Painting with a Loose Brush Part2

In this blog post I am reporting on some plein air painting that I have been doing of late. Here in Oregon the weather doesn't cooperate much and one has to take advantage of whatever sun breaks occur. Yesterday I was in the Coburg area and painted from in front of the high school.

Painting on white canvasboard (unprimed) gives an immediate effect, very much stronger than when painting on a toned ground. The colors and the darks are more intense.




Here is another oil sketch on white canvasboard. In this composition, wet in wet painting is done using thick paint and not bothering to draw at all. Everything is massed in with brushes and I am working as fast as possible.



This painting is more finished but was still completed in one session.




One in my Italian beach series. Here the loose brushwork is actually calligraphic drawing that is used for a minimalist rendering of the scene. The idea is to keep the painting minimalist and fight the temptation to finish it to death.



The painting above was completed in several sessions at a location near my home. Note that painting in Oregon is somewhat delusional. The sun comes out but the sky is always full of grey values. This tends to deepen the greens which are truly lush.
On the other hand many plein air artist have difficulty with the sky and they tend to make it too muddy and too grey.

It is important to get enough blue into the sky and to use violets and violet-blues to represent dark areas in the clouds.

Painting with a loose brush

"View from Spring Boulevard"

Sorry, if you were looking at this page a few days agao. Blogger had closed down for "maintenance" for one hour which because one day, then the page completely disappeared. As time allows, I will recreate some of the writing I did on "loose brush" which was posted here before.



"View from Owen's Trail, Eugene"

Oil sketching involves making quick paintings in full color but just capturing structure, leaving out details and finish. the idea is to capture the composition and to use loose brushwork doing that. Work quickly and sketch out the painting in any size, preferably small, and then move on to the next location.



"Loiano, Italy"

Pay attention to value when you are sketching. The goal is to achieve an interesting "macchia" or pattern of darks and lights. A misconception of making the "macchia" is that it has to be a strong 2-value (black/white) or at most 4-value pattern. It can be that but perhaps in the most ideal form it should be more complex with all sorts of gradations of value. The criterion for a good macchia is somewhat indefinable but might be described as subtle complexity with strength as values tend to form patterms that move the eye in and out of various locations. Macchias cannot be discussed intelligently without simultaneously talking about eye movements.

Why most landscape painting go bad

Students have always remarked on how difficult landscape painting is to accomplish. Things can go very bad quickly. Often the result is not satisfying. The problem usually comes from trying to paint at "high noon" when the values go flat and it is almost impossible to see contrasts. A very common problem is that the range of values is too simplistic and/or not interesting enough to keep the eyes moving around the composition.



This sketch might be borderline but you will have to be the judge. As long as eye movement can be brought into the canvas and then move laterally and then takeoff into another direction, it might work out.



Sometimes the result is dictated by the location. In this painting (above) the eye moves along a nearby diagonal and then shoots out to the horizon and then the sky. There is enough of interest in the sky with lazy soft clouds and a variety of values in the blues that keep the attention there for a moment and then the eyes can slide back to the ground.

How Sketchy Can You Get

Exercise: see if you can get really minimalist in your oil sketching. Just put down the barest getsure to create a mark, an object represented by that mark on the canvas. In this sketch made today at an Alpaca farm, see if you find the animal with no legs, just the body indicated?

Back to Blogging

Sorry for the interuption but after returning from Rome, I had to prepare two painting shows, one right after the other. Now back to blogging!



This was the first portrait I painted after getting back. The face is invented, just to practice a new technique which consists of painting the entire canvas black and then scrapping it all off with a razor blade, leaving a thin black background then painting wet into wet with flesh colors.

Note that the subject's left eye isn't finished yet. something wasn't quite right and I had to scrape it out again. Perhaps I left it this way because of the problems I have been having with my own left eye.

This technique comes somewhat from Sargent who used no painting medium, just oil paint out of the tube and who scraped out the face or areas of the face to make corrections. More on this later.

Remember seeing this gal?



She is from Napoli but I found her working in the Loiano area when visiting friends there. The technique here is the direct opposite of the man because here the background is the pure white of the canvas and the paint is a light sienna used to draw the face. Both works are linked by another dimension of painting, loose brushwork and expressive portraiture where the face tells a story, hopefully an interesting one.

After returning to Eugene the rain was coming down almost every day. Only now, in the last few days have I felt like going outside to paint en plein air. Its going to take me some time to warm up properly but here is a first attempt from Mt. Baldy.



I have shown the following Rembrandt study before but have recently been working on it again, so it has changed. I know I am supposed to have more color in the face but have been spending time instead on the subtle value changes in white and grey: