Posts Tagged ‘landscape painter’
Compositional Problems of the Landscape Painter
Robert Genn, my favorite Canadian landscape painter, recently wrote a letter about problems in composition which artists often have. Today are the first two.
“Weak foreground. The foreground appears as an afterthought. Wishy-washy, unresolved or inconsequential–it fails to set the subject onto a reasonable ground or to lead the eye to what the artist would have us see. Even in abstract or mystical work, a foreground needs to be implied and understood as a vital contributor to the whole.
Homeostatic conditions. Homeostasis means equidistant lineups of trees, rocks, blocks of color, or other patterns that are too mechanical or regular. It includes trees growing out of the tops of people’s heads. While sometimes seen in nature, homeostasis is a natural human tendency–a subconscious reordering and regularizing within the brain. “Even in front of nature one must compose,” said Edgar Degas.”
Creativity for the Landscape Painter
In Andrew Agassi’s autobiography Open, I found some useful information for the landscape painter: “Although people talk about being creative as though it were a headless achievement, I think this quote does actually hit the nail on the proverbial head. Examining the achievements of the achievers, there’s no denying that a lot of their success lies in the marketing, and if that isn’t head stuff, I’d like to know what is. I’d quarrel with the mathematics in that percentage calculation, but I can’t quarrel with the message.
But the other point is also salient, I think. I know from my own experience how negative the striving for perfection can actually be. Self-criticism, certainly. Self-annihilation, no. But how does one know when that line has been crossed? Is it now time to re-gesso those 50 colorful canvases that have been hanging around for longer than I care to reveal? Or do I show mercy yet again?
The answer must be in that quote. It’s a case of what Agassi’s coach Brad Gilbert calls “meat and potatoes.” When you play tennis, you don’t have to beat the world, just make the opponent fall down (= lose) or better still, let him lose. When you make an artwork, you don’t have to be better than Rubens or Picasso or anyone else for that matter. But maybe just a bit better than the worst thing you’ve ever done yourself and then a helluva lot better at selling it!”
The Landscape Painter gets Unstuck
Betty S. Flowers, Professor of English and Director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library has some suggestions for any writer or painter who gets stuck getting started. Think “madman,” “architect,” “carpenter,” “judge.” What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked, horn to horn, pushing against each other. Your ‘madman’ writes or paints crazily, perhaps sloppily and gets carried away with enthusiasm. Then the ‘judge’ sees the sentence fragments or sloppy painting and says, “It’s trash.”
The trick to not getting stuck is to separate the energies. First, let the ‘madman’ loose. Write or paint your passion. Then set it aside for a day. The next morning, ask your ‘architect’ to enter. Her job is to select large chunks of material of the writer and arrange them in a pattern that might fit an argument. The thinking here is large, organizational, paragraph level thinking. For the landscape painter, the thinking is similar – make sure the large parts are working together.
The sentence structure is left for the ‘carpenter’ who enters after the essay has been hewn into large chunks of related ideas. The ‘carpenter’ nails these ideas together in logical sequence, making sure each sentence is clearly written, contributes to the argument of the paragraph and leads logically to the next sentence. The painter puts on the finishing touches. Finally, the ‘judge’ comes in to inspect.
The Landscape Painter Walks
The latest newsletter from Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, describes his feelings about the benefits of walking. He says, “Walking briskly, pushing the blood to your extremities, alone and with minimal distraction along the path, concentrating the mind on the thighs’ movements, you trigger imagination and focus. In other words, brisk walking is a form of creative meditation.” He takes a notebook to jot down his thoughts and later records them on his laptop.
“With the brisk walk, you make up your mind and improve your focus. It’s as if someone is walking along with you, helping you with your thinking. No matter how long the walk, the best stuff comes in the second half. You may just find that the last minute is spent running to the studio.”
Five Skills Worth Learning
In his February 14, 2012 newsletter, Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, lists five skills worth learning by a landscape painter: 1) Drawing mastery is understanding relationships – it means seeing and reporting the relative distances between things. 2) Color mastery involves knowing the properties of pigments and the effects on one another when juxtaposed or mixed. Color mixes that call for opposites on the color wheel (complementary), as well as nearby on the color wheel (analogous), or even so closely related as to appear to be one color (monochromatic) make for lively and sophisticated effects.
3) Abstract understanding generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery and attacks your feelings before your understanding. 4) Compositional mastery, the queen of the skills, involves learning to play with the eye and move it around in the picture plane. Composition includes the golden mean, role of thirds, big and small, dark and light, activation, circulation, focus, pattern, stoppage and many other ploys developed by you and unique to yourself. 5) Emotional evolution means combining basic skills, such as those above, so that your unique voice and engagement occur.
Robert Henri, American Artist, Landscape Painter
The March/April issue of American Artist had an interesting article about Robert Henri (1865 – 1929), who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later in Europe where he acquired an impressionistic technique. He painted in many genres – figures, cityscapes and landscape paintings - always striving to present a true view of reality as he experienced it.
Henri’s book The Art Spirit, published in 1923, compiled his lectures, letters and ideas and offered a wide-ranging set of principles about art and life. One of his recommendations is that artists premix the most important colors in the painting before beginning the painting and to mix enough of them to allow yourself to make variations of them later.
A few of his figure-drawing tips: Better to give the gesture than the outline of the arm. Search for the simple constructive forces, like the lines of a suspension bridge. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. You will never draw the sense of the thing unless you are feeling it at the time you work. A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don’t confuse a drawing with a map.
Creativity of the Landscape Painter
A study by Teresa Amabile and colleagues at the Harvard Business School tells an interesting story about creativity. The researchers asked a number of artists to select 20 of their works of which 10 were commissions and 10 were from their regular production. A panel of curators and art experts, knowing nothing of the nature of the research, were then asked to rate each work on creativity and technical skill. While skill ratings turned out to be pretty well the same, the commissioned works consistently rated lower on creativity.
In the studio or on the road, many landscape painters find they are the most creative when they’re simply on the lookout for joy. Experts are now seeing intrinsic reward, when there is no payoff except for the joy, as the silver bullet of motivation and a principal key to evolved work.
Judging Landscape Paintings
Damar Minyak, of Kansas City (area), MO, wrote a response to the January 20, 2012 newsletter written by Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter. It touched me because I feel very much the same way.
“History has shown that those who set themselves up as arbiters of “proper art” are wrong, almost 100% of the time. Consider as the prime example, the Impressionists, who set themselves up because the museums and “art experts” of their day refused their products. Today, it seems, almost everybody wants to pretend to the title “neoimpressionist” or “post impressionist” or “non-impressionist”, or whatso-everist. Judged shows usually mean “It all has to look like our stuff.” Virtually all of the artists I respect were the renegades of their periods. So, it remains, for my contemporaries. Being told I’m not doing it correctly just makes me smile, and say, ‘Thank you!’ “
The Landscape Painter Visits a Museum
Today: a couple of quotes. The first is by Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, from his newsletter last week.
“If a brilliantly good artist happens to live just down the street, his top-up of your efforts may be hard to take. That’s why it’s good to check out dead artists. The dead guy won’t let you take him to dinner or tell you, ‘There’s something wrong with that mouth,’ as several of our subscribers did with my painting of Mel, but he can show you stroke by stroke how things might be. Cruising your eyes over someone else’s work in silence and with respect may be the next best thing to struggling on your own. Art museums help artists realize they’re never truly alone.”
“The way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.” (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
Selling Landscape Paintings (Again)
Last week, Pat Weekley of Clovis, New Mexico wrote Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, about trying to sell art in Clovis. The art league members had conducted an auction with wine and cheese and other goodies on a day with perfect weather. Few people came and several art pieces sold for less than the cost of framing.
Genn’s answer was to note that Taos and Santa Fe are known for fine art. If the folks want it known that there is good art in Clovis, they must make better art. They must make art so good that collectors in their Caddies and Lincolns would come – and bring their own wine and cheese! Many readers gave quite good suggestions also, but the bottom line always was that the artists in Clovis needed to make better art!