Sketchbook: Master Copies

Sketches after Ingres, "Bather", 1808
and Carravagio, "Lute Player", 1596

Sketches after Rubens, "Descent", 1612
and "Apotheosis", 1691

Sketches after Reni, "Deianeira", 1621

Sketch after Robert Campin,

"Portrait of a Woman", 1420

I bought the beautiful book Sister Wendy's Story of Painting because I wanted to refresh my art history knowledge with a general overview. Sister Wendy (of PBS Special fame) has written an inspiring survey of art, with hundreds of high-quality color reproductions.

The format is similar to Eyewitness Guidebooks, in that the information is presented visually with lots of sidebars and with a storytelling style of writing, great for a general survey. She has included an illustrated time line for each major period of art history, which is great for visual learners.

Sister Wendy tells the history of painting in terms of the constant sweep towards and away from Classicism, the swinging between Northern and Southern European influences, and between Catholic and Protestant perspectives. After reading the book I feel like I could plot all of art history along these major axis.

As I read the book I put a sticky note on every painting I found especially interesting, and now I'm going back through all the bookmarked pages to do sketches. I've found when sketching from a heavy book, it's good to set it up in a cookbook stand. And try to keep the cat away from the piles of graphite shavings.

Silver Globe Pitcher: Underpainting

Globe Pitcher underpainting
oil on panel
16 x 20 inches
(work in progress)

This is the completed underpainting for my most recent Wax Paper Series painting. I started this composition with sketches and a detailed contour drawing you can see in this previous post.

Using trace paper I transferred my drawing to the gessoed panel. I refined the drawing directly on the panel in pencil.

My goal was to get a very accurate drawing that described the gesture and energy of the crumpled paper, as well as a very precise geometry for the silver globe pitcher. Badly drawn round and elliptical objects in still lifes look wobbly and unconvincing, so I took a lot of time to make sure the silver globe is the correct shape. The pitcher needs to have a believable structure to make the whole painting convincing.

Contour drawing transferred from paper to panel

Once I was satisfied with the drawing (although I'm never satisfied with the drawing) I moved on to a transparent wash underpainting. Traditionally artists use a tiny brush to outline the contour drawing to "set" the graphite. I've never felt the need to do this, I find that this first wash layer of underpainting sets the graphite and I don't ever notice the pencil marks mixing with the paint in later stages. Most traditional artists would advise against this, though.

First layer of the underpainting

With the underpainting I "knock down" even the lightest lights. I've learned it's annoying and difficult to paint white paint over a white ground, so I cover every part of my surface with at least a light layer of umber paint. But I try to get a fairly full range of values so I can get a feel for what the whole painting will look like.

Second layer of the underpainting

Below I have finished the underpainting and started a small part of the opaque layer. The underpainting is transparent, meaning I use turpentine to thin the umber paint to show the white of the panel beneath. The opaque layer uses white oil paint.

Final stage of the underpainting

As you can see in the final underpainting above, there are some patchy "dry spots" especially in the upper left dark area of the painting. This is where the paint has started to "sink" into the gesso ground, and the more matte areas look chalky. This will be solved with later layers of medium-enhanced paint, so the background will look deep and dark.

So far I am really enjoying working on my hand-gessoed panels. The surface is silky and smooth but the paint really seems to "grab" it. It feels good to paint on. Which makes me happy, because gessoing the panels was a lot of work!

Below is a closeup of the beginning of the first opaque layer of painting - you can see where the upper areas of wax paper are more white and refined, that's the opaque layer:

Detail of first layer of opaque painting over transparent underpainting

To bring the painting to a convincing finish I'll have to work at least two more layers of opaque paint over this layer, probably several more in many places. At this stage I'm just laying down a "bed", so the general values and basic colors are correct. With these decisions solved I will be able to really focus on one area at a time without having to constantly back up and compare the values and colors to the rest of the painting.

See the previous blog post about this painting here.

Waterhouse's Mermaid

JW Waterhouse's "Mermaid"
and my copy done at age 12

I was reminded of my early love of this painting when I listened to a podcast lecture about Waterhouse from the Art Renewal Center website a few days ago.

The painting came to my house on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine in the early 80's and I fell in love with it. My drawing of it was taped to my bedroom wall for all of my early adolescence.

I had no idea how the painting fit into art history until a few years ago, as Waterhouse and the Pre-Raphaelites, if mentioned at all, were only a small footnote in my art history studies in art school. It was painted in 1905, when a few other things were going on in the art world around that time.

Despite the sentimental and politically loaded subject matter that squarely dates the image, I certainly could have learned a lot about figure drawing in my youth if I had known of and continued to copy the masters of the 19th century academic painters.

An interesting tidbit from the podcast: Waterhouse married a fellow painter, a woman named Esther Kenworthy. According to Peter Trippi, the expert on Waterhouse interviewed in the podcast, Esther "gave up painting" once she married Waterhouse.

Head or Heart?

Just read this quote in an SF Chron article about a contemporary operatic composer named Jake Heggie:

Heggie had been taught in school to "write from the head." Modern composers tend toward abstract, dissonant sounds, not melodies.

"I tried," Heggie says. "It's not me. It's when I took the good things from school - skills in counterpoint and harmony - and wrote from my heart that my work started to flourish."

This really resonated with me as I have been struggling recently with pinpointing the difference between so-called "abstract" and "realist" art.

I could venture into deep water really fast here, but I'm curious what other people think.

Is so-called "Expressionism", art after 1910-ish, for lack of a term, "art from the head"? (That would explain those long complicated artist statements).

Is so-called "Realism", both pre-1900 and current movements, "art from the heart"? (That would explain why contemporary realist art is derided as sentimental so often.)

Our difficulty with terminology for these movements is indication of our problems conceptualizing them. But most people know immediately if they are looking at "modern art", and think of it as sharply distinct from "old masters art".

Is Expressionism more emotional than representational work? It's supposed to be pure feeling, right, pure expression abstracted/taken out of the eye's understanding of the world? But isn't Realism more sentimental - therefore more "emotional"? Abstractionists would say realism is a false sentiment. And realists would say abstractionists are cynical. And round and round.

Is one the work of the mind, the other the work of the eye?

A class I took about the science of visual perception in college has stayed with me these 15 years, I think about it all the time. The class taught me that what we call "seeing" involves much more than simply the light that hits our retina. The light rays our eyes perceive are processed at many levels of the brain, from simply noticing movement or flashing lights, up through recognizing the illusion of space and form on a flat surface.

Is abstract art just another level of this, art that is produced in a different area of the brain than representational art? Maybe an "abstract" level of the brain it took Freud and the horrors of the World Wars to make us aware of? Maybe a more word-oriented, idea-oriented part of the brain? I find I discuss theory with my abstract artist friends and I discuss technique and history with my realist artist friends.

I am scouring my art books these days for explanations of the moment when interpreting what hit our retina switched to expressing what hit our mind's eye.

Interpretive versus Expressive? Is that an accurate delineation? Expressing what? Is our experience of witnessing an emotional scene understood by our brains in an abstract or literal way?

Can we trigger emotions like awe and distress with abstract art? Does representational art now fail to trigger these feelings in many people, ever since our former concepts of "self" and "humanity" were destroyed by industrialization and world war?

Is art about feeling? 20,000 years of humans representing the physical and visual world have been recorded. Is art control over our experience of an uncontrollable environment?

Surely 20th/21st century life is equally traumatic and fulfilling as it was when we huddled around fires 20,000 years ago? Our lives are no longer "ugly, brutish and short", but is our despair deeper?

I've also been thinking about that blog post I linked to last week, and what has stayed with me is the author's frustration at having to defend the validity of a now-100 year old art form over and over. And I realized feeling attacked and misunderstood is also part of the abstract artist's experience. We realists have to deal with being called sentimental which gets old - and we get tired of having to defend the validity of a 1500 year old art form over and over....

Anyway, more posts with pictures coming soon. I've finished the underpainting and am waiting for it to dry another couple days. In the meantime I'm sketching from Ye Olde Master paintings. (I'm more in love with Guido Reni every day.)

Will post the results of both soon.

Gender Observations

I was looking though the latest issue of American Art Collector Magazine recently (which is a monthly catalog of all the contemporary realist art gallery shows in the US) and I started to notice I could often tell if a painting was done by a man or a woman instinctively, without reading the name.

I decided to test myself, by looking at the painting and covering the name and then guessing the gender of the painter, and was shocked to find I was correct most the time.

I have no idea what makes a woman's painting look like a woman's painting, do you? It was based more on a feeling than anything else, certainly not ability or subject matter, but just an approach. Whether still life, figure, or landscape, I could tell. Figure I'd say is the easiest to identify, landscape the most subtle, but all are discernible.

I've looked at this magazine a LOT over the last year or two, I pore over every page every month and make notes of galleries and artists to watch, and I think it's been helpful to train my eye to recognize trends and styles in the realist movement. I noticed a couple months ago I could recognize different areas of the country sometimes (different "schools of training" etc). I can also tell who has studied with or been inspired by whom (David Leffel and Malcolm Liepke have apparently huge followings because it seems every issue has a splashy, red-nosed New York-style sprite drinking a martini, or a still life with a spray of "silver dollar" willow receding into black with some scattered grapes...). I also feel I can tell if someone has studied the Florence School/Bargue/Sight Size method.

But I didn't realize till just this month that gender is so obvious. Every painting is pretty clearly executed by a male or female hand. Of course this isn't a scientific study, just a feeling, but try it and maybe you can tell, too.

It also brings me to my other gender observation. Is it possible to paint a female nude without SOME aspect of sexism? It seems to me to be nearly impossible to paint a female that does not reference thousands of years of art history and have some element of a female stereotype implicit in the image.

How does a woman paint a woman without referencing how men have always painted women?

Silver Globe Pitcher: Contour Drawing

Contour drawing for Globe Pitcher
pencil on (wrinkled) trace paper
16 x 20 inches

After completing my small 8-inch value sketch, I began a full-size contour drawing of my subject at the actual size I will paint it. And I immediately ran into a problem. The proportions of my small drawing were not exactly the same as my 16 x 20 inch panel. And also, the composition I had sketched small, once blown up would require me to paint the pitcher huge, larger than it is in real life.

So even though the composition looked nice in the sketch, the larger scale made it look overwhelming, way too big. There's a lesson in here.

It's a change for me to paint this big. The previous paintings in this "Wax Paper" series are 11 x 14 inches and 12 x 12 inches. So 16 x 20 is a HUGE leap. It may not sound much bigger, but to me it's enormous. This is the problem with blogs... there's no sense of scale.

You'll also notice the left side of the crumpled wax paper has a new shape. I decided it looked better if it angled up at the left, instead of tapering down and to a point, running off the left into infinity.... So I crumpled up the wax paper on one side (gently) and altered the composition.

contour drawing phase 1

contour drawing phase 2

contour drawing phase 3

contour drawing phase 4

contour drawing final

I've drawn the final version on trace paper so I can transfer to the gessoed panel. I usually draw directly on the panel, but since I labored so hard to gesso them so perfectly, I was afraid of dinging or marring the perfect surface with a lot of erasing. So I nearly finalized the contour drawing on paper before transferring it.

As an final note, I'd love to draw your attention to this hi-LAR-ious blog entry by an abstract painter who says, in part:

"...what’s so hard about painting a realist painting nowadays, when even a no-talent can transfer images and paint textures straight from a computer to a canvas?"

To which I nearly choked, as you can imagine. Laurie Fendrich, I sure hope you find my link to your two posts on the superiority of abstract painting to realist painting, so you take a good look at my blog here and see that realist painting takes quite a bit of study and work, even "nowadays".

Post # 1 in which Ms. Fendrich describes her irritation at having been "duped" to admire the "abstract" work of a 3 year old

Post # 2 in which Ms. Fendrich has to respond to the tempest of comments she recieved on her first dip into the abstraction-versus-realism fire pit

Oh, and especially note the parts about how the Old Masters used optical devices, implication being that anyone with a lens and a grid could have produced the masterworks of art history.

Le sigh....

----

See the previous blog post about this painting here.

Silver Globe Pitcher: Value Sketch

value sketch for Globe Pitcher

graphite pencil on paper
about 6 x 8 inches

I am working on drawings to prepare my next painting. It will be much larger than my previous paintings, so I am trying to plan out the composition and values before I start. I started by spending some time on this small value sketch. It helped my visualize a feeling for the final painting.

I find my paintings work best if I spend time at the beginning imagining the finished piece as clearly as possible. I try to imagine the feeling it will have. I love the feeling of calm, cool overhead light resting on eye-level objects. I want the painting to feel like you are really seeing them and feeling the quiet.

The sketch only approximates this, but it helps me crystallize the feeling in my own mind.

sketch phase 1

sketch phase 2

sketch phase 3

sketch phase 4

sketch phase 5

sketch final

Home-Cooked Gesso

The messy studio - a far cry from the "gallery look" of last weekend!

I've finally decided it's time to bite the bullet and become a painter who preps my own supports.

"Support" is the general term for what an oil painting is painted onto, either a wooden panel or stretched canvas. I prefer wood panels to stretched canvas because the surface is smoother and more rigid.

Previously I have mainly used factory-gessoed wood panels, like GessoBoard. Gesso is the chalky white paint that is layered on a canvas or wood panel before you start an oil painting. But I've decided that if I'm going to spend 60 hours on a painting, I may as well spend a couple hours preparing the surface.

So being an all-or-nothing type, I dove in and spent 3 solid days layering 19 panels with 2 layers of rabbit skin glue and 5-6 coats of homemade gesso, sanding between each layer. My right deltoid muscle aches to say the least.

I used traditional gesso materials from Sinopia (glue crystals, chalk, and white pigment) and combined them using their traditional gesso recipe. For the wood panels I used ArtBoards of all sizes, rectangles and squares from 6 x 6 inches up to 18 x 24 inches.

I bought a single burner hotplate for using in my studio, and improvised a double boiler by nesting two old cooking pots together - two pots that won't ever be used for food again.

First I soaked the rabbit skin glue crystals in water overnight, which made a transparent, gelatenous gray lumpy mixture. Then I put the mixture into my double boiler, and when it warmed up it got clearer, runnier, and became a thin, watery glue. It spread really easily onto my wood panels with a housepainting brush, but immediately began to sink in to the wood and dried almost instantly.

Re-reading the directions, I found out I had to do TWO coats of the glue. It wasn't too horrible, and I have a good ventilation system in my studio, but there was definitely a distinctly funky odor. I don't know exactly how they make rabbit skin glue, but I imagine vegetarian painters don't use it.

Once the panels were sealed with the glue, I mixed together the chalk, white pigment, and remaining glue mixture and warmed it to make the gesso. It made a watery, not very paint-like liquid, so I had to play around with the proportions a bit. But I found it works best if it's slightly more watery than housepaint, so you can paint thin layers.

This was how I stacked them to dry, "good side" leaning down to avoid dust, but careful not to let the front surface touch anything. I got pretty good at perfecting a sort stable mutual leaning system. Every time I added a layer of gesso to a panel, I had to lean it up to dry, and by the time the last was painted the first was ready to be sanded, so I had to rotate them around quite a bit.

The sanding was the most tedious part, and my arm began to really ache. The second and third day I tried to use my left hand as much as my right to sand, so now both my arm ache.

Anyway, the project was a success - I now have 19 beautiful panels with a silky/chalky/smooth surface, plus a dozen teeny tiny panels that were just laying around the studio, for little oil sketches. Hopefully I won't have to do this again for a long time!

Michael Grimaldi Drawing Workshop

Melissa
graphite pencil on paper
about 20 x 16 inches

This is the main drawing I did over the last two weeks in Michael Grimaldi's drawing workshop at BACAA. It was drawn over about 8, three-hour sessions. (It's interesting to compare this drawing to my first BACCA workshop drawing I did of Melissa in March 2006)

detail

We started the drawings with a 2-dimensional, stright-line block in that I have described many times on this blog, for example: here, here, and here.

After solving the basic proportions and refining the block-in, we moved into seeing the forms as three-dimensional blocks in perspective.

To construct the major masses of the head, torso and pelvis, we identified bony projections and median lines to describe the roll, pitch, and yaw position of each shape.

I've roughly diagrammed a few of these with the red lines in the picture above. The points where lines intersect are determined by bony projections and places where the flesh attaches to the underlying bony structures. We look for indications of these on the surface of the skin, and build a concept of the box construction of each form: showing the perspective to identify tilt, position and distance.

Here are some of my notes from what Michael said in class:

Gesture, Proportion, Perspective
All three are inseparable, any error in one creates a series of problems in your drawing.

All the answers are within the drawing.

We need to find the points on the body that yield the most information about perspective possible. These are the distant outside bony projections.

This pattern of points starts having a profound meaning about the subject's three-dimensionality.

Let the drawing inform what your next decision will be.

Make a three dimensional drawing without relying on value - the plotting of points and median line tells you what the perspective is doing.

Look for the constructive anatomy and the perspective as a foundation for the drawing.

Anticipate without inventing: Hone the ability to see your environment through knowledge.

Drawing is like diffusing a bomb, all the concepts are a form of deconstructing and reverse-engineering.

There are two extremes, monotony versus mayhem. Our goal is to find a balance between the two.

Composition is the "composite", the entire experience of the image, from design to texture to paper to size, everything that affects the view's experience of the image.

Cut of the light - the angle of the shadow is perpendicular to the light

The image above is a detail of the small value study I did in the upper right corner of my drawing, about 3 x 6 inches. Michael encouraged us to make small tonal studies before moving forward with making a full tonal drawing. This really helped solve a lot of the major tonal decisions - otherwise it's too easy to mix light and shadow and make inadvertent holes or protrusions.

The lower part of my drawing shows how I blocked the terminators - delineating where the light slips over the horizon of the form. These terminators seem much softer in life, but there is a distinct moment where the shadow ends/terminates and the light begins.

To find the terminators, which can be confusing when seeing light slide over a complicated form, Michael encourages us to find "the cut of the light" - the angle of the line perpendicular to the direction of the light source. I've diagrammed some of that here:


I also wrote down the artists and films Michael referred to in his lectures this week, here's the list and links to the best resource I could find about each (in no particular order):

Artists/Paintings/Art Movements
Brunelleschi - created/discovered our current understanding of perspective
Harold Speed
Munich School
Ashcan School
Antonio Lopez Garcia - Dream of Light
Vicent Disiderio
Neue Gallery, NY
Reubens - Rape of the Sabines
George Bellows - Use of the Golden Section
Gericault - Raft of the Medusa
Balthus
Chardin
Walter Murch
Damien Hirst
Wim Delvoye
Tim Hawkinson
Neo Rausch
Marlborough Gallery
Betty Parsons

Films
Michael references films constantly so I asked him to name some of his all-time favorite ones. This is his list, in no particular order and off the top of his head while we were talking:

The Conversation
Memento
The Lives of Others
Miller's Crossing
The French Connection
Blade Runner
Collateral
The Third Man
Kurosawa Eloru and Stray Dog

If you are interested in studying with Michael, who is a fabulous teacher, please visit Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier. He also has started his own school along with Kate Lehman and Dan Thompson: Janus Collaborative School of Art in New York.

NOTE: As Usual, My Caveat
Everything I post on my blog is my own highly subjective and filtered interpretation of my studies. My notes don't necessarily accurately reflect the teachings of my instructors, in fact my teachers may disagree or find some of my expression of their ideas to be inaccurate. The best way to understand their teaching is to buy their books and take their classes.

Blog Mentions

In addition to the writeup on the Haight Ashbury Beat, I was also pictured and listed on Emma Krasov's art review blog, "Art and Entertain Me".

Thanks, Jeremy and Emma!

Open Studios 2008 Recap

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and especially those who bought artwork, my open studio weekend was a huge success! I sold 28 artworks, had 126 people sign my guest book, and I estimate over 400 people toured my studio - sometimes standing in line to wait because my little space was so crowded. It was wonderful to talk to neighbors and art lovers all day and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I'm also thrilled to have already been written up on the Haight Ashbury Beat blog - scroll down the page and you'll see one of my gold-leaf-goddess collages with a nice description.

So, my blog is officially 2 years old, and it's made me very introspective about the last 24 months of my life as an artist. Two years ago I had not yet discovered the classical realism movement and the contemporary masters who would become such a huge inspiration to me. Two years ago I was mourning all the years I had been away from painting. Two years ago I was facing my biggest fears about returning to it.

Now, two years later, I am completing my 24th week of intensive, full time training under some of the most important living masters teaching today, through classes at BACCA, Gage Academy, and Studio Escalier. My studio work has begun to take shape and with the recent still life paintings this summer I've found a direction I want to persue for a series. I'm starting to feel the ticklings of recognition, and also a pull to teach.

I'm finding that with dogged pursuit, momentum grows.

Who Does She Think She Is (the movie)

Watch this movie trailer, looks like an amazing film about women artists and motherhood.

Juror's Choice Award

Tonight I walked into the Preview Gala for the San Francisco Open Studios Exhibition, and there was a big ribbon tacked next to my painting - turns out my painting received a Juror's Choice Award!

See previous posts about this painting here

My studio is open next weekend, October 11 & 12, more info at www.artspan.org, please stop by!

And Now for Something Completely Different: Collage!

Wow, I had so much fun....

I used to do a lot of collage (before I got back into painting) and I have boxes of cool vintage-y stuff I never got around to using.

After a month of having the flu, setting up my space for Open Studio, and attempting a new painting that completely flopped, I decided to have some fun and haul out my stash of goddesses, divas, and french postcards...


This is just sneak preview of some layouts I'm playing around with, had fun photographing them with my new camera lens - shallow depth of field is yummy!!

Next step is to lacquer everything down with layers of gold leaf, sepia stain, tissue papers and varnish... it's so fun to get back to my little collages! Stay tuned for scans of the final images - all of which will be framed and for sale at my Open Studio October 11/12!

In other news, I decided last-minute to sign up for Michael Grimaldi's drawing class starting in just a few days. I'm so excited because I thought I wouldn't be able to do it, but in the end the scheduling came together.

Finally, a reminder my studio will be open as part of the official San Francisco Artspan Open Studios October 11 & 12, 11am-6pm both days. I also submitted my most recent oil painting, Wax Paper and Ribbon to the open studios artists group exhibition. There are opening events for that show this weekend October 4/5 and I'll be at both events, hope to see you there!

Le Shed

I had my studio built last year in a tiny space where a decrepit tool shed used to be. I designed it to fit against our odd-shaped bay window-ed house, avoiding a medallion window we wanted to preserve. So it's like a puzzle piece wedged into a concave shape between the house and the outer fence. Anyway, it will be open for Open Studios so you can check out my quirky little Art Shed if you are local!

This is a sneak preview of my for-sale paintings framed and hung for my opening, and also a preview of the new setup for a little painting of lilies I am hoping to crank out quickly. It will be interesting painting flowers, because my last 3 paintings took 3 weeks each, and these flowers will change much faster than that! How did the Dutch masters paint all those ephemeral dewdrops and beetles?

UPDATE
Open Studios for my neighborhood is the weekend of October 11/12. My studio will be open both days 10am-6pm. There are some good brunch places in my neighborhood, so make a day of it! You can get a guide listing all the open studio locations at most coffee shops in San Francisco. The map will also be included in the Bay Guardian newspaper the week before. Email me sadiej [at] gmail.com for my studio address if you need help finding me. More info at www.artspan.org