A Master Copy

A copy of Arthur Hoeber's Golden Twilight

A month or so ago, I wrapped up teaching a painting class titled Landscape Painting in the Studio at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. One of the final tasks I set before my students was to execute a master copy. I don't know if doing this sort of thing is somewhat out of date, but I have done a number over the years, and they have done me a lot of good. The effort of very carefully observing the original and then exercising your own technical abilities to render the same effects is a wonderful challenge with real rewards.

My copy after Arthur Hoeber's Golden Twilight

You get deep into aspects of painting such as:

Palette / Colors
You may go as far as researching what colors the artist used and replicating his or her palette, but I think assessing what colors you have that can mix the desired resultant hues is fine. You may find yourself getting only so far with 4 colors and realizing you need a 5th (as I did), but that's part of the learning. (I list my pallet below)

Value
Overall value structure is key. You can mix the right color, but it's essential to put the right value and value relationships down. More important, even.

Composition
I think looking at good work and allowing yourself to be influenced by it can help an artist absorb good compositional structures. What then could be better than making a copy of a work with strong composition?

Brushwork / Edges
How do you think the artist applied paint? How do areas of differing color and/or value transition to each other? All that good stuff.

I planned to do a copy along with my students, and brought along one of my favorite and most personally inspiring art books: David Cleveland's A History of American Tonalism.

I thumbed through and somewhat randomly chose a painting by Arthur Hoeber (1854-1915) titled Golden Twilight. I just liked it, that's all. It's moody, with a kind of contre-jour effect of the light of the recently-set sun facing the viewer and giving the shadowy trees a warm halo. He wasn't an artist I was at all familiar with prior to choosing this image. I thought it best to work from the image in the book, as I figured it would be reasonably well color-corrected and it can be nice to get one's eyes off a lit screen. Also, a printed image in a book works in a reflective light model as does paint on a canvas (as opposed to transmissive light from a digital device's screen). It can help for comparisons to keep things within one realm.

My Palette

After looking the painting over, I figured I could mix the necessary colors with Yellow Ochre, Terra Rosa, Cobalt Blue, and Burnt Umber. (Later on, I added Indian Yellow.) Not sure what he used exactly, but I'll bet an umber would have been on his palette. I would say the one color I didn't quite nail was the green in the middle- and foreground.

What did I learn?
Most of his colors are quite neutralized. The blue in the sky - when I had gotten it mixed satisfactorily close to the original - looked just like a grey sitting on my pallete. The power of context when it's placed by the warm areas of the trees and the warmer clouds make all the difference, and heighten the apparent saturation of both.

The areas of greatest contrast are right along the horizon where the golden area of sky shines behind the dark tree trunks. Clearly, right where he wants you to look. Everywhere else is softer edges. The line of clouds in the sky and the water in the foreground all lead to the large tree left of center.

I think he may have done a warm, orange underpainting, or just had his canvas toned. I feel like it peeks through in some areas. I would of course, love to see the original. I think there's some thick impasto in the foreground grasses.

Here is an image of the original I found online. It differs from the one in the Cleveland book in a few ways. It has a less saturated green in the lower half and more extreme light values. I think the way it was lit for photographing exaggerates the surface texture. Possibly the photo online is before a cleaning and re-varnishing? (I tried to tweak this a little to better match the book version with some success.)

Golden Twilight

Arthur Hoeber c. 1895

In conclusion, master copies are good for you. Do one once in a while. That is all.

You can see some lovely Hoeber paintings here:
http://www.artnet.com/artists/arthur-hoeber/

Birge Harrison, part 3

The quotable Birge.

Grand Central And The Biltmore In Hazy Twilight

I have taken notes from some of the passages from Landscape Painting that reveal how Mr. Harrison went about his painting, and his thoughts on art-making in general.

I find the below to be some of the most revealing.
(These are all from chapters 3 & 4)


On technique in the service of individualism:

"... one of the chief delights of the art of painting lies in the fact that each artist does, and of necessity must, invent his own technique; for his personal technique is an inalienable part of the personal vision which makes his art his own."

I take this to mean in practice that one should learn and try many techniques from the masters of the past and your teachers of the present. Some technique, or combination of techniques, is the way forward for you on your path to an individual creative style. The only way to find out which is to work and experiment. A lot.


On vibration:

"The whole picture in all its exact values can and should be built up in this preliminary covering of the canvas, for the value of the overtone must in every case exactly match the value of the undertone."

"While we wish to secure broken color, we must avoid broken values, for they utterly destroy atmosphere."

" The undertone must be warmer than the overtone, and second it must never be brown;  and this for the excellent reason that out-of-door nature abhors brown, and never uses it."

So... broken color was Birge's thing.
There's more than one way to go about that. Birge's way was to lay down a warm underpainting of shapes and values, and then work on top of that with a cool color, not completely obscuring the undertone.
He was after vibration through contrast of hue, not value.

His whole negative reaction to brown may stem from an over-use of it in the generations preceding him. Earlier artists - and many, if not most of them did not paint outside much - tended to lay down a brown underpainting and/or have brown shadows in their landscape paintings. Shadows outside tend to be cooler, blue or blue-grey, often reflecting some of the blue of the sky. And tree trunks and branches are more often grey, or grey-green than the commonly thought of brown. I myself would never say that there is zero brown out in nature, but there is not as much as people often think.

November

On Refraction:

(I take Mr. Harrison to mean "edges" when he says "refraction.")

"no picture in its extreme corners should be painted with quite the same vigor of technique or strength of color or of value as in its natural focal centre."

A pretty obvious concept, but a good one to keep in mind when painting or drawing.
One can become obsessed with rendering detail and over-refining over the whole of an image, but end up doing so at the expense of clarity and focus.

Birge Harrison, part 2

Soaring Clouds

Back to Birge

Lovell Birge Harrison

(I notice many sites have his first name as Lowell. It is actually Lovell, but many have mistakenly assumed the more common Lowell.)

His elder brother Alexander was also a very accomplished painter.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alexander_Harrison

The Wave

Alexander Harrison

They exhibited together at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1913.
The catalog from that show can be seen/downloaded here:
http://www.artic.edu/sites/default/files/libraries/pubs/1913/AIC1913A_BHarrison_comb.pdf
What a show that would have been to see...

Hidden Moon

At one point in Landscape Painting Birge outlines the 4 distinct ways (as he saw it in 1909) to make an oil painting.

They are:

1. The classical approach of making a monochromatic underpainting and then glazing color on top, as Renaissance painters did.

2. Laying unbroken color in "smooth flat masses" as a house painter does

3. Painting dabs of differing colors like an Impressionist. The "spot and dash method," as Birge calls it.

4. Doing what Birge himself advocates (and presumably other Tonalists did?) and painting cool colors on top of a still-wet warm underpainting. "Care being taken not to mix or blend the two coats and not to cover up completely the undertone, rather letting it show through brokenly all over the canvas...." The visual interaction of the cool and warm giving the painting "vibration."
I plan to try this method. It seems to me that it might be tricky to do as he says and not inadvertently mix or blend the warm and cool.



I think this detail are from Fifth Avenue at Twilight shows the kind of vibration he went after in his work. The turquoise and violet in the distant building contrast and vibrate with their differing hues, but their values are very similar:

Fifth Avenue at Twilight (detail)

More to come....

Birge Harrison, part 1

Sometimes it can really pay to go back and reread something.

In my case, Birge Harrison's 1910 book Landscape Painting.

Fifth Avenue at Twilight, ca. 1910

Detroit Institute of Arts

One of his most (rightly) famous works and they do not have it on display!

I got it a while back and read it. Liked it, but wasn't particularly bowled over. A recent Facebook mention of it got me to start rereading it, and I'm very glad I did.

Having made a certain number of paintings, and logged many more miles of brushwork in the interim, his concepts now really resonate with me.

Oh, and his work? Amazingly beautiful. Gorgeous. Rich with atmosphere. I long to see one of his paintings in person.

Sunburst at Sea

I made this post a "part 1" as I have not read through the whole thing again and yet feel I have enough for a worthwhile post. There will be a part 2 and maybe more...

Here are some of his points that really clicked with me:

on Art:
"...this is the test of the highest form of art - that it should stimulate the imagination and suggest more than it expresses."

on Values:
"the best we can do is to translate the infinite value scale of nature into our sadly finite scale of pigments, and endeavor' by most careful balance, to adjust our means to our ends."

"...the most important thing to consider is the value-key of our picture. Assuming the whole scale of values from the deepest black to the purest white to be represented by the number 100, the question arises as to what proportion of this number we shall use in the particular work which we are proposing to execute.. In this matter the golden rule is reserve. We lose rather than gain in power by forcing the note, and a picture in which the whole scale from black to white should be employed would be absolutely without atmosphere, and without charm."

Sunrise from Quebec

sold at auction in 2016 for $26,000

For me, his paintings really seem to make color (and value) count by his using less of it.

You can purchase a reprint of Harrison's book combined with A. Durand's in one volume for $15
buy from Amazon

"White Ink"

My understanding is that white ink isn't really a true ink, as inks are always transparent and so white ink must have something added to it to make it opaque. Like acrylic binder.

With that out of the way:

I add light values to pen & ink drawings in a number of ways: colored pencil, gouache with a brush, and lately I have been trying some white gel pens.

I want a white I can use with a dip pen and brush, and so have been hunting for something that clicks with me. (Gouache out of a tube won't work well with a dip pen nib.)

The top "clouds" were applied with a No. 2 Robert Simmons Expression synthetic round brush.

The linear marks were made with one of my all-time favorite and most-used nibs, an Esterbrook 988:

Esterbrook 988 in a Koh-I-Noor holder.

My conclusion?

They all felt serviceable with brush and dip pen. I could make do with any of them if I had to. I think the Daler-Rowney flowed the best in the dip pen, And the cloud it produced has the most subtleties.

This drawing shows the effect of a dip pen putting in the light value lines:

 (I think the dark lines were a fine line marker)

Decoding Pigment Codes

limited palette painting demo in chromium oxide green and pyrrole red

     In the process of working on materials for my limited palette workshop at Evanston Art Center, I came across a number of interesting things in the world of colors and pigments and oil paints.

Now, I always assumed that a paint's pigment code (such as PB29 for Ultramarine Blue) was absolute. Not so much, really. It is pretty specific yes, but 2 paints from 2 different manufacturers can vary quite a bit even if they have the same pigment code. Also, 2 different-looking paint colors can be made from the same pigment, by varying the grind and including additives.

This whole labyrinth came to my attention when I realized that Cadmium Lemon and Cadmium Yellow Deep oil paints (both from Williamsburg) are each composed solely of PY35 pigment. Now, Cad Lemon is a lighter, cooler yellow and Cad Yellow Deep is more like an orangey yellow and darker in value. Pretty different while both obviously still being "yellow." How can they both be the same pigment? I emailed both Williamsburg and Gamblin these sort of questions and got helpful responses from both.

From Scott Bennett at Williamsburg/Golden:

"There are many examples of paint colors that have the same pigment ID number but exhibit different colors. Iron Oxides in general have a wide variety of colors due to little tweaks in trace elements and pigment size. Phthalo Blues and Quinacridone Reds can have the same number but with a color and a sub number indicating a variation. How the pigment is ground during paint making will change the color. PR 108,..the various Cadmium Reds, is similar but the differences have to do with the addition of selenium.

Differing hues of Cadmium reds, orange and yellow are made by increasing the percentage of selenium, zinc or sulfur during one stage of production. The range of cadmium pigments, yellow, orange, red are basically cadmium yellow (cadmium sulfide) with some selenium added in place of sulfur (cadmium selenide). Therefore cadmium sulfide can be made in various shades ranging from yellow, orange to red. Mineral pigment produced from cadmium sulphide when heated with selenium becomes red.

So it is not just one variable but a range of variables depending on the pigment. And the same pigment in different binders can look very different."


Another thing I found is that in researching colors, you really have to go to the manufacturer's site's to get accurate information on pigment content. It can seem handy to just look on the Blick site (or some other retailer), but they tend to just assume pigment content based on the name and I have found numerous errors.

Below, see Blick's pigment info on the left, and Michael Harding's on the R:

If you want to read info on specific pigments read up on:
The Color of Art Pigment Database

Two-color Painting Explorations | Confounding Expectations pt. 1

I recently taught a workshop called "Limited Palette Painting" at Evanston Art Center. Teaching a class (my first time) was a wonderful experience and I hope to do it again soon.

The goal of the class was trying to concern ourselves with pigment and paint in a deeper way by pushing a small number of colors to do as much as possible.

To work along with my students, I did a painting and mixing grid for Burnt Umber (Blick) and Indian Yellow (Liquitex Heavy Body) acrylic paint.  Working somewhat backwards (it's more ideal to do the mixing grid first), I first made a painting (using a black & white photograph for reference) using just these 2-colors:

I was rather surprised to find green tones appearing, especially in the upper right. (BTW, I tweaked the photos to look as they do in real life as much as possible. Some subtleties and colors will inevitably be off.)

I wasn't expecting any greens from 2 warm colors like these. Possibly if I had used raw umber (a cooler color), then maybe yes.

So to prove that I wasn't seeing things, I then made a matrix of possible mixtures of burnt umber and indian yellow and tinted them:

If you look at the center square and some of the ones around it, sure enough, it appears greenish.

And because I had originally started using Indian Yellow in oils, I made this comparison between the 2 versions of Indian Yellow I own in oil and acrylic:

It may be hard to see here, but in person, the Williamsburg oil version (left column) maintains a richer color as it gets tinted. Out of the tube it is more orangey and Liquitex  is more like yellow ochre.

The real point here is not so much why unexpected results can occur with pigments, but that you should explore and get to know what your pigments can do!

Pigment codes only tell part of the story, but it is important to be aware of them.

The acrylic colors I used were:

Blick Raw Umber PBr7

Liquitex Indian Yellow PY139

And my oil versions:

Williamsburg Burnt Umber PBr7

Williamsburg Indian Yellow PY83 (Diarylide Yellow)

Given that the Williamsburg Indian Yellow uses a different pigment, you would expect a slightly different result. (BTW, originally Indian Yellow supposedly came from feeding cows a diet of nothing but mango leaves and then collecting and drying their urine to get the pigment.)

Well, at least Burnt Umber is consistent. Or is it? I also have a tube of Michael Harding Burnt Umber which I haven't used yet, and it lists the pigment as PBr6. I would think that a common earth tone like that would be consistent.

Be aware.