Bear Down

Sometimes it feels like a scene paints itself. All the work seems preordained and there aren't decisions as such. It just is a matter of putting the brushstrokes and colors where the moment tells you they belong. That is a great feeling and the work done that way has a sense of organic integrity and freshness that is unbeatable. Other times seem weighted down with many problems to solve or gaps between what I can do and what I need to do. I frequently used to paint over scenes that I could not figure out how to complete. So, anyone who has one of my pieces from my twenties possibly has two or three images, one atop another. Lately, I've tried to find a way through to the end, even if it's at the expense of the freshness of the observations at the scene. It's as valuable, maybe even more so, to work through all the puzzles and try new tools as it is to quickly knock something out. It's a matter of self-discipline to find a way to get what I need to make the piece work in some manner.

This painting took me a long time to finish, mainly because I had a hard time matching the tools to the image, but also because I didn't have a clear vision of the end state of the painting, which is pretty typical for me. I started out doing a ultramarine blue underdrawing on a cerulean blue background - 24" x 36". The original drawing got the shapes and volumes of the banks of the river pretty well.  This was painted on top of an overlook that required me to lug gear about a hundred feet up a very, very steep climb. To do the underdrawing, I had to leave behind everything except a brush, a tube of blue paint, some water, and the canvas.  On the way up I was stung by hornets, which put a dent in the old plein air mood.

(Photo: James Tucker)

If I could have preserved anything from the original it would have been something from the first pass at the river. I really liked the transition from brown to yellow ochre to pale ochre, all on top of that blue background. This set of deep blues reminds me of some of the late Cezannes that I like enormously. It would be fun to try this another time as a night scene.

On a second visit with all the gear, I put some paint into the spaces for the trees on the mountainsides using a single brush, leaving the blue underpainting in view. Some I did in the straight green and some darkened, but the overall effect resembled piles of cabbages. I lost the thread of the drawing during this stage. I avoided the hornet's nest this time, sparing myself what would have been a brutal tumble down Paint Rock.

Continuing with the brush, I reworked the right side of the mountains to replace the cabbage with patches to suggest the contours of the slopes in some places and some prominent details of the foliage in others. In all this the colors were just me putting paint up there, not something derived from observation. I was trying to step into a space that is unfamiliar for me, a little in the spirit of John Marin, like the stabs and angles in the lower right corner. This was not a successful step. But a few things started here that survived into later states. First, I reworked the horizon to create a "V" where the two mountains meet. Second, the rock outcroppings in the foreground and middle distance persisted. Third, a few of the efforts succeeded in making the slope shapes. But, all this is done in the crudest manner. The one place I still liked was the water and the island in the lower center of the river.

Getting stuck can make you do some absurd things. My next move was to drop almost everything   I had done to this point and try out some palette knife work with some odd choices for underpainting. Part of this goes back to how I painted one of my more successful views of Mt. Ste. Victoire. The other part may have come from a colored pencil workshop I did with a friend, where we used a random gouache color as a base for our drawing. I also wanted to try a flattened river surface- forget about trying to get the river to look like it's flowing. So, here's what that yielded. 

I almost would have called this last stage a finished product, if I had had the nerve. I liked pieces of this painting a lot, and wanted to work more expressively with a palette knife again. But something left me unsatisfied. It seemed too spasmodic, too easy somehow. Kind of funny considering how much had gone on before. So I lived with this version for a while, but I wanted to get the tree in. It felt like the composition would be incomplete without it. I knew that would be nearly impossible given how chaotic the painting of the mountains behind the tree would be. So I began to imagine a way to keep some of the palette knife and interesting underpainting while getting the crazier parts to tone down enough to let me put the tree in. First I used a thinned out dark green wash to darken most of the right side of the mountain. I also went back in on the rock outcroppings and rendered them in a more traditional style, and from there it spread over the right side of the mountain, and down to the river and the islands. Later I picked up a Sharpie and began to add lines to the rocks and the river.

So then the character of the painting shifted increasingly to a conventional representational work. But what was curious is how many pieces of earlier stages persisted. I added more detail to the mountains, the trees, and the river. I took out the clouds and replaced them with a blue sky.  At some point I remembered there was a railroad that ran behind the trees. I caught glimpses of it as I was painting up there.  I added a railroad line and, above it, a road for traffic. I had a lot of fun working with the deep red browns, blues, and greens on the left side.  With some additional work on the water and some Sharpie details, I brought this to an end. 

This place is called Paint Rock because there were Native American hieroglyphics found here. 

Here is the view from which I worked on this painting. This is another case, similar to the Wolf River painting, where, except for the tree in the foreground,  I depended less and less upon a reference photo.

Over a year later I reworked much of this painting in oils. I never could reconcile myself to that yellow ochre water, even though that’s what it was. I couldn’t render it so that it registered as water instead of a creek bottom or arroyo. So, later, I went over it one more time with oils using a blue and green palette for the water. Then I reworked the island and some key parts of either bank of the river. And I lightened the tone of the sky. Here is how that ended up. I liked the reflection of the left bank in the water and the pink rocks. I also liked the distant rock outcropping after the right bank takes a turn. Right about there it changes from NC to TN. I also like the ridgeline better.

Pruning

At the very beginning, I would take a sketch pad and a pencil or marker into some nearby woods, sit down in the brush, and draw what was right in front of my face without discrimination. I ended up with a lot of scenes of tangled bushes and grasses  as dense and chaotic as what I saw. There was no way in. Later on, I’d aim for the “perfect point of view" but there usually were flaws, things blocked, out of balance, or just unnecessary.  Getting to the point of leaving something out was a slow lesson for me. Like, years. 

Between the holidays, I went out to Delisle and did a scene of the Wolf River. It felt at first like I was regressing into old inspirations and themes- pine trees and bushes, but what I wanted was something to see between and through the pines. I started this one out with a gray under drawing and aimed to keep the colors thin and light. This is on a 24 x 30 canvas.

As I moved ahead all the underbrush in the foreground and middle distance began to tug at me urging me to pay attention to its chaotic half shaped tumble weeds and I went along for awhile even though it obscured the opportunity to express the freedom of travel on the river. This took me to something like this. 

By this time, my time on scene had run out. Back home at the studio I decided to do some pruning. It began by doing the sky and cutting into the tree and leaves in places. At first I did it in a lavender sky but that didn't work and so I went from white to full on cerulean with touches here and there of ultramarine. I put it in with a very small brush that felt a little like Van Gogh at first (regression, maybe, but always plenty to learn) but it didn't have that effect when finished. It felt like the blue was more intense than the yellow green of the trees and was overpowering it, an effect I struggled with in the Bryant Grocery painting. So I darkened the fans of pine needles. The piece came together when I realized I should just clear away everything blocking the house and the horizon. I used the yellow ochre and orange to do the reeds and middle  and part of the foreground. I did some softer greens for the far tree line and added a few blue strokes in the space between the yellow and green. And then I added a sky blue for the water which worked nicely with the yellows and oranges. I painted the whole house, eliminating the two trees on the left side. I used the blue in the canal to push back on and shape some of the clutter and blockage of the underbrush.  I liked the light browns in the trunk and was hoping to hold on to some of those colors along the way. This took me to this point.

I did most all of this without using reference photos. In the final push I added red browns into the trunks and branches, put some notches into the far marsh at the waterline, put in a small road and a figure on the pier in the middle distance and worked on the foreground bushes and saplings for awhile. I used charcoal to add some graphic accents on the pier and the tree trunks.  This got me to here, and here it will stop.

Vantage Point

This is Fort Morgan, site of the Battle of Mobile Bay. I had about 2.5 hours before the fort closed. I set up on a walkway overlooking the port facing northeast with my back to the passage into the bay where the ironclads and warships slugged it out. It would have been ideal to have laid down with a ruler the lines of perspective but I didn't have the time or the tools so I had to make do. I didn't have a knife to cut open the water bottle so I had to put the brushes into the mouth  to clean them and this slowed me down. An annoyance but also a subconscious strategy to put the brakes on the hastiest impulses. I laid out wobbly basic lines and kept the initial layers thin. 

Working thin and keeping the colors light early on produces really nice effects that often get lost as the scene is reworked to correct mistakes. I need to draw the scene out completely before putting the colors down, just to see if I can preserve the freshness and transparency of the early layers of paint. I tried this in another scene that I will get on this blog as soon as I can finish it. 

I like the fort scenes for the views of the water, the geometry of the structures and the interesting brick colors. Fort Morgan was a reddish brick  with a slightly orange row in places. The red brick turned rose colored in the area nearest me but the interior was blackened in several places. I worked to capture these aspects early on.

I worked a little more on this scene before leaving for an 11 day business trip to Washington and NYC. Back at home I began to fill in the colors and shape things more carefully using reference photos. But it's always evident when a painting has been finished on site vs. in the studio. A certain life essence is sacrificed as things get more precise and refined. On the left and along the battlements, it still was pretty fresh at this stage. Anyway, here is where it stood when I left town.

By the time I got back, I had seen several exhibits including the Michelangelo drawings at the Met, and the  Protest art at the Whitney, among others. I also spent time at the Phillips looking at an exhibit of works connected to Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, to try to overcome my dislike of his work. I'm glad I did this. I learned some things from this deep dive into a group scene that may help me improve my efforts to do crowd paintings. I also found some things about him to admire.

What I saw when I got back to my painting was a strong need to establish clear lines of perspective and to have a clear line of separation between the fort and the background.  I also realized that upper deck of the fort needed to be more clearly painted and the arches and far right staircase needed to be redrawn. I also had to alter the walkway inside the fort.  I did some sketches and looked at a few tips and then got to work. In this case the best results came from using masking tape to get the horizon line very clean, and to provide a guideline for other places where I would have to paint them in more finely. I also had to start over on the background and so I whited out the area between the fort and the water. I liked the brown umber over the arches but I couldn't keep that alive over the remainder of the painting.

I took a few liberties. I put in a beach, eliminated the buildings and the ferry jetty. I slid in some lemony colors along the beach and back to the treeline. I tried a variety of red+black+orange combinations on the main interior wall. I liked the colors but they weren't drawn in so I had to go back later and change them. I still at this point had an open upper story, leaving out the guard rails for as long as possible. I never could get something that I liked for the yard inside the fort. I probably should have stuck with something more transparent. 

I reworked the interior wall and its arches to give it a heavier presence using more blackened colors. I tried to get at that weathered and battle worn look. I did a lot of little adjustments on the battlements and the trees in the distance. After I got a good but kind of busy effect on the interior wall, I decided to simplify the yard.  Finally with a small brush I put in the guard rails. And that's how I got to this.

New from Old

When it comes to easel painting, I admire the artists who are able to create a scene from imagination or a combination of sources, such as sketches, photos, or other images. (Lately as I have done more civil war forts I have gotten interested in battle scenes.) This is not how I have worked for most of my life.  Occasionally I'll work from a photo and maybe modify it a little, but it's the exception to the rule. This piece is something new for me.

In this painting, which took me about 16 hours, I pulled a lot of different sources together. I horizontally flipped two photos from a trip to New Orleans several years ago- one of the man in the coat on the stairs (call him John, since that's who it is)  and the other of the band - and reimagined the space as an interior scene looking out to the street. I populated the audience with people taken from imagination, memory, and a backlog of sketches in music spots and nightclubs. In a few cases, I used an unrelated photo or a sketch to fill things out.  

Doing a scene like this was something that motivated me long ago as I was seduced as a teenager by the lively depictions of Parisian nightlife. I never got a piece done to my satisfaction, although I have a lot of sketches of old Jackson haunts like Poet's, CS's, the Dock, George Street, and other hangouts in New Orleans and along the coast. So, about 40 years later, I'm finally achieving something I had hoped to try for a long time.

Early on, it wasn't clear whether this painting would be the same as an earlier version I had done. Here it is. 

In the earlier version I flipped only the figure on the left, John,  and I didn't try hard enough to link the two sides of the painting. We're looking over the shoulder of John walking past an open nightspot  and listening to the band. I liked both sides of this painting, but I wasn't happy that the left and right sides seemed so disconnected and the styles seemed very different. I also didn't try to do an audience- instead I have this strip of chaotic abstraction on the far right. 

In the later version, I placed John inside the room, flipped the band, so they were facing each other,  and created space between the two for an audience. To do this I took the point of view of the interior of the club looking out. This solution wasn't settled at the outset however, and for the first day I had an interesting push/pull between interior and exterior elements. There are some painters who can carry that off in a final work, like Diebenkorn. I'm not there yet. So somewhere in the second day I settled firmly on an interior scene, but I still held on for a while to the green lamp with the street signs, although I did modify the top to remove the signs and add the curved braces. 

I sketched out the elements after covering the canvas with an ochre and orange background.  I added in some white to indicate the stage and the walls. This color scheme triggered some echoes of Degas and Lautrec studies I had seen, but it didn't last very long. You can see the lamppost with the street signs. At this point I still was imagining John on the outside, but with a better filled out audience surrounding the band. It also wasn't clear that this was in a building, It might have been an open courtyard with street traffic. 

I began to put some of the figures in and also try out some very thinned out bright colors on the wall and stage. I like working with the medium that lets me thin out the color and do layers, but I haven't fully figured out how to do that well. The dancers on either side of John came from some other sources and I started to put in the French Market elements in the background. Somewhere along in here, I began to frame this up as an interior scene. 

I spent a good bit of time on the second day getting the figures and instruments of the band together. Unlike the first time out, I did the trumpet and sax players before finishing the trombone player. Working this way made for better results with overlapping of imagery. I spent way too much time trying to recreate a light effect on the stage that I had gotten in an early version of the first painting. Eventually I reached a place where the elements were beginning to balance out. But there were some things that bothered me.

I though the interior green pole was confusing and that it was something I was reluctant to let go of from the prior painting, so I took it out and extended the facade of windows opening onto the street - it also opened up some space on the floor. I also had made the drummer too small and had done a sloppy job of the drum kit, so I went back and enlarged the drummer, twice. I took some inspiration from a set of sketches I did at the Almanett last winter. I was still unhappy with the stage colors and the brushwork. Nothing about it worked, and so I decided to replace it with a bare wooden floor. Turns out that this allows the eyes to focus on the figures more.  Finally, John and the woman behind him seemed to be on an elevated level from the rest of the audience, so I put in a black stair rail to indicate that one walks down into the dance floor. Then I did various clean up tasks and called it done. 

Bits and memory, unseen lines

When traveling or watching TV, I sometimes doodle on a tablet app. It has wakened me up to several things. One, laying down color and then erasing around or through it to create shapes. Two, layering color. Three, accidental blending. Four, just the freedom to do any old thing and not be concerned about wasting materials. After all it's just bits and memory.

When I was unsure about how to try something on a canvas, I took a picture and imported it into the app and then used the color matching function to test out various corrections or changes. . Some worked, others didn't. In the process I also learned a bit about color matching and tonality.

For most of my life as a painter I never used black or Payne's gray. I also didn't using any mixing white. A few years back, when I started using that Julien easel, I began to use both a good deal and liked the results a lot. 

On a recent trip I took a small kit of watercolors and worked on a few scenes of the NYC stone and glass corridors. I have a way to go before I get to the facility that lets me be as free as I am with the tablet app.  But I really valued how much simpler and more portable it is. I just need to get free enough to try some of the ways of working with the tablet on a sheet of watercolor paper. 

Forty years ago, a teacher encouraged me to find "The Painter's Secret Geometry" Recently I discovered PSG was back in print - for a while, I only saw lending copies and rare book offerings. It has some very interesting descriptions and analyses of how line and proportion are used across different eras in art. Until I found PSG I tried to use techniques in the Elements of Dynamic Symmetry.  This started several years ago in larger work using some basics in the EDS book, such as setting the mast and horizon in the Triage painting.

So now I am trying out some of the pieces in the PSG. The upper scene-in-progress is built on top of a grid roughly resembling what is shown in the lower grid.

Said and Not Said

This past weekend, I went to Money, Mississippi to paint a location I have thought about for a long time. It is the roadside location of Bryant Grocery, where began one of the most notorious crimes in Mississippi, a 1955 murder that many believe helped to spark the civil rights movement.  An African American teenager from Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting relatives in Money and entered the grocery with his companions. Till was the last to leave and a young white woman, Carolyn Bryant, later alleged that Till menaced, grabbed, and wolf-whistled at her. Within a few days, Till was kidnapped by white men at night from his relatives' home, brutalized, murdered, and dropped in a nearby river.  The men accused of the murder were tried by an all-white, all-male jury and acquitted, though they later admitted their crime in an interview with Look Magazine. In the 2000s this case was reopened and Till's body exhumed, but ultimately no further action was taken.

In a new book, the accuser, now 82, recants the accusation.  

Anyone traveling in the area can learn a lot from the excellent displays at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center across from the Sumner Courthouse. 

Across the road from where I was painting was a group of men salvaging the remains of a recent train wreck. One lane of traffic was closed and this sharply slowed down the trucks and cars that usually race down this road. A large number of people slowed to observe the painting under way, including 4 or 5 cars of people leaving a post-church lunch at the home next door to the Grocery. Not a single person mentioned (or asked me if I know) what happened there. People rolled down their windows and struck up a conversation for a few minutes. I did get some interesting questions, such as "Do you frame those?" or "Do you think my wife'd like something like that for Mother's Day?" or "Do you hire out?"

I may add some more to this later, including visits with Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker and his wife, whom I met on several MCJ road trips. But for now, I'll put up the painting as it came about. The main difference in this was to do the underpainting in gray and establish a tonal base. It produced some interesting effects early on to have the gray show through in places. I also painted this in a rougher-edged style, almost like carving out a woodcut, but the temptation is so strong to smooth out the rough edges. Once more I lost the edginess by working it a little too long. 

Here it is.

After the first touch

Yesterday I started a painting of Ft. Pickens. I sketched the outline in grey, then added zinced down cerulean blue for the water, a light gray with an ultra blue-green tint for the tree line, zinced down yellow  ochre and orange for the ground cover inside the fort, a sweet olive green in middle distance and on the oak tree and various orange and maroon hues for the brick fort walls. This was mostly applied in short strokes with the bare canvas showing through. Whatever shortcomings it had, this first set of touches had a nice feel and color harmony.

I have taken pictures of stages of work for awhile now as a way to learn what I am doing. There are painters who have the end product fully formed in their minds when they begin. That is an extraordinary talent. But it's not how I work. Every time, every stroke, every drawing and color choice is a product of the moment of perception and reaction. It could go in a number of different ways, bit by bit, provisional every step of the way. It involves a certain kind of concentration like contour drawing. At least, at my best, this is how it works. The one who was the best at this approach for my money was Cézanne.

Whenever I'm distracted from that moment of perception, or become tired, or decide to step back and look, then a different set of habitual thoughts kick in. These include "are the shapes right" "is that the real color" "is it sloppy there" "let me fill in that space" "does it need some drawing details," to name a few. So I'll carry on with these in no particular order. As I "fix" one thing, other parts of the picture fall further into or out of balance. There's a middle period after the first set of touches where I end up fixing some things and losing the fresh touch by housepainting, just moving back and forth with no attention to the vitality of the stroke.  There are times where I have to render something more carefully and the dilemma is to ensure that doing so still blends in with the fresher parts. At some point I arrive at a near end, then the final few tweaks and it's "done."

After painting this scene, I am thinking about using a rule to only do 2 hours at a time and then set it aside, so I can come back the next day and really appreciate what's good and fresh in the first touch.