Shaping the light

My for­mer art teacher, Den­nis Cheaney, is a real­ist painter and a stu­dent of Ted Seth Jacobs. I learned a lot from Den­nis and wish I could still study with him. He con­cep­tu­al­ized the process of oil paint­ing in sev­eral ways, one of which has really stuck with me.

Gen­er­ally, when ren­der­ing form, you mix up var­i­ous col­ors of paint and put them into the right places on the sur­face of the paint­ing. I like to use nat­ural bris­tle and syn­thetic flats for this. Some artists stop there and get a cer­tain kind of styl­ized look. But in the aca­d­e­mic real­ist tra­di­tion, there is another step, which Den­nis calls “shap­ing the light.”

For this you use a dry soft brush. Not a fan blender, which is too wide for the kind of focused work we’re talk­ing about here. Shap­ing the light involves slowly and del­i­cately adjust­ing each patch of paint to con­form to the way that light falls across it. How does the light flow across a fore­arm, for exam­ple? What is the rate of gra­da­tion? Is there a sharp change in value as the light moves from one form to another, or is it grad­ual? What is the shape of each patch of light as it flows from one pas­sage to another? How hard or soft is each edge, at each point? As you work across each sec­tion, you stroke, clean the brush with a rag, stroke, and con­tinue. If you need the color to be excep­tion­ally clean, then you might switch to a fresh brush to avoid con­t­a­m­i­na­tion while shap­ing. This process is more than just blend­ing, which you can do with­out really even look­ing at the sub­ject. It requires just as much obser­va­tion as you need when apply­ing paint.

Den­nis sug­gested tak­ing about half the time you spend in mix­ing and apply­ing paint, and about half in shap­ing the light. You can do that in two dis­crete stages in a ses­sion, or move back and forth between one mode and the other. Either way, you develop a sen­si­tiv­ity to light and a sense of how to con­vinc­ingly ren­der form. Den­nis is far bet­ter at this than I am, but I am start­ing to get a sense for how to do it correctly.