SHAPE into Color: A painting workshop in Italy

August 5 – 19, 2013
WITH CATHERINE KEHOE
@CIVITA CASTELLANA

How much information is necessary in a painting? How much can be left out while saying everything essential about the subject?

Translating the visible into simple shapes is one way to arrive at the essential. Doing so frees the painter from rendering in order to develop strong color and value relationships.



VIEW IMAGES WITH ARTISTS' NAMES

We will work (in oil paint) from clothed models, in everyday poses, with the emphasis on the figure in relation to the space it inhabits. Still-life setups will be another option, both for class sessions and free time. Afternoons will be free for independent work, either landscape painting or optional studio assignments. Additional individual attention is available by appointment for an afternoon meeting to discuss student work, goals and progress.

Although working with the same motif and objectives, the diverse results will show the personal voice each painter brings to the process. Stepping back to appreciate each other’s efforts and approaches will be part of the conversation.

Workshop meets Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday:

4-hour morning sessions each day.

To download supply list for the SHAPE into Color workshop click here.

Included in workshop are two bus excursions:
August 8: Siena
August 15: Via Apia
Also included are evening slide talks by faculty.

 FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT CATHERINE KEHOE
catherinekehoe8@gmail.com

OFFERED IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE JSS SUMMER PROGRAM
DETAILS:
ROOMS AND MEALS
EXCURSIONS
TUITION AND FEES
APPLICATION FORM

Painting of the Week

Diarmuid Kelley

Quotation of the Week

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
— Martha Graham in a letter to Agnes De Mille

Catherine Murphy Interview


Courtesy of Gorky's Grandaughter

The White Album


LINK TO ALBUM

Catherine Murphy Talks About Painting


The Innocent Eye is Blind


Paintings and text by Dik F. Liu
Dik F. Liu website

 A cityscape from life. The light is from 8:45 a.m. to around 12:45 p.m. Different time of day for different parts of the painting. 

It's from a large 9th floor balcony of a university I teach in. I painted while standing on a stool to make the view possible. The viewing angle is wide enough that the perspective on the right side begins to warp. I guess it is a phenomenon unique to observational painting — unless one is using a wide-angle camera lens.

If the lines were straight, the painting would look more “realistic.” That has always struck me as the fundamental difference between a realistic painter and an observational painter. The observational painter paints the world as he sees it, even if the resulting painting does not fit the accustomed paradigm of realism.

I have wondered the extent to which one can be a PURE observational painter. As Kant noted in Critique of Pure Reason, percept without concept is blind, as concept without percept is empty. Pure seeing sans knowing might well be an impossible task. Later in that book, Kant bluntly rephrased that idea as “The innocent eye is blind, as the virgin mind is empty.”

I think all observational painters edit to some degree, even if they do so unknowingly. I never feel that I know enough about what I am seeing to knowingly edit my paintings. The visual world has so many surprises that when I‘ve tried to work from imagination, the results look programmatic and unimaginative.

I have thought that Fairfield Porter was as close to a pure observational painter as there was. I wonder if that's why his paintings were so hit or miss.

Small is Big

Tim Kennedy Claw and Cone

 CLICK HERE TO VIEW ALL PAINTINGS IN THE SHOW

 An exhibit of paintings at Grunwald Gallery of Art, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington, featuring work by Catherine Kehoe, EM Saniga, Ken Kewley, Eve Mansdorf and Tim Kennedy. 
October 19 - November 16, 2012 
 
Small paintings that stand on their own – as a category distinct from painted studies – are capable of producing a powerful effect on viewers. Paintings done on small scale communicate intimacy. The viewer becomes intensely aware of his or her own space as well as the space in the painting. Viewing a small painting one can feel the contradictory sensations of nearness and distance experienced simultaneously. We see the artist’s hand in the marks on the surface of the panel or canvas that magically transform themselves at the same instant into a house or a flower – and then back again. It is an endless circuit that produces the hypnotic illusion of stopped time. 

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Small is Big: Questions + Answers

Podcast of interview with artists on WIFU By YAËL KSANDER

 Article about the show on Indiana Public Media website.

 The following questions were asked of the painters in the Small is Big show, at Grunwald Gallery of Art, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington:   Ken Kewley, Eve Mansdorf, Tim Kennedy, EM Saniga and Catherine Kehoe.
The artists’ replies are below. Artists are listed by last name, in alphabetical order.
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Small is Big essay

By Tom Rhea

The physical terms of confronting a small painting are quite different from the approach to a large painting. The space of a large painting can envelop or contain a viewer: architectural in a way, like a room. The small painting exists at a permanent distance, its space accessed as if through a portal. There is a crystal ball aspect to a small painting: we peer into it. Like the twisting of a kaleidoscope, the images turn and hover on the edge of recognition, often without clear context. Skilled interpretation is required, and sometimes outright divination. 
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Ruth Miller's Atmosphere of Thought

By Kim Sloane

“The art of painting, for those who know how to use their eyes, resides in an apple on the corner of a table. What could be more stupid than painting an apple! And yet to make of such a simple fact something that will be elevated to beauty, painting will have to engage all of its means; it will have to be solid, flexible, and rich in substance, suggestive too, so suggestive that it will have the luxury, the grandeur of revealing man’s presence in the apple — the apple surrounded with an atmosphere of thought.” 
From "To Myself," Odilon Redon 

If we substitute cabbage, gourd or pumpkin for apple, this quote of Odilon Redon perfectly suits and describes the achievement of the paintings of Ruth Miller on view (October 12-November 12, 2011) at Lohin Geduld Gallery. Few painters of our time could renew the sentiment of these words and convince us of their continual relevance. Miller is an artist who clearly knows how to use her eyes. Her vision has been honed by over sixty years of working from nature, studying the work of the past, and in communion with the best artists of the New York School. She is an exceptional draftsperson, as demonstrated by the drawings in the exhibition. 
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Some Still Life Paintings


Paintings by William Barnes, Temma Bell, Stanley Bielen, Georges Braque, Lisa Breslow, Joan Brown, Paul Cezanne, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Robert Dukes, Phyllis Floyd, Josephine Halvorson, Israel Hershberg, Chelsea James, Rebecca Kallem, Diarmuid, Kelley, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Karl Knaths, Sydney Licht, Dik F. Liu, Sangram Majumdar, Eve Mansdorf, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Margaret McCann, Ruth Miller, Piet Mondrian, Walter Murch, William Nicholson, George Nick, Andy Pankhurst, Raphaelle Peale, John F. Peto, Susannah Phillips, Fausto Pirandello, Harold Reddicliffe, Celia Reisman, Emil Robinson, Mark Rothko, Barnet Rubenstein, Lisa Gabrielle Russell, Joseph Ryan, E. M. Saniga, Yael Scalia, Helene Schjerfbeck, Evan Tyler Stallone, Kimberly Cole Trowbridge, Euan Uglow, Peter Van Dyck, Susan Jane Walp
GRID VIEW WITH ARTIST NAMES

GEORGE NICK: THE WORLD IS FLAT

That is, in relationship to painting the world. 

Mirror, Raven, Rose, Lemon and I, 20" X 20", 2011

We are in constant motion and the motion seen with two eyes gives us information about our place in space and the relationships of forms within space. We have since babyhood developed a keen understanding of the world as form and space. We use this knowledge plus the flat world we see (if we don't move) to paint images. 

What is the flat world we see? Monocular vision?
Even though we have two eyes, what we generally see is one clear object. Or think we do. Up close if we look with only our right eye we see the object and a background. If we close our right and look at the object at close range with our left eye, we see the object slightly moved and the background moved quite a bit. Because we are focusing on different parts of the site we do not notice this discrepancy. The mind makes it simple for us to see what we want to look at. Like peripheral vision. I remember Dickinson telling us that when we are studying an object to close one eye to see it clearer. And that is monocular vision.
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Some Figure Paintings


Paintings by Linda Anderson, Kimberlee Alemian, Rosemarie Beck, David Campbell, Paul Cezanne, Lin Chen, Edgar Degas, Andre Derain, Edwin Dickinson, John Dubrow, Phyllis Floyd, Lucian Freud, Ann Gale, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Charles Hawthorne, Peter Inglis, Chelsea James, Alex Kanevsky, Diarmuid Kelley, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Kurt Knoblesdorf, Lotte Laserstein, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Eve Mansdorf, Henri Matisse, Joe Morzuch, Alice Neel, Janice Nowinski, Nathan Oliveira, Andy Pankhurst, Fausto Pirandello, Joseph Ryan, Nicole McCormick Santiago, Jenny Saville, Tai Shan Schierenberg, Helene Schjerfbeck, Walter Sickert, Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco, Euan Uglow, David Wooddell

Painters and their Palettes

Some painters were invited to describe their palettes and the way they organize them, as well as their preferences regarding brushes, paint brands and medium formulas. Their replies follow.
Paul Cezanne

The colors on Cezanne's palette, according to Emile Bernard:
Yellows:
brilliant yellow
naples yellow
chrome yellow
yellow ochre
raw sienna
Reds:
Vermilion
red ochre
burnt sienna
rose madder
carmine lake
burnt lake
Greens:
emerald green
viridian
green earth
Blues:
cobalt blue
ultramarine
prussian blue
peach black
lead white
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52 Nudes Through Art History


Paintings by Ken Kewley
Link to grid view

Sangram Majumdar — Color and Paint


One of the first lessons regarding color I ever had was at RISD, in a two-dimensional design class with Gerald Immonen. The class, and his projects created a wonderful foundation that was steeped in acute observation as much as it was in understanding color systems. When I began working with oils, my color palette was based around a warm/cool combination of the primaries alongside green (Permanent Green Light and Viridian) and a couple neutrals (Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna). Also, early on I began working with ‘artist’s grade’ paints. After realizing the amount of filler and chalk that is mixed into student grade paints, there really wasn’t even a choice in the matter! However, as finances often shape a lot of our decisions, I quickly had to downgrade my palette, and so I decided to keep working with artist’s grade paints and edited my palette down to: Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Ultramarine. This went on for about three years, until slowly I started reintroducing other colors back into the mix (this was in grad school). During this time I also began working indirectly, applying paint in various manners, so I introduced an entire range of transparent hues to parallel my working palette that was primarily opaque hues. So, some of the new colors were Indian Yellow, Terre Verte, Transparent Blue Oxide, and Transparent Yellow Oxide. Over the last ten years my working palette has changed dramatically a few times. The first was when I decided to leave my chromatic palette and switch to a hybrid of chromatic and neutral primaries/secondaries. The reason behind this was a shift in my subject matter (working more from life, and motifs that were more somber in nature). I was finding myself spending a lot of time ‘knocking down’ colors, especially cadmiums to arrive at mixtures that could be arrived at quicker.


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Ruth Miller


LINK TO GRID VIEW

Stuart Shils on Color and his Palette


Of most importance for me, regardless of what is on the palette, is that the color mood of the painting is not the result of what specific colors are put out, but of what the painter can do with those colors to create a color complexion in the painting. I use the same colors for night painting, day painting, painting in Italy, painting on the coast of Ireland, urban painting or rural painting — the idea being that the colors are like the tools in a stone mason's bag and it is the mason's job to use the tools to get the job done. Just because a landscape is green doesn't mean we don't have reds on the palette. Everything gets mixed with everything, the color is never even close to being right out of the tube, and the palette has to look like a battlefield, which it is. The warms and the cools, mixing it up in the middle, out of which comes color. But until the color is put down on the canvas there is still really no color. Color is something that cannot exist on the palette but only in juxtaposition in the painting itself.
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Cezanne's Doubt

By Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred- fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, an attempt, an approach to painting. In September of 1906, at the age sixty-seven—one month before his death—he wrote: "I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive.... Now it seems I am better that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am working from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress”. 
Painting was his world and his mode of existence. He worked alone without students, without admiration from his family, without encouragement from the critics. He painted on the afternoon of the day his mother died. In 1870 he was painting at l'Estaque while the police were after him for dodging the draft. And still he had moments of doubt about this vocation.

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Israel Hershberg: My Palette(s)


My palette, if I am to think of it only as a list of colors inside of tubes, has changed little over the past 40 or so years. Whether in the attenuated, saturated notes and temperatures found in much of the Northeastern US, or under the merciless and brutally denuding light that bears down on Israel’s long dry summers, or in that tempered and fragrant apricot tinged light that is Umbria or Tuscany - that palette has served me well. This same list of colors has survived significant shifts and turns over time, as my inclinations, temperament, and aspirations toward light, color and place took to new directions.
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My palette: E.M. Saniga

Still life palette
Here are pictures of two palettes I use. The smaller one with the paint built up that looks like a bunch of Giacometti figures is used in a little room in the house with a small north light for still life painting when I think I need intense light. The bigger one is the one I use in my studio where the light in more diffused and is about two years old so the paint hasn’t built up yet.. I clean the palette after I paint but I don’t remove the colors from the edges and it builds up over time. The palettes look cool grey in terms of color but are actually warm grey of a middle value-the cool north light is on them in the pictures.
Studio palette
Laying out a palette in words is more complex than laying one out in paint because I have to think about things as compared to when I am painting; there I am just sort of reacting to what is in front of me or in my mind. But here is a try anyway.
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Other: Inside and Out


Gulgun Aliriza, Anna Ancher, Meir Appelfeld, Giovanni Bellini, Lisa Breslow, Christopher Chippendale, Meredith Fife Day, Andre Derain, Lois Dodd, Tina Engels, Yuval Etzioni, Meredith Fife Day, Phyllis Floyd, Elana Hagler, Rebecca Harp, Israel Hershberg, David Hockney, Diana Horowitz, Paul Inglis, Chelsea James, Rebecca Kallem, Alex Kanevsky, Ken Kewley, John Lee, Stanley Lewis, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Paul Manlove, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Henri Matisse, Nancy McCarthy, Ruth Miller, Piet Mondrian, George Nick, Stephanie Pierce, Carolyn Pyfrom,  Brian Rego, Celia Reisman, Yael Scalia, Claire Sherman, Helene Schjerfbeck, Stuart Shils, Telemaco Signorini, Harry Stooshinoff, Peter Van Dyck
LINK TO GRID VIEW

Straight lines/curved forms


Link to grid view with artist names

Fluidity in Focus


This essay was written by Christopher Chippendale 
on the occasion of his exhibit at Soprafina Gallery, December 2011

Je ne puis pas distinguer entre le sentiment que j'ai de la vie et la façon dont je le traduis.*
—Henri Matisse (1908)

*I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and the way I translate it. 

Through their medium artists reconstitute and give permanent form to nature’s evanescence, to its very authenticity. Painting…is nature’s paradox: it gives form to that which, in its essence, is beyond permanence. … To accomplish this feat…is a painstaking task. … [It] requires going beyond convention, beyond training, beyond culture, back beyond language, to a state of naïve yet sustained scrutiny and inquiry...[to a] world of forgetting.
—Joel Isaacson (1994)

The paintings in this exhibit aim to translate the fugitive conditions of light and color as discovered through the act of painting. They result directly from my desire to find and reveal through the material language of paint that which is essential in what I see. As such, they extend a modernist tradition of perceptual inquiry and representation based upon the raw data of sight, an interpretation of appearances directly apprehended and reconstructed on the canvas in a preform of color patches, unmitigated by any predetermining identification of what those color patches represent.
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Giving the Mundane its Beautiful Due

By Imogen Sara Smith
“Nothing humiliates his brushes,” the Goncourt brothers wrote in 1867 of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century master of still life. Their amazement betrays disdain for such mundane subjects as copper pots, a jar of olives, a brioche, a dead rabbit, a clay pipe, a plate of plums. But while Chardin transformed kitchen scenes into enchantingly harmonious compositions, he never lost the feel of the kitchen. Evoking what Norman Bryson calls “a low-plane reality of quiet duties and small satisfactions,” he created an art not humiliated but nourished by the mundane and the quotidian. The evolution of these words is telling. Mundane means the things of the monde, earthly rather than heavenly; quotidian means daily, as in panum nostrum quotidianum, our daily bread. Both terms have picked up connotations of not merely the commonplace and ordinary, but the banal, unimaginative, pedestrian, dull. Used this way, the words diminish everyday experiences and ordinary surroundings.
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Behind the Curtain:
Meaning and Representations of Cloth in Painting

By Richard Baker
I think of painting as mildly calcified theater — all the “action,” so to speak, moves at the rate of a slow moving liquid, like glass.
To paraphrase something Myron Stout wrote in 1953, — in the process of painting, each successive moment is a list of moments spread out in time while the painting progresses — they are gathered together at the end and become a single immutable moment. At the theater, when the curtain closes, the series of events now ended become an object-like memory composed of a myriad of moments. I have chosen a handful of images that depict cloth in painting. I hope they will illustrate my speculations about the metaphorical potential of such images as seen in still life paintings.

This painting is by Edward Hopper, painted in 1927. It was once common when going to the cinema that the screen would be concealed behind a curtain. This served to heighten a sense of anticipation and expectation. Like at the theater we, the audience would be ready to actively receive whatever spectacle was to be presented before us. What would unfold behind this unfurling fabric?
Would it be a treasure or a dud?











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Some Drawings


Link to grid view

Diebenkorn's Notes to Himself

The following list was found among the papers of the painter Richard Diebenkorn after his death in 1993. Spelling and capitalization are as in the original.

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued — except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont “discover” a subject — of any kind.

6. Somehow don’t be bored — but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Some Heads


Lennart Anderson, Linda Anderson, Leland Bell, David Campbell, Glen Cebulash, Lin Chen, Christopher Chippendale, Katie Claiborne, Susanna Coffey, Stuart Davis, Edgar Degas, Elaine Despins, Thomas Eakins, Emily Eveleth, Henri Fantin-Latour, Lucien Freud, Ann Gale, Ilya Gefter, Alberto Giacometti, Elana Hagler, Israel Hershberg, Frank Hobbs, Peter Inglis, Alex Kanevsky, Diarmuid Kelley, Lotte Laserstein, John Lee, Michal Lewit, Sangram Majumdar, Edouard Manet, Joe Morzuch, George Nick, Andy Pankhurst, Fausto Pirandello, Carolyn Pyfrom, EM Saniga, Helene Schjerfbeck, John Singer Sargent, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Evan Tyler Stallone, Paula Swaydan Grebel, Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco, Roni Taharlev, Euan Uglow, Édouard Vuillard, John Wentz Grid view with artist names

Quotations

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
—Hans Hofmann

Long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.
— Helen Keller

 Don't think: look!
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

In art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.
— Robert Kulicke

There’s no story. I don’t want to tell stories.
Other people always read things into your work, which you can never see. That’s fine, that’s great. For me it was just exciting to look at it and try to do something with it.
— Lois Dodd

You have to accept your nature. And this is who I am.
— Catherine Murphy

I have a criterion which requires my subject to have a precision which says, "I am a particular tree," or "This is a real location." I love this idea that correctness in nature brings about another dimension to the painting, at once abstract and specific, a line that speaks in the particular and alludes to a lot more.
— Sylvia Plimack Mangold

If you can turn off the mind and look with only the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.
– Ellsworth Kelly

In art, as in everything else, one can only build upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom will be so much greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. 
— Igor Stravinsky

Precision is not the opposite of mystery.
— Louise Glück
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Lois Dodd: Painting in Maine



Lois Dodd video

Chuck Close: Note To Younger Self

Courtesy of CBS News
I was in the eighth grade and was told not to even think about going to college. I couldn’t add or subtract, never could memorize multiplication tables, was advised against taking algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry. Since I was good with my hands I was advised to aim for trade school, perhaps body and fender work.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you. I applied to a junior college in my hometown with open enrollment, got in and embarked on a career in the visual arts. Virtually everything I’ve done is influenced by my learning disabilities. I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out I can remember it much better.
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Some Books

Alphabetical by author

Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter — a life
by Patricia Albers
Blanche Lazzell — The Life and Work of an American Modernist
by Bridges, Olson and Snyder
Looking at the Overlooked —
Fours essays on still life painting by Norman Bryson 
Albert York
by William Corbett
Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir
by William Corbett
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
by Eugene Delacroix
Conversations with Cezanne
edited by Michael Doran
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
by Mark Doty
Matisse on Art
edited by Jack Flam
Old Masters and Young Geniuses
by David W. Galenson
Man with a Blue Scarf
by Martin Gayford
Hawthorne on Painting
by Charles W. Hawthorne
Sargent's Daughters — The Biography of a Painting
by Erica E. Hirshler
Mysteries of the Rectangle
by Siri Hustvedt
Jasper Johns — Privileged Information
by Jill Johnston
Secret Lives in Art
by Jill Johnston
Lee Krasner: A Biography
by Gail Levin Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
by Martha Livingstone
Portrait — The life of Thomas Eakins
by William S. McFeely
Art in its Own Terms
by Fairfield Porter
Let's See — Writings from the New Yorker
by Peter Schjeldahl 
William Nicholson
by Sanford Schwartz
Fairfield Porter
by Justin Spring 
The Unknown Matisse
by Hilary Spurling 
Matisse the Master
by Hilary Spurling 
De Kooning — An American Master
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Poetics of Music
by Igor Stravinsky 
The Extreme of the Middle
by Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor

Links

Stanley Bielen
Lisa Breslow
David Campbell
Claudia Carr
Katie Claiborne
Tim Kennedy essay: Human Measures
Ken Kewley — Albums
Richard Raiselis
Harold Reddicliffe
Gareth Reid
Seymour Remenick — An appreciation by Stuart Shils

Contact

catherinekehoe8@gmail.com
Catherine Kehoe

Ken Kewley Dressing Room Paintings


Link to grid view

Sargent on Painting

• Painting is an interpretation of tone.

• Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.

• Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.

• The thicker your paint — the more your color flows.

• Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements — values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.

• The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.

• You begin with the middle tones and work up from it .... so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

• Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.

• It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.

— John Singer Sargent

Lennart Anderson on Painting

For me, painting from nature is akin to playing music. The notes are there. One tries to get them down in the proper proportion to bring out the proper impression. Realizing your palette is limited; it cannot begin to have the richness, the depth from light to dark that nature encompasses or the subtlety of it. Nature seems to strain for its effects, and yet it has so much power. One always wants to feel confident that one is painting what one see, but nature is not always what it seems. One seeks to disarm the objects as objects to seek for an agreement of tone that encompasses differences of color that can cross the barriers of object. It is these agreements, these similarities that float in and out, that coordinate the work and allow the subject matter to have its eloquence. It amazes me how the same material can be seen in so many different ways, all in an honest attempt to see it justly.
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An Encounter with Euan Uglow

by Tai-Shan Schierenberg

Tai-Shan Schierenberg studied painting with Euan Uglow
at the Slade School in London.


Girlfriends by Tai-Shan Schierenberg
Marigold by Euan Uglow
I had been doing the usual: chucking on the paint, wasting prodigious amounts of energy and materials. Sometimes, something would appear in this undisciplined mess, full of vitality and beauty. However it all smacked of monkeys and typewriters, and my understanding of the way painting worked was purely instinctual.

Then, one day in my last term, Euan strolled by and told me that I didn't know what I was doing. Now usually this would have led to a fair bit of antagonism.

But on this day, like a good Zen master dealing with a stupid and recalcitrant student, Euan timed his approach perfectly, and cutting the crap, just asked me which color I thought was the most prominent when I looked at the posing model, and how light or dark I thought it was. Then, after I had mixed and applied that to the canvas, we moved to the next most prominent color, and its tone, and most importantly the relationship to the first color. And so on. Until I had filled the canvas, often with colors that seemed totally wrong but had been ascertained by their relationship to other colors.

There magically appeared on my canvas the model in all her three-dimensional glory. After some fine-tuning, it became a great little painting which I still keep as a memento to Euan Uglow in my studio. In twenty minutes, he had shown me a fundamental building block, which I was able to adapt to my own painting needs, for which I am eternally grateful.

John Cage Rules

For students and teachers
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
General duties of a student:
  pull everything out of your teacher.
pull everything out of your fellow students.
General duties of a teacher:
   pull everything out of your students.
Consider everything an experiment.
Be self-disciplined.
Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.
The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. 
You can fool the fans but not the players.
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
Be happy whenever you can manage it. 
Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Save everything. It may come in handy later.

    Robert Storr: Advice to Art Students

    If you go into it knowing that you will probably not be rewarded lavishly, but you can in fact continue to work, you’re on a much better footing than if you go into it trying to make a huge impact when you’re 23 or 24, and then maintain that for the next 60 years. I’m interested in people who make good art, whenever they make it, and I think a lot of the best artists today are late bloomers.
    There isn’t less of a focus yet [on the cult of youth], but it’s going to dawn on people that it’s not working. It’s always nice to be a coming attraction, but it’s murder to be a has-been. If [success] hasn’t happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might.
    It’s a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you’ve never really thought about what you’re going to do when you go out of fashion because you’ve never been out of fashion, it’s much harder to take than if you’ve gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive.
    — From "Robert Storr: Most theory has little bearing on art: The critic and curator speaks to The Art Newspaper," By Helen Stoilas, Frieze daily edition, 16 Oct 09
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