Some have a germ of truth; some are out and out wrong.
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Ăle dâOrlĂ©ans waterfront farm, by Carol L. Douglas. âImmediateâ shouldnât mean half-baked.
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Donât overwork it:This is the most common bromide I hear. I hate it. It encourages painters to stop prematurely, and to not work out the latent potential or problems in the work.
Itâs far better to go too far and need to fix your mistakes than never understand your limits or see where you might end up. âDonât overwork itâ is a great way to permanently stunt your growth as a painter.
Replace it with this: âIf you can paint it once, you can paint it 1000 times.â It liberates you to scrape out, redraw, paint over, scribe across your surface and otherwise really explore your medium. And itâs actually true.
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| Cirrus clouds at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas. I couldn’t have painted this had I not learned how to marry edges. |
Thatâs your style: When I was a painting student, I had a teacher tell me that heavy lines were my âstyleâ. They werenât; I just hadnât learned how to marry, blur or emphasize edges. These are technical skills, and to master them I had to move on to the Art Students League and teachers who understood the difference between technique and style.
Ultimately, we all end up with identifiable styles, but they should be un-self-conscious, the result of putting paint down many, many times. Anything that we do to avoid learning proper technique is not a style, itâs a failure.
Blues player Shakin Smith once told me that his style was the gap between his inner vision and his capacity to render it. That made me stop worrying about style at all.
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| Vineyard, by Carol L. Douglas, courtesy of Kelpie Gallery. The dominant greens in this painting are based on ivory black. |
Donât use black: âMonet didnât use black, and you shouldnât, either!â Thatâs true, but only after 1886, when Monet (apparently) adopted a limited palette. On the other hand, his palette included emerald green, which was copper-acetoarsenite, the killer pigment of the 19th century. There are limits to aping the masters of the past.
Monet made chromatic blacks, which are mixtures of hues that approximate black. Every artist should learn how to make neutrals, and not rely on buying Gamblinâs premix. But there are places where black is useful. One is in mixing greens. Another is in mixing skin tones. Contemporary painting is all about the tints (mixing with white) but ignores shades (mixing with black) and tones (mixing with black and white).
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| Back in the day, art students learned not just tints, but shades and tones. |
Pros use more paint:Beginning artists generally donât use enough paint, so itâs useful to tell them to increase the amount of paint. However, there are some great painters out there who work very thinâColin Pageis an excellent example. The problem is in getting to that point. Itâs a mastery born of years of experience. To get there you needâannoyinglyâto start with more paint.
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| Fish Beach, by Carol L. Douglas. |
If itâs not beautiful, youâre doing something wrong: Seeking beauty instead of truth is a great way to make static paintings. Paintings go through many ugly phases before theyâre finished, and sublimating their ragged edges is a great way to drain all the juice out of your painting.
Iâve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. Weâre strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.
