The Ugly Duckling Phase.

The ugly duckling faze. It's that girl in grade school everyone loved to picked on until puberty, then you find yourself sweaty, slightly smelling of body odor, full of pimples and wondering if she's forgotten about the time when you tied her shoelaces together and she fell down and got a concussion. "Do I even have a shot will my pizza face? what's that smell?"...but I'm getting off track here.

This is a very basic block in for my Spanish Civil War painting. All of my paintings go through this stage. Here I'm using all cool earth tones, over a cool ground. I'm thinking very basically about general large tones and values. Everything is essentially two values, one being the light middle-tone, the other being a dark half-tone.

This stage always gives me anxiety because before getting my education this was about as far as I could get before being completely in the dark on how to proceed. I understand the desire a lot of painters have in wanting to get through this stage as quickly as possible, or skip it entirely if you're able.

But I think this stage is critical in some ways for as difficult as it may be to stay in, because it allows for the consideration of the whole in different aspects than from drawing. It gives me the chance to compose in color, to set myself up for juggling the harmonies that will help guide the composition.

Here is where the designing really starts for me. Going from line to color and value can alter the relationships of things and so there's the struggle of trying to be flexible, while not letting it derail me.  I did more than one color study, but here is when I can start to specifically visualize how I'm going to plot my color relationships. Every little character has to be dressed, which means it has to look natural while still being designed.

For this painting I'm tackling it in groups. Every group connects to every other group as far as colors go in one way or another. I feel that if I can do it without making it look obvious, it will help to unify the work. Thankfully, the further back you go in history, the more prominent earth tones become, especially in times of war.

With the block-in done, I had to sit down and reorganize my references, and break everything down into sections. As I work through more layers in this painting, I'm collecting a substantial amount of references, so keeping them all organized has really helped me gain more focus. It also makes working much easier as I don't want to have to stop for very long and go digging for reference material when I could be painting.

So the first pass is done! Now only a million more to go. Another blog about the second and third layers will be up as soon as I get through the second and third layers... But just to give you an idea I've included a shot here below, with the two figures in the foreground in the second stage, compared to the nearly indecipherable blobs behind them.

"Those blob creatures are coming right for us!"

It's not a religion, it's a way of life.

*Warning, this is a work of satire, any resemblance to actual, pretend representational art movements is purely a coincidence*

Welcome to a new way of life.

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. Le singe-peintre,
dit aussi interieur d'atelier

I would like to introduce you to my new creation, the dawn of a “neo-life” if you will. It’s called PoKoNovitsch.

You see the art scene is big and confusing, and art history is even bigger and more confusigner. I came onto the brilliance of a system of thought that is PoKoNovitsch after seeing the growing rise in a desire to start art movements. I noticed that I too held a brush and a pencil, and by taking part in that craft means that I am a part of its history, and by being a part of history this means that I have opinions that matter. The first and foremost tenet of PoKoNovitsch is that for an opinion to matter one need to be either fairly good at drawing and painting, have relatives who were good, or be friends with someone who has skill! With high skill in one thing, you can have high skill in all things related to it. This is the magic of PoKoNovitsch.

So what is PoKoNovitsch exactly? Let me tell you. “PoKoNitch” we’ll call it for short, is NOT an art movement, instead I hope for it to be a style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists in the immediate future, in other words it's a way of life. You see it’s like sex, you know how when it sometimes feels really good? PoKoNitch...or we’ll shorten it again to “Pokes,” is like that good feeling. When it happens do you question it? Do you deny yourself feeling that good? No, of course not, why would you?

When doing research on what Pokes really should mean, I realized that intuition needed to be my guide, that I shouldn’t clutter my mind with the confusing ways of Postmodern intellectualism, or historical “facts” as it were. It was the intellectuals of academia who started the need for a way of life like Pokes, in their destructive quest to rid the world of all representational art. They created a way of life that glorifies only destruction and chaos, and anything under that banner needs to be ruthlessly obliterated without question.

But enough history, I would like to introduce one of the many benefits of Pokes, and that is a new interpretation on aesthetics, I call it Intuitive Aesthetics, or, “Intu-Ase”. There once was a great need to read books and do research, to study history, philosophy, sociology and so on. Artists of the past needed to read these kinds of books before Modernism turned them all into lies by rewriting them. The representational artists of the future will never need to look at a book again. Through the beauty of Wikipedia, and most importantly intuition, I discovered that by simply having participated in the act of making art, you can make fairly true assessments about art history and aesthetics as a whole. Not only can you do this about representational art, but you can also do it about other kinds of art which consists of mostly non-art, and philosophy.

I realized that I had been carrying Pokes around with me all these years and not known it. Everything I had been doing was Pokes, from trying to seduce my models, to showing off my penis to everyone to prove the point that by painting myself doing it, I was making it art in the face of the irony that is me going against anyone else doing it in another medium.

Non-representational art is bad at its core, one of the reasons is because it goes against man’s instinct to procreate. You see by making something that looks like a thing, the other person can see how much or little of what you made, looks like the thing you’re trying to make. I apologize for being deep here, but this is called being “objective.” Before Modernism came around, it was easy to get the women to see how well you could draw something. It was much easier to not have to come up with reasons for why we were all drawing naked people.

But what are you to do if someone makes a thing that doesn't look like the other thing he’s trying to make!? Well that means that this person is saying that there is no truth, that anyone can create anything, and well science has long disproven the categorical imperative. It’s a man of evil who wishes to construct for himself a reason for doing something that just doesn't make sense. Do you want to see buildings and clothing, for instance, in our society that don’t make any sense? That is the world Postmodernism wants for us. Which is why we need to not only be post the post modernists, post the Popo Coco Contemporary...but we need to be Pokes. We need it now more than ever, not just to distinguish ourselves by excluding the people we don’t like, and including people under its name who we never asked permission to do so, but also we need it to create hype so buyers will jump on a new wave in making art. We all want to make money right? You need to in today’s age, unlike what it was for the old masters.

And so this is why I give you PoKoNovitsch.

You’re Welcome.

The art of the study.

The artist's study is one of those cherished entryways into the working methods and mental states of the craftsman doing them. Some seek them out from others they admire as one would a cipher to a code that could unlock secrets of lost technique. Studies also tend to have a charm to them in a way not always found in the finished works. The sketch has in its own right become an art form in itself, where once artists did them to gain a better understanding of the subject they were about to paint, artists now have taken away from the subject and turned the object of the studies into the primary focus.

I would argue that some of Ingres studies are better
than his finished paintings.

I don't see the point in this, but I do see the purpose of doing studies in preparation for a painting, there's really no end to the amount you can make before starting one. Here are a few key points I keep in mind when doing my studies:

Trying to get a feel for the likeness of the
main character, Edward Norton.

There's no place for worry; It's a study, you can't forget that. A study is for you, not your facebook friends, or a competition, or other painters perceptions on what something should be. I've never been able to paint well when there were worries on my mind. You have to freely attack the study, see what comes so you can build off of what you discover.

Experiment; Any inclination you might have, any chance of a 'what if,' or 'why not,' you should indulge. Try things in a study that you would never try in a more serious work because you simply never know what can come from it. Instead of copying someone else's technique, experimenting allows you to develop your own solutions to the problems you are about to face. Develop your own voice, just copying technique is trying to fit your message into another painters tune.

Stop and start and stop and start and...; It's a study, you have no obligation to it other than what it can do for you, but think about it like this, in every other art form, the artists tirelessly practice in order to get ready for the end performance, or final draft. Your final painting is the opening night of a play, would you dream of going into it cold? A dancer spends months preparing their bodies so that when the task comes to delivering the performance, they don't need to think about the specific movements, just the expression of the movements inside the harmony of the music. If you want your final painting to be as good as it can be, you must prepare. 

Portrait study of my beautiful girlfriend. Getting the
feel of flesh tone in the light I want, and the various
colors of  stone that will be in the painting.

Educate yourself; I'm sure I'm not the only painter who thinks back on their past pictures and wonders how much better it would be if I had to paint it again. I try to get into the mentality of the object, I ask myself why it feels a certain way when I look at it, what kind of impression gives it its substance. I try to gain that insight when doing my studies.

What is the purpose of this? This is the most important question I ask myself when painting. Everything you put into a picture can either add or take away from the narrative. Is what I'm adding helping or hurting the work? What is its relationship to everything else? A multitude of questions come to me from asking what the purpose is of the object I'm putting into the painting. This helps me stay critical of myself. There's a fine line in a work of art between having a good idea firmly developed, versus a number of good ideas all competing for attention, and never fully realized because one is competing with another. It's easy to lose harmony and cohesion by indulging every whim. 

The more I paint, the more I see the need to get as many of the obviously stupid mistakes out of the way, make room for the more clever, stupid mistakes. The things that end up giving me a hard time are never what I expect.

Scribbles and lines.

Okay I've finally finished the corrections, and have gotten the go ahead. This is the evolution of the composition;

The first rough, more exactly based off my sketch. The problem with not developing the much smaller cartoon was that I hadn't fully worked out the background on the left. This made for an awkward, simplistic and unimaginative setting.

Having developed the city further, I added more figures and started playing around with the placement.

Here just the figures on the right have changed, I'm seeing if placing them partly out of the canvas helped with the tension, but realized that the woman's feet was crucial for keeping her attached to the scene.

The final composition, the patron wanted more focus on the two main figures the story is based on, and wanted them interacting with the scene more than what they were, in addition to more emotion. There also needed to be more of an emphasis on the executions happening, which meant getting rid of one figure, and moving around some others.

 My biggest enemy throughout the entire composition was/is scale and perspective. Yes, I learned perspective in college, but it's not something that comes easy to me. Also, figures in space going into perspective on a slight incline...not exactly things that get covered at an Atelier.

I've come to realize that I need to do more landscapes of cities, those objective buildings and their straight lines and unbending forms! Not fun, it made me wish I had a nude to work on. I used to use landscape as a way to get away from people, but when doing a painting about people in a landscape, all the tree paintings in the world won't help with solving the problem of scaling a figure properly in space.

What I did to understand the scale was pick a street that had the incline I needed and then I took references using the lines in the sidewalk as markers. It turns out sidewalk lines here go by five foot intervals, so every five feet I got a shot of a figure going back about 150 feet. Here are a few for example.

 Working on this street, in the overcast light like this, allowed me to stage the scene. Mapping out how wide and how deep it really would be, and what the figures look like in that space. The sidewalk gave me lines to work from while getting the figures on the canvas. It set me up to be able to compare all of the figures to the five foot intervals. Otherwise I would have had no basis for comparison because I didn't have 28 or so figures to pose all at once.

From there I drew the figures directly in charcoal because I said to myself, "I hate doing transfer drawings," stupidly not accounting for the fact that I would make mistakes and need to move things around. Moving things around meant having to re-size and transfer the figures way too many times to count. My only regret here is that I wasn't better at digital work, I could have drawn everything out digitally and moved them all around much easier. This is something I'm slowly working to rectify.

But the composing and sketch is done, time to start painting. I would like to thank some of my friends who were kind enough to lend their careful eyes and minds to critiquing these little scribbles. It really does help to have people you trust look over your shoulder once in a while.

Bust-a-move with your pencil!

I'm still in the composing stage for my Civil war painting. The patron wanted some changes made, as expected, and so now I'm finishing up those changes and will be posting the evolution of the drawings from start to finish as soon as I'm given the final approval.

For now I want to say a little something about references. For something like this project I'm on, it would be impossible to do it without taking reference shots. The aim for this painting is to capture a moment in time, the moment happens to be one of war, and that means lots of movement.

So instead of having my models pose, all of my first references are video instead of pictures. capturing someone walking by having them pose in a walking stance doesn't teach me about how a human walks. But studying a video of people walking, pretending to be in the scene I want them to be in, does.

Andrew Loomis shows a great way in blocking in
a gesture in action, when mapping a scene.

You capture movement by studying movement. What this does is give you a better idea of what is possible anatomically, in an action pose, or I should say a gesture that gives the impression of movement.

The gesture is crucial. It is the difference between a character looking bored, and a character about to act, or is feeling tense, or is about to fall asleep. Look at this screenshot from the movie Akira. Not only studying actual action, but going to the people who do it best, professional animators, to see how they solve the problems of capturing movement in gesture.

In this clip, look and ask yourself what makes each figure look as though they are doing and feeling a certain way, just in the gesture. It is far more than just a face that can tell you about the emotional status of the person you are trying to capture.

This is where it become very essential that as an artist you get into the mentality of the people you're trying to convey. Go and put yourself in the position, the action and mental state of the persons you're attempting to draw. This will teach you much more about how to capture a gesture in action than anything else I can think of.

Don't get soft flabby boy.

There's this irrational fear put into classically minded artists, I don't know if it happens directly, not always, or we just absorb it via osmosis from the rigidity of the method, but across the board one of the common fears I've noticed talking to friends, and ones I face personally, is that you will grow weak or get soft from only working with references, or going any length of time not working with the figure directly from nature.

Frazetta must have gotten all of his cro-magnon  friends
to model for him in this easy to hold action scene...

Whenever I have this fear I stop myself and think about how many artists who I admire who worked from photo's and out of there heads alongside working from nature, and who I still can't even touch in skill.

It's not whether or not you use references that will lessen your drawing skills, you can't let that fear eat you because it does nothing to help you become a better artist, aaaaand it's not true. Using photo's won't inherently lessen your skills, but what will hold you back is a lack of discipline and ability to creatively solve problems as you come across them in making pictures.

So long as you are practicing you will be gaining skill. Repeat that over and over to yourself, the act of painting and the desire to do better than you did last time at all costs whether it's from life, references, out of your head or in another dimension, it doesn't matter, just paint and you will get better. The more important thing is that you don't get stuck being able to only work one way, the longest and hardest road to be on is the one where you are the most versatile, if trying it one way doesn't work, you let it go and approach it in another way no matter what anyone has told you is the supposed "right way" to do it.

I think about making art as I would having infinite resources to go exploring in a hypothetical world where there aren't so many people everywhere, always be asking "what if," especially if you get stuck, but if the inclination strikes you to try something different, give in, you will only gain from it.

Capturing the Impression, Gaston la Touche.

It was not long ago that I came upon this painting by Gaston la Touche entitled Pardon in Brittany which is about a regularly held festival honoring a saint, this picture taking place in northern France.

The subject matter really isn't my concern here, but looking into Gaston's history and how he came about painting the subjects he did, and his relationship with Manet, is extremely interesting, and worthy if its own post.

As a Post Impressionist I find him of a higher caliber than most who carry that label. Earlier last year I stumbled upon this painting, and every time I've been back to the Art Institute of Chicago it's been to see this picture. I make sure its the last one I look at before I leave.

I've always thought it a much harder task for a painter to capture the impression of something than it is to just render it. Rendering has its difficulties, ones that I admire when done well, but personally if you can trick the viewer into seeing detail where there's just a blob of paint upon closer inspection, I have nothing but respect for you.

This painting is exactly that. Pardon in Brittany from a distance is a beautifully soft scene capturing the meditation and quiet of a religious service in dying light. From afar you can make out some of the individuals who are moving along with the mass of them while holding candles. It's a luminous painting while still being low key, and through the style he painted it in, is also able to capture the movement of the masses of people as well.

On closer inspection the painting turns into globs and brushstrokes. He first painted thick passages with his brush and then went in and flattened certain sections with his palette knife, and left mainly the brush strokes that lead the eye to the right, flowing with the crowd. From a distance this is what gives the painting it's sense of movement.

Some of the tones are muddy, but work with the color range, the details are extremely subtle and most of them don't make sense up close. This painting truly captures a moment in time, with the only sharp lines being that of the woman on the horse, leading the procession and the eye along with the group.

A thought on Sargent

I think that a masterful painter makes every painting feel like a performance when you look at it. That from start to finish every inch of the canvas was something to get lost in, only to come out of it and be directed back to the purpose of the work. It's all a reflection of a mindset.

Sargent is the epitome of that sentiment for me. There have been more paintings I've seen by him, than any other artist so far, where I've felt that every brushstroke had had a distinct place in his mind before he put it down. Or he at least he aimed for it, but more than that it's a painters ability to breathe life into the work. Using his personality to capture the personality of the people or the scene he was painting.

It's that indescribable thing you can't figure out right away with good painting because it's inside of the gesture and particular movement of the paint somehow. I really think it's a kind of empathy towards working to understand everything about what you're looking at. It's the parts of the "art" that justify the romantic notion attached to actual artistry. A painting can be a symphony if the painter is able. In every work there can be a performance. I don't think the world will ever see a painter like Sargent again.

I like that, it's mine!

Still sketching, but getting close to having the cartoon done for Death in Malaga, so a post will be coming about all that.

For right now I'm going to share with you my process of how I steal from other artists better than myself.

When I start a painting it's important to determine what the color range is going to be, and in those harmonies I like to see how other artists rendered some of the same things I'm after.

-Leon Maxime Faivre Death of the princess de lamballe

In this painting here I'm looking at a number of things the artist has done that just blow me away. The light is very much the same kind of light I'm looking to get in my painting. I'm studying the stone, stucco and flesh under this kind of light, how the range of values are pushed to accentuate the point of the picture, how the crowd in the background is done, the softness of the edges, the atmosphere and sense of depth even in a relatively small space...the lessons never end. It's important to study nature yes, but seeing how someone else has solved a problem I'm getting ready to tackle is really helpful.

Another thing I like to do is wander around video game worlds that have a similar feel for the scene I'm wanting to do. In this case Fallout 3 is perfect.

If you take into account how much work that needs to be done for a game from start to finish, the concept all the way through to actually creating the world that you can go walk around in, I think it's a waste not to take advantage of the amazing talent behind these games.

So I go in the game and I walk around, in this case I'm looking at the destruction, as well as the post apocalyptic grey and brown tones used in the destruction. I've used video games to explore perspective, mood, lighting, and whatever else I need for just about every thematic painting I've done. It's not only a lot of fun, but a lot of help too.

Whatever you end up using, seeing what other artists have done to accomplish something similar that you are aiming at, can help you set the bar high for yourself, and get your eye used to seeing art that is on a whole different level.

Sketch for the first painting Death in Malaga

Where to start...

I got the commission. Not that I really feared being rejected, I know Bill (my patron) wanted to do this as much I do, but it was a shock that when he saw both of my sketches he decided that I needed to do both paintings. So I ended up landing both of them instead of just one. Do the happy dance! Okay, enough playing around...

So the work begins. This is the loose sketch for the first painting, Death in Malaga.

A bit about the painting. Towards the later half of the book, and of the war, Nell decides that if her and Edward are going to die that they might as well die together, so she starts walking with him to work. There was one particular day Edward described, where he was walking with Nell and the sky had otherwise been beautiful out, but you wouldn't know it when entering Malaga from all the smoke from the bombings. He then went on to describe how brutal and continuous the killings were. The Anarchist groups especially would round people up daily and shoot them and dump the bodies in mass graves, people would come around and cheer during the executions. Edward used to wear an American pin, and carry around a pipe, playing the role on an important American diplomat. The tactic saved his life more than once. This particular scene came to mind for the picture.

The good thing about having already done paintings like The Pale Cast of Thought and Faust, is that I've started to get a good method going for how to progress on this sort of thing. Here's what I'm considering right now:

Casting. Who plays what role. For the two main characters, Edward and Nell, all I'm looking for with a reference are people of the same height and build, the faces I'm taking from old photo's of the couple. For the characters in the background there's a lot less pressure, it doesn't have to be anyone specific in any particular pose, but I do have to decide male and female, and it helps to come up with motivations for the people doing the actions, so that it looks genuine.

Location. I've been walking around my neighborhood looking for alleys and streets that fit what I need, which is a street running up a slight elevation, Cobble stone is also important, Chicago common bricks and old stucco too. None of these are hard to find in the city. For the rest of it though, I'll have to pull from references on destruction and rubble and then start designing. The hardest part here is making parts look destroyed without making the clutter and rubble detract from the picture.

Costume. Who's wearing what and why? I've been doing a lot of research on clothing. This is a guilty pleasure for me. I don't like shopping, especially buying clothes, but for some reason figuring out what a character needs to be wearing makes me feel like Sherlock...if he were much less intelligent and painter...It's like getting into character. You have to put yourself into the mind and time of the people you're pretending to be. I think it's a lot of fun.

Time of day and source of light. In this instance I will be working in overcast light. In most cases tracking the light is important. This scene would be happening in the morning, so when it's overcast in the morning is when I'll be shooting my references. Normally I would figure out what direction they need to be facing, but its not needed here.

Color. What will the overall harmony of the painting be? When I'm doing something like this I like to collect paintings that remind of something I want to working towards. One thing I look to see is how artists of the past might have done something in a similar palette or affect that I want to learn from.

Since it came out, I've been using Pinterest to collect all my photo refs for inspiration on my paintings. I usually make the board private, but in this case I've decided to make this board public so that people can see my thought process.

So there are a few things I need to order for costumes and props, then all I need to do is take my reference shots. In order to do that I'll have to stage the scene. That's a post for another time...like when I figure it out.

The Little White Hearse. Some sketches and thoughts.

I just finished a painting entitled The Little White Hearse, a life sized picture which is about a mother reliving the pain of losing her child after seeing a white hearse drive by.

I completely lost track of time on how long this picture took because I had an apartment fire that destroyed nearly everything I owned. Tragedy tends to warp time. This painting was the last picture that I was able to pull out of the apartment, and it was still wet when that happened. There were some scrapes I had to repair, and I ended up repainting the entire top half of it because the dust and ash from the fire stuck to it. (No surprise considering there was dust and ash from the fire on the houses down the street from my apartment)

It sounds more daunting than it was in actual labor, the repairs went fast and I was back into actually working on the rest in no time. But I really don't think this painting took me all that long to do. The sketches were done almost a year before, here is the first sketch.

A lot of words, but really starting the sketch is opening up a dialogue with myself on the whats and the whys and the hows of the picture. Sometimes I get a flash of an image followed by its meaning, and sometimes I get a concept or idea or emotion that is then followed by a flash of an image.

In this case it was the concept first. I knew the feelings I wanted to convey, but it took a bit to flush out the picture. I started this sketch a year in advance so that I could occasionally look at it during down time with other projects.

This second sketch here was when I really started to answer some of the questions I posed for myself. Whenever I get stuck on something I stop and ask what the purpose of the picture is supposed to be. A lot of times this is all I need to edit and refine. I wanted to try and capture as much as possible with as little extra information as I could get away with. I probably tried for this because the last painting, Faust, was full of objects and detail. Life is most fun with some contrast in it.

I lost all of my process shots, they were on my last camera that seemed to just disintegrate into thin air, despite not being anywhere near the flames. But for this figure I drew in charcoal on the canvas until I reached my limit on pushing the drawing. Then I blocked it in with a grisaille so all I had to worry about was the drawing and the value.

I did this very thick and loose, and then scraped in the direction of the form after it had started to set up. Then I started in with the color. The background was mostly done in with a palette knife to give the feeling of an old plaster wall. My goal in my work is to make it feel like what its supposed to.