Windbreak Video

Thanks to Jackie Simmonds for the kind quote.

Thumbnail Critique

Conté pierre noire pencil on Cartiera Magnani Velata paper (cream tone, 3″ x 4″, 3″ x 5″, and 6″ x 3″), August 2008.
Brian McGurgan

I won't be doing crits, except by request, and then gladly. Brian McGurgan, of Brian McGurgan's Drawings and Paintings, has asked for one as he follows along with my Abandoned Barn Workshop. What I do hope to do with this series is to post about the Abandoned Barn Project every week at least once a week. Since Friday is Tips, I'll choose another day of the week.

We'll be doing color sketches after the B&W thumbnails, and eventually I'll post my artist's demo as we finish this work in my studio. I started the painting on site, with all of the flavor of plein air work, but I'll be completing it in the studio for ease of teaching from a blog. This whole thing is an experiment for me in teaching, blogging and demonstrating a Work in Progress (WIP).

Brian:

There is no doubt you get the feel of the site, with its lonely and abandoned barn. Maybe you'll have to get me doing some NYC buildings, next, from photos and while I'm in my western studio. I hope to show some of these to the farmers who own the property some time. They'll be thrilled, I know. That distant mountain shows up in many of my own artworks, and I like to tell people it is "almost in Canada" .

You have a great understanding of your aspects, and how they effect the outcomes. I would do several sketches of each (or one) aspect, because the one-each system is too confusing.

I'm glad you're thinking in color at this stage, already. A true sign of a painter! Be willing to change your color ideas as you ruminate on the image over time. I like the brown and neutral idea, but it will dictate certain things down the road, and we'll need to figure that out along the way.

The lower left image makes the barn the star of the show, but the negative space remaining is ambiguous - there is too much of it. And, be careful about getting the barn in the center of the drawing.

The upper left one is an interesting study of what happens when looking at photos (you don't get my advantage of being here to see it in reality). The photo (I call them "evil") flattens perspectives. I have to constantly be aware of this, and stretch the vertical view on my paper to counter this. So, when you lower the horizon line intentionally to include some sky, you fall into the photo-become-drawing trap of flattening the view too much. I have addressed the same issues in my Charcoal Thumbs, but I have kept the hill mass above the barn "fat" to avoid the evil camera perspective effect.

Also, my sky inclusions are for pictorial (linear) purposes, and not for color purposes. I am keeping these two aspects in compartments: first the linear composition, then the color composition. Don't let the color needs screw up the linear composition or failure lurks near.

On the subject of drawings from photo reference, see my post here.

The vertical format is nice because it keeps the loneliness of the barn intact, and yet crowds nothing. A bunch of issues develop here, though. Remember our friend, Wolf Kahn? He is all about Hans Hoffman's "Push-Pull" theories, and Kahn's drawings are a virtuoso performance in allowing lines to push the sky down (or up!) as the composition needs. Same story with his foregrounds.

So, in looking at your third drawing, I wonder which element will dominate. The sky, mid and foregrounds share thirds equally. My eye needs to be told which element to favor. In fact, you risk having four elements equally weighted, if I think of foreground, barn, mid ground and sky. I do like the "fat" field mass above the barn, though. I think #3 is my favorite over all (vertical).

Finally, I want to get into your drawing a bit. The barn drawing works great for it's value scale, and has perfect "weight" and is anchored well to the ground. It's a great drawing! I want you to analyze the perspective as a 3 point perspective, though. It looks like you have a 2 point perspective going, with almost a slight third point (the vanishing point below the dirt would wish for the vertical wall lines to be more acute). Does that make sense? My thumb#3 illustrates a 3 point perspective of this barn, where the viewer is slightly above and looking down on it. The vanishing point for the vertical lines is below the ground level.

Anyone else willing to follow along? I'll be out-of-pocket through Monday, and then we'll be resolving my compositions and moving on to the demo.

Enter The Atelier

Now, to look at the little Hoquiam Shipyard painting through the lens of classic realism.

Early in her book, Aristides provides one of the best explanations of the "Golden Mean" I have read. Without getting into the math, philosophy and science here, I'll offer the interested this link (One-Over-The-World web link, everything you could ever hope to learn about the Golden Mean). Cut to the chase and see the application of the Golden Number to art.

But, how did my "intuitive" composition hold up to the "school solution" methods of arranging the elements of my picture? I went to Photoshop to see.

The first jpeg gives an overlay of the Golden Mean (GM). Hmmn, I thought. Not too revealing. I guess I did have the key lines of my building-boat masses parallel to a GM line (short line). And, the line of background elements sort of fit the theory, although not quite parallel with the long axis GM line.

Then, I decided that it was kosher to look at the main elements of the picture, and to group them as a GM box (jpeg below). Nice! The green outline is the GM 1:1.6 ratio box that is the anointed "perfect ration" outline (well, not to scale, but the idea is there). The pink-violet lines are the lines of interest of the anointed pictures. The upper yellow line shows a parallel line that I employed, and the other yellow lines complete the magic triangle so well known by lovers of the Renaissance artists.

Well, not too bad. I describe myself as "self taught," but I actually have studied a thing or two about art and drawing over the years. It's just fun once and a while to hold these things up to the light of the classical drawing standards and see how they compare.

In the end, I do have troubles with a few things in my painting. The way that the right most line of the building lines up with the boat's housing line gives me fits. In one way, it helps the grouping cohere, but on the other hand it makes it harder for the eye to distinguish the boat from that background element. If I were to re-do this painting in a larger format, I would monkey with that to see what I liked better. What do you artists out there think of that part?

Further, there are some crude aspects to the boat hull and the tall legs of the large building, but I also kind of like the way the pastel mimics the brush strokes of an oil painting and just left it as is.

The main thing is, I wanted to take this piece fresh from my studio and in my less intellectual state of mind, and critique it against the searing light of "perfect drawing" skills as shown in the new Atelier book. In the end, I am happy that my composition is in the ballpark, and I very much enjoy that turquoise color!

Golden Ratio Links:

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~dlnarain/golden/
http://www.goldennumber.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle
Play with an interactive Golden Rectangle - fun!
Just the facts
Blogger Post On Subject
An Approximative Approach
Museum of Harmony

Self Critique - The Back Story

Here is some interesting "back story" on the little marine piece that I just posted last week.

It started out as a plein air session drawing, on a beautiful sunny day (rare in Hoquiam!). My first efforts at isolating a composition in the studio had me getting in a value scale. Early on, I wanted to get in one boat and the "SHIPYARD" building. The reasons for this were the strong white values of the two objects, and their clear shapes. But the problem occurs in how to portray them both without getting too cluttered and losing focus.

My value scale kept pushing me towards a darkened to middle value sky, which trended away from the sunny day reality. Oh well, that's my Hoquiam, always gray. And I very much liked the tall green-gray structure at the dry dock, but knew at first that it would be a huge distraction from the composition.

I went thrashing around for some ideas, because I wasn't very pleased with the line and form compositions. I'll say here that I don't have a hip pocket or standard plan for realist works, since my signature work is the abstracted landscape. I pulled out the Albert Handell book on plein air pastels, and he did have a marine scene, so typical of California. There were the colors turquoise and gray-green! Since I wasn't after the originality of color that I often go for, I decided to try using the turquoise, especially because I don't favor blue greens typically. Here would be some great color exploration for me.

The compliment of turquoise is red-orange, so I chose a hot orange to tone the Wallis paper. Now, all of a sudden, everything started to flow together. I abandoned the first value idea, but stayed with the massed values aspects. I really had fun putting this together. The turquoise provided a very cool temperature color to place against an otherwise warm setting. Back came the original blue sky, because the value scale of the main area was strong enough to support a light sky. Back, too, came the tall green structure to "push" the eye down and to add linear means to the composition.

The white building was able to recede because of the strong cool color of the boat's superstructure. All I had to do was add some warm compliments to the white walls.

Then my drawing book came in the mail! Now, all of a sudden, I had to start looking again through the critical lens of "perfect" realist drawing! The book, Classical Drawing Atelier, is a marvelous overview of old school, measured rendering and representation. I say old school, but of course the atelier is a contemporary institution that is established on the timeless foundations of rendering.

But, I wanted to finish the work, sort of "as is". I could see some "realist" errors, but wanted to keep them in. Why? Because I knew I had a non-commercial goal, and have a penchant for looseness, anyway. And, that is not to mention that it is very tiny at 6" x 4.5".

The one thing I did notice on my first opening of Juliette Aristides' book was that I may be too line-centric in my drawing in general, and not very refined in my "forms". So, when I took the little pastel work back to the studio for it's final effort, I did work on "modeling" the form of the boat's structure.

Next Post: I compare my drawing to the Atelier principles.

The Green Singer

The inspiration that the cover article from this month's issue of The Pastel Journal gave me was tremendous. The article displays the 8 Wonders of the Pastel World, which amounts to a jurying of individual pastel paintings (well, perhaps one is a drawing) by 8 famous artists in history. Then, the magazine chose 8 noted contemporary pastelists to comment on these great artists.

It doesn't hurt that they had beautiful photos of each artwork, and that the historical artists are known to all pastelists everywhere.

Because I find it rewarding to write critiques, I decided that my own choice for the best pastel work should be included here at Pastel.

La Chanteuse Verte, 1884
23.75 " x 18.25"
The Green Singer
Pastel
Edgar Degas

Degas (1834 - 1917) gets the wave as the artist with the number 1 pastel work of all time. I agree wholeheartedly with the premise, but my pick for the best work that I have seen by Degas is The Green Singer. This virtuoso painting resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. I am kicking myself for not getting in there when I was in town last year, but I now have another reason to return to the big apple.

Considered to be performer, Marie von Goethem, this young subject is possessed of a stage grace that Degas brings out, even in his cropped style, by creating arcing lines that are most notably present in the left hand bent at the wrist, and the cocked head and extended chin. Counter pose the graceful figure with the artist's choice of the gauche colors turquoise, orange, yellow and olive. It seems to me that the colors become the star elements, as the orange and orangey-yellows bloom from the blue paper. And, even our singer is aware of the attraction of her stage attire.

Add to the mix Degas' wonderfully free scribbling marks of the background and the lace at the model's collar. Is the work unfinished, or simply rendered to create freedom of expression? Our hero is known for his attention to detail, and his slavish realism. Yet, his freedom of action as he grew older is noted, both in his usage of different and pioneering media, and in examples of his sketching style. 1884 is hardly his latter era, though. Perhaps the dogma about Edgar Degas must be re-thought. Can we think of him as an early expressionist?

Maybe I'd better step-up my personal goal of returning to the figure in my own art...can you say "Atelier," anyone?

Further Links:

Degas' Unfortunate Model.
Degas' Model in a Fictional Better Light.
Looks like when Degas' eyesight began to fail, he had to turn to pastels. (Link) They require less acuity, apparently. Oh boy, fellow pastelists, we still have work to do in educating the art public about our fantastic medium.