How Duveneck Inspired Greg Manchess

The image above is of a study done by Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), an influential painter active in the late 19th Century.

Illustrator and Painter Greg Manchess recently posted this article on the Muddy Colors blog in which he explains how the Duveneck study profoundly inflenced his own painting style.

His post is well worth your attention if you are interested in painting technique.

F.C.B.Cadell: Scottish Colourist Who Used Black

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) was one of a four-man group known as the Scottish Colourists: his wikipedia entry is here.

The Colourists (I'll use the British spelling in this post) were influenced by Post-impressionism and perhaps Fauvism. They succeeded the previous-generation Glasgow Boys (scroll down) who were influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Cadell was socially well-connected, living for a number of years in a fashionable Edinburgh neighborhood (Ainslie Place) a few blocks from the west end of Princes Street. He tended to live higher than his inheritance and painting sales could support and was essentially broke when he died from cancer and liver disease aged 54. What little tangible estate he had (probably mostly in the form of unsold paintings) was willed with a few stated exceptions to his housemanager/companion Charles Oliver. Unlike the other Colourists, Cadell enlisted for the Great War and was twice wounded.

As for his mature art, his subjects ranged from portraits to interior scenes to still lifes to plein-air works. Some pre-war paintings were done in a loose style, but his later work tended to be carefully composed with defined edges.

For one known for color, his works tended to feature significant areas painted in pure black and much of the rest were flatly painted in pure or tinted grays. These served as contrast to other colors that then stood out. In a number of interior scenes from the 1920s he included a Chinese Red chair as a prop that provided a considerable color jolt.

I have yet to see a Cadell in person, so will assume that their general appearance is colorful. Here are examples of his work. They are in rough chronological order (he seldom dated his work), and some titles might be conjectural.

Gallery

Ben More from Iona - c.1913
This was from his first visit to the island. Cadell went there many times in the 1920s and early 30s.

Afternoon - 1913
An interior scene painted when his style was relatively loose.

The Black Hat - c.1914
From the same period. He used a black hat as a prop for many of his portraits of ladies.

Portrait of a Lady in Black - c.1921
This is one of his better-known paintings. Post-war, he tightened his brushwork and incorporated flatly painted areas. A good deal of black is used here while the rest of the color is limited to pastel shades.

The Embroidered Cloak - c.1923
This painting used a similar color scheme to the one shown above.

A Lady in Black - c.1925
Still more similar colors.

The Orange Blind - c.1927
Blacks and grays set off the orange, gold and blue-green.

Matisse and Fergusson: Color Versus Drawing

At its root, the issue of color versus drawing is a matter of taste. So there is no agreed-upon point where one can draw the line (pardon the expression) where one or the other should begin to take precedence.

Those who favor color are sometimes called "colorists." I thought it might be interesting to compare two colorists whose emphasis on drawing differed somewhat, this to illustrate what I noted above.

In one corner, I offer Henri Matisse (1869-1954) who went wild with color as a Fauvist in the early 20th century. After Fauvism faded, Matisse continued to emphasize color for the rest of his career. What he de-emphasized was drawing; people and other objects were presented in a sketchy and somewhat distorted way, being subordinate to colors.

Matisse was quite able to draw accurately. So why did he persist in distorting the images he painted? I don't know. Perhaps he was simply following modernist fashion. But I'm inclined to doubt this because he tended to intellectualize his work, stewing over whether he was making "progress." My guess is that he justified his casual draftsmanship on the grounds that the drawing should also serve the needs of composition and perhaps that well-drawn images would distract viewers from focusing on his color experiments.

The opposite corner is John Duncan (JD) Fergusson (1874-1961), a member of the four-man Scottish Colourists group. Some of Fergusson's painting subjects were as casually rendered as Matisse's, but most of the time his images featured more careful draftsmanship.

Below are examples of their work. For Matisse I favor his odalisques, of which he painted many in the 1920s, because he was paying more attention to draftsmanship then than in his Fauve days or later on.

Matisse

Decorative Figure Against an Ornamental Background

Odalisque with Gray Trousers - 1927

La robe jaune - 1929-31

Woman in Purple Coat - 1937

Fergusson

Tete

Summer - 1920

Spring in Glasgow - 1941

Le voile persan - 1909

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

Dialing It Back

I posted recently about my visit to the Arts Festival at La Quinta, California and mentioned that an artist's work gave enough food for thought to inspire a future article. Well, the future is now.

The artist was Beverly Wilson who paints bright California scenes that often include strong purple shadows, as can be seen in the picture below.

As mentioned in the earlier post, I thought the art show had an above-average quality level for that kind of event. And I'll add that I think Wilson was among the better painters there. However, I also think she goes a little too heavy when it comes to those purple shadows. Yes, it's a means to distinguish her paintings from the rest of the crowd, but the effect detracts a little from what her paintings might have been had she dialed back on the purple.

Sometimes an artist with a distinctive -- even highly marketable -- style should consider dialing back in the name of improved quality.

One artist who recently tried this is Michael Carson. Below are examples of his career-building style and recent works, a few of which I noticed in a gallery in Palm Desert, California about the same time I took in the Arts Festival.

Gallery

Many of Carson's early paintings were party scenes containing people with exaggerated expressions.

Most of his paintings feature women. These are typical of his previous style: mural-style outlining, skin painted richly with occasional highlight spots as if the subjects had a slightly greasy surface.

I'm not sure of this, but these two paintings strike me as being transitional between the style seen above and his new style, below.

Recent Carsons have lost the bright, shiny skin surfaces. The brightness has faded towards gray. Highlight areas remain, but their impact is reduced thanks to the change of color key.

This painting is similar to what I saw in the Palm Desert gallery. More subtle skin color offset by stark blacks of the subject's clothing.

Carson's recent paintings are becoming a far cry from those early party scenes: he's done a lot of dialing back. To his benefit, I think.

Sorolla Museum: Pictorial Report

Allow me to confess at the outset that I'm a fan of Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923).

So the morning after arrival in Madrid last month -- before visiting the Prado, Thyssen, Sofia and other well-known art museums -- I hightailed it to the Museo Sorolla, the former home of the artist.

Getting there is fairly easy, provided one is willing to take public transit. (From the Plaza Puerto del Sol, the walk is no less than a mile and a quarter; this can be a serious project on a hot summer day.) Get on or connect with the No. 10 Metro line and exit at Gregorio Marañón station. Then walk two blocks south on the Calle Miguel Angel and turn right onto Paseo General Martínez Campos, a street with mid-rise post-1960 structures. A short distance along the north side is a wall, behind which is the Sorolla house/museum, completed in 1911.

House/Museum

Before entering, one must pass through a garden.

That's the entry. To the right once you enter is a desk where you pay for your visit and buy publications (most or all in Spanish); they will give you a free English-language museum guide.

Looking down on a hall area. The house is laden with objets d'art, as can be seen in this and following photos. These were present when Sorolla lived here.

The dining room.

The living room.

Sorolla's studio as seen from above.

The studio from floor-level.

Another general view of the studio. Note the covered bed at the right. Sorolla was driven to paint. Apparently this compulsion required that at times he wanted to sleep close to his work so as to get back in action as quickly as possible without disturbing others in the household.

Sorolla's Tools
The scene set, let's look at his work setup at the time in 1920 when he suffered a debilitating stroke.

The painting is the one Sorolla was working on at the time of his stroke. It's title is Retrato de la Señora de Pérez de Ayala. In the foreground is Sorolla's working setup.

Another view, this in high resolution: click to enlarge.

Sorolla's paintbox and palettes.

Sorolla's smaller palette.

A high-resolution view. Click to enlarge.

Unfinished Study
Sorolla worked rapidly. He left a number of small oil sketches that probably mostly served as notes from the field. Early in his career he produced works that were relatively "tight" and "finished" in the academic tradition. But his better-known later works, aside from some portraits, were large and painted freely. These and the sketches allow us to understand his methods to some degree.

What is rare are clearly unfinished paintings. Fortunately, the museum has an example of a study made as part of his Regions of Spain commission. Part of the work is "complete" (insofar as Sorolla "finished" his later works). Other parts reveal preliminary on-canvas oil sketching of a person.

Here is a detail of the study. The next views are high-resolution pictures that you can click to enlarge.

Painting-Detail Photos in High-Resolution
Snapping digital photos in museums is usually easy, but getting good high-resolution results is a tricky business. When you glance at a preview image on that tiny camera screen it may seem just fine; but loaded into your computer and viewed, the results are often blurred and stray lighting not noticeable to the naked eye in the gallery can become apparent.

Nothing can be done about odd lighting effects; that's largely beyond your control at the time you're taking the picture. Blurred or out-of-focus results can be tamed to some degree, but not entirely.

One problem is that painted images are not always crisp, making it difficult for camera automatic-focusing software to be sure what the correct focus should be. Expensive, manual-focus cameras can avoid this problem, but those of us with a sub-$800 camera budget are in a pickle in this regard.

In many cases it's not possible to get close to the target area of a painting, so the photographer must zoom in close. In telephoto mode, focusing must be precise. But as I just mentioned, this can be hard to do. Another problem in telephoto is holding the camera steady -- movement is exaggerated in telephoto mode (and some museums don't allow use of a tripod, a helpful device).

Wide-angle photography entails greater depth of field (focus zone) than telephoto, but there are problems here too. One is that too much wide-angle creates distortion. Another is that the photographer has to get close to the part of the canvas that he's interested in if he needs plenty of high-res detail -- but, as noted, often one can't get as near as one would like.

All this is a kind of excuse/apology/rationalization for the spotty quality of the high resolution photos shown below that are intended to provide insights regarding Sorolla's color selection and brushwork. These photos are not as good as I intended, but they're what I took when I was on-site. So take a look and click to enlarge if you're interested and your computer allows it.

High-Resolution Details of Various Paintings

Detail of Trata los blancas 1894.

Detail of self-portrait, 1912.

Detail of Clotilde con traje de noche, 1910.

Detail of another portrait of Clotilde.

Detail of Clotilde en la playa, 1904.

Detail of La bata rosa, 1916.

Detail of woman with mantilla.

Detail of Bajo el toldo, playa de Zarauz, 1910

Detail of Cordeleros de Jávea, 1898.

Detail of painting with three women.


Sorolla's work can be found here and there in the United States, but the largest concentration is at the Hispanic Society in New York City, a site that I, alas, have yet to visit.