Have the Courage to Paint Badly

Josh Shenk, author of "Lincoln's Melancholy" suggests to writers:

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. It's hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

I came across the quote above and it struck me that the same is true of painting. So often students will put weeks into a painting and it ends up looking no better than it did a few hours after they started it. They are lost in learning how to paint. You can't take a painting further than you know how, no matter how much time you spend on it. Every painting is practice and the fastest way forward is to do your best, move on, and make lots and lots of starts. Let each painting go. Accept that it is what it is. Progress is in the process, not in insisting on perfection ... before you are perfected!

You won't know the shape of your creativity until you've risked letting go of the result.

Color Block Exercise

I highly recommend studies of colored blocks set up in a variety of light sources - one light source per painting.  You will learn more about color by doing this exercise than painting from a photograph. Use a  9 x 12" or 11 x 14" canvas panel. Don't labor over these. It's an exercise. Observe the color spot; match the color; apply the paint. 

1.   Using a brush, draw the blocks on your canvas as close to life size as possible.

2.  Observe each side of the block or the background adjacent to it and mix a single color spot and apply it with a palette knife or as few strokes as possible. 

3.  Cover the canvas before you go back and assess your choices or make any changes.  

4. As you work compare each color spot to the one next to it by running through the three properties of color.  Is it warmer/cooler, brighter/duller, lighter/darker than the spot next to it?  Relate.  

5.  Don't jump all over the canvas.  Relate each spot to the adjacent spot.

6.  As you compare on your second/third/fourth pass at the canvas, make any adjustment you see.  Trust your eye, not your brain.  If the gray cloth looks alizarin-ish, add alizarin. 

Keep in mind two types of comparisons you are making:

1.  Compare the adjacent sides of a color block in the set-up.  Then make the same comparison in your painting.  So, in the set-up, compare the top of a block to the side of the same block.  Then, compare the top of the that block to the side of the same block in your painting.  Relate within the set-up, then relate within the painting. This is to this, as that is to that. The goal is to accurately see the relationships in the set-up and to create the same relationships in the painting.

2.  You can double check the accuracy of your color spots by rapidly flicking your eyes back and forth between a spot in the set up and the same spot in the painting.  Quickly glance back and forth between the top of a block in the set-up and the top of the same block in the painting.  What is lacking in your color spot will rise to the surface.  If your spot needs green, you will see it's lack as you glance back and forth.

So, relate this is to this as that is to that to make your color spots.  Then, relate this to that to check yourself.

What you do in this exercise is what you should be doing all of the time when painting from life, whatever the subject matter.  You cannot learn about color from photographs.  The photograph is not subtle enough to make distinctions. It generalizes color.  It does not accurately record relationships, so the information is simply not there for you to use.

Don't be ambiguous. Commit.

I have been working on some paintings that I started in the past but had not finished.  With each one, even though they were started, I have had to go back to the beginning.  I thought at first this was because I had lost my train of thought and needed to find my way back into the painting.  It is more complicated.  I had to go back to the beginning because in each painting I had not done the work that needs to be done at the start of a painting.  I had not decided what it was that I wanted to do.  It's probably why I never finished the paintings.

I had not made basic, essential decisions about the value distribution in the design. About shapes.  Really, I had not decided what the painting's story was. You can't reach a destination if you don't know where you want to go. I'm rather shocked by the ambiguousness of my block-ins, about my reluctance to make decisions and commit to a direction.  What I am having to do with each of these paintings, is to decide.  Is to commit.

What shape exactly do I want a field to be.  What is the purpose of this tree to the design.  Do I want the painting to be about the sky or the land.  What is the focal point.  A blob of a tree is randomly placed because I didn't stop, observe what was happening in the landscape and decide how the tree was useful. I didn't make a decision about what to change and what to keep.

Block-ins may be loose, but they are the bedrock of the decisions that make a painting.  Don't be ambiguous.  How can the viewer understand what I am seeing, if I am not clear about it myself, and not clear about how I want to organize that information.  Decisions about value, shape, placement and design have nothing to do with style, or whether a painting is loosely or tightly rendered. They are the artistic process itself. Confront and solve each painting from the moment you pick up a pencil or brush.  You can experiment with possible solutions, and they are infinite, but you can't paint the painting until you commit to one solution. Then, everything you do must support the direction you have chosen.

Plein Air at the Santa Rosa Plateau

Yesterday TPAA (Temecula Plein Air Artists) and SDPAP (San Diego Plein Air Painters) met at Sylvan Meadows at the Santa Rosa Plateau. The recent rain turned the grass a muted green, but it is still a week or so early for the poppies. There were about 12 artists there. It adds so much energy to paint with a group.

I painted two paintings. The first is 9 x 12". I was amazed at how much I had to tone the greens with reds and orange. It was a sunny day, but there was a lot of moisture in the air so a haze brought the values in the distance up. I blocked in the entire painting but it didn't look like the scene, so I took out my color isolator and checked for value. I had everything two steps too dark. When that was corrected it began to look like the day.

Path on March Morning, Santa Rosa Plateau

Mary Mulvihill

As I was cleaning up I turned around and loved the scene behind me. There were three receding hills with warm olive trees on them. I quickly did a 6 x 8" color spot sketch. The purpose of the sketch is to record the colors of each object  and how they relate to each other. It isn't necessary to create an exact representation of the scene. I recorded the light, halftone and shadow colors of a tree and the hill in the foreground, mid-ground, background and sky. Combined with a photo of the scene, I have all the information I need for a studio painting. The color spot sketch took about 10 minutes. Sometime when I paint plein air the color and light are changing so fast, all I do is color spots. I end up with color reference that no photograph will ever match.

Receding Hills, Santa Rosa Plateau

Mary Mulvihill

Plein Air Supplies

This is my plein air kit. I squeeze out plenty of paint in the Masterson palette and leave all tubes except white at home.

plein air easel or pochade box and tripod

chair or folding stool

     If you like to sit.

umbrella

palette

paint

brushes

     Bristle filberts #2, #4 (two), #6 (two) and #8

canvas panels

     6 x 8", 8 x 10" or 9 x 12" 

palette knife

palette scraper

odorless mineral spirits

paper towels

sketchbook & pencil

viewfinder

color isolator

plastic grocery bag for used paper towels

hat

sunscreen

water

camera

masking tape

cart to carry everything

Plein Air at Santa Rosa Plateau, March 29th

Hello all!

Those of you who know me personally, know that I have been caregiver for my mother the past few years, since she was diagnosed with dementia. She passed away last month. Thank you to everyone who has supported me through the past years and especially the past six months. She had a long, productive and healthy life and was a few weeks shy of her 95th birthday.

I am re-initializing my blog and website, so expect to be hearing a lot from me. I currently have classes on Wednesday in Fallbrook, in drawing and painting. I'm looking for a Temecula location and am also organizing a plein air class and a critique class. I have also started a group on Meetup, the Temecula Plein Air Artists. The first plein air event is this Saturday, March 29th, at the Santa Rosa Plateau. It starts at 9:00 a.m. The best way to receive news of new plein air outings is to join the Meetup group. You will receive notices of events and a map.

I hope to see you soon, painting the Inland Valley. The best way to improve your skills and see color is to paint from life!


A few photos of my class at the Santa Rosa Plateau:

Guy Rose Seascapes