Green Squash, Oil on Panel, 10 x 8 inches
Currently at Auction, click here to view
Tightness in paintings equals a lack of emotion and expression. Tightness is bad.
Looseness equates to freedom, expression and emotion. Looseness is good.
You hear this a lot.
Actually (and although I’m painting more loosely now) I couldn’t disagree more.
Tightness or looseness is an aesthetic decision. There is bad and good painting made with both approaches.
If you press me, though, I would say that looseness as an approach results in more bad painting than tightness, because it is often used to attempt to cover up a lack of skill, a lack of diligence and a lack of the sheer stamina it takes to paint realism well.
Personally, I do prefer my looser, more brushy paintings on the whole. And I do find them to be more expressive.
But that shouldn’t suggest that they’re painted with less control.
If anything, I think painting loosely requires more control, more dilligence, more care.
Because for loose painting to work, you have to get it right pretty much first time. You can’t hide a poorly made brush strokes because the brush marks are an integral part of the piece.
You’d better make sure they’re good, and that requires care and forethought.
I also believe that looseness need to be earned. To work well, it requires a very good understanding of value in particular, and also of colour.
Those things can only come from deliberate practice of the fundamentals, in my view.
Here’s this painting near the start (this is a still from the live stream of the painting session):
It looks pretty loose at this stage.
I’m trying to work very broadly, thinking about the value balance of the picture as a whole, and also trying to introduce texture in brush strokes at the very start that will show through a little when the painting is finsihed.
Here it is a little further through. After you’ve noticed how broad and loose it is, I’d like you to notice the palette:
I have careful modelling strings pre-mixed for the light and shadow of each of the main objects, the squash, the onion and the garlic. Later I’ll have one for the cloth too.
Looseness, and control.
Because I have the colour so carefully controled, I can be much looser with the application without losing the plot with the values and the colour. It enables me to take a more “meta” view of the picture as a whole, concentrating on the overall value balance and painting broadly.
Here it is much further through that session. The ordeliness of the palette appears to have broken down a little! But you can still see the orginal modelling strings, I still have a separate area of the palette for each part of the painting.
For me, most of the thinking is done on the palette. That’s where most of the action happens. If I don’t have it right there, I won’t get it right on the painting.
Looseness and Control
This isn’t the only way to approach it. But it is one way.
The point I want to underline here is that what apprears to be loose and brushy work is very often the result of a lot of practice and a high level of skill – of control.
If you have control of your process, which comes through the development of skill, you have more freedom to express yourself as loosely as you like.
If you try to do that without first developing the necessary skill at the fundamentals of form, light and shadow…well, frankly, it’s likely that you’ll just make a mess.
Looseness and control need not be mutually exclusive of each other. They complmeent each other and can both part of the process.
Control first. Freedom needs to be earned.
Here are the recordings of the three live streams during which I made this paiting. I talk as much as I can about what I’m doing and why, especially the decisions I’m making about value and colour as I go along.
If you have the patience to watch them, I hope you find them useful.
Follow or friend me on facebook to see new stream as they’re made. I stream live a few times a week now, and they’re free to watch.
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
Session 1: Drawing out and block-in
Session 2: Refining the block-in
Session 3: Finishing
The Keys to Colour - Free 6 step email course
Learn how to:
- mix any colour accurately
- see the value of colours
- lighten or darken a colour without messing it up
- paint with subtle, natural colour
Great work, Paul. I admire your tenacity. You have come a far way and growing.
Thank you Mortimer!
right on, Paul. you hit the nail on the head. I have been teaching people how to paint moreloosely for many years, and when they show up for workshops they think they’ll be painting mindlessly, spontaneously and freely. NOT SO. The first thing i explain is that we will be painting very deliberately – mindully, one well-considered stroke – that embibes value, color, and shape – at a time. its slow but fast, if you know exactly what you are going for. Thanks for demystifying the “loose” myth so well
Mindfully – that’s the perfect word for it, Patti. Thank you.
Love your work, loose or tight. Your paintings please my eyes. I REALLY need to loosen up and your approach on this subject will help greatly.
.
Thank you for sharing, I appreciate you.
Darlene
Thank you Darlene!
I’d disagree that looseness is more difficult as you have to get it right first time.
1. You can wipe or scrape off and develop some beautiful and invaluable guides for the next ‘performance’ or ‘campaign’ or ‘pass’ depending on how you think of these things -or how you are feeling on the day!
2. There is another way of painting where you build the work in slowly evolving steps according a different method. To gain volume, depth and palpable physical ‘thereness’ you need to think ahead and plan the painting with focussed application to the task in hand at each specific stage.
This building gives you a deep dialogue with the painting. It is for you to decide whether to trust your steps before letting your paint application continue onwards. At any stage you can stop, as long as you find you have ‘said’ that something that needed saying.
For me the painting must capture what I saw. I’m much less interested in what I have to say or express, I want my subjects specific and perfect self to be understood. And that self is a physical, dimensional certainty.
This is such an interesting split. Arising in the 1950’s with abstract expression, or even half a century before with Impressionism, and some say it was fuelled by the loss of the teaching of skills.
The artist expressing them-self versus the artist giving their understanding and endeavours to create a heightened representation of that thing, person, landscape – the deeply seen meditative subject.
That both exist is interesting. I don’t want to make my own language, my own bravura gestures. I enjoy looking at such work. But for me?It is whatever it takes to show how spellbinding and wonderful the world appears through my eye. A gift.
That’s a very good point, you can indeed wipe off and try again, and the near missses underneath can add a depth and texture to the final piece.
I don’t really see a dichotomy between self expression and wanting to show the inherent beauty of the natural world though – surely both can exist in the same piece? I find that, for me at least at this stage, painting more loosely and leaving areas undefined, as well as adding texture, addslife to the picture which I find difficult to achieve any other way.
I’m not particularly advocating expressiveness for its own sake, my point is that people often equate loose painting with expressiveness. As I said in the post, I think highly finished work can be equally expressive. That expression may be metaphorical, calligraphic (which I think is probably also metaphorical, in a way) or more literal, and about the subject matter – I think it’s a mistake to assume that only brushy work can be expressive.
I think perhaps we actually agree 🙂
Thank you, Paul. I watched one of your streams yesterday for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed. I am a fan 😉
That’s lovely to hear, thanks Toni – many more to come 🙂
“Control first. Freedom needs to be earned.”
100% agreed Paul.
I don’t mind that my paintings are still quite tight as I think it’s an essential part of the process. When we first “met” Paul I had only just started drawing, painting was a distant hope of “one day”…
In fact the painting before last was a deliberately “loose” portrait of the Mad Hatter – at first glance the brush strokes may appear a bit wild. But the precision of the underdrawing was down to the millimetre, on an A3 size picture!! And whilst I was waving about with the brush from the elbow rather than wrist, I’d planned beforehand what I was going to do rather than it being some random and emotionally driven activity.
Nice work Paul, good stuff 🙂
I followed your advice about light and form and for the last few months have been doing studies and exercises using a monochromatic palette for geometric and still life studies; mostly neutral grays of titanium white, burnt umber and paynes gray. With a dry brush the effect is rather ‘tres crayon’ similar to your painting about midway through the first-part of video-1. As you suggested in earlier videos, leaving chroma out of the qustion really helps concentrate on form and light.