During my painting lessons in Amsterdam, I take an approach that may be a bit longer, but more sure-footed than that of others.
Most of the time when we go to painting classes in Amsterdam or elsewhere, we expect to be given a canvas, a bunch of oil paint or acrylics, a few brushes and to start merrily painting away at some flowers, or a photograph of our choice. I have seen it time and again, and I have even fallen pray to such courses. There's nothing wrong or evil about this, but to the more serious student, or someone who is aiming high, going this route is full of disappointment.
If I would compare this approach of painting lessons, to learning to play the guitar, I would say this is 'playing by ear'. You're able to play songs you hear on the radio, as long as they're not too complex, and perhaps make some simple songs of your own. However, your style is likely to lack the clean characteristics of a learned musician. In their playing you can distinguish the knowledge of the instrument, and in the songs they make, you will recognize deep knowledge of tone, theory and harmony.
Playing by ear, is easier, often nicer and more relaxed. It never gave anyone a headache, and it will actually make you progress quicker at first. But in my opinion it handicaps you ever after, as I can attest by my mediocre guitar playing skills.
If we go back to the painting lessons, a more structured and academic approach, is to learn drawing first. This is to a musician like learning the scales, and becoming good at going up and down the instrument without making a blunder.
Learning to draw before you embark on a full on painting education works on many levels. First you get to master form and proportion, without which you will struggle endlessly in your painting attempts. Secondly you get to learn how to turn form with the use of value (tones). You will also learn to achieve a good use of edges, which is usually underrated, and most importantly, you will start to develop an understanding of composition, and how to use it to create a visual hierarchy in your work.
While all these points can be learned while painting, it proves a bit too much to handle if on top of that list, you have to deal with color mixing, chroma, hue, color temperature, color harmony and manipulation of the medium on the canvas. With these many plates in the air, one is likely to fall, and it usually is the most basic one: form.
Therefore, during my Amsterdam painting lessons, we don't start by painting, we start with drawing. The student needs to be comfortable being able to render any image with a pencil, convey it's proportions, turn form using values, achieve a mood or light situation, depict surfaces and do it all to a high degree of quality.
This is not to say that once you've done this, it will be smooth sailing as you start to paint, but it means you will be able to see if something is wrong, and correct it before you carry on forward, which is the sign of a good artist.
As you progress from drawing to painting lessons, you will have to unlearn some of the things you took for granted. Your approach will have to be almost completely tonal, and you will be able to turn form without having to change values, by using only color temperature. This will confuse the hell out of you at first and some artists choose not to do it, and to stick to the dramatic approach. However, the really good ones learn that conservation of values has a real impact on the quality of their work, and will push this when possible.
So the main point of today's entry, is that your drawing skills are the foundation of your artistic education, fail to take this seriously and your painting skills will miss the key element!
Monday, November 25, 2013
Monday, October 28, 2013
Drawing Classes Amsterdam, My 2 cents on Malevich
As part of my drawing classes in Amsterdam, I offer guided visits to museums in order to develop a good eye for how the masters achieved their impressive results. These visits are not historical, but purely analytical.
My last visit consisted on attending the Kazimir Malevich exhibition on the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It claims to be the largest collection of the artist ever assembled and judging by the number of works on display, I'm inclined to believe them.
I still have mixed feelings about this art exhibition as it seems to me Malevich navigated a fine line between being a genius and a fraud. On the one hand he was able to produce exquisite drawings and paintings, the degree of finish of all his work was impeccable and it is obvious he invested an immense deal of time and energy in his life, exploring art and his concepts and ideas about it. He was in other words honestly and highly dedicated to his craft, and not just some nutter making weird stuff.
Thus far so good. So where does it go wrong for me?
Perhaps it's in putting too much value on the ideas at the expense of the art itself. All the isms that he came up with are interesting concepts, but the art they inspired was rarefied and distant. Of course, a modern art curator would take those words and at the flip of a hat, give them a spin and turn them into what makes his paintings brilliant, but I'm not convinced. Malevich started by heavily imitating Gaugin and Cezanne, and then went off into some tangent, from which only a Russian government prohibition on abstract art brought him back.
It is of course impossible to take art out of its historical context, so I would never venture saying that for a painting to be good, it would have to fend for itself anywhere and at any moment. I do believe though, that a painting should fend for itself regardless of who made it. Otherwise, we're appealing to authority, and making the piece itself second in line.
What I mean to say is that if Malevich's black square is so brilliant, it should be hailed as such regardless of whether he made it, or someone else did. Ironically my point was proven in the same exhibition, where some lesser artist also produced a black square, except nobody talked about this one. That sounds to me more like religion than being objective about whether the work is good or not.
The situation reminds me of the movie Vanilla Sky, where Tom Cruise plays a millionaire playboy who's face is disfigured. Since surgery was not possible he is offered the most advanced facial prostetic in the market, which adapts to his features, allows the skin underneath to heal better, and has plenty of other advantages.
In a fit of irony, Cruise appears impressed and pleased a the suggestion and says he's grateful that they tell him all about these features and benefits, because otherwise he would have thought they were trying to make him wear a f@#!ng mask!
Well, I feel the same about a lot of Malevich's work. It requires so much explanation, so many isms and conceptual framework, that it makes me wonder if we're not just being offered a bloody black square. Once again I don't question his dedication and honest pursuit of pushing the boundaries of art, but what resulted may not look outstanding, which is to me THE test of a visual piece.
Some of his work, and that of his followers is worthy of a 3 year old. However, if modern art has shown us something is that adults making 3 year old worthy art can come up with really good concepts and excuses to justify it.
My 2 cents...
My last visit consisted on attending the Kazimir Malevich exhibition on the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It claims to be the largest collection of the artist ever assembled and judging by the number of works on display, I'm inclined to believe them.
I still have mixed feelings about this art exhibition as it seems to me Malevich navigated a fine line between being a genius and a fraud. On the one hand he was able to produce exquisite drawings and paintings, the degree of finish of all his work was impeccable and it is obvious he invested an immense deal of time and energy in his life, exploring art and his concepts and ideas about it. He was in other words honestly and highly dedicated to his craft, and not just some nutter making weird stuff.
Thus far so good. So where does it go wrong for me?
Perhaps it's in putting too much value on the ideas at the expense of the art itself. All the isms that he came up with are interesting concepts, but the art they inspired was rarefied and distant. Of course, a modern art curator would take those words and at the flip of a hat, give them a spin and turn them into what makes his paintings brilliant, but I'm not convinced. Malevich started by heavily imitating Gaugin and Cezanne, and then went off into some tangent, from which only a Russian government prohibition on abstract art brought him back.
It is of course impossible to take art out of its historical context, so I would never venture saying that for a painting to be good, it would have to fend for itself anywhere and at any moment. I do believe though, that a painting should fend for itself regardless of who made it. Otherwise, we're appealing to authority, and making the piece itself second in line.
What I mean to say is that if Malevich's black square is so brilliant, it should be hailed as such regardless of whether he made it, or someone else did. Ironically my point was proven in the same exhibition, where some lesser artist also produced a black square, except nobody talked about this one. That sounds to me more like religion than being objective about whether the work is good or not.
The situation reminds me of the movie Vanilla Sky, where Tom Cruise plays a millionaire playboy who's face is disfigured. Since surgery was not possible he is offered the most advanced facial prostetic in the market, which adapts to his features, allows the skin underneath to heal better, and has plenty of other advantages.
In a fit of irony, Cruise appears impressed and pleased a the suggestion and says he's grateful that they tell him all about these features and benefits, because otherwise he would have thought they were trying to make him wear a f@#!ng mask!
Well, I feel the same about a lot of Malevich's work. It requires so much explanation, so many isms and conceptual framework, that it makes me wonder if we're not just being offered a bloody black square. Once again I don't question his dedication and honest pursuit of pushing the boundaries of art, but what resulted may not look outstanding, which is to me THE test of a visual piece.
Some of his work, and that of his followers is worthy of a 3 year old. However, if modern art has shown us something is that adults making 3 year old worthy art can come up with really good concepts and excuses to justify it.
My 2 cents...
Monday, October 21, 2013
Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, the danger of dogmatic approaches to art
During my Amsterdam drawing classes I try to convey the classical approach to learning art as a near surefire method of learning the principles of the visual language. This is not to be confused with saying it is "the best way to make art" or even a guarantee that the art you produce when learning to draw with the old master's approach will be beautiful or compelling.
My point to this blog entry is to express my reluctance to believe in, and point out the pitfalls of certain assumptions or dogmatic views that certain teachers hold, or that the public has about making art.
When teaching a method of drawing, no matter how good, a proper teacher will tell you the downsides of this method, and must stress the fact that this is not the only way to do things.
Dogma 1: There is one best method of drawing
If we take the academic drawing method, it is very slow, focused on accuracy and precision and follows certain learning and execution steps which are well known. When drawing fast poses and quick gesture sketches, this approach is not practical, but in other circumstances it can create amazing results.
Take on the other hand the quick sketch illustrative approach. This creates beautiful flowing lines and plenty of expression, but the detail may be missing and accuracy is often sacrificed for the sake of a more organic and spontaneous result.
It is nonsense to say either approach to drawing is "better" than the other one. Each approach has it's place in art and you can choose to use them depending on the situation, the result you are looking for and the one you find more enjoyable.
Dogma 2: Painting and drawing must be kept separate
This one is a very damaging dogma that some art teachers spread and which make some practitioners struggle unnecessarily with their art. The dogma says that when painting, lines and drawing are not to be used. Painting must be done on a tone and mass kind of way and problems with proportions, alignment and form must be sorted out in the thick of things.
The problem with this, is that if the artist's drawing skills are weak, those problems can never be sorted out. It becomes an endless, frustrating struggle that produces nothing but weak results.
The basis for painting is drawing. No question about it. You can then use these drawing skills to make markers or drawings with your brush, or even with charcoal before starting to paint.
Some academic artists take this one step further by creating a full drawing study and then transfering it to the canvas so that they separate the drawing from the painting. Having tried this, it does feel a bit like painting by numbers, but with experience, the result can be made to look as natural and beautiful as any painting made in a tonal manner.
Dogma 3: Fresh art must be made in a careless way
This is one poorly conceived idea that I try to discredit as soon as possible in my Amsterdam drawing classes. The thinking is that to obtain results that appear loose and fresh, the piece must be created with a careless approach.
The reality is that to create a beautiful work of art, the artist must become a kind of criminal mastermind, plotting and scheming about composition, light color harmony and also brushwork and edges. These last two being largely responsible for the feeling of spontaneity in a finished piece.
Remember that loose results can only be good if they are deliberate. If you try to create art by acting carelessly and hoping it will come out right, you are stacking the odds badly against yourself.
Dogma 3: Good original art cannot look like any other before it
This is the kind of idea that has aspiring artists creating the most weird and peculiar things and more often than not, failing to strike a successful formula for aesthetic results. The reason is simple, it is easier to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn about principles that worked well for artists in the past.
No aspiring novelists sets out to write their work by first re-inventing language or trying to completely rework the structure of what a novel is. The possibilities are so endless within the given framework that we can benefit from exploring those before veering off in some awkward tangent.
This is not to say that pushing for originality is a bad thing, but we humans are original even when we're not trying. When you learn to draw and practice by making master copies, the impulse to make changes is almost unavoidable. In the end the fear of being like a parrot that only replicates the work of others gets in the way of learning the principles of art in order to make more educated choices on your own work.
Dogma 4: Art that is well executed is boring
This one is probably the worse art calumny that has been spread after the impressionists. These guys departed from the strict salon style looking to find true effects of light, which could only be captured in very short periods of time and outdoors. This meant drawing had to be sacrificed in favor of speed and color accuracy.
Unfortunately, the lesson taken from this was that something drawn and executed with exquisite finish was boring and not progressive enough, and ever since then, artists have tried to get away with ever diminishing levels of craftsmanship.
It's interesting, but painting seems to be the only art where something poorly made can still be called good. Fair to say that some cubist and postmodern works are good. They have interesting compositions, strong use of color and line, but a lot of them are total crap and we should be able to say that a specific Picasso or Mondrian is total crap.
When we hear a song in the radio that is poorly plaid or just bad, we call it bad no matter who it's from.
Hope this gives you some ideas of what to look out for. Don't be afraid to learn properly, and don't think that one single approach is the best one no matter how famous the teacher that conveys it!
My point to this blog entry is to express my reluctance to believe in, and point out the pitfalls of certain assumptions or dogmatic views that certain teachers hold, or that the public has about making art.
When teaching a method of drawing, no matter how good, a proper teacher will tell you the downsides of this method, and must stress the fact that this is not the only way to do things.
Dogma 1: There is one best method of drawing
If we take the academic drawing method, it is very slow, focused on accuracy and precision and follows certain learning and execution steps which are well known. When drawing fast poses and quick gesture sketches, this approach is not practical, but in other circumstances it can create amazing results.
Take on the other hand the quick sketch illustrative approach. This creates beautiful flowing lines and plenty of expression, but the detail may be missing and accuracy is often sacrificed for the sake of a more organic and spontaneous result.
It is nonsense to say either approach to drawing is "better" than the other one. Each approach has it's place in art and you can choose to use them depending on the situation, the result you are looking for and the one you find more enjoyable.
Dogma 2: Painting and drawing must be kept separate
This one is a very damaging dogma that some art teachers spread and which make some practitioners struggle unnecessarily with their art. The dogma says that when painting, lines and drawing are not to be used. Painting must be done on a tone and mass kind of way and problems with proportions, alignment and form must be sorted out in the thick of things.
The problem with this, is that if the artist's drawing skills are weak, those problems can never be sorted out. It becomes an endless, frustrating struggle that produces nothing but weak results.
The basis for painting is drawing. No question about it. You can then use these drawing skills to make markers or drawings with your brush, or even with charcoal before starting to paint.
Some academic artists take this one step further by creating a full drawing study and then transfering it to the canvas so that they separate the drawing from the painting. Having tried this, it does feel a bit like painting by numbers, but with experience, the result can be made to look as natural and beautiful as any painting made in a tonal manner.
Dogma 3: Fresh art must be made in a careless way
This is one poorly conceived idea that I try to discredit as soon as possible in my Amsterdam drawing classes. The thinking is that to obtain results that appear loose and fresh, the piece must be created with a careless approach.
The reality is that to create a beautiful work of art, the artist must become a kind of criminal mastermind, plotting and scheming about composition, light color harmony and also brushwork and edges. These last two being largely responsible for the feeling of spontaneity in a finished piece.
Remember that loose results can only be good if they are deliberate. If you try to create art by acting carelessly and hoping it will come out right, you are stacking the odds badly against yourself.
Dogma 3: Good original art cannot look like any other before it
This is the kind of idea that has aspiring artists creating the most weird and peculiar things and more often than not, failing to strike a successful formula for aesthetic results. The reason is simple, it is easier to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn about principles that worked well for artists in the past.
No aspiring novelists sets out to write their work by first re-inventing language or trying to completely rework the structure of what a novel is. The possibilities are so endless within the given framework that we can benefit from exploring those before veering off in some awkward tangent.
This is not to say that pushing for originality is a bad thing, but we humans are original even when we're not trying. When you learn to draw and practice by making master copies, the impulse to make changes is almost unavoidable. In the end the fear of being like a parrot that only replicates the work of others gets in the way of learning the principles of art in order to make more educated choices on your own work.
Dogma 4: Art that is well executed is boring
This one is probably the worse art calumny that has been spread after the impressionists. These guys departed from the strict salon style looking to find true effects of light, which could only be captured in very short periods of time and outdoors. This meant drawing had to be sacrificed in favor of speed and color accuracy.
Unfortunately, the lesson taken from this was that something drawn and executed with exquisite finish was boring and not progressive enough, and ever since then, artists have tried to get away with ever diminishing levels of craftsmanship.
It's interesting, but painting seems to be the only art where something poorly made can still be called good. Fair to say that some cubist and postmodern works are good. They have interesting compositions, strong use of color and line, but a lot of them are total crap and we should be able to say that a specific Picasso or Mondrian is total crap.
When we hear a song in the radio that is poorly plaid or just bad, we call it bad no matter who it's from.
Hope this gives you some ideas of what to look out for. Don't be afraid to learn properly, and don't think that one single approach is the best one no matter how famous the teacher that conveys it!
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Drawing classes Amsterdam, the Loomis Method
In my Amsterdam drawing classes I offer the possibility to learn creating portraits either from photos or from the live model.
Learning to draw from the live model is a demanding discipline, so it is perhaps a good idea to start by learning to draw faces from photos on the internet, since you can choose the level of difficulty and type of face, as well as enjoying a model that you can summon whenever you feel like and always stands still.
One of the cited methods to learning to draw the portrait is the Loomis Method. Andrew Loomis was an illustrator who could create faces and characters from his imagination thanks to the deep knowledge he had from the human skull and anatomy.
To illustrate the power of a method and knowledge of a subject, here are two portraits that I have created. This first one was created through pure practice and honing my powers of observation:
This was drawn from the live model during 3 sessions and it's a work of pencil on paper. As you can see, there is plenty of detail on this drawing, all the parts of the face seem to be in the right place, and there is knowledge of using the gray scale, called values, to achieve a sense of volume. However, from an academic perspective this is a fairly weak drawing as I will explain by pointing to the strengths of this next example.
This was done using academic knowledge and the Loomis Method:
You will argue the differences are small, but then again learning to draw is learning to understand the power that small details have on the whole. Notice the stronger knowledge of anatomy, which becomes apparent on the structure of the eyes, nose and lips. The skull structure is also well understood, which allows the values to more clearly show the different planes of the head. This all sounds almost too technical, but it gives the drawing a certain clarity of thought that the smooth and mooshy result of the previous one does not achieve.
Having a method and learning it through drawing classes also allows you to start doing the 'mechanical' part of the drawing in a more sure-footed way, and in turn focusing more of your attention on compositional touches and fancier expression. Notice the play of edges on the hair, which are sometimes diffuse and sometimes very hard or broken.
When learning to draw with a particular method, be aware that some of your first results will be even worse than the drawings you normally produce. This is OK, you're taking a step back in order to absorb the new method. Sometimes this feels terrible and its frustrating, because your eye is ahead of what your hands can do, and it's telling you the results are no good.
In this particular example, the first drawing though week bears a closer resemblance to the model, while in the second one, a good piece of art has been created, but resemblance has suffered, though not dramatically.
The Loomis Method focuses on thinking of the entire skull as a structure in space, with a very specific shape, which once grasped allows you to place the features in the correct position. This method proves something rather counter-intuitive for beginning artists, which is that the individual features can never help enhance resemblance when the correct structure of the skull has not been assessed correctly.
Stick with it and you will get there with method, practice and discipline. During my Amsterdam drawing classes I encourage students to only draw at a speed at which they can be accurate and not a second faster. Only frustration will come from rushing in and building on top of a shaky foundation.
Good luck!
Learning to draw from the live model is a demanding discipline, so it is perhaps a good idea to start by learning to draw faces from photos on the internet, since you can choose the level of difficulty and type of face, as well as enjoying a model that you can summon whenever you feel like and always stands still.
One of the cited methods to learning to draw the portrait is the Loomis Method. Andrew Loomis was an illustrator who could create faces and characters from his imagination thanks to the deep knowledge he had from the human skull and anatomy.
To illustrate the power of a method and knowledge of a subject, here are two portraits that I have created. This first one was created through pure practice and honing my powers of observation:
This was drawn from the live model during 3 sessions and it's a work of pencil on paper. As you can see, there is plenty of detail on this drawing, all the parts of the face seem to be in the right place, and there is knowledge of using the gray scale, called values, to achieve a sense of volume. However, from an academic perspective this is a fairly weak drawing as I will explain by pointing to the strengths of this next example.
This was done using academic knowledge and the Loomis Method:
You will argue the differences are small, but then again learning to draw is learning to understand the power that small details have on the whole. Notice the stronger knowledge of anatomy, which becomes apparent on the structure of the eyes, nose and lips. The skull structure is also well understood, which allows the values to more clearly show the different planes of the head. This all sounds almost too technical, but it gives the drawing a certain clarity of thought that the smooth and mooshy result of the previous one does not achieve.
Having a method and learning it through drawing classes also allows you to start doing the 'mechanical' part of the drawing in a more sure-footed way, and in turn focusing more of your attention on compositional touches and fancier expression. Notice the play of edges on the hair, which are sometimes diffuse and sometimes very hard or broken.
When learning to draw with a particular method, be aware that some of your first results will be even worse than the drawings you normally produce. This is OK, you're taking a step back in order to absorb the new method. Sometimes this feels terrible and its frustrating, because your eye is ahead of what your hands can do, and it's telling you the results are no good.
In this particular example, the first drawing though week bears a closer resemblance to the model, while in the second one, a good piece of art has been created, but resemblance has suffered, though not dramatically.
The Loomis Method focuses on thinking of the entire skull as a structure in space, with a very specific shape, which once grasped allows you to place the features in the correct position. This method proves something rather counter-intuitive for beginning artists, which is that the individual features can never help enhance resemblance when the correct structure of the skull has not been assessed correctly.
Stick with it and you will get there with method, practice and discipline. During my Amsterdam drawing classes I encourage students to only draw at a speed at which they can be accurate and not a second faster. Only frustration will come from rushing in and building on top of a shaky foundation.
Good luck!
Monday, October 7, 2013
Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, the portrait
During my drawing classes in Amsterdam, I give students the option to learn to create portraits. This is usually an important segment of a drawing lessons program and must be covered fairly extensively.
A good portrait consists of many layers of knowledge which come together to create great resemblance as well as a good piece of art.
As with everything else, good drawing is the basis, and once this is established, and a strong composition is found, the chances of a successful piece are greatly enhanced. Amsterdam offers a great option of small ateliers which bring live models in, for art students, professionals and hobbyists alike to draw and paint any way they like.
For aspiring artists who want to learn to draw the portrait, this should be a regular part of their artistic practice. However, lots of practice and a 'feel' for how to capture someone's likeness can never compete with strong knowledge of the anatomy of the skull, and a solid method of how to capture it. This is something I strongly emphasize during my Amsterdam drawing lessons.
The reason is simple. If you look at portraits made by amateurs, and even by the masters of the 17th century, you usually find that the face looks round and smooth. While this was highly appreciated back in those days, and will make you feel like you can draw a portrait, we have since then, found out that as it happens, it is better to draw certain areas as flat. A combination of roundness and angular sections makes for a far stronger statement on learning to draw a portrait.
During drawing classes, the only way to achieve such a result, is to have clear and solid knowledge of the planes of the head. This brings excellence of drawing and clarity of structure to the head you're drawing. You're no longer drawing the outline of a head and putting the features in it. You are instead drawing the volume of a skull, with its particular structure, and once you've captured it, the features fall into place almost automatically.
This is an approach that John Singer Sargent, the great master advocated, and which only started to make sense to me once I learned that, when drawing a portrait, you must assess the underlying structure in order to succeed. Features move and change, but the skull remains exactly the same, and this is what you're after.
During my Amsterdam drawing lessons I make use of great tools such as the Loomis method in order to bring structure to this understanding.
So in conclusion, lots of practice is very necessary to be a good portrait artist, but all the practice in the world will not get you to the peak of your abilities if it's not founded on sound knowledge.
Better to put in the practice hours while you are solidly informed of what you're doing than to blindly try to strike luck. Not doing this, you will risk being someone who after many years of attempting portraits, still runs into simple mistakes of alignment and proportion, and who's lukewarm art is surpassed by the crisp and beautiful art of a knowledgeable counterpart.
A good portrait consists of many layers of knowledge which come together to create great resemblance as well as a good piece of art.
As with everything else, good drawing is the basis, and once this is established, and a strong composition is found, the chances of a successful piece are greatly enhanced. Amsterdam offers a great option of small ateliers which bring live models in, for art students, professionals and hobbyists alike to draw and paint any way they like.
For aspiring artists who want to learn to draw the portrait, this should be a regular part of their artistic practice. However, lots of practice and a 'feel' for how to capture someone's likeness can never compete with strong knowledge of the anatomy of the skull, and a solid method of how to capture it. This is something I strongly emphasize during my Amsterdam drawing lessons.
The reason is simple. If you look at portraits made by amateurs, and even by the masters of the 17th century, you usually find that the face looks round and smooth. While this was highly appreciated back in those days, and will make you feel like you can draw a portrait, we have since then, found out that as it happens, it is better to draw certain areas as flat. A combination of roundness and angular sections makes for a far stronger statement on learning to draw a portrait.
During drawing classes, the only way to achieve such a result, is to have clear and solid knowledge of the planes of the head. This brings excellence of drawing and clarity of structure to the head you're drawing. You're no longer drawing the outline of a head and putting the features in it. You are instead drawing the volume of a skull, with its particular structure, and once you've captured it, the features fall into place almost automatically.
This is an approach that John Singer Sargent, the great master advocated, and which only started to make sense to me once I learned that, when drawing a portrait, you must assess the underlying structure in order to succeed. Features move and change, but the skull remains exactly the same, and this is what you're after.
During my Amsterdam drawing lessons I make use of great tools such as the Loomis method in order to bring structure to this understanding.
So in conclusion, lots of practice is very necessary to be a good portrait artist, but all the practice in the world will not get you to the peak of your abilities if it's not founded on sound knowledge.
Better to put in the practice hours while you are solidly informed of what you're doing than to blindly try to strike luck. Not doing this, you will risk being someone who after many years of attempting portraits, still runs into simple mistakes of alignment and proportion, and who's lukewarm art is surpassed by the crisp and beautiful art of a knowledgeable counterpart.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Drawing lessons in Amsterdam, The importance of Method
During this post about the drawing classes I offer in the center of Amsterdam, I would like to describe in very brief detail the importance of method in learning art, and describe the alternative results that can be obtained.
Perhaps I can relate to this closely not due to my drawing lessons, but because of another passion in my life, which is to play guitar.
I have been playing for a long time, and after over a decade I have certain dexterity with my fingers, as well as what seems to be a more or less innate ability to hear things correctly. This last factor made me never look for musical education or method. I would listen to songs I liked and learned to play them, having lots of fun in the process and laughing at friends of mine who would attend guitar lessons.
Proper art lessons back then seemed like the most boring and pointless thing. They took away the spontaneity and turned this fun hobby into a boring methodical activity. They introduced effort and consistency into something that I though should be loose and organic.
This is very often the felling we have about drawing lessons and how art should be done.
In fact for some time my natural ear and enthusiasm made it so that I was ahead of all these guys taking endless lessons and learning boring scales and other such things. But then something funny started to happen. The guys taking consistent lessons had built a huge strong foundation and when the time came, their skills skyrocketed, while my playing remained sloppy and repetitive.
It hurts me to say it but this was over 15 years ago, and though my guitar skills have improved dramatically since then, I cannot compete with someone who learned and mastered the principles such as scales, correct picking technique, etc.
Such is the case with drawing lessons and art education in general. You can wing it up to a certain level but unless you learn the principles and learn them well, you will plateau for lack of knowledge if nothing else.
As a concrete example of what this means during drawing and painting, we can take portraits. It is indeed possible to draw and paint faces without any knowledge of anatomy, and to be fair the results may end up quite OK. However, quite OK is not good enough and if you want your portraits to acquire that clean impressive result, learning anatomy and formal portraiture methods is the only way to go.
There is a distinct look and feel to a portrait made by someone with thorough academic drawing education. The knowledge of line, value, planes and anatomy is unmistakable. It simply comes through.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that, deep knowledge of your subject's construction will guide your eye into trying to find landmarks that are all but invisible to the untrained eye.
During art history the way drawing lessons has been approached has changed dramatically and shifted from masters who would argue you should be able to draw from knowledge as opposed to observation, and then back. The old masters would be able to construct bodies and faces due to their very deep knowledge of anatomy, while the John Singer Sargents of this world would argue that the less you knew about the subject, the better off you were, relying only on visual perception.
This last tendency probably arose from the realization that you could never deeply know all subjects you wanted to paint, and while old masters limited themselves to drawing few subject matters, the new ones wanted broader subjects. Hence reliance on principles of observation was a better base.
Nowadays things couldn't be more divided, with illustrators and digital concept artists relying on their knowledge and imagination, and classical atelier artists doing the opposite, and going visual, taking all their cues from the real world.
My personal take, and one I try to advocate during my Amsterdam drawing classes, is to learn the principles and then deepen your knowledge on subjects for which your time, interest or technical skills allow. The human face and body would be examples where your knowledge must be deep because of the innate ability we have at perceiving inaccuracies in these subjects. All others subjects can begin with observational approaches which may become deeper if you so choose.
For what it's worht!
Perhaps I can relate to this closely not due to my drawing lessons, but because of another passion in my life, which is to play guitar.
I have been playing for a long time, and after over a decade I have certain dexterity with my fingers, as well as what seems to be a more or less innate ability to hear things correctly. This last factor made me never look for musical education or method. I would listen to songs I liked and learned to play them, having lots of fun in the process and laughing at friends of mine who would attend guitar lessons.
Proper art lessons back then seemed like the most boring and pointless thing. They took away the spontaneity and turned this fun hobby into a boring methodical activity. They introduced effort and consistency into something that I though should be loose and organic.
This is very often the felling we have about drawing lessons and how art should be done.
In fact for some time my natural ear and enthusiasm made it so that I was ahead of all these guys taking endless lessons and learning boring scales and other such things. But then something funny started to happen. The guys taking consistent lessons had built a huge strong foundation and when the time came, their skills skyrocketed, while my playing remained sloppy and repetitive.
It hurts me to say it but this was over 15 years ago, and though my guitar skills have improved dramatically since then, I cannot compete with someone who learned and mastered the principles such as scales, correct picking technique, etc.
Such is the case with drawing lessons and art education in general. You can wing it up to a certain level but unless you learn the principles and learn them well, you will plateau for lack of knowledge if nothing else.
As a concrete example of what this means during drawing and painting, we can take portraits. It is indeed possible to draw and paint faces without any knowledge of anatomy, and to be fair the results may end up quite OK. However, quite OK is not good enough and if you want your portraits to acquire that clean impressive result, learning anatomy and formal portraiture methods is the only way to go.
There is a distinct look and feel to a portrait made by someone with thorough academic drawing education. The knowledge of line, value, planes and anatomy is unmistakable. It simply comes through.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that, deep knowledge of your subject's construction will guide your eye into trying to find landmarks that are all but invisible to the untrained eye.
During art history the way drawing lessons has been approached has changed dramatically and shifted from masters who would argue you should be able to draw from knowledge as opposed to observation, and then back. The old masters would be able to construct bodies and faces due to their very deep knowledge of anatomy, while the John Singer Sargents of this world would argue that the less you knew about the subject, the better off you were, relying only on visual perception.
This last tendency probably arose from the realization that you could never deeply know all subjects you wanted to paint, and while old masters limited themselves to drawing few subject matters, the new ones wanted broader subjects. Hence reliance on principles of observation was a better base.
Nowadays things couldn't be more divided, with illustrators and digital concept artists relying on their knowledge and imagination, and classical atelier artists doing the opposite, and going visual, taking all their cues from the real world.
My personal take, and one I try to advocate during my Amsterdam drawing classes, is to learn the principles and then deepen your knowledge on subjects for which your time, interest or technical skills allow. The human face and body would be examples where your knowledge must be deep because of the innate ability we have at perceiving inaccuracies in these subjects. All others subjects can begin with observational approaches which may become deeper if you so choose.
For what it's worht!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Drawing Lessons in Amstedam, Visit to the MBA Lyon
During my last holiday to France I had the chance to visit the museum of beaux arts in Lyon France and had a look at some of the most amazing paintings and drawings I've seen before.
As I mentioned in some of my previous posts, part of your drawing lessons and painting lessons homework should always be to visit museums and develop an eye for the art you're observing. Learning to draw and paint is first of all learning to see. Once that part is covered you can then start to grapple with using the medium of your choice to show the world what you are personally perceiving.
So on the practical side, how it is that I try to see a work of art? First comes trying to absorb the whole. The big skeleton of the picture. I want to understand in very broad terms what the composition is doing. You can almost imagine you are looking at a black and white postage stamp instead of the full size picture. All the detail and color are gone and you're left with the most basic structure.
In drawing lessons and painting lessons, composition is usually a topic left for last, because of its great complexity. However I believe it's easier to break it down and start dealing with it's basics from the begining. This is something I try to do in my lessons in Amsterdam.
The second thing that interests me is the use of color and how they achieve harmony in the light. I don't memorize but constant looking begins to give you a feel for colors that create beautiful harmonies.
As this becomes clear and I have a grasp of the composition and color harmony, I want to then know how the execution was done. I want to see the kind of brushwork that the painter used, and especially how he or she handled the edges in the painting, which are a big element that separates the amateur from the professional.
As for what I found on the museum that caught my eye, the piece I was most impressed with, ironically was a wooden sculpture of a court jester that was so realistic in it's carvign and posture that you couldn't help but expect it to jump to life at any second.
On the painting side of things, there was a large canvas of two women reading in a darkened room by Fantin Latour which was for me the greatest masterpiece in the collection. The composition, execution and play with light where absolutely masterful.
As I mentioned in some of my previous posts, part of your drawing lessons and painting lessons homework should always be to visit museums and develop an eye for the art you're observing. Learning to draw and paint is first of all learning to see. Once that part is covered you can then start to grapple with using the medium of your choice to show the world what you are personally perceiving.
So on the practical side, how it is that I try to see a work of art? First comes trying to absorb the whole. The big skeleton of the picture. I want to understand in very broad terms what the composition is doing. You can almost imagine you are looking at a black and white postage stamp instead of the full size picture. All the detail and color are gone and you're left with the most basic structure.
In drawing lessons and painting lessons, composition is usually a topic left for last, because of its great complexity. However I believe it's easier to break it down and start dealing with it's basics from the begining. This is something I try to do in my lessons in Amsterdam.
The second thing that interests me is the use of color and how they achieve harmony in the light. I don't memorize but constant looking begins to give you a feel for colors that create beautiful harmonies.
As this becomes clear and I have a grasp of the composition and color harmony, I want to then know how the execution was done. I want to see the kind of brushwork that the painter used, and especially how he or she handled the edges in the painting, which are a big element that separates the amateur from the professional.
As for what I found on the museum that caught my eye, the piece I was most impressed with, ironically was a wooden sculpture of a court jester that was so realistic in it's carvign and posture that you couldn't help but expect it to jump to life at any second.
On the painting side of things, there was a large canvas of two women reading in a darkened room by Fantin Latour which was for me the greatest masterpiece in the collection. The composition, execution and play with light where absolutely masterful.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Painting Lessons in Amsterdam, Why go Private?
My drawing lessons and painting lessons in Amsterdam city centre are private, although I agree to teach to couples or small groups.
What I like to offer is what I would have liked to receive during the limited painting instruction I once signed up for, and which to my mind did no deliver. Given that I have a house studio, this allows me to deal with 1 or 2 people at a time.
Most painting classes have you come to an atelier or studio and paint away. The price may be per lesson or per 'course' and you are told that you can get 10 three-hour lessons for 300 Euro. You do the math in your head and think "WOW, I'm paying only 10 Euro per hour to learn how to paint!"
That's the first mistake. In reality, you're paying 10 Euro per hour to paint somewhere and receive occasional (and perhaps very good) advice on how to do it. These are not 30 hours of learning, they are 30 hours of painting or practicing. It is not the same thing.
This distinction is crucial, when you start to realize just what a time consuming activity drawing and painting can be. I will say this as clearly and plainly as I can: It makes absolutely no sense to put in the practice hours while at the same time paying someone.
This is the first reason that my Amsterdam painting lessons and drawing classes are private. They separate learning time from practice time. No need to pay me while you're taking all the time in the world and doing things you already know how to do. Do that on your own (literally) free time. The time you pay for, next to an instructor, should be spent making the most out of what this person knows, asking all the questions, discussing the work, learning a new technique and how to apply it, etc.
The drawing and painting you actually do during these lessons is focused on the learning of one specific thing or technique. You try the technique out, see if it works and figure things out with the help of the experts. Then you practice it on your own time.
Compare this idea with that of learning how to play a musical instrument. You don't pay a teacher to come over and ring away at your guitar for 3 hours. You sit down, discuss and learn what needs to be learned and then during the days between lessons you do all the ringing away and the practicing.
The second reason why my Amsterdam painting lessons are private, is that of positive criticism.
Not everyone knows how to give it, and not everyone knows how to get it, but it is a crucial part of improving. It is well known that you must become your harshest critic and the great masters of art always were. If you let things go, and cut yourself slack, the results may not be as good as they would otherwise.
A few things tend to happen during a painting lesson with this regard. Other members of the class may be too encouraging to keep things nice, or perhaps each will have a totally different opinion about what to make our work improve. You may not be comfortable receiving criticism from them or from the teacher in that setting. Finally, you may begin to compare your work to that of others and draw unwarranted conclusions about your own talent and capabilities.
In a private setting, you can openly discuss the bits you find challenging and receive a stern criticism about your work from someone who is an expert and who's job it is to raise your artistic level, without the risk of feeling like you came short. You are there to learn.
Then there is the obvious stuff during painting lessons, such as the fact that the teacher's attention is solely dedicated to your work, you can choose your subject with more flexibility and even call the shots about when and how to take a break.
Contrary to the social and fun idea we have about painting lessons, an atelier with practicing artists is usually as quite as a mausoleum for most of the time. The painting 'lessons' with a real social value, such as the 'wine and pallet' types are great fun but you will not make great progress beyond what you already know.
Anyway, that's my take on the whole private lessons bit!
What I like to offer is what I would have liked to receive during the limited painting instruction I once signed up for, and which to my mind did no deliver. Given that I have a house studio, this allows me to deal with 1 or 2 people at a time.
Most painting classes have you come to an atelier or studio and paint away. The price may be per lesson or per 'course' and you are told that you can get 10 three-hour lessons for 300 Euro. You do the math in your head and think "WOW, I'm paying only 10 Euro per hour to learn how to paint!"
That's the first mistake. In reality, you're paying 10 Euro per hour to paint somewhere and receive occasional (and perhaps very good) advice on how to do it. These are not 30 hours of learning, they are 30 hours of painting or practicing. It is not the same thing.
This distinction is crucial, when you start to realize just what a time consuming activity drawing and painting can be. I will say this as clearly and plainly as I can: It makes absolutely no sense to put in the practice hours while at the same time paying someone.
This is the first reason that my Amsterdam painting lessons and drawing classes are private. They separate learning time from practice time. No need to pay me while you're taking all the time in the world and doing things you already know how to do. Do that on your own (literally) free time. The time you pay for, next to an instructor, should be spent making the most out of what this person knows, asking all the questions, discussing the work, learning a new technique and how to apply it, etc.
The drawing and painting you actually do during these lessons is focused on the learning of one specific thing or technique. You try the technique out, see if it works and figure things out with the help of the experts. Then you practice it on your own time.
Compare this idea with that of learning how to play a musical instrument. You don't pay a teacher to come over and ring away at your guitar for 3 hours. You sit down, discuss and learn what needs to be learned and then during the days between lessons you do all the ringing away and the practicing.
The second reason why my Amsterdam painting lessons are private, is that of positive criticism.
Not everyone knows how to give it, and not everyone knows how to get it, but it is a crucial part of improving. It is well known that you must become your harshest critic and the great masters of art always were. If you let things go, and cut yourself slack, the results may not be as good as they would otherwise.
A few things tend to happen during a painting lesson with this regard. Other members of the class may be too encouraging to keep things nice, or perhaps each will have a totally different opinion about what to make our work improve. You may not be comfortable receiving criticism from them or from the teacher in that setting. Finally, you may begin to compare your work to that of others and draw unwarranted conclusions about your own talent and capabilities.
In a private setting, you can openly discuss the bits you find challenging and receive a stern criticism about your work from someone who is an expert and who's job it is to raise your artistic level, without the risk of feeling like you came short. You are there to learn.
Then there is the obvious stuff during painting lessons, such as the fact that the teacher's attention is solely dedicated to your work, you can choose your subject with more flexibility and even call the shots about when and how to take a break.
Contrary to the social and fun idea we have about painting lessons, an atelier with practicing artists is usually as quite as a mausoleum for most of the time. The painting 'lessons' with a real social value, such as the 'wine and pallet' types are great fun but you will not make great progress beyond what you already know.
Anyway, that's my take on the whole private lessons bit!
Monday, August 12, 2013
Drawing Lessons in Amsterdam, Things I Don't Do and Why
If you're planning to take some drawing lessons in Amsterdam, it's handy to know what techniques and ideas are available with your teachers of choice.
Perhaps it's fair to begin with the techniques and styles that I personally do not cover in my drawing lessons just to make sure expectations are correct. I will try to give the reasons behind some of the choices in my drawing techniques so far and hopefully it all makes sense and gives you something to consider in your own artistic development.
The first style I do not practice, or endorse in my drawing lessons is that of the fast poses or ultra quick sketches. I have a couple of reasons for this. First of which is the fact that I'm very slow when it comes to drawing. The moment I speed things up, results start to suffer badly to my eyes.
There is also something contradictory about trying to draw as quickly as you can. If you are looking for hobbies involving speed, then you would be well advised to steer clear of drawing and painting, which most masters will agree, are all about slowing down. If you stick to the speedy approach, especially in the beginning, you will rob yourself of the chance to develop your eye for detail. Your visual sensibility will not change and you'll keep churning out the same doodles year after year.
I have seen this in some painting acquaintances of mine, which only after 25 years of painting (a lifetime indeed) they discovered there is such thing as lights and darks, and how to see them correctly!! It took me about 2 weeks to discover this and another 6 months to a year to practice it and understand what it really means.
However, if you put a time pressure to this practice, the depth of your understanding will be very superficial indeed and your art will show it.
See by comparison what the most well-regarded academic schools apply during their drawing lessons. One of the techniques is called long poses. In long poses, the same model poses in the same light and the same position not for hours or days, but indeed for weeks. The students analyze the outline of the form, the way shadows turn around limbs, and every day, further nuance is discovered and reflected on their work.
Let's make no apologies here, this kind of drawing lesson is not the most exciting and to someone walking into a room in dead silence where everyone is creating the same perfect rendering for weeks on end, it would seem more like an autistic clinic than an art school. However there is a purpose to this, which I mentioned above. Developing visual acuteness and sensibility to a level above what other people can see.
I have engaged in such long studies myself and found them to be invaluable:
The second type of drawing that I do not practice or teach in my drawing lessons is the ink line drawing style. The reason is I get extremely nervous about making a line that I cannot delete later. I have tried and every time the result is somewhere between the pathetic and the irrelevant.
Contrary to my comments on the previous style of fast sketches, the art of line in ink is one that has only shrank in popularity, including it's availability in drawing lessons, and which can be an exquisite form of drawing in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. I wish I can learn this myself.
Given the fact that most of my studies and practice have been to try and achieve realism, which is an excellent way to learn how to draw and in turn paint, I also know little about illustrative type of drawing. By this I mean the type that you can make without necessarily looking at the subject. this would include cartoon drawing, inventing characters or settings, and basically doodling to a high level all from your head.
This last area is one that has really caught my attention lately and which I would love to include in my drawing lessons. The reason for this is that I see illustrators as people who have a highly developed visual intelligence, which is not so much perceptive but perhaps more mental or imaginative. They can dream up a subject and then render it realistically any way they want. I envy that capacity and indeed wonder how it may be developed.
They also work at speed, which I criticized so much at the beginning of this article, but their speed is the cherry on top of years of dedicated studies of form and light and therefore they have a license for it.
Good illustrators are in a word for me, the monarchs of the visual arts, able to compose, draw and manage light any way they want and do so in relatively short periods of time. Whenever one of them breaks out of their usual work and produces fine art, he or she is usually met with great acclaim.
I'm sure that academic drawing lessons is part of all their education and therefore a valuable tool for all of us to use!
Perhaps it's fair to begin with the techniques and styles that I personally do not cover in my drawing lessons just to make sure expectations are correct. I will try to give the reasons behind some of the choices in my drawing techniques so far and hopefully it all makes sense and gives you something to consider in your own artistic development.
The first style I do not practice, or endorse in my drawing lessons is that of the fast poses or ultra quick sketches. I have a couple of reasons for this. First of which is the fact that I'm very slow when it comes to drawing. The moment I speed things up, results start to suffer badly to my eyes.
There is also something contradictory about trying to draw as quickly as you can. If you are looking for hobbies involving speed, then you would be well advised to steer clear of drawing and painting, which most masters will agree, are all about slowing down. If you stick to the speedy approach, especially in the beginning, you will rob yourself of the chance to develop your eye for detail. Your visual sensibility will not change and you'll keep churning out the same doodles year after year.
I have seen this in some painting acquaintances of mine, which only after 25 years of painting (a lifetime indeed) they discovered there is such thing as lights and darks, and how to see them correctly!! It took me about 2 weeks to discover this and another 6 months to a year to practice it and understand what it really means.
However, if you put a time pressure to this practice, the depth of your understanding will be very superficial indeed and your art will show it.
See by comparison what the most well-regarded academic schools apply during their drawing lessons. One of the techniques is called long poses. In long poses, the same model poses in the same light and the same position not for hours or days, but indeed for weeks. The students analyze the outline of the form, the way shadows turn around limbs, and every day, further nuance is discovered and reflected on their work.
Let's make no apologies here, this kind of drawing lesson is not the most exciting and to someone walking into a room in dead silence where everyone is creating the same perfect rendering for weeks on end, it would seem more like an autistic clinic than an art school. However there is a purpose to this, which I mentioned above. Developing visual acuteness and sensibility to a level above what other people can see.
I have engaged in such long studies myself and found them to be invaluable:
The second type of drawing that I do not practice or teach in my drawing lessons is the ink line drawing style. The reason is I get extremely nervous about making a line that I cannot delete later. I have tried and every time the result is somewhere between the pathetic and the irrelevant.
Contrary to my comments on the previous style of fast sketches, the art of line in ink is one that has only shrank in popularity, including it's availability in drawing lessons, and which can be an exquisite form of drawing in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. I wish I can learn this myself.
Given the fact that most of my studies and practice have been to try and achieve realism, which is an excellent way to learn how to draw and in turn paint, I also know little about illustrative type of drawing. By this I mean the type that you can make without necessarily looking at the subject. this would include cartoon drawing, inventing characters or settings, and basically doodling to a high level all from your head.
This last area is one that has really caught my attention lately and which I would love to include in my drawing lessons. The reason for this is that I see illustrators as people who have a highly developed visual intelligence, which is not so much perceptive but perhaps more mental or imaginative. They can dream up a subject and then render it realistically any way they want. I envy that capacity and indeed wonder how it may be developed.
They also work at speed, which I criticized so much at the beginning of this article, but their speed is the cherry on top of years of dedicated studies of form and light and therefore they have a license for it.
Good illustrators are in a word for me, the monarchs of the visual arts, able to compose, draw and manage light any way they want and do so in relatively short periods of time. Whenever one of them breaks out of their usual work and produces fine art, he or she is usually met with great acclaim.
I'm sure that academic drawing lessons is part of all their education and therefore a valuable tool for all of us to use!
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, for the Patient Painter
My academic drawing classes in Amsterdam for beginners and intermediate artists who wish to learn the way the old masters learned the craft.
When joining a drawing class in the academic style you may discover that some of your ideas about how to draw, and whether you were born to do it or not are not exactly correct. In a sense everybody was born to draw, and nobody was born to draw.
The most brilliant draftsmen (drawing artists) from the past, some of which indeed lived in Amsterdam, reached the level they did, not through flairs of genius which was obvious from an early age. It's almost guaranteed that their first doodles were as poor as those of everyone else who wanted to learn drawing. The difference is that they didn't reach any wrong conclusions from this, other than the obvious one: they had never done it before, and therefore, a bad result was inevitable.
Turn the clock forward 3 or 4 centuries and the image of the artist shifted from that of a craftsman to that of a creative bohemian. I find this to be a terrible idea, especially for people considering to take drawing classes. They may give things a try, and when their drawings are not brilliant and effortless, the conclusion is: "Oh well, I guess I'm just not the artistic type".
The title I used in this entry, the 'patient painter' stands for someone who above all is willing to put in the time and the effort, and go the distance. The only failed drawing is the one that you consider finished before it reaches a standard that you consider excellent, whether produced by yourself or somebody else.
Many of the discussions in my drawing classes in Amsterdam, will revolve around the idea of measuring thoroughly, slowing down, using your lines and tools carefully in the beginning, almost as if you were planning a crime. Did I mention slowing down?
Take for example the portrait of a religious man which I made in a visit to my home country of Guatemala this past march:
I frankly don't recall how many hours it took to create, but I do know it did not happen in one afternoon. It took days of careful observation, of letting the work 'rest' and coming back the next morning with a fresh pair of eyes and also trying different compositional decisions of lines, values, edges and atmosphere, all of which you will learn in my Amsterdam drawing lessons, and which are difficult to crack in a couple of sessions, unless you are an accomplished master with decades of drawing under your belt.
This is one of the reasons that during my drawing classes in Amsterdam I strongly encourage people to carefully choose what they want to draw. It has to be something that keeps you motivated to give your best and stick to it as long as humanly possible. Until it is perfect and not a moment less.
What you will find during the drawing lessons, is that the secret behind amazing works of draftsmanship has little to do with old secrets or artistic genius. It's just plain old hard work, and some techniques that should be always kept in mind.
So I guess the bad news is that it's not easy, but the good news is that anyone can do it!
When joining a drawing class in the academic style you may discover that some of your ideas about how to draw, and whether you were born to do it or not are not exactly correct. In a sense everybody was born to draw, and nobody was born to draw.
The most brilliant draftsmen (drawing artists) from the past, some of which indeed lived in Amsterdam, reached the level they did, not through flairs of genius which was obvious from an early age. It's almost guaranteed that their first doodles were as poor as those of everyone else who wanted to learn drawing. The difference is that they didn't reach any wrong conclusions from this, other than the obvious one: they had never done it before, and therefore, a bad result was inevitable.
Turn the clock forward 3 or 4 centuries and the image of the artist shifted from that of a craftsman to that of a creative bohemian. I find this to be a terrible idea, especially for people considering to take drawing classes. They may give things a try, and when their drawings are not brilliant and effortless, the conclusion is: "Oh well, I guess I'm just not the artistic type".
The title I used in this entry, the 'patient painter' stands for someone who above all is willing to put in the time and the effort, and go the distance. The only failed drawing is the one that you consider finished before it reaches a standard that you consider excellent, whether produced by yourself or somebody else.
Many of the discussions in my drawing classes in Amsterdam, will revolve around the idea of measuring thoroughly, slowing down, using your lines and tools carefully in the beginning, almost as if you were planning a crime. Did I mention slowing down?
Take for example the portrait of a religious man which I made in a visit to my home country of Guatemala this past march:
I frankly don't recall how many hours it took to create, but I do know it did not happen in one afternoon. It took days of careful observation, of letting the work 'rest' and coming back the next morning with a fresh pair of eyes and also trying different compositional decisions of lines, values, edges and atmosphere, all of which you will learn in my Amsterdam drawing lessons, and which are difficult to crack in a couple of sessions, unless you are an accomplished master with decades of drawing under your belt.
This is one of the reasons that during my drawing classes in Amsterdam I strongly encourage people to carefully choose what they want to draw. It has to be something that keeps you motivated to give your best and stick to it as long as humanly possible. Until it is perfect and not a moment less.
What you will find during the drawing lessons, is that the secret behind amazing works of draftsmanship has little to do with old secrets or artistic genius. It's just plain old hard work, and some techniques that should be always kept in mind.
So I guess the bad news is that it's not easy, but the good news is that anyone can do it!
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Painting Classes in Amsterdam
Hi all,
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I've started offering private painting lessons in Amsterdam, right in the center of the city in my canal studio/house.
To satisfy lord Google's need for lots of text about my website, and also help you understand my approach in some more detail, I'll be creating some posts about the whole thing here in my blog and if anyone has questions, you can always call me with the contact details provided on my website:
www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
The painting classes I offer are not for everyone. Many art enthusiasts think of painting lessons as a place where you go and explore things around. This is no doubt a lot of fun and I've done it myself, but the results were not to my satisfaction. The artistic results I mean, the socializing was great!
So these Amsterdam painting classes are much more focused and structured and the value you get in return is the ability to start producing art that you may not have though possible before.
One of the thing my painting classes do, and which may be disappointing is to start with the very basics of drawing. So for those who want to waltz in and start putting brushes to a canvas, I do apologize in advance. Not gonna happen.
Why? Well, it was stated at the entrance of the old French Academy of Art in Paris: "Well drawn is well painted". Painting schools in Amsterdam may not have had this inscribed at their entrance, which may explain why there's lots of old masters and very few new ones!
Trying to paint while dragging around sloppy drawing skills is painful to do and painful to witness. So painting lessons begin with making sure your drawing skills are really solid. Even if you have been drawing for some time, there is great benefit from learning the academic approach. It provides you a foundation on which to fall upon when things are not going the way you expect.
My webpage on painting classes provides you with a quick glimpse of what this means:
www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
So what are interesting positive points of an Amsterdam painting class which is based on the classical methods:
1. It gives you a foundation to learn painting, which is easy to learn by anyone regardless of background, personality or talent
2. It breaks down the creation of an artwork into small and easy to execute steps which make it possible to learn to paint anything you like and do it very well
3. It demystifies art and allows you to look at it as a craft with tools, techniques and a language that every painting class should be teaching before anything else
4. The paintings of the masters will become more understandable to you, and not less but in fact more amazing and enjoyable
5. You will create the art you want, at the level you decide. You will be able to become the best critic of your work, because you will know which aspects to look for.
6. You will be able to draw and paint any subject, in almost any style you choose.
Now, before I start to sound like a snake oil salesmen, I must say that learning the method and practicing it is hard work. That is both good and bad news. It means anyone who's willing to work at it can do it, but the work has to be done thoroughly.
So that's today's post about this. My website contains some image examples of the art I produce thanks to this method, as well as some steps followed in their creation.
Come visit soon!
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I've started offering private painting lessons in Amsterdam, right in the center of the city in my canal studio/house.
To satisfy lord Google's need for lots of text about my website, and also help you understand my approach in some more detail, I'll be creating some posts about the whole thing here in my blog and if anyone has questions, you can always call me with the contact details provided on my website:
www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
The painting classes I offer are not for everyone. Many art enthusiasts think of painting lessons as a place where you go and explore things around. This is no doubt a lot of fun and I've done it myself, but the results were not to my satisfaction. The artistic results I mean, the socializing was great!
So these Amsterdam painting classes are much more focused and structured and the value you get in return is the ability to start producing art that you may not have though possible before.
One of the thing my painting classes do, and which may be disappointing is to start with the very basics of drawing. So for those who want to waltz in and start putting brushes to a canvas, I do apologize in advance. Not gonna happen.
Why? Well, it was stated at the entrance of the old French Academy of Art in Paris: "Well drawn is well painted". Painting schools in Amsterdam may not have had this inscribed at their entrance, which may explain why there's lots of old masters and very few new ones!
Trying to paint while dragging around sloppy drawing skills is painful to do and painful to witness. So painting lessons begin with making sure your drawing skills are really solid. Even if you have been drawing for some time, there is great benefit from learning the academic approach. It provides you a foundation on which to fall upon when things are not going the way you expect.
My webpage on painting classes provides you with a quick glimpse of what this means:
www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
So what are interesting positive points of an Amsterdam painting class which is based on the classical methods:
1. It gives you a foundation to learn painting, which is easy to learn by anyone regardless of background, personality or talent
2. It breaks down the creation of an artwork into small and easy to execute steps which make it possible to learn to paint anything you like and do it very well
3. It demystifies art and allows you to look at it as a craft with tools, techniques and a language that every painting class should be teaching before anything else
4. The paintings of the masters will become more understandable to you, and not less but in fact more amazing and enjoyable
5. You will create the art you want, at the level you decide. You will be able to become the best critic of your work, because you will know which aspects to look for.
6. You will be able to draw and paint any subject, in almost any style you choose.
Now, before I start to sound like a snake oil salesmen, I must say that learning the method and practicing it is hard work. That is both good and bad news. It means anyone who's willing to work at it can do it, but the work has to be done thoroughly.
So that's today's post about this. My website contains some image examples of the art I produce thanks to this method, as well as some steps followed in their creation.
Come visit soon!
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Art Lessons in Amsterdam, Classical Drawing and Painting
Learning to draw and paint in Amsterdam, following the style and principles of the old masters should be readily available, one would think.
However, as some of my earlier posts will tell you, this is currently not the case. The availability of instruction that focuses on the classical way of learning art is extremely scarce. I myself found this while trying to learn to draw and paint, and I had to rely on internet downloads and the purchase of foreign (mostly American and British) books to learn the craft.
Since then not much has changed and I was surprised to see this confirmed in the latest issue of Palet magazine, which comments how Florence in Italy, for example, boasts a classical atelier-type art school which Amsterdam could only dream of nowadays.
So, being one to take matters into my own hands, I now offer art lessons in Amsterdam on a private basis via my website:
http://juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
Now, even though the website tells you all about it, lord Google demands that I write and write on the subject so that my website is considered worthy of appearing somewhere near page one, so in this post I will tell you something about the principles and the process.
One of the first things you will notice about my painting lessons in Amsterdam is that they are private, mostly.
The reason for this, is that I'm not the lucky owner or unlucky tenant of a nice studio or atelier. I work from home, and I'm proud to say that my kitchen counter has produced good art. This is not something I'm ashamed of, in fact I'm proud of it, and it is a more real and feasible scenario for 99% of people out there than a large beautiful studio with North light coming in.
This means your Amsterdam drawing or painting lessons will take place at my home, your home or when the weather allows, outdoors at a nice location.
The second reason my painting classes in Amsterdam are private is because I'm no certified teacher and to tell the truth, I would not know how to deal with a group. The logistics of it alone make me nervous and I don't feel like spending a lot of time organizing, scheduling and coordinating. I like to draw, paint and focus on the task at hand.
Next thing to say about these new little Amsterdam art classes is the style that I practice and intend to teach. The style is strictly academic. A quick look at my website www.juanpablobran.com will show you I'm currently focused on classical realism. This is not to say other styles are less interesting, less worthy or that my own artistic style will not change later. However if you want to produce beautiful art, you have to learn the visual principles, and I'm convinced that these principles are best learned in an Amsterdam painting course that sticks to the classics.
Why?
Because they were bloody good. They discovered (or invented) color, composition, drawing and painting techniques that hit a solid cord on our human notion of esthetics. You are well adviced to study why this is and learn how to use it. If you don't you are tossing a coin hoping to get lucky and the odds are so dramatically stacked against you that the result is almost always guaranteed to fall very short of your potential, if it's not downright ugly.
This is my own personal opinion anyway.
But lets look at what this approach of art classes can achieve, rather than what it avoids. What it does is to remove the element of 'talent' out of the equation. The normal art enthusiast has this expectation that a creative personality is necessary to create good art, and that trying random stuff results in good art if you have the right genes.
The academic approach takes your drawing and painting to a totally different level, in a very short period of time because it starts from a completely different standpoint. It uses a number of very simple and proven ideas, which when properly used and combined, produce amazing results that anybody can achieve.
My Amsterdam painting lessons take this as a starting point, and I really do believe this can make a difference in the level that you can reach with your art.
You may not believe this but I only started to draw in August 2012. Before that I could only draw smileys and stick men. Now you may not have the same amount of time on your hands, the same knack for method or visual acuity, which is where taking lessons comes in handy, but if you live in Amsterdam and you want to become an artist whether it is drawing or painting, my lessons can help you get that underway.
One integral part of the painting classes I offer in Amsterdam is knowing the masters. In itself, Amsterdam lends itself perfectly to anyone who wants to study how art, drawing and painting is done to the highest levels. The Rijksmuseum just re-opened. The Hermitage, the van Gogh, are all places where we can go and figure out how it's really done.
However, to learn how to draw and paint in Amsterdam, there is visiting a museum and there is visiting a museum. What are we looking for when we see a piece of art? We want to evaluate every aspect that makes it good, both from a distance and up close.
Hope this initial post gets you interested, my contact details are on the website and we can discuss at length your artistic ambitions and how I can help you reach them!
However, as some of my earlier posts will tell you, this is currently not the case. The availability of instruction that focuses on the classical way of learning art is extremely scarce. I myself found this while trying to learn to draw and paint, and I had to rely on internet downloads and the purchase of foreign (mostly American and British) books to learn the craft.
Since then not much has changed and I was surprised to see this confirmed in the latest issue of Palet magazine, which comments how Florence in Italy, for example, boasts a classical atelier-type art school which Amsterdam could only dream of nowadays.
So, being one to take matters into my own hands, I now offer art lessons in Amsterdam on a private basis via my website:
http://juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
Now, even though the website tells you all about it, lord Google demands that I write and write on the subject so that my website is considered worthy of appearing somewhere near page one, so in this post I will tell you something about the principles and the process.
One of the first things you will notice about my painting lessons in Amsterdam is that they are private, mostly.
The reason for this, is that I'm not the lucky owner or unlucky tenant of a nice studio or atelier. I work from home, and I'm proud to say that my kitchen counter has produced good art. This is not something I'm ashamed of, in fact I'm proud of it, and it is a more real and feasible scenario for 99% of people out there than a large beautiful studio with North light coming in.
This means your Amsterdam drawing or painting lessons will take place at my home, your home or when the weather allows, outdoors at a nice location.
The second reason my painting classes in Amsterdam are private is because I'm no certified teacher and to tell the truth, I would not know how to deal with a group. The logistics of it alone make me nervous and I don't feel like spending a lot of time organizing, scheduling and coordinating. I like to draw, paint and focus on the task at hand.
Next thing to say about these new little Amsterdam art classes is the style that I practice and intend to teach. The style is strictly academic. A quick look at my website www.juanpablobran.com will show you I'm currently focused on classical realism. This is not to say other styles are less interesting, less worthy or that my own artistic style will not change later. However if you want to produce beautiful art, you have to learn the visual principles, and I'm convinced that these principles are best learned in an Amsterdam painting course that sticks to the classics.
Why?
Because they were bloody good. They discovered (or invented) color, composition, drawing and painting techniques that hit a solid cord on our human notion of esthetics. You are well adviced to study why this is and learn how to use it. If you don't you are tossing a coin hoping to get lucky and the odds are so dramatically stacked against you that the result is almost always guaranteed to fall very short of your potential, if it's not downright ugly.
This is my own personal opinion anyway.
But lets look at what this approach of art classes can achieve, rather than what it avoids. What it does is to remove the element of 'talent' out of the equation. The normal art enthusiast has this expectation that a creative personality is necessary to create good art, and that trying random stuff results in good art if you have the right genes.
The academic approach takes your drawing and painting to a totally different level, in a very short period of time because it starts from a completely different standpoint. It uses a number of very simple and proven ideas, which when properly used and combined, produce amazing results that anybody can achieve.
My Amsterdam painting lessons take this as a starting point, and I really do believe this can make a difference in the level that you can reach with your art.
You may not believe this but I only started to draw in August 2012. Before that I could only draw smileys and stick men. Now you may not have the same amount of time on your hands, the same knack for method or visual acuity, which is where taking lessons comes in handy, but if you live in Amsterdam and you want to become an artist whether it is drawing or painting, my lessons can help you get that underway.
One integral part of the painting classes I offer in Amsterdam is knowing the masters. In itself, Amsterdam lends itself perfectly to anyone who wants to study how art, drawing and painting is done to the highest levels. The Rijksmuseum just re-opened. The Hermitage, the van Gogh, are all places where we can go and figure out how it's really done.
However, to learn how to draw and paint in Amsterdam, there is visiting a museum and there is visiting a museum. What are we looking for when we see a piece of art? We want to evaluate every aspect that makes it good, both from a distance and up close.
Hope this initial post gets you interested, my contact details are on the website and we can discuss at length your artistic ambitions and how I can help you reach them!
Friday, June 28, 2013
Something's Rotten with Dutch Art: Part 2 Rijksakademie has Fallen
What do you get if you mix a mafia boss with a modern art curator?
Answer: someone who makes you an offer you can't understand.
In the previous entry of this series, I had a go at the Art Zuid 2013 exhibition for their poorly curated outdoor sculpture choice of post-modern nonsensical "art".
However, as you can see by the title of this series, this is in my opinion a wider problem in Holland and in today's article I criticize what, in my opinion, should be the last bastion of hope for high quality esthetics and art in the Netherlands: the Rijksakademie.
I found out about the Rijksakademie while doing research and trying to find an art academy in Amsterdam that had kept the old master's traditions alive.
With such a name to uphold, I expected a group of people pushing the disciplines of academic drawing, painting and sculpting to the limit, and churning out works of art that would be known worldwide. An institute sought by artists with high aspirations, where masters would take students under their wing, and which would be the envy of today's academies in Florence and Paris.
You can imagine my surprise when I arrived to their homepage and saw a slide show, in which they put forward what I presume is their 'best foot':
So it is safe to say that the Alamo has fallen. The Rijksakademie is now totally divorced from the esthetic and artistic values that put Dutch art on the map, and is instead engaged in some wild goose (or duck carcass) chase. Some weird sort of experimental ... ehm ... experiment.
In my next article I will try and speculate how and why this is the case, but for now let's see if we agree whether it IS the case.
To try and drive this point home, I've prepared a series of photos of random images downloaded from the Internet. Of all these random things, one of them is a piece of art made by a resident artist of the Rijksakademie, and you must guess which one it is:
A guy in a corner with some trees and fruit on the floor and a plastic dead dog.
A man holding a baseball bat wearing a red shirt.
A woman drinking from different glasses, with mandarins while someone pours water, in Holland's Got Talent style
Some kind of figure's image peeled away and destroyed.
A high-tech-looking rubber carpet.
A rather crappy painting with people.
A metal fence.
A guy jumping in the dust on some industrial grounds.
Two monitors with business men shaking hands.
Photo of a parking lot with some cars and trees around.
A board burnt and melted with some colors.
A board with some masking tape, where something was probably painted before.
Notice you should already be worried by the fact that the piece of art doesn't exactly jump out at you from this series. That in itself is a sign of something...
Now, as for the answer. Did you guess which one was the Rijksakademie piece of art?
Well, surprise!!! They are ALL Rijksakademie pieces of art.
Yes. These beautiful creations is what these people are busy with, only a stone's throw away from the Rijksmuseum, which just reopened and is now hailed as one of the best museums in the world.
Not surprisingly, some of this stuff is being show in the Tate Modern in London. An artistic institution so rarefied, it can get away with showing you just about anything as art and get away with it, so long as the story sounds plausible.
A case in point is Gabriel Orozco's white shoe box exhibition piece, which is...well a white shoe box:
The curator says, with that typical deep high-brow tone of theirs, that Orozco is an artist that "often likes to disappoint people".
I think that is a disgraceful statement. When even the wish to disappoint is praised, we've just been stripped of our ability to call a turd a turd.
In my submission, the current philosophy of the Rijksakademie is a sham, creating turds and then dressing them up in all sorts of convoluted explanations to make them seem interesting.
Beautiful art is on its own. And when I say that, I mean it does not count with the 3.3 Million Euros that the Secretary of Education, Culture and Science spends on the Rijksakademie every year to make this kind of stuff.
Now, less I start to sound like a fascist to all those free experimental souls out there, there should be room for everyone to play. So my take on it is this:
IF, you want to throw a plastic white dog on top of some dry Christmas trees and give a name to it, or put the carcass of a duck inside a cement crusted bulldozer blade, then by all means go ahead and do it, but don't expect:
1. Praise or recognition,
2. Entire organizations at your service, and
3. Subsidies
Do it like everybody else does and try to see if you're stuff is really worth making, and whether it is of value to anyone other than yourself and your little club. If this strange and unique category you've dreamed up is only interesting to 1 person, well, you have your answer and government shouldn't be sponsoring your randomness over anyone else's.
This last point is important, because it implies that tax payers are funding art that not everyone likes or approves of. Technically buying things they would otherwise despise at the benefit of a few artists and ignoring others.
It also means that the government is having an opinion on which type of art deserves funding and which type doesn't, which should not be part of public policy in my submission.
Under their 'donations' page the Rijksacademie tells us to "Support the art of the future, and the artists of today".
I really hope the art of the future looks better than this.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Something's Rotten with Dutch Art Part 1: The Art Zuid Embarrasment
Something's rotten with much of Dutch current day art and everyone knows it.
I may be no learned art critic, but all one needs to do is take the pulse of the industry to get a feel that the home of the old masters is producing little worth writing home about these days.
From the Art Zuid embarrassment, to the mediocre level of the Affordable Art Fair and Art RAI events, and ending in the downright disgraceful produce of the Rijksacademie, which would make Rembrandt, Van Dijk, Albert Cuyp and Vermeer turn in their graves. But more of that in the posts to follow.
I want to start this post series with a quote by Harold Speed, author of The Practice and Science of Drawing, widely acknowledged as one of the best ever books on the subject, and now relegated to the free download section of www.archive.org. A bad omen in its own right.
Speed says referring to the artist's correct use of old artistic conventions:
"The result is likely to be something very different from the violent exploits in peculiarity that have been masquerading as originality lately. Originality is more concerned with sincerity than peculiarity.
The struggling and fretting after originality that one sees in modern art is certainly an evidence of vitality, but one is inclined to doubt whether anything really original was ever done in so forced a way. The older masters, it seems, were content sincerely to try and do the best they were capable of doing. And this continual striving to do better led them almost unconsciously to new and original results.
Originality is a quality over which an artist has as little influence as over the shape and distinctions of his features.
If an artist does not have a strong original personality, it is a matter of opinion whether he is not better employed in working along the lines of some well-tried manner that will at any rate keep him from doing anything really bad, that in struggling to cloak his own commonplaceness under violent essays in peculiarity and the avoidance of the obvious at all costs."
I think Speed has summarized it brilliantly. What we see in the case of Art Zuid is an exercise in peculiarity and little else in my submission. Esthetics, beauty and craftsmanship have been all mindlessly sacrificed, as offerings to the goddess of "I'm so different and explorative".
Had I been a donor or sponsor to this, I'd ask for my money back and god forbid this came out of tax-payers money.
The total rejection of the old artistic knowledge and conventions, which Speed talks about, leaves us dangling in the wind with random attempts at .... well ... something. The result is a series of, pardon my French, brain-farts made flesh.
Take the following piece, an interesting idea of wooden feet along the grass. So far so good. But then carved with what seems to be a daft table spoon instead of craftily chiseled into beautiful pieces of the human form. Why? Because its 'cooler' to make something with the finish quality of a 5 year old. And lets not forget, easier, because making beautiful things is bloody hard. And who wants hard.
Or a mirror with the shape of an ironing board. Yea, we're really breaking new ground here.
There is something about these sculptures, and current day painting that demands that we suspend all our critical faculties in favor of nonsense. The biting remarks we would make at a crappy song or a crappy book seem to go out the window when we're presented with a crappy sculpture or a painting, because we're made to think we just don't get it.
Then our typical response: "yea, I guess it's kind of cool."
I don't hate experimentation. There is a place for everything, but that does not mean everything should be labeled as good, or even acceptable. Rewarding foolishness and mediocrity, and letting it go on only ensures we get more of it.
And if we do let it go, we best be preparing an excuse when people look back at Holland and try to figure out how in the world we went from Vermeer's Milkmaid:
To a plastic guy in pink with a lemon for a head:
They say every society gets the art they deserve, so I think we should make it clear to the artists and organizers that we demand better. Much better.
PS. I'm reminded by a friend that not all art in Art Zuid is Dutch, but that the choices were unfortunate and certainly made by Dutch curators.
Share and Like if you agree :0)
Photo credits: Joost Molegraaf
Sunday, June 16, 2013
How to Paint Like Paul Cezanne
During my first (and last) painting class in Amsterdam, which lasted for about 10 sessions, I was asked to try and paint a still life in the style of Paul Cezanne, which according to my teacher was a simple master to emulate and an easy way to learn technique.
What inevitably followed was a terrible attempt of trying to learn drawing, brushwork, color mixing and composition, all in two 3-hour sessions, with an inevitable weaksauce result:
Frustrated with what had just happened I took a trip to the Hermitage museum, which is a few blocks from my place, and was showing an impressionist exhibition including 3 works by Cezanne.
Here are some of the notes I made from two paintings. I decided to share them, because we don't usually hear this sort of information from curators and other people who know art. They tell us what a 'disturbed character' the artist was, how they painted this the year 19xx, or where they lived and who they hung out with during that time, and the feeling conveyed by the piece. So what I think is lacking in all that is how the bloody painting was made, and my notes may seem mundane, but they are a technical look at a Cezanne.
Brushwork:
Then there's one of his big trademarks, the short uni-directional brush strokes. These are grouped in directional patches which are determined by areas of the same color and value. Contrary to the impression of totally loose and careless spontaneity that his work protracts, I have the feeling it was rather meticulously executed.
Still Life Notes, Fruits
There's significant differences here versus the landscape. I'm not good at judging composition yet, but he seems to divide spaces quite radically the wall, the fruit, the cloth, the vases and the table. Each of them being of a certain value family.
Although the brushwork and outlines around the objects still make this a very recognizable Cezanne, the amount of paint he uses is much more generous compared to the landscape. The background only uses directional strokes around the objects on the foreground.
Also, the direction of the brushstrokes is sometimes aiding, and sometimes in oposition to giving body and roundness to objects such as the bread and the apples.
He uses hard edges for his main objects.
Other details include the fact that his table and vases are always crooked and misaligned. Same goes for the shape of objects like the bowl.
He uses several layers of color for the apples, which have some 4 different tones of orange and red.
For painting classes in Amsterdam and other art lessons: www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
What inevitably followed was a terrible attempt of trying to learn drawing, brushwork, color mixing and composition, all in two 3-hour sessions, with an inevitable weaksauce result:
Frustrated with what had just happened I took a trip to the Hermitage museum, which is a few blocks from my place, and was showing an impressionist exhibition including 3 works by Cezanne.
Here are some of the notes I made from two paintings. I decided to share them, because we don't usually hear this sort of information from curators and other people who know art. They tell us what a 'disturbed character' the artist was, how they painted this the year 19xx, or where they lived and who they hung out with during that time, and the feeling conveyed by the piece. So what I think is lacking in all that is how the bloody painting was made, and my notes may seem mundane, but they are a technical look at a Cezanne.
Landscape Notes, The Banks of the Marne
Limited Palette:
First thing you notice is how limited his palette is. Basically down to white, green, blue and brown. This gives imediate unity and atmosphere to the piece.
Then there's one of his big trademarks, the short uni-directional brush strokes. These are grouped in directional patches which are determined by areas of the same color and value. Contrary to the impression of totally loose and careless spontaneity that his work protracts, I have the feeling it was rather meticulously executed.
The brushwork seems soft and using rather meager amounts of thinned oil paint. Texture doesn't seem to be a concern and you can clearly discern the canvas grain through the paint.
There is no visible light source, he goes for atmosphere instead
Finish:
Several patches of the canvas are left totally untouched and you can see the white or faded yellow showing through. Also, he doesn't seem concerned with softening his brush strokes too much. They seem carefully made, and then left as they are.
He also seems to leave some of the drawing outlines around objects such as mountains.
Finish:
Several patches of the canvas are left totally untouched and you can see the white or faded yellow showing through. Also, he doesn't seem concerned with softening his brush strokes too much. They seem carefully made, and then left as they are.
He also seems to leave some of the drawing outlines around objects such as mountains.
Still Life Notes, Fruits
There's significant differences here versus the landscape. I'm not good at judging composition yet, but he seems to divide spaces quite radically the wall, the fruit, the cloth, the vases and the table. Each of them being of a certain value family.
Although the brushwork and outlines around the objects still make this a very recognizable Cezanne, the amount of paint he uses is much more generous compared to the landscape. The background only uses directional strokes around the objects on the foreground.
Also, the direction of the brushstrokes is sometimes aiding, and sometimes in oposition to giving body and roundness to objects such as the bread and the apples.
He uses hard edges for his main objects.
Other details include the fact that his table and vases are always crooked and misaligned. Same goes for the shape of objects like the bowl.
He uses several layers of color for the apples, which have some 4 different tones of orange and red.
For painting classes in Amsterdam and other art lessons: www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Master Copy of Jeremy Lipking's Danielle in Kimono
 |
| Danielle in Kimono, Jeremy Lipking |
I've been following the work of Jeremy Lipking for a while and have become a big fan, so it was due time to create a master copy of his paintings. Danielle in Kimono seemed just right because it gives a nice challenge to try and learn his handling of flesh tones, edges and drapery.
Here are the steps, some notes on the challenges and the final result. In conclusion, the guy is an accomplished master, and there's lots more to learn before reaching his level, but still, an honest amateur attempt, and lots of stuff learned in the process.
The main drawing felt relatively easy, although as you see later, I made critical mistakes regarding the width of the head, the position of the chin, and the jawline :0( the lesson here is to spend more time measuring and get it right in the beginning stages. The underpainting color was easy to choose, because Lipking's characteristic style is to leave large patches of it showing through in the final work.
Here we start to have a go at some of the flesh tones, but to achieve the degree of realism that he has, it's necessary to navigate an extremely narrow band of values and color temperature, so this will be a mission-long struggle.
Here you see both the flesh tones and the background color varying wildly. The reason is I'm using a photo on my computer as my original, and the ambient light around me keeps changing. Sometimes the background looks to orange compared to my original, sometimes it looks to purple. So I have to decide for a color harmony and just stick to it, which I finally manage to do, as you see later.
The picture at the beginning of this series has fairly solid flesh tones on the face, and the one at the end is very patchy. The reason is I was happy with the result at first, at least color-wise, but I realized that the paint was very thin and not satisfying in terms of texture when looking at it up close, so I painted over with thicker wet-on-wet brush strokes to try and make the painting more exciting.
Later on I will smooth things out. I start to work also on the drapery, which is a challenge because it has slightly different dark colors and patterns that need to be just right, as well as spontaneous areas left untouched.
At this point I've nailed the ear (always a nice small victory!) and I'm working out the patterns on the Kimono. Flesh tones are solid and the drawing has been corrected for a nicely shaped head.
And here is the final result!
Let's compare it to the original...
Some of my darks will probably become alive once I varnish and shoot the photo in better light conditions.
Now I have a Lipking in my kitchen :0)
www.juanpablobran.com/lessons.html
Happy painting!
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