The Estremoz Paintings

Estremoz Castle, Spring
Estremoz Castle, Spring. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel.
Estremoz Castle in the Summer
Estremoz Castle, Summer. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel.
Oil painting of Estremoz Castle in the Autumn
Estremoz Castle, Autumn. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
Estremoz Castle, winter
Estremoz Castle, Winter. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

It’s been over a year now since we left Portugal, and even longer since I last wrote a blog post, but I wanted to show the series of paintings I did while we were living in the beautiful town of Estremoz. I had hoped to exhibit them as a group at the time, but between the Covid lockdowns and our other shows, I never got a chance to organize it.

Estremoz Castle #5. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

(Above is a YouTube video of the process for the previous painting).

oil painting of a field of
Yellow Lupine in an Cork Forest. 70 x 90 cm, oil on linen.

We loved our three years living in Estremoz. The Portuguese people were as wonderful as everyone says, the towns, cities and landscapes of the Alentejo are gorgeous, and the history and culture is utterly fascinating. I had no idea how much of the world’s culinary culture was influenced by the Portuguese. From the vindaloo curries of Goa, to Japanese tempura, to the multitude of peppers worldwide, Portugal had a huge influence on food everywhere they went.

Today as well, the food in the Alentejo and the Algarve is amazing, and not as well known as it should be. The seafood is especially great, in part because the area south of the Tagus (Tejo) river is the only area in Europe where cilantro is still part of the regional cuisine.

Today there are a lot of great restaurants in Estremoz, but we especially loved Larau and Mercearia Gadanha.

Saturday Market, Estremoz. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
Oil painting of Carnival in Estremoz
Carnival Parade, Estremoz. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
Cafe Alentejano
Café Alentejano, Sunday Morning. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
trees in bloom painting
Spring, Estremoz. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
Câmara Municipal, Estremoz
Tower of the City Hall, Estremoz. 30 x 20 cm, oil on panel.
Artists Society of Estremoz
The Artists Society of Estremoz. 25 x 28 cm, oil on panel.

We hadn’t originally planned on living in Portugal. It was one place on our list of possible places after my wife finished her studies at the Florence Academy of Art. But we really liked our time scouting in the Alentejo so we thought we would just look around at possible towns. One problem we had at first is that much of the architecture is designed around small windows as the summers are so hot. As artists we were looking for large windows with a lot of natural light. So we were thrilled when we discovered Estremoz. Much of the town is built on the north facing side of the hill under their castle, and there are a number of old, beautiful buildings with large north-facing windows.

Sociedade de Artistas Estremocense
Largo General Graca, Estremoz. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel.

As we walked around on our first visit, we stumbled across a large, ornate, empty building with large north-facing windows. The plaque next to the door read ‘Sociedade de Artistas Estremocense’, the Artists Society of Estremoz, so we asked next door if anything was for rent, and moved in a few months later.

We are very thankful to the Sociedade de Artistas for all their help in getting us settled into their beautiful building, and into the life and culture of Estremoz.

Rossio Marquês de Pombal painting
Rossio Marquês de Pombal. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.
wildflower painting
Wildflowers. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel.
R. da Campainha painting in Estremoz.
Rua da Campainha, Estremoz. 30 x 20 cm, oil on panel.
(Another process video, with thoughts on urban plein air painting in general).

plein air painting of the Igreja de São Francisco
Igreja de São Francisco. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

I also painted a few larger paintings. One is posted above, and here are a couple more:

large plein air landscape painting of Estremoz castle.
Estremoz Castle. 120 x 140 cm, oil on linen.
Plein air painting of my wife on our terrace in Estremoz.
Tina on the Terrace, Estremoz. 120 x 90 cm, oil on linen.

This last one is of my wife on our terrace in the Artists Society building. I love the huge chimneys that you see all around the Alentejo, apparently they were for curing meat for storage.

sunset painting
Sunset, Estremoz. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

Overall we had a wonderful time in the Alentejo and it is a period of our life that, despite the Covid pandemic, we will always look back on fondly.

Ema 2005(?) – 2020

Oil painting of a dog.
Ema. Oil on linen, 2010

Our little dog Ema passed away today. She was about 15 years old, and probably a mix of miniature pinscher and rat terrier. She was found abandoned in Naples in August of 2009, and brought to Florence for adoption. As a painter’s dog, she had to move around a lot and she seemed to love going somewhere new everyday. Funnily enough, the only place she disliked was my painting studio. At the time I was doing less studio work and more plein air landscapes, so it worked out fine for both of us.

Ema. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel

She had a good life, full of travel and adventure. She ate fresh lobster on the docks in Maine, she peed on the golden staircase at the Danieli, and she hunted crabs in the marshes of South Carolina. Despite her small size, she was very brave. She once charged a bear on a beach in Albania, she leapt from the window of my moving Land Rover to chase a stag in the Val d’Orcia, and she drove off a boar one night in Maremma. She ran across beaches and through fields from California to Nova Scotia, from Holland to the Alentejo, and from Normandy to Zagorje. She lived in Naples, Florence, Zagreb, Limburg and Estremoz, and she summered in the Hamptons, on the Dalmatian Coast, or in the south of France.

Plein air painting of a sleeping dog.
Ema Sleeping. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel

She was a muse to many and had poems, songs, and a book written about her. As an artist’s dog, she was often painted and sculpted. These are a few of the works I did of her.

Ema. Oil on linen 2014
Ema. Oil on panel, 2012

She was very loved, and will be greatly missed.

Ema, marble
Ema, marble
Ema, marble

Here are some video clips of her from over the years:

Technology, Oil Painting, and Tim’s Vermeer

Last winter, around the time that plein air landscape painters migrate back into their studios to begin enlarging sketches into larger finished pieces for the coming year’s exhibitions, I was thinking a lot about this painting entitled Lake, Rus by Isaac Levitan.

Isaac Levitan's landscape painting of an invented lake in Russia.

Isaac Levitan. Lake, Rus (1900).

It’s a large landscape and, like many larger paintings, the artist made a number of small preparatory drawings and oil sketches for the final piece. The studies I have seen for this piece have a wonderful freshness to them and a great sense of light, place, and the eternal captured in a moment.

What I find most interesting about Lake, Rus though is that the place doesn’t exist. None of these studies, nor the final piece, were done from life. There was no proportional comparison, no sight-size, no photo reference, and no camera obscura used in the making of the painting. It’s a very different method of picture making than my own, or that of many painters I know.

Artists often disagree about the techniques and materials used by historic painters. In what’s referred to as confirmation bias, their beliefs regarding the working methods of these long-dead artists often conveniently coincide with their own preferred painting system. For example, some artists who use photographs (or who can’t draw well without them) believe the great historic painters all used photography or another optical device like a camera lucida or obscura. Artists who use sight-size have found (some say inconclusive) evidence to prove that sight-size was a common portraiture technique dating back to the Italian Renaissance. Painters who use a grisaille technique are convinced the same method was used for some of the best oil paintings in the Western Canon (this is probably true), and so on. 

In the past couple of decades there has been a lot of media attention around the idea that the Old Masters couldn’t draw or paint without the use of some sort of optical aid, be it a camera lucida, camera obscura or some other mirror/lens combination. Much of this started with David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge and his subsequent media crusade. I read the book and saw him give a talk in Florence. Like the camera-obscura proponents before him, he has little evidence to support his assertions and his sentences in the book often start with some variation of “I think…” or “It seems to me…”. Overall, it’s an amazingly unscientific book, though the reproductions are beautiful. Other writers have disproved his thesis already, so I won’t go much into it. That said, I would like to reiterate that during the 20th century, despite the plethora of technological advances, the best realist painters have continuously avoided using any optical aids. In portraiture, where an accurate likeness is of the utmost importance, every account describes great artists like Sargent, Zorn, DeLaszlo, and Annigoni working directly from life for important commissions, even if they were known to use photographs for less important work. If photography or optical aids were so useful, why wouldn’t these artists use them for their most stressful and prestigious projects? Today, if we look at the best contemporary naturalistic painters, artists like Antonio Lopez Garcia, Richard Maury, Joseph McGurl or Jacob Collins, all of whom are able to produce excellent naturalistic images with accurate shapes and ‘photographic’ value ranges, these are the very same painters who eschew or minimize the use of photographs, projections, or other technological devices in their work.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that almost every art historian, realist painter, and visual scientist has rejected Hockney’s theory, there was a media frenzy to promote it and many people have accepted it as truth.

A couple of years back there was a documentary made called Tim’s Vermeer and the genesis of the story came from Hockney’s debunked book. The premise of the film is a rather extreme version of confirmation bias and it tells the story of Tim Jenison, a self-described computer graphics guy with no artistic training, who “uses technology to make realistic, beautiful images” as he sets out to prove that Vermeer also had no artistic training and used technology to make realistic, beautiful images.

I saw the movie a while ago and I remember thinking it must be a hoax. It was made by the magicians Penn and Teller, who used to have a cable tv show called ‘Bullshit!’. In this show, the magicians would take pseudoscience, paranormal beliefs and common misconceptions and subject them to critical thought and concrete evidence in order to show that these ideas are falseMy thinking was ‘why would they then make a documentary which is patently bullshit too?’ It made no sense. I thought that after a couple of years they would come out and admit it was all a joke to show how ridiculously easy it is to sway public opinion to believe anything via mass media. Unfortunately, that appears to not be the case.

People have asked me what I thought of the movie so I figured I’d write about it. The TLDR is that I didn’t like the movie because much of what they claim is either outright false or, at best, misconstrues what we know about Vermeer and historic painting methods.

Early on, the movie makes the statement that Vermeer’s painting are special as there are none of the ‘usual artist’s sketches’ under his paintings (they state “he was some unfathomable genius who could just walk up to his canvas and magically paint with light”). That is not necessarily true. First, there are lots of paints, chalks and charcoals he could have used for his underdrawing which wouldn’t show up in the infrared technology they use to look under layers of oil paint. Only marks made by dark media are revealed by infrared images. Vermeer’s own work entitled The Art of Painting shows an artist painting on a grey-toned ground with the underdrawing done in white chalk which, for example, wouldn’t show up in infrared imagining. Both Vermeer and his wife went through great pains to keep this painting in their collection, which has led art historians to believe it might be a self-portrait. Second, it hasn’t always been usual artist’s practice to do an underdrawing since the egg-tempera days (Velasquez, late Titian, Caravaggio and many of the great 19th-century painters come to mind). And third, we know from studying his paintings that Vermeer’s technique was not just ‘painting with light’ and, like that of many painters in 17th-Century Holland, required lots of glazes over a tonal underpainting. Such a method completely removes any possibility of working a passage in one shot as Jenison does.

To nitpick with smaller examples: They make the claim that a blurred line on the profile of the girl’s back in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is a chromatic aberration that could only come from a lens. But if it was a defect in the lens he used, why wouldn’t it appear in other paintings? The truth is that anytime an artist wants a form to turn away from the viewer they blur the line. In Vermeer’s painting, if you imagine a razor sharp edge you can see how it would jar the eye. You don’t even have to imagine, just look at Jenison’s final painting. It is quite poor precisely because he makes no attempt to vary his edges. Every edge he paints is sharp as he is shown focusing on each edge at a time in a piecemeal fashion, without any relation to the whole image. This is not the way the human eye sees and clearly not the way Vermeer painted.

The glow that they find so magical (“like an image on a movie-screen”) is probably a resin-based, maybe amber-based medium, and lots of artists from the 17th-century get the same effect in their work. In fact, when you walk through the Louvre, as you leave the late 18th-century Rococo rooms with the Greuzes and Le Bruns and move into the first Neoclassical room with the Davids, it’s interesting to see the switch from those earlier rich and unctuous mediums to the more simple and dryer-looking linseed-oil based mediums that have remained common up to today.

At another point in the movie they state that it is impossible for artists to see subtle value shifts across a wall in relation to the whole image. The filmmakers show an animation demonstrating that people can easily see value differences when two squares are close together, but that it becomes more difficult to discern the difference when the squares are further apart. Like so:

Tim's Vermeer value demonstration.
Tim's Vermeer value demonstration.
The film claims that Vermeer could only see these value differences if he was some sort of savant, or he had a special super-human retina, or he used their lens. They call it ‘absolute brightness’ (like musicians have perfect pitch) and claim only a lens would allow a painter to see values properly. This is completely false. Artists squint to see the compressed value range that they can reproduce in paint. You can try it at home. In the second image of the squares above, squinting way down will allow you to see the difference in values almost as clearly as when they are next to each other. The human eye can only see a few hundred value changes at a time, so to get the number of values to a smaller range, where subtle differences are visible, artists squint. They’ve been doing so for centuries, and have written about it in treatises. It seems silly that the filmmakers don’t mention this. There are excellent realist painters working all around the world today, getting ‘photographic’ values in their paintings by reducing the amount of light hitting their retinas by squinting. It’s one of the first things painting students are taught.

Vermeer also painted outside. How would he paint changing light effects and moving subjects, such as the clouds in his ‘View of Delft’, by copying from a mirror?

The movie takes a lot of cheap shots at art historians, and no art historian appears in the film. It’s a bit like climate-change deniers made a documentary denying global climate change and couldn’t get any scientists to appear in the movie. The art historical evidence is inconvenient for them. After Vermeer died, an inventory was taken of his possessions and he didn’t own a camera obscura or lens, or any other optical device. This document is still in the Delft city archives and it describes the other objects in his studio. It’s not mentioned in Tim’s Vermeer. They also claim that historic artists were ‘sworn to secrecy’ and never shared or wrote about their techniques. Again this is false. There are a great many treatises on painting techniques and materials written throughout the history of Western Art and none recommend the use of optical devices in painting. Both Hockney and Tim’s Vermeer continually make the point that their theories are not an attempt to diminish the genius of the Old Masters, but their suggestion that these painters were hiding their methods contradicts that. If using an optical device didn’t make painting easier, why would painters hide it? To me this suggestion of deviousness and connivance on the part of historical artists says more about the characters of David Hockney, Penn and Teller, and Tim Jenison than any of the Old Masters.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, did own a camera obscura. This fact is regularly trotted out by the pro-optical device crowd as proof of artists using gadgets as he had one in his possession when he died and it’s still on display in London. What they miss though is that Joshua Reynolds also wrote a great deal about the making of paintings. These writings are collected in his Discourses. In the book Reynolds discusses all aspects of drawing and painting from the technical to the philosophical, but only mentions the camera obscura once, and he pans it:

“If we suppose a view of nature represented with all
the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene
represented by a great artist, how little and mean will
the one appear in comparison with the other…”

Leonardo da Vinci is also suggested as an example of an artist who used a camera obscura. On this page in the Atlantic Codex he illustrates the inversion of an image through a pinhole.  It’s the small sketch of the candle at the bottom of the page. The rest of the drawings on the page are images of optical phenomena and the functioning of the human eye and I’m not convinced he was suggesting its use in painting. In his own work, there is very little stylistic difference between his early work, his fantastical drawings of invented spaces and characters, and any subject where the use of a camera obscura would have been possible. Furthermore, some of Leonardo’s thoughts on art were compiled by his pupil Francesco Melzi into the Treatise on Painting. In the book, tracing shapes using a piece of glass is described a few times, as well as the practice of observing ones work with a mirror to check shapes, yet there is no mention of the use of a camera obscura.

He does, however, specifically warn his readers not to copy the subject the way Tim Jennison does:

“The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence”.

One can go on through the various artistic treatises, but they are all silent on the use of gadgets. What every text written by a painter does repeat over and over is the importance of learning to draw over the course of years.

Despite this rant, I am not against the use of technology to make art. I don’t think we should go back to horses for getting to landscape painting spots (though moving slow and being high up is great for scouting), I love looking at the new wave of digital artists I see online, and I will incorporate technology into my own working method to experiment with new ideas. I’ve written before about using video rather than photography for portraiture, experimenting with carbon fiber and Dyneema composites fabric to lighten my plein air painting equipment, and I use weather, map, and sun-tracking apps to plan my outdoor work. I’ve also used Photoshop on occasion to make compositional decisions quickly, rather than doing lots of studies, as seen in the gif below:

 

Because I use technology sometimes in my work, I am well acquainted with its disadvantages, of which this gif is a good example. My thought here was that since I was able to quickly and precisely move elements around, in theory I would be able to produce a better painting. In reality though there is evidence to suggest that I would be better off doing a number of small studies by hand. Cognitive psychologist Robert Bjorkhe called the principle ‘desirable difficulty’ in his studies on teaching methods, and his discussion of ‘Generation’ is especially relevant. The idea is that generating words, rather than just reading them, helps students remember them better. I believe that artists generating studies also contributes to an understanding of the work that will be different than if the same work is done using technological shortcuts. There is a depth that we get into when spending painstaking amounts of time on an idea that will not be there when using technological shortcuts. It seems commonsense to suggest that doing a number of studies will give an artist more practice and better help them visualize and remember their subject, but we sometimes forget just how much of painting is memory. For a realist painter recreating an image before them, every brushstroke is based on a memory. For Levitan, recreating a whole scene in his head, he would be required to call upon a large vocabulary of objects from memory, and visualize them in a specific light and atmosphere. 

I’ve often wondered how our brains have changed over the centuries as we rely less and less on memorization in other areas of our lives. There used to be elaborate systems based on visualizing spaces which were used as memory tools (Frances Yates wrote a great book on the subject called The Art of Memory), and perhaps historic artists were also using these ‘memory palaces’ to store information they might have access to on rare occasions. It would have required years of practicing imagined spaces. Would that have wired their brains differently than ours? For those of us living in a digital age, we don’t really have to remember much at all. We carry the sum total of human knowledge around in a tiny device in our pocket. When you read about the concerns of scholars after the invention of the printing press – that people would lose the art of memorization that was so essential in the days when seeing a manuscript might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience – you have to wonder what they would think about our lives today. We are also bombarded by images in the form of tv and movies, public advertising, newspapers and magazines, and now the internet. Is that going to make us less sensitive to images or more sophisticated with regard to them? Studies show that reading short internet articles and blog posts (!) reduces our attention spans, and I personally notice a difference in my thinking when I stay offline and go back to reading books. How does all of this affect our work? And is relying on technology to make painting easier really producing better artwork? 

This is the point that I’m really trying to make here: On the one hand, art is a craft and, like any craft, mastery comes from really hard work. There aren’t any shortcuts. Years of exercise in the form of thoughtful repetition and copying leads to a visual and physical dexterity which allow an artist to create the work of art. 

On the other hand, there is an emotional component to great art which comes from the artist’s love for their subject. The subject can be their passion, idea, or just their reaction to the beauty of light on the world around them. They create these works either from visualizing the world around us, or reinventing it in their head. When an artist shares this with visual honesty and thoughtful expression in their medium of choice, it is a special form of communication between them and the viewer of the work. I believe art is one of the few ways of successfully sharing the sensation of a powerful emotion between two people, sometimes over the span of centuries. But this requires time and a situation where the artist will feel moved by their subject.

To return to confirmation bias, Penn and Teller are magicians and entertainers. Part of their shtick is that everything in magic is smoke and mirrors. Their movie, Tim’s Vermeer, is an attempt to prove that Vermeer’s art was also just smoke and (literally) mirrors. Tim Jenison is also operating under an almost pathological confirmation bias. In the movie he claims that when he looks at a Vermeer he sees it as a still from a video camera. I disagree, and using my own confirmation bias (combined with more evidence, experience, and using Occam’s razor) I would like to suggest that Vermeer had excellent training, spent a great deal of time learning to draw, and worked very hard over long periods of time to make his beautiful paintings. He painted in grisaille and glazed over it, perhaps repeatedly. But most importantly, he felt a strong emotional reaction toward the light falling on his subject, and I don’t believe that can happen looking at a subject upside down in a black box or reflected bit by bit in a mirror. 

In art, the end does not justify the means. The means are an essential part of creating art in the first place.

Social Media for Painters

Traditional media tends to ignore contemporary traditional painting. When I was first starting out as an artist I found this really frustrating. I was searching for art training which did, as it turns out, exist but it was there was no mention of it anywhere. Today the internet and social media have really changed things for the better. There are a lot of great traditional painters working and we now have a myriad of ways to see the work of these artists, as well as network, sell paintings, and discuss issues relevant to realism with painters from all around the world.

Screenshot of Pinterest.

Pinterest is my favorite online resource for art. Google Images and Bing are both stunningly awful for any generic art search, and even refined searches quickly descend into irrelevance. Looking for 19th-century Italian artists, for example, starts to turn up soccer players and starlets very quickly. When you first go to Pinterest, all the images are of clothes and furniture. The trick is to set up an account, unfollow all the boards they start you with, and begin looking for painters you like. From there you pick boards you like via the ‘this painting is also on this board’ link, and follow them down the rabbit hole of great artwork. The way I have it set up now gives me a large number of inspiring artwork to peruse, and it’s usually a wonderful mix of historical and contemporary artists. It’s also great for finding a very specific genre of work, as generally the people curating their boards do a good job with it. I don’t post work much myself, but my profile is here.

ArtStack is similar to Pinterest, but focused on art. I’m new to it, and the art is mostly Contemporary with a big C. The layout is very elegant and clearly made by people who understand looking at artwork (they even convert from centimeters to inches for you, and list both). Currently they are having a crowd-source art contest which I’ve entered, and if you have a free moment you can ‘stack’ my work here.

Wahoo Art, on the other hand, has to be one of the least elegant sites on the web. They make up for it with a ridiculous amount of work on display by historic artists. Here are the results for a search of Isaac Levitan’s paintings, for example. My wife actually just showed me that link yesterday and many of those works I had never seen before, despite having seen a large number of his monographs.

Other online catalogs for paintings that I sometimes use are the ARC Museum, Wikiart, and Olga’s Gallery.

Facebook is the social media platform where there seems to be the most activity for artists. I’m personally very thankful to the site for getting me in touch with old friends I wouldn’t have found again otherwise. For painters there are some good groups worth joining to see historic as well as contemporary realists, and participate in some interesting discussions. I find it is also an excellent way to get in touch with painters around the world before I travel there to paint. Having a local artist show you around is the best way to work. Unfortunately Facebook has a limit of 5000 ‘friends’, but you can follow me here. I only post painting-related things these days, and it’s always set to public.

All the cool painters use Instagram these days. I really dislike everything about it. I rarely use my cellphone, and if I’m looking at paintings I prefer a big, color-calibrated screen. It’s also really snooty about what phone you use and my old Nokia didn’t make their cut. After recently inheriting an Iphone I’ve started using Instagram more, though I find the quality of photo that can be taken with any phone to still be seriously lacking. Photographers sometimes use Dropbox to get their high-quality photos onto their phone and then upload to Instagram from there, so I’m trying that.  Another clever social media trick is to use IFTTT to automate your posting with ‘recipes’: This one, for example, posts anything that goes on Instagram to Facebook, this one does the same to Tumblr, and this one posts it as a native Twitter image. So, after that rant, you can follow me on Instagram.

Twitter I find to be very useful for specific things. When I was setting up this blog I started following all the ‘how to start a blog’ twitterers and found tons of useful links and information. If I need to find art materials in a new city I can just tweet to the company that makes them and they’re usually good at responding. I know of other artists who use it to great effect for finding clients, commissions, etc. and it clearly can be a powerful tool for those that understand how to use it. On that note, here is my (rather uneventful) twitter.

The online world has also opened up access to new markets for painters. I personally still do most of my sales through brick and mortar galleries, but I’m a big fan of the Painting a Day movement. It was originally pioneered by artists such as Julian Merrow-Smith, and has now been taken up by lots of great still-life and plein air painters. The premise is simple: Have a blog, paint every day, and sell the works one by one as they’re finished. I think it’s great that so many artists around the world have used the internet to find a new way of making the daily act of painting interesting, and that so many clients are able acquire beautiful, original works of art at the same time.

There are some good forums for artists, though nothing really stands out since RationalPainting went full Munsell (edit: I was informed that Rational Painting is no longer Munsell-only, it was just for a brief period after they changed servers). Natural Pigments has a good materials forum, Wetcanvas is very active with every style and technique, and ConceptArt has a good fine art section, among its various offerings.

The only podcast I know of for painters is the Suggested Donation Podcast (I was interviewed for it in November).

The most comprehensive list of painting schools is the ARC Approved Atelier List.

And finally, the online media on art I subscribe to are Plein Air Magazine (it’s a real magazine, but I read it online), The Artist’s Road, Artists on Art, and Underpaintings. Stapleton Kearns, Painting Perceptions, Lines and Colors, The Hidden Place, and Fine Art Views are some of the free blogs I peruse when I’m not arguing on reddit.

Edit: As Maike mentioned in the comments, I use my Flickr account to host large images of all my paintings. I do this since Lightroom has an easy upload system for Flickr (for some reason, there isn’t a similarly functional way to upload into Adobe’s own image-sharing website Behance). I didn’t list it as social media simply as I don’t use it as such. The one thing I did do for a while, which I’ve discussed before, is to use geotagged photos from my phone to keep a database on Flickr of some of the places I’ve painted so others can use them. For more ideas of locations, Paintmap does the same thing but with artists from all over the world.

If anyone has any suggestions to add, please list the in the comments.

A Dennis Miller Bunker Quote

Oil painting by Dennis Miller Bunker.

Dennis Miller Bunker. Meadow Lands (1890).

Dennis Miller Bunker is considered to be one of the greatest American painters. He died tragically young, at age 29, in 1890. He studied with Jean Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, was one of the first ‘American Impressionists’, and he painted with John Singer Sargent.

Portrait painting by Dennis Miller Bunker.

Dennis Miller Bunker. Jessica (1890).

One of his best students was William Paxton, who taught R. H. Ives Gammell (who taught my teacher, Charles Cecil). Gammell wrote a biography on Bunker, published in 1953, and in the book there are a number of personal letters given to him by Bunker’s widow. I reread the biography earlier this year, and the following letter from Bunker to his then-fiancée struck me as being particularly insightful into the working life of the artist:

You must try to realize how dull and monotonous an artist’s life is. There is absolutely nothing but work, work, work. And there is nothing in the work of an artist that shows his personality. You are marrying a man whose highest ambition is to conceal his identity, to remain above his work and apart from it, not to appear in it in any way – to be as cold and calm as a machine. Oh! if I only could, I might some day learn to paint! What I am trying to tell you is not to nourish any any ideas of an artist people whom you see may expound to you. Don’t think, as they do, that the charm of an artist’s work must be found also in his own personality. It is always apart, or should be, should have nothing to do with it, and that is what makes it such an infernal trade. Never to play on ones’s own twopenny flute but to keep the big end in view always; to remain patient and cold and quiet and work like a dog from morning ’til night; there is no other way of arriving even at talent, unless one is cut out of larger stuff than I am.

Oil painting of a tree by Dennis Miller Bunker.

Dennis Miller Bunker. Tree (1884).

That’s it really. That’s all I wanted to say. Since you took the time to get here though, I’ll leave you with this passage from the book as well. In it Gammell beautifully express the idea of breadth and detail in painting:

People untrained in the art of painting often believe that finish is attained by simply adding detail to detail and consequently they dismiss it as a mere by product of industry and patience. Unfortunately this view does not correspond with the truth. For an essential characteristic of all fine painting is unity of effect and this unity is destroyed by any detail stated in a false relation to the other component parts of the picture. This is particularly true of the type of painting we are here discussing, the purpose of which is to recreate on canvas the impression made on the painters’s eye by the landscape before him. To achieve this end, each detail must be set down with just the degree of definition and coloration which it holds for the eye when the focus of vision is adjusted so as to include the entire scene depicted. Piecemeal notation of individual detail immediately destroys the requisite unity of impression and turns the canvas into a compilation of separately observed visual facts. This invariably results in a hard, dry look, destroying all breadth of effect and offensive to those who are quite unaware of its technical cause. It is, in fact, one of the most serious defects which a painting can have and perhaps the most difficult defect for an earnest painter to avoid. The ability to carry a picture to a high degree of finish without losing its unity of impression is the mark of a master and requires artistry of the highest order. It is the central problem of the type of painting which takes for its main theme the interpretation of the beauty of the visible world.

Oil painting by Dennis Miller Bunker of a beached boat.

Dennis Miller Bunker. Beached (1882).

For those of you noticing the wide range of style in the posted images of Bunker’s landscapes, Darren Rousar has an interesting post on Bunker’s move from the more Academic influence of Gerome, to the Impressionism of his later style.