fragment of painting by Joseph Zbukvic

We are going to put in some washes, for example the distant mountains, following the rule to start:

1.  from the distance to the foreground and

2.  from the top of the paper to the bottom and

3.  from the side away from your dominant hand to that of your non-dominant hand (right to left for right-handers.)

4. from light to dark (“dark over light”)

Our Day One washes were very wet paint on  a partially flooded, very wet paper.  The consistency  of the wash (actually the “viscosity”) was like tea or water which is a viscose as a liquid can be.   (It is 1 on a scale of viscosity whereas corn syrup is 3000.) We now have to put in some thicker or more viscous washes on a paper of varying degrees of wetness.

Transparent watercolor differs from most other types of painting because the the different types of washes that occur allow the painter to describe different atmosphere and light conditions in a way that is more genuine than in other mediums.

If we look at the above  fragment of a Joseph Zbukvic painting we see a brown reflection on the water portrayed probably with Burnt Sienna paint.  Notice how the levels of dilution and hence the intensity and value of the brown color vary within the reflection.   It has also changed hue from brown to an orange as would happen to Burnt Sienna when diluted.  Also notice that some of the pigment has migrated to the periphery of the area leaving a slightly darker outline.   Above the rower the brown has “feathered.”

Many of the earth colors dilute out to another hue.  Raw Sienna begins as a brown but dilutes to yellow, Burnt Sienna goes from brown to orange,  Burnt Umber also tends to get more red-orange as it is diluted.

The effect of using watercolor in this way would be difficult to do in oils because brush stokes would show and it would be extremely difficult to even think up all the subtle transitions let alone actually paint it. ( I should mention that, if you dilute acrylic paint to water color viscosity, you can sometimes make a painting that can’t be told from watercolor.)  You can’t do this is oil because the oil dries so slowly.

It is traditional to discuss at this point the stages of wetness of the paper and the stages of viscosity of the paint and sometimes the amount of water in the brush.  I think it’s better to focus on the marks themselves that result from these variables. Rather than thinking about how wet the paper is and how fluid the paint is, think about what sort of mark or passage you want to make.

There are two ways to go about getting the right sort of transparent watercolor mark or wash.  The first is to work with varying degrees of wet paper.  The second, which I recommend to less advance and experienced artists, is to always work on dry paper which can be accomplished quickly in the studio with a hair dryer, or you can wait for it to dry.  James Fletcher-Watson, when painting out of doors,  sometimes used to smoke half a pipe between washes.

No-No’s, marks you do not want to make

You want to think about and look for these mistakes to correct them if you can.

backwashes

These occur when the viscosity of the paint in the brush is greater than the wetness of the paper.  The worst occur when the paper looks dry to the eye but is actually damp,  It is natural at this stage for the wetter paint to spread out into the damp paper. That’s why I suggest you work with absolutely dry paper in the beginning.

You must put down one wash or mark and, as soon as it gets the slightest bit dry, leave it alone.  If you missed filling in the area of the pencil mark you have made, it often doesn’t matter.

Once this backwash happens there is nothing you can do about it except wait for it to completely dry and hide it with another wash.   But this better than trying to fix it. Occasionally it doesn’t look so bad in a small patch and can be left alone.  Naturally there are some artists who let this happen in a controlled way, but I don’t recommend you trying it.

bronzing

Paint out of the tube is very thick, so that, when it dries, it is not at all transparent and forms a “scab.”  It has absolutely no transparency or variability.  It might be good for a headlight or tail light of a car, but in general it is a bad idea.  It looks like gouache (body color). You can wet it and blot it sometimes or scrub it with a “scrub brush” used for stenciling  and return the wash to a degree of transparency.  You tend to get this when you try for a deep dark passage.

boring flat passages

Even if you put in a transparent mark, if it is too large, it will be boring. After it dries you can put some clean water down and blot it to create some variability.  If you notice it in time and it is still very wet, you can drop some other color into it in a wet-in-wet fashion.  You can spray it with a spray bottle also.

no sparkles of white

Usually, when you are putting down a wash, if you do not go back and forth over the area, that is run your brush from one side to the other and  back again, there will be some small areas of the paper that do not connect with the brush and stay white.  This is a positive thing at least since Winslow Homer did it.  You should try to make this happen.

THE ONE WAY RULE: Use the biggest brush you can for what you are doing.  PUT YOUR BRUSH DOWN ONLY ONCE AND DO NOT GO BACK OVER THE STROKE.  It’s a one way street.  MAKE THE STROKE DEFINITIVE AND FAST WITH THE BELLY  OF THE BRUSH ON THE PAPER.  HOLD THE BRUSH TOWARD THE BACK END (AWAY FROM THE HAIRS).  (except for very detailed work) NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK OF THE MARK YOU HAVE MADE. WAIT FOR IT TO DRY BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING.

not using the belly of the brush

You want to work with the full brush not like with the tip of a pencil.  You put the brush down so that the belly of the brush touches the paper.  Also try to hold the brush as far up the handle as you feel is comfortable for you.  This is so you do not make a tight line and introduce a little uncertainty into your stroke.

being a “tube painter”

A tube painter never mixes his or her colors but always uses paint right out of the tube.  Unfortunately, when you look at a painting like this, you think, not “that’s a nice painting”, but “that’s Cobalt Blue and Viridian, and there’s Payne’s gray again!” and “Oh, look over there.  The painter has bought some Opera.”  If you watch video of well know watercolorists, you won’t learn much because the camera person just videos them painting, but you will notice that they dip their brush into several paints almost the time.  If you have a show and use tube paints exclusively, all the pictures will look the same.

Some marks to try to make

dry brush.

You use the side of a relatively dry brush, blotted on paper  (see below for brush wetness), and make a fast stroke going only one way hoping that only the tops of the hills in the texture of the paper will be painted.  Obviously rough paper is easy to use for this.

scratching out

You can use your nail, a credit card, or a pocket knife on wet paper to make either a dark mark (on very wet paper) good for indicating boards on the side of a house, for example, or (on a less wet paper) a light mark good for indicating blade of grass.  It takes some practice to know exactly  how much to delay and let the paint get a little less wet to get a white mark.  If you want a dark mark, you can do it right away , but if you are gentle with your scratch, you can try again and again until you can see that you’re going to get a light mark without leaving a dark one.

Sometimes a razor  or the tip of a sharp knife is use to actually scratch the dry paper to make a white line.

If you use a stylus or a ball point pen without ink, you can write your name on dry, unpainted paper so that there is an indentation in the paper, cover it with paint, and wipe it dry.  Paint will stay in the indentations made by the stylus, and your signature will appear in whatever color you use to paint over the indentations and wipe away.

wet-in-wet, charging the wash with another color

If both paints are of the same degree of wetness they will mingle but still maintain the form.

Marks having to do with edges

As most people know there are hard edges and soft edges.  If you work with absolutely dry paper, you get hard edges, but you can make a soft edge by running a brush damped with clear water along the edge to soften it.  When someone is more experienced, he or she can judge the wetness of the paper and the viscosity of the paint to be able to put down a mark that will have soft edges, but this is hard to do, so I recommend starting with modifying a hard-edged mark on dry paper by brushing it will a damp brush.

If you are making a multiple stroke passage, as much as possible put enough paint on the paper to have a bead of water at the lower end of your wash.  When you refill your brush with water and/or paint, you start with the first stroke along the bead, picking it up.  Joseph Zbukvic is adamant about the bead being where good things happen although, as far as I know, he has only mentioned that it is were granulation happens, where particles of paint precipitate out to make a tiny pattern of dots.

more advanced marks

There are some edges one sees only in watercolor which are soft but have spread out slightly.  These have to be made on wet paper and are tough to do.  The basic idea is to have the thickness of the paint matched to the wetness of the paper.  The drier the paper the thicker(drier) the paint.  This is because paper that is not completely dry is very thirsty for more water and will suck up the what water it can from your brush mark, and this will spread out.

 paper wetness

Generally you can divided the wetness of the paper into the follow divisions, although it is a continuum from flooded to completely dry.

 1. You can notice that, after the flooded stage, there is a stage in which there are a lot of reflections because some of the water that was put on is still in the valleys of the paper but the hills are less wet and reflect light.

2. Next there is a stage when the paper looks dull and wet, no reflections.

 3. Next there is a stage when the paper looks dry but it is cool and damp.  This is the most dangerous stage because it is the thirstiest and any mark you make with paint that is the slightest but viscous will blossom into a big area.

One way to check on the wetness of the paper is to touch it.  It will feel cool even if it doesn’t look wet.  It is usually recommend to use the back of your hand so you do not get skin oil on the paper which will repel water.  You can also check the back of the paper because the water can go all the way through.  Bruce McEvoy thinks you can also smell the wetness of paper that looks dry.

The wetness of the paint (it’s viscosity)

YOU MUST ACTIVATE YOUR PAINTS.  THEY CANNOT BE DRY BRICKS IN YOUR PANS THAT YOU SCRUB  TO GET PAINT ON YOUR BRUSH.  IF YOU SCRUB TO GET PAINT, YOU ARE USING VERY DILUTE PAINT, THE VISCOSITY OF TEA, ALL THE TIME.

THE GOAL IS TO BE ABLE TO STICK THE TIP OF A BRUSH INTO THE PAINT WITHOUT THE TIP BENDING.  (Scrubbing will wear the tip off your brushes.)   If you paint frequently, you can squirt some water into your palette from a eye dropper daily or more even when you are not painting.  That way the paint does not get bone dry.  If not, you have to give the paint some time to become liquid again, count on a half an you from squirting water to painting.

The various viscosities of paint.

The viscosity of the paint will determine how it will flow.  The problem is finding your own way of judging this ability to flow.  I have two ways below.

One way to judge viscosity of paint

Very wet paint is the consistency of tea and cannot hold enough pigment to have a high chroma, intensity of color.  It’s often used in the sky and in the distance.

Other distinctions of the wetness of paint, which of course is actually a continuum,  have been described by matching them to the consistency of well know fluids like coffee, milk, cream, and butter.  Butter is the consistency of paint just out of the tube and has very little use.

Different paint viscosities will start to flow down a tilted palette at different degrees of tilt and drip off the brush at different speeds. But I personally do not find this flow or drip test useful. Although viscosity, in fact, is often measured by how fast it flows through a small hole in the bottom of a cup.

The two most important distinctions are between the thicker paint, a creamy drop and a milky drop.  A drop of paint that has not started to flow down the palette will  have a different look depending on its viscosity.  I find I can easily see that a creamy drop of paint  on a tilted palette will keep it’s round look whereas a milky drop will bulge on the lower side getting ready, so to speak, to break loose and flow down the palette.  What I find the best test is, when you shake the palette from side to side,  a creamy drop will not move whereas a milky drop will wiggle.

another way to judge the viscosity of your paint

Actually it’s a minority of watercolor books that discuss the viscosity of paint as I have done above.  Most just don’t mention it.  They don’t mention this way either, but another way is to have a scrap of watercolor paper to try your wash out first.  When picking up paint, mix it on the palette with or without additional clear water and then make a mark on the scrap paper, You will get an idea of how viscose the paint its color. Then paint with it.  The hue will remain the same at all dilutions but  the value and intensity will differ.  Below is some Raw Sienna with different amounts of water in it.  I think it’s pretty easy to see differences.   And really what you are after is what it looks like not its viscosity.  I was recently watching a video of James Fletcher-Watson in his studio and noticed that he checked his paint on a scrap of paper very often.  (Of course, there was no discussion.  In most videos there is just the camera man and the artist  working away who is concentrating too hard to say much.)

the water in the brush

It is important to fill your water container high enough so you can see how far you have dipped your brush into it.  That way you can vary the amount of water that it takes up.  Almost everyone take the first drop off either by flicking the brush and getting drops all over the floor or blotting it on paper, sometimes on a roll of toilet paper with the cardboard tube removed and squashed down a bit.

You also can take water out of a brush by blotting it with paper at the base of the hairs where they meet the metal ferrule or heel of the brush.

The take-home message is, in the beginning, to work on dry paper and use a piece of scrap to check the strength of the paint (the viscosity) in your brush.

Instead of completing a painting a day as all the other courses I know of do, we are going to break up the process so that we bring all of paintings to completion as the course goes on.  As I have pointed out, most of these paintings will be the same motif because this is an exercise and repetition will lead to better technique.

Basically what we are going to do on the first day is lay down the first wash(s) that covers the paper, the “foundation wash”.  We are going to lay it down in one fell swoop and leave it alone.  We will either talk while it dries or start another, and another, and another getting more complicated as we go along.

We are going to use all these sheets in the following days for the next step in the paintings beyond the foundation wash.

If your curious, we’ll more or less follow Ian  King’s seven stages of a panting (see reference in previous post), combining a few to fit the course time.

The basic rule is you start with what is furthest from you in space and highest on your paper (the sky usually) and work toward you and down to the immediate foreground.  

Ina King’s stages are:

1. sky
2. background
3. foreground
4. main subject
5. trees  (I’m adding water, buildings)
6. details  (figures, animals, lampposts, fences, brick & stone walls etc.)
7. shadows

before getting to the classroom 

Everyday begins with activating your paints Preferably before you get to class.  You do not want to scrub the dry paints to get some paint on your brush or you will wear your brushes down quickly and you won’t get enough paint to make a “juicy” wash. I use an eye dropper.    It can take a half an hour if you want to get the paints to the point that you can dip the point of your brush in them, but even ten minutes makes a difference.

On the other hand, some professionals top off what’s left in the palette with tube paint when they are ready to paint and that really would be the best, but you have to judge how much you are going to use or you are going to waste a lot of paint.

After you activate your paints at home if you can hold your palette flat as you transport it, it’s helpful because you can activate the paint way ahead of time.  There are bags specifically for transporting watercolor gear that allow for this by having a flat bottom.  Here’s one:

the pencil marks

Before we put in the washes, we are going to make a pencil mark for the horizon and for a few primitive shapes we are going to not paint at all, leaving them dry paper in what is called “reserving the white”.   In any watercolor you are going to make, you have to first do a drawing no matter how little and second figure out where you are not going to paint.

Everyone has a favorite type of pencil, but in this case it is important not to make an indentation in the paper with a very hard pencil.  The indentation will have pooled paint in it and it is hard to erase.  Most people use a pencil on the B side of the spectrum like a 2B.  Even so, you want to go lightly so that you can erase without tearing up the paper because it will become a blotter.  As far as erasers go, you can’t use the red erasers  on the end of ordinary pencils.  They simply don’t work.  The white erasers are the best.  Here’s a link to a discussion of erasers here.

The first line is the horizon or eye line.  We will talk a bit about where to place it and whether to use one pencil mark across the whole picture or break it up as well as what type of pencil you prefer (pencil marks are allowed to show in watercolor:  Winslow Homer used them for boat rigging for example.  They also erase completely after washes are put in.)  Of course there are times when you do not want a distinct horizon line.

Then we make a square  (which we are going to reserve the white on/in) sitting on the horizon for the front of a building with the light hitting it or, perhaps, draw in the whole building in the simplest way, but the rest of the building will be covered with washes.  This is a John Hoar idea.

Then a few shapes for rocks in the foreground will be reserved on the other side from the house which we will also leave dry so we have to delineate them.

Over the course of the day we will place these form around the paper so that we have to be alert to them to keep them untouched.  It’s harder than you think to see where you are going as you are quickly making a wash with a big brush.  It’s difficult to keep track  and avoid a shape which you will only see out of the corner of your eye.  If you do your wash slow enough, you can put a penciled “W” for white which you might see and remember in more complicated paintings.

the first (in this case) sky wash

In a general way it’s a good practice at the outset to run one or two half-washes over the entire sheet of paper on which you are working whether there a sky in the picture or not. Usually one strives for the dominant mid-tone (not hue) “reserving the white” of the paper in some places.  This was the procedure made popular by  Carolus-Duran (in oil) whose pupil, John Singer Sargent also used and taught it to his students.  Carolus-Duran, who was French, called it the “demi-teinte generale .”

Once that was established and the first wash(es) are completely dry,  it makes it easier for you to figure  how small the variations from this first wash are  needed to pin down the other values to get “absolute tonal precision”.  You can’t actual reproduce the values in nature because the range is far greater than the range of values possible with paint.   But you can make the values relatively to each other the same as in nature, and that seems sufficient for the viewer to feel the painting represents the scene.  This is probably because we can only make relative judgements about value.  In other words the sky look light although it is no where as light as a real sky.

You work up and down in tone from these initial washes.  However, you only have one more washes that can go over your initial wash, one free over wash.  After that you will lift the color from the bottom wash and things will get muddy.  You can, of course, lift off places in your washes where you want to go up in value (lighter).  This is an important difference between a good watercolor and one that look amateurish.

Sometimes you might want to run the sky wash, particularly if it is gray, all the way down your paper to have a unifying wash under everything else which might be slightly damp softening edges.  Sometimes a term from oil painting is applied to this called “painting into the soup”  as James Fletcher-Watson called it, the soup in this case being the first overall wash perhaps still slightly damp.  It’s somewhat inaccurate since “painting into the soup” was the derogatory term impressionist used for the classical oil technique of having a lot of medium on the canvas with an unsaturated hue, a “dead” color, into which one painted.  One’s brush moved very smoothly in this “soup”.

The sky wash is our “first wash” although it will be a little too light to please Carolus-Duran.  If we were planning a very busy foreground we would have a simple sky and visa versa.

• Also, I don’t know where this fits in, but you shouldn’t look at the sky for too long or your tonal judgement will be thrown off.  You are looking at the light source sort of like looking at a light fixture, and your pupils are going to contract and your retina is going to get washed out.  The same is probably true of hues as well.  The longer you look the more the visual system is going to simplify and lump things together.  Your first glance is your best reference.

Nothing can be more important than this wash.  A good sky makes a painting, yet it requires very little from you.  The watercolor “paints itself “is the way it’s said.  In the extreme this is a type of watercolor technique called “experimental watercolor.”  Nita Engle is the master of this.  See here for her book.  There are many derivative UTube videos.  Just Google “experimental watercolor” if you’re interested.  The basic idea is an extreme controlled wash.  The paper is literally flooded with water.  This means that it has to be stretched tight as a drum with stables and glued tape.  It works well with full sheets  of paper, but with, say, half imperial size paper a less extreme method like the one proposed here does not require preparation.

It’s like a lot of things in life:  you can’t make it happen, but you can set up the context that allows it to happen.  The more you try to make it happen under voluntary control, the less it will happen. A lot of bodily functions work this way, for example sleep.  You do not consciously will yourself to sleep like turning off a switch, but you set the stage and it happens.  So just like falling sleep is essential and you can clutch up trying to sleep and fail to do so, so are controlled washes (as Trevor Chamberlain calls them) you can tighten up and not be able to let them happen.

Above all we are going to try to avoid a formulaic sky.  Your sky, although a controlled wash, should be inspired by a real sky that you’re seeing or have seen.

The process we are going to use for the first sky wash is typical of modern English impressionists.  First we slosh on some clear water, skipping areas of the sky which we leave dry.  When we then put in the first wash, the paint in the wet part is soft edged and where the brush goes over the dry paper there are hard edges.  Some of the white is left white (reserved).  Well start with a blue sky in parts and then wash in another color which as been described as a peachy color or sometimes a milky red.  It is made by mixing raw sienna and English red.  So some of the sky is going to be blue, part of the clouds are going to be this peachy color with some white reserved.

Below is a hasty example.  It’s crude as all first washes can be.  It probably took about 30 seconds to compete.  I put in the foreground (raw sienna, which is transparent, in the back and yellow ochre, which is more opaque and has more intensity, in the front) because it’s hard to judge with white paper below it.  There will be a “background” on the horizon on both sides of the house (for example, a row of low blue mountains, but that’s for another day when we do that.  We will have to make a house out of the square, but by running the sky all around the house we assure ourselves that the rest of the house will be in the shade. (I forgot to put in some reserved areas for rocks in the front in my haste to just get something quickly done.)  I let the sky color come down over the horizon in case we want to have some water in the distance.  It’s sometimes good to run the sky color all the way down because  it integrates the picture.   You can see that the paper “cockled” that is got wavy a bit, but when dry it will straighten out.

here's what it looks like wet. It will dry lighter

I wanted to show it to you wet and dry, so you get an idea of how much lighter a wash becomes.  Will keep doing this sort of thing varying the colors.  We can make a gray sky with just a little blue showing through, etc.  But I am not going to go through all of that here.  Not all of them will be “keepers” and this one might not be, but you cannot tell until you have put more into the picture.

here is is dry and flat but still a little too much chroma in the photot:

here it is with the house drawn in:

and here it is with the roof painted, the background put in, and some trees around the house to give you an idea of how the whole picture develops in other sessions and where we are going. I don’t know how the camera foreground got so dark.  It’s really the same color as the above pictures.

Actually I think it says something of value.  The camera expects high chroma  (intensity)  c0lors and programs it.  The beauty of watercolors of this sort is that we have subtler shades and colors that more reflect the real world.  So we can complete with the camera in this way.  If people want a snapshot of a beautiful scene they should use a camera, but they want a beautiful painting, they should make a watercolor.

Now what we’ll do is tack everyone first effort on a wall and talk about it and what we might do differently.

FINAL COUPLE OF PAINTINGS

For a change we are going to reverse the sky-foreground proportion and have a small insignificant one color sky, a small house on the eye line, and a huge foreground.  Instead of white clouds we are going to have white patches of snow and instead of gray or peachy clouds we are going to have green, brown and yellow grasses.  We will use the same technique of partially  flooding the paper.  We will have more washes over washes after letting each one dry than in a sky.   Will scrape out some grass and fiddle with it a lot.  We have to make it interesting with some hard edges, some soft edges, and some ghostly washes.  What we are going to wind up with is a painting like Philip Jameson or Wyeth.

This is it for my description of the first day.  It’s doable don’t you think?  If enough interest is shown, I’ll continue with some more “days.”  Thanks for looking.

x

on English Impressionist Watercolor Landscapes

English impressionist watercolor artists focus on capturing the light and simplifying shapes.  They  “indicate” but do not “state”.  They let the viewer put the details into the painting.  For a  review of some modern masters see here:

I think there has to be two phases of instruction:  the first is about making a basic watercolor and the second (to come later) is about making a more atmospheric one of mostly “controlled” washes.

The problem with people who sell equipment for watercolorists and the people who teach courses for watercolorists is that they try to modify oil painting equipment (hence pochade boxes instead of tin palettes) and courses in oil painting studios where the only water that is going to be used is at the end of the session to clean the brushes.  This post attempts to change that approach at least theoretically.

the rationale

Developing the skills to be proficient in watercolor is no different from developing skills in music or sports.  It requires breaking down complex skills into their component parts and practicing them in a repeated, disciplined way that allows you to see when you get it right and when you don’t.  The problem with doing so in watercolor is that there are no notions of how to practice in this way. This course suggests a way for doing so.

Why anyone thinks he or she can become moderately good at watercolor without a lot of practice is beyond me. Just as a pianist works on  “Hanon exercises”, 60 such exercises “for the acquirement of Agility, Independence, Strength, and Perfect Evenness”, in this course a way of doing so in watercolor is demonstrated for somewhat the same goals.  However, this exercise is much easier than Hanon exercises and suitable for a beginner as well as someone more advanced who would like develop a discipline practice.

In fact, advanced artists practice all the time.   That’s what “sketches” are.  Many watercolorists, for example, when they haven’t anything in mind to paint, will grab a piece of paper and sketch in a sky or a tree to “warm up.”

I have a whole post on the subject of practice here.

overview

We work over and over again with an all-purpose simple scene which has everything one is likely to encounter in a landscape: a sky, a house, some trees, rocks and bushes (and later some figures, water. etc) .  It is similar to a scene painted by John Hoar in his first video.

The scene can fall into the category, often mentioned by watercolorist, of “making something out of nothing.”   Camille Pissarro wrote in 1893, :”Blessed are they that see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”  That’s what we want to do.

This “making something out of nothing” is an important added benefit as we focus on making the washes the way we want them, the composition, etc without trying for a dazzling center of interest.  It’s an important change of attitude toward art making particularly suited to watercolors.

In other words: It’s how we paint not what we paint.

the camera makes the foreground to much like the clouds

But the main point is that it is possible to practice it at home with infinite variations until our mental and manual skills begin to shape up.  The very simplicity of the scene is instructive in itself since simplifying naturally complex landscapes is one of the goals of this kind of art-making.  Although the scene itself is simple there are many decisions and judgments at each step, really too many to improvise as one goes along, which we shall discuss in this course as they come up, for example where to place the horizon line or the size of the house and the adage that you never put a tree in a painting without its having some work to do.  Repeated exercise helps these thoughts to pop up automatically as you paint.

One of the advantages of the scene we use is that it doesn’t require any expertise in drawing, which is ultimately essential to more complex landscapes, but by sidestepping drawing, the emphasis can be placed on compositional decisions and paint handling techniques.  This is the reason that we are not using a Winslow Homer painting as a starting point.  His work always has a beautifully drawn center of interest behind which is a loose, abstract watercolor.  This center of interest drawing would both require too much time to really do well and require advanced drawing skills.

We also do not soak the paper beforehand and mount it to a support with tape, so that reduces the time needed for preparation because we are going to use a lot of paper.  Since nothing of what we produce is going to be hung, we can stick pushpins in it, tape it down, staple it to a board — whatever we want.

The physical setup of the classroom

There would be four essential requirements specific to watercolor besides, of course, the usual individual tables, good light, etc.  This equipment in many ways takes the place of an exotic locale in which to try to learn watercolor:

1. an overhead demonstration mirror at the front.

I will paint along with you and make comments as I go along.

2.  an outlet at every table for a hair drier.

Washes must be absolutely dry before another one is put over it, so there are pauses for this to happen.  This is good because demonstrations and crits can take place during these periods but, it is essential to speed this process up at times because drying time varies with the weather, and that’s what the drier is for.

3.  Adequate water supply.

Art studios and classrooms often have the water supply pretty far away, watercolorists have to be able to refresh their water often and conveniently not trudge upstairs to the bathroom.

I’ve been thinking that a chemistry lab in a school might be a better place for watercolor than an art studio!

4.  A means of showing sample watercolors from seminal watercolorists in high definition such as a computer, projector, and screen.

materials for the student to bring

You will need a lot of good watercolor paper.  Bring anything you have, but, if you’re going to buy paper,  Bockingford  140 lb (white not tinted) is probably the cheapest to start with.  It is a wood chip based paper and perfectly acceptable to watercolorists (neutral pH and archival).  It doesn’t absorb paint as fast as cotton fiber paint (there isn’t any linen fiber paper left), and this can be an advantage.  Your washes stay on top longer and you can scrub passages off easier than with cotton based paper.  If you’re going to buy  paper, buy it in imperial sheet size and for some of the sheets, cut or  fold it a few times and tear it into quarters.  It’s a good idea to have both rough and cold press (called”not”  in England) and maybe some slightly warm tinted paper (“oatmeal” color.)  If you buy imperial sheets, you can probably mix and match.

Bring the biggest and best brushes you can afford particularly as you work on progressively larger paper sizes   (Rosemary’s Brushes in England has the best buys and will send them to the US.  It may take two weeks to get them.), a scrub brush (like those for stencils), a palette with deep wells for wet washes (e.g. plastic “muffin tins” palettes) and some flat surfaces for stiffer paint, and a minimum number of artist grade watercolor paints.

Every watercolor artist of renown suggests some sort of brush.  Neville Chamberlain uses a shaving brush!  Edward Wesson made popular the mob brush which used to be used for French varnishing until he made it popular.   I don’t think the brush will make you a painter.   I use a mop brush, a large pointing filbert (which can be used flat, on its side, and with its point),  and a rigger or, better still, a dagger liner.  The latter two brushes I picked the idea up from John Hoar.

On the left is a sword liner, then a mop, and finally a pointing filbert (all from Rosemary’s Brushes).

For paints I would suggest a “multiple primary palette”:  all the yellows , all the reds, and all the blues you have hanging around  and burnt umber (as a convenience in mixing grays).  We will mix the secondaries (e.g. green) and tertiary colors.

Earth colors are best for  our purposes because, when they are in washes of varying amounts of water, they suggest varying states of the light.    Watercolor is unsurpassed at rendering the nuances of atmosphere and the changes effect in local color by the intervening air.   For example, if you get raw sienna get one that does not have an ordinary yellow pigment mixed in with it.  If you do, when you make a long mark the hue will change from the sienna yellow to the yellow that’s been added, and there won’t be that lovely change in value that are associated with changing atmospheric conditions, atmospheric perspective, subtle reflected light, etc.  Of course, you will eventually want to keep some “eye candy” type paints “up your sleeve (as Tevor Chamberlain said) with high saturation colors like Winslow Homer’s use of vermillion, but this is a frill.

If you don’t have any paints at all:

get the following yellows:  raw sienna, cadmium or arylide yellow,  and yellow ochre.

the following blues:  ultramarine blue, pthalo blue RS (rs= “red shade”), and cobalt blue

The following reds:  burnt sienna, light red (Winsor Newton) or Indian Red, or another earth red.

and burnt umber.  While you’re at it, thrown in some Payne’s gray for cloudy skies.

You will need a cheap hair drier so we don’t have to wait forever for a wash to dry.

You need some paper towels and/or a toilet paper roll with the cardboard tube removed to blot your brushes.

The textbook for the class is Ian King’s Watercolour Tips available on Amazon

here.  He really was an art teacher and it shows in his approach.

If you need a palette i suggest looking at this one at Ken Bromley (also English)  here.

You’ll need a pencil (there are mixed opinions about whether it should be 6B or HB), a “real” eraser such as a Pilot foam eraser, and a hand-held pencil sharpener such as the Kum long point (which has two holes, one to shave the wood and another to sharpen the lead.  Much better than anything else.

See here for the next installment.

As a rule someone who has difficult with painting in any medium is not prepared to believe that the real trouble is ignorance of drawing and composition.  (William Herring)

A well-composed painting is half done. (Bonnard)

Looking for something to paint

The composition problem begins with finding something to paint.  A landscape painter carries equipment outside and, if not careful, can wind up wandering around taking a long time trying to find something worth painting.   This is a classical mistake that many of us have made:  tiring ourselves out before we even begin painting, lugging heavy equipment around, looking for the perfect motif when, in fact, there are no paintings out there.  We are acting like tourists not artists. Paintings  are “constructed.” They are in our heads.

What I mean by paintings are all in our head is that the task of finding something to paint is often misinterpreted to mean finding a subject or object of significance to the imagined viewer of the finished painting, perhaps a boat, a bird, or even a group of figures.  Worse, well meaning friends will point out “interesting” subjects, but they are interesting in the wrong way.

I recently saw a suite of photographs from a safari in Africa.  Most of them were of animals:  a snake crossing the road, a lion yawning, etc.  But a few were “scenes” that one could paint.  One, for example, that caught my eye was of an elephant ambling down the road away from the camera.  (It’s not because of the classical compositional cliche of the road “entering the picture” as I ranted about in the first post on composition.)   The point is it isn’t just a picture of an object or animal.

Contrast the above photo with this one:

One way to understand in what way something pointed out to us as interesting is wrong for a painting is to consider how John Singer Sargent was taught.  He was taught painting by Carolus-Duran in a group setting.  Carolus_Duran would have the group march around the studio and stop at a certain random point, much like musical chairs, and then paint what ever was before them.  This stood Sargent in good stead often.   When delayed while traveling, he would take his painting equipment, just march off a few paces, and begin to paint what was before him.  Carolus-Duran understood that the “painting” is not out there to find.  One constructs it.

What Sargent was taught to look for by this musical chairs exercise was four things:

1.   Large interesting shapes

2.  Sharp contrasts of value

3.  Sharp contrasts of color intensity: jewel like sparkle of a hue (high intensity) against grayed flat hues.

4. Sharp contracts of warm and cool colors of the same or close hues often described as “vibrating” and often in multiple small passages.

It is not the thing you are painting that makes a work of art but how well you design and paint it.  Someone may commission you to paint her new swimming pool (as happened to a friend of mine) and think in terms of the object alone, but in all likelihood she will not like the resulting painting unless you think in different terms than she does – in terms of the design

  I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things;

         to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings. (Balthus)

As far as I know only John Singer Sargent ever gave a name to what this something else is called.  He called it “the effect”.   This is an edge in which there is a strong contrast that draws the eye.  For example, he often found a strong value contrast in portraits between the side of the nose and the eye.  It draws the viewer’s eye.

However, There are three aspects of contrast in the subject for which we must look:

Value (light against dark)

Intensity (rich color against grayed color)

Warm against cool

First, let’s look at shapes

 It’s best to look for large forms.  One way to do this is to zoom in, to start the painting 30 feet from where you are.  This was Corot’s advice, I believe.

Once you have some forms in mind, they have to be arranged.  One of the most general and best rules is that there should be no even intervals of objects (and, values, hues, etc. which we will discuss below.)    This means that you must move things, change their size so that there are uneven intervals. Usually there should be considerably more of one size shape than the other.   Greg Albert in the book  The Simple Secret to Better Painting: How to Immediately Improve Your Work with the One Rule of Composition (May 7, 2003) put it this way:  the distribution of shapes should be “mostly, some, and a little bit”of big, medium, and small shapes.  The same distribution should occur with the intervals between them.

This means, of course, that one must take some artistic license to modify what is before you to make a good painting, a good composition. It also means that you can turn around and add something that isn’t in the view right in front of you.  It’s called “Stealing” by some people.

Some degree of exaggeration and simplification is allowable and often necessary.

Avoiding a “pasted on “ look

 This is very important, but there’s not much to say.  Shapes must be connected to each other or the background otherwise they look like they are pasted on.   The easiest way to do this is to connect the shadows.  You can also lose edges to make a shape blend into the background or have some overlap.  Always check to see if a shape looks “pasted on.”

The rabbit rule (Suzi Short)

If a horizontal passage come up to a vertical edge, it should come out the other side.

composition is really preparation

If you were building something in wood, let’s say a table, you wouldn’t just grab a piece of wood and start cutting.  You would plan ahead.  You would start by making a little sketch and then follow that with a better drawing with measurements.  Even when cutting wood the adage is measure twice, cut once.    So why is it that some people think they should just start by putting paint on paper without any preparation?  Actually I think some of the blame lies with the artists who make it appear as if that’s what they do.  It’s a bit of a parlor trick.   Someone grabs some art materials and knocks off a decent piece of  work in 15 to 20 minutes like the people in the park drawing portraits.  It’s sometimes said that it takes 20 years and then 20 minutes to do such a thing   But as Ron Ranson points out, there are thousands of artists who can do that sort of thing and it isn’t art.  It’s like the first step, getting adept with the materials. Sometimes it’s called illustration.   You have to go to the next stage to make a sincere, heart -elt piece of art.  And that requires preparation.  You have to want to communicate something about what you are looking at.

Using this contraption we can actually learn where someone looks when shown a painting.  It works by bouncing a light off the eyeball which gives us an idea of where the subject is looking and superimposing this information on a video that is being taken at the same time of the painting at which the subject is looking.  (The video lens is attached to the eyeglasses.)  The result is a graphic of the painting with lines or dots on it where the eye was focusing.

We now know without a doubt that the eye does not walk into a painting and follow that road.  The eye doesn’t move like a person.  That’s not surprising, if you think about it, because the eye doesn’t have legs.  What actually happens is that our eyes jump all over the picture in quick, jerky movements. See here for a U-Tube video that demonstrates this.

Some of what seems to be going on when someone looks at a landscape is quite primitive.  We look for snakes under the rocks and predators behind the trees.  So that kinda of puts an end to the “lead the eye into the painting” myth which ranks up there with “if you mix too many paints you’ll get mud” (you get gray) and that “all the painter needs is the three primary colors” which I have railed against in this blog.

As far as keeping the “eye” in the painting, one strategy is to have some puzzling narrative going on.  That’s Eric Fischl’s strategy.  If you check out his painting, you will often be puzzled about what the people are doing.  That keeps you looking at the painting particularly since there are often fairly overt erotic overtones.  Your eye jumps around, as I have already pointed out, doing its thing, while you’re trying to make some sense of the narrative which, of course, you can’t.

However, I don’t buy this idea that you must keep the person looking at the painting.  The visual system gets things very rapidly.  In museums it is often lamented that people only spend on average 8 seconds looking at a painting, and these are masterpieces!  They can’t all be philistines.   On the other hand, there are paintings which you can never get tired of  looking at.  As you do so, you see more and more.  In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Lehman Wing they have ordinary chairs that you can move around and sit and look at some impressionist paintings.  It doesn’t seem to require leading the eye into the painting, but more having a seat!

More importantly we are not in the guide business, neither for eyes nor people, nor are we in the business of keeping someone looking at the painting for whatever reason.  We are in the business of making paintings that other people hopefully find beautiful (or “sublime”), and want to own.  The painting should look good immediately and keep on looking good over time.  However, there is a opinion that no painting should remain on the walls for a long period of time.  One should have a rotating collection and “curate” his own space by changing what he or she puts on the walls, but that’s a modification that doesn’t negate that what we are looking to create is beauty.

But first, if we’re trying to make something beautiful,  let’s define what we mean by “beauty”.  I prefer behavioral terms.  Beauty creates a disposition to act in the person experiencing it to do one or all of three things:

A. protect and preserve what is felt to be beautiful or sublime.   You would fish something out of the garbage and prevent it from being thrown out if you thought it was beautiful.  You would stop someone from damaging beautiful painting in the museum.

B.  Take home what you found beautiful or sublime so that you could continue to look at it, for example, a beautiful rock from the beach.   You would want to own something you thought was beautiful if it were within your means.

C. On seeing something beautiful or sublime you would be inspired to make something similar if you could (to reproduce it.).  That’s maybe why the Metropolitan Museum of Art very perceptively always seems to have art-making sets (albeit expensive, bad ones)  on the way out of its special exhibit.   There must be enough naive people exiting the exhibits to be inspired to try to paint and purchase equipment to do so at the museum rather than an art supply store.

Now what is beautiful to which you are responding is often not the painting itself but what is being depicted by the painting.  Can there be a beautiful painting of something extremely ugly, revolting or horrible?  Would you fish this painting out of the garbage, would you want to hang it in your living room, and would you want to paint similar paintings?  Does someone purchase a sunset painting because the painting itself is beautiful or is it the sunset itself (albeit captured successfully by the artist?)   There is a kind of second hand beauty in the painting if it’s representational.

Of course, there can be many reasons for buying a painting other then its intrinsic beauty.  which I am not going to discuss here.   There are people buying paintings for investment purposes or to impress their guests.  In the latter case the painting must be instantly readable, preferably by an easily recognizable artist, and (as the New York Times put it) “scream expensive.”    This has nothing to do with composition, of course, and everything to do with marketing. This is a separate  People also collect art to hang out in the art scene.

Composition versus design

I would start with considering Greg Albert’s point that no two intervals of anything should be equal (see his book here.)  In The Simple Secret to Better Painting he emphasizes that no two trees should be the same size, no two areas of color should be the same size, no areas of tone should be the same size, etc.  The picture should not be divided in half by the horizon or vertically.  This is a basic foundation of composition.  There is probably a neurological reason.  Animals including us are always alert to possible danger.  One of those dangers is a trap or a predator.  Any unnatural “composition” of things in the environment reads as artificial and possible created to deceive.

viewfinders

So you’ve come to a place to paint.  Most painters make a square shape with the index finger and thumb of both hands to view the scene before them.  It’s usually billed as helpful for composition, but it fact it is more helpful for drawing.  You get an idea of where on the canvas something is placed because the borders created by your fingers and be used as substitutes for the sides of your support.  It takes a bit of remembering.

There are four other sorts of view finding tools:

1.  There is the Claude mirror see here.  This was a convex, grayed mirror very popular with tourists during the Romantic Era.  It was used by turning your back to the scene.  It’s just an interesting historical anecdote, but the reducing lens and the graying is worth noting.  I’ve tried to paint with it, but I found it disconcerting to turn my back to the scene and depend on such a small image.

2.  There are reducing lenses.   Probably more useful for someone at a desk who doesn’t want to be bothered to get up, hang up his work and walk away to get an overall impression.  But it is also useful in the field because, to follow Corot’s dictum, the painting should start 30 feet from the artist.

3.  There are viewfinders that simply replace the use of fingers mentioned above.   They can be configured to have the opening resemble the shape of the support you are using.   Some of them have grids that can be used to place objects on the support.  Some have grayscales and complements.  Others have the capacity to have a red filter which is supposed to make it easier to see values.  An old slide holder can be used as well.

4.  Then there is a newer version of the viewfinder which has both the opening of the regular viewfinder and a reducing lens that can be flipped up.

The problem with viewfinders is that we actually don’t want to make an exact replica of what is before us.   It only crops.  It doesn’t “design”.  Composition is not restricted to cropping.  I, myself, do not find any of the viewfinders better than making a rectangle with my fingers.  The reducing lens in the field can be informative particularly if the subject is close.  It pushes it out in space which usually makes a better landscape.

There is a quote from Stapleman Kearns on the subject:

“Well, the problem is this……. Cropping may be composition, but it is not design. Simply cutting a window out of nature and copying that, is the lowest form of composition as it doesn’t include deliberate arrangement of the shapes and elements of a painting. The literal and exact representation of nature before you is a “must have” skill for the landscape painter. But it is not the highest form of art. It is journalism, not poetry. Fine landscape painters design their paintings. They arrange the elements and shapes within that picture into an artistic presentation. The artist who literally copies nature before him is going to have his lunch eaten by the artist who can design a picture, rather than having it imposed on him by the happenstance arrangement of the shapes as they naturally occur before them. A camera can crop, it takes human decision making to arrange, and an artist to arrange beautifully.”

Actually Degas using cropping in rather a radical way from a design point of view.  In some of his ballet dancing picture there can be a leg jutting into the picture doing a kick of some sort with no image of the person to whom it belongs.  Photographs do that sort of thing naturally.   I just recently designed a landscape in which, just for fun, everything human or manmade is cropped (cars, people, etc.) by the sides and top and bottom of the support.  I think it works.

more to come: see composition 2 here

If you happen to run into Spanish watercolorists, you frequently see them with this palette.  The wells can hold a full tube of paint.  If you paint big with big brushes like I sometimes do, this is helpful.  It has a thumb holder on the other side. I should mention that it is made out of thicker metal than what we are used to and is heavier.  I don’t have any trouble holding it in my hand, but from a design point of view, it should be made of lighter metal.   It is also made of metal that will eventually rust.  Many people seem interested in it, but unfortunately it is unavailable outside of Spain.

It appears to be made in Barcelona by one company that does not sell to the public, and it is sold by another company in Barcelona that does not have an international internet business.  It is best to e-mail them in Spanish  and translate their Spanish replies(use google translate). See here for the mention of the palette on the store’s internet site.  I don’t think you can order one through it, but you can get the price in Euros.

I was able to get one after an extensive e-mail correspondence.  It was hard to give them my credit card number and for shipping I had to wire Euros to their bank.  First they wanted to send it via a next-day (in Europe) Spanish package service like FedEx which would cost $75 (US), but I eventually prevailed on Mireia Garcia, who was very nice, to use regular mail.

The name of the store  (not manufacturer) is VICENÇ PIERA <info@vpiera.com>.  I would write to Mireia Garcia there who, after all, has done this once before.  (VICENÇ PIERA, perhaps coincidentally, was a famous Spanish soccer player, now dead.)  Be very clear about your name and address, but mostly your name since Spanish name conventions are very different than ours.

Here’s the box it comes in with the manufacturer’s name (“Artist”).  They recommend getting it from Vicenc Piera.

What we really need is for some art supplier here to import it.  I wrote to Cheap Joe’s, but I’m sure the e-mail got lost in a miscellaneous pile.

Good luck, if you try at get one.   If you do try, please leave a comment since many people view this post and could benefit from your experience.  Thanks.

Homer's studio/home Prout's Neck, Maine

I’ve done a post on Homer’s brushes here and his paper here and his paint here and here and I’ve posted a picture of his tin palette here , so why not do something about his studio.  Fortunately one of the people who left a comment (Louis Mezian) mentioned that he had visited Prout’s Neck and actually got into the studio and took pictures.  He has been kind enough to scan them and allow them to be posted here with his comments.

The background of the studio

Winslow Homer  settled on the coast of Maine in 1884 on some land adjacent to his father’s summer home at Prout’s Neck in Scarborough, Maine. He moved his father’s carriage house about 150 feet along the coast and retained architect John Calvin Stevens to modify the former stables into his studio and residence. Until his death in 1910,  he worked there when he wasn’t traveling, for example to the Bahamas.

The Portland Museum of Art purchased Winslow Homer’s Studio in January of 2006 and retained Mills Whitaker Architects in early 2007 to begin planning an restoration to restore the building to the time of Homer’s life (not, of course, to what it was like when it was a stable. The facility will be used for an artist/scholar-inresidence program, for special events hosted by the Museum Director and for high school art classes.

Thus challenged I asked at the information desk to whom I should write.  This led to an e-mail correspondence with the curator of American Art who said that they did indeed have a great collection at the Met and that I was eminently qualified to look at them (!).  However, she was very apologetic that, because of the construction associated with building a new American Wing, there was no space for me to do so.  When I asked, she gave me a name at the Brooklyn Museum to whom I immediately sent an e-mail.   This, in turn led to an appointment with Karen Sherry, the assistant curator of American Art in the Brooklyn Museum, to see Homer’s work.

Ms. Sherry could not have been nicer or more professional.  She said that there was going to be a Sargent show in 2013 and therefore all the Sargents they had were being kept in the dark at present because of the light exposure which they will sustain during the show.  However, no such restrictions applied to the Homers.  She e-mailed me an illustrated list of the 24 Homers they have from which I chose three although she did not restrict the number. (I had been given only an hour to view them.)  My strategy was to pick fairly late ones in which Homer’s style had evolved from his early more or less English style.  The three ones I choose were the following:

Road in Bermuda

In The Jungle, Florida

End of Portage

The way it worked was that they were wrapped in translucent paper and laid on a table.  I was not allowed to touch them, but Karen Sherry was there to unwrap and move them for me, and we chatted as I looked.

Before I saw them I was a little uncertain what benefit I would get from seeing the originals over seeing reproductions, but afterwards I had no doubts.

The most prominent observation, which I think is only possible from the originals, was how heavily the paint was applied in a lot of places.   For the most part there was layer after layer of paint in the fairly prominent dark passages.  Most of the passages were not transparent at all.  Homer clearly put down large area of the lightest paint such as yellow or greenish yellow, waited for them to dry, and then applied another darker layer over that, and repeated the process over and over again.  For the most part the “glazes” were never completely over the layer below them.  There were little” windows” left through which to see the paint below.   There was some use of a damp brush to take off some of the top layer for things like tree branches.  However, the glaze itself was almost never transparent .    A lot of areas were heavily worked over, glazes, scrapes, lifting off, etc.

It was difficult to tell if Homer used the equivalent of friskit, a resist, on any of these paintings which at the time was a chalk paste which was taken off by bending the sheet of paper over and edge, called counter rolling.   Chalk resist was invented by the English watercolorist Francis Nicolson (1753-1844).   If it had been the rubber cement-like stuff we use today, I think I could have seen the hard edge it tends to leave.  I could see a lot of pencil marks.  In each of the paintings there was a small red element like in the belt of the guide in the front of the canoe in End of Portage.  I always thought it was vermillion which was on his palette, but it look more like carmine now.  Perhaps it had faded.

The paint in these heavily glazed areas was what would be called “bronzed” in watercolor parlance.  That is, it was heavy enough to be what some call “scabby” and had a dull and flat matte look.  Today this is considered a mistake:  over worked, bronzing, etc.   (A corollary of this is that there were not many wet in wet areas.)  However, it did not leave me with that impression.  First of all, it was Homer playing off against the “inanely pretty” work seen today and in his day (which a reviewer pointed out).   Seeing the watercolors “in person” at the Brooklyn Museum I would have to agree with the statement in Scribner’s  that Homer’s watercolors were  ” direct, simple, crude sometimes –never “pretty”–they [have] the unmistakable look of nature . . . such drawings as these are a judgement upon the easily discerned tendencies of some other artists –toward the sentimental, the gorgeous, and the inanely pretty.” (quoted in Helen A. Cooper “Winslow Homer Watercolors” Yale, 1986).  (Watercolors were called “drawings” in those days and the brush, believe it or not, was called a “pencil” in the old days — “drawing” are done with “pencils”, after all.)

The heavily painted areas with the windows to the previous glazed layer suggested a depth and mystery to the nearby woods and forests that every woodsman would recognize.   That is to say, the environment is not completely revealed, and modern eye-tracking studies would suggest that viewers are going to search by instinct behind every tree and into every bush for possible “dangers.”  It’s  holds the eye in the painting. See James Gurney’s discussion of viewers’ eye movements looking at a painting of his with a dinosaur in a woods here.

It, also, looked to me like a deliberate strategy to make the isolated wet-in-wet or more fluid “splashy” passages standout as special.  That is, rather than make an entire watercolor wet-in-wet bravura brush strokes and splashy with lots of blank white paper like, for example, Charles Reed, Homer has chosen to draw the eye to a few such passages which by contrast to the more bronzy passages make them seem every more delightful.   The heavy passages also make for deep darks and intense dark colors.

Because there is always a well-drawn and more delicately painted center of interest, the paintings are easy to get in a superficial way if you’re just strolling by, but the complexity of the background of the paintings can also draw you into them.

I had never really thought deeply about Walter Benjamin’s work about “mechanical reproduction” of art before this, but seeing the real thing and seeing reproductions on the internet were completely different experiences.   There is no way one can pick up the”direct, simple, crude sometimes” quality that makes them great (and very modern, now that I think if it.)  However, with high definition reproductions (which entail both the image and the monitor) that all may change.  I certain hope so.  It’s hard to see a real Homer or Sargent these days.

introduction

A pochade box was designed specifically to do a color oil sketch in the field .  The best review I’ve found of the currently available wonderfully crafted boxes is here.

But what is a pochade?  Painting a “pochade” was one of the steps taken to produce a large painting in the studio in French academic practice.  Here’s a review of the system.

First there was a  ”equisse”  which means in French a sketch,  outline, beginnings, or  hint.  A “croquis” was a fast pencil sketch usually of a model who held poses for a short period of time like our 2 minute pose.   Then there was a pochade or color study.  If the motif (subject matter of the painting) was outside, the pochade was done in the field (“sur le motif”– literally “on the motif” but translated as “in nature”.) Later “en plein air” took the same meaning.

Naturally to make such a pochade it was necessary to bring certain things from the studio outside.    With the invention of the paint tube by a painter named Rand and the ferrulled brush taking stuff outside was easier.  (See here for more history).  One did this with a box made for this purpose.  In the early days it had the thumb hole and was somewhat on the line of being a box built on top of a wooden, hand-held palette with the canvas attached to the lid.  There was no easel or tripod.

After the pochade was used for the studio painting it was discarded and did not have any intrinsic  market value.  This changed probably as a result of the market for sketches from artists who explored the American West.  One could find pochades in flea markets in Paris by famous artists selling for very little.  (These days are over.)

In case it is not clear a pochade was not a finished painting.  Cezanne, for example, worked outside and made finished paintings.  The French academics did not.

the derivation of the term “pochade”

Pochade comes from the term for a stencil.   It does not come from what seems obvious that is from the French word “poche” which means “pocket”.  Pochade boxes were never put in ones pocket.  However, Judson art suppliers does make a box they call a “pocket box” that is 5×7 inches.

Pochade comes from the word “stencil”  in French because the way that the color was handled was in what we would call today a posterized fashion.  Posterization of an image entails the reduction of a continuous gradation of tone, shadow, to several regions of fewer tones, with abrupt changes from one tone to another.  It was originally done with photographs in posters, but is now done by much of the graphic software which has to simplify images to conserve memory.  Although every pixel of a digital image can have color information to do so would exceed the limits of the storage available for that information.  So the software says something like all the pixels in this area are more or less the same color (even if they are not.)  Carried to an extreme the results look posterized.

Making a pochade uses the same technique  where there are large areas, geometric forms of the same color.  This is because the idea is to make color notes that can be useful back in the studio not to actually describe all the variations in value and color.  In so doing brush stokes can be broad and indicate rather than describe the scene.  Of course, these studies can be quite attractive.  Often more attractive than the final product.  Here’s Joshua Reynolds quote on the subject \:

• From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce. And we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch…

The bottom line for someone who does watercolor work is that pochade boxes are not particularly useful. see my post on equipment for outdoor use of watercolors here.  In that post I discuss the alternatives to pochade boxes.  After all watercolors were the preeminent out door painting equipment for explorers, surveyors, and travelers for centuries before the plein air movement, and it makes sense that they thought about what to bring outdoors with them.