Marc Dalessio

These are the ten books on art which have had the most influence on me as a painter over the years. I haven’t listed them in any particular order. I should mention that these are all books for reading, without color reproductions. Clicking on the titles takes you to the Amazon.com (U.S.) page for each book.

• The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche. Even though it has nothing to do with painting, this book probably influenced my views on art more than any other that I’ve read.
• Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850: Sources and Documents by Lorenz Eitner. An incredible collection of writings by painters and sculptors from back when artists were the only experts on art.
• Pagan Mysteries In The Renaissance by Edgar Wind. This book introduced me to iconography and really blew my mind when I first read it. There are more great books on the subject by Wind’s teacher, Erwin Panofsky.
• Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball. Great book on artist’s pigments by an excellent author.
• The Enjoyment and Use of Color by Walter Sargent. There are a lot of books on color, this is the best one that I’ve read.
• The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed. The classic book on drawing.
• Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne. Excellent book on landscape compostion by the great plein air painter.
• The Artistic Anatomy of Trees by Rex Vicat Cole. The first two chapters on landscape painting in general are brilliant.
• The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents by J. J. Pollitt. Excellent resource for studying Greek sculpture. Also interesting to see how much art history repeats itself.
• The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques by Ralph Mayer. My favorite out of the number of materials handbooks available.

The two children’s books which I still remember from when I was a small child are  Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World by Ed Emberley and Frederick by Leo Lionni. If you want to keep your child from becoming an artist, these are two books you should avoid.

If anyone has other great art books to add, please put them in the comments.

The handy studio tube wringer.

I’ve always thought these tube-wringers were a waste of money, but my studiomate has one and now I find them really useful. Its amazing how much paint you can still get out of an “empty” tube.

My apologies to the tube wringer inventor for having ever doubted your genius.

One thing to note is that, apparently, the cheaper plastic models are better than the more expensive metal ones which can rip the tube if the paint inside is stiff (e.g. hand-ground colors or Old Holland lead white).

Traveling around, I occasionally get dents or scratches in my canvases. On a small ding, usually just wetting the back slightly on the deformed spot is enough to stretch the linen back into place*. Recently however I had a long line appear on a commissioned painting which was almost finished (something probably leaned on it in my car). As the painting was done for the most part in the fall, I would have had to wait half a year to paint it again.

Instead I had a professional restorer, Daniella Murphy Corella, come by the studio and take the painting to be ironed. I ended up doing all the work myself under her guidance and I’ll share what I learned.

First off I used a regular household iron. The iron must be able to operate at lower temperatures, i.e. you can place your hand on it without burning yourself (do this carefully). If your iron doesn’t go to just ‘warm’ you can put newspaper between it and the canvas.

Second, you take out all the water from the iron and make sure it doesn’t steam the canvas.

Third,  you unstretch the canvas and place it with the painting side down on silicon paper or something that the paint wont stick to.

Then you iron the canvas on the back where the problem area is for a very long time. I probably ironed for over an hour total, applying pressure the whole time. At the end the line was gone and the canvas wasn’t deformed in any way by the low heat. Apparently, if you use high heat (or water), the canvas will get waves in it which makes things much worse.

*One note about wetting the back of the canvas to get rid of dings. In my experience, if it doesn’t come out the first time you wet the canvas, don’t try it a second time or the ground can crack.

My suitcase-of-paintings safely back in the studio.

Opening the box slowly for the rat/gecko/spider check.

I spend an inordinate amount of time discussing this with my fellow painters. With the new security restrictions on airplanes and the airlines trying to squeeze more money out of passengers with weight limits, traveling with a large amount of painting equipment is getting harder and harder.

I’ve never traveled with turpentine, or anything I felt was dangerous, yet I have still had equipment taken from me at airports. Often in big American airports, when I would have difficulty getting through the screening, just changing to another x-ray station would get me through. It seems to often be just the decision of one individual whether or not tubed oil paint is dangerous.  Once I had an agent take all my hand ground paint because the tubes were unlabeled. When I protested that I had made them myself he said that I should make my own labels too. So I did. I named my brand ‘Safety Series’ and had labels professionally printed to fit my tubes. That worked until the 100ml rule, and now its just easier to send them in my baggage. My (non-flammable) medium goes in a shampoo bottle, the Canada balsam smells like conditioner anyways.

Turpentine can be bought almost everywhere. The problem many people have is that they go looking for ‘art supply stores’ rather than the ‘chemical shops’ where most people buy turpentine in countries without large numbers of oil painters.

On this trip I was hit with massive overweight fees both going out and coming back. Luckily I was able to talk them down both times. The smart thing to do these days is what all of my fellow painters did, which is put everything heavy (including the box-easel) into the biggest carry-on that you get away with. One even filled his jacket pockets with books and cameras and other heavy objects.

Overall I’ve had good luck with Airport security. If you try to make things easy for them, they are usually accommodating to the fact that we are not the average traveler.

My ultra-portable cigar box palette.

I’ve been asked a few times lately what my palette is, so I thought I’d put a post about it.

Over the years I’ve whittled down the palette I was taught to fewer and fewer colors. At present I use:

• Lead or Titanium white (I prefer the handling of lead, but I’m currently using titanium for health and environmental reasons).

• Cadmium Yellow from Michael Harding (or I’ll grind my own Cad Yellow light from Zecchi).

• Zecchi’s Roman Ochre

• Vermilion, hand-ground from Doak. Though I sometimes use the Zecchi one outdoors.

• Cadmium Red Medium, either Harding’s or hand-ground from Zecchi.

• Alizarin, either hand-ground or I was using Doak’s Florentine Lake for a while too.

• Cerulean Blue, $70 a pop from Old Holland, or hand-ground if I need a lot for a large painting.

• Ultramarine Deep from Old Holland.

• Manganese Blue from Old Holland.

• Cobalt Blue, either Old Holland or Harding.

I also use hand-ground Ivory Black when painting indoors, and I’ve tried to find a use for it outside but can’t. I know some landscape painters use it for clouds but I can never see the point.

The palette I started with included Naples Yellow, an earth red (Pozzuoli, English…etc), and Veridian. I have also used high chroma oranges and purples for specific projects with orange trees, irises and such.

My current set-up in the studio.

As a landscape painter, I really dislike painting from photographs. The obvious reason is that one of the top attractions to painting landscapes is being outside, but I also really find it difficult to be inspired by a photo in the same way as I do standing in front of the scene. Winters however, I do have to spend a lot of time inside and over the years I’ve tried to figure out how to work successfully from photos.

Last year I bough a DLP projector from Dell and experimented with using it in the studio with much better results than any attempt in the past. First, the large size of the image helps greatly when you’ve been trained to work from life like I have. More importantly however, I think that the poor image quality of the projector works as a constant reminder for me not to trust the image. The real problem with painting from photographs, in my opinion, is that they should only be used as memory aids, or for a detail here or there.

When using modern color photography in painting you can’t trust the values (especially with a light-based projection), you can’t trust the colors, and you really can’t even trust the shapes (which are often distorted). I think when painters have used photography successfully in the past (Zorn and Sorolla come to mind), it was because their approach was to create a painting using years of experience from life, and not just to slavishly copy the image.

The photo above is my set-up at the moment. I’m reworking the sky and foreground from a large landscape I finished from life earlier this summer.

I’ve recently gone back to grinding my own colors. I used to grind all of them, but as the good pigments (vermilion and lead white especially) became impossible to find here in Florence, I started using tube paints. Every August though I run out of colors and have to get out my pigment stash and grind up a bunch of paint to make it to September. Even better is when my studio mate Greg is out of town and I can pillage his wonderful supply of pigments.

Here is a brief list of the pros and cons of grinding your own paint.

Pros: Large range of dry pigments to chose from, complete control over consistency, (usually) much cheaper, more intense colors, and finally, you get a better understanding of your materials.

Cons: Its time consuming, messy, and many of the pigments are toxic.

This is the first part in a series I intend on doing over the winter where we try all the various brands for each color on my palette to see which is the best. I’ll start with the four colors I use in portraits: Red, Yellow, Black, and White.

Today we spent the day grinding every hand-ground vermilion we could get our hands on and comparing them to each other as well as the pre-ground tube paints on offer.

When I say ‘best’ I am referring entirely to what I, personally, am looking for in a vermilion. I only use 4 colors in my flesh palette and I need each to be perfect for the way I paint. By this I mean that the red has to mix beautifully with the white and ocher to give me my flesh tones, and to make rich purples when mixed with black. Here is the run-down of images from the test-canvas:

I realize the images don’t really show the best pigments. Luckily I took notes.

For me the best of the hand-ground paints was Robert Doak’s vermilion, which I believe is either cut with cadmium if not entirely cadmium-based. That said it is extremely similar to the old Zecchi cadmium vermilion they stopped selling 8 years ago (which we all remember fondly). I would prefer a cadmium based red anyways as historically real vermilion has had issues at times. Doak prices the stuff like it was cadmium as well.

The Sinopia cadmium #2 was really interesting as well, I hope to try it this winter on portraits.

Of the real vermilions, the ‘Sparrel’ (Daniel Graves gave me some of his stash, no idea where he got it) had the highest chroma. The Phase (a restoration store here in Florence) was pretty impressive as well. The Zecchi Cinabros were dull in comparison, though the Zecchi ‘Monte Amiato’ vermilion deserves a special mention for the chroma and tinting strength. I’ve never used it in a painting before, but I was very impressed in this brief color testing.

Of the tube paints the Zecchi was a surprising first for me (cadmium based again, but I was surprised by the tinting strength). The Harding was too cool and dull for my tastes, and the Zecchi cinabros were too blue as well.

These are just my personal opinions, I’ll post my notes tomorrow.

A couple of quick rants. First, current GPS systems are not made for landscape painters. They have no imagination, they always try to get you on the freeway, and the incessant “recalculating” gets really annoying. I need a GPS system with topographical maps, full tractor-trail coverage and suggestions for scenic routes. And I don’t want to hear about it if I don’t turn.

Second, the continuing decline of materials. The Venetian company (Fome) that makes those fantastic steel tripod easels also make the only palette cups that don’t leak. They used to put cork on the inside of the lids, recently they switched to rubber. Now, every painter I know puts turpentine in at least one palette cup. Rubber, when it touches turpentine, expands (try spilling it on your keyboard as I’ve done -all the keys pop off). So why would they put rubber in the lid where the turpentine will go? Within a day the rubber expands and pops out of the lid. How could they not know that? Its like they never paint, and don’t even know any painters to consult anymore. The funny thing is that the cork and rubber are unnecessary as they don’t leak anyways.

O.K. Ranting done. Sorry for that.

My cigar box palette.

I just started using a good quality manganese blue again after a 4 year break. I remember finding it essential when traveling but of less use here in Italy. This summer however, there have been a couple of times when I’ve really struggled to get the exact hue I needed. Using the manganese for the last two weeks has made mixing some colors so much easier. I see more colors just by having the capability to get them. ‘Like scales falling from your eyes’ as Gammell said.

The same thing happens every year with my landscape students who bring brand-name yellow ochres outside and fight the chalky color for hours. Its impossible to key your colors correctly with tube paints which are full of extenders which dull the color.

Matching color in nature is hard enough with the right tools, with poor quality paints it becomes almost impossible.