Category: Édouard Manet

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Monday Morning Art School: how to be painterly

Bravura brushwork rests on a foundation of practice and skill.
Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh, courtesy Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
“Painterly” describes a painting that is comfortable in its own skin. It uses the paint itself to create movement and expression. It’s a quality found in every medium; even sculpture is sometimes described as painterly. Painterly works are loose and emotive, and they lead with their brushwork.
This is a sensual, rather than intellectual, quality. It comes from experiencing the paint itself. You’re there when you no longer fight the paint, but work with it. It’s the opposite of photorealism, where the artist works hard to conceal all evidence of his process. A painterly painting doesn’t fuss over the details.
Does that mean it must be impasto? No. Peter Paul Rubens, JMW Turner and Joaquín Sorolla were all painterly painters, and none of them wallowed in paint. There are many fine contemporary painters who work thin and expressively.
Cloud study, watercolor over graphite, 1830–35, John Constable, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We don’t usually think of Constable as painterly, but he was in his plein air work.
The term “painterly” was coined in the 20th century by art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. He was trying to create an objective system for classifying styles of art in an age of raging Expressionism. The opposite of painterly, he felt, was “linear,” by which he meant paintings that relied on the illusion of three-dimensional space. To him this meant using skillful drawing, shading, and carefully-thought-out color. Linear was academic, and painterly meant impulsive.
That didn’t make the Old Masters inevitably linear, however. Rembrandt and Lucian Freud are both painterly painters. Richard Estesand Sandro Botticelliare both linear.
Today, we don’t see accurate drawing as an impediment to expression. In plein air work, acute drawing is often overlaid with expressive brushwork. The idea of painterliness—of being loose and self-assured—is treasured even as we strive for accuracy.
House in Rueil, 1882, Édouard Manet, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
How do we develop painterliness?
First, master the fundamentals. “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way,” said basketball great Michael Jordan. “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise,” he said. That’s very true of painting, where there is a specific protocol for putting paint down.
Then practice, practice, practice. “I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat,” said Jordan.
Expect failure. It comes with pushing your technique. “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games,” said Jordan. “On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot… and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Beach at Valencia, 1908, Joaquín Sorolla, courtesy Christie’s
You can’t teach yourself to be relaxed; you can only get there through experience. The only way to be painterly is to paint. I can show you expressive brushwork techniques, but there are still no shortcuts. It happens automatically and naturally with experience. You stop focusing on the mechanics, and start focusing on what you see. Your eye is on the ball.
Many times, artists only realize their painterly styles in old age. That is when Titianstarted painting in blotches, in a style that came to be known as spezzatura, or fragmenting. “They cannot be looked at up close but from a distance they appear perfect,” wrotethe Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari. Rembrandt is another painter who started out painting precisely but ended up loose. Édouard Manet is still another. In fact, the list is inexhaustible.
Vincent Van Gogh is the personification of painterliness. He died at 37, but still managed to produce around a thousand paintings (that we know of).
Bravura brushwork simply rests on the foundation of all those paintings that went before.
I’m at Saranac Lake, prepping for Adirondack Plein Air, which starts this morning. I wrote Extreme Art: Painting inside the Blue Line just for this event. It’s not on my blog, so if you’ve ever been interested in what goes on at a plein air event, enjoy.
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Monday Morning Art School: perspective of boats

Don’t fall into the trap of drawing what you know instead of what you see.
The Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874, Claude Monet. All three waterlines are parallel to the horizon.
I prefer painting from a floating dock, where I’m at eye-level with the boats regardless of the tide. However, on Friday, I found myself up on the wall looking across Camden Harbor. That creates a different perspective.
The horizon line in a drawing is the viewer’s eye level, regardless of where the viewer is standing. At the top of Mount Rainier, your horizon line is around 14,410 feet above sea level, and everything is below you. If you’re swimming in the Caribbean, your horizon line is about three inches above sea level and everything but the sharks are above you.
I explained basic perspective in this post about drawing clouds; the exact same rules apply to boats, except that everything is flipped over. We can see down into objects that are at our feet, but not into objects at the same level that are far away. The farther away the object is, the more horizontal our gaze is as we look at it. Our measly 5 or 6 feet in height is nothing compared to the distance across. 
When a boat is a few hundred feet away in the water, it’s for all intents and purposes at eye level. Its waterline is almost absolutely flat, regardless of whether you’re looking at its side, transom, or bow.
The Seine at Argenteuil, 1872, Alfred Sisley. Although it’s also from towpath height, Sisley included more foreground, creating the sense that we are looking down into the Seine.
During the 1870s and 1880s Argenteuil, northwest of Paris on the Seine, became an important painting location for the Impressionists. They immortalized its bridges and boats from every conceivable angle.
We can infer Monet’s point of view in the top painting as being about equal to the house across the river. In other words, he was standing on a towpath. That allows us to see into the boat slightly, as we’re at mast height to it and it’s close to the near bank. We cannot see into the far boats at all. Note that the far bank and the waterlines of the far boats are parallel to the horizon. The bridge, which reaches across the river to us, is not.
Alfred Sisley’s painting is from the same height, but he’s given us more foreground, and therefore the sense of looking down into the water. But while the tree in the river is definitely below us, the boats are not. Again, their waterlines are parallel to the horizon. The river bends, and the land curves away, but the curve is very gradual.
Boating, 1874, Édouard Manet. Here we’re looking straight down into the boat from impossibly close quarters.
We are definitely looking down into Édouard Manet’s pleasure boat in his 1872 painting done on the same river. Manet has us practically standing on the rail looking down into the well of the boat. The horizon isn’t even visible. It would be yards above the boaters’ heads.
An example of incorrectly drawn boats.
Ignoring these rules results in the most common error I see in painting boats. This is from an example I picked up on the internet. The boats are close to the horizon but we still seem to be looking down into them. In fact, the closest boat is at about the angle of Manet’s Boating. This is an impossibility, as the three masterpieces from Argenteuil have demonstrated.
This happens frequently with painters unaccustomed to boats. I think it is a case of painting what we think we know vs. what we see. We know that boats have form, therefore they must have perspective, too. Well, they do, but it’s very subtle from the distance we usually see them.
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How to make art that stands the test of time

Occasionally, someone wonders whether an emerging painter will end up being a superstar. Can we ever tell?
Iowa Cornfield, 1941, Grant Wood, courtesy Wikipedia.
This week I contemplated a piece of contemporary art with a gallerist. “I don’t see thinking,” she said. “I only see beautiful contours. It’s content-free. There is no struggle.”
I can’t imagine anything more stultifying than striving to be in the Pantheon of Great Artists. However, the question of what makes great art is an important one. Great art must satisfy long after the flash of novelty dissipates. How does it do that?

The Ghent Altarpiece, early 15th century, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, courtesy Wikipedia.
Technique
It ought to go without saying that mastery of one’s craft is the primary job of the artist. Sadly, that’s not always true in contemporary western art, where ephemeral ideas sometimes mean more than specialized competence. However, if one looks back at art which has staying power, it’s always technically superb. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, sister? Practice, practice, practice.
Courage
Art is a process of exploration, a constant revolution. An artist must travel beyond his abilities every time he picks up a brush, or he begins to parody himself. The end of our training is, conversely, the beginning of our real education.
People sometimes tell me that they want to be ‘more consistent’ in their painting. I think that’s a trap, antithetical to the idea of development. A consistent body of work just comes with time.

Saturn Devouring His Son, 1820–23, Francisco Goya, courtesy Wikipedia.
Emotional content
One reason I hate writing artist’s statements is that I believe my real content is inexplicable. You, the outsider, might understand it, but the word-spewing part of my brain never will. Still, I hope my simple trees, boats and rocks convey something greater than their nominal subject.
There’s lots of art that’s didactic, and I’ve produced much of it myself. But didacticism is not necessary. Nor is it the hallmark of real artistic maturity, which somehow moves beyond issues.
The Railway, 1873, Édouard Manet, courtesy Wikipedia.
Within the vision of our times
Johann Sebastian Bach is recognized as one of the greatest composers of history. His period and his style were the Baroque. He was one of its last practitioners. He grew up within its aesthetic and it reached a climax in his writing. He was both within the vision of his time and the full flowering of that vision.
Knowing whether we’re painting within our period is difficult. In my first class with Cornelia Foss, she had me paint an orange on a tray. “If it was 1950, I’d say ‘Brava’,” she said. “But it’s not.” It was the best criticism I’ve ever received—she was telling me my technique was fine, but my style was dated.
We’re not Hudson River painters, we’re not Dutch Golden Age painters. This is the 21st century, and we need to paint what speaks to our peers. That’s often uncomfortable, and frequently a mystery.
You can’t count on your audience for advice with this. They’re as mystified as we are.
Bach was forgotten soon after his death. His works were rediscovered by Felix Mendelssohn. In 1823 Mendelssohn’s grandmother gave him a copy of the score for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Five years later, Mendelssohn mounted a performance of this long-forgotten masterpiece. His selfless promotion of a dead artist gave Bach his rightful place in music history.
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Rejection

Queensboro Bridge construction, 10X8, Carol L. Douglas

A friend got a rejection letter from an agent on whom she had pinned hopes. This is where her life as an artist begins, where she begins to look inside herself for approval and develops a strong sense of the value of her own voice.

Rejection either makes you or breaks you. Some of us walk away from the encounter so badly bruised that we stop putting our work in the public marketplace. Others get up and paint again.

The Dugs in Autumn, 12X9, Carol L. Douglas
Rejection is part of the artistic process. Last year, I encouraged my pal Tarryl to apply for a show that I thought was a slam-dunk. She was rejected. This year she encouraged me to apply for a show that she thought I would get in. I was rejected. This has nothing to do with either of our abilities or worth as people or inherent talent. It’s about the taste and style of the judges.
It’s paradoxically true that we can be rejected for being either too good or too bad; it’s easiest for critics to see and understand what has already been done, what is in the safe middle ground.
“When they organized their first exhibition [the Impressionists] all already mature artists who had been working for fifteen years or more… Dissatisfied they may have been, but they did not consider that they were as yet beyond the pale. Manet, in fact, still endeavored to show in the Salon, and was bitterly disappointed when he was rejected.” (Richard J. Boyle, American Impressionism)

Indiana sketchbook #1, 12X6, Carol L. Douglas
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Off your game? Who cares?

Bathers with a Turtle (Baigneuses), 1907-08, Henri Matisse

This week some friends were discussing Thomas Kinkade, whose work is being dragged out into the public sphere through a retrospective, which in turn has engendered a flurry of new stories about his troubled life. (Predictably, none are positive.)
I was curious about why his landscapes said nothing about his personal struggles. “He did not paint what he wanted to paint; everything he painted was to sell,” said Brad Marshall.
Steamboat Leaving Boulogne, 1864, Édouard Manet
Then we moved on to bad moments by great painters. Karl Eric Leitzel mentioned how bad Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle is, which in turn reminded me of Manet’s Steamboat Leaving Boulogne and Sargent’s Spanish Dancer, in which either the head or the arms of the figure are inexplicably stuck on backwards.
Matisse, Manet and Sargent were brilliant painters; the rare duds in their oeuvre serve to point out just how brilliant they are. “When painters are that innovative and pushing painting in such new directions, they will be unsuccessful at times,” said Brad Marshall.
Spanish Dancer, 1879-82 (preparatory oil study for the main figure in El Jaleo), John Singer Sargent
And that is where I want to be: not painting what I know will sell, but painting outside myself.
This week, Pastor Bill Blakely suggested that if “I Am,” is the Lord’s name forever (Exodus 3:14), then all the “I am” statements we use to define and limit ourselves are in fact blasphemous. Thomas Kinkade was trapped by his “I am a great artist” statement; it was dissonant with the world’s opinion. Instead of painting setting him free, it made him miserable.

There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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It could always be worse

Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868, by Édouard Manet
My friend Martha recently told me, “Taxes are the price you pay to live in a free society.” I’m doing my taxes this week and debating what I should post while I’m off in the land of spreadsheets and illegible receipts I never got around to entering.
I’ll start with some French realism today, to remind myself that things could always be worse. We could be struggling to heat our homes and our children could be executed for stealing crusts of bread. Officers could be convicted of heinous crimes simply because of their Jewishness.
Let’s start with Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola, who was France’s most important social realist writer. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel prizes in literature (which were won, characteristically, by nobody you ever heard of). He is remembered chiefly for his championing of the falsely-accused French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus.
But that was still in the future when this painting was conceived. It was a thank-you gift for Zola’s passionate support of Manet’s work. The setting is Manet’s studio. On the wall is a reproduction of Manet’s scandalous Olympia, tying this painting very clearly to Manet’s gratitude. Zola is seated at his work table. The book, inkwell, quill, books and papers tell us he is a man of letters.
Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners, 1857. Note how the figures are dehumanized by their faces being obscured and how they are separated from the prosperity in the distance.
The French Barbizon painters championed realism as a painterly technique (in response to the accepted Romanticism of the time). But they were also social realists, taking an unflinching look at the vast poverty that endured in rural France.
Hunting Birds at Night, 1874, by Jean-François Millet.
Unfortunately, social realism can be tough to appreciate over time, because appalling poverty starts to look quaint when we are distant from it. This is the fate that has overtaken Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners. In its day, it was an electric criticism of French society. The wealthy (who tend to buy paintings) seemed to get a whiff of the tumbrels of the French Revolution and it made them decidedly uncomfortable.  “His three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty … their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved,” wrote one reviewer.

Short on money, Millet sold this painting at a sharp discount. A century and a half later, it is one of the most recognized and beloved paintings of all time.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Even great painters have bad days

The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot
This morning I came across Tissot’s The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, above. Tissot was a fine painter, but one has to wonder what he was thinking to portray Rahab as a man in drag, with a 5 o’clock shadow. (For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Rahab was the original ‘hooker with a heart of gold.’ Joshua sent two spies into Jericho, and Rahab hid them on her roof, in exchange for which her family was spared during the sack of the city.)
Seascape, Calm Weather, 1864-65, Édouard Manet
I’m pretty uncomfortable on the days I share my ‘fails’ with you, but it helps to remember that even great artists have bad days. Consider Édouard Manet, who surely must rank as one of the most incisive painters who ever lived. He was capable of wonderfully complex compositions articulating wonderfully complex commentaries. Yet his seascapes range from mediocre to terrible; still, he painted a lot of them.
Sunset at Montmajour, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh’s Sunset at Montmajour was misattributed for a long time, although it was once owned by Theo Van Gogh. Art historians simply didn’t believe he could have painted something that pretty, that bland. It has taken modern paint analysis to prove that the pigments came from the master’s palette.
I think I’ve mentioned before: there is no secret gnosis to painting. There is only hard work.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Working under duress

Annunciation to Joseph, c. 2000, by little ol’ me. Who likes hearing upsetting news?
I was recently diagnosed with cancer. It’s kept me from doing much of anything these past few weeks, as I’m in a sort of paralysis of awe and anxiety. This is why I’ve been writing about art theory and history and not so much about practical painting.
Yesterday my doctor was reviewing the charts from my 1999 bout with a different cancer. “And you were running 900 miles a week,” he finished up.
I laughed. “I was actually running 30 to 36 miles a week then,” I said. “And the odd thing is, I’ve been ramping up my mileage all summer, and now I’m doing 25 miles a week.”  Last winter I realized that scrambling around rocks while teaching plein air painting in Maine would require a lot of endurance, so I started training harder.
Carnations and Clematis in a Crystal Vase, Édouard Manet, 1883. Manet dealt with illness by painting some exquisite small florals; you just know they are flowers from his bedside table. I don’t think I have this kind of ‘sweet’ in my character, but, then again, Manet probably didn’t think he did either.
When I had cancer in 1999, I made exercise my top priority. If I wasn’t hooked up to an IV, I walked or ran. It was how I kept sane. And my first resolution with this round of cancer is to do the same, even if it uses up all my limited energy. In retrospect, running is probably why I’m still here.
Twice now I’ve ramped up my workout the year before I learned I had cancer. No, exercise doesn’t cause cancer. Rather, sometimes God tells us to do something that we don’t understand at the time. Listening to the voice of God is pretty hard for people who have been trained to think rationally rather than intuitively. But when we succeed at it, we rapidly realize God has his hand firmly on our shoulders.
Carrying the Cross, from A Child Walks With Jesus, 1999-2000, St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Rochester.
Right before my last diagnosis, I agreed to do Stations of the Cross for St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Rochester. It took me ten months to do 26 sketches, but in retrospect, I think the cancer shaped the work in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. The work also shaped my faith, because it addresses the fundamental question of the Christian experience: did Jesus really give us an end run around the inevitability of sin and death?
Oddly enough, I recently made a commitment to do seven large paintings on the subject of God and man in the environment. I have no idea how being sick can affect this work; I won’t know until I break this paralysis. But I will, and it will. That I know.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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No mandatory retirement or forced disability for painters


Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, was completed in 1844, when the artist was 69 years old. Turner moved fully into the  free, expressive, colorful treatment  at an age when most modern Americans have retired.
Two lifelong friends have recently entered hospice—one with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and one with metastatic breast cancer.  Despite my grief, I can’t help but smile each time I hear from them. In both cases, the closer they get to physical shipwreck, the more joyous they become.
Another friend mentioned a similar phenomenon in church this morning: for some believers, the older they get, the more their spiritual disabilities are stripped away and the more they are able to enter into their spiritual gifts.
Tate Britain’s upcoming show, Late Turner: Painting Set Free, on the last works of J.M.W. Turner, illustrates a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. Turner moved fully into his romantic, free, expressive, colorful best at a time when most modern people have retired.
Flowers in a Crystal Vase, by Édouard Manet, was painted in 1882, when he was bedbound with gangrene.
Édouard Manet died of gangrene at the age of 51, two years after completing his final tour de force, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In his last months he was bed-bound, so he painted still lives of the flowers in his sickroom. These intimate, small, perfectly observed paintings are among his finest works.
In 1941 Henri Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer, which left him with a stoma and confined to a wheelchair. As he began to recover from treatment, his ex-wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo; Mme. Matisse remained in prison for six months, while Marguerite was tortured and sent to a concentration camp (from which she ultimately escaped). After this, Matisse entered what he called une seconde vie (a second life). For fourteen years, he worked in cutout paper. These works are among the most influential and frequently cited of Matisse’s entire career.
Polinesia, the Sky, by Henri Matisse, 1947
What is it about artistic maturity that—like spiritual maturity—often catches its practitioners at the end of their lives? For example why did Rembrandt become so deeply reflective in his old age (and why did he paint so many self-portraits at an age when most people have given them up)? Perhaps old age and illness result in freedom from the tyranny of personally-imposed goals.  Despite the enfants terrible we tend to lionize in American culture, perhaps artistic genius is truly the province of the elderly.
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