Brushstrokes

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Léon Delafosse, 1895, Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 by 23 7/16 in.,  Seattle Art Museum

Sidney E. Dickinson (1890-1980), Gentleman in a Brown Overcoat, Oil on Canvas

Sidney E. Dickinson (1890-1980), Portrait of Paul P. Juley, Oil on Canvas

The trouble with traditional figurative painting today is that most painters take their own photographs of their paintings.  It is cheap and easy to do, what with all the digital imaging gadgets now available.

But painters aren’t skilled enough photographers to eliminate the glare caused by obvious brushstrokes in their work.  Only a professional photographer can get rid of that glare perfectly, and who wants to pay big money to a pro when digital photography is so quick and easy, and pretty darn good at getting a fair representation of the color and values of the original work.

So to get around this glare problem, today’s painters just eliminate all obvious brushstrokes in their work. Backgrounds and figures are painted uniformly flat, often with a thin layer of paint barely staining their canvases or panels. 

Problem solved.  Photographs are glare-free.  Masterpieces are denied.  You can’t paint a masterpiece without obvious brushwork.   Brushstrokes equal passion and passion equals masterpieces.  That’s all there is to it.  And as has often been said, oil painting is really sculpture in low relief.

What about Bouguereau and his academic friends, what about Vermeer, what about all those other painters who created flawless surfaces in the old days with no obvious brushstrokes?  Well, just look closely at the surfaces of their paintings.  Those painters learned at an early age how to draw and paint simultaneously with a fully loaded brush.  They knew how to handle paint – how to build up form, how to use it transparently when necessary..  Today’s painters get a much later start on learning traditional painting techniques and never really connect with their medium in the same way.

  

Anybody can paint in very thin layers with a careful preliminary drawing to achieve photo-like copies of their subjects on canvas if they have the patience to work long hours on each painting.  The digital images of those paintings look great on a computer screen, but lifeless in person.  A substantial layer of oil paint is essential to bringing a canvas to life.  That’s all there is to it!  It’s the paint itself that is the life force.  How thick or how thin that paint layer has to be is up to the individual painter.  But it has to be more than a mere watercolor-like stain on the canvas.  Of course, most people who buy art don’t know the difference, so I suppose knowing how to really push the paint around is not worth a whole lot anymore.

I got to thinking about the subject of brushstrokes the other day when I saw the Sargent exhibit at the Met.  Another great show full of masterpieces that were obviously painted with great passion, because when you looked at any one of them in raking light you could sometimes barely see the image because of all the reflections on the surface of the paintings.

I had to laugh then at my own conflicted views on brushstrokes because only a day or so before, I was closely inspecting in raking light the background of a painting I was working on.  The prestretched canvas was only primed with two coats of acrylic gesso.  I was so annoyed because every little nub of the cheap cotton canvas was reflecting light.  So I mixed up a liquid batch of the background color and sludged it on wet in wet and then used a wide flat brush to smooth out the heavy layer of paint to eliminate any glare.  I got rid of most of the reflections.  What a disaster for the painting, though. 

It was my own fault for not giving the surface a couple more coats of acrylic gesso.  The old painters had the advantage of working on prestretched canvases primed with a lead ground by canvas preparers who did all that work for the artists in those days.  Think Sargent ever stretched and primed his own canvases?  Maybe early on, but certainly not later in life.

Sargent didn’t give a damn about glare!  He never had to photograph his own work!  What did he care about raking light creating glare on obvious brushstrokes?  All that mattered to him was getting a feeling of real life on canvas from his vantage point.  And that’s what he always did, whether you like the way he painted or not.  That’s because this shy man, who couldn’t speak in public and who didn’t like to teach painting because nobody listened to his advice anyway, was finally able to let loose with unbridled passion when he was painting.

My old friend Albert H. Wasserman and I were talking about brushstrokes the day after I saw the Sargent show.  Al is 94 years old, but still teaches two art classes a week, draws and paints a couple of days a week with members of The Art Students League and exhibits paintings at the Salmagundi Club and Allied Artists of America.

Al was a very good friend of Sidney Dickinson (1890-1980), a highly acclaimed mid-20^th Century portrait painter who worked in a style that was obviously inspired by Sargent’s brush work.  Dickinson taught at the League and Al subbed for him occasionally in the 1950s.

“Sidney’s paintings were so thick with brushstrokes that you couldn’t photograph them,” Al said. 

Arthur Brown, a guy who studied with Dickinson at the end of Sidney’s teaching career told me of the time Dickinson returned to his evening class after a few beers at Carneys, the Irish pub around the corner, and proceeded to demonstrate how to put a highlight on the forehead of Arthur’s portrait.painting.  With a big brush, Dickinson scooped up a load of white paint and slapped it on the canvas.  Nothing.  He tried it a couple more times.  Nothing.  By the time he finished, the highlight was drooping like a melting ice cream cone from the canvas.

So when Dickinson had to get his paintings photographed, Al said Sidney did what just about every other famous American painter of the time did – he took his paintings to Peter A. Juley and let him photograph them.

Al also went to Juley on occasion and tells an amazing story of how Juley managed to eliminate all glare from a painting’s surface in the black and white photographs he took.

Al said Juley took off his shoes, kept the lens of his Linhof large format camera open, and with a black velvet cloth in his hands he walked in stocking feet slowly from side to side of the painting, shadowing any glare he saw coming off the surface of the painting.   Now I don’t know how that could work, but it did.  And the world of art owes Juley and his son an enormous debt for figuring out a way to get flawless images of paintings and portraits of America’s greatest artists for almost 80 years.  He got rid of the brushstrokes for them.

The Peter A. Juley & Son Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.,  holds 127,000 photographic black-and-white negatives documenting the work of 11,000 American artists. The firm served artists, galleries, museums, schools, and private collectors from 1896 to 1975. The Juley collection also contains 3,500 portraits of artists, including formal poses as well as candid shots that depict artists working in their studios, teaching classes, and serving as jurors for exhibitions.

So take it from Sargent.  Paint with passion and don’t worry about glare from obvious brushstrokes.  You’ll thank him for it.