your original work. Once you’ve figured out how a master blends, or applies paint, you can do it in your own work any time you want.

My cranberry-glass goblets, oil on linen, 9X12. My big surprise painting these was that none of them are exactly the same!

Learning by copying builds confidence

I still don’t think I’ll make a good forger, but it is always heartening to realize that I can fake it enough for the painting to be recognizable.

A few tips for success

You have to be a little in love with a painting to bother copying it. It helps to understand the historical context and technique of the artist before you start. There’s no reason to sweat this part; the internet is a terrific resource.

Find the best image of the painting that you can. I have a picture of Cheese Slices in a book but ended up painting from a photo taken by my friend. It was much more detailed and nuanced.

Above all, be patient. It took time to create the original, and it will take time to make a copy. Mine took the better part of a day.

Focus on what you care about. I was uninterested in copying Thiebaud’s paint-handling; I understand how he did that. Among other things, he was right-handed and I’m a leftie. But if juicy brushwork is your issue, copy the brushwork. If color’s your issue, copy the color. If they’re both your issue, focus on them both.

My major question going into this copy was when those brilliant penumbral colors were added—in the base layer, the middle layer, or the top. All of the above, it turns out.

The night after I copied this painting, I dreamed about it. My subconscious mind showed me how those penumbral colors are organized and I looked at the original with new eyes. Then I went on to paint my own cranberry-glass goblets using the same general idea. Is it brilliant? No. Is it interesting? To me, at least.

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Monday Morning Art School: the twenty-brushstroke painting

Mike Prairie’s twenty-brushstroke painting, in watercolor. He did the whole thing with a single 1.4″ dagger brush.

When I told my Composition and Brushwork students they were going to complete a finished work in twenty brushstrokes, they were skeptical. “You’re going to demo,” they insisted. Once they realized it was easier than it sounds, they—not to put too fine a point on it—nailed it.

Baby spruce in snow, a twenty brushstroke painting by me, in oils.

What will you learn?

The twenty-brushstroke painting is an exercise to loosen up our painting. It emphasizes simplicity, efficiency and intention. It means prioritizing the essential elements of composition. That teaches us to focus on what matters most.

Painting is always about strategy. Limiting the number of brushstrokes forces you to plan carefully before you start. You must think ahead about where each stroke will go, what color it will be, and how it contributes to the overall painting. This sharpens your ability to observe and distill a subject into its most important elements.

That is the basis of making bold, deliberate marks rather than overworking, hesitating or flailing around. Simplifying helps you see larger shapes and forms instead of getting mired in details. Since you can’t rely on detailed rendering, you are forced t focus on strong contrasts, values and color harmony to convey thoughts and feelings.

Lynda Mussen’s twenty-brushstroke painting in oils.

The twenty-brushstroke painting frees us from perfectionism and encourages economy of movement and painterly efficiency.

I do the twenty-brushstroke painting when I’m tapped out. It encourages me to experiment and take risks. It’s almost impossible to do a twenty-brushstroke painting that isn’t energetic.

How do you start?

First I draw… always. In this case, I wanted to understand a baby spruce’s needle and branch structure before I started to abstract shapes.

The twenty-brushstroke painting isn’t necessarily easier and faster to do than a conventional painting. It’s more thoughtful, less frenetic.

Start with a simple subject with clear shapes. A subject with defined forms is easiest, but with practice you can pare down most complex subjects into striking, recognizable shapes. Strong contrast helps.

For my class demos, I snapped a photo of a baby spruce. I drew a careful rendering of the wee tree in order to study how the limbs and needles branched out into space. After that, I drew a composition drawing, because if a picture doesn’t work in greyscale, it’s never going to work in color.

My twenty-brushstroke painting in watercolor.

Since I was painting a baby spruce in snow, a complementary scheme of blue and palest peach was an obvious starting point. I mixed sufficient paint so that I didn’t run out in mid-brushstroke. This is almost counterintuitive in watercolor, where people tend to mix smaller amounts with a brush, but it’s a great skill to develop. You can modulate and mingle the basic colors as you go.

I always test my watercolor strokes on a sheet of scrap paper to make sure the value, hue and chroma are exactly what I want. In oils, I can generally see the chromatic relationships on my palette. Knowing that value is the most important element of color, I get that straight first.

Each stroke is deliberate, with no dithering, correcting or overpainting. Brushstrokes should vary in length, texture, pressure and direction, but every one should have a purpose.

Work from the general to the specific. If you save details for the end, you may find you don’t want or need detail at all. In the watercolor painting above, I used one brush, a squirrel mop. In my oil painting, I used a #10 flat, a #6 bright, and a wee thing that was probably unnecessary. Mike Prairie used this dagger brush for his whole watercolor painting; I was so impressed I now want one myself.

Stop after each stroke to assess the overall balance and composition. Above all, resist the urge to overcomplicate matters.

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Monday Morning Art School: gallery and studio light

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“Can you give me information on lighting for artists, especially lights that work well for watercolor painting?” asked my friend and sometimes-student. “I have a new table setup in a permanent spot now, but it doesn’t have much direct or indirect light from the windows in that room (they are under our deck on the east side of the house) and I am looking to purchase a light that will give me good natural lighting to paint by.”

It’s a pity she doesn’t have natural daylight, since it is the standard by which all studio light is measured. But we all sometimes need to work in less-than-optimal conditions.

Main Street, Owl’s Head, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The evolution of gallery and studio light

I’ll spare you the candle and gaslight, which were mostly obsolete by my childhood. Besides them, I’ve had incandescent, compact and regular fluorescent and LEDs (Light Emitting Diode) in my studio and gallery spaces.

Fluorescent lights are now illegal in my state and many others. Incandescent and halogen lamps are being phased out, but are excellent light sources for color quality.

In recent years, we’ve adopted LED technology. It’s more energy-efficient, longer-lasting, and offers greater design flexibility. LEDs offer color temperature shifting and dimming potential.

LED lights are now the most common choice for most lighting applications, but that doesn’t mean they are the best for color rendering.

Switching to LEDs can lead to a reduction in color accuracy, which we express as Color Rendering Index (CRI). The higher the CRI values, the closer a light source will be to natural daylight.

Evening in the Garden, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Color Rendering Index and more

“Daylight” balanced bulbs are a start, but they’re not the whole story. What’s most important is the CRI, which is 100 for daylight and usually 80 for LED, which is too low for accurate color. A few years ago, the best you could get in an LED was a CRI of 85. Today you can get CRI-90 and even 95 bulbs.

The CRI number indicates how accurately a given light source renders colors in the space it illuminates. Natural white light from the sun is a combination of all colors in the visible light spectrum. It renders the colors of objects accurately. Incandescent and halogen bulbs also have a CRI of 100, because they’re also broadband.

CRI is calculated by measuring individual colors and then averaging them. However, it doesn’t include some outliers, including R9 (red) and R13 (skin tone) colors. If you’re primarily a figure painter, you might choose light sources with high R9 and R13 values, in addition to a high CRI. How do you find that information? In the tedious small print on the manufacturer’s website.

Cinnamon Fern, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How do LEDs work?

LEDs make white light by combining red, green, and blue LEDs in the same light source or by incorporating white phosphors on a blue LED to generate white light. That isn’t a full spectrum, which means that some colors are missing in the light reflected to you.

LED technology is advancing every day, and getting closer to representing the full color spectrum in white LEDs. The LED bulbs in my gallery are CRI-90 and tunable, with five different color settings.

My gallery has conventional track lighting, but the fixtures aren’t the important issue. Just make sure you have enough fixtures so the light is more ambient than focused.

Reflected light

The cleanest color light can’t override brilliantly-colored walls. My studio has natural wood shiplap, it makes everything too warm. Doug doesn’t want me to repaint my studio walls white (I don’t blame him; they’re natural wood). In the daytime it’s not a problem; at night, white reflectors help.

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Monday Morning Art School: cloud painting

Fog over Whiteface Mountain, 11X14, $1087 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Cloud painting trips up emerging artists more than any other element. To paint clouds properly, you must first draw them properly. Clouds are not are flat little cutouts, and rendering them like that marks a painting as amateurish. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air.

A two-point perspective grid. You don’t need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line. The vertical lines indicate the edges of your paper.

 Clouds have volume

I’ve written before about two-point perspective. It’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. However, understanding it is useful, especially in cloud painting.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line, at the very edges of your paper. These are your vanishing points.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It’s that simple.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

(There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you’ve left cloud painting and entered a fantastical world of technical drawing.)

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Clouds follow the rules of two-point perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The flattest part of cloud paintings is at the bottom of the sky. All you see of clouds directly overhead is their bottoms. In between is a steady shift from side view to bottom view.

A flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky is always at the same altitude. That means their bottoms are on the same plane. That’s because clouds form where the temperature changes.

We paint cumulus clouds because they’re ubiquitous and lovely. Luckily, they form up in consistent patterns, with flat bases and fluffy tops. I’ve rendered them here as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. In reality, their bases aren’t square and their tops are far puffier. This is just so you see how they’re distributed in the sky.

When cumulus clouds start piling up into thunderheads, they appear to violate this rule of perspective, but that’s just because of their vast size.

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

I don’t want you to go outside and paint clouds with a perspective grid. This is just for understanding the concept before you tackle the subject. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky, rather than pasting puffy white shapes on the surface of your painting.

Maynard Dixon Clouds, 11X14, oil on archival canvas board, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

Painting starts with drawing

In order to paint, you must first learn to draw. Sometimes people point to abstraction to argue otherwise, but simplification actually requires top-notch drawing chops.

That’s why I’m teaching a drawing class on Monday evenings starting a week from today. This class is always a hard sell because people think drawing is ‘hard’ or ‘boring.’ Nothing is farther from the truth. If you’re trying to be a better painter, start by refining your drawing skills.

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Monday Morning Art School: draw yourself a very merry Christmas

The ornaments we chose: a simple sphere for me and a globe-spider for Sandy.

I was surprised to learn that a few of the things on my tree are vintage post-war Shiny Brite ornaments made by Corning. That’s not because I’m chic, but because I never replace what ain’t broke. Here’s a Christmas-tree exercise Sandy Quang and I first did in 2017. All it takes is a simple, round, reflective ornament, and you can draw yourself a very merry Christmas indeed.

Those of you who don’t believe in Santa Claus or haven’t found the ornaments yet can find other spherical objects: marbles, snow globes, billiard balls, or even some tiny planetary bodies, if there are any revolving around your house.

Noting the axes.

Sandy was my painting student and went on to get a BFA from Pratt and an MFA from Hunter. She’s also my goddaughter, so it was no surprise that she was hanging around my living room in the runup to that Christmas.

I asked her if she wanted to draw with me. As all my best students do, she had her sketchbook tucked in her backpack. I gave her first dibs and she chose the spider ornament; that left me with the plain globe.

We both added details. Mine were the ellipses on the collar of the ornament; Sandy’s were the beaded legs of the spider and her first markings for reflections.

I’ve written about drawing a pie plate, which is the fundamental skill underlying all column-shaped objects from cups and dishes to lighthouses. Each are a series of ellipses on a central axis. A circle is even easier to draw. And a sphere looks like a circle when it’s down on paper. What could be simpler?

Both of us started with the axis of our drawing. For me, that was the vertical axis; for Sandy it was the axis holding her circles together. I mention this because when people say “I can’t draw!” they seldom realize how much of drawing is simple measurement. It’s best to learn this from life, since the measurement has already been done for you when you work from a photo. You can easily work back from life drawing to working with pictures, but it’s harder to go the other way.

Marking out the outlines of our reflected shapes.

Next, we put the appendages on our spheres. For me, that meant measuring the ellipses in the collar, as I demonstrated in that pie plate post. For Sandy, it was the beaded spider legs. Sandy was starting to note the overall areas of reflection in her spheres.

Sandy and I chose different approaches in the next step, dictated by the paper we were working on. Because I had a smooth Bristol, I was able to blend my pencil line into smooth darks with my finger. Sandy could only work light-to-dark on the rougher paper she was carrying. This gives you the chance to see two different approaches to shading.

We both worked on shading next. I finished my shading with an eraser, Sandy couldn’t do that because her paper was too rough.

Sandy has a shadow under her final drawing because the ornament was sitting directly on my coffee table. I put the reflection of myself drawing in my ornament.

All drawing rests on accurate observation and measurement. Get that right and the shading and mark-making is simple. A very merry Christmas indeed!

Our finished drawings: mine on the left, Sandy’s on the right. From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to painting them.

What does this have to do with you?

Yes, I’m on a drawing tear, because it’s the single most important thing you can do to improve your painting in 2025. I still have room in my drawing class starting right after the new year; if you’re frustrated by your painting, start with the fundamentals.

This post originally ran in December, 2017. It’s been updated, of course.

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Monday Morning Art School: treading-water syndrome

Coast Guard Inspection, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Canadian-American mystery writer Charlotte MacLeod coined something she called, ‘treading-water syndrome’. This was, “panic at being out of one’s depth. Fear that, if a case did not quickly yield up its secrets, it would remain forever impenetrable.” The character who said that was a middle-age college professor. By putting those words in his experienced mouth, MacLeod was saying that it happens to us all.

That’s just what happened to me at my first professional plein air event. I was slopping solvent around my underpainting, which made everything dark and muddy. Then I tried to use white to lighten that layer. In fact, I was pretty much breaking every painting rule I’d ever learned. Eventually, a friend came over and brought me up sharp: “Carol, stop this. You know how to paint.” I took a deep breath, wiped out the canvas, and painted the painting properly.

The Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

My friend Brad Marshall called what I was doing ‘flailing around.’ It’s a good description of one way in which we temporarily take leave of our senses. But it’s not the only way. There’s also:

  • Creative block: you suddenly have no ideas at all, or if something occurs to you, it doesn’t seem worth pursuing;
  • Obsessing over details: I’ve wrecked some perfectly wonderful paintings doing this;
  • Avoidance or procrastination;
  • Negative self-talk;
  • Imposter syndrome: “Why did they let me in when there’s so many great painters here?” Bobbi Heath can attest to how many times she’s had to talk me off this cliff;
  • Emotional and physical distress: in moments of stress, I’ve learned to look and sound calm, but my gut always betrays me;
  • Seeking external validation: That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it requires that there’s someone around who’s kind-hearted and intelligent enough to give you the right nudge.
Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

First principles

I just heard a story about a very competent musician who couldn’t make it in music. His highs were too high; his lows too low. He essentially never found a way to manage his panic.

One way to get over treading-water syndrome is to get older; you’re less inclined to panic in general. That’s not much comfort to younger people. And there are still times when everyone feels like they’ve lost control. How, then, do you get your ship righted with the least amount of psychic pain?

It helps me to have a plan. I approach painting the same way each time, and if I’m feeling jittery, I slow down on the value drawing until my mind submits. I teach every workshop from a syllabus. That’s primarily so I know I’ll cover the important stuff. However, when something unexpected happens, I can take a deep breath, return to my notes and keep going.

A plan is just an external support to our cognitive flexibility and self-monitoring. You can’t beat it.

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Eensy weensy bites

As you can imagine, there’s rather a backlog here after I’ve been gone so long. I’m pretty disciplined about studio work before housework, but some of these domestic tasks haven’t been done since October. If I try to tackle everything at once, I’m just going back to bed until after the holidays. Instead, I’m going to ignore the big picture and tackle one small thing at a time. It’s my best strategy to avoid total paralysis.

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Monday Morning Art School: digital reproduction

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed.

I get several messages a week asking me if I’m interested in selling my paintings as NFTs. My answer is that paintings are one-off tactile objects, not digital assets. Not that the shills for NFTs like taking no for an answer, but NFTs and fine art don’t really mix.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t learn a lot by looking at paintings online. The world has been immeasurably enriched by museums opening their collections on the internet. For example, the 99% of people who will never see Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch in person can still look at it brushstroke-by-brushstroke on the Rijksmuseum website. And the digital world has had a remarkable democratizing influence on the sale and distribution of contemporary art and music.

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

But a digital image of a painting is never the same as the real thing. Recent research using Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring may validate this argument. Using electroencephalograms (EEG), researchers at the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands demonstrated that looking at actual paintings stimulates the brain differently than looking at reproductions. “The viewer’s emotional response is ten times stronger when they are face to face with the painting in the museum,” they reported.

Vermeer is what’s known as a linear painter, which means he focused on clarity, modeling, structure, and detail. That’s in contrast to painterliness, which means work that is less controlled, relying more on brushwork and expression. The researchers got similar results from the works of two other Dutch Golden Age painters, Rembrandt van Rijn, who is considered painterly, and Willem Van Honthorst, another linear painter. Apparently, it was the paint itself that mattered, not how it was applied.

The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869, includes shipping in continental US.

You may recognize this composition

Researchers also reported a ‘sustained attentional loop’ unique to The Girl with the Pearl Earring. People who’ve studied composition will recognize this as a classic triangle composition, a series of focal points designed to engage the viewer. While this composition has been used throughout art history, The Girl with the Pearl Earring delivers it as a quick one-two-three punch-up—lips, eye, earring.

More questions

This was a very small study of a very narrow period in art history, but it raises interesting questions. Would similar experiments on a broader range of art and artists show us, for example, whether other periods of art fare better or worse in reproductions? Would that information help us determine whether one kind of painting is objectively better than another?

The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa are both superstar paintings, known by almost everyone. However, Mona Lisa is almost unviewable in real life, due to the immense crowds thronging its gallery. If similar responses were recorded at the Louvre, would that mean that part of the response to The Girl with the Pearl Earring was due to celebrity?

Nighttime at Clam Cove, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $696 unframed.

An aside about scams

Because my phone number and email address are on my website, I get more than my share of scammy messages. I thought I was expert at weeding through them. This week, one of my students apparently texted me, asking me to follow her new Instagram store. When the texter asked me to send back information, I checked the phone number against my records and realized it was a clone.

What shocked me was that the bot seemed to have some idea of my relationship with my student. Was that AI or a lucky guess? I don’t know, but you can never be too careful.

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Monday Morning Art School: the secret to confident brushwork

I always carry a sketchbook with me when painting, and I always start with a drawing. It saves me tons of time.

People ask me how to develop confident brushwork. The answer is to get better at drawing. Yes, confident brushwork depends in part on painting technique, but it really requires that you not flail around changing things in the painting phase.

“Draw slow, paint fast,” one of my students once said, and I’ve found it as good a motto as any for developing a loose painting style.

Confident brushwork is about simplification, and you can’t simplify when the shapes aren’t right to start with.

One painter’s testimony

Pam’s sketch of her doctor’s office.

Pam Otis is a painting student who’s taken my drawing class. I asked her what her biggest obstacle was. “Silencing that voice inside my head that told me I couldn’t draw,” she said. “What finally put it to rest for me was when you talked in class about the developmental stages of drawing and how adults who say they can’t draw are really just people who got to a certain developmental stage but for a myriad of reasons didn’t take it any further.

“Once I realized that it wasn’t a matter of me lacking talent or competence, just that I hadn’t learned the skills I needed to progress, it made the whole thing less mysterious and more a concrete skill that I could get better at with practice. That was truly life-changing in terms of gaining confidence in myself and my abilities as an artist.”

Most people avoid things they find difficult. “Having the technical ability to draw something correctly makes it so much easier to execute a painting without avoiding hard things,” Pam said. Drawing gives me the space I need to ask questions like ‘What would happen if I…?’”

Drawing by Pam Otis.

Pam says the most surprising thing about drawing is that it’s so interpretive. “There are so many ways that you can use line and shadow to tell a story, and what you leave out can often make for a more powerful image. 

“Drawing gives me time to reflect about my goals for a piece of art, lets me play around with the details and easily make changes. One of my sketches (above) is of a waiting room. I did it on site and it was time boxed. I learned a lot from that little sketch. I redrew the chair a couple of times because I wasn’t getting the legs quite right and I wanted the cushion to be nuanced. It was like figuring out a puzzle.

“It’s fun to spend time creating with other artists, but it’s also fun to draw out in public. This autumn we went to a busker festival and I drew some of the performers while they played and had them autograph my drawings afterwards. It was a nice ice-breaker when I was talking to them, and I had a chance to talk to some people in the audience.

Drawing by Pam Otis.

“There’s still a lot of mystique around drawing, and I like to think that by taking some of my projects on the road, maybe, just maybe that’ll be the thing that inspires someone else who thought that they couldn’t draw to maybe take another try at it with fresh eyes. I’m definitely glad I did.”

If you feel your painting skills would benefit from better drawing skills, I encourage you to take my six-week drawing class starting January 6. I can promise you that your painting skills will benefit.

The best laid plans

My assistant (or boss), Laura, who’s 31 weeks pregnant, has been bunged into the hospital for the duration. That means, sadly, that the last step of my Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painting will not be wrapped and beribboned for Black Friday. I can’t launch it without her help. It also means I’m in Albany for some unspecified time, since someone needs to rassle the four-year-old while his dad’s at work.

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