Art Thoughts

More Butterflies

2011-10-03T13:41:00.001-07:00

It has beena good year for butterflies. The butterfly bush that I planted a couple ofyears ago in the studio garden has finally come into its own. Spires ofmultiple purple flowers, often three to a stalk, have attracted a large part ofthe local butterfly and hummingbird population. There are always two or threebutterflies perched and feeding, much to my delight. Large-winged Monarch butterflieshave been sailing in in the last week or two, on their way to Pacific Grove.

I’mcontinuing to paint butterflies, bees and hummingbirds this year in my new“Nature” series. This is a large Red Admiral butterfly that I finishedrecently. The painting size is 30” x 30”.

More Time Travel

2011-03-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

There’s an odd satisfaction to going back in time – and when I’m making art, time travel is remarkably easy to accomplish. When I started this pencil version of John Constable’s 1820 oil painting, Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, I was thinking about capturing the sense of space – the way the dark shadows of the grounds and trees open up to a bright and soaring cathedral tower. Constable was one of England’s great landscape painters; his expressive brushstrokes record the fleeting effects of light several generations before the Impressionists. With a combination of realism and looseness, he brings great movement and life to an essentially static view.

As I worked to develop the dark shadows and varied textures of the landscape in my pencil drawing, I became completely absorbed in the painting I was copying. I was mentally transported back to Constable’s moment in time where I was surrounded by the pastoral beauty of pre-industrial England. Cow bells, birdsong and church bells were unbroken by the hum of motorcars and air traffic. There was an underlying stillness.

All content copyright 2011 by Susan Sternau.

El Capitan, winter (Yosemite, CA)

2011-01-07T13:50:00.000-08:00

My challenge in this drawing was to darken the values of the shadowy pine trees at the foot of El Capitan enough so the morning-lit rock face would stand out against a sky shrouded in mist.

I loved drawing the soft contours and shadows of the snow mounds on the riverbank in the foreground, and suggesting the frosting of snow on top of the rocks peppering the semi-frozen Merced River.

I tried for a rich variety of pencil lines to suggest a landscape of enormous contrasts and variety, using a Design Ebony jet black, extra smooth drawing pencil.

I started sketching the scene very lightly, and gradually built up the light / dark contrasts with shading, cross-hatched lines and smudging.

All content copyright 2011 by Susan Sternau. All rights reserved.

Looking Closely at the Birth of Impressionism

2010-08-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

This illustration is one of my oil paintings, Monet's House and Garden, which is available as a print from SusanSternau.com.

I’ve just been to the Birth of Impressionism show here at the de Young Museum – a great collection of paintings traveling from their permanent home in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. As I concentrated on sidling around the crowds of people with audio guides, I was able to really zoom in on some of my favorite canvases and enjoy the unique surface textures and brush strokes of the paintings. Later in the evening I replayed the show in my mind (without the crowds) and was able to repeat the pleasure of looking really closely at canvases by some of my favorite painters.

I’ve seen many of these great paintings reproduced, but for me, there is nothing like looking at originals. Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, has always been one of my favorites because of the atmospheric effect of the clouds of colored steam and light that transform the vast space of the glass-enclosed railroad station. The painting has a flat surface in reproduction, but in reality the surface is textured and pitted overall with layers and layers of pigment. Likewise, Manet’s flowers and seascapes aren’t flattened by reproduction, but come alive with individual descriptive brush strokes where I can see not only the width of the brush, but the mark of each bristle in the paint. Monet’s The Magpie has built up crusts of white paint highlighting the creamy snow, and melting blue shadows cast by the fence. The reproduction in the gift shop couldn’t begin to compete with the original.

In the Birth of Impressionism show, the progression of paintings from a dark and academic Salon style, to outdoor scenes actually painted outside give the impression of stepping from darkness into light. The radical change in painting style within a few years time, and within the space of a few exhibition rooms, redramatizes the familiar story of Impressionism and recaptures the fresh spirit of that moment.

Prague Paintings, 1

2010-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

I spent a week in Prague in the Czech Republic this spring – and between sightseeing jaunts, I managed to do a number of paintings. I brought pens, pencils, paper and a portable box of watercolors and tried to do a painting every afternoon when my feet got tired of walking. Sitting and really looking at a scene helps me absorb the essence of a place when I’m traveling. It really heightens my memory of the experience.

This painting of the Charles Bridge shows one of Prague’s big tourist attractions. It has splendid medieval towers and lots of statues. The bridge is just for pedestrians and has lots of vendors and entertainers creating a lively scene. For centuries, apparently, it was the only bridge spanning the Charles River, although now there are many bridges, each interesting and unique.

Looking at Flowers

2010-03-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

Seeing like a painter means practicing a different way of looking at things. First you see a flower with a certain shape and color – what most people would see. Then you start looking carefully at each petal to see the colors within the colors. A white flower could also be yellow, pink, or orange in the lighted “warm” areas and blue, lavender, or green in the shaded “cool” areas, for example. Often by seeing a hint of color you get the idea of exaggerating or emphasizing it to make the flower more dramatic and interesting in your painting. The leaves also hold many different colors within their green – brown, purple, myriad shades of green and white highlights are all present. You have to choose which colors to paint more brightly and which to ignore or downplay.

When planning, notice the big shapes of the flowers first. These help you to build a strong composition. Within the big shapes are little shapes of color with soft and hard edges that create their own set of abstract patterns and designs, as well as define the shape of the flowers as three-dimensional forms. How do you link it all together? What do you paint? What do you not paint? All your decisions will shape the final painting. The longer you observe your subject, the more you’ll see, and the more complex and interesting a painting you’ll be able to create.

This Calla Lily was blooming beside my house last week. I painted it in acrylic on watercolor paper.

My Fair Lady

2010-02-19T14:54:00.000-08:00

Flowing hair, expressive eyes, and luxurious gowns and jewels are all hallmarks of Pre-Raphaelite women. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has always been my favorite Pre-Raphaelite painter. His sensual portraits of women have abandoned the moralistic and religious fervor of the late Victorians and crossed into the realm of pure fantasy. Rossetti and his fellow painter, Edward Burne-Jones remain Victorian to the end, however, in their attitude toward the women who modeled for them. They made a habit of “discovering” their beautiful models in lower class and impoverished settings, then grooming them to appear as ladies in the spirit of Henry Higgins’ transformation of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Rossetti expressed contempt for his women models even after their transformation. For example he went so far as to paint the beautiful Alexa Wilding with an unusually low brow to symbolize her lack of intellectual development and lower class origins. Of the many favorite Pre-Raphaelite models who underwent this Eliza Doolittle-like transformation; Anne Ryan was discovered at a sketching club, Ellen Frazer was a friend’s maidservant, Elizabeth Siddall was found working in a bonnet shop, Annie Miller was discovered in a slum yard behind Rossetti’s studio, Louisa Ruth Herbert was an actress (not a respectable profession at the time), Fanny Cornworth was a prostitute, Ellen Smith was a laundress, Alexa Wilding was a dressmaker, Jane Morris was an embroiderer, Maria Zamboco was a sculptor and medallist, Marie Spartali became a painter, and Anne Mary Howitt and Julia Margaret Cameron were artists.

I painted this copy of Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859) which is typical of the portraits he produced. The model, with her gorgeous jewels, full lips and floral adornments illustrates the sensual side of femininity that well-brought-up Victorian women were not supposed to express or acknowledge. Her loose hair had erotic significance since respectable Victorian adult women always wore their hair up. Rossetti’s model for this painting was Fanny Cornworth who was formerly a prostitute. The title is borrowed from a colorful story by Bocaccio about a woman with many lovers whose “much-kissed mouth” renews its freshness. Holman Hunt, another painter of Rossetti’s circle regarded this portrait as lewd, which perhaps says more about Victorian repression than anything else. The predominantly young male, middle-class painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as they called themselves, had little income and did not yet have the means to get married. Small wonder then, that their paintings are filled with the imagery of yearning and desire.

Interestingly, no small number of the women who modeled for the Pre-Raphaelites, including their models, sisters, wives and daughters, also were or became artists themselves, though they generally received scant recognition for their art in a society that limited and constrained women’s roles to wife and mother, virgin or whore. Women Pre-Raphaelite artists include Joanna Mary Boyce (married to painter Henry Wells), Emily Hunt (painter Holman Hunt’s sister), Rebecca Solomon (sister to two painters), Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown (trained in their father’s studio), Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Evelyn de Morgan, and Kate Bunce.

For more on this topic, I recommend Jan Marsh’s splendidly illustrated book, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity. For more about the accomplished women of that circle, see also Jan Marsh’s book, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood.

Painting Transparency

2010-02-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

Painting transparent objects can seem like a contradiction of nature. How do you perceive something if it is clear and how do you paint it? The mental twist is that glass or plastic is never really completely clear. It will always have a bit of cool color, whether gray, blue, green, or lavender that distinguishes it from the surrounding atmosphere.

For an exercise in painting transparent objects in watercolor, I put together a collection of bottles filled with colored water. In front of the bottles I added a glass vase partially filled with clear water and an empty plastic mayonnaise jar. For the first step, I sketched the shapes of all the containers lightly in pencil. In the second step, I began to paint, blocking in all the colors generally, including the foreground and background. For the transparent objects in this exercise I used a very light gray blended from ultramarine blue and burnt umber.

I painted the objects with broken strokes, leaving the white of the paper unpainted to represent highlights. I also left white outlines unpainted around the containers to create the illusion of highlights on their outer edges. I blocked in the colors of the bottles, also leaving the highlights unpainted. Once I completely blocked in the foreground and background colors and allowed that layer to dry, I started adding some detail. Over the first paint layer, I used a fine brush and a darker gray to outline the forms of the clear vase and the jar. I used a broken outline based on observation and a dark line of varying thickness.

The edges of the water in the colored bottles called for a darker colored line, so I deepened my mixture of orange and pink with a touch of burnt sienna. I then went back into each form and carefully painted the abstract pattern of colors and shapes as I observed them. Then I painted the blue cast shadows on the foreground and some cast colored light that flowed through one of the bottles onto the foreground. I may go back and add some brighter color and sharper value contrasts, but this was a good beginning.

All content copyright 2010 by Susan Sternau

The Magical World of Peter Max

2010-01-19T10:22:00.000-08:00

One of my earlier art memories is of riding the Number Ten bus to school on Central Park West in the late 1960s. In those days New York City buses had rows of advertising posters above the seats which always commanded my attention. One day I noticed a beautiful brightly colored poster that didn’t seem to be advertising anything. The firm black outlines enclosed flowing graded pastels in candy colors – they were irresistible.

Over the months different designs kept appearing with motifs of suns, stars, butterflies, and happy people in magical places that were a perfect synthesis of the psychedelic spirit of the times. The posters were signed by an artist named Peter Max. My classmates on the bus admired the posters too, and we all looked forward to spotting new ones. But then the posters disappeared again, all too quickly. There were rumors that people were stealing the posters – it seemed everyone wanted one. We were left with a landscape of the grimmer sorts of bus posters for hemorrhoid creams and trade schools, and the awful and memorable poster with a photo of an atomic mushroom cloud which puzzled and terrified me. What exactly was being advertised? Was it fear of our cold war enemies? I mourned the disappearance of Peter Max.

As the music and fashions of the 1960s are revived, I’ve been rediscovering the good feelings of Peter Max’s art again with one of my students. There is a combination of poster style, outlines, pastels, and creating a happy, colorful dream world that makes for appealing images. This monarch butterfly fantasy in ink and watercolor is the result of revisiting Peter Max’s world. I recommend Charles A. Riley’s book, The Art of Peter Max, as a great introduction to the artist.

The Day of the Dead and Mexican Folk Art

2010-01-04T16:22:00.000-08:00

The Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos) is a joyous festival – a celebration that combines the images of death with delight in life. In Oaxaca, Mexico everyone participates in creating the festival and everything is decorated. Several days before the big holiday weekend, the whole town hums with activity as people prepare and decorate.

In the town square many young people crouch together in a giant sandbox creating sand tomb sculptures of skulls, sand skeletons, bony animals, and all manner of strange folk art creatures. The sand is wetted with buckets of water then molded and sculpted by hand into mounds that quickly transform and articulate into bony shapes. The artists (and for this festival the whole community are artists) work from drawings that have been squared up so it’s easy to translate the small sketches into sand sculptures many feet long. People work peacefully together. There’s no tension or squabbling, just efficient cooperation and concentration. Once the design has been molded into 3-D sand, the artists begin to color their sculptures by sprinkling colored sand over them, white limestone dust for the bones and black charcoal powder for the shadows. All the colors are sprinkled from kitchen strainers tapped lightly with the gesture of a baker dusting powdered sugar over a cake. Blue, green, and red as well as yellow and brown are added as accents for a brilliant final product, although I actually preferred the elegant monochrome light and shadows of the brown sand before the colors were added.

The tomb sculptures take shape over several days, culminating on the festival day. The work in progress draws many curious admirers and the sculptures sit unguarded at night. Apparently no one would think to vandalize them, as they represent the collective efforts of the whole community, as do all the decorations. The sand sculptures are a recent tradition that was only introduced about a decade ago, but already they are popular all over Mexico. Day of the Dead celebration has Christian elements but the root of the celebration is millennia deep in the pre-Christian and pre-Spanish traditions of Mexico.

All over the city of Oaxaca, in hotels, restaurants, schools, homes, public buildings, and of course, cemeteries, people are making Day of the Dead altars, every one a creative masterpiece. They weave golden marigolds and fuchsia velvet flowers into arches supported by sugar cane and adorned with clusters of fruits and vegetables. The altars are piled with offerings of skulls made from sugar and chocolate, bread baked in special forms decorated with spirit faces and other goodies to please the dead including bottles of mescal liquor, Corona beer, and plates of mole, soup and other popular dishes.

I love that the whole town is unified by a creative force for this festival. Everyone becomes an artist because folk art is for everyone. The common purpose is to honor and celebrate the spirits of the departed in a joyful manner with folk art, music, dancing, feasting, drinking, and costumed parades. The Day of the Dead in Mexico is equally a celebration of life.

Monarch Butterfly Memories

2009-10-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

Sausalito is on the monarch butterfly flyway and in the last few weeks I’ve seen a couple of monarchs every day heading through town. Their seemingly directionless fluttering is actually a mass migration following a specific route each year. The butterflies I see are headed for their over-wintering spots in forests along the California coast. I’ve seen them sheltering in the trees of Pacific Grove. They congregate high up in the Eucalyptus trees in huge hanging clusters with folded wings – while others flutter in the sunshine. It’s amazing to see a collection of so many creatures grouped together and yet be surrounded with absolute silence, except for the wind in the trees.

Monarchs have a distinctive “stained glass” wing pattern of orange with black lines bordered with black with white dots. They don’t look like any other butterfly I’ve seen. Birds, which like to snack on butterflies, know to leave them alone because their bodies are filled with toxins from the milkweed plants they love to eat.

There was lots of milkweed in Connecticut when I was growing up. Tall stems of rubbery broad leaves with pink flower clusters lined the roads and fields. If you broke a leaf or stem, sticky, milky juice leaked out – hence the name milkweed. In the late summer the plants were full of drying pods that would burst open to release clouds of dandelion-like fluff that sent seeds flying everywhere on the wind.

One summer I captured a fat caterpillar, beautifully striped in yellow, black and white. I punched air holes in the lid of a jar with a nail and added a twig, milkweed leaves, and my captive caterpillar. In a few weeks, after eating most of the milkweed, the caterpillar sealed itself inside an elegant jade-green chrysalis flecked with gold that dangled from the twig. A few weeks later the chrysalis turned transparent and I could see the monarch butterfly within. I carefully placed it in the garden and watched the butterfly break out of the chrysalis and slowly unfold itself in the sunshine, warming and dry its wings before flying off.

Monarch butterflies populations everywhere in the United States suffer from habitat loss and for a few years I didn’t see any monarchs at all in the early fall. I haven’t seen milkweed anywhere for a long time. This year, though, the monarchs are back in force and I feel hopeful that they are rebounding. Plant some milkweed if you can and help the monarchs on their way.

Stormy Weather

2009-09-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

This time of year always gets me thinking about storms. August and September mean it's hurricane season again. Soon we will be looking at the slowly revolving, ominously expanding spirals of hurricanes clouds seen from above in satellite images. I’ve always been easily hypnotized by the violence of wind and rain. I’ll be unable to look away from tree branches moving frantically and erratically in the wind. I can’t take my eyes from water drops sluicing down window glass or rippling puddles in the road, expanding into instant lakes.

When I lived on the east coast, muggy summer weather was always punctuated by the drama of thunder storms. You could smell them coming-- there was a tinge of ozone in the air. The most amazing lightening storms I ever saw were in Texas where the big sky lit up with a bright forest of jagged strikes in pink and white.

Even ordinary landscapes take on extraordinary dimensions when in the grip of a storm. Artists have always understood the drama of storms and exploited the excitement that storms clouds and lightening strikes bring to skies to make more interesting pictures.

George Burr was a master American print maker of the 1930s. I recently did this drawing in ink and graphite after Burr’s etching “Arizona Storm.” Enormous thunderheads darken the Arizona sky. They dwarf the eroded and mysterious ruins of the desert landscape swept with fierce winds and rain.

Turner was a master of dramatic light effects. He worked his magic on waterfalls, rainbows, and the cloudbursts of light rays showering from the heavens. He also did a masterful job of painting storms at sea by exploiting the drama of roiling waves and stormy skies. I did this new drawing in white chalk on black paper after Turner’s mezzotint print of “Catania, Sicily.” You can read more about Turner’s dramatic approach to landscape in Andrew Wilton’s book, Turner and the Sublime.

A Cat to Remember

2009-08-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

Our cat, Princess, disappeared quite suddenly at the end of July. She went out early one morning, as was her habit, but never returned. There was simply no knocking at the screen door demanding reentry for breakfast, no appearance later on my studio door mat requesting kibble, and no little creature curled under the nasturtiums in the garden. Princess simply vanished, leaving our life as suddenly as she had appeared on another July day, six year before, when I was summoned to the garden to feed her a can of tuna.

Princess was the smartest, prettiest, sweetest black cat you’d ever meet. She had both of us wrapped around her littlest claw, doing her bidding, admiring every twitch of her tail and pointy ears, her luxurious neck ruff and her fluffy plume of a tail.

She spent her days sleeping on her chair on the studio porch, checking out the activities and greeting the students. She’d entry the studio through the window and drop to the floor with a startling plunk, then glide silently across the floor to investigate the hole under the heater or the space behind the futon. Evenings she perched on the window ledge on her lavender blanket and watched the “lighted mice” (cars) with great attention, then settled for a nap on any available lap.

When Nancy came home from work, Princess presented herself for a belly rub before Nancy had even had a chance to put down her briefcase. She recognized the sound of our car, intuited the timing of the bus, and knew exactly when Nancy would be knocking.

Princess, which is short for her full title, Princess Landed Gentry of Sausalito, disappeared a few days before a full moon. She’d been unusually lively and playful in the days before. She’d recently brought home two mice for our approval, and had been worrying a garter snake half to death by the garden gate.

She’d been out late hunting, maybe prowling the storm drains, or perhaps answering the calls of her noisy “boyfriend” who was in the habit of serenading her from the driveway every night around 10 pm. She’d been in an out numerous times for several nights before she vanished keeping us somewhat sleepless in the process.

Then suddenly, there was a little tuft of hair on the rug by the window, a collection of pink toy mice, a lot of memories and a hole in my heart. I can see her in every corner, curled sweetly sleeping, or alert like a lion in her lair. She’s exploring the book case, peering up the chimney, clawing the couch, chasing a string, batting a ball, weaving between the legs of the dining table and chairs, scooping her kibble out of the dish on the mat with a distinctive plunk. She’s knocking at the screen door, scratching at the basement door, curled on her condo watching the night, walking across the quilt leaving a little foot print indentations in the fluffy down. She’s hopping up the book case to look out at the birds in the avocado tree, strolling across my desk and hopping down from the printer, lapping up the remains of the butter and cheese from a dish of pasta placed on the floor after she stares at us through dinner, or drinking juice from the tuna can, saved especially for her, but ignoring the flakes of tuna. She’s racing around the house like a circus cat when I clap, climbing the avocado tree, negotiating the studio roof and slinking through the weeds in back of the studio. She’s leading me down the stairs and across the basement with dancing steps, stopping to bat around a wood chip on the way, or to lurk in a favorite dark corner. Her green eyes shine in dark behind the boxes as she follows her secret pathway to the door, leaping over the dusty plastic bottle of emergency water as she makes her exit.

Princess is peering into my sock drawer or up into a corner of the room, as though a magic door with suddenly appear. She’s curled on top of the boxes in the basement, sulking because the good folk of Sausalito are having another noisy civic event. She’s presenting her sleek little head for scratching, her soft wet nose for petting, her belly for rubbing and brushing. She’s rubbing her face on my toes, tickling me. She’s racing around trying to avoid the vet and having her ears cleaned or starting for the door in scout mode, long and low with her tail flattened, when the UPS man knocks too loudly.

She’s angling for treats when I get up, and when I sit down, batting open the bathroom door to check on me and peaking around the corner with one eye to make sure I’m there to obey her. She’s patrolling the driveway from under her favorite bush or car, vanishing skillfully into the shadows when dogs walk by. She’s waiting on the doorstep accusingly when we return home from a night out, or lovingly emerging from inside to greet us when we return home with her happy tail held high.

She’s curled in her little green bed by the heater on cold winter mornings, or curled under the cool ferns on hot fall days. I’m toweling her off with two towels when she comes in soaked from an outing in the rain as she slinks around, ducks under the coffee table and enjoys and evades the towels simultaneously. We watch her dreaming and smile as her paws twitch and her body vibrates as she chases imaginary mice.

And then there are all the conversations she has – she imitates our speech with tones, replies, solicits comments, whirrs and chortles gently. Sharp demanding meows are when she wants to go out, and there are loud purrs at all hours of the day and night, purrs from the foot of the bed as she blocks my view of the TV, purrs from under the covers where she seeks our body heat.

Princess was my muse. I’ve drawn her and painted her countless times. She inspired my Big Pet series of paintings, and has a wide circle of admirers among our friends and family.

Princess, we’re going to miss you!

Time Travel

2009-08-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

The lure of time travel has always been one of the most appealing aspects of science fiction as well as just plain fiction. Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plunks the characters and the reader down in Elizabethan England. Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court does just as the title describes, with hilarious results. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series allows children to step through wardrobes and pictures into other worlds with a resulting magic.

Recently I’ve had two memorable encounters with time travel. Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking introduced me to the concept of wormholes which theoretically are a warp in space-time which might permit time travel. Hawking says it’s possible “that one could warp space-time so that there was a shortcut between A and B. As its name suggests, a wormhole is a thin tube of space-time which can connect two nearly flat regions far apart.” I also was unaware, except in the vaguest way that, to quote Hawking, “the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on. Rather, each observer has his or her own measure of time.” To me, physics novice that I am, that seems to imply that time travel is indeed scientifically possible!

Of course, given the current lack of available wormholes, imagination offers the best possibility of time travel in 2009. I found this out during the improbable exercise of copying a Rembrandt etching with one of my drawing students. Rembrandt did many etching of everyday life that capture the mid-seventeenth century world of the Netherlands in remarkable detail. This group of thatch-roof cottages is but one example. The more time I spent drawing the scene, the more I could feel myself being transported back into that moment in time, seated on a stump beside the road, and gazing across at this small domestic grouping. The minute observation of detail, vivid textures, individual planks of wood and patterns of straw, cluster of people blending into the shadows, and the moist atmosphere of the place made me feel as though I was the one seated there sketching this scene, which hasn’t existed in over 250 years. How’s that for time travel?

In terms of technique, a combination of ink lines and finger-smudged graphite on Bristol board captures, if approximately, much of the inky, smoky quality and rich values of the etching. An actual etching is made by drawing with a sharp tool on a soft ground covering a copper plate. The plate is placed in an acid bath which literally etches the drawn lines into the copper. Once the protective soft ground is removed with solvent, the plate is inked, wiped off, covered with damp paper and run through a printing press. The resulting print combines the black of ink-filled etched lines with some residual ink left on flat surfaces of the plate. Thus value is created by linear means – cross hatching and closely spaced lines -- and also by areas where some ink is intentionally left on the flat surfaces of the plate to create tone.

On Ansel Adams

2009-06-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Looking through The Portfolios of Ansel Adams recently, I was struck by the perfect balance of light and dark in so many of his photographs. The richness of black and white photography as a medium may be falling by the wayside in this age of color everything, but looking at Adams’ photos from the mid-twentieth century renewed my appreciation of everything black and white.

Ansel Adams landscape photos are deeply satisfying to look at. The compositions are perfectly balanced, as are the rich darks and dazzling lights. Nature takes on an iconic quality, whether in a snow-covered tree, curving roots, or the fluff of cirrus clouds in a wine-dark sky.

Edges take on an added significance, too. The softness of clouds contrasts with crisp mountain silhouettes and the jagged edges of snowfields. Sharp shadows on the rocks at Joshua Tree contrast with the dark blur of cactus and shrubs. The granite face and crisp shadows of the monolithic El Capitan at sunrise contrast with the dark blur of the pine forest at its base.

Many of Ansel Adams images strike me as the emergence of light from shadow. This drawing in white chalk on black paper is an expression of that mental reversal. The inspiration was a 1962 Adam’s photo called Sierra Nevada, winter evening, from Owens Valley, California.

Natural Affinities

2009-06-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

I recently saw the show Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. The show’s premise is that because both artists favored landscape and nature subjects, and were actively working in the 20th century, there’s a natural relationship between their artistic visions.

I’m not sure I buy that premise, though. It seems more likely that the museum found a way to cleverly combine two of the most popular artists of the 20th century into one exhibit, thus creating a sure crowd pleaser. And pleasing it is. The crisp black and white of Ansel Adam’s photos inhabit a different universe from O’Keeffe’s paintings which are alternately starkly sensual and luminously colorful. A roomful of O’Keeffe’s Taos architectural images and some remarkable waterfall paintings are on one side of the scale, the fabulous purple Petunias and fluffy gray and yellow trees are meltingly lovely at the other extreme. Somewhere in the middle are the remarkable hill paintings of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. O’Keeffe manages to reduce the landscape to its essence, enhancing our perception of the colors and flowing eroded forms of the many-layered hills.

The oil painting above is a similar type of landscape, my version of the hills of Big Bend in Texas. I was there a long time ago, but the painting brings the place back to me in a flash.

Italian Adventures, Part 2

2009-04-30T10:43:00.001-07:00

Here are some watercolor and ink paintings I did in Venice over 30 years ago. They still resonate with me and remind me of a wonderful experience. Venice is such a unique city. Surrounded by water, it reminds me a bit – in the abstract -- of the Bay Area. All the light on the water is reflected back on the white and pink marble buildings. Everywhere there are bridges, arches and ornaments. Boats replace cars because the roads are canals. The plentiful life on the water reminds me of Sausalito. We are also close both to the sea and the Bay – Venice has the Adriatic and its calm lagoon. In both places, boats of all types are everywhere.

Art in a Toxic World: When Your Profession is Poisonous

2009-04-14T15:38:00.001-07:00

Working with paints and art materials has made me very conscious of the toxic hazards of my chosen profession. Paint thinner and turpentine fumes, the fumes from fixatives and varnish are not good for a body, and over the years I’ve developed an increasing sensitivity to them. Even acrylic paints should not be used without good ventilation.

The paints themselves can contain various heavy metals including lead and cadmium which are poisons. Do I just open the windows, hold my breath and hope for the best? I don’t eat or drink when I’m painting – and I try to keep my hands clean and away from my face.

I’ve got a limited tolerance for respirators – they make me claustrophobic, but better that than killing a forest of brain cells. I clean my brushes with vegetable oil, soap and water, which works just as well as paint thinner – I think it evens conditions the brushes better. Disposable palettes also help simplify the clean up and require no paint thinner. When I spray fixative on a drawing, I do it outside and hold my breath.

I just finished reading The Body Toxic by Nena Baker which puts the hazards of art materials in a perspective that pales in comparison with the chemicals we’re all exposed to daily, and which often accumulate in our bodies over time.

We’ve all become more aware of the chemicals in our environment, and we think we are good at avoiding the worst of them, but Baker’s book made me think again.

Of the various chemicals that are everywhere, there are five groups that Baker focuses on – the most pervasive and harmful in this modern moment. Some have been banned by progressive state laws, but all are still legally in use in the USA.

1) The widely used agricultural pesticide Atrazine has polluted water in many areas where it is in use. Even trace amounts can cause strange sex-changes in frogs and may affect human development as well. Buying and eating organic foods when possible is a step towards supporting more sustainable agriculture that doesn’t poison our environment.

2) Phthalates, which are added to plastics to give them flexibility, are in many products we use, including food packaging and personal care products (as fragrance). I’m allergic to fragrance, so I like to think I’ve avoided this – but phthalates are difficult to dodge – they’re in so many things (including paints, apparently). Look for them on the labels, and avoid those products. Don’t microwave food in plastic containers.

3) PBDEs are part of a family of flame retardant chemicals related to the banned PCBs. They are just as persistent in the environment and were added to tons of household products such as mattresses, upholstered furniture, car upholstery, and plastic casings for household electronics. They degrade into dust in our homes and offices which then ends up in our bodies and the bodies of our pets. They are bad for our health in many, many ways and build up in our bodies over time.

4) Bisphenol A is a component of polycarbonate (hard) #7 plastic and epoxy resins. It is known to disrupt the endocrine system in humans, even at low levels. It is also used to line cans that hold food, or in bottles to package beverages. It’s even used in some tooth filling materials. This is a tough one to avoid, but avoiding plastic beverage containers, especially worn ones, is a start.

5) Perfluorinated Chemicals. These are everywhere in non-stick cookware, stain-resistant treatments for fabric, and greaseproof coatings for paper. They coat the bags of microwave popcorn, protect our shoes and sofas from stains, and help the eggs slide out of the pan. I’ve thrown out most of my non-stick cookware and don’t buy any new ones. Stainless steel works fine. Also, I’d rather have a stain on the sofa, than sit in an invisible chemical soup.

Italian Adventures Part 1

2009-04-14T14:41:00.001-07:00

Way back when I was a senior in high school who had only recently fallen in love with painting and art history, I spent the springtime traveling in Italy with my mother. I used the materials I had with me to sketch what I saw– they happened to be watercolors and a pen.

I found myself painting in every spare moment. There were so many wonderful things to see and everything was visually delightful. The ornately decorated buildings reminded me of fine pastry, the landscapes of gorgeous gardens, the street scenes were mediaeval.

Sometimes it was just me sketching the view from the window of the hotel, or what I could see from the café table in the piazza. Other times I’d find myself surrounded by groups of school children who applauded when I finished the sky with a flourish, or by young men in pairs who tried a limited selection of pick-up lines in English, mostly “Where are you from?”

I recently rediscovered a cache of these watercolors, and was struck again by the freshness of my impressions from that moment.

Artistic Luxury

2009-03-24T17:13:00.000-07:00

The great irony of Artistic Luxury, a show at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, is that it reflects the excesses of a century ago in a way that shines a spotlight on the excesses of today.

The multi-million dollar AIG bonuses that have provoked such public outcry and “off-with-their-heads” vitriol have something in common with the gilded and bejeweled Fabergé Easter eggs that preoccupied the family of the doomed Russian Tsar at the turn of the 20th century.

An enormous tankard made from an ivory tusk, carved with endangered African animals and topped with a silver elephant seems like the horrifyingly politically-incorrect crowning achievement of the aesthetics and colonialism of the Victorian age.

Artistic Luxury is a disparate grouping of objects of wealthy excess, side-by-side with objects of great beauty and artistic innovation, particularly in the nascent field of glass art.

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s magnificent stained glass Magnolia Window (c. 1900), seen in the United States for the first time since it was created outside of the Russian State Hermitage Museum, is stunningly beautiful and unique.

Nearby is displayed the Imperial Lilies-of-the-Valley Basket (1896) by the House of Fabergé fashioned from pearls and gold that is simply irresistible, politics aside.

The image is a ceramic tile I painted that is based on Tiffany’s stained-glass work, Magnolia and Irises. It’s on the cover of my book, Art Nouveau: Spirit of the Belle Epoque, (Smithmark: NY. 1996).

I recommend my book on Art Nouveau as an introduction to the elegant, decorative style that flourished around the turn of the 20th century. A number of the works discussed and illustrated in Art Nouveau: Spirit of the Belle Epoque can be seen at the Artistic Luxury show in San Francisco.

Drawing from Paintings

2009-03-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

Student artists have always copied other artist’s work because there is an extraordinary amount to be learned about art from doing this. Every choice you make about what to copy will enrich your later work by imbedding snippets of composition, subject, and technique in your memory.

Although copying may not, at first, seem creative, there is a lot of creativity in choosing which parts of a composition to focus on. Drawing from paintings also challenges you to discover which types of drawn lines and marks can best recreate a painted subject.

Copying is always an exercise in looking and seeing that is unsurpassed. You will never look at anything as closely as you will when copying it. Starting with a black and white reproduction of a painting can simplify the process.

Painting is by nature more tonal than linear. It follows that making drawings from paintings is an outstanding way to expand the range of tonal values in your drawings, from black to white and every shade of gray in between. Copying expands your awareness of the richness of tonal values in the paintings because drawing from paintings challenges you to reproduce all those shades of gray.

Many paintings are fascinating to copy as drawings. I used pencil and a broken graphite stick on its side, smudging with my fingers, to develop the painterly qualities of Toulouse Lautrec’s Laundress (1889) in this drawing.

Edward Hopper’s Automat (1927) also made an interesting study in pencil. Hopper’s simplified, sculptural shapes give his figures solidity. His paintings are constructed of alternating “puzzle pieces” of light and dark that you become most aware of when copying a composition. There is a world of the difference between looking at the solution to a complicated puzzle and solving it yourself.

Drawing from paintings helps unravel the mystery of the artist’s own mental process; it gives you insight into the working method of an expert, and gets you more deeply inside the emotion of the art than merely looking ever could.

The Cake Dude

2009-03-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

California artist, Wayne Thiebaud, is one of my current inspirations. I love his sense of color and the vibrations he sets up between patches of complimentary colors. I love the thick, cake frosting-like application of paint in many of his paintings. I love his vertigo inducing San Francisco cityscapes, where he captures the feeling you get at the top of San Francisco’s steep hills, that the road will drop off into nothingness. I love the aerial perspective and sweet colors in his Delta landscapes. And I love his pop art inspired paintings of cakes and pastry cases where everything looks good enough to eat.

One of my students called Thiebaud “the Cake Dude” which I think is entirely appropriate, and not just because he’s done so many wonderful paintings of cakes. There’s something about his use of color that reminds me of the pastel frostings on little tea cakes. And his thick trowelings of paint often remind me of the freedom of applying a creamy frosting to a cake.

I’ve started a series of mountain landscapes that are inspired by Thiebaud’s art – and all the things I admire about it. The play of colors and textures, big simplified shapes and dramatic subjects of my new paintings all owe a lot to Thiebaud. I feel like I’ve entered into a world of new and unexpected color relationships, where anything can happen within the borders of these landscapes.

I’ve illustrated this entry with a couple of my new paintings, “Patagonia” and “Half Dome.”

The Challenge of Composition

2009-03-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

Getting comfortable with composition is one of the basics of producing satisfying art works, yet sometimes a good composition is hard to create.

Often, it’s easier to say what doesn’t work than what works. A good piece of art should hold the attention of the person looking at it, draw the eye into focus on the subject and lead the gaze around the picture in an easy flow. This is equally true for a picture with a realistic subject and a picture which is abstract.

All paintings are essentially groupings of abstract puzzle pieces of shapes, lines, colors, and contrasts that fit together in a pleasing and satisfying way. Of course, what is pleasing and satisfying to one person, may be annoying or boring to someone else. But overridingly, good compositions hold up to a lot of looking over time and eventually some become the masterpieces that are universally admired.

In his book, Mastering Composition, Ian Roberts recommends drawing a “composition a day” to improve this skill – which with time and practice will become easier and more intuitive. Not every composition you create will work, and some will be better than others, but by doing a lot of them, it will become easier to judge your successes.

Start with a source photo of landscape – something you took yourself or found in a magazine. See if you can create three different compositions from the same picture. Draw three small boxes, no more than four inches per side: one horizontal, one square, and one vertical. Make three different drawings of the same landscape in these boxes. Think about what you’d like to focus on, and what’s not important. Try to create an interesting pattern of light and dark shapes in each landscape. Then pick the one you like best. The one you like best will be the best composition. Just trust your judgment. It’s that easy.

Getting Good

2009-03-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

Getting good at anything takes practice – a lot of practice. This definitely holds true for art. The more you draw and paint, the better you get. The artists whose work has held up over the years are the ones who devoted their lives to art.

Matisse spent a lifetime on art (1869-1954), with wonderful results. His style evolved and changed dramatically over time, but his fabulous sense of color remained constant throughout.

I seem to keep coming back to Matisse, maybe because I had the privilege to write a book on his life and art: Henri Matisse by Susan A. Sternau (New York: Todtri, 1997).

Here’s a demo of one of Matisse’s goldfish paintings that I did last week.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: the Story of Success which was every bit as mind-opening as his other books Blink and The Tipping Point. Gladwell has a knack for seeing the big picture, finding patterns, and making sense of the world. Outliers shows the fallacy of the rags-to-riches stories that permeate our popular culture.

Instead of happening the way they do in the movies, every rags-to-riches success story turn out to be the result not just of ability, but of a combination of hard work, good fortune, and good timing – sometimes over multiple generations that precede the “miracle” of an individual’s personal success.

Gladwell notes that becoming an expert on anything, whether playing a musical instrument or becoming a computer programmer requires an average of 10,000 hours of practice. That works out to five years of 40 hours per week doing just that one thing to become exceedingly good at it.
I challenge anyone to spend 10,000 hours drawing and painting and not find they have gotten very good at it. In the case of art, keeping a daily sketch book, thinking about and visualizing art you like and art you’d like to make, visiting museums, looking at art books, looking at art on-line, planning paintings, as well as producing sketches, studies, and finished work, even doodling, all count towards those “expert hours.”

Here are a couple of museum links to get you started with the looking part:

http://www.famsf.org/
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This site has a searchable image base that lets you zoom in on the art works to catch every detail.

http://www.metmuseum.org/
Website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum allows you to view all of the art in current exhibits as well as look at all of the art in the permanent collections and create your own personal museum of favorites.

Looking at Textures and Patterns

2009-03-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

This exercise is a great way to build skills and strengthen your powers of observation. It will get you to start looking at the world of everyday things around you in a different way. The textures and patterns you feel confident drawing or painting will become part of your artist’s vocabulary. They’ll help you add variety and visual excitement to your work.

As you begin to paint or draw textures, you’ll notice that many textures create their own patterns – it follows that pattern and texture are closely related in the world of illusion that is two-dimensional art. Patterns are repetitions of shapes, colors and/or contrasts and are enjoyable to look at. Everything has texture – start noticing and appreciating the variety around you. Is something smooth, shiny, rough, bumpy, silky, soft, furrowed, or cracked? Each texture you feel can be translated into a pattern that creates the illusion of texture on your paper or canvas.

Divide your paper or canvas into eight or more boxes. Collect a variety of real things and photos to work from. Look through your own photos, find pictures in magazines or search for images on-line and print them out for reference. Fill some bowls or plates with things that interest you, collect samples of textures indoors and outside.

The textures in the painted demo, clockwise from the top left, are: marble, wood grain, camouflage, bubble wrap, dry grass, water ripples, lace (painted through like a stencil), and crumpled foil.

In the pencil drawing, the textures are, clockwise from top left: wood, rice, cracked mud, foil & bubble wrap, a sponge, wood chips, cotton balls, a basket, and wet sand.

Look for the “underneath color” to use as a base color in your acrylic painting. Add contrasting lines or shapes on top. When drawing and painting, note the contrast of light and shadow, the direction and relationship of small shapes and/or large shapes and try to mentally summarize the texture. Is it all hard edges, soft edges or a combination? Do the shapes line up in certain directions or seem totally random?

Study the texture and break it down into simpler shapes in your mind. How often does the pattern repeat itself?

You may start noticing that many textures and patterns in nature are related. Clouds look like cotton balls or certain flower clusters. Wood looks like stone or like eroded hillsides in the distance. Have fun enjoying the world of textures and patterns. Can you paint a texture so real someone wants to reach out and touch it?

A painting lesson inspired by Delaunay

2009-02-27T12:49:00.001-08:00

Robert Delaunay painted circles within circles of prismatic color. Find a reproduction of Delaunay on line or in an art book or just follow these steps.

Painting your own “Delaunay” is surprisingly easy. Acrylic paints work well because they dry quickly and are fairly opaque, although watercolors would also look great. Just make sure adjacent colors are dry before you paint the next one (use a hair drier on low). Otherwise, colors may bleed into each other.

1) Collect various sizes of circular templates. Jar lids and round plastic containers and their lids work well. If you are using acrylics, use charcoal to trace a variety of overlapping and concentric circles on your canvas or paper. If you are using watercolors, do this step in light pencil.

2) You can also use a ruler to divide some of the circles into halves or quarters. Stop when your composition looks complete. Trust your instincts for this step, or stop when you can’t think what else to do.

3) Make sure you have a palette that includes primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), complimentary colors (green, purple and orange) and white.

4) Now start mixing colors you like and painting parts of circles. Make sure you paint over the temporary charcoal lines and overlap the colors completely so there is no black charcoal or white canvas left showing.

5) Try to use each color you mix for at least 3-5 shapes so that the painting is unified by colors used multiple times.

6) When all your circle parts are painted, add a background in a less bright, dark, or neutral shade of color. Blue gray would be a good choice.

7) Step back, sign, and enjoy your “Delaunay” original.

Warhol's Colors

2009-02-26T15:31:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol’s colors are masterful. His multiple-face celebrity portraits pair two identical silk screened faces – identical, that is, except for the colors. One background will be bright pink and the adjacent square a vibrant turquoise that sets up a strong energy between the two alter egos.

The same synergy happens with flowers, soup cans and other silk screened multiples. In many of Warhol’s paintings complimentary color pairings; red with green, yellow with purple, blue with orange, or pastel variations of these pairings create a strong visual impact, as does the pairing of pink and yellow, or purple and red.

At Warhol Live, a new show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, I was amazed to recognize the impact Warhol has had on contemporary visual style – on things we see every day. This impact is equivalent, in a way, to the huge impact Picasso’s work had on artists of the earlier 20th century. Generations of painters were obsessed with Picasso. Warhol has inspired a similar obsession among designers.

So much of what we see today is packaged – literally and figuratively. Everything is designed, and many designers are borrowing aspects of Warhol’s art. If you start looking, you can see his presence everywhere.

Pop Art started as a movement with sources in popular culture and design – notably product packaging. Now Pop Art has come full circle. Warhol’s designs have transformed popular culture through eye-popping and seductive color combinations.

This study is called "Demented PoinsettaS" It was an exercise in both Warhol's colors and negative space.

Gardens for Spring

2009-02-23T15:37:00.000-08:00

It’s already spring-time in California. My daffodils and crocuses are coming up, the quince is in bloom, and the acacia trees, which have fluffy yellow blossoms, are making me sneeze. I love the quick transition from winter to spring here, after only a little rain. There is no East coast bleakness of February and March where everything is brown for a long time before the first Pointillist hints of green as the trees begin to flower and leaf.

Here’s a little acrylic copy I did in 2005 of one of Camille Pissarro’s wonderful garden paintings. All that variety of green was fun to mix. There are so many shades of green in every landscape; greens that tend toward yellow, brown or blue. Mixing greens is one of the joys of painting landscapes and gardens. I could never confine myself to green straight from the paint tube.

Two smallish original oils I did in 2008 also have a great variety of green in them. They were inspired by a recreation of Charles Darwin’s garden. Those gardens had tall stands of pink foxgloves and blue delphiniums which are more about summer back East.

Signac's Colors

2009-02-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

Paul Signac’s paintings are Pointillist with a passion. His scenes of sailboats and the harbor at Saint Tropez are thoughtfully composed and painted entirely with dots of color. Dots of red and blue mix optically in the painting – when viewed from a distance they form purple. So dense are the dots that there is no space between them. Together, the mass of dots form a continuous value. There is no sparkle of white or light between the colors as appears in the work of Impressionists.

The skies in Signac’s paintings glow an egg yolk yellow – I used Cadmium Yellow Medium mixed with just a touch of Alizarin Crimson to get the proper hue. The boats and shorelines are stylized by being rendered in the tightly packed dots – yet amazingly graceful, nonetheless.

By copying Signac in these demos, I gained an appreciation for his glowing color harmonies. Cadmium Yellow and Ultramarine Blue dots coexist, yet no green is produced by optical mixing. Instead, because the yellow is tending toward orange, it actually sets up a strong optical vibration with its complimentary blue.

Matisse's Cut-Outs

2009-02-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

I was just looking at the Jazz series again. The small cut-out shapes are so energetic and alive: jagged bursts, leafy forms, swarms of squares, starfishy things, coral shapes, dove/jellyfish shapes, spirals, arrows, squiggles of all colors. The relationship between positive and negative space is paramount. The color harmonies and strong contrasts are deeply satisfying. My mind creates all sorts of associations from the plethora of shapes and colors. Matisse's Jazz Series really is musical improvisation made visual.

This painting of mine, from July 1991, was based on Matisse-inspired cut-outs I was experimenting with that summer.