I haven’t been out landscape painting this Autumn as much as I would have liked. The image above is an HDR photograph, but it gives an idea of the colors here in Tuscany at the moment.
Here is a short timelapse of a sketch for a commission up near Barberino val d’Elsa. Its a 17th century copy of the Duomo of Florence in the middle of the countryside, people often think I’m dabbling in surrealism when they see the paintings, but its really there.
I’ve recently gone back to grinding my own colors. I used to grind all of them, but as the good pigments (vermilion and lead white especially) became impossible to find here in Florence, I started using tube paints. Every August though I run out of colors and have to get out my pigment stash and grind up a bunch of paint to make it to September. Even better is when my studio mate Greg is out of town and I can pillage his wonderful supply of pigments.
Here is a brief list of the pros and cons of grinding your own paint.
Pros: Large range of dry pigments to chose from, complete control over consistency, (usually) much cheaper, more intense colors, and finally, you get a better understanding of your materials.
Cons: Its time consuming, messy, and many of the pigments are toxic.
This post is for my portrait student in our discussion about lighting for portraits. I quickly pasted together a few examples to explain myself better.
The classic 3/4 view, light on both sides of the face with a strong ‘Van Dyck Z’. Painter stands between the window and the model:
Light on the far side of the face, half-tone or shadow on the nose:
Light from both sides, much more difficult to pull off in my opinion (the Serov on the left has light bouncing from everywhere in the room):
Half the face in full shadow, seems to very popular with self portraits:
I couldn’t find good historic examples of the high light-source, raccoon effect which is popular today. There are more lighting possibilities than just these four, but I figure this is a good start.
Someone sent me this link to a tutorial on lighting, one of the better ones I’ve seen.
This is the first part in a series I intend on doing over the winter where we try all the various brands for each color on my palette to see which is the best. I’ll start with the four colors I use in portraits: Red, Yellow, Black, and White.
Today we spent the day grinding every hand-ground vermilion we could get our hands on and comparing them to each other as well as the pre-ground tube paints on offer.
When I say ‘best’ I am referring entirely to what I, personally, am looking for in a vermilion. I only use 4 colors in my flesh palette and I need each to be perfect for the way I paint. By this I mean that the red has to mix beautifully with the white and ocher to give me my flesh tones, and to make rich purples when mixed with black. Here is the run-down of images from the test-canvas:
I realize the images don’t really show the best pigments. Luckily I took notes.
For me the best of the hand-ground paints was Robert Doak’s vermilion, which I believe is either cut with cadmium if not entirely cadmium-based. That said it is extremely similar to the old Zecchi cadmium vermilion they stopped selling 8 years ago (which we all remember fondly). I would prefer a cadmium based red anyways as historically real vermilion has had issues at times. Doak prices the stuff like it was cadmium as well.
The Sinopia cadmium #2 was really interesting as well, I hope to try it this winter on portraits.
Of the real vermilions, the ‘Sparrel’ (Daniel Graves gave me some of his stash, no idea where he got it) had the highest chroma. The Phase (a restoration store here in Florence) was pretty impressive as well. The Zecchi Cinabros were dull in comparison, though the Zecchi ‘Monte Amiato’ vermilion deserves a special mention for the chroma and tinting strength. I’ve never used it in a painting before, but I was very impressed in this brief color testing.
Of the tube paints the Zecchi was a surprising first for me (cadmium based again, but I was surprised by the tinting strength). The Harding was too cool and dull for my tastes, and the Zecchi cinabros were too blue as well.
These are just my personal opinions, I’ll post my notes tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone who came, we had a huge turn-out. Everyone was very complimentary about the work and the space (and the wine), and we even managed to sell some paintings despite the fact you could barely move around inside the gallery. Below are some images from the evening, and the work can be seen on the Cami gallery website.
I wasn’t really drinking 3 glasses of wine at the same time.
Alba and Leo pose for our professional photographer.
As a working painter, I have always tried to avoid teaching. When I taught in the past I always had too many students, inconvenient schedules, and found my own work suffering to the point where I was having trouble meeting my commitments with galleries. This year however, after getting married, I decided the stable income wasn’t such a bad idea and I began taking students again.
The difference this time however is that, working for myself, I have taken them in very small numbers. From 1 to 3 students at a time, and I work alongside them. This summer I tried it out in the countryside with landscape painting and just basically dragged the students to the spots where I was already working and let them set up alongside. I would do demonstrations and give regular critiques, but I found that it didn’t affect my work at all. In fact I ended up painting more this summer than I have in the last few years. More importantly though, the steady (though small) income took off some of the pressure of the gallery production grind, so I was able to work at a much slower pace. In the end I think my work actually improved due to the teaching. The students, of course, appreciate the small class size and get a lot of information in a short period of time.
This winter I intend on continuing with small numbers of students in the studio. At the moment I’ve begun portrait projects with one student at a time, sharing a model.
The invitations have been mailed and the catalog should be printed by the end of the week. For my part all the paintings are ready and framed and waiting by the door.
The gallery has asked for 25 paintings, but most of the work I did this year is quite large, and I don’t think they can honestly fit it all. It will be nice to have too much work for a change and just show the best of it.
You can see the work on their website.
Alba and I were in Zermatt for a wedding this weekend. I had forgotten how beautiful Switzerland can be in the summers. We had great weather and I managed to bat out a couple of sketches in between the festivities.
I enlarged one of the sketches in the studio:
Edelweiss Huts, Zermatt. 70 x 100 cm, oil on linen, 2008
We also passed over the Simplon pass twice on our trip where Sargent painted in the summer of 1911 (?). Its still a very beautiful stretch of road. Most of the traffic into Switzerland goes through the tunnels now and not over the passes, so it has this wonderful abandoned feel to it. Every few miles the scenery changes dramatically as well so you have a huge choice of subjects to paint from. Next time…
Don’t try this at home. Some blogs do a painting-a-day, I was given a house last week for 4 days and tried to make as most out of it as possible by painting as many small sketches in a day as I could. I thought I would go for ten a day. This seemed easy as the estate where I was painting is in an especially picturesque part of the upper Maremma, and I was very inspired by the landscape. I ended up working from 7:30-ish in the morning until 11 pm at night (there was a full moon, so I could paint at night).
Unfortunately I have the habit of holding my brushes with my left hand while I work, and as I painted over the course of the day I kept grabbing clean brushes while continuing to hold the old ones. By the end of the day I had held a huge mass of brushes in my hand for hours and that night I came down with severe tendinitis and a terrible fever which lasted 4 days. It still hurts today as I type, almost a week later.
Clever. Anyways, here are some of the sketches:
The Beach Road at Bolgheri
Reeds
The View from Biserno
Airplane
Stone Pines at Bolgheri
Fishermen at Cecina
Cypress at Biserno
The Beach at Bolgheri
Here is the trailer for a new movie coming out about traditional painting. A young painter goes to study with Russian master ‘Seroff’. Based on the life of the director, the website is here.