For our final assignment, Dick has “removed the fence posts” constraining subject matter and technique. He said, “My goal is to make you more independent. With each assignment I’ve given you more flexibility. You have the opportunity to push your boundaries.” He offered the following guidelines and checklist.
Look at what’s happening
Look at your checklist
Ask, “What would happen if?”
Be willing to keep experimenting, even taking it to disaster
It’s not a coloring book – the magic happens when you cross the lines
“It’ll take painting an acre of canvas before you get it” – George Allan
A checklist for a watercolorist:
Identify the givens, e.g., white ground, 1, 2, or 3 mixtures, etc.
Define the neighborhood, e.g., Earthy, Candy Store, Luminous, Plain, etc.
Identify the options:
Tones, tints, & shades
Halations
Vanishing boundaries
Film and veil
Reverse gradation
Surfaces
Light and shade
Bring your work in for critique next week. We won’t be painting in the final class, so you don’t need to bring your painting supplies.
Talking about recognizing and representing surfaces
Chris brought in a photo of fruit on a reflective surface, which Dick used to point out visual cues of surface qualities.
The image under discussion
Critique: simple watercolor compositions focusing on surface
Tips for painting surfaces
A number of tips came out during the critique:
Water and glass have two qualities in common, transparency and reflection. Use them to create more convincing and interesting results. Use principles of veils to explore the mist quality of water.
Reflective surface will reflect anything in the environment – use your eyes and your mind to recognize that a surface will be influenced by the things around it. That’s how nature works, and it ties things together. It’s all relationship.
If there’s a highlight, take care to leave it (for instance, in an eye or a reflection). It provides an important visual cue.
If it’s worth doing, do it again and again. Each time will bring more sureness. Dick would do as many as five or six paintings for a major commission, working through different problems each time. Working in watercolor, he could do a complete painting in a day.
Reserve white for a small accent (see above), rather than keeping it as the majority of the space, because it takes the scene out of context.
Try to create exciting colors. You’re working with shape, and color – the problem comes when you say, “Grass!” Most of your viewers will look for subject matter, but the artists in the audience will look for visual excitement in your shapes and colors.
To make grass more interesting and less flat, start with some yellow interspersed with white. This will promote vanishing boundaries when you add other colors over it.
“I’m trying to get you to see what you paint – to recognize – to RE-COG-NIZE.”
How to plot reflections
How to plot reflections
Reflections behave differently than shadows. A shadow’s position depends on where the light source is, relative to the object. Reflections always point straight toward the viewer.
Why go to the trouble of using surfaces in a painting?
Great composing, whether in music or art, requires a heart, and a mind, that wants to share. These are tools under your command for conveying emotion as well as subject matter. To Dick, it is important to show each of us what can be achieved. You don’t have to use the tools, but be conscious of the choice. You have to work hard to be great, as a musician practices. Dick shared that this was the one year anniversary of his wife, Elly’s, death, and said, “You only get one life. Live every single moment. Don’t put it off. Enjoy the process.”
Seeing neighborhoods and painting demo
Using Ls to find “neighborhoods” in a painting
We used mat board Ls to frame “neighborhoods” in the demo piece. A neighborhood has a common language and culture. Look for a focal point, like a special park or restaurant.
The evolving demo piece
Dick gave another painting demo, going into the ongoing piece and finding unresolved areas, joining some, highlighting places. Use gradations between light and dark, and warm and cool. Create areas of darker-than, lighter-than, where a shape transitions.
Class started with Dick talking us through, and demonstrating, how he builds a painting as “a conversation,” responding to what he sees, unifying disjointed areas of color, “addressing issues” of unresolved [too raw; primary or secondary] color, and choosing what to leave and what to emphasize. He explores and experiments and asks, “What if?” because even with his years of experience painting, he is sometimes surprised and delighted by the magical things that can happen as he adds a new area of color.
We looked at student solutions to last week’s gradation exercises and talked about strategies to achieve them, and in what situations we might want to apply them.
The Floor Scrapers – Gustave Caillebotte
Dick introduced the topic of “surfaces” by having us look carefully at a portion of a canvas by a Dutch Baroque painter he’d included in a handout, looking for the visual cues the artist used to tell us the nature of the surfaces in the painting. Objects act on and react to their surroundings, and accurately depicting the visual appearance of that interaction triggers tactile sensations in our brains. He mentioned another masterful depiction of surfaces, “The Floor Scrapers” by Gustave Caillebotte.
Today’s handouts are below. The homework assignment is at the bottom of the second one: “EXERCISE: Paint a simple watercolor composition which incorporates these visual phenomena.” In a few surfaces, explore the range of reflections, from dull to shiny.
