art books

Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy: Revised Edition by Francis Ames-Lewis. It’s a good summary of drawing in the period. Lots of illustrations, a good summary of period drawing materials and methods, and an extensive discussion of how the practice of drawing evolved in Italy in the period leading up to the High Renaissance.

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From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400-1500 This is a book on the influence of the Netherlandish “Ars Nova” movement on Florentine art. In the early 15th century, a new style of art, using new compositional devices, new themes, new virtuoso rendering methods, and a new use of an old medium (oil paint) began to dominate painting in the Netherlands. Within a decade or so, artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden came to be well-known and highly regarded in Italy, including the city of Florence, which was at that time a great center of Renaissance painting. Locally-produced paintings in the Netherlandish style soon became popular and, over the next decades, many painters began to excel at this new style of work. This is a big book, full of wonderful illustrations, that examines this phenomenon in great detail.

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Art in the Making: Rembrandt I don’t know enough about 17th century painting, so I blew a couple of Borders gift cards left over from Christmas on this book. It’s a detailed technical analysis of paintings by Rembrandt (and followers) in the National Gallery in London. I just got it, but it seems quite good so far. The folks at the National Gallery seem to really know their stuff; I’ve very much enjoyed two of their other books in the “Art in the Making” series. The other major book on the subject (in English) is Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, which I have not read.

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The Notebook is a web site where random bits of information about art, design, resources, art education, and lots of other stuff are collected. It includes the text of several books with lapsed copyrights (including the first real book on how to be an artistâ��Cennini’s Il Libro dell’ Arte). It is ever changing, so it’s worth poking around there every few months to see what’s new.

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Mixtures are usually lower in chroma than paint straight from the tube. So with just a few paints on your palette, there will be colors you cannot approach, because when you try to mix the right hue you lose too much chroma. One way to deal with that is to simply have a very large number of paints on your palette. That way, whenever you need to represent a high-chroma color, you are likely to have one that is close. You can then get the right color with a minimum of mixing.

My teacher, Dennis Cheaney, uses this approach. It is based on the method advocated by Ted Seth Jacobs, his teacher. Here’s what Ted says about this in “Light for the Artist,” the book I’ve quoted from in a number of posts.

Some painters prefer to work with the fewest possible colors (called a “limited palette”). The disadvantage to this method is that mixed colors are not quite as chromatically intense as their counterparts out of the tube. For example, an orange made of red and yellow loses some chromatic intensity as compared to tube orange. The limited palette reduces our available chromatic range.

Another one of Ted’s students, Tony Ryder, was profiled in a recent article in American Artist. His palette for one painting has 47 paints on it:

flake white, misty blue, zinc white, titanium white, Naples yellow green, jaune brilliant, Naples yellow light, Naples yellow, Naples yellow red, cadmium yellow lemon, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, coral red, brilliant pink, cadmium red, cadmium red scarlet, alizarin crimson, rose grey, cobalt violet, cobalt violet light, Winsor violet, ultramarine violet, cobalt blue, king’s blue, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt green light, viridian, green grey, chrome oxide green, cinnabar green, Bohemian green earth, sap green, yellow ochre light, yellow grey, raw sienna, Old Holland ochre, deep ochre, raw umber greenish, mars yellow, mars orange, burnt sienna, mars violet, burnt umber, Van Dyke brown, Payne’s gray, ivory black.

That’s a lot of different paints. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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More from “Light for the Artist” by Ted Seth Jacobs:

The Inseparability of Value and Hue. Many painters, such as the surrealists, for example, lighten values only by adding white. They treat the value scale as if it were only a lightening and darkening of the same hue. This is a serious mistake for the optical artist. It is an essentially “black-and-white” approach. The result is similar to a colored drawing, with local colors washed over the value changes, and does not take into account the fact that the light is colored. Value and color change together, organically. We cannot run up and down the value scale without constantly varying the hue.

For example, if the light source has some kind of (unnameable!) yellowish coloration and the shadow turns correspondingly complementary, as the values darken the yellowness will also drop. We need to incorporate this hue change into each value change. We must see each change as a colored value. Otherwise we are essentially painting in a monochrome. We also must avoid “tinting” value changes with the same color. For example, if the light itself is yellowish, we ought not to put the same intensity of yellow everywhere in the light.

Also take care not to give the shadow the same kind of hue as the light. The color of the shadow can be deceptive. For example, when the body is under a yellowish light, the reflected light in the shadow may be very warm. However, approaching the terminator, where there is the least influence of reflected light, the shadow may show more of its complementary nature. Some students notice only the very warm reflected lights and paint all the shadow warm. This makes for a warm-on-warm effect that does not correspond with optical reality. The effect is rather heavy, or hot, and the picture will not have the feeling of light speeding through it. The hue will be turgid if it is too similar in the and the shadow.

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Diego Velazquez was one of the great painters of all time. He was a wealthy court painter who traveled extensively and had access to the full range of pigments available in the 17th century. In my last post I noted that, by modern standards, artists before the 19th century had an extremely limited selection of available pigments. Velazquez chose to use only a subset of those. If you are interested in what is known of his painting methods, a great book to get is Velazquez: the Technique of Genius, by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido.

Here’s Velazquez’ usual palette (which he seldom deviated from throughout his career):

White: lead white mixed with calcite (calcium carbonate).

Yellow: yellow ochre, lead tin yellow, and (rarely) Naples yellow.

Red: vermilion, a red earth (red ochre, burnt sienna, etc.), and a red lake (equivalent to alizarin crimson or madder lake).

Blue: azurite, ultramarine blue, smalt (a dark blue pigment made from ground glass).

Brown: brown earth, an umber (raw or burnt).

Green: mixtures of azurite and lead tin yellow.

Purple: mixtures of red lake and azurite.

That’s it. Often he used fewer colors; in Coronation of the Virgin he used only five pigments.

He probably had a mixture of calcite and oil on his palette that he would add to mixtures that he wanted to be more transparent. More opaque passages often show evidence of some sort of protein (probably either hide glue or egg yolk) added to the paint. He sometimes added a lot of oil to the paint, which has resulted in some yellowing (but not as much as you might expect).

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More from “Light for the Artist” by Ted Seth Jacobs.

Poster Studies. As I mentioned before, this is a book about the actions of light, not how to paint. Nevertheless, I would like to advise painters to get into the habit of doing frequent key exercises. Treat them strictly as studies. Don’t be concerned with making a pretty picture. Key exercises are designed to deal with one problem of painting only. They have nothing to do with drawing. Do not use key exercises for any of these other problems. The only purpose of key exercises is to train yourself to register and suggest the major tonalities of a subject in very broad, general, highly simplified terms. I stress this point because students inevitably try to make “little pictures,” rather than key exercises. Don’t try to show off, to yourself or others, how well and deftly you can do a small, quick study of a model. If you start getting occupied with other problems, such as drawing, you will not be looking at the key, and mistakes will occur. In practice, we often don’t have a great deal of time in which to do a key exercise. Light conditions outdoors change rapidly, for example, and in art schools we may only have a few hours. Even at home, where we may be able to take as much time as we wish, it is in fact better for training our decision-making faculties to get the key study down quickly. With these time limitations, there is simply not enough time to take on other problems. But the real purpose of eliminating all these other aspects of painting is to concentrate all our attention on getting the key right. In key exercises, we want to find the flat poster-like averages for each major element in the picture. For this reason the exercise is also called a â��poster.â�� It takes mre time to cover a large canvas, so poster studies are usually kept small. They are highly simplified and in that sense abstract. We eliminate all the small shapes and variations. Wherever there is a major area of a single tonality, we find one flat color equivalent for it. It is as if we have to pick a piece of colored construction paper to suggest each major tonality. Poster studies can occupy a large chapter on their own, and this book is not the place for it. An accomplished painter should be able to do them very quickly and fairly accurately. What is important is to be able to see the subject in poster terms. A good poster study accurately suggests the key.

You can see an example of a poster study in this demo at Tony Ryder�s web site. Tony is a student of Seth�s.

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Another quote from Ted Seth Jacobs:

Geometric and Organic Shapes. There is a radical difference between shapes of things made by nature and those manufactured by man. Although nature is capable of producing some startlingly geometric forms, most living creatures, and especially we humans, are irregularly shaped. Our shapes are adapted to carry out specific functions. Unfortunately, many books about how to paint and draw present the human form as a collection of simplified geometric shapes. For example, the head may be described as an egg shape, or the eyes as spheres, along with many squarish planes and slices, cubes and cylinders. It is important to remember that none of these abstract geometric forms exists on the body. Humans are human-shaped.

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“Light for the Artist,” by Ted Seth Jacobs, is out of print. I strongly recommend that any artist who wants to work in a realist mode, rather than one that is symbolic or abstract, attempt to find a copy. There is no other book like it. I can find something worth quoting on almost every page, so I will do so from time to time.

A Word About Half-Tones. If we consider that light travels in beams, it is impossible to conceive logically of a plane that is not facing either toward or away from those rays. Although some parts of an object face more and some less directly into the light, I cannot conceive of an object that is turned neither away nor toward the source. I cannot imagine a mysterious angle or plane that lies somehow between light and shadow. Probably what is meant by “half-tones” is what I call the darker lights, that is, those surfaces still receiving some light but not turned very directly into its path. The semantic distinction is important because the concept behind the idea of a half-tint tends to produce excessively soft and indecisive work. [Emphasis his.]

And this:

Imagine, for example, that we are painting an interior scene where the light enters through a window on the left. Now, imagine that we draw one chair near that window and place another much farther away from the light. If we paint the same intensity of light on both chairs, it will be as if they both occupied the same position or were at the same distance from the window. There would be an anomaly, or contradiction, in our painted room that would produce an unconvincing suggestion of space. The drawing would suggest that our chairs were in different parts of the room, while the amount of light, or value, would suggest that they were both in the same place. Our painted room would not seem “real” because it would not be consistent with what we are accustomed to seeing. Our painted space would seem visually distorted. It is crucial for the value to be in perfect alignment with the spacial placement. Value and drawing must be in a logical relation. At every point, the light’s value represents a spatial value. Like a symphony conductor, we must orchestrate our notes, or values, harmoniously in relation to the position of the light source. Our pictorial space will then sing true.

As of this writing, Alibris has a copy that they want $127.45 for. If you can’t afford it at that price, then look other places and keep checking. It’s worth your effort.

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What Painting Is, by James Elkins, is kind of odd. The book is all about one metaphor, explored in great detail. Elkins wants us to understand that painting and alchemy are the same. I must admit that he gets off to a great start. He’s an art history academic who was once a practicing artist, and he is inspiring in his ability to describe the obsessive, seductive, overwhelming fascination of playing with colored mud. From the Introduction:

According to the Library of Congress there are over 7,400 books on the history and criticism of painting, enough for several lifetimes of reading. Another 1,500 books cover painters� techniques�most of them popular artists� manuals describing how color wheels work, or how to paint birds and flowers. In all that torrent of words I have found less than a half-dozen books that address paint itself, and try to explain why it has such a powerful attraction before it is trained to mimic some object, before the painting is framed, hung, sold, exhibited and interpreted. But I know how strong the attraction of paint can be, and how wrong people are who assume painters merely put up with paint as a way to make pictures. I was a painter before I trained to be an art historian, and I know from experience how utterly hypnotic the act of painting can be, and how completely it can overwhelm the mind with its smells and colors, and by the rhythmic motions of the brush. [footnote removed]

Reading that made me really want to find out what he had to say. Unfortunately, the book would have been better as an essay�i.e., shorter. In Chapter 1 Elkins takes his single metaphor and pushes it, hard. Then you get to chapter two, and he keeps going.

For the rest of the book.

It doesn’t take too long before the metaphor starts to get strained. We learn a lot about the different processes of classical alchemy and the bizarre ways that alchemists thought about them. For each process, Elkins comes up with a (usually) strained comparison to how painters work with their materials. If I happened to be deeply interested in the practice of alchemy (both historical and modern) as well as painting, I’m sure that I would have had lots of “eureka” moments as I read this. But even though I am fascinated by painting and sort of interested in wierd and arcane bits of history, Elkins lost me somewhere around the middle of the book as it became clear that his metaphor was all he had. It’s just not quite enough to justify a whole book.

And what’s really painful is that I’m sure Elkins felt like he was leaving a lot out. This is an interesting and quirky essay, stretched into a short-ish book, that wishes it was a really long book, with a whole lot more footnotes.

In other words, Elkins is even more of an art geek than I am. I’m impressed by that, but I can’t recommend the book unless you are one of the seven other people who share these two interests with Elkins. If you are, and you didn’t know this book existed, then you’re going to love it.

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Giotto to Durer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, by Jill Dunkerton, et al. If you get only one book about Renaissance painting, this is the one. The reproductions are excellent and numerous. The text reviews not just trends in the evolution of subject matter and symbolism, but also how paintings were commissioned, what workshops were like, and how artists were trained. Best of all, it has extensive information on what is now understood about the construction of paintings, from support, to ground, to pigments, to binding media. All of this is explained in a manner that doesn’t assume that you already know a lot about conservation science, but with enough detail to really understand the subject. It’s a great reference and a great way to understand how the Renaissance changed the course of Western art.

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a booklet on “Techniques of Medieval and Renaissance Painting” for the Compleat Anachronist, which is published quarterly by the Society for Creative Anachronism. If you’re interested, you can get a copy for $4.50 plus shipping here (scroll down to the bottom).

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has one page, more or less, showing the effects of light and shade on, say, a cylinder, a cube, and a sphere.

Light for the Artist, by Ted Set Jacobs, is a whole book on that subject alone. It talks about light on different kinds of surfaces and how to render changes in hue, value, and chroma depending on the nature of the light and the surface it falls on. Ted reviews different approaches to depicting light, rejecting symbolic methods in favor of careful observation and realistc rendering. He presents a logical terminology for describing light, avoiding confusing terms like half tone (since light travels in a straight line, each point on a surface is either illuminated by a light source or not; there can’t be any half illumination or “half tone”). He focuses not on generic geometric solids, but on the kinds of complex, packed curves found on organic forms. He shows how to render a variety of lighting situations realistically, including a single point source, multiple light sources, and diffuse light. If you are interested in realist painting, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve never seen any other source for this kind of information presented this cogently and in this much depth.

Unfortunately, the book is out of print and used copies are often expensive. If you can’t find a copy at your local library, it’s worth the investment.

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The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, by Daniel V. Thompson. This small book is great, even if you’re not an art geek like me. Thompson was one of those rare authors who was both completely immersed in his small area of specialization and also able to explain it in chatty, comfortable, engrossing detail to people who don’t know anything about it. It’s a little dated (for example, he was writing before the rediscovery of lead tin yellow as the standard artificial opaque yellow pigment from the later Middle Ages through the Baroque period), but for the most part it’s a great survey of how artists painted back in the day.

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