Studios and Storage

I love to look at photographs of artists’ studios in the art magazines and on the Internet.   Some of the studios are spectacular and others are not.  All are interesting.  The studios don’t look anything like mine, and I imagine most artists would thank their lucky stars that they don’t.  I’d prefer to see these studios in person, but I don’t get out of the house that much.

I’m still buzzing about the perfect urban studio I saw many years ago in Midtown Manhattan on the far west side in a neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen, which was a pretty seedy part of town then.  I painted from the model in that studio a couple of times with a few other artists in the early 1980s.  I wish I had photographs.  But I’ll do my best to recall some details of the place, which I believe was an old horse stable that had been taken over for use by artists.    

At the time, the entrance to the building was through a half-height, padlocked door that made you think of Alice entering “Wonderland,” which I later thought I had done.  An average-sized adult had to stoop to get through it.   The building was off a small inner courtyard, and you had to walk up a couple of flights of rickety stairs to get to the studio.  Once inside, the first thing you saw was a small, improvised kitchen and bathroom on the right, and a small sleeping loft on the left – all the creature comforts a painter really needs.  Beyond the kitchen was a little lounge area that was festooned with velvet drapes.

The occupant then was Leroy Van Horne, a tall, lanky, somewhat eccentric painter who often wore his waist-length black beard rolled up and pinned just below his chin.  Leroy worked for an “antiques” dealer on the Upper West Side, and he used to rapidly paint full-length portraits on those wonderful old dark green, fine cotton canvas window shades (once standard issue in NYC rental apartments), which he sold to customers who might have thought they had stumbled across an original Robert Henri and were counting their blessings and the profit at auction.   My friend Michelle, who also painted in this studio, recalls that Leroy always hid the hands behind the back or otherwise ignored them in his portraits because they were “hard to paint” and it would have slowed him down too much to include them.  One of the artists who had rented the studio previously was David Leffel, and Leroy had taken it over from some of David’s other friends, including the accomplished violinist and painter Phillip Parnes, whom you might have seen in the movie “I’m Not Rappaport,” playing his violin in Central Park, which he occasionally did in later years.  Phil’s only web presence is a listing for him as an “actor,” which he never was.  Being a lazy researcher, it frustrates me that Leroy and Phil, both excellent painters, have no online presence, not unlike a lot of my talented friends and acquaintances from the time I was starting my so-called painting career in the early 1980s, when the Internet was in its infancy.

John Singer Sargent in his Paris Studio, ca. 1885

Getting back on "house tour," when the velvet drapes of the lounge area were pulled open, the piece de resistance of the place was revealed in all its magnificence, a "starving artist's studio" straight out of the 19^th Century -- right down to the pot-bellied stove.  It was probably the size of Sargent’s elegant Paris studio, if not larger.  The unobstructed north light windows started about chest height, as I recall, and went all the way up to the 20-foot-plus ceilings.  The natural light was glorious.  The first time I went there, one of the artists sharing the studio space was painting a low tabletop still life with a couple of pots and one white onion against the far brick wall about 30 feet from the velvet-draped entrance.  That onion absolutely glowed like the finest diamond in the world.  The sight was so thrilling that I knew that the only light I ever wanted to paint in was natural light.  And I’ve pretty much kept that promise I made to myself on that day.  I must add, unfortunately, that the light I work under does not come close to the kind of natural light you can only get from such an expansive interior environment.  But at least it’s comfortably natural, the best light for seeing the true color and form of things.

Except for the pot-bellied stove providing heat in the winter, that old-fashioned studio was perfection itself to a late-blooming artist still harboring romantic notions about the life of a painter.

Some 20 years later, I was fortunate to pay a short visit to another perfect studio in an entirely different setting.  This one sits in nearly total isolation in picturesque “Cornwall Hollow” in the Northwestern Connecticut woods near the Massachusetts border.  The large, perfectly proportioned studio is a former Baptist church that was built in 1844.  Right across the country road from the church there is a cemetery with graves of the deceased dating back to the Revolutionary War.  When the sun goes down it is totally black outside, with only the sound of crickets and coyotes to disturb your sleep, I imagine.

The studio, with a small attached building on one side for living quarters, is owned and occupied by Curt Hanson, an outstanding landscape painter with ties to the Boston School of painting through study with R.H. Ives Gammell.  Hanson paints serene, faithful, tonalist landscapes of New England and Thailand, where this devout Buddhist now spends part of the year.  Many of his New England landscapes are all-season views of the “hollow,” which he can see perfectly from the large windows of the studio.  The historic building, named “Cornubia Hall” by the previous owner, is pictured and described on his website: www.curthansonpaintings.com. 

I still dream about studios like these, but reality interferes.  I believe I will be stuck in my rent-stabilized home studio till the end of days.   It’s not such a bad studio for painting pictures from life of modest scale, no bigger than 24 by 30.  But the pictures keep piling up year after year, and I’m running out of storage space in my 12 by 18 foot monastery.  I’m not keen on paying an exorbitant monthly rent on a cubicle in a storage warehouse to stockpile the paintings I keep making at a rate far exceeding my rate for selling them.  And I hate the job of taking canvases off their stretchers and rolling them up or storing them flat.  I’ve already got about 150 20x16 inch portrait sketches from members’ painting sessions Saturday mornings at The Art Students League affixed flat to plywood boards.  I could just close my eyes and toss them all in the garbage, I suppose.  I already toss plenty of rejects on a regular basis as it is.  But I’m a sentimental hoarder of too many of these paintings.  So what to do?

I assume this is a problem almost all artists have, but the pictures of artists’ studios that I like to look at seem never to include a clear view of what their studio storage facilities are like.  There are more than enough art instruction books, and all the authors are happy to tell you, in some detail, in close, repetitious harmony, how to clean your brushes, choose your colors and mediums and painting surfaces, and show you all the stages of a painting, along with a lot of other serious tips for making better paintings.  But they never say anything useful about where they put all their paintings before they are shipped to some high-end gallery.  I wanna see a few pictures of storage racks, not just paintings!  I’ve seen plenty of them already.

Well, actually, at least one artist did have some valuable advice on the subject of storage.  The English painter Bertram Nicholls (1883-1974) had a neat storage rack built along one long wall of his studio at a convenient height so it could store frames and canvases and double as a work bench.  Nicholls described it as “a large shelf about a yard wide…supported on a double series of inch by inch uprights four to five inches apart.” His storage solution is similar to the racks used at many of the art schools and galleries.  He included a photo of it in his 1938 book “Painting in Oils,” which was part of the practical “How to do it” series published in London by The Studio Limited.  Nicholls thought of everything in this fascinating little book.

So I’m paying a young sculptor/carpenter to design and build another wooden storage rack to fit into some unused space about 9 feet long above a rack similar to the one Nicholls wrote about that I had someone build for me a few years ago.  I already have a couple of those industrial, metal shelving units covering the opposite long wall of my studio and have just added two more smaller units.  This new wooden storage contraption will be designed to accommodate my current use of the countertop for, among other things, a place to dry my wet paintings parked diagonally against the wall.

Here are some pictures of the studio as it looks now, with brushes and other stuff shoved into my 6 by 14 foot painting area next to the window to make way for the carpentry project. You might find the images amusing.

Will be lowering Shelves for more Canvas Storage

 New Wooden Rack built on platform will leave some needed wall space 

Opposite long wall covered with metal storage units

Two new metal units just added

Painting area near window now storing supplies

Please Sir, May I Have Some More Photographs?

Painters used to be ashamed to use photographs in their work and tried hard to hide the evidence.  An old painter I knew told me he went with the rest of the Frank Reilly illustration class one day to pay a call on a former student now working as an illustrator.  When they rang the studio doorbell, the illustrator yelled out, “Just a minute,” and they could hear the commotion inside as the illustrator quickly hid his Balopticon and other photographic paraphernalia before opening the door.  The idea was that if you had mastered drawing, color and composition, you didn’t need an opaque projector to trace an image from a drawing or a photograph onto your canvas.  Those days are long gone.

There’s a very entertaining website called, “Artist and Studio,” where the guy in charge posts two or three new images every day of artists and their work, their studio environments and their models.  The archival photographs of artists and their studios are particularly interesting, although there do seem to be more images posted of Frida Kahlo than are seemly.  But what I can’t help noticing is that all the contemporary figurative work posted on this site is photographic in nature.  Just look at the hands they paint.  No painter in the history of painting was great at painting the knuckles on every finger.  So they didn’t.  Besides, they understood the obvious, that knuckles aren’t the most attractive part of the human anatomy, and add very little to the overall beauty of the painting.  A few masterful portrait painters, like Sir William Orpen, could draw everything so well that they accepted the challenge of painting hands, with knuckles and veins, and won.   That was yesterday, though, when painters could draw and paint quickly and accurately from life.  Today if you want to paint hands, you normally take a photograph.  Knuckles are no problem for a camera.  Do you think today’s young kids can draw and paint hands better than Sargent or Orpen?  No way.  But they seem to take great delight in copying every knuckle on every finger as recorded by the camera.  

Albrecht Durer’s famous pen and ink drawing of praying hands is about all you get of any note from the Old Masters.  And you can bet that he had a hard time drawing them so accurately from life.  

Beyond the knuckles, however, if the painting looks like a high-resolution photograph then it was copied from a photograph.  But it’s getting harder to tell now, because so many realist painters are painting pictures from life with all the accurate, trivial detail that only a camera wants to record, without establishing a strong focal point, and ignoring painterly concerns such as the atmospheric effect on values, color and spatial relationships.

So it’s impossible to write about contemporary realist painting without mentioning how much it has been influenced by photography, consciously or not.  Here’s the basic timeline from the 19^th Century on.

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929)

Horses at the Water Trough, 1884

Degas Photograph and Painting, “After the Bath”

Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

First we have oil painters using photographs as mere reference to help them with some details they can’t paint from life, to paint posthumous portraits or to experiment with them just for their novelty.   Dagnan-Bouveret and Degas are often cited here, although  many other famous artists used them on rare occasions.  Even bravura painters like Sorolla are thought to have used photos in their work, but its been hard to pin the tail on their donkey.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942), Queen Victoria and

her Great Grandson, 1936

Then we have artists copying or freely interpreting photographs from newspapers or magazines for their “original art.”  Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is often cited here.  Sickert was an eccentric, cosmopolitan artist who influenced many 20th Century modernists with his varied non-traditional painting methods, including the use of grids on canvas to quickly work interpretively from drawings, prints and photographs.  Early on in his career he was a good friend of both Whistler and Degas, taking the latter's advice to work in the studio and avoid "the tyranny of nature."  He had a more than casual interest in the dark side of human behavior, so much so that in 2002, Patricia Cornwell, a crime novelist, identified him as Jack the Ripper in her book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed."  Her theory was good for a laugh at the time.

John Howard Sanden, President George W. Bush, 2012,
 The White House

Then we have oil painters copying photographs to create paintings such as official portraits, because the subjects can’t be bothered with the boring business of sitting (or standing) for the many hours necessary to do the job from life; and wildlife paintings, because it’s hard to get a duck in flight to hold the pose.  Any contemporary portrait painter or wildlife artist fits in here.  And who really knows how to draw a duck or a wildebeest well, anyway, other than Walt Disney artists.

Richard Estes, Ansonia, 1977, Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have photo-realists using an airbrush or soft-hair brushes to copy photographs precisely, or “interpret” them ever so slightly, to make monumental paintings that look to the naked eye exactly like the photograph, down to the smooth emulsion surface.  Think Richard Estes here.

Chuck Close, “Phil,” 1969. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 108 × 84 in.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have artists making photorealistic paintings of giant heads on canvas without actually copying the photograph, but by systematically applying tiny little brush marks grid by grid by grid by grid.  These marks are only revealed upon “Close” inspection.

Rackstraw Downes, "Sprowl Bros. Lumber Yard, Searsmont, ME", 1978-80
Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 43 3/8 in., Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Then we have artists going outdoors to copy a commonplace industrial landscape spread out in front of them, for several weeks worth of work, to create a modest-sized painting that ends up looking exactly like a photograph, until a 30-page essay is produced to prove that what you see is not, in fact, a photograph, but the illusion of a photograph with all kinds of artistic license behind the process, which makes it much more interesting than an actual photograph would have been, you see.  Think Rackstraw Downes.

Stephen Hannock, “The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded,”

2000, Acrylic, alkyd and oil glazes with collage elements on

canvas, 96x144 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

At about the same time, we have artists using power sanders, collage elements and all sorts of reference material to create slick-surfaced monumental studio “paintings” that look exactly like giant digital photographs when hung on the requisite museum walls, but which reveal a lot of indecipherable scribbling of gibberish when you put your nose right up to them, and which are accompanied by a 30-page essay to prove that what you see was not, in fact, copied from a photograph, but was created with all kinds of serious artistic invention and hard work to give the illusion of a photograph or a movie still, you understand! That must be Stephen Hannock.

Well those are just some of the major players in the game.  Then we have thousands of other artists cheerfully working from photographs or computer images as a matter of course in all media and genres today to create “original art” in sizes that actually fit on a living room wall.  There is no shortage of photographic images to inspire creativity today, so we see plenty of paintings that have the whiff of photography or computer-generated imagery about them.

I wonder about those big photographic paintings that everybody raves about.  Is doing something really difficult and quirky on a monumental scale, with or without unusual painting tools, worth anything as a lasting work of art if the only goal is to give to it the convincing illusion of a photograph?  I certainly don’t think so.

Jeff Wall’s photograph “Men waiting,” 2006, Silver gelatine print

103 1/8 x 152 3/4 in., The Guardian, London,

© Jeff Wall / Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

Besides, those giant photographic prints we now often see on museum walls look mighty impressive themselves. Working big is no longer an advantage for the representational painter.

By the way, does putting your nose near the surface of one of those massive photo-like paintings to see all the indecipherable little bits embedded there make it somehow a deeply moving emotional experience you will cherish for the rest of your life?  Would you like a reduction made of it so you can put it above your living room couch – or perhaps a little postcard as a souvenir of your visit to the museum?  I seriously doubt it.  Scale is everything for these guys.  But my opinion doesn’t matter, no it really doesn’t matter, matter, matter…because I just want to paint pretty little pictures from life, and I’m not even very good at that, in my own humble opinion, verified a thousand times over by my perspicacious ability to see how much better others have handled the same subject matter.

No, my opinion and that of a few other diehard traditionalists doesn’t matter.  The revolution has been won.  Art workers in the digital age have united.  They are determined to cast off the shackles of whimsical, intemperate Mother Nature once and for all.  Iris, hence away with the accursed, antiquated practice of wrestling with nature to paint pictures that actually look and feel like the real thing as seen through the lens of the human eye.  Such pictures tend to excite raw emotion in viewers and will not be allowed in the brave new world of high-definition, digitalized visual reality.  Let a decree go forth throughout the land that the only representational art that will be permitted is that which will look like a photograph, whether actually painted from a photograph, extracted from a fertile imagination, or created from life with no other purpose than rendering by hand an accurate snapshot of the subject, composed as if seen through a camera’s viewfinder, with no indication of nature’s depth and breadth beyond the borders of the canvas.   

I have no objection to photographs, per se.  I took some good ones myself before I started to paint 30 years ago, but I haven’t touched a drop since.  Look at it this way:  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s (photographs and computer imagery) and render unto God that which is God’s (painting).   Maybe you don’t agree.  So all right, let’s just keep them “separate but equal.”  Don’t say I’m not willing to compromise!

How a Portrait Should Look

Glyn Warren Philpot, R.A. (1884-1937), Portrait of

 Ellen Borden Stevenson, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 in., Christie's, London

Without a doubt, this is how a commissioned oil portrait should look when painted from life.  What else can one conclude?  Just look at it.  The creamy, flawless flesh of youth is painted to perfection.  The expression is flattering, lively and lifelike, not emotionally dead as in all of today’s photographically rendered portraits that the public pays darn good money for.  The drawing is excellent and the details subordinate to the sitter’s lovely countenance.  The pale color theme is unobtrusive, soothing and exquisite.  Have you ever seen a portrait painted in the last 30 years that looked as good?  I didn’t think so. 

This portrait radiates all the bloom of life emanating from this beautiful young woman, and it is a look that no photograph could ever capture.  Where and why have we gone wrong!  Who wouldn’t want to try to paint such a lovely portrait for themselves today?  Is it simply that we lack the ability to paint this well?  Are we just not interested in capturing the emotional state of the sitter in front of us? Has the photograph rendered us incapable of appreciating natural beauty, the softness of real flesh, the curious, lively gaze of the sitter as the painter goes about his work, the mouth at its most seductive transition, the sparkle in the eye, the arched eyebrow that adds such playfulness and joy to the portrait.  What a nice painting! 

Glyn Warren Philpot, Self-Portrait

Glyn Warren Philpot, R.A. (1884-1937) was a highly accomplished, successful portrait painter in England in the 1920s and 30s who had studied painting at the Lambeth School of Art in London and at the Academie Julian in Paris under J.P. Laurens.  After travels to Spain, his portrait work reflected his love for the paintings of Velázquez.  In notes for the auction of this portrait in London on July 11, a Christie’s specialist writes, “Faced with the young American girl, Ellen Borden, clad in pale lemon trimmed with gauze, it was not surprising to find Philpot producing a modern 'infanta'.”   Philpot’s contemporaries considered him to be a masterful craftsman.  And critics celebrated his exceptional ability to capture the sitter’s personality, particularly in his informal portraiture.  This more formal portrait of Ellen Borden surely must have confirmed that attribute of his work.  Philpot also painted genre studies and religious, mythological and allegorical subjects, and was a sculptor, as well.   Apparently some of his later work was too sexually explicit for the public and he suffered financially as a result.

In Harold Speed’s outstanding 1924 treatise on the “science and practice” of oil painting, now titled “Oil Painting Techniques and Materials,” he lists some palettes of contemporary English painters, and here is the list of colors obtained from Philpot, right to left, with colors used occasionally in Italics: Light red, Indian red, Vermillion, White, Yellow ochre, Raw umber, Burnt umber, Ivory black, Cerulean blue, Cobalt, Terra vert, Burnt sienna.  He used copal varnish thinned with turpentine for his medium and for glazes.  And just to show how serious I am about this technical stuff, I even looked up the definition of “ultramarine ash,” which Philpot sometimes used for delicate grays.  Here is the 1913 definition, brought to you courtesy of the Internet: “Ultramarine ash is a pigment which is the residuum of lapis lazuli after the ultramarine has been extracted.  It was used by the old masters as a middle or neutral tint for flesh, skies, and draperies, being of a purer and tenderer gray than that produced by the mixture of more positive colors.”  But you probably already knew this.  Sounds something like Gamblin’s Torrit Grey, made of recycled pigment dust, although I’m sure nobody uses that color for anything other than to enter a painting in the manufacturer’s annual Torrit Grey competition!

Philpot’s list of colors won’t help us paint better, of course.  But can’t we try to connect emotionally with each subject, as he must have done, and not strive so hard to get a frozen, photographic likeness in our portrait work?  Shouldn’t we strive to let our sitters be recognized on canvas as the distinct, living and breathing individuals they are, rather than as exact replicas of a photograph?   But maybe we’re not so interested anymore in rendering soft, tender flesh in all its natural beauty.  We’re being taught to prefer the glossy, plastic flesh of dinosaurs, aliens, action heroes and supermodels nowadays. 

Figurative painters working from life in a traditional manner know that the sitter and the painter are in this together, and painting skill only takes you halfway up the mountain to a heavenly portrait like this one of Ellen Borden (1908-1972).  The daughter of a prominent Chicago family made wealthy through real estate investments and mining operations, she was educated at finishing schools and studied independently in England and Italy.  She was an excellent pianist and trained as a mezzo-soprano.  Her portrait was painted before she married a young lawyer named Adlai Stevenson in 1928, when she had not yet turned 20.  She divorced him in 1949.  Their marriage became strained as Stevenson rose within the ranks of the Democratic Party, culminating in his two unsuccessful bids for the Presidency, in 1952 and 1956.  Ellen apparently voted Republican.

Peony Hunting Season

Peonies in Bavarian Coffee Pot, 20x16

For a couple of years, beautiful peonies grown locally had been pretty much absent without leave in my neighborhood on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan.  Too much frost, I’m told.  Of course, at the Korean markets you can get a common variety of peonies year round, as well as common varieties of a lot of other flowers, including sunflowers, of all things!  And the roses, ah yes, the roses -- two dozen for $10, and each bloom exactly the same shape and size.  Egad!  The peonies are no bargain -- $10 to $15 for a mere three blooms.  These flowers are grown in South America and don’t look very good when they get to New York City --  and even less so when the Koreans strip the stems of leaves and the blooms of petals that show the slightest signs of wear and tear.

This year, though, the locally grown peonies are gorgeous again!  The husband and wife team who sell bedding plants and cut flowers at the Farmer’s Market at 78^th and Columbus on Sundays are bringing in lots of the beautiful peonies I love to paint – whites and light to medium pinks in all shapes and sizes.  Each $2 stem has one big blossom and several buds, and plenty of beautiful leaves.  And they last a week or more in a vase.

Besides having extraordinary beauty, peonies are fun to paint.  They are large and lack the exacting detail of the rose, so you can freely pile the paint on with a big brush.  They are also the most exciting flower to paint because of their shape-shifting propensity.  It’s like chasing butterflies without a net when painting them.

Unlike most cut flowers, peonies look gorgeous at any stage of erosion, even when they are ready to shed their petals in a cascading snowfall of soft and tender color.  But they look their freshest at the market, so you want to make a painting initially of the four or five stems you have selected at 9 a.m., when the market opens.  You walk six blocks back to your 8^th floor apartment with the flowers and quickly choose one of your unexceptional vases, fill it with tap water from the kitchen sink, cut the stems at a diagonal and drop in your flowers.  Some stems have to be cut again to suit the arrangement. 

You put the vase on your upended model’s stand, which you now use for still life setups, since you’re not painting people much these days, select a 16x20 or 20x24 canvas and you are ready to start painting by 10 a.m.  Your palette of colors, including a couple of gray mixtures from a previous painting, was set ahead of time.  You move the stems around a little bit until you feel you have a fairly decent design, brush on a background tone with a lot of turps, and start painting wet into wet, after first wiping out the main shapes of the blossoms with a paper towel.  You have to start somewhere, so you pick the largest white bloom and start painting it – at first with a local color wash and then with thick, impulsive strokes of paint with a big flat or round bristle brush, cleaning up the edges with a smaller round or filbert brush filled with the background tone.   Now you move around as the spirit moves you to the other flowers with a thin wash of local color on each bloom before piling the paint on.

After about an hour and a half you’ve pretty much finished the flowers and have indicated the position of the stems and leaves and given shape and some local color to the vase.  But by now the blooms have opened into new and interesting shapes that look just as beautiful as before.  You see that the interior shapes of the biggest white flower are even more interesting so you slap on more paint to catch the drift, as it were.  The same goes for all the other blooms.  You work like a maniac to shovel the coal onto the canvas to capture some semblance of their beauty.  The fabled “one stroke to describe a form” is a pipe dream for you.  Oh, the tragedy!  Eventually the highly personal you gives up and takes a lunch break.  After lunch you push the paint around for another hour or two until you feel you have captured some of the look of these beautiful flowers.  The next day you work on all the other elements of the picture, hoping to complete it by the end of this second session.

Against my better judgment, but because it is the subject of this blog entry, I am forced to attach the paintings I’ve done in the last two weeks of the peonies I "bagged" on two successive Sundays – four stems each time.  I would love to have done just one decent, well-composed painting, but the impulse to paint these flowers in all their “stations of the cross,” makes that difficult for me.   So I just toss in some “usual suspects” to fill in the blank spaces on the canvas once the bouquet is painted.  Pretty boring stuff, I admit.  But time, tide and flowers wait for no man.  Anyway, I go along with the old idea that you have to paint 20 pictures to get one good one.  That’s probably not a popular notion with many of today’s high-definition realist painters who work long and hard on each creation.

No. 1, 20x16

No. 2, 24x20

No. 3, 20x16

No. 4, 20x24, First Stage

No. 4, Final, Less Exciting, More Serious

No. 5, 20x16

No. 6, 16x12, last one for now

I’ll probably paint a couple more peony paintings before the season is over, hopefully one of them will be a good one.  And then I start looking forward to locally grown zinnias and sunflowers at the Farmer's market in late summer.  To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven, including the painting of flowers.  It’s bizarre to paint pictures of those immigrant peonies when the snow is falling in December.  Go ahead and have your fun, I won’t be joining in.

Just Another Yoke

Among the rare, distinct pleasures for a low-income artist living in Manhattan are the free auction exhibits of 19^th Century and American Art held a couple of times a year by Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  You can always find a few great paintings that you will never see again once they revert back to private ownership.  And it’s fun to come across excellent work by artists who never quite make it to the Big Leagues.  I have seen many of these exhibits in the past 30 years and have acquired hundreds of used auction catalogs as well.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing the latest American Art exhibit at Christie’s and saw some terrific landscape paintings.  In particular, I lingered over paintings by Daniel Garber, Edgar Payne, Oscar Berninghaus, Granville Redmond, Maurice Braun, Julian Onderdonk, John Leslie Breck, Edward Redfield and Willard Metcalf.

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Over the Hill, 1917, 30x25

Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947), High Sierra, Big Pine Canyon

Edward Willis Redfield, (1869-1965), Hillside and Valley, Point Pleasant, 28x32 1/4

Granville Redmond (1871-1935), Snow Cap Spring, 1927, 20x24

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899), At Annisquam, 1894, 18x22

Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922), Blue Bonnets at Twilight, 1918, 22x40

Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Evening Light

Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952), A Field in Taos, 18x24

Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925), May Pastoral, 1907, 36x39

What strikes me about all these painters is they found their own way to interpret the beauty of nature.  They did not attempt to copy somebody else’s stylistic approach, which seems to be the standard procedure for today’s artists working in all genres who aren’t copying photographs.  These earlier painters were obviously influenced by the color theories occasioned by the Impressionist work of Monet and other French painters.  But the Americans retained the form of the natural world in a way the average picture lover could appreciate without having to see the paintings encased in expensive Louis XV frames.  The result was the production of some of the most beautiful landscape paintings you have ever seen. 

Willard Metcalf, The Green Canopy, 1908, 29x26

I remember being amazed by a Metcalf painting I saw in a gallery a few years ago that really increased my already great admiration for the painter.  He had chosen to paint a woodland interior scene that seemed an impossible subject to paint.  But he did an incredibly masterful job of it in his own way.  I don’t know how he did it.  I only know that I was awed by the fact that he had pulled it off.  Carlson’s book on landscape painting isn’t going to help you one bit.  You have to figure it out for yourself.

Vincent Van Gogh expounded on this idea brilliantly in a passionate letter to his brother Theo on Sept. 3, 1882 regarding a recent landscape painting:

“Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground — yet that ground is very dark — in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish. Then there are also mosses and an edge of fresh grass that catches the light and sparkles brightly and is very difficult to get. There at last you have a sketch which — whatever may be said about it — I maintain has some meaning, says something.

While making it I said to myself: let me not leave before there’s something of an autumn evening in it, something mysterious, something with seriousness in it.  However, because this effect doesn’t last, I had to paint quickly. The figures were done with a few vigorous strokes with a firm brush — in one go. I was struck by how firmly the slender trunks stood in the ground — I began them using a brush, but because of the ground, which was already impasted, one brushstroke simply disappeared. Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it — shoot up out of it — stand firmly rooted in it.

In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint. Probably then I would have learned to ignore effects like this. Now I say, no, that’s exactly what I want — if it’s not possible then it’s not possible — I want to try it even though I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint.”

Oh, Vincent, how your words resonate with me!  This is one great artist that posterity definitely was right about.  It’s high time for today’s landscape painters to throw over the yoke of instruction from workshops, DVDs, YouTube videos, Internet blogs and books, and paint with their hearts, not just their heads, which are filled with all the rules and regulations they had no part in formulating.  Maybe you won’t become another Van Gogh, but at least you will have learned how to think about painting on your own.  And if you are luckier than him, you may even sell a few paintings.