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There are two basic positions for painting—sitting and standing. For oil painting, I generally find it best to stand. It’s in the nature of painting that you stand in one position for long periods.

How do you stand comfortably for hours at a time? Millions of people in Western countries suffer from back pain, in large part because of poor posture. It’s important to avoid standing while painting in a manner that contributes to your own back problems.

Here are some basic principles to keep in mind:

• Slouching for long periods will eventually wreck your back.
• Standing up “straight,” with your back muscles at tension, is uncomfortable and you will stop doing it as soon as you are no longer paying attention.
• Instead, you’ll need to develop a standing position that keeps your head over your spine, your spine over your hips, and your hips over your heels. That keeps your body in alignment so that standing does not place undue pressure on your spine, back, hips, neck, or other parts of your body.

How do you do that? Stand up. Feet facing forward, about shoulder width apart or a little wider.

Now feel your hips. Many people in Western countries habitually tilt their hips backward. This leads to a rounded back and hunched shoulders. Instead, tilt your hips forward. Your waistline should be at an angle downward, so that the buckle of your belt (if you’re wearing a belt) is a bit lower than the back of the belt.

Don’t overdo it to the point that you feel tension in your lower back. The idea is that you are stacking your spine so that it bends correctly and is balanced directly over the hips.

Standing with your hips tilted forward tends to pull your shoulders back, but if you’re used to rolling them forward, make sure they are aligned backward. If you’re a woman, that means boobs up, ladies. This makes breathing easier by expanding your lung space. You should feel your spine align itself over your forward-tilted hips. This is a position in which your spine can be at rest while you are erect.

Your head should also be aligned straight, with your neck over your hips. Moving downward, your weight should be balanced over your heels, not your toes.

This is a comfortable standing position that can be maintained for long periods. If it’s not your habitual way of standing, then you’ll need to train your body to do it. The hard part is that painting takes so much focus that it’s very difficult to also concentrate on posture. One way to do that is to start painting in this position, and make sure that every few minutes you take a few steps back from the painting and look at your progress. That’s very good practice when painting anyway so that you don’t get tied up in fussy details. While you do that, attend to your  position and when you go back to painting, make sure that you’re standing correctly. Over time, you’ll catch yourself in the correct position without having assumed it consciously. Your back will thank you for it.

For more information, read Esther Gokhale’s excellent book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Even if you don’t usually have a sore back, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book. It’s that good.

Later on, we’ll talk about how to paint in a seated position without hurting yourself.

Caveat: I have no credentials that support giving health advice. Please don’t assume that I know what I am talking about. If you have any relevant health problems, consult a professional before doing anything I suggest.

I’ve made an error. The hook is too small. It looks almost right, but not quite.

I sit for a minute, then take a rag dipped in turps and wipe it off the painting. You need to be willing to do that sometimes, just as an author needs to be able to delete a wondrous chapter that just doesn’t work with the rest of the novel. If it’s not right, it has to go, no matter how much you like it.

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.

• 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would suggest that Dorothea might want to think more about edges in her next painting. Most of the edges here are hard. There are few soft edges and no lost edges that I can find. Every object stands out clearly against its background, creating a “cookie cutter” kind of look. It would enhance viewer interest, as well as the sense of mystery, if there were more variability to edges. It is also possible to create a better sense of dimensional form in objects with careful manipulation of edges. Additionally, one can eye control, and therefore compositional control, by the use of edges, with the focal area and lines of movement in sharper focus and areas of lesser importance in looser focus.

Let’s talk about composition. Dorothea has chosen an unusual “checkerboard” structure: upper right and lower left dark squares, upper left and lower right light squares. The pattern is not exactly symmetrical, which is good because too much regularity is uninteresting. Within this basic structure is an interior pyramid shape in the form of the woman’s body, leading toward the focal point: her face. Dorothea breaks the basic rule that the focal point should contain the darkest dark and the lightest light in the painting, since the face and body are middle value with relatively low contrast compared to the wide range of value in other parts of the painting. To compensate for that, she’s used other compositional devices to draw the eye to the figure. The very bright sky points toward the figure, although the shape of the clouds counters that pull. The ray of light, the walking stick, and the gray shapes at lower right tend to pull the eye toward the figure. I get the sense, however, that these factors are somewhat accidental, as small shifts in structure could have more clearly pulled the eye inward. The high chroma areas (blue sky, bright orange foreground pots) are all away from the figure and don’t seem to serve a clear compositional purpose. My eye is largely drawn around the painting without a clear sense of deliberate structure.

I think with this structure Dorothea could have benefited more clearly from counterchange. That’s a concept originally drawn from heraldry, in which a foreground pattern is drawn in reverse colors from the background pattern. If Dorothea had used the basic square pattern and manipulated lights and darks to create clear counterchange, I think her composition would have more clarity, interest, and focus.

Beyond that, consider the color scheme. Dorothea has used some fairly high-chroma colors in parts of the painting. High chroma, especially in warm hues such as those on the clay pots, tends to communicate excitement and intensity. I’m not sure that fits the intent of the painting, which, it seems to me, is more geared toward serenity. My personal bias is toward relatively understated chroma most of the time, and I think that in this case, a more controlled use of chroma might have benefited the tone of the work.

Overall, this is a nice piece that will look good on someone’s wall. I hope that Dorothea can take my comments as constructive and finds them useful. I recommend that she be personally critical of my opinions, accepting what makes sense to her and rejecting what does not.It’s very hard to submit your work for criticism, and I appreciate that Dorothea has trusted me with the task.