Measurement and angles are the basis of drawing. Learn how to use them, and you can draw anything. |
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| Geraniums, by Carol L. Douglas, pastel. Available, but has to be collected in person as it’s glazed in non-reflective glass. Last weekâs lesson on the pencil and thumb method was easy to teach in person, but difficult to write out in steps. Todayâs lesson, on using angles, is easier to write, but will be a little trickier to master. This has to do with how our brains are wired, not how âtalentedâ you may or may not beâthatâs mostly, as Mr. Edison pointed out, a matter of persistence anyway. But the human mind simply doesnât âreadâ angles and negative space when itâs not focusing on them. This is why we use our pencil as a visual aid. It forces our brains to pay attention. The good news is that you can rapidly teach your brain to notice angles and negative space.
Once again, close one eye and focus on the pencil, not the object youâre measuring. Hold the pencil along an imaginary plate glass window in front of you, and tilt it to match the angle youâre measuring. Then reproduce the line on your paper. If at first you screw up, itâs probably that youâve canted one end of the pencil away from you. Straighten it up and try again. Once youâve mastered measuring with the pencil and thumb method and learned to see and copy angles on to your paper, you can draw anything from portraits to animals to landscapes to figure.  Start by measuring the basic shapes using the pencil and thumb method we learned last week. Mark off the heights and widths of all the basic shapes.  Use your pencil to determine the angles at which the silverware, the sides of the cup, and the handle are traveling. Draw them in as straight lines. This takes a little practice, so be patient and take your time looking at each one.  Use your measuring and angle hash marks to block in the major shapes.  Often, you can see distortions, objects that are too close together, etc. more easily in the negative space than you can in your drawing of the positive objects. It’s best to check this before you go on to finish your drawing.  You can use angles to check your work. Here I checked the angle from the right tine of the fork to the handle of the cup, and the angle across the top of the two pieces of silverware. Note: last week I wrote about the difficulty of decision-making in the age of coronavirus. My workshop in Pecos is now on, thanks to the Herculean efforts of Jane Chapin. The statewide 14-day-quarantine is expected to be lifted on September 1, but that doesnât do travelers or hoteliers much good for trips immediately after that, which must be booked now. Jane figured out a great solution. We wonât be breaking quarantine, and we will be able to paint out in the field.
San Miguel County, where the workshop will be held, remains one of the safest places in America, with zero deaths from coronavirus. Weâre going, using all the safety methods we can employâmasks and hand sanitizer in the airport, frequent handwashing, etc. And we expect to have a lovely, lovely time, paint in some gorgeous spots, and learn lots.
Ironically, airfares are so low right now that the total cost of the workshop has plummeted, at least for me, coming from the northeast. At this point, the limiting factor isnât the number of people I can teach, but the number of beds I can rustle up. Jane still has a few up her sleeve. So if youâre bold* and love the western landscape, youâre welcome to join us. Email me to initiate a conversation. On the road again. I can barely contain my excitement! *Jane and I have a history, and it always seems to include adventure⌠and lots of laughter. |
Fear of Failure
People do not become brave in a vacuumâthey get that way by taking risks.
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| Along the Pecos River in Winter, by Carol L. Douglas. Available. |
The newest diversion for small businessmen in America is to sit up nights and think about what they should cancel. I had my most recent conversation about this with Jane Chapinon Saturday, as we try to figure out whether my New Mexico workshop is on or not. The problem in New Mexico is the same one we faced here in Maine earlier in the year: the same advisories that are appropriate for places like Albuquerque are overkill for small mountain towns. Even though painters will be safe in Pecos, we still must abide by state law.
It may seem like tempting fate, but I donât worry overmuch about coronavirus. Itâs wise to be cautious about it, just as itâs wise to be prudent when camping in bear country. But Iâm in good health for my age, and my chances of recovery are vastly greater (better than a hundred to one) than dying if I contract the disease. Iâd like to live to a great old age, but, as Lucy Angkatell chirpily notes in Agatha Christieâs The Hollow, weâre all going to die of something anyway.
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| Downdraft snow, by Carol L. Douglas |
The Hollow was written in 1946, and Lady Angkatellâs attitude toward death is as obsolete as the novelâs melodrama. Modern society is constructed around a fierce desire to minimize risk. We worry about lawsuits; we worry about perceived threats that may have little basis in reality. Weâve been conditioning ourselves out of risk-taking for most of my adult life.
When I was a kid, we routinely walked to school without adult supervision, played games without adult supervision, rode horses without adult supervision, and used tools and equipment with only the loosest adult supervision. Today, kids are barred from doing these things, yet the child mortality rate has never been lower in America (largely because of vaccines).
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| New Mexico Farmstead, by Carol L. Douglas. |
When my kids were babies, the bogeyman in the room was child abduction, which kept a whole generation under the watchful eyes of their mothers. It turned out to be largely illusory, but it effectively ended childhood freedom.
Yesterday I was talking with a Zoom student from Tennessee. He mentioned that he learned to drive a tractor at age 8. Today, heâs a pilot. I was about the same age when I learned to drive our Ford 9N. By age 14, I was moving hay from fields in one town to our home farm in the next. Had I been injured in a farm accident then, it would have been a tragedy. Today, it would be a reason to pass a new set of laws barring kids from farm work.
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| Pecos hillside, by Carol L. Douglas. No, our workshop isn’t scheduled for snow season; I just have a perverse liking for winter. |
But being raised as âfree rangeâ children was formative to creating intrepid adults. A child who learns how to manage risk will grow into a confident adult. Thatâs key, as I wrote recently, to success in the arts. People do not become brave in a vacuumâthey get that way by taking risks and accepting defeat.
I occasionally have a super-achiever in painting class, a person who has always been the best at whatever he or she attempts. Thatâs a terrible handicap in art. The inability to accept failure means they canât accept the risk that is inherent in all art-making. Their fear of failure consigns them to fail.
Art, after all, could be defined as a series of failures on the way to an impossible objective. For that, risk-taking is a great teacher.
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| By the way, if you wonder why comments must be moderated on this blog, it’s because of mornings like this, where I start my day by deleting dozens of bot-spam comments before I can actually write anything. |
Why the details matter
Super-simplified paintings may intrigue at first, but do they have enough information to satisfy over time?
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| Snow at higher elevations, by Carol L. Douglas |
Yesterday we let the software engineer out of his cage. He traveled down to Pecos National Historical Park with us. He could get a signal enabling him to work. Meanwhile, we painted a snow squall approaching across the Sangre de Cristo mountains. (Weâre limited to satellite here on the ranch and a tethered hotspot is faster.)
As is true on the ocean, the sight-lines in the west are extended. You have hours to watch weather unfold. It made for great painting for us, and a nice work setting for him.
A friend once told me, âIâd never date an engineer; theyâre too boring.â Iâve found exactly the opposite to be true. This one has an undergraduate arts degree and is a serious musician as well as being a programmer. When he talks about aesthetics, I listen.
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| An abandoned farmstead in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. |
We took him for a brief walk through a small, abandoned farmstead with log and stone barns. It was where Iâd spent most of my time during Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta last April. The difficulty, Iâd found, was in the surfaces, which are textured and edgy and needed more definition than my usual painting style. How could I paint them convincingly without being too detailed?
âAlla primapainting applies a low-pass filter over everything,â he told me. âYou need a way to convey high-frequency information in some places.â Huh?
Think about the sound of clapping. Itâs impulsive and unexpected. If you were to look at a graph of it, you would see a spike. Thatâs what they call a high-frequency sound, and itâs exactly the same as a line, a dot, or an edge in your paintingâin other words, itâs a big, sudden, value shift, packed with information. It gets your attention. Itâs the opposite of low-frequency sounds, which are more like the hum of your dishwasher in the background.
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| Our office on the road. My trusty Prius is not up to this terrain. (Photo courtesy of Douglas Perot) |
There are low-frequency passages in painting, too. A grey sky is an extreme example. Nothing much changes there. When you save a photo at too low a resolution and it gets blurry, itâs essentially been subjected to a low-pass filter.
When your teacher tells you, âfocus on big shapes,â or âignore the detail,â he or she is telling you to apply a low-pass filter to your painting. In general, thatâs good adviceâwithin limits.
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| And then there was snow, and a gravel road up a mountain ridge. (Photo courtesy of Douglas Perot) |
In photography, those blurry, low-resolution photos may intrigue at first glance, but they arenât that satisfying over time. In the long run, that may be true of paintings as well.
The trick, I think, is to vary high information passages with super-simplified ones. It’s a good goal but itâs not always possible in plein air painting, where you often have to quit before you think youâre finished.
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| Horno in the snow, by Carol L. Douglas. I haven’t looked out yet to see how much stuck. |
And that was exactly what happened to us. One minute, it was dark and cold, and the next, snow was swirling everywhere, obscuring our view. We slipped up the road back to the ranch. Iâm hoping for snow-cover to last through today. If it doesnât, Iâm sure weâll find something to paint.