As happens, life got in the way and I’ve let my blog slip for a bit as I dealt with some annoying and painful events that I’m now on the other side of. In my commitment to document every one of my paintings, though, I’m going to drift back in time to when I thought I was pretty hot stuff for creating my first work in color (extremely dark and under-saturated color, but color nonetheless). Now it’s — let’s say — a few days later.
Let me preface this next image by letting you know that I’m a little embarrassed by it. It’s no Dopey and the Oven Mitt. But hopefully someday when I’m famous(!), some insecure beginner like myself will see it and say, “What?! Jennifer Caritas started like this?!”
Yeesh. I think I hate it even more in digital form.
Okay, first off — what the heck is going on with that little bowl on the left? It appears to be doing some Dali-esque melting. And all of my little stones seem caught in their own little tornados. Maybe this is actually a masterwork of surrealism!
I’d probably forgive myself the odd perspectives and brushwork missteps, though, if I were happy with the style. What I’ve done here, though, is an unsuccessful mashup of realistic and expressive, which reads as unrealistic, and very messy. Hyper-realistic painting is not a style I care for anyway, but I’m realizing that once I start adding all the small-brush details (like the grain on the vase and the table), I’ve upped the ante for how perfect all the other aspects of the painting need to be. No little halos or tornados allowed! Now I have to figure out how I can suggest grain (and other details) without resorting to all the little ticky-tacky lines I’ve used here.
So much to learn!
What I did well: I like the two stones on the right. The composition was somewhat thought-out.
What I could’ve done better: Too much to list! Odd distortion on bowl, too many little lines to suggest grain, light from several sources…
Most of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with my husband came down to the fact that I’m a take-charge, active person, and he’s a passive cow. (He might’ve framed these fights differently. It’s MY blog.) So after so sensitively drawing Dopey and the Oven Mitt, I was anxious to lay in some paint. I had a space above the fireplace ready for it, and I don’t like to wait. (And that’s a GOOD thing.)
Alas, class wasn’t for another week, and my drawing was still locked up in The Art Academy’s thermohygrometer-monitored (I assume) vaults. But now that I had da skillz, I could start over — I could keep moving ahead!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find this particular work in any of my old art history books. Instead, I searched online for something with the same clean lines, and found this:
I knew I might have trouble with the little “iStock by Getty Images,” but the rest looked pretty easy. After all, I already knew how to tone my canvas, hold my paintbrush, prepare my palette, and draw with a grid. Also, I had been through childhood. I figured I got this.
So after preparing my palette and grid and drawing my lines (and holding my paintbrush!), I picked out some greys to use. (I probably would’ve gone straight for color — I don’t like to wait — but we hadn’t bought any). And I painted.
Pretty good, right?
I mean, I knew I had some trouble with the little protuberances at the bottom — that I can blame on a bad lighting situation — but my curves looked pretty good, and I even did that cool gradient thing in the sky. We hadn’t even been taught that — extra credit!!
Then I brought it to class to show Jim.
I didn’t want to be one of those little suck-ups who does extra homework and then shows it off to the teacher — I know everyone hates that kid (I was that kid). So I framed it in terms of a question I really did want to know: When would I add the protuberances? Would I actually draw in those little details, or lay them in over the top of the other paint? But really, I wanted him to praise my natural talent. (I’m still a little suck-up at heart.)
He didn’t.
Jim is a very positive person, and I could see on his face that he was struggling mightily to say something kind. “It’s really great that you’re so…enthusiastic,” he managed. “But we’ll be talking more about the right way to put down paint in tonight’s demo.” The right way. Ouch.
The fact that there was a right way, though — even for such a simple painting — was obviously news to me. In my next post, I’ll show you what it was.
Used to be, whenever I’d think of an artist, busy in her studio, I’d pictured her as follows. She’d have brushes, probably several. She’d stand at an easel. She’d be wearing a beret (just kidding). And she’d have one of those white plastic palettes with all the little wells to keep her paints nice and clean.
Wait — no?
As I learned in my second class – no. Though it varies by brand, most oil paint starts out “short,” a nasty word (He was short with me because I came up short in painting) when what we want is for it to be “joyful.” For this, we need medium.
Painting Medium
2 parts Walnut Alkyd Medium 2 parts Gamsol (Gamsol is an Odorless Mineral Solvent — basically turpentine without the stink and braincell killers)
Mix!
It should look like this:
No, I’m not taking a drug test — that’s my painting medium!
All oil paint has oil in it (it’s true!) — typically linseed oil, from the seed of the Lin (actually, I have no idea what kind of oil linseed is). Gamblin paints, though, don’t have very much, making them stiff (or short) to use straight from the tube. In order to make them flow, and have the glossy, buttery, luscious consistency we’re looking for (what Jim calls “joyful”), we need to add some extra oil and solvent: our medium.
Note: You could use linseed oil instead of walnut oil in your medium — it actually dries faster than walnut oil (a lovely thing when you have to cart paintings back and forth to class) — but it will become more yellow than walnut over time. (And by time I mean — say it with me — 200 years…).
According to Jim, many artists have learned to do what I used to do — dip the brush first into medium, and then into paint (though I seem to recall instead dipping straight into — horrors! — turpentine). The problem with this method is that any yellowing you’ll see over time will be inconsistent, because some of your brushstrokes will have more oil than others. That’s a lot harder to compensate for with lighting. Instead, you’ll need to mash your medium directly into your paint, and for that, those cute little wells just ain’t going to cut it.
In class we use tempered glass as our palette, with a backing of little swatches of all of our greys to remind us what to put where. That’s awesome while I’m there, but being a little, um, short on cash I just hate wasting all of that unused paint, only to have to remix it all again the next time I sit down. Instead, I just bought this Masterson Artist Palette Seal, which will allow me to close up my box of paints until the next session. Handy dandy! You use it with palette paper, so when you’re done with a project you just scoop up the paper and trash it. Nice!
If you’re following this method, and painting without color, you’ll have five paints: Titanium White, Portland Light Grey, Portland Medium Grey, Portland Dark Grey, and Ivory (?) Black.
When you’re ready to paint, squeeze out an inch or so of each in a row from black to white, with a space in the middle of Portland Medium and Portland Dark to create a blend of the two.
Note: Normally for a project you’d use A LOT more paint then this. It’s a real bummer to run out of a mixture you’ve created and have to try to match it. I’m just cheap and didn’t want to waste it for a demo.
Dip the back of your brush into your painting medium, and drip about 4 drops onto each blob of paint (the amount of paint in my photo would probably just take a drop per pile!). Taking your palette knife, cut them in and continue to mash up each pile of paint, scraping up regularly to keep your piles small and neat (I’m not there yet with this skill.). You’ll probably find you need more medium — it should be around the consistency of shaving cream (if shaving cream feels joyful. Maybe you get more joy from… sour cream? Me, I like shaving my legs.)
You’re ready to paint!
In my next post, I’ll talk about holding the brush. Who knew this was something I could do wrong?
Student painters at The Art Academy (from their website)
The Art Academy is located in a dumpy little strip mall on Snelling next to a liquor store — hardly the location to foster rarified beauty. Inside and downstairs, where my class is being held, students sit grouped at big tables, and the deeper you go into the room, the brighter and shinier the supplies and clothes, the more nervous and excited the participants. My class was against the back wall — the kids’ table.
My new teacher, Jim, is the founder of The Art Academy. That first night, I wasn’t sure what to make of him: He has a very dry, bored way of speaking that reminds me of Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller, minus the “anyone? anyone?”‘s. He didn’t seem particularly anxious that night to learn our names, and told us almost immediately that he asks for quiet during class because his eyesight is quite poor and it requires intense concentration for him to critique our fine details. Clearly, we were not there to have fun.
The first part of class was spent filling out a questionnaire meant to evaluate our background and interest in art, while Jim went to help the more advanced students. “I feel judged,” I said to the woman next to me after scanning a few of the questions. “Oh, have you gotten to the question about the last time you took an art class?,” she asked. I had not. I had gotten to the one about the last time I read an artist biography or art magazine; the last time I visited a gallery; the last time I had a conversation about art. Twenty-eight years; twenty-eight years; twenty-eight years. For the question about my three favorite artists, I racked my brain for some of the names I remembered from college. I knew I had done my senior thesis on an artist named Lucian Freud… or was it Lucius? Thirty years ago I think I had liked Ingres… was that someone? I dimly remembered liking an artist that painted a lot of obese nudes — who was that? And then, for the last one… Leonardo da Vinci. A safe bet. I decided to make my writing very messy in that section.
Paintings by Lucian Freud (left) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was Freud!
Over the course of the evening, however, Jim — and the class itself — started to grow on me. First of all, he had a real reverence for DOING THINGS RIGHT — there was nothing half-assed about his instruction. It’s true that his speech about what materials to use to be sure our work would still be sound in 200 years drew some stifled giggles from those of us who couldn’t imagine our audience ever being wider than our own families, but when we’re starting from nothing, didn’t it make sense to start with the right habits, the right technique? And while he was quick to criticize most art professors and programs, he was incredibly positive with us, praising us for our “great questions,” and even our abilities to pat toner onto canvas. Lastly, he gave us this great piece of advice (paraphrased): “We all have busy lives. Some of you work full-time; some have kids. There’s always going to be something that makes you think you don’t have time to paint. That’s why it’s vitally important that you plan your painting time into your week. Can you get away for a couple of hours on a Monday afternoon? Can you wake up before anyone else on a Saturday? If you schedule your painting time in advance, and treat it like a job, a priority, you’re much more likely to stick to it. And the more hours you can practice, the more quickly you’ll advance.” Amen.
Perhaps most importantly though, all the while he assured us that we will learn, that anyone can, and all the while we saw as seeming proof the beautiful work of the group at the very next table. I’m ready!
From Mess to Master(y) 