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 love the M. Graham watercolors, so I am going to start there, but, I wonder: Can I use linseed oil with them as a brush cleaner without degrading the quality of the walnut oil? (Linseed is SO much more cost effective.)

Thanks, Alex. I’m not aware of any technical reason not to mix linseed with M. Graham oil paints (which are ground in walnut oil). M. Graham would much prefer that you buy oil from them, but inexpensive linseed will work just as well and is exactly as natural and nontoxic (don’t buy boiled oil or other hardware store linseed oil).

In fact, two of my favorite paint makers—Robert Doak & Associates and Blue Ridge Artist Materials—grind their paints in a linseed/walnut blend. You might want to check them out. M. Graham is of mid-range quality while theirs is high-end, but not all that much more expensive. All three brands are extremely smooth and brushable. You could mix paint from all of these brands together without any problems.

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.

I messed up the right sleeve. As was painfully obvious the next day, but somehow didn’t hit me at the time, the shadow color in the right sleeve is too green and too low in chroma. (This may not be clear in the photo you are looking at, as these are fairly subtle color distinctions.) Shadows elsewhere are in the orange and yellow range, assisted by the earth red tone I had applied on top of the glue-chalk gesso primer. My plan is to let let that section dry completely while I work on the rest, glaze the shadows with transparent yellow oxide and transparent red oxide, and work into that base in order to correct the color.

Other than that, I like it so far, which is rare for me at this point in a painting. It still needs a bunch of fabric detail and the hangar needs to be painted in, but it’s basically progressing well.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Why was that necessary? These paintings were not pornographic or even explicit. They were of a man and a woman posing in the nude.

I’m not criticizing my wife, of course. She responded appropriately, especially since their mother hadn’t been warned about the possibility of them seeing paintings of naked people. I think it kind of disturbs me that this was necessary, however. We didn’t discuss the issue with our friend—we just assumed that she would never allow her children to see that kind of art.

This especially interesting when we compare modern attitudes to those of the Victorians. We think of Victorians as absurdly prudish, even to the point of considering it proper to do things like put books by male and female authors on different shelves and cover up the “limbs” of roast poultry with paper covers. We can laugh at that, yet I’ve read that Victorian children were routinely exposed to nude art. It was considered educational and uplifting. Obviously, not all people in the Victorian era had the same values, and I’m sure some found the idea of children looking at nudes to be inappropriate. Yet I’ve seen images of museums from the period, with throngs of both adults and school-age children looking at nude paintings and sculpture.

Are we more prudish about art than the Victorians, for all that advertising and other media are filled with sex? Is it inappropriate for children to see nude art?

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this topic, but I do know that if there were a nude in my living room, some uncomfortable situations would occur from time to time.

Comments?

“Shibumi, sir?” Nicholai knew the word, but only as it applied to gardens or architecture, where it connoted an understated beauty. “How are you using the term, sir?”

“Oh, vaguely. And incorrectly, I suspect. A blundering attempt to describe an ineffable quality. As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is … how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that.”

Nicholai’s imagination was galvanized by the concept of shibumi. No other ideal had ever touched him so. “How does one achieve this shibumi, sir?”

“One does not achieve it, one … discovers it. And only a few men of infinite refinement ever do that. Men like my friend Otake-san.”

“Meaning that one must learn a great deal to arrive at shibumi?”

“Meaning, rather, that one must pass through knowledge and arrive at simplicity.”

—From the novel Shibumi, by Trevanian (1979).

The concept, of course, has great applicablilty to visual art.

I did this a couple of years ago. It’s a copy of a small panel painting by Raphael (6.7 × 6.7 inches) at the original size. Wikipedia says this about it (the original, of course):

The Vision of a Knight or The Dream of Scipio or Allegory is a small egg tempera painting on poplar by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, finished in 1504. It is in the National Gallery in London. It probably formed a pair with the Three Graces panel, also 17 cm square, now in the Chateau de Chantilly museum.

The theme is controversial. Some authorities intend the sleeping knight to represent the Roman general Scipio Africanus (236-184 BC) who was dreaming to choose between Virtue (behind whom is a steep and rocky path) and Pleasure (in looser robes). However, the two feminine figures are not presented as contestants. They may represent the ideal attributes of the knight: the book, sword and flower which they hold suggest the ideals of scholar, soldier and lover which a knight should combine.

I did it in egg tempera with oil glazes. More recent analysis by the National Gallery indicates that the original was actually an oil painting. Although it is by no means a perfect copy, I am mostly satisfied, as I think I managed to capture some portion of the sweetness of Raphael’s early work.

I clean bristles by wiping on a cloth, then washing in a linseed-based brush soap (the excellent “Ugly Dog” soap from Studio Products). It’s important to keep washing, very thoroughly, until all the paint is completely gone.

With synthetic sables, I use Ivory Soap (a white hand soap without much in the way of perfumes or other additives). Once clean, sable rounds can be “pointed” back to shape by smacking them lightly against a hard surface.

Nothing sophisticated, but it seems to work for me.

Month after month, this is the single most popular post on this site. It seems that lots of people are using search engines to answer this question.