Category Archives: Painting

Dealing with the heat!

What to do if the temperatures reach 100F (38C) or more? Is it still possible to paint in watercolor? Well, as the old saying goes: ‘they paint watercolor in England and NOT in Egypt’, I’d say forget about it. It would be like trying to go for a run in a sauna. Something like that.

I went to the coast instead and painted in oils. We had a perfect 65F or 15C as a high and I actually had to wear a jacket while painting. I loved it. The good news is, Highway 1 has re-opened last week, so it is possible to drive up to Big Sur again. It will be a relief for business owners in our area, from Cambria all the way to Big Sur. The road closures have kept many people away for the past year and a half.

As you can see we found a nice spot and painted the beautiful California coast. Just another day at the office! It was of course foggy and overcast, muted colors everywhere, just the way I like it!

I am hopefully past my painting slump. This weekend I am teaching a workshop in Northern California near Eureka. Another beautiful place!

What is Notan?

Notan is a Japanese word that means dark-light. The principle of Notan, however, means much more than that. It is the interaction between positive and negative space. The ancient symbol of Yin and Yang is probably the most widely known Notan. The positive and negative areas make a whole through a unity of opposites. The Notan’s practical applications are for the design in painting. Understanding Notan will enable us to create value masses, tension, movement, and symmetry in our work.

A tone of grey between two value extremes (i.e. ,black and white) changes their relations and opens up a new field for creative activity. Here we think of Notan as the values of one tone against the another.

The set of three values is the basis of drawings, mezzo tint, aquatint etc. From there it is an easy step to many values. It is an exercise of great value (pun intended) to draw or paint a landscape with three values: white, black and grey.

Understanding Notan can help identify the most interesting and dominant shapes. It will also help identify the correct values and therefore create a stronger painting. Art sources to check out are Japanese Notan designs, the artists Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian, among others.

I recommend reading Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design (Dover Art Instruction) by Dorr Bothwell, Marlys Mayfield (1991).

I also recommend doing value studies before painting as it is the same exercise in determining value masses and their interaction = Notan! Other examples of strong Notan in representational art: Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Self-portrait at an early age” and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” (Whistler’s mother).

Painting and music – a great analogy

Both art forms (music and painting) have effects on our subconscious!

Words like sensuous and passionate, or emotional, stimulating, mood altering, uplifting, depressing… can be applied to both music and painting! An example would be to make a painting too busy. It is equal to listening to music where someone plays solo without stopping. It is tiresome and ultimately not a pleasant experience. It is like looking at a painting that is filled with too much information or no color harmony.

Emotional attributes are equally felt in the use of color in art. A painting has the highest impact when it captures some poetic mood of nature, an impression of strength and power, or an emotion in a portrait. Color sets mood. Just think of the beautiful works of the masters Corot, Whistler or Thayer. Warm colors, by nature, are exciting and stimulating but can also be irritating. Imagine being in room where all the walls have been painted scarlet red! Cool colors have quiet the opposite effect. They are restful in the emotional sense. There is a reason why most people use soft greyish tones when painting walls in their houses.

Going back to music, any music piece is only consecutively played notes between pauses which, when played without emotion, are just that: notes, scales. The actual music is in the interpretation. It is nowhere to be found in the notation. Exactly like in painting: without an emotional connection a painting is just pigment on paper or canvas. It is certainly not found in the color mix. That’s why there is the term ‘artist’ and another one for ‘painter’. When does a painter become an artist?

When a painting is ‘technical’ we may be impressed (or not), but when a painting grabs you by your emotions it becomes art. That’s the painting you keep coming back to, whereas the technical one has your attention for 30 seconds and then you loose interest!

Instead of my paintings, this time I have uploaded some of the Masters.

A good quote by artist Jean-François Millet: ‘Technique should always hide itself modestly behind the thing expressed.’

Tribute to a Beauty!

This is a small oil painting of ‘Beholder’, a famous American race horse. She is retired now, but during her career she earned more than $6 Million.
The picture was taken at Santa Anita race track. She was warming up for her last race before retirement in 2016. Usually, I am not a big fan of horse racing but I am a big fan of horses! Over the years I visited Santa Anita race track multiple times to sketch, take the tour of the stables and just look at the magnificent horses. They are athletes and just amazing to look at.
Beholder had initially quite the reputation: she was known to be very temperamental and hard to control. That changed as she aged thanks to her trainer with whom she developed a bond and depth of communication that made all the difference.
Before races, her trainer would use ear plugs and a hood with ear coverings to help her calm down. She also didn’t like travel therefore she raced most of her career in home state of California.
When asked what it’s like to ride Beholder, her jockey Gary Stevens said: It’s like I’m driving a Mack truck with the speed of a Porsche and the brain of a rocket scientist.”
Definitely a horse that deserves to be painted!

As for process, I don’t do any sort of underpainting in oil. As I do with watercolor I do a pencil sketch and work ‘alla prima’, as far as I am able to. What that means is, I try to judge value and color, mix the appropriate paints and put it on. Done. No going back (if at all possible, doesn’t work all the time). While this may be a harder approach it is also more gratifying because the energy of the brush strokes is completely preserved. No fiddling, over blending etc. etc. Unlike in watercolor, the brush strokes in oil painting is everything… actually, it’s the same in watercolor..never mind!

The editing process: a pain in the…

I had the chance to visit Ellicott City on my trip to Maryland last June. While there was no time to actually paint en plein air, I was able to take pictures in this remarkable town.
(the name is a bit misleading, it is definitely a small town)

Ellicott City was founded in 1772, so it is quite old by American standards. It is nestled in a narrow valley and unfortunately, that contributed to a devastating flash flood a few years ago. But the people are resilient, have battled their way back and rebuild their dreams!

I was immediately attracted to all the odd views of old Architecture, hilly terrain, beautiful craftsmen and Victorian style buildings. Busy streets and storefronts and some nice galleries as well.

In fact, finding a paint-able scene was quite a challenge, because there seems to always be too much in the viewfinder. Too much and all stacked up! Arguably one of the hardest things to find is a scene that can actually be good painting material. I did find a few eventually but not without doing some pretty drastic editing first.
Side note:
On the day I was there it was actually cloudy. Fortunately, my painter friend Thomas Bucci was able to take pictures the day before when it was sunny. This picture was taken by him and he was kind enough to let me use it.

This is the reason why I wanted to write this blog post: How do we edit scenes with way too much information in them? As with everything else in art, there is no easy answer.

A good way to think is like this: First, what is essential to the scene, what elevates the painting? What has to go in so you can ‘say’ what you have to say?

Second, what does not help the scene? What can I change and still say the same thing?
In this case, the building on the left has a very long extension to the right that does not all have to be there. So I shortened it. Needless to say I didn’t want to paint the trash cans.

The right side is also too complicated: the truck takes up too much space. I added people instead which, in street scenes, always seems to help develop a focal point. I changed the format to vertical and made the scene more mysterious by adding clouds and the background hill which is really not visible from my viewpoint.
Color harmony was created by the repetition of the red and by playing with shadow angles throughout I think I was able to paint an interesting, engaging scene.

As a final thought: these design problems have to all be worked out in advance. As should be pretty obvious, once we start putting pigment and water on the page it would be too late to try to resolve all of this. Time well spent before painting!