Something I’ve noticed lately about the way a paint is that I have two modes of painting.
In the first mode, I’m judging colours and values as accurately as I can. I’m not even thinking about the panting much, I’m mostly laying down a jigsaw puzzle of colours that often don’t make a lot of visual sense. They’re more like markers, to show me where things actually are. I might end up oscillating around those markers a bit later on in the painting, but without this carefully observed, almost analytical foundation, I almost always lose the plot.
While I’m in this mode I have one eye closed and the other thrown out of focus. I don’t want to see form, I want a vague visual impression. But I want what I paint to be very, very accurate from a point of view of hue, chroma and value. I know that’s a strange dichotomy. It gets resolved in the next stage.
When I’m coming to the end of this stage, I’m usually convinced that the painting is a complete failure and I should wipe it and start again. I get depressed. Seriously! I walk away, usually, and take a break. Go to the shops and buy the veg for dinner, maybe, or just do something else. I’m heartbroken. But I’m also in that weird cloud of focus that makes it hard to talk to people.
Coming back for stage two, I deliberately make myself take the focus of the painting and resolve it as much as I can. I’m thinking about the form in this stage, and the light. I’m trying to make some part of the painting live as much as I possibly can. I slow down to a crawl. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if I ever finish the painting, just as long as I make one part of it well.
Somehow, at some indefinable point, I realise I’m making the painting, and it might not be a complete failure. I’m very rarely pleased with what I do. Occasionally, but not often. Usually I have to go away from it for a bit and look at it after a few days before I can decide if I think it’s any good or not.
I went through all of these stages with this painting – and the initial, experimental phase when I’m drawing and laying a base on which everything else will sit. This painting started life like this:
I know, odd. But I had an idea that I wanted a very warm underpainting to show through everything, a unifying colour, and I wanted it to be high chroma – much higher chroma than anything in the actual scene. And over that, I wanted to paint the picture as if it were about to dissolve.
This is what I do at the moment. For it to work, some parts of the painting have to be painted well enough to have convincing form. Without that, it would just be a mess. With it, some kind of interplay starts happening between the parts that are resolved and the parts that aren’t.
It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of painting like this. Most of it came, technically, from learning a lot about edge handling and how affects form. Also, a deeper understanding of perception. What we see isn’t an objective thing that happens in the retina. We construct our reality from visual cues. That’s why optical illusions work and realist paint, after all, is a form of optical illusion.
Leaving parts of the image deliberately unresolved forces our minds to create the reality there. It only works, I think, if enough of the image is resolved enough to be convincing. But I think it brings the painting alive in some way.
Paintings are not meant to be seen close up on a computer screen, they’re meant to be seen from a distance, and thats’ how I paint them. This is how this one looks if you stand back:
And here’s a detail of the lemons:
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I like your more realisic paintings better. I cane across a painter, Kyle Stuckey who has an in fous, out of focus method to managing the viewer’s eye. I agree that paintings are not to be viewed so closely, but your pqaintings have been so small, they will be viewed more closely. I take exception to the vertical streaks on the left lemon. Some of this out of focus works better on large pieces. LOVE your in focus work.
Your painting of the lemons looks like it could have been done by one of the old masters. It’s wonderful! Thanks for sharing with us the thoughts and processes you went through in creating it.
Thank you Kathy!
Paul,
You are so talented in the way you paint, but more meaningful to us students is the way you teach. You are an infinite source of information for those of us beginners, thank you for sharing, you are so generous with your knowledge. The painting is beautiful, I learn so much from you, it’s like watching a magic show. Love it!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
Thank you Elizabeth! You’re very welcome.
Paul…question about the left lemon…why a blurr?
I’ve begun to try to explain it in the description here, and also in the previous blog post here: https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/lemon-water. It’s about fragility, and perception. I’ll continue to try to explain it as well as I can, as I continue to develop it.
Love the soft edges…
Thanks Linda 🙂
Do not worry a lot about matching colours. After all, the viewer does not know what the originall chroma, hue and saturation are. I think it is a wonderful painting, beside chroma, etc. The edges are amazing, and the whole work is beautiful.
Best wishes, Paul, and thank you for sharing your work and your knowledge.
Well, the colour matching is a very important part of my process. Not because I want to match them exactly just for the sake of it, I often change them. But because it teaches me so much about about light, colour and how we see. That’s a never ending study and I’m continually learning new things about colour. It’s the process of enquiry involved in judging and matching natural colour that teaches me general patterns of colour and how it behaves in light that informs everything I do.
And, you can tell when colour is wrong 🙂
Thank you so much for your kind words Balta, they mean a lot to me.
This painting has an energy to it that excites me along with the last one you did and I love that you are following what is bringing curiousity and excitement to you! I hope you keep exploring and following your intuition because it is beautiful and breathtaking! I have been immersed in your videos and blogs the last week and want to personally thank you for answering many questions I have had and had no idea where to get help. You are helping me so much. I also found great comfort in your honesty of the process of your thoughts as you paint that you described in this entry and how you wonder if the painting will live. It made me laugh and encouraged me to know that we all tackle that mental chatter as we paint. Thank you Paul for who you are and all you share! Well done!
Thank you so much Suzanne, for taking the time to let me know all of this. What you’ve described is exactly what I hope for, and why I put out everything I do. We’re engaged in a very difficult and sometimes lonely pursuit, one that can be made easier by sharing our difficulties. It’s tempting to try to give the impression we have arrived and no longer struggle with the same things we did when we were beginners, but in my experience, that never goes away. You just get better at managing it.
In fact, the better painters I know struggle with these things more, if anything.
Also, I must thank you again because I really needed to hear this this morning!
Great to see you experimenting Paul, taking a risk and trying to put more of yourself into the work. I love the dedication to the craft a realist painter has, but it has all been done so brilliantly before by many masters. The weight of all that achievement can be oppressive for the artist. Taking a step back and asking questions about how you can paint more personally is quite liberating and terrifying. You suddenly find you have left the well trodden path behind…