Progress!

 The peonies in my little garden have flowered, and I could not resist taking a vase of them to the studio to paint. The bloom season is very short--but a painting lasts forever!  I thought it might be fun to share a few photos showing how the painting materialized.

Top shot:  I "blocked in" the big shapes.  At this first step, the most important things to me are (1) getting the big shapes in approximately the right place on the canvas, and (2) paying attention to which shapes are in light and which are in shadow.  The shadow shapes are toned in a fairly deep blue-ish color. If I'm not excited by what I'm seeing at this point, I don't proceed.

Next step:  I paint the background.  As painting instructors say, one should "paint the SPACE around the thing", rather than painting the thing itself.  Getting the color down accurately for the area behind the flowers tells the viewer where the flowers are located in space.  It makes the painting believable.  Plus, notice how the painting almost seems to paint itself once this is done.  Sometimes I wish I could stop here and let my mind entertain all the possibilities, without having to commit to any one of them.

Third step:  Trying not to mess up the magic of the underpainting.  This is the hard part: keeping room for the imagination, and deciding which parts are important to emphasize.  It's a battle between the general and the specific.  I definitely don't want to draw each petal!

Fourth:  Stopping point.  I've worked far enough through the prior steps to stop for a while.  I'll let it sit for an hour or two, or a day or two, and see whether it feels finished.  The key from here on out is to avoid the temptation to fiddle and fuss so much that the freshness is destroyed.  Wish me luck!

Transcribing the Masters

Transcribing from Degas

My last post was about the discovery that Edward Hopper had copied some of his early paintings (previously believed to be originals) from paintings photographed in magazines. Since then, I have been thinking about the difference between "copying" and "transcribing".

"After Degas I'

12 x 10.5, Oil on Linen

(c) Lesley Powell 2020

"Copying" could be called an attempt to make an exact replication of the original. "Transcribing", on the other hand, is not aimed at replicating the original, but rather at getting into the mind of the master.  The goal is to see how the master painter saw the subject, to understand how his composition worked, and to feel how he applied the paint to the canvas. This type of transcription is an important part of the curriculum at many art schools.

Along those lines, I just watched "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix (worth a watch, by the way).  I learned that serious chess players spend time re-playing the matches of grandmasters.  They don't just study the moves from a book, but actually set up the board, and touch and move the pieces. The physicality of the process is an important element in retaining the concepts. 

Transcribing Vermeer

Twyla Tharp, the great ballet dancer and choreographer, used a similar approach. As a young dancer, she would stand behind every great dancer then in New York, and literally mimic him or her. She said that this process imprinted their movements into her own creative DNA. I love the idea of developing mastery this way! 

"After Degas II"

12 x 12, Oil on Linen, Mounted on Cradled Panel

(c) Lesley Powell 2020

In case I needed another prod, I happened to attend a talk by the talented painter Elizabeth Geiger.  She discussed her practice of copying from masterworks. Geiger advised that all painters should study a variety of masters whose work they admire.  Each painter will draw a different "thread" from each master.  As a result, the tapestry that any particular painter weaves with those threads will be different from that of any other.  We all draw on our predecessors, but each of us is unique.

I'm illustrating this post with a few transcriptions I've been working on.  Enjoy!

Fast and Slow

Faithful readers know that quotations are sprinkled liberally throughout this blog. I recently ran across a startling one that I had never before heard. It goes like this:

"Fast is fine,

but accuracy is final.

You must learn

to be slow in a hurry."

The words are attributed to none other than the famous gunslinger of the Wild West, Wyatt Earp. You can imagine what he meant when he said that accuracy was "final". 

This quote seems especially instructive in the context of plein air painting. When painting outdoors, many things (light, clouds, temperature) are constantly changing, and the painter has to work fast. But being fast is not enough--the painter must also get the right colors, in the right shapes, in the right places on the canvas. It's always a eureka moment when you put down just the right stroke of paint--it works!--and you can lay it and leave it. That's what I'd call accuracy in painting.

"Quiet Hamlet"
12 x 8, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell
(SOLD)

But how do we achieve that accuracy? By being "slow in a hurry". That's quite a paradox--it appears to make no sense, but it actually holds a powerful truth. While working very  quickly, the painter must still take time to look deeply, to analyze what he sees, to compare each color to the next.  In other words, he must slow down enough to make careful decisions, but still work at a hurried pace. Just being fast isn't very helpful if you're not doing the right things!

"Atmospheric Hills"
7 x 14, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2019
(Available)

And how do you go "slow in a hurry"? I suspect it has  to do with sustained practice--repeating certain challenges so often that the approaches to them become second nature. Such practice allows us to develop painting skills that become almost instinctual. They become part of our artistic DNA. They can be summoned in an instant.  When we slow down to make the decision about the next brushstroke, the decision can be taken relatively quickly. And the entire series of decisions can be made in a hurry. And so we "go slow in a hurry".  A useful goal to keep in mind.

"Paris Pont"
10 x7, Oil on Carton
(c) Lesley Powell 2019
(SOLD)

I'm illustrating this post with a few favorite plein air paintings that I've done over the past year or so.  These are the miraculous ones  that came together completely in the field, and required no adjustments back in the studio. Final!

Time Will Tell

I have recently relocated my studio. The experts say that moving is stressful, and I can attest that moving one's "creative space" from familiar to unknown territory can indeed be traumatic. But despite the upheaval--or maybe because of it--there are triumphs to be had. 

"Stones of Time"
9 x 5, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2019

First, I love my new space, and the wonderful light it gets from two different exposures. More on that later. The big story for today is the experience of the "Aha Moments" that occurred upon seeing paintings that have been in the closet for months, or even years.

"Near Kenwood"
8 x 16, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2019

I've written before about the process of destroying old paintings that never worked out. Those paintings were obvious failures. But there is an entirely different category of painting that lurks in the hidden corners of the studio: paintings that were pleasing in many respects, but that were not quite right. Something was missing, or something was wrong, and I could not figure out what it was. So the canvases were banished to the closet.  

"Stone Spans"
9 x 12, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2019

And in the closet they stayed, until my recent move. I was forced to face them all, and decide whether they lived or died. It's amazing how one can see with fresh new eyes after taking a long breather from an old painting. In some cases, the "Aha Moment" revealed that there was no fix, that the painting had to go. In other cases, a quick glance was all that was needed to tell me exactly what was wrong, or missing, and how to fix it. In those latter cases, the "Eureka!" feeling was a real high. It's as if the solution needed months to incubate and was finally revealed. Maybe an angle needed to be corrected, or a color muted. Maybe a detail needed to be added, or eliminated. In any event, making those corrections finally brought the paintings to completion, and I felt as if I was ushering an old friend out of hiding, and into the real world of the studio. I'm illustrating this post with some of these paintings, and hope you'll enjoy them...