Z is for Zinnias

Zinnias and Onions, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 24 in.

Zinnia Painting described below, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 16 in.

I’ve gotten into a habit of painting pictures of locally grown flowers in the summer, and right now zinnias are in season and being sold at the farmers’ markets near my home studio on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side, a painter’s paradise in The Year of Our Lord 2014, and home to throngs of artists who congregate in the local sushi bars to share trade secrets every evening after an invigorating day painting the urban landscape en plein air.

Two Saturdays ago, around 8:30 a.m., I walked 10 blocks south to the popular Greenmarket that sets up on Thursdays and Saturdays opposite Lincoln Center in Richard Tucker Square, which is actually a small triangular traffic island on Broadway, to see what flowers were available to paint that day.  What follows is a tedious account of a trivial pursuit that occurs with regularity in my humdrum existence.  It’s easier to write a thousand words than to paint a picture. 

Zinnias were being sold by two farms with stalls next to each other.  One of the farms had a dozen or more big plastic buckets jam-packed with large bouquets of zinnias for $6 each, but the zinnias appeared a little bedraggled.  They looked much fresher when I passed by the market on Thursday afternoon on my usual trek down Broadway to the Art Students League on West 57th Street to draw in the late afternoon life sketch class.  I spent about 20 minutes mulling over the selection, getting very little inspiration from the combinations of yellow, orange, red, and light and dark shades of violet in each bouquet.  One large bunch was comprised of a dozen bright yellow zinnias.  I gave that one quite a bit of attention, but decided it would be tough to assemble an attractive still life composition with all that yellow.  There is a lot of truth to something Degas once said, “What a horrible thing yellow is.”  There weren’t enough off-white zinnias in the bouquets to suit my taste either.

At the market stall next door, a young woman creates smaller bouquets on the spot for $5 apiece, so I “impulsively” bought one that looked promising, even though the fresh-looking zinnias were accompanied by stalks of snapdragons in complementary colors.  I have trouble painting the small, amorphous forms of snapdragons.  And it’s difficult to get the flower maven to custom-make an arrangement for me – she has her own way of doing things.  Besides, what do I expect for just five bucks? 

With the flowers now in hand, I wanted to hop on the M104 Broadway bus, which lets me off right in front of my apartment building.  But I didn’t see one coming, so I walked back to my apartment, greatly concerned, as always, that I was shortening the life of these fragile cut flowers by not getting them back in water right away. 

When I got home I cut the stems a bit and put the zinnias in a water-filled glass vase until I decided that this bouquet might look good in my recently acquired and somewhat unusual Japanese coffeepot with a quaintly decorated, flared base.  This turned out to be a big mistake.  But these flowers aren’t going to last long and you have to make decisions quickly.  I threw in some ice cubes in the pot and moved from the kitchen sink to my west/northwest natural light studio in the former bedroom of my apartment.  I plunked the vase down on the ledge of my upturned model stand, which I had draped with a gray cloth that kind of went with the gray background cloth I chose to pin on the wall behind the arrangement.

The ledge of that upturned model stand has lately been the primary staging area for my still life setups.  The sheetrock wall about 18 inches behind the stand is a good surface for accepting push pins to try out different-colored background draperies.  I’m a little depressed about this new use for my model stand, which I built because I love painting faces and thought I might get a little portrait business going when I sacrificed my life to painting years ago. That didn’t materialize.  And the older I get, the less inclined I am to wheedle and cajole people into posing for me.  That never worked for me, anyway.  As it often happened, the only people who wanted to be painted by me were people I didn’t necessarily want to paint.  But sometimes that resulted in a very good painting, so what do I know.  And I simply could not afford to pay for private models on a regular basis.  I’m reminded of Winslow Homer’s comment upon fleeing urban society for the desolate Maine coast when he got older.  “Leave rocks for your old age – they’re easy,” he told a student artist in 1907.  I’ll bet Homer didn’t waste his time painting zinnias.

The gray background cloth I chose for my zinnia painting gradually shifts from cool to warm gray without my permission as the sun heads west.  The important thing is getting the cut flowers down on canvas quickly while they are as fresh as possible, considering how far they have to travel in an urban environment.  If you are lucky, you can always harmonize any background color through trial and error with admixtures of the various flower colors, painting into and around the bouquet while the paint is still wet.

I did two paintings from this bouquet.  I got going on the first one at 10:30 that Saturday morning, about an hour after buying them at the market.  That’s really too late to complete the work in one three- or four-hour session under the same light conditions.  The natural light in my studio is pretty constant from about 8 or 9 a.m. until about 1 or 2 p.m.  But the afternoon sun gives my still life setup a much warmer look, with dark, crisp shadows, which looks great, but I don’t have the energy to start another canvas.  That’s why painters who work alla prima love true north light studios.  They can paint for longer periods without worrying about the colors and values changing dramatically.   I have read that some terrific painters like Sorolla and one of his students, Aldro T. Hibbard, were known to paint for hours outdoors on the same scene and then summon all their creative energy to complete their paintings with dramatic late afternoon light effects.  “Now, Estevenson, now is the time to paint,” a student named Stevenson recalled Sorolla exclaiming at the hour of reckoning.  That’s one painting “demonstration” I would love to have witnessed.

Cut flowers can last a long time unless you intend to paint them.  Then they start wilting and taking on different shapes immediately just to spite you, so you have to paint rapidly.  I’m familiar with a lot of different approaches to painting flowers from life.  Some artists paint the vase and surroundings first and add the flowers later, or vice versa.   As I’ve written before, Fantin-Latour painted the flowers against a background color he prepared the night before, and then painted like blazes on the flowers he had just cut moments before from his backyard garden, finishing them mostly in one session.  He then could complete the vase and touch up the flowers a bit at a comfortable pace the next day.   Some artists do a careful drawing of the design and paint one flower at a time.  Some take a flower and turn it several different ways to fill out the arrangement.  Some write books on how to paint flowers their way.  Some artists stoop to painting silk flowers.  Some even copy photographs of flowers, I’m told, as Cezanne’s dealer Vollard said was done by “the father of modern painting.”   And take note of what one of my teachers said about photographs of paintings when you look at the images of my zinnia paintings displayed with this blog post:  "A bad painting photographs better and a good painting photographs worse," said the late Frank Mason.  I don't think he was talking about just plain bad photography, though.  

Lots of determined realist painters avoid painting flowers from life altogether because they are restless models that can’t hold a pose.  It’s quite a challenge to figure out how to avoid a real disaster when painting flowers alla prima. 

I learned to paint directly from nature by working pretty much over the whole canvas without a preliminary drawing on paintings up to 24 by 30 inches or so.  This approach suits my impatient personality.  With turpentine-thinned oil paint, I indicate the approximate boundaries of the entire setup on the canvas.  The color of the paint I sketch with doesn’t matter much to me,  although it is usually raw or burnt umber.  I then move from flower to flower to estimate their relative positions by holding a brush handle at the proper angle.  When the rhythm of the design takes shape, I start washing in a thin local color for each of the flowers in their approximate shape before building up the paint.  I like to work from light to dark colors, hoping I can get by with using fewer brushes that way.   After that, I tend to forget what comes next.  I’m too busy painting to conjure up any real-time analysis. 

I sometimes wish I could be as analytical as other painters, but the act of painting for me is more of a spontaneous emotional experience than a meditation, and I can’t remember what I did from one painting to the next. 

On that score, many artists often have no idea how they produced a successful painting.  I can thank the eminently quotable Degas again for supporting that observation. "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things," said Degas.  I’ve known a few artists who find it extremely difficult to copy their own work when necessary because they can’t remember how they painted it.  A portrait painter friend was asked to recreate a woman’s portrait he had painted many years ago so the second of the woman’s two daughters could also have this wonderful portrait of their late mother. He said it was a most difficult assignment.

The first painting I did of these zinnias is just a formal arrangement, front and center, without any serious design effort, other than initially shuffling the flowers until the arrangement looked balanced and harmonious, at least to me.  As when painting all my subjects, I try my best to get the flowers to appear to exist in the same atmospheric space they occupy in my studio.  In my moderately impressionistic way of painting, I suggest the most obvious details, rather than try to render all the petals perfectly, which is really a tedious operation and beyond my patience and skill level.  There’s not much to say about this process.  It’s all just pushing the paint around to make the flowers on canvas look and feel right in the atmosphere that surrounds them.  I painted the zinnias pretty completely in the first three-hour session, but I had some trouble with the snapdragons.  I was pretty sure their plump little bell-like shapes wouldn’t change much in 24 hours, so I left them unfinished for the second painting.  But the next day, they had veered out of position in such a way that I was forced to invent a larger shape for the snapdragon stalk on the right to balance the composition.

Flower painting is hard enough, but painting that fancy coffeepot really drove me crazy.  The frieze at the top and bottom of the vase is a delicate floral design that is indistinct from my vantage point a couple of feet away.  I worked very hard to keep it as restrained as possible so it wouldn’t dominate the composition.  And I repositioned and repainted the body of the pot to have it straight on rather than at a slight angle as it was initially, which I hadn’t noticed until the second day.  It just didn’t look right probably because I was painting it as if I were viewing it head-on.  The bluish-white body of the coffeepot was giving off a beautiful glow and it was exciting to lay in the color with a big brush fully loaded with paint.  It looked fantastic until I had to subtly indicate the bulbous segments of the porcelain façade.  I threw in a snappy highlight and signed the painting, feeling pretty good about my effort.  But I then noticed that the symmetry was way off on the right side of the flared base.  As Sargent said, most of us have a bias to one side and painters should always have a plumb line handy to deal with symmetries.  I think a lot of us just paint some junk to camouflage one difficult side of a symmetrical object to avoid grappling endlessly to get it to seem right to our “biased” eyes.  Some artists like to draw such things perfectly before beginning to paint, but painting around a careful drawing is a technique I’m not much interested in.

After quite a number of tries to improve the symmetry, I was ready to give it up and come back for a fourth session -- way too much time for me to spend on a simple still life.  I was getting very agitated.  But about an hour before I headed off to draw at the League again in the late afternoon, I became frantically obsessed with this problem.  I had to find a solution.  I took my paints out of the freezer again and threw down the flower at the center right of the bouquet to hide the right side of the flared base of the pot so I could sleep that night.  

The paint was still pretty wet, but there was no way I was going to wait for it to dry in a couple of days to calmly add another flower over the dried surface or come up with another solution to my problem in the clear light of day.  So I really juiced up the cold paint with my trusty half-oil medium of stand oil and turps so the flower would stand up without becoming like Dali’s painting of watches, The Persistence of Memory. After 30 minutes of panicked hard labor I was finally through with this one.  I had said all I wanted to, and to be honest, all I could say.  What a relief!   Now my sun was shining again.  And later that afternoon I had one of my best life drawing sessions of the summer at the League.

The next day I took another newly acquired pot, put a few of the surviving zinnias in it, added an onion that’s been lurking at the end of the ledge for about two months now, and painted this small still life basically in one session.

Today at the farmer’s market on Columbus Avenue at West 77th Street it was cosmos from one vendor and two sunflowers from another.  I must be crazy to keep torturing myself this way.  Point me in the direction of those Maine rocks.  Oh, Lord, I'm on my way!

The Second Painting, Oil on Canvas, 14 by 12 in.

Oil on Canvas, 18 by 15 in.

Oil on Canvas, 24 by 18 in.