Atelier Book and Plein Air Magazine

atelier
21st-Century-Atelier
Tony Winters has written a thorough book on artist’s studios called ATELIER: Building the Visual Arts Studios of the 21st Century. It’s interesting as it is written from the point of view of both an architect and painter. There is a small part on my ex-studio in Piazza Donatello in Florence (currently part of Charles H. Cecil Studios).
You can pick the book up on Amazon.
plein-air-magazine

Also, Plein Air Magazine has a short piece on my use of sight-size and scraping down in outdoor figure painting (Joe Paquet has the cover and a longer artist’s profile).

The Iphone as a Painting Tool

A short post on using an Iphone as a black mirror. Like most of my tips, this is not my idea and I understand this has been common practice for a while at the ateliers like the FAA which teach sight-size. I mentioned it to other painters who hadn’t thought of the idea and it was well-received, so I decided to post it here.

I made the following video a few years ago demonstrating the use of a mirror in sight-size portraiture:

And in the next video of Ben Fenske painting a landscape you can see how often an artist will reach for the mirror while working:

The fact is, the mirror is one of the most efficacious devices for checking shapes and proportions in painting. It can be used without sight-size, but having everything visually locked-in makes the mirror especially powerful as an artist’s tool. For commissioned portraiture, where speed and accuracy are so important, it is really essential.

In landscape painting, artists will often use welding glass (sometimes called a black mirror) as it also greatly reduces the values. This allows the painter to see a value range closer to what they can actually capture in paint, and simplifies the number of values they need to compare.

Enter the Iphone, the $700 black mirror.

The Iphone has a flat, black glass screen and works perfectly for measuring shapes, proportions and values while landscape painting. Most of us also carry our phones around with us all the time. I recently inherited an older Iphone to replace my Nokia. While I’ll miss the maps and the privacy of my previous phone, I hated the rounded screen as I couldn’t use it to check shapes. Since I often forget, lose or break my painting mirrors when I travel, it will be a nice upgrade (that and the fact that iOS supports Instagram so I can stop borrowing the wife’s phone to post).

Update: I recently came across this quote from Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting:

It is an acknowledged fact, that we perceive

errors in the works of others more readily than in

our own. A painter, therefore, ought to be well

instructed in perspective, and acquire a perfect

knowledge of the dimensions of the human body;

he should also be a good architect, at least as far

as concerns the outward shape of buildings, with

their different parts ; and where he is deficient,

he ought not to neglect taking drawings from

Nature.

It will be well also to have a looking-glass by

him, when he paints, to look often at his work in

it, which being seen the contrary way, will appear

as the work of another hand, and will better shew

his faults. It will be useful also to quit his work

often, and take some relaxation, that his judgment

may be clearer at his return ; for too great apph-

cation and sitting still is sometimes the cause of

many gross errors.

Belgrade Sketches

Plein air painting of souvenir stands in Belgrade.

Souvenir Stands, Belgrade. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

Here are a few plein air paintings from this weekend in Belgrade, Serbia. I wasn’t prepared for how cold it would be, and I spent a lot of time walking to try to get a feel for the town so I didn’t get a great deal of paintings down. Before leaving for Belgrade I was inspired by the wonderful urban watercolors of Dusan Djukaric, who is based there.

Plein air painting at sunset in Belgrade, Serbia.

Popcorn Stall at Sunset. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

Plein air landscape painting of Sveti Sava in Belgrade, Serbia.

Sveti Sava Sketch. 30 x 20 cm, oil on panel.

Plein air painting of Sunday in Zemun.

Boats along the Danube, Zemun. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

The last day I was there I was shown around by the very talented, fellow landscape painter, Veljko Djurdjevic, who took me over to Zemun, one of the more picturesque neighborhoods of Belgrade. These short days make plein air work hard though. It’s too dark to paint by 4PM most days.

Plein air painting of the Assembly Cupola in Belgrade, Serbia.

The Assembly Cupola from Pironirski Park. 20 x 30 cm, oil on panel.

New York City

Plein air painting of Chambers Street in Tribeca, New York

Andrea and Luella on Chambers Street. 12 x 8 in. oil on linen.

Here are some paintings from the past week on the streets of in New York City. I was there for a portrait commission and other business stuff, so I didn’t get a lot of time for plein air work.

It was fun painting on the streets, the New Yorkers (and tourists) were very complimentary about the work.

Apologies for the potato-quality photos, I didn’t have my camera with me.

Plein air painting of the Freedom Tower from West Broadway.

The Freedom Tower from West Broadway. 12 x 8 in., oil on panel.

Plein air painting of soccer players in Central Park, NYC

Soccer Players in Central Park. 8 x 12 in., oil on panel.

Plein air painting of a print seller near City Hall, NYC

Print Seller. 8 x 10 in., oil on linen.

I don’t normally sell prints of my work, but the above piece will be available for purchase as a print from Larry, the guy in the painting. He’s by the exit to the City Hall subway exit, near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Plein air painting of Times Square, NYC

Times Square. 8 x 12 in., oil on panel.

Plein air painting of the Manhattan Bridge.

Manhattan Bridge. 14 x 11 in., oil on panel.

Update: One more of the pile driver in Dumbo that woke me up every morning.

Plein air painting of a construction site in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Pile Driver, Dumbo. 14 x 11 in., oil on panel.

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.