Low Country Caravan

I got to bop around Charleston, SC for six weeks this past winter. It takes time to learn an area, scout for motifs around which one might build a picture or two. I happened upon this scene a week or so after hitting town. It not only was a nice view of the marshland, but also offered a place to park my truck and set up my gear.

For a fella used to the winters and springs of Ohio and various other northern locales, finding greenery and temperatures like this on the first days of March was a delight. My intention for the trip was to work large, but I figured I'd warm up to that with a 16x20" canvas.

Sometimes I do a monochrome underpainting for these things, but here I decided to try for the final effect immediately. Here's Day One:

I've done fairly successful one-session pictures before, but generally I'm a better re-painter than I am a painter. For Day One, it's enough to cover the canvas and try to put the correct shapes exactly where they belong, trying to get everything right. If correct value, hue and chroma are not secured that first session, it's not the end of the world. But slipshod drawing needs to be fixed immediately.

The paint is opaque and fairly thick. Once it began to set, after a few hours, I scraped it down with a palette knife. This leaves drawing and color intact, but removes any buildup of paint.

For the second day, I tried to punch up the values, a lot. Looking back, too much. If Day One was too bland, Day Two was too stark. That's okay, you move back and forth on this stuff till you get it the way you want it.

Day Three. The darks are brought back under control. This was almost what I was after, but not quite. That curving line which moves from the edge of the grass on the right and slopes down to the left corner was like a slide, carrying the customer's eye to the one place I don't want it to go: out of the picture.

So I grabbed a bush from outside the picture and transported it to the lower left corner of the picture, where it stands blocks the eye's retreat from the picture, like a prison guard. And a little more refined drawing was given to some scraggly branches in the center bush. My first Charleston picture in the can.

Sour Grapes, or The Value of Rejection from Juried Shows

I got to attend the opening of the 2017 ViewPoint show last night, after having my own submission rejected by the three-person jury.

It's a pretty good show. I recommend you see it, at the Greenwich House Gallery in O'Bryanville. Jeff Morrow's terrific portrait won best in show. If I disagree with their blackballing my picture, I highly agree with their selection of Jeff's picture for the grand prize.

There was a lot of cool stuff to see. Was some of it inferior to my own rejected piece? Yeah, I think so. But herein lies some of the benefit of juried shows like this. Who cares what I think? If it's a matter of opinion whether my stuff should have been included, then this is another way of saying that I need to try harder, a whole lot harder. The judgment of three contemporaries can be tough, but the judgment of future generations is going to be downright brutal. If I want to do work that will endure fifty years from now, or five hundred years from now, then what I paint dare not be as good as some of the pictures selected for ViewPoint. It needs to be hugely, obviously, frighteningly better.

The Beatles spent years playing in German strip clubs. The money was terrible and the audience wasn't paying much attention. These gigs were their "juried shows", and they learned to play much better than their contemporaries because the judgment of the Hamburg "jurors" was not positive. They made up their minds and rose above it.

We don't yet know everything about visual perception, or about how pictures can carry the illusion of reality to the superlative degree. Were I, or anyone else who entered the ViewPoint competition, able to travel back to the fourteenth century, our pictures would be considered impossibly real. We have a greater technology of image making behind us.

Paint like someone visiting from the year 2717 and it will be tough to find a jury anyplace that won't award you best in show. Don't be arguably as good as the pictures which made it into the juried show. Instead, be 700 years better.

Maybe next time. In the meantime, my congratulations, Jeff. You earned it.

Hale's Folly, and My Own

41 years ago, I moved back to my birthplace, New York City, to study at the Art Students League. I'd gone there a few months three years earlier, but left, dissatisfied with the teaching I found there. When I returned, in 1976, I took the advice of a friend and enrolled in Robert Beverly Hale's class, "The Elements of Drawing".

I wish I could ask, "what was I thinking?" but I know exactly what I was thinking. I wasn't looking for a teacher, but a Messiah. And this particular Messiah had no credentials other than the fact that he was a brilliant and entertaining lecturer and theorist. He would draw diagrams on a huge sheet of drywall, using a stick of charcoal mounted on a four-foot pointer, held at the back and manipulated with movements of the shoulder. It looked like a bravura performance. It was not until some 23 years later, when I began teaching, using the same tools, I discovered that this was not difficult at all, although it seemed to impress my twenty something students as much as it had impressed me when I was their age.

Hale had fascinating theories, and a zippy lecture style (which incidentally I have freely adapted for my own work teaching anatomy, figure drawing, and the Bible). He also was popular with the New York intelligencia; his students had included Muhammed Ali, Jackie Onassis and many others.

To his credit, Hale was a wonderful anatomy teacher; the five-eye proportional system which he invented and taught is a simple and mostly accurate means of handling human anatomy. If the class had purported to be nothing more than an anatomy class, or had I been less naive, I'd have been better served.

Unfortunately, "The Elements of Drawing" focused not only on anatomy, but also on light and shade, and on perspective. And Hale presented himself as an authority on drawing, whose lineage he could supposedly trace back as far as Titian. Which is peculiar in itself. Titian had teachers too, who probably could have traced their lineage back to Giotto. So why stop at Titian? But I guess I shouldn't look a gift lineage in the mouth: Hale trained me, so I guess I can trace myself back to Titian as well, and Giotto, and maybe the great cave painters. Street Cred is Street Cred.

Hale's teaching on anatomy was terrific, and his handling of perspective was good. But as far as light and shade, and on drawing in general, his ideas were elegant, sounded cool, and were tragically misleading.

I should have known better than to trust him. If you're auditioning teachers, or your kids or grandkids are doing so, please do what I didn't do: demand to look at your guru's paintings and drawings. If he has none to show you, there has to be a reason for this. No one who can paint well is going to balk at showing students what he's got.

In Hale's case, the subject didn't come up, although in unguarded moments, he would admit to being a man of immense self-doubt.

It is a kind of madness to decide that a man who has never walked down the path you wish to tread is a competent teacher of how to tread that path, let alone a great teacher. Yet the prominent art critics and book reviewers worshipped him. Don Holden, in his introduction to the DVD set of Hale's lectures, called Hale the only great drawing teacher America produced in the twentieth century. How in the world world Holden know this? Like Hale, he never learned to draw.

Hale didn't trick me. I hoodwinked myself. It wasn't till my forties, when I began teaching drawing and anatomy myself, that I realized how naive I had been. Even then I didn't see the trap I'd walked into. Hale the Theoretician appealed to a quirky side of my own personality, and when I realized that Hale's theories were misleading, I simply cooked up better theories. You can read about them in my book The Art of Figure Drawing. Fortunately, the book also contained some decent instruction, in addition to the theories.

Good drawings and paintings are not made by theoreticians, nor can they be made by the use of theories. Theory is mostly forensic in nature: you look back on successful pictures, see a pattern, and come up with theories. As far as learning  to draw and paint goes, the only valid theory is to work yourself like a pack horse. Given talent, taste and good coaching, you might someday accomplish significant work. If it's really significant, maybe some future charismatic teacher will cook up some theories to explain how you did it.

Ultimately, Robert Beverly Hale's greatest contribution to our culture was a poetic view of the nuts and bolts of drawing, to the extent that he understood them. He was a critic, rather than a teacher or an artist. It's been said that it was more fun to read Pauline Kael than it was to see the movies she critiqued. Similarly, it's a lot of fun to read Hale's books, as it also was to sit through his lectures. He made the process of drawing look cool and fascinating. In doing so, he espoused a lot of ideas as gospel: that the trained artist does not draw what he sees, but draws what he knows. That mass conceptions are the artist's secret weapon. That what made the great masters great was their knowledge of anatomy. And that light and shade is entirely conceptual in nature. They're fascinating ideas which bear little if any resemblance to the actual practice of drawing, and absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the higher discipline of painting.

But none of this posed a problem for Jackie Onassis, who attended the lectures and may have drawn well for an amateur, but who certainly had no designs on becoming a professional artist. There were dozens of people who attended Hale's classes year after year, chasing after a fantasy of doing important work, and for good reason: it's a lot easier and more fun to listen to a master lecturer than it is to actually learn how to draw and paint. Hale was an entertainer, filling a niche which he invented and perfected. He did no harm to his listeners, except the ones who seriously wanted to become competent painters, and who were naive enough to treat him as a Messiah.

Alas, there are no messiahs in art instruction, or at least none if they can't prove it with a backlog of genuinely great paintings and drawings. The classicists doing atelier training are far closer to the mark than a third-rate theoretician such as Hale. But even with such people, one ought to beware of treating their ideas as Received Truth. Great respect is due one's teachers. A healthy skepticism is due them as well.

The Duck Creek Spillway Boogie

For some years, I've driven past a concrete spillway in the town of Fairfax, Ohio several times a month. Although I've never been a huge fan of graffiti, the unrequested spray paint decorations on the walls hold some charm, and it's been on my mind to try building a picture around them. Here's a photograph of the scene:

So in early June, I figured what the hell, it might at least be worth a 16x20" canvas. As fate would have it, I just happened to have one such canvas in my truck. So I gave it a go.

Day One. Some people call this a lay-in. On some subjects, it can be helpful to paint everything in monochrome. On this thing, maybe because the subject was fairly simple, I just jumped in.

Day Two. Once the canvas is covered with paint, with everything hopefully in the right place, you can make some editorial decisions. The values certainly needed some punching up. Describing the reflections of the spray painted color in the wet pavement began on this day. It's a project which would end up occupying half the summer.

The diagonal line is clean, perfectly drawn, and almost uninterrupted. In other words, it had to be gotten rid of, or at least broken up a lot. Never allow lines like that to dominate your canvas, or you'll be in big trouble.

Hegel would have loved painting. Two steps forward, one step back. Mr. Royce, of Rolls Royce fame, would also have liked painting. His motto: test each part until it breaks. Then find out why  it broke, and redesign it so it won't break. Then test it again until it breaks.

Day Four. I was pretty happy with the effect, but something was missing. Suddenly I heard voices. Two young ladies were walking down the spillway. I called down, and one of them agreed to let me put her in the picture.

So that's the story of my 16x20" Duck Creek Spillway picture, which fulfilled half of my objectives for this year's picture-making. Objective one: put figures in my landscapes. Objective two: paint larger. A 16x20" is hardly large. Which meant that I wasn't done, not with the spillway, and not with my model. Both would be revisited. But that's another story.