No Artistic rock left unturned.

When I started painting women, it was an exercise to see if I could paint portraits and figures. It had always been a challenge. My plan was to paint one every six months or a year to track my progress. It’s kind of taken over my spare painting time. After painting a few, I started looking at Manet’s paintings of women. They are captivating. He painted them in a modern way, many with a challenging direct gaze like Olympia or the portraits of the impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, or looking through us lost in thought like in his final masterpiece Folies Bergère. All of them are more than just paint on canvas. They are living, breathing, thinking women with the same worries about modern life that women still have today. My exercise is turning into a personal series. It’s really just in its formative stages, but I imagine a series of women painted in today’s world doing routine things. "Extraordinary Women in Ordinary Life" is the working title. It will be an interesting and fun project. I’ll probably be a real pest to my women friends as I’ll need to take many reference pictures. I think there are parallels between Manet’s time and ours; in both times, technology was changing women’s roles and place in society quickly. I am in no way comparing myself to Edouard Manet. I am instead drawing inspiration from the magic Manet captured and, in my way, adapting it to modern life. Next week, for the art-wonks who are reading my posts, all two of you, I’ll talk about my process for creating these paintings.

Manet's Berthe Morisot

Manet's Folies Berger

a few of my modern women

Keep Makin’ Art, Carl

Hi Friends,

first of all I am  out of town and writing this from my iPad, so please pardon the inevitable typos. I have been thinking about what I wanted to blog about all week.  I decided to Talk about the big picture when it comes to painting.  As an artist who works in multiple mediums (watercolor, gouache and oil) and teaches I take a lot of workshop and classes.  I do this to improve as a painter and teacher.  I have been exposed to a lot of great teachers across many mediums.  surprisingly all of the painters whose work I really admire in all the mediums teach the same thing.  I’m going to boil the concepts down.  They all say basically the same thing and just use a little different language.  This applies to the studio and plein air equally. It’s probably not the message starting painters want to hear.  I bucked against this in my early watercolor practice, but I’m a convert now and it applies to all mediums. Here’s the secret. Color is not as important as you think.  There is a hierarchy to the painting process. Design (composition) is the most important. With this at the top of the list I can hear the screams of the painters who like to decide to paint and want to just start painting right away, but a little planning makes for a much stronger painting and avoids a lot of frustration. Next is value the design process is really about the arrangement of lights and darks for impact and to lead the viewer through the painting. Now we get to color. It’s another form of contrast.  Placement of warms and cools and your color scheme land in this bucket.  Finally the icing on the cake is the last bit detail.  Now the folks who jump in and start in details are screaming too.  I get it, but there is a reason why the best painters I know all work in this way.  Working this way your paintings will improve dramatically! The bonus to thinking about all painting this way you will also find it easier to shift between mediums. If you asked me what the one piece of advice I wish I had embraced right away when I took up painting it would have been this process.  The more you know about how you are going to paint and the more you work out the problems before you start your painting the more fun you’ll have and the more you’ll be free be in the moment while you paint.  

do you paint this way?  Let me know. 

Happy painting,

Carl