Painting One Area at a Time

My readings in the How To Paint genre usually advise that a painting should be worked up as a whole rather than completed area by area. The concept is that balance can be maintained regarding colors and values (degree of dark-light).

This seems to make sense, but not all artists follow the advice, portrait painters in particular. I suppose that they think it's best to make sure that a likeness is captured. Once that is accomplished, then the remainder of the painting can be completed. The alternative would be to risk spending too much time on an overall workup and then failing to achieve the likeness.

Here are some examples of development by area.

Gallery

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson - Napoleon

Sir Thomas Lawrence - unfinished portrait

George Romney - unfinished portrait

Nancy Guzik at an early stage of painting a portrait

Boris Vallejo - illustration in progress
Vellejo is a well-known fantasy - science fiction illustrator. I'm not sure about his present practices, but 30 years ago when the above image was created, he would paint from background to foreground. The main subjects would be painted by section in a systematic manner.

Mel Ramos - Unfinished Painting #5 - 1992
Ramos usually likes to have a little fun. In the early 90s he made a series of paintings titled "Unfinished Painting" wherein outlines and a little shading were introduced to create an mostly monochrome image that was supplemented around the subject's face by a full-color treatment.

Up Close: Saul Tepper

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Saul Tepper (1899-1987), a leading illustrator from the 1920s into the 1950s. Additional information on Tepper plus a number of his illustrations can be found here.

Featured here is a painting that clearly seems to be an illustration. But so far, the Kelly Collection people (see below) do not have the date it was painted, nor is it known if it was ever used in a publication.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

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The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

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This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

I prefer other Teppers in the Kelly Collection (see here), but this and another one that I liked even less were what got exhibited. Still, the detail image shows Tepper's style from his heyday as an illustrator. Along with the likes of Mead Schaeffer, Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn and other illustrators treated in this series, Tepper painted his oils thickly (impasto) and used strong brushwork. He was also something of a colorist: note the touches of green on the girl's skin in shaped areas.

Up Close: Frank Schoonover

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972), a student of Howard Pyle. Additional information on Schoonover can be found here, here and here.

Featured here is "Woefully Exhausted as He Was -- His Brain Was Clear: Darby's Friend" an illustration (also known as "Trapper and Mac") for the story "Mac battles for the Code" by Hubert Reginald Evans in the "American Boy" magazine's February 1929 issue.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

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The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

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This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

Schoonover was older than the other illustrators from the Kelly exhibit shown in this Up Close series. He studied under Pyle with the likes of N.C. Wyeth whose works were also on display. Like Wyeth, Schoonover was influenced by Impressionism in that he seldom covered an area of a canvass with a single color, but instead layered his colors, sometimes over contrasting hues. For example, notice his treatment of the sky in the image above.

Seeing the Girl and Her Earring

Perhaps the hottest item on the traveling art show circuit this year is Jan Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring." It's normally housed in Mauritshuis in The Hague, Netherlands, but the museum is undergoing renovation, so apparently that was considered a good reason to send some of its best paintings on the road. "Earring" is currently on display in San Francisco and then will move on to Atlanta and, finally, New York City. I saw it in San Francisco recently.

The painting is around 350 years old and suffered some wear and tear as well as a restoration that wouldn't pass muster today. It went through another restoration in 1994. I failed to study the painting at really close range (the price one pay's at a popular exhibit that attracts lot of viewers), but my impression was that its surface was in pretty good shape.

As for the most recent restoration, here is some information and here is an interview with the man who directed it.

And it seems that there is more than one way to do a restoration. Nowadays it's possible to do the deed digitally, as this site indicates.

Below are before and after images of "Girl with a Pearl Earring." I'm not sure about the source of the "before" image -- there were dozens of duplicates on Google. The "after" image was taken from the Mautishuis web page, so I assume it is a correct representation. Click on the "Before" image to enlarge; the "After" is at maximum size.

Gallery

Before

After

Restorations are necessary at times. The question is whether or not they represent a "necessary evil," given that the hand of the restorer is not the same hand that painted the original version. I suppose we have no choice but to take the validity of restorations on faith.

Stape's Practical Painting Blog

For all I know, there must be a mega-gazillion art blogs lurking out there on the Internet. I trip across some when I'm trolling for images to post here. But for better or worse, I usually don't bother following them.

Once in a while I do spot a blog I find really interesting or otherwise useful, and when I do, I add it to the Links list over in the right column. Such is the case for Stapleton Kearns' blog which has been around for about four years in its present form. Kearns is a full-time painter specializing in landscapes that are solidly crafted and worthy of your attention. Here is detailed biographical information on Kearns.

Kearns' blog deals largely with practical information and advice about painting, probably an outgrowth of his experience teaching at workshops. His post tally is now more than one thousand, the bulk appearing 2009-11. I think it's worthwhile to sift through the earlier posts because they deal most thoroughly with issues than matter most to him.

To give you a taste, here is a post from 2009 dealing with art education.

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NOW LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY, THE PURPOSE OF AN ART SCHOOL IS TO PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT FOR ITS INSTRUCTORS.

I am aware that the situation is improving and there are a few places that do produce better trained young painters. I also know there are some fine teachers out there who do lead their young charges through a fine course of instruction. Now I know that over in the graphics department students learn useful skills. But I feel these fine instructers are still very much the exception, if you take a walk through the studios of most art schools, colleges and Universities the work is appalling. Most of the art schools out there are foisting a deceit on their pupils. By making their students believe that all they need to know is already within them, if they just have the self awareness to find it, the student is taught, its all about them. That, for many young scholars today is an attractive idea, they do like being told how special and individual they are. In many art schools today the teachers will tell a student that there is no way to even teach art, and they will be contaminated by studying works by another artist with the end of improving their own. The contemporary art school changes the educational event from really wicked difficult, to one of self admiring introspection that any student can do. Now they can fill those classrooms! The art schools of America graduate more students in a year than there have been artists in the history of our nation. If the hairdressing schools of America produced as few hairdressers they would be shut down for robbing their students. It can be argued that art is subjective and shouldnt be measured for its results the same way as say, engineering, but isnt hairstyling kind of subjective as well?

Often enough in the fine arts department the students are coddled for four or more years, and then released into the real world where the are served a harsh awakening that it's not just about them out there. I have often seen young would be artists confronted with this reality go back for a masters degree, to get more of the training that didn't make artists out of them in the first place. If you really unpack this with them, you find out they intend to teach. The best of them will, and the best of their students will be teachers as well . There are plenty of teachers out there who have never made a living as artists and their teachers and their teachers' teachers didn't either. They have in fact only contempt for those of us out here who actually do it as a vocation. The sudden rise of popularity of the new ateliers across the country and in Italy is a response to a small but growing number of students who would like to make a living painting and have figured out they will need to know a lot about painting in order to do it. I believe that small but growing atelier movement probably holds the promise of a new American art.

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I notice that Kearns has cut back on posting frequency, but you might consider checking for new material from time to time once you've digested those first 400 or so posts that contain the most meat.

Up Close: Harvey Dunn

Harvey Dunn (1884-1952) was an influential illustrator and teacher perhaps best known for illustrations of action stories, scenes from the Great War and paintings of rural life on the upper plains. His Wikipedia entry is here and further biographical information along with images is here.

Dunn is known for his vigorous brushwork and focus on the emotional content of his subject matter. That's why I decided to introduce this "Up Close" occasional series with his work.

The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

Night Raid - c.1927
Cover illustration for American Legion Monthly, January 1928 issue. This mage is from the Kelly Collection web site. It is copyrighted, as are all such images from that site appearing in this series.

This image segment is of the doughboy seen at the lower left. Note the variation in color between the two images; the latter seems closer to the original as seen at the exhibition, where lighting was warm rather than the cool of the Kelly site image. These difference will be apparent in many other posts of this series.

Dunn used plenty of oil paint and relied to a large degree on discrete brush strokes rather than smoothed color transitions. I find it interesting that he chose to paint the face of the doughboy using green. Other artists might well have mixed blue into skin color to create a nighttime effect. But Frederic Remington also found green useful for nigh scenes, and perhaps Dunn picked up the concept from him.

Hard-Edge Fantasy Artists

Nineteenth century academic painting usually took the form of what can be called "hard-edge" art, where subject matter is portrayed in sharp detail. Back in those days, the term used to indicate it was "finish," meaning the state of completion. Paintings by the French Impressionists were considered lacking in finish.

Nowadays, the degree of hard-edge treatment can be a matter of an artist's personal preference or perhaps is demanded by an important class of viewers. For instance, some fans of aviation or railroad art might prefer to find rivets and sheet metal joins crisply and correctly shown and there are artists temperamentally inclined to produce such illustrations who will do the job. I'd say that it's the artist's wishes that usually prevail, because the greatest part of his work falls in an identifiable zone on the hard-edge to painterly continuum.

I tend to favor painterly art, but thought it might be worthwhile to present some examples of detail-oriented artists who specialize in science-fiction and fantasy art.

Gallery

John Carter Mars scene - by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell
Vallejo and Bell are married and sometimes work together, as for the painting above, or make illustrations on their own. Biographical information on Vallejo is here and for Bell here.

Through a Dark Red Veil - by David Palumbo
Palumbo is Julie Bell's son from a previous marriage, as mentioned here.

Demon Hunter - by Gerald Brom
As this indicates, he has been called Brom most of his life, and it does make for a nice, easily-remembered brand name.

Tarzan scene - by Joe Jusko
Biographical information on Jusko is here.

By John Jude Palencar
I don't have a title for this Palencar work.

Guardians - by Raoul Vitale
No Wikipedia entry as yet, but this is what Vitale has to say about himself on his Web site.

Celebrant of Peace - by Volkan Baga
The same applies for Baga. He mentions that for a while he was studio assistant to Donato Giancola, an established fantasy artist.

Illustration for fantasy and science fiction should be given more than casual consideration because it represents one of the few remnants of illustration art as it was practiced before 1970. Incidently, much SFF illustration is make using digital media these days, but the artists mentioned above prefer traditional painting.

Walt Kelly's Pogo Brushwork

The Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly (1913-1973), whose life was cut short at age 60 by diabetes, was beloved by many.

I read it some when I was young, but had trouble following it. Plus, I suppose I wasn't intelligent enough or sophisticated enough to appreciate the politics Kelly injected into the strip. Even today, I think Pogo would have been better had it stuck to the foibles of life and personalities because injecting politics upsets or angers a good deal of one's potential audience.

That aside, Kelly's cartooning style was marvelously inventive. I show some examples below that I grabbed off the Web so that readers unfamiliar with Pogo can see what I mean. For instance, note Kelly's use of a variety of typescripts in the second image. Also observe the outlines of the panel boxes; hand-drawn and bold. Most of all, consider Kelly's combination of strong brushwork and body action for his subjects -- this probably thanks to his days working for Walt Disney.

Gallery

Self-portrait

Kelly's use of type

Albert and bird

Original art with non-reproducing blueline workup

Viewing Nicolai Fechin

For those of you who can get to Seattle by 19 May, consider visiting the Frye Museum which has an exhibit of paintings and drawings by Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955).

Fechin's Wikipedia entry is here and I wrote about his Taos, New Mexico house and studio here. But if you have time to go to only one link, go here to Matthew Innis' blog for biographical information plus details concerning Fechin's palette and technique (the latter Innis regards with horror).

Fechin's basic style changed little from the time he completed his training, though individual works fell within a range of "painterlyness" (I made that word up, I think) from kinda finished to pretty sloppy, the more finished examples being commissioned portraits. While I can't say that I love Fechin's paintings, I find them interesting and instructive.

The archetypical Fechin painting featuring a human subject follows a formula. Skin, especially the female face, is depicted smoothly; Innis states that Fechin would wet his fingers with his tongue and finger-paint the smoothness. Subjects' hands were more likely to be done in a sketchy manner, while nude bodies fell somewhere between. Backgrounds are typically highly sketchy and painterly to the point that they often seem like the New York school of Abstract Expressionist art from the 1950s. Sometimes recognizable objects appear, other times not. Being somewhat lazy myself, I wonder if Fechin adopted this kind of background treatment to avoid having to get bogged down painting details.

The exhibit at the Frye was an excellent opportunity to examine a large number of Fechin paintings and draw some conclusions of my own. Below are a few examples of Fechin's work to set the scene; the lower two were on display.

Gallery

Konstantin Mihailovich Lepilov, artist - 1909

Portrait of My Father - 1912

Eya in Peasant Blouse - 1933

The upper two paintings are of men, so the faces are not smooth, in contrast to the lower portrait of Fechin's daughter. In many of his works, Fechin's application of paint ranges from thin to thick. In the portrait of his father, you can see thinly painted sketch lines and washes supplemented by built-up areas for the background and flesh. The Lepilov portrait is also fairly early and follows the same pattern, Eya's portrait was made more than 20 years after his father's, and is more typical,

Images of Fechin's paintings fail to convey the actual appearance more than in most cases because his work usually contains passages of heavy impasto than can be hard to discern. In the case of Eya, if you click on the image to enlarge, you might be able to notice extremes of thick and thin paint in the lower right quadrant of the painting. In some cases, Fechin painted thickly with a brush, and at other times, use of a palette knife is evident. Innis says that he would apply with a brush first and then swipe with the knife at an angle to the brushstroke.

Innis also asserts that Fechin's techiques resulted in his paintings being in bad shape even before they were finished. Whereas I do not doubt that, nearly all the works I saw at the Frye seemed to be in good condition. Given Fechin's use of both washes and impasto on completed paintings, such works would probably be a nightmare to restore, so I contend that many have aged well.

Henry Raeburn, Rule-Breaker

Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) is a painter whose work I've liked for just about forever. I first encountered him years ago at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art while on weekend passes from Fort Slocum, then home to the Army Information School, where I learned the dark arts of journalism and public relations. Raeburn's Wikipedia entry is here.

Raeburn's mature style was based on strong, smooth brushwork that created portraits which conveyed painterly solidity slightly softened by some blending and use of selective small value distinctions. At its most characteristic, the sitter's face appears borderline out-of-focus. This Raeburn "touch"makes many of his works instantly identifiable.

As noted, the Met has some Raeburns in its collection and others can be found here and there in the United States. But a good place to find them is in his native Edinburgh in Scotland, specifically in the Scottish National Gallery main building and in the nearby Scottish National Portrait Gallery. I vised both museums recently and was able to see a number of fine Raeburns.

After a while I began to notice something.

Several portraits featured the almost-out-of-focus look on faces, yet other objects such as collars and other bits of clothing were sharply rendered. This is counter to conventional wisdom for portraiture where eyes and other key facial features are emphasized while less important details such as clothing are to be rendered less distinctly so that the face is the focus of attention.

Raeburn painted many portraits where the normal procedure was followed or else where face and clothing received equal emphasis. But a number of paintings of men (usually) done in the last 15 or so years of his career followed the pattern I had finally noticed.

Why did he do this? I do not know. Perhaps he stumbled onto the technique, saw that it could yield appealing results, and then continued to use it.

How did he get away from this deviation from convention? Probably because the face is the natural focus of attention almost no matter what.

Below are some examples.
Gallery

James Waldrop of Otbrane Hill - c.1820
Note the white collar that stands out more by its contrast to its background than by crisp edges alone.

John Playfair - c.1811
The same holds here. Those early 19th century Scots certainly liked dressing in black.

James Watt - 1815
Not a good reproduction here. The skin colors in the actual painting appear normal (not so yellowish). But the face does have a slightly blurred appearance whereas the area around the collar is more tightly painted. Americans can see this portrait at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California (near Pasadena).

Major General Charles Reynolds - c.1818
Here the balance is closer, though most of the crisp detailing is on the uniform; only the eyes are sharp facial features.

Sir Walter Scott - 1820
Again, the eyes are crisply painted. Yet the sharpest detailing is otherwise reserved for the chain on Scott's chest and the white collar.

Emily Carr's Centered Compositions

Emily Carr (1871-1945) is one of Canada's most famous artists. And if you visit Victoria, British Columbia, her home town, and wander the old part of the city near the touristy harbor, it's hard to escape references to her. Wikipedia can still be hit-and-miss when it comes to being comprehensive, but its entry on Carr contains a good deal of useful detail about her and her career as a painter and writer.

The largest trove of Carr's painting seems to be in Vancouver, a city I find unappealing apart from its spectacular setting. So the Carr paintings I tend to encounter are in Victoria, whose art museum devotes a room to her work.

Carr received artistic training, plus she was friends with leading artists such as Lawren Harris (who I wrote about here) and Mark Tobey. Which is why it puzzles me that she often resorted to placing subjects of paintings at or near the center of the horizontal axis of her paintings. I suppose this can be explained through an analogy to a portrait painter placing his subject in a similar way. Still, the result is a little too static for my comfort.

Let's take a look at some examples.

Gallery

Painting of a tree; don't have title or date for this

"Red Cedar" - 1933

"Heart of the Forest"

"Crying Totem" - 1938

"Indian Church" - 1929

Square-Brush Painters

Impasto is one of those fancy art terms, and it means slapping on the paint really thick. There are several ways this can be done; using a palette knife will do the job, but I think the results are usually pretty ugly -- messy-looking. Almost any kind of large brush will do the job too, but one with a squared-off end easily signals impasto!, impasto!!. And thanks to this brush effect, you don't have to lay on paint so thickly to get an impasto appearance.

Some artists have built reputations around their use of square brushes (though they seldom make an entire painting using such a tool). Over-use of square brushes can yield results just as off-putting as palette knife painting, so moderation is usually a smart strategy.

Let's look at some works by artists who made use of square brushes. Click on images to enlarge.

Michael Flohr - Martinis and Jazz
Flohr is currently active, and giclées of his paintings can be found in many art galleries around the USA. He uses square brushes much of the time, yielding a signature look that probably assisted his career. I find some of his work interesting, but his technique mostly seems to get in the way of what he's trying to depict. Perhaps he's already evolving from so much reliance on square brushes; I hope so, anyway. As for the painting above, I think that there are too many brush strokes of similar width and length; more variety in strokes (not to mention use of brushes with other-shaped tips) would have improved it.

Wilhelm Trübner - Salome, 1898
If it weren't for John the Baptist's head on that plate, this would be simply an interesting nude-in-the-woods painting. I like the use of warm and cool colors applied in large patches by square brushes; a little extreme, maybe, but it gives the work its unique character.

Leo Putz - Am Ufer (detail), 1909
During the early years of the 20th century Putz made a number of paintings featuring areas painted using square brushes. The result is a faceted look which, while mannered, intrigues me as an artist (of sorts).

Mead Schaeffer - Rialto Bridge scene - 1932 magazine illustration
Up to the early 1940s Mead Schaeffer created illustrations using a strong, "painterly" style where brush strokes were often obvious even when seen on printed pages. The illustration above is one of his best, and used square brushwork in certain places such as the lady's gown, but not all over.

Saul Tepper magazine illustration, circa 1930
Tepper worked in a painterly style around the same time Schaeffer did and also created many fine illustrations. Square brushwork in this example can be seen on parts of the building's wall as well as on some of the rubble.

Greg Manchess - apparently a detail of a larger work
Manchess is currently active as an illustrator of science fiction and fantasy book covers and he also paints murals and does other commercial illustration. He has a strong, painterly style and isn't afraid to use a square brush in places, as the example above indicates.

Useful Paintings

The title of this post, "Useful Paintings," is the name I gave to a directory on my main computer. That directory contains out-takes of images I've been accumulating from various Internet sources.

(The Internet becomes increasingly useful as it expands and servers gain enough storage room to hold images greater than a megabyte in size. When I started blogging at 2Blowhards, we tried to keep image size down to 50K, which forced me not to use certain images that I truly wanted to include.)

I currently have directories devoted to "Painters," "Illustrators" and "Modernist Painters" with sub-directors by artist's name. Each main directory contains a "miscellaneous" slot holding too few images by any artist to justify a devoted directory. As images accumulate, from time to time an artist will be promoted to his own sub-directory. I've been finding that I have less need for buying art books chosen mostly for their images (rather than for textual information; the Internet allows me to have a very good art reference collection at virtually no cost in space and coin).

That "Useful" directory contains images that provide me information regarding use of color, brush technique, and other artistic factors. Some are included simply because I like them and there's less need to dig around to locate them elsewhere.

You might notice that all the images shown below depict beautiful women; that's because I like paintings of beautiful women and that directory is almost entirely filled with images of paintings of them.

I'm thinking that, from time to time, I'll do similar posts showing other images from that directory. Hope you don't mind beautiful women.

Gallery

Étude du femme - John White Alexander - c.1890

Erubescent - Casey Baugh

Asidua del Moulin de la Galettte - Ramon Casas - 1891

My Daughter Dieudonnée - William Merritt Chase - c.1902

Deguisement - Virgilio Costantini