Teach me to paint

We spent last week camping in Algonquin Park. Algonquin scenery is always amazing and I came prepared to paint but for some reason I didn’t get to the hands on stuff until the day before we were to leave. Even the clay that our niece Rachel brought sat around the campsite until the last day. We collected it from the lake-bed during last year’s camping trip, She decided our creation looks like one of her other uncles on my wife’s side except that he has way too much hair.

So I rolled out of the sleeping bag at 6:30 am and wandered down to the beach. There, sitting in a lawn chair, was Tom, (no not that Tom) painting the mist. He said he was an art teacher from Mississauga and had been camping for a week. He too was leaving so guilt had driven him down early to paint something before packing up. Suddenly my own guilt kicked in. By the time I dug out my paints and came back, he was gone. If you ever read this Tom, I’m sorry that I disturbed your only paint time.

The mist was also gone but below is my morning’s effort, about 3 hours worth.

It brings me to the issue of color. I remember reading that Tom Thomson spent most of his time during the summer months at Algonquin guiding tourists and fishing because the colors were so boring. He preferred painting in the fall or spring. If you happen to get to the National Gallery in Ottawa or the Klienburg Gallery, to see any of Group of Seven paintings you will notice they used very little green, even in their summer paintings. If I follow my rule to paint what you see not what you think you see then the painting would look like the photo below so what’s a painter to do but to exaggerate, invent, compress, manipulate, get creative, or go fishing.

Rachel decided she would like to try oil painting so we setup a makeshift easel and outfitted her with paints and brushes. Her first attempt is amazing. It is in the flavor of Emily Carr’s paintings of the west coast forests. Carr didn’t have any trouble finding color in the woods. Look, not much green as well. Her paintings swim and flow with lots of creative energy.

My socks have dried out from the Groundhog Hill trip. Turns out the view from my couch (see previous blog) isn’t quite the same angle as my plein-air attempt on the hill. Consequently, my recent insight to “paint what you see not what you think you see” won’t work here (see the blog before the blog before.. ). Anyway, after a couple of other distracting adventures, I finally finished a painting using the photo I took from the top. Click-it for a better view.

I’m not sure why but I decided to do this one with acrylics. I haven’t spent much time with the plastic paints. Well that isn’t really true. See Helen’s bedroom mural.  I just haven’t tried acrylics for small paintings. They certainly are different from oils. It takes some getting used to. I used them like oils and the result, now that I see it here, looks a little calendar-artish or like the backdrop for a kids TV show. There will be a big red dog through there any minute. The original actually looks better.

I can see that using acrylics with maybe watercolor techniques like washes or glazes combined with thicker applications would produced some interesting results. Boy does it dry fast! That’s good for getting the job done quick but bad when needing to blend. Impossible for outdoor painting. The crazy paint was drying in the brush before I could apply it! The acrylic retarder seems to work. On to the next.

From our front window you can see Groundhog Hill. It is one of this area’s unique collection of Drumlins left behind when the glaciers passed by last week. Being July 1st - Canada Day, I decided to celebrate the birthday of our nation by climbing to the top of that hill with my paintbox. It is only about half a mile away so I headed out on foot, loaded down with gear. All the brushes and paint tubes rattled when I walked so I gave up on sneaking up on anything with my camera. Or, on the bright side, I would scare away bears.

The problem is that, that half mile is fraught with unspeakable dangers. One must first negotiate the dreaded Cedar Swamp creatures. Then there is the bottomless bog of eternal stench and finally you must claw your way 10 miles up to the windy barren summit with five hundred stone of noisy gear. All that in half a mile? Then, paint a masterpiece and be back in time for supper. Hmm…

I was across the first field and heading into the woods when I heard a noise. As I swung around, out of the trees leaped a white tailed deer. I scrambled for my camera and shot his tail when into the viewfinder stepped another one, then another! I cracked off two more shots in quick succession. I saw two more “Swamp Creatures” that afternoon and I didn’t realize until I stopped to look at the pictures that they were all bucks with new fuzzy antlers. I’d never seen that before.

With all the rain that we’ve had, everything was quite marshy which necessitated hauling logs out of the deep dark never-ending woods for a little bridge building over the bottomless bog.

It was then a short dash across a meadow to the base of the hill but a shadow crossed the path in front of me so I swung my camera over my head and fired. It was a brimstone belching turkey vulture. I figured I’d better keep moving so he doesn’t think I’m carrion. Vultures love to snack on carrion.

I finally arrived at the base of the hill. It looks a lot smaller from my living room couch. My noisy ascent through tall grass not only deterred the vulture but loosened all the wing-nuts on my portable easel/paint box (no comments about the wing-nuts). It meant that at the summit not only did I have to reassemble and tighten everything but also a key piece was gone that holds one of the legs in place. Hmm.. This far into the expidition is not a place to discover design flaws in the equipment.

The view from the top is amazing and worth the effort, except that I calculated an hour was all that I had before descent was necessary. I made some quick decisions and started at the task. I made a quick burnt umber sketch and pushed some paint around, munched my lunch and decided I’d finish it (the painting not my lunch) from my living room couch. The view should be good from there.

Here is my first effort. I need to revise the layout somewhat. Color mixing is always a challenge and worth a separate post, and working on a small unprimed board means you really have to simplify a complicated subject.

It was an exciting day. I got some great photos but have learned its not always wise to combine a plein air paint trip with a major expedition. One needs to focus. How did the Group of Seven do it trecking through Algonquin or Algoma?

I have to work on fine tuning my equipment as well. I forgot my tube of titanium white and had to rely on the almost dry gob on a previously used palate. Thanks to John who suggested you don’t always have to totally clean your palate. “Lots of good paint under those skins” he’d say.

That snake fence should be good for another adventure.

I suppose if I am going to paint this sign it would make sense to follow its progress here. Actually, I hate to admit it but sign painting is seriously out of date. Sign manufacturers these days use computer generated peel and stick vinyl letters cut out on huge plotters. Even the picture work is computer generated and printed inkjet style with vinyl inks. Lots of truck and bus advertising is done that way. I expect to see brush wielding sign painters demonstrating at pioneer villages with the women and their spinning wheels or steam driven wheat thrashers.

A good sign painter can draw a crowd. Grandpa hand lettered the fire trucks and did pin striping at the fire station. As a kid fifty years ago I accompanied him and the firemen would gather around and grandpa would show off. “Do anything with your pinkie up and it looks classy,” as he put his index finger up his nose. I remember a fireman asking if it bothered him to have them all watching and he replied, “Naw, If I thought you could do it better than me, you would be here and I wouldn’t.”

So check out this link because you may may not see it again. Thanks Paul for digging through the rock pile to put it up. His wife is also a quilter. We figure our wives were allowed into the guild not for their quilting prowess but for their able bodied husbands.

Hey Blog, I know I’ve neglected you but I’ve been busy, OK? I have a life you know.

This is supposed to be a record of my painting endeavors, well I’ve resurrected my mahl stick and 30 year old lettering brushes, and I’m back in the sign business for a while. In a previous post I suggested we should work large. I’m working on a 4′x 8′ crezon ply sign. (clickit)

My wife gets involved with a quilting group and I (quite happily I hasten to add) become a go-to-it-guy. I’ll be back to the oils I promise, as soon as I finish this project and the one at the local school helping with their year book and the garden and cleaning out the garage, and installing a hardwood floor and the trip to…

… so stop nagging!

Jim came up with another of Grandpa’s paintings recently. It has to be about 60 years old and was painted while he (Grampa not Jim) sat beside Burleigh Falls. You can tell this one is an early painting as his trees became more intense with color as Grampa headed into his own autumn years. I couldn’t resist last week taking a run up to video tape the falls during the spring run-off. Burleigh Falls (video) and Grandpa’s painting is a view of the area in spring and fall. Sorry about the tinny sound. If your browser won’t allow you to view movies, you may need to download the free Quicktime movie plugin.

Dave’s comment about its condition is true, I tried cleaning the painting but the last thing Grampa did was add a coat of varnish. Well maybe not the VERY last thing. The varnish is the problem. One book I read suggested spitting on it. That didn’t work. Took me forever to work up enough to cover the whole thing Dish soap and warm water had little effect and basically took off light surface dirt. I tried varsol, turps, snap hand cleaner, even Windsor & Newton Brush Cleaner and Restorer for dried acrylic and oil color. It needs something a little more aggressive like lacquer thinner and a light touch but I’m a tad reluctant.

Oil paint and varnish, in fact all mediums oxidize over their life. Old paintings have finished the oxidizing process and a hammer and chisel would be more appropriate. Apparently there is chemically specific soap to be applied with a Q-tip that is scientifically designed for the narrow margin of dissolving one layer and not the next. Hmm… Any other suggestions?

To recap, we traveled to Pennsylvania last week and visited the Brandywine River Museum in which are displayed N.C. Wyeth’s full sized paintings commissioned almost a century ago as illustrations for Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. Wyeth came from the golden age of American illustrators that eventually produced the likes of Norman Rockwell before photographs took over the medium. I was fascinated by Wyeth’s almost life sized images from my childhood. But now more so from an artistic standpoint.

What might I learn from the experience? First get yourself a huge studio with a monster north facing window overlooking a winding river and grand sweeping willows and flowering cherry and rhododendron trees and lush green fields. Oh Ya… no phone! I’ll have to work on all that. How about an unheated garage with the big door open? It does face north.

Second, in that cavernous studio, work large. The painting for that book cover at the top of this post was four feet high. Click the pics to see. You have much more latitude to put in important details in large paintings without your sausage fingers or splayed brush bristles getting in the way. You are also apt to dash off a small painting whereas a larger one requires you to spend more time at it. It becomes worth the effort. Maybe like writing a novel instead of an essay. It kind of separates the serious artists from the hobbyists. Hmmm… We’ll work up to that as well.

The third “Aha!” for me was not so much new, as a confirmation for this amateur something I kind of figured out for myself. Click the picture of NC in front of his Washington on his horse painting above and study it again. Artists will sketch, or project and trace drawings onto their canvas. And before you go rolling your eyes, rumor has it that Michelangelo used a pinhole camera on the Sistine chapel.

But here is where different folks part company. Some simply fill in the spaces coloring book style adding details later. Those would be the beginners. It looks like Wyeth does a complete monotone painting first. That way he can work out what will be darker and lighter therefore more prominent or subdued, pushing objects or people farther into the background or bringing them forward. All of that is worked out in this under painting which often could stand on its own. Some of the paintings in the gallery were in gray tone with no color. Those were for publications that didn’t use color.

In the case of these pirates on the left or of Ben Gunn below right, what can be better seen in the larger paintings is that the dark areas are almost exclusively the original burnt umber under-painting done as a kind of dark wash or dry brush. He could even have started with an all dark canvas. The details are in the thicker lighter colors of paint; lightest colors applied last. It makes the most important center of interest pop out at the viewer. The painting of Ben Gunn was especially amazing and compelling from across the room as we came into the gallery. The balance of dark and light contributed to the powerful drama in these paintings.

Finally, to justify my comment in the previous post, Paint what you see, not what you think you see. It is true that it would be pretty hard for Wyeth to keep 17th century pirate models still long enough to paint, but he did use models. He also had studio lighting which he could place strategically to splash vivid light or dramatic shadows where he wanted them. Studying his paintings, its not hard to imagine them set up even with manikins under studio lights. And yes, they came directly out of his imagination. He was sent the manuscript and asked to dream up illustrations. Who knows what the genuine 17th century pirate looked like?

What I take from all this is that other than the aeroplane hanger studio, I should, if at all possible, paint the real thing even if I have to set it up visually then paint what I see, not what is assumed to be. It is also the argument for plein air landscape painting. Subtle colors and details are best “seen” even smelled and felt rather than imagined.

Uncle Dave here is a workshop experiment painting of a plaster cast set up in the studio with a strong floodlight. The cast was white plaster and the assignment was to force the painter to “see” even exagerate slightly the colors which direct and reflected light and shadows made on the surfaces of the cast. He started as an umber monochrome painting and lighter colors were mixed and added quickly and thickly. My wife named him after an old great uncle of mine and thinks he should be hung in the garage ’studio’.

On a whim last week, we packed up and headed for Lancaster County Pennsylvania, because we could, which means I wasn’t blogging again. We left naked trees, snow in the woods and fence rows, and literally drove South into spring. We arrived to trees in blossom and full blooming flower gardens, and behind our motel, Amish farmers were cutting their first crop of hay with horses. I’ve heard that spring travels north at roughly 35 miles per hour.

Our destination was chosen because of a quilt museum located in the village of –um– I just realized I can’t type it here or it will set off spam and website blockers. This is a link to the name of the village in an ad I scanned from a flyer. It has the most stolen road signs in America (chuckle). People from all across the continent come in buses or they fly in to this area from as far away as Denmark and Germany several times a year. I know what you are thinking but stopit! They are lured by high quality, inexpensive quilting fabric. Of course, they are also drawn by American history. Down the road in Philadelphia is the Liberty Bell. Its too bad about that crack. There are lots of famous battle sites and the place where Washington crossed the Delaware. If he had used his dashboard GPS, it would have found him an alternate route over a bridge and saved him renting that boat.

Just before heading home we stopped at the Brandywine River Museum, a converted mill at Chad’s Ford which houses the paintings of three generations of the famous Wyeth family: illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew and James. N.C. (Newell Converse) Wyeth kick-started his career by illustrating Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Treasure Island in 1911. And, there they were in front of me, wall sized paintings for the book illustrations; pictures from my impressionable youth. All the icons of typical pirates and generations of halloween costumes were first seen in these paintings. The one legged pirate with a parrot on his shoulder, gruesome characters storming battlements with vicious scars and daggers in their teeth. They fired a twelve year old’s imagination and thirst for adventure.

From an artistic viewpoint, looking at them again almost 50 years later they were amazing! They were really helpful in several ways, especially showing Wyeth’s technique which isn’t so obvious in the book illustrations. Its the literal, practical application of “Paint what you see, not what you think you see.” but it is 1:00 a.m. and I’m discovering myself nose down on the keyboard with weird messages on the monitor so I’ll finish this tomorrow. G’nite.

I’ve blogged off for the last few days. Is that a legitimate phrase? I have this 8 page insert that I edit for a national magazine 5 times a year which keeps me busy non-stop to meet a deadline (Yuck ptooie!). I suppose keeping up with the pressure of regularly posting something intelligent on a blog is also a kind of deadline (Yuk ptooie!). I’ve gotta stop using that ‘d’ word.

I have been working on the Autumn Woods painting that I started a few blogs ago. I hate it! I have to admit that I get that reaction during the life of most of my paintings. It never looks like it did in my mind’s eye. Follow this link for a video of the progression so far.

I learned from my daughter Meg, who is a writer, about the three day rule. Put it away for three days then look at it again. Get some perspective. Set it up and view it from across the room. I read where Robert Bateman has a small mirror set up on the wall behind his easel. If he is having trouble with a painting, the mirror reverses it for a different perspective. Or if you have sketches that aren’t working, analyze them, even draw them upside down.

Distance and perspective doesn’t hurt for many problem situations in which we find ourselves. Do you think a pocket mirror over your shoulder would help you to understand that jerk who works with you? It would at least be secretly really satisfying for you, or annoying for that person to be always in your rear view mirror. (chuckle)

I have to acknowledge that there are writers and photographers that are checking in occasionally and that many of the problems or creative solutions may be similar.

Anyway, back to the painting. I have to admit it looks a little better here than it does on the easel. So far it is basic under-painting. I’ve actually gone out to the local big box and bought some workshop floods to photograph these things. A thousand watts of power!! I could mount these suckers on the roof of my old Mercury Sable and go off-roading at midnight. I’ll try not to melt the paint

Aha moment!: It wasn’t until I put up the video above that I noticed the final shape of the painting. I thought I’d distorted it in preparation. I used a canvas prepared for something else and was painting it on an inclined drawing board. Idiot! When I stood it up, suddenly it looked too tall and out of proportion. Hmm . . . What difference does that make?

The problem with stopping a project is the danger of not getting back to it.

A number of years ago I found myself in a tour bus bouncing through Israel with a bunch of ministers. Not government ministers, the church kind. Now don’t be rolling your eyes. Most of them were fun folk. At one point the bus got stuck in a tight turn in a crowded Jerusalem street and couldn’t go back or forward. After much loud discussion in several languages about what to do, seven burly clergy bounded off the bus, picked up an offending parked car and deposited it out of the way on the sidewalk. Amid cheers from the gathered crowd up and down the street, they hopped back in the bus and we were on our way. So don’t mess with ministers!

Its a neat story but not what I needed to share. The tour included a visit to the Dead Sea which is the second saltiest body of water on earth, in or rather on which we all bobbed like corks. It is also 420 meters or 1378 feet below sea level; the lowest place on the earth. When someone commented on the mist which obscured the opposite shore, the guide said it wasn’t mist, it was the weight of the air that far below sea level. <—click-it

Weight of the air? When I think about it now, I understand what is wrong with some of my paintings. Landscape painters paint atmosphere. The air between us and distant objects filters what we see. Trees or hills or buildings that are 5, 10, 50 kilometers away are in fact the same color as the ones right beside us, but they look different. The difference is that we are seeing them through air that has moisture or dust particles or is just plain heavy. A firey sunset happens because of pollution.

I remember watching a TV interview with Robert Bateman in his studio. He was in the middle of painting one of his photographic animal paintings in acrylics; an elephant I think. As he was talking to the interviewer, he was casually splattering the painting all over with liquid white paint and wiping it with a rag. I’m thinking, “Why is he ruining that painting?” Then I realized he was adding atmosphere. In fact he probably added foreground detail over that, waited for it to dry, then ‘ruined’ it again. Every time he did he pushed everything farther into the distance.

James McNiell Whistler, who is most famous for painting his mother, was also known as the painter of atmosphere for his paintings of the Thames River in early morning light. click-it—>

I remember a painter telling me to paint what you see not what you think you see. That is different from artistic license where you intentionally interpret and embellish what you see. However, most amateur painters paint what they think they see. Leaves and grass are green aren’t they? So we use it right out of the tube for everything.

The Group of Seven painters became famous for painting Canadian landscapes. You would think doing that they would use gobs of green but their paintings show very little. Go and check it out, I’ll wait.

This is a quick paint sketch  of Whitefish lake in Algonquin. Atmosphere causes the distant hills to go blue. It also masks detail so distant trees are are harder to discern. They could be a little more washed out. As it was I got washed out. There was supposed to be a canoe on the beach in the forground but it started to rain!

It seems strange intentionally painting in atmosphere to obscure the view but paintings deal with emotions and impressions. If we want accuracy take a photo.