Tag: Vincent van Gogh

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Monday Morning Art School: why you should draw

I draw every week in church, riffing off the sermon. Today’s was about persistence and hard work.

Nobody can master painting until they master drawing. That’s true for both abstractionists and realists, because drawing is how you express depth and dynamism. Painting is really nothing more than drawing with a brush. To build facility in paint, you first must draw.

Tens of thousands of years before there was written language, there was art on cave walls and cliffs. When words started being written down (around 3000 BC) they were first written in the form of pictographs. That tells us something about the importance of drawing to humankind.

I can draw things out of my head because I know how to draw from life.

Drawing is liberating

Drawing allows us to express ideas, emotions, and narratives non-verbally. For painters seeking to escape being literal, that’s critical. I can’t think of a single great painter who couldn’t draw. Vincent van Gogh famously taught himself, and his early drawings are bad enough that they should give us all hope that we too can do better. “Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit,” he wrote.

It’s not just about putting pretty things down on paper. Drawing tightens up our observational skill. We develop a keen eye for details, shapes, proportions, and visual relationships. That helps us analyze and map both the world around us and our inner world.

All I need is a sketchbook and a #2 mechanical pencil. Anything else is just a refinement.

Much of drawing is about translating a three-dimensional reality onto a two-dimensional surface. That teaches us about structure and spatial relationships. If you don’t see the value in representing depth and space in a painting, take a deep dive into the work of Edgar Degas.

A lot of us stopped working on hand-eye coordination when we mastered cursive writing. Then we let it go when we started relying on computers, which is why so many of us have terrible handwriting. We need that hand-eye coordination for painting, and we develop it through drawing.

This is partly from my imagination, but the window is high up in our church building.

A study showed that drawing helps memory in young and old alike. Researchers speculated that it was because drawing draws on varied brain paths simultaneously. I think it’s because in drawing we must attend much more intensely. That reaps benefits not just in art but in life overall.

There is a gap between what we draw or paint and what is ‘really’ there. We like to think of that gap as a shortcoming, and to some degree it is. But it’s in that gap that we develop style, and where we do a lot of non-verbal creative thinking. Tracing from photographs will never allow for the soul to creep in like drawing does.

This was drawn when I had to sit in the foyer because there were no seats. I amused myself by imagining what was going on inside.

So why don’t we do it? The sad answer for many of us is that we’ve never been taught, so we’re frustrated and afraid to try again. We don’t grant ourselves the grace and patience to persist.

I’ve butted my head against this since I started teaching. Drawing and painting are closely related but I can only teach one at a time. That’s why I’m breaking a promise to myself to not work six days a week and offering a Saturday class on Fundamentals of Drawing, starting January 6. By Ash Wednesday, you’ll be well on your way to good draftsmanship. That in turn will lead to better painting.

My 2024 workshops:

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What is style?

Beautiful Dream (Rockport Harbor), oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed, includes shipping in continental US

Style is tricky. It can have different meanings depending on context, but we all know it when we see it. Just as we recognize Modern Farmhouse in decorating and Vintage in fashion, there are styles in painting.

The major families of painterly style are:

  • Realism, representing the subject as accurately as possible.
  • Impressionism, focusing on fleeting impressions of light and color.
  • Expressionism, emphasizing the emotional and psychological.
  • Abstraction, or non-representational painting.

Within them, however, are myriad other categories, classified by the choices the artists have made in each of the elements of design.

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on birch board, unframed, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

Don’t overthink your own style

I’m all for understanding our own points of view; that’s the deepest discipline in painting (and life). Yes, style ties our work together in one body, and it ties us to a specific time and place. It’s the art historian’s best tool for classifying artwork.

But style should develop naturally. Forcing it stymies development.

I can never be a Scottish colourist, any more than I can be Wayne Thiebaud. Imitating the style of Dead Masters is a sure path to irrelevance. Once you’ve learned to paint, you should spend at least as much time with your peers as with the past. Painting is, above all, a dialogue, and you live here and now.

Ketch and Schooner, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping in continental US.

It takes some deep scratching

Good painters choose truth over stylishness, even to the point of seeming awkward to their contemporaries. They investigate thorny questions, not just about the world, but about painting itself. When they’re answered, these artists move on. Often, by the time they get through the cycle of making and mounting a body of work, they’re no longer that interested in it. There’s another struggle engaging them.

Each time we pick up the brush, there’s variation in how we approach painting problems. That’s why it’s important that you have facility with big brushes, small brushes, palette knives, detail, broad strokes, and tiny strokes. Even if they’re not part of your regular repertoire, they increase your versatility and scope.

Don’t box yourself in

‘Embrace your style’ is a trap that painters may not be able to escape.

There’s a difference between style and being stylish. I enjoy fluid, assured brushwork. That’s not styling; it’s self-confident skill.

Sometimes, what people call style is just technical deficiency. For example, some painters separate their color fields with narrow lines-white paper in watercolor, dark outlines in oils. That could be a design choice, or it could be that they never learned to marry edges.

Skylarking II, 18X24, oil on linen, in a handmade cherry frame, $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

Direct and unconscious

I do not love painters who use the same scribing or pattern-making on the surface of every painting. If you study the best mark-makers, like Vincent van Gogh, you’ll see that their surfaces are highly varied.

Style for its own sake is just a ruse to cover up badly-conceived paintings. “People often mistake verbose for skill,” a reader mused recently. “The best writing it direct and almost unconscious. I think the same thing is true of painting.”

Mature artists don’t generally think about style. At that point, style is the gap between what they perceive and what comes off their brush. That’s deeply revelatory, and it can be disturbing when we see it in our own work.

Some of us try to cover that up with stylings, not realizing that those moments of revelation are what viewers hunger for. They-not the nominal subject of the piece-are the real connection between the artist and his audience.

My 2024 workshops:

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Art-vs.-Life is a false dichotomy

High Plains, 8x10, oil on canvas, available unframed, $522

By now, most of us have read about two Just Stop Oil activists who threw tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London. They’re part of a growing trend of annoying young people gluing themselves to the frames of great art and gallery walls in protest against petroleum culture.

They ought to be gluing themselves to a gas pump where they’d be addressing their actual enemy; oil paintings are generally made with flax-seed oil. However, they’d doubtless be ignored or worse, as their sit-down protests in roads have mostly just infuriated British drivers. In a gallery, they’re sure to get attention.

Sedona, 8X10, oil on canvas, Carol Douglas, private collection

“What is worth more, art or life?” said one of the lasses, Phoebe Plummer, 21, from London. “Is it worth more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?

Mankind has always recognized that there’s a physical world and a non-physical world and that the borders are fuzzy. Descartes wrote “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) to prove to himself that he really existed. Cartesian dualism rests on the idea that there are tangible things, and there are intangible things, and that we humans are a combination of the two. Generations of spotty teenagers, myself included, have pondered Descartes’ question. The idea that reality isn’t real is tailor-made for adolescents.

Apparently, Plummer missed all that. Otherwise, she’d know that art isn’t separate from life any more than food or justice are. It’s part of thinking, and that’s part of life as much as checking the gas meter.

Van Gogh was just 37 years old when he died, either by suicide or murder. The vast majority of his 900 paintings were finished in the last two years of life as he grappled with crippling mental illness. That period of suffering paradoxically gave us a legacy of paintings that’s unparalleled in human history. Through his work, Van Gogh lives on.

The Rocks Remain, 16X20, is one of two pictures going with me to Sedona Arts Center. I'll post a better photo later.

I’m a reader. That takes me to alternate worlds and different viewpoints and realities, all possible through the artistry of the writer. Are those worlds more or less real than my physical one? The answer, I suppose, depends on when you ask me.

Marcel Proust addressed this question in Remembrance of Things Past, that monumental opus that we all talk about but seldom read. “(A)s many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished.” The knowledge thus gained, he said, is something different from the “practical ends which we falsely call life.”

Rim Light, 16X20, is one of two paintings going with me to Sedona. I'll post a better image later.

It's an unexamined life that makes us so prone to excess consumption, exacerbating the petroleum problem. By no measures are American adults healthy. More than 37 million of us take antidepressants, more than 40% of us are obese, and 77% of us worry about money. A little more reading, writing, drawing, painting and thinking and a little less shopping would make us all happier.

By the way, the wise old souls at the National Gallery had protected the painting, and only the frame sustained minor damage.

I’m writing this en route to Sedona, AZ, for the 18th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival. It’s the last event of my season, and I’m excited about all the rocks I get to paint this coming week!