Archive for August, 2011
John Losonczy
Today was John Losonczy’s 90th birthday! He was born in Budapest and came to the US in 1961. He was a pharmacist in Hungary, but when he came to the US, he studied art.
I met John when I came to Salisbury, MD, in 2002. He was a teacher at the Institute & Gallery and I became his student for a few years until he and his wife were in an auto accident 2 or 3 years ago.
Today John’s daughter had a luncheon for him and invited all of his students. There were perhaps 15 of us loyal students who had studied with him for several years. It was wonderful to spend time with my former teacher and classmates and to see many of his paintings hung throughout the daughter’s house. We all adored John because he knew just how to correct our paintings. We secretly called him “Variation John” because if we ever painted a straight line in a landscape painting, he would correct it and make it varied. We all wish John many more birthdays!
The Composition
Before brush ever touches canvas, the plein air painter has answered the questions: What is the subject of this painting? and, Why is it so interesting to me? The next question is: How shall I present it?
A great deal of thought must be given to just what the subject really is and how it can be placed on the canvas you have chosen. Using a plastic view finder is an immense help at this point. It can be altered to be rectangular or square and can be moved about to find a good placement of objects. Or, a sketch book can be used to make preliminary sketches. Sometimes when I have used my sketchbook, I’ve discovered that I should start the drawing with one object rather than another. Some artists do these small thumb nails in color or value with as little specific detail as possible as they work out the effectiveness of various ideas.
Berlin, MD
Berlin, Maryland, is a small town on Eastern Shore of Maryland. It’s most famous event was the making of the movie Runaway Bride some years ago.
Today was the Peach Festival. Churches cooked dinners, individuals set up tents and sold peach pies, ice cream and all things peach. Since crabs are well loved here on the Eastern Shore, crab cakes were also sold. It would have been a huge success but the rain poured down.
This past Friday and Saturday, Berlin had a Paint Out. There were only 11 artists who took part, but we met on Friday at the Worcester Arts Council in Berlin, who sponsored the event, had coffee and donuts and got our canvases stamped. I painted at the Museum – on Friday, a Sycamore and on Saturday, a Magnolia tree. The plein air paintings were still wet when I framed them, and I couldn’t photograph them because of the pouring rain, but you’ll see them sometime in the future.
The Artist’s Response
Determining the subject for a landscape painting is only the beginning, according to Edward Betts in his book Creative Landscape Painting. The next step is to clearly identify and then sustain whatever your initial response was. If you know exactly what it was that struck you so forcefully, then it will be easier to project that particular quantity with force and clarity in your painting.
Was it color, light, pattern, space, weather, mood, or shape relationships? Beauty is too vague a term. Besides the description of beauty lies in the terms already mentioned.
It is important to cling to the original conception as you begin to search for the best methods to communicate your own interest in the subject, especially as you get deeper into the development of the picture. If you can hang onto what you originally wanted to say, you will be in full control of your painting at all times and you will have a firm rationale behind all your pictorial decisions while your painting is in progress.
Choosing Your Subject
Edward Betts, one of America’s most creative painters, in his book Creative Landscape Painting says that developing a creative imagination or a creative viewpoint means beginning to comprehend nature and create paintings that go beyond the ordinary, toward an art that is more personal and inventive.
One of the first decisions an artist makes is deciding on the subject of the picture. Actually, it is not so much a matter of choosing a subject, but rather to responding to some visual situation. The artist sees something that triggers an interaction with the artist’s inner world of the subconscious. As Sir Thomas Browne stated, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.”
The fact that something outside himself has affected the artist intimately means he now has something to communicate. If you are genuinely excited about your subject, then you have a very good chance of sharing that excitement, by means of your art, with someone else. So search out the landscape forms that touch you deeply and make them the core of your art.
Decorating Your Home With Style
Bring nature indoors by hanging wildlife art prints on your walls. You can also place other nature-inspired items in your living area. These include wooden sculptures, vases and figurines made of pottery clay.
Other ways to bring nature indoors include
~ Placing a bunch of fresh wildflowers in a vase.
~ Choosing Landscape oil painting
~ Decorate your living room with various shapes and sizes of pots and jars.
Dan McCaw
In the September 2011 issue of American Artist is an article about Dan McCaw, California artist and teacher, formerly a landscape painter of traditional realism. Today his style is somewhere between traditional and modern art. One of his main pieces of advice is to not be afraid of frustration, but to keep going when you hit a block. “Some of my worst days of painting are my best,” he says, “because I am taking risks outside my comfort zone and pushing past challenges to find something original.”
As McCaw began searching for a style that was true to his inner self, his brush work became looser and he began to think in terms of patterns, shapes and design. He always left something to the viewer’s imagination. As he experimented with the expressiveness of abstract painting, fear gave way to freedom. “Capturing an emotion is so much more powerful than just copying an appearance,” he said. “I want to bring my own personal interpretation to the canvas and connect with viewers on a higher emotional level.”
On the Subject of Drawing
When I studied under Austin plein air painter Cassandra James, a daily assignment was to spend 15 minutes drawing. That seemed like such a small amount of time, but somehow I had a difficult time finding the time to do that. I have read that 15 minutes per day for 6 months will make an immense difference in one’s ability to draw.
Canadian painter Robert Genn has this to say: “I’ve encouraged both myself and others to experience the joy of drawing. It may be separate from painting, but it is certainly key to much that is great in painting. To find a line, to make it work, to really see it and know it holds life and energy or is pregnant with feeling, is to experience a kind of excitement that even sensitive observers cannot truly know. If only for the forward march of our own character, we need to fill our sketchbooks.”
Copper as Support
Perhaps the only thing better than using Iridescent Copper Light (fine) for the underpainting of a landscape painting would be to use the real thing – copper. In the September 2011 issue of The Artist’s Magazine, Meredith Lewis has written about artist Kent Lovelace who actually uses copper as his support.
Lovelace wanders about Europe finding inspiring vistas to photograph and later crop for the perfect scenes. The copper surface must be clean and free from oxidation so he sands it with 60-grit sandpaper and wipes it with alcohol. Then he creates a monochromatic underpainting to work out the composition, textures and values using Old Holland neutral tint. Color glazing follows using only transparent or translucent paints. The layers are thin so the radiance of the copper shows through. Later when he works on the sky he leaves some of the area unpainted so that the bare copper is exposed. The result is a painting which glows with an inner luminosity reminiscent of Rembrandt, El Greco and hundreds of others. For more information on working with copper, visit http://www.copper.org .
Underpaintings
This past spring I attended a workshop near State College, PA. One thing the instructor, Susan Nicholas Gephart, tried to teach us was the importance of an underpainting and the effects that can be created by different kinds of underpaintings.
Three of her favorite acrylic colors for underpaintings are Iridescent Copper Light (Fine), Interference Violet (Fine) and Dark Ultramarine, all by Golden. She especially likes the copper because it gives a luminous color to landscape paintings when it shines through the oil top coat.