art technique

Decker Walker posted a thoughtful comment on my recent tongue in cheek post on Chroma Cluelessness Syndrome.

I agree that indiscriminate reliance on high chroma leads to discordant, brassy, loud paintings. But the alternative of matching the chroma of nature is not, in my opinion, the best solution. Since paints have such a limited range of value and chroma compared to nature, painters who try to match nature’s colors exactly wind up with a dull, dim picture. This is most evident in a clear blue sky. No paints can mix a blue that is as intense and yet as light in value as that sky. Only by selectively and artfully exaggerating the chroma relationships and value differences observed in nature can a painter approach the color relationships we see in nature. I’m not speaking here of the expressive exaggeration of color for emotional effect, but simply of painting a realistic picture of the scene before you.

I don’t think there’s much disagreement between us. My objection is to artists who use high chroma thoughtlessly, because they think that a painting that consists entirely of intense colors is “prettier” or more “exciting” than one that is more modulated, or because all of the paints they own are high in chroma and they never learned how to mix them to get a desired chroma.

If I might be indulged in quoting myself, here’s what I wrote in an article on color mixing:

Let me give you an example. I was browsing through art books in a bookstore the other day and found one about the painting techniques of the impressionists. It’s a very well written book, based on lots of research on the individual methods of many 19th century artists. There are a number of demonstrations in which the author copies a section of an impressionist painting, using the methods of the original artist. In every single case, throughout the entire book, the author gets the chroma badly wrong and pretty much everything else right. In particular, almost every color is one or two chroma steps higher than the corresponding color in the original. Impressionists were not known for making dull pictures, but the author felt the need to “improve” the originals by bumping the chroma, even though she was clearly making a serious attempt to use the same or similar pigments and techniques. What’s more, I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I think she believed she was doing precise copies, but failed to see chroma differences right in front of her face. That’s just a guess on my part; some of the pigments used in the typical impressionist palette were fugitive, so she might have been deliberately compensating for their tendency to fade. But if that’s the case, I couldn’t find where she told us that, and she was certainly increasing the chroma even in areas corresponding to those painted with lightfast pigments. So either the reproductions in the book are badly messed up (and no one caught it) or this artist has a remarkable insensitivity to chroma.

I see similar errors on internet forums in which amateur artists post copies of old master works. The chroma is usually too high—often much, much too high. That might have something to do with how the work has been photographed, digitized, and presented on computer monitors, but in case after case, the posted copy appears consistently more chromatic than the original, even when the artist has shown them side by side. The artists usually seem unaware of this difference, and sometimes have trouble seeing it even when it is pointed out to them.

Decker’s example of pushing the chroma in the sky because you just can’t capture the chroma and value in paint at the same time is an excellent one. It makes me think of Maxfield Parrish, who painted skies with high chroma, but never cluelessly.

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Severe Chroma Cluelessness Syndrome affects about 32% of artists. It is characterized by making paintings with uncontrolled high chroma (intensity). Symptoms include:

• High chroma colors make up most of the patient’s paintings.
• The patient might agree that a symphony that consists only of high notes would be excruciating to listen to, but thinks that a painting that consists only of high chroma colors is “colorful” and “exciting.”
• The patient doesn’t actually know how to adjust the chroma of mixes. In severe cases, the patient may apply only straight tube colors to your paintings, without ever mixing.
• The patient never uses earth colors.

Please give generously to the International CCS Institute. CCSI doctors are working tirelessly, day and night, to develop new and innovative treatments for this debilitating disorder.

Related article

Color and Color Mixing

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It didn’t start with the impressionists. Painting with expressive strokes in which the artist creates the impression of a lot more than what’s directly presented goes back to at least the 16th century. Velazquez, for example, did it brilliantly. It has been one of the core skills of most of the great visual artists, in all cultures, since the time that the first cave paintings were made. We all recognize, and admire, the bravura stroke that somehow makes us see what the artist is not really showing us.

But the reality of those perfect strokes creates a horrible temptation for those who can’t reliably create them. I call it “the shmear.” When we don’t know how to paint something right, we smear some paint around and call it a day. While the viewer may be able to tell what this schmear or that schmear is intended to represent, it creates no resonance in the eye or the heart. It’s just a messy blob that tells you that the artist wasn’t really trying, at least not right there.

You can see it even in good paintings sometimes. Monet, in my humble opinion, relied on the schmear often when he tried to paint people. I remember sitting in a waiting room one time, looking at a van Gogh reproduction, thinking about which parts created a dead on sense of altered reality without any need to actually render what that part actually looked like. A few other parts, not so much. They were just schmears, places where Vincent had not the skill, the time, or the sanity to look, see, and do his magic.

I’m not talking about messy panting. There are artists who paint in nothing but loose smears that somehow pull together into a whole that just works brilliantly. I’m taking about the paintings, or parts of paintings, where the artist, so far as I can tell, got sloppy and just made a vague mess. Some artists, alas, seem to do nothing but schmear painting. Some of them get hung on gallery walls and appear to sell for a lot of money. Perhaps it’s my own failure to see the quality of their work, but to me they are doing nothing but messing around with paint. There work doesn’t convey anything. They seem to sell because people have become used to thinking of impressionistic painting as a good thing, and they can’t really tell the difference. Or they can, but think that others can see what they can’t. Plenty of amateur artists have learned that they can play around with paint all day, making one awful schmear after another, and someone will tell them it’s good, or at least OK.

I can’t define the difference between a loose, bravura passage and a schmear. But it usually seems fairly obvious to me. I’m not trying to be superior here or claim that I have some kind of extraordinary perception. This is just what I see when I look at paintings and try to figure out whether there is a resonance or not.

_Update 22 July 2007:_I don’t want to give the impression that I myself am immune from the schmear effect. I’ve done lots of paintings in which I realize midway through that I didn’t know what I was doing and had resorted to schmear painting. I don’t show those here because they suck. Also, usually I tend toward more detailed rendering than schmear painting allows. That has its own pitfalls, of course, but in that style of painting it’s harder to cover up when you don’t know what the heck you are doing.

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Most good realist paintings are about something. They have a clearly readable hierarchy. There is one thing that is most important. There are other important things, while everything else is subordinated.

The failure to organize is a a common beginner’s error, and one that more experienced artists make as well sometimes. It’s easy to get caught up in “just painting what you see” without realizing that a painting is a statement about what you think is important. If you don’t create a hierarchy, you make the statement that nothing in your picture is important. Paintings without hierarchy don’t attract the eye and don’t have wall presence. Even big complex paintings, with many figure groups doing various things, have a clear sense of hierarchy—the more complex the composition, the more important the need for making some things more important than others.

There are a variety of methods for establishing hierarchy, including light/dark contrast, selective focus, selective detail, lines and blocks for leading the eye, and many others.

David Apatoff also discusses the issue of compositional priorities in this post on his excellent Illustration Art weblog.

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I never really though of myself as a still life painter, but that’s what I’ve been doing lately. That’s largely because I realized that I’m not very good at working from photographs. I don’t have the equipment for painting outdoors, and besides I tend to like to work in more detail than outdoor painting easily allows for. And I’m not currently attending life painting classes. I do hope to start hiring models at some point, because painting live people is a wonderful challenge. But for now, I’m painting still lifes because they fit into my current working approach, and because I’ve found that I like them.

I have now painted enough still lifes that I’m starting to think about what kind of still life painter I am (and want to be). The big advantage to this kind of paintings is that you have excellent control over composition, lighting, and so on. When some objects, like plants, change over time, in general you can work at whatever pace you like.

• I like simplicity. I have always disliked “kitchen sink” still lifes in which the artist appears to be showing off by painting a big pile of stuff.
• I like cast shadows. I love to use cast shadows as compositional devices and to define the dimensional structure of the picture space.
• I hate kitsch. I dislike still lifes full of ugly plastic toys or pretentious references. It just doesn’t work for me. Likewise, I dislike folksy objects that are in the picture only to bring forth a sense of sentimentality for a perfect past that never really existed (can you tell that I’m not a Thomas Kincaid fan?).
• So far, I’ve avoided surreal still lifes and scenes that are impossible or improbable, such as a ship battling a storm in a teacup. I don’t hate that kind of work, but so far it doesn’t seem to fit the aesthetic that works for me.
• I don’t like still lifes that are about prosperity or plentifulness, such as pictures of expensive wine bottles, sophisticated foods, and other objects that are there because they symbolize old money. I have no problem with money (old or otherwise) but painting tokens of it is uninteresting to me.
  *I like simple objects that are challenging to render, such as rumpled cloth and crumpled paper.
• I don’t feel the need to delineate a complex three-dimensional space. Most of the time, I paint objects on a wall or objects that I’m looking down on.
  So far, I’m not interested in trompe l’oel.

For me, setting up a still life is an intuitive process in which I try to make it interesting without going over line into folksy, kitschy, or just plain dumb. So far, I like the pieces I’ve done, although I’ve rejected a number of planned ideas that, upon reflection, didn’t work.

I’d love to get comments on how you think about the topic of still life.

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Here’s another painting sent to me for critique. I apologize that it’s taken me so long to get to it. It’s “When Work is Done,” oil on linen, 36 × 40”. Once again, I’d like to emphasize the problems of judging a painting on the basis of a digital image. colors, edges, and other important characteristics are often distorted. Please keep in mind when looking at this image that it’s an imperfect representation of the original.

I’ll spend most of this critique talking about areas of potential improvement. That’s not because the painting is bad or because I don’t like it (I don’t critique paintings I don’t like) but because that’s the purpose here: to come up with issues worth thinking about so that Dorothea can take them into account when planning other work.

Overall, the painting is done with skill. Objects are rendered realistically and I can’t find any obvious errors in proportion, except that several of the pots seem to lean slightly to the viewer’s left. The blue/orange complimentary color scheme is effective. I’m not sure if I entirely understand the three-dimensional space of the painting. The wall doesn’t seem entirely consistent with the steps, the floor, and the walking stick. I’d find it hard to draw out an overhead floor plan of this place. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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This web site seems like a great resource for those who would like to learn to draw with silverpoint (or any other sort of metal-point).

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I recently offered to provide a public critique of paintings and drawings that anyone might want to send to me. In response, Phil Holt has sent this one. It is “Discovery,” 12 × 16”. I assume it’s in oil as he describes himself as having painted in oil for several years. He notes, “Obviously painted from a photo. I morally prefer to paint from life but was intrigued with the facial expression on my granddaughters face.”

It takes some courage to send an image that you’ve spent many hours on and send it off to a stranger to look at and critique publically. That’s especially the case since a computer image of a painting is never perfect, particularly when it is not professionally shot. There are, for example, a few strange color/value transitions that I think are almost certainly photographic artifacts. One example is the lack of gradation in the paint around the girl’s right hand. My guess is that it isn’t there in the painting itself (I’m sure Phil will correct me if I’m wrong about that) or that the photo exaggerates what’s there. So what I’m doing here is looking at a photo of a painting and doing my best to imagine what it looks like without distortions introduced by making a photo of a painting and sending it as a JPEG file to be viewed on some one else’s computer screen. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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There are many art fora, resource sites, blogs, and other places on the internet where information for artists is posted. This is one of them. Often, they (we?) provide contradictory information, advice, and opinions. If you are looking for reliable advice for artists, whom do you believe?

First, with regard to safety information, don’t ever just take anyone’s word for it. I have several posts here that relate to safety. But I’m just some guy. Why would you do what I say, no matter how much authority I seem to pretend to have? This is your health and the health of everyone who comes in contact with your art stuff we’re talking about here. Just because I say that lead paint, used with reasonable caution, is perfectly safe, is no reason to think it’s true. It is true, but you shouldn’t believe me just because I say so. Only believe it after you’ve checked out the relevant information, separated out the truth from the fear-mongering, and decided for yourself what makes sense for you.

I’m not an expert. I don’t have a degree in art. I’m not a professional artist. I’ve done a lot of studying about art and I think I mostly know what I’m talking about. But you haven’t read my sources. You haven’t tried the things I have. You haven’t made the mistakes, or had the successes, that I have. All you have when you come to this website is the words and images here. You don’t know for sure whether I know what I’m talking about, or I’m a clueless blowhard.

The same goes for just about everyone else. Even people who have nice websites and appear to have some sort of credentials may be providing useful information, or garbage. Likewise, people who post on internet fora may or may not know what they’re talking about. I’ve found some pretty silly stuff in books as well.

So please read with intelligence and skepticism. Do that with everything here, and everything else you see on the internet. Try people’s advice and see if it works for you. Read other sources and compare. It’s more work that way, but a lot better than deciding that I (or anyone else) can be taken at face value. I know I have a clue, but you have no reason to believe me. Not until you try what I suggest and find out.

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The mountain is bigger than the house; the house is bigger than the man. When objects are sized according to how large they really are (or are expected to be) then the eye interprets them as existing in orderly three-dimensional space. This works even when a more geometric approach would make a small object that is close to the viewer take up a larger area of the picture than a large object that is far away.

Size perspective is a convention in some pre-Renaissance Western art, as well as many traditional non-Western art styles, such as Persian or Chinese. It is interesting to look at works from certain Eastern art traditions (such as Japanese woodblock prints), comparing art from before and after the adoption of “modern” geometric perspective conventions.

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I’ve said previously that the belief by some artists that the color black is somehow harmful to pictures is silly. There are many pigments that I don’t happen to use, but I don’t think that you’ll harm your paintings if you use them.

The anti-black bias seems particularly odd when you consider artists like Leonardo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, or Caravaggio. All of them used lots and lots of black. Although they had more limited palettes than we do, they certainly could have mixed darks without black. In other words, their extensive use of black was their choice. I don’t see anyone painting today who could reasonably say to Rembrandt, “if you would only skip the black, your paintings could be as good as mine.” But there are plenty of art teachers today who tell their students that they should never, ever, use black. If you have a teacher who tells you that, you should consider whether their other advice is equally nonsensical. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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A hard rough edge comes forward. A hard smooth edge also advances, but not so much. A blended edge tends to recede.

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Accurate application of shadow, especially cast shadow, defines three-dimensional space. This is one of the most powerful uses of chiaroscuro.

In the top example, even with foreshortening and overlap visual cues, the space is fairly flat. In the lower example, the addition of form shadow on the frontmost object, and cast shadow from it, space is much more clearly defined and the illusion of dimensionality is greatly strengthened. This is just a beginning—adding form shadow to the rearmost object, and a cast shadow from it, would enhance the effect.

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Objects with less contrast against their background appear to recede. Objects with more contrast against their background appear to advance.

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This is what you think of when you think of perspective. When a scene contains straight lines (roads, buildings, boxes, the interior lines of a room) the rules of geometry dictate that those lines recede from the viewer in predictable ways. A series of objects arrayed in a line (buildings on either side of a city street, for example) will recede together toward a mutual vanishing point. If they are aligned on a flat plane, and the viewer is near the ground, then the vanishing point will be on (or very close to) the horizon. If there are different groups of objects on different lines, then there can be multiple vanishing points. If the plane is not flat (a group of buildings on the bumpy streets of San Francisco, for example) then there can be many vanishing points, some on the horizon and some not.

The effective use of linear perspective provides the eye with powerful cues about the nature of three-dimensional space in the scene. The overuse of linear perspective starts to look less like art and more like a silly stunt involving someone with a ruler and not enough to do.

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