Here’s a quick video I recorded live on facebook earlier this week.
It’s 16 minutes long, and it’s all about why I’ve decided to abandon the painting I’ve been working in this week.
I’m sharing this because I think it’s useful to know that this happens to all of us sometimes. Mostly artists just share their most impressive work online.
But I like to take a “warts and all” approach because I think it’s probably more helpful in the long run.
So here it is, a large wart on a panel 🙂
In the video, I talk about a couple of resources that I highly recommend you check out.
The first is the Suggested Donation Podcast, and specifically this episode with Peter Van Dyck, which I think is particularly inspiring one.
The second resource I think you should get (and use) is the book composition by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a hugely influential American artist and educator. His basic idea is that art is about design first and foremost, and has a beneficial influence of its own. He was roughly contemporary with the American arts and crafts movement, and very much in line with its philosophy.
You can download Composition by Arthur Wesley Dow here (legally, it’s out of copyright).
I’ve used this book extensively in the past but have worked only with the line and tone sections. Now I’m going to start working on the colour design exercises. Expect posts on how I plan to develop this skill before too long.
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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Hi Paul,
Firstly, thanks for sharing your “failure” as well as your successes with us! I agree that it is helpful to see other artists struggling and at times bombing. Richard Schmid says in his book that it happens even to him, but that, eventually, your failures are still pretty good. (Like yours in this video.)
Coincidentally, I just went through this the other day with a portrait that I scrapped after having started it, leaving it unfinished for a lengthy period, then getting really excited about finishing it – until I realized that I was unhappy with the original proportions, and made a mess of trying to fix it up., Luckily, I was able to calmly, rationally decide that it wasn’t working and wasn’t worth pursuing. It actually felt good to be able to make that decision without any ego getting in the way.
As for your painting, it’s a bit of a pity not to see you develop it, because it truly is lovely so far, although I can understand your not wanting to finish it for your own reasons. I do like the thrust through the central blossom and stem. That said, I think the centrality of the blossom might be detrimental to your composition. It looks like the darkest part of that blossom is dead center horizontally. That’s the only thing I would want to critique about this painting. It’s got some truly lovely painting otherwise.
(What if you moved the stem an inch to the right?)
Paul, I am so happy you are talking about design. I actually bought that composition book last fall after taking a Notan workshop that kind of rocked my world.
Thanks for the excellent post Paul. I’ve had loads of these failures with reasons similar to yours. Sometimes I get so excited about color or even the beauty of the object itself that I completely forget about eddentials like value or composition. Only wish my failures look as good…Any composition posts would be great!
Thanks Paul! Great to see a teacher having the courage to share a work they consider a failure. It would be so instructive if more artists did this so that people come to understand that failure is truly part of the process. I’ve had so many paintings reach that “oh no” stage, unfortunately many after months of hard work. Absolutely despair-inducing….! I realised on looking back that the fault was in the basic drawing. So in regard to design I’ve learned the hard way that it’s absolutely fundamental to a painting. Recently I went back to a painting and redrew what had become flabby and formless, with lines, in paint, in order to begin to reconstruct a stronger picture. Watching the movie Final Portrait about Giacometti and his agonising (and sometimes self destructive) struggles with the scaffolding of his portraits reaffirmed for me a) the inevitability of suffering in the pursuit of art ! and b) the importance of strong composition.
Paul
The issue with this painting is that you dont have a focal point and your making this painting about things and not effects…..
Yupper…working on a painting now that’s not foing anywhere!! I was so excited about it that I dove right in and now it sits on my easel staring at me, and I’m completely lost!! Funny thing though, the last little oul I did, I did do some small sketches changing things around and getting a nice little painting.
So, there you go…dive right in with no thought and you will likely fail almost every time. Tale an hour and do little sketches, design it properly, and it will turn out perfectly!! Lesson learned, as long as the memory isn,t too short!!!!
Thank you Paul, for your very generous lessons. Love every one of them and so very grateful to you!
Hi Paul,
Yep – been there and might even have one on the easel right now that shouldn’t see the light of day. I absolutely agree that intentional practice is the way to improve, but I think there is another element, and that is to develop habits that prevent us from going off the rails when we are working on a “real” painting rather than a study.
I attended an Atelier for 4 years and when it came time to start still life painting with more complex subjects, our instructors always told us to do thumbnail black and white studies (a way to see of the notan was working in favor of the painting) and then to do postcard size color sketches. Neither of these made sense to me at the time – I just wanted to dive in and make a painting – and because we spent so long on every painting, I would forget about this from one work to the next. Also quite honestly, I didn’t have much of a sense of what good design was so I couldn’t figure out the problems even after doing the sketches.
Fast forward to a number of failures since school and now I get it. Yes you must make a conscious effort to practice to learn good design skills, but you also need to force yourself to apply them in an intentional way before picking up the brush. Hard to do and I forget often, especially when insight of beautiful fruits and flowers at the market that I know just won’t last.
In the end I guess we need to also go easy on ourselves; failed paintings can be funny, and weirdly, sometimes they appeal to others. Last year I sold two small works that I considered useful only because I learned so much about what not to do.
That’s a REALLY good point Jan, thanks for the reminder! I’ll stick a note on the easel.
Aloha, thank you for sharing your experience. I have been in the same spot. One suggestion that was given to me by my mentor was to draw a red line through the image. Ruthlessly. It’s amazing how this seemingly drastic gesture can refresh my viewpoint.
Alternatively, I think if the blue delft bowl had been put in before the fruit, it would have been an entirely different composition. I can see the bowl, a string of casually dropped pearls cascading out of the bowl with a Vermeer sensitivity. The flowers do need your value adjustment but the gesture is believable.
My mentor had suggested I do the excercises from Dows book, Composition also. It changed how I look at imagery I want to paint.
We both love Georgia O’keefes work. She studied under Dow in her early years. Her ascetic in composition shows his influence, although she took it to another level all her own.
I look forward to looking at the podcast you suggest. Thank you for what you share. It helps.. it’s aleays good to see what others are working out in their work too. Aloha pam
Thank you for this heartwarming and insightful video. You do beautiful work with your art, and your teaching videos are excellent. It is a gift to the rest of us joyful but struggling artists! The book looks wonderful. I paint in watercolors, and I am happy to say that I have gotten better at discerning when a painting is still rescuable and when it isn’t. Then I can throw it in the trash quickly and get on with another, even when it hurts, instead of spending days trying to save it, as I used to years ago.
Paul,
There is also a free PDF of Dow’s book, but of somewhat higher quality, at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45410.
I have learned a great deal from watching only a few of your videos (so far). You are doing good work. Thank you,
Is the curving tulip dead centre in the composition? A
and does the corner of the vase coincide with the edge of the table?
PS Thank you for your generous sharing and unfailing honesty, from both of which we all learn so much!
Hi Paul
Thank you for this ‘honest’ presentation. As you said all of us have failed or incomplete paintings stacked somewhere in dark corners of our studios/paint spaces/even our minds, but most would be ashamed to show them, let alone admit to it. However, I see more and more Utubers and other artists bloggers actually sharing their unsuccessful attempts, which is a welcome relief because it is inevitable to fail as you learn and look for ways to practice and improve. I grew up in an era and culture where if you failed at the 1rst two or three attempts at anything, be it music, learning a foreign language, drawing, etc.. you were categorized as an idiot and would never amount to anything. So I’m really happy to see a turn in the evolution of learning and teaching, as failing becomes a tool to examine what could we do differently to improve, what do we need to change to make a better more compelling picture in this instance.
At the moment I have 2 landscapes on the easel which are in mid air, one stuck on values, the other just about to get overworked. Last summer I threw away everything (about 350 painting and more than 600 drawings, entire sketchbooks even) that I considered stepping stones to better art (notice I’m not calling them ‘failures’). I took a good look at my current skills, how I had improved, and put the past behind. It felt good to turn a leaf and keep moving forward. Friends were appalled by the sheer quantity of stuff I got rid of, but let me tell you it felt liberating, now I had a clear slate, a better vision of what lay ahead, of what I needed to focus on.
Sorry this is not at all what I intended to write in this response to your blog.
At any rate, my point is don’t be afraid to make errors, to lay down the wrong values even on purpose to see what works, what doesn’t and why. With music, we never hear how many times a musician practiced a particular passage until s/he got it right, same with learning to use a bow and arrows, how many times does one shoot and miss until one day one shoots and hits. The thing with visual art is that it’s visual, something remains after you paint, unlike with music where the sound is gone. And that’s where we get judged, by others or our own selves, but that’s also where we can assess, like you did and face the music, so to speak.
So thank you for sharing. We all feel better that we’re not alone in our struggles !
Best
You might want to consider cropping the work to redeem the overall design. Put it aside for a few months, then break-out the cropping squares and experiment; overall aspect-ratio of the existing canvas, recasting a new focal point, adjusting the color and value balance. If nothing presents itself, then recycle and re-gesso the canvas, …or discard.
That’s a good idea Ted, hopefully it will be useful to some readers here – for me though, I’ve already sanded back and re- primed the panel. Scorched earth policy, I didn’t want it looking at me accusingly any more 🙂