Oil Painting

A long-standing wish of mine was fulfilled this summer: to teach at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. I had taught workshops there, and substituted for other teachers over the years, but I had not taught formal classes. Andrew Rodgers, the new director of NOAFA, invited me to teach both portrait and advanced still life painting for the entire eight-week summer session. I immediately accepted! I am grateful to family for graciously housing me this summer.

The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts was founded by Auseklis Ozols in 1978, and patterned after the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he had studied. Luckily for us, both the portrait and still life classrooms have natural north light overlooking Magazine Street. Our delightful view was of unique New Orleans architecture: brightly painted double shotgun houses and a corner po-boy restaurant.

I love to teach and I believe it is a calling. To paraphrase Exodus 35:31-35, the spirit of God gives the artist the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to perform his or her craft, and gives the ability to teach. Teaching gives me a sense of purpose. It is thrilling when a student has an epiphany as a direct result of something I said. For example, in presenting the idea of a lost edge, I ask them to squint. Then I point out the lost edges on a figure and finally they understand. Many students say they have never heard of this idea before. I suspect they may have heard it, but were not ready to absorb it.  I frequently think of new ways to get my point across. For example, this summer I had students sculpt little balls of clay and told them to insert the orbs into the skeleton’s eye sockets.  I hoped this would help them in the future to remember that eyeballs are three-dimensional and to treat them as spheres. So, through God-given ability and years of studying, I would like to think I am answering my calling.     

Teaching is also a great way to make new friends and to build long-lasting relationships. Initially I was invited by a local New Orleans art guild to teach a workshop. From there, the Jewish Community Center director invited me to teach drawing classes. After my husband and I moved from New Orleans to Texas, I was asked by my fellow artists if I would teach a weekly portrait class. I usually return to New Orleans a few times per year to teach. So after almost two decades, I have taught countless classes and workshops. I have art buddies I have known for decades and new students that have recently taken my classes. As the Girl Scouts’ song goes, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold”. I have stayed in touch with many friends through Facebook, Instagram, and my association with the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. Teaching is a wonderful path to friendship. 

Back to my summer vacation. I was in New Orleans most of the summer. I visited old friends and family, enjoyed café au lait and beignets at City Park, and ate New Orleans cuisine centered around fresh seafood. On the last day of class, we were photographed by a Times-Picayune/NOLA.com staff photographer. He wanted to photograph our class wearing masks to accompany an article about the mayor’s recent mask mandate. We reminisced about how the local photographers use to send film via carrier pigeons and now it is immediately done digitally.

Now that my wish of teaching at the NOAFA has been fulfilled, I am back home in Texas resuming my normal life. That means attending the Woodlands Art League portrait studio, experimenting with painting, and planning upcoming workshops.

So you want to be an artist?  Go sit at your palette, wear old shabby clothing, wear a beret, live in a romantic studio hideaway and wait to be discovered.  Hollywood has created a stereotype of the tortured creative genius that once found, is instantly successful. An outlier endowed with rare creative talent who only produces masterpieces.  Artists are magicians, creating without stress, worry or failure.

I can remember my parents saying it was fine that I wanted to go to art school, but I had better have a backup plan and also get certified to teach.  I did get certified, and upon graduating with a BFA I went straight into a marketing job.  But, I continued to paint in every free moment after work, while raising kids.  More importantly, I took workshops from some of the best artists in the nation. I have grown more from workshops post-art school, then I did from art school itself.  But I did learn one of my most valuable lessons about perseverance from offhand comments made by an art school professor. 

The professor looked around the room and bluntly stated that most of the people in the class would drop art as soon as they graduated and go onto something more lucrative.  He stated it was rare to continue on as an artist. He said it took dedication and the persistence to be motivated enough to plow through the difficulties. He said for most, life would get in the way, as would the need for a steady income.  Talk about a downer! It was a shocking revelation that none of us wanted to hear. And, I must say, many of these art students were incredibly creative and skilled. His statements were a challenge to me that I have never forgotten.

As artists we know the truth.  It takes much more than magic and acting like a Hollywood stereotype to become successful. Few people, if any, are born exceptional painters. Most must put in a lot of hard work.  It takes pushing though many failures and the courage to keep taking risks and trying new things.  There are no shortcuts to success – with possibly the exception of training with accomplished artists willing to share their expertise. I would like to tell that professor, I am still here!  I am working to improve my art by constantly learning.

I am so very grateful to those artists who share their knowledge through teaching.  I have taken multiple workshops over the years with many recognized names. Most have been more than generous in passing on their knowledge. I have gained valuable insight from every class I’ve taken and added to my skill set.  I have learned that after the workshop, practicing what I’ve learned is critical to becoming a better painter. Often, there’s a struggle before there’s a leap forward in my ability.  I know I still have much to learn because my abilities are always a few paces behind my vision.  For me, learning will never end. 

Good art does not come easy.  And good artists usually do not think they are “good enough”.  Maybe that’s imposter syndrome. Entering juried shows can help an artist gauge his/her progress. It can be nerve-wracking to enter competitions and put your work out there. As artists we put not only time and expensive materials, but heart and soul in our work. Putting our art in front of the public asks for judgement we may not want to hear. But I’ve found that entering juried competitions both locally and nationally has given me a benchmark to measure my skill set and see if my work is “good enough”.  It took me a while to have the courage to enter national competitions and I’m glad I did.  I encourage my students to do the same with their best work, because sometimes they just don’t see what they are doing right. 

Once I started getting into juried shows I was hooked. I always say that artists are the worst gamblers.  We pay the entrance fees, roll the dice and hope for the thrill of the green checkmark.  And despite the results, we keep coming back for more! We continually kick each other up the ladder to improve our art.  I believe that the competition pushes us to be better. 

By analyzing my work against work in exhibitions, whether my work was accepted or not, I can observe how to improve, find a different point of view on a subject, or see an approach that I might not have thought to try.  And that may be the best lesson of all.  Yes, it’s a gamble to put work out there to see how it rates against the best of the best.  But when a painting is accepted it’s the sweetest reward to hard work, and it has nothing to do with magic.  The magic and the gamble is moving on to work on what my next painting will be – in my mind’s eye it is always going to be my magnum opus – perhaps a masterpiece.

The times we live in and the problems people are dealing with make me pause. Although I am not a person who regularly reflects on the past, lately I have been thinking about something….my illustration days, and the importance of all those years spent creating images of everything imaginable, from romance book covers, to editorial-magazine assignments, to car and movie advertisements.

I have been a picture maker for fifty years.  I started freelancing in 1971, and spent the first 28 years of my career as an illustrator.  The past 22 years have been spent doing “fine art” oil paintings that are of interest to me and the galleries that represent me.  When looking back on the body of work I created, I find myself acknowledging the importance of the first 28 years on the second stage of my personal journey as an Artist.

As illustrators, we were asked to draw and paint anything and everything ….and we were well compensated for it financially.  Aside from the obvious money aspect of commercial art, there was, for me, a more important side to all of that work…it was a fabulous training ground for learning one’s craft.  The book covers with all of the figures in them were probably the most valuable lessons.  Figures are difficult because if you get them wrong it is obvious.  I think what helped me the most during those Illustration years was the sheer volume of work I had to produce…hundreds of book covers with the always lurking deadlines!  I rarely turned work down.  I learned discipline and work ethic from my father when I was young. This was greatly enhanced by the pressure of the commercial art business.  I can honestly say that I never missed a deadline in that period of my career. 

One late afternoon in my studio while finishing a book cover for Bantam Books, I was cleaning up the edges with white gesso (as I always did) and accidentally tipped over a bucket of white acrylic onto the oil painting! Distraught as I was, I calmed myself and started the painting over immediately, and still delivered it on time.  That was certainly a confidence builder, knowing that I could respond that way (under such pressure) and not have the job or the deadline suffer in any way.  The art director never knew what I had gone through. 

Creating a book cover typically went like this: First, the Art Director would send me a concept sheet describing the characters, the fashion, and the action they wanted to see on the cover. Next, I would produce several rough thumbnail sketches and call my photographer in New York to pick models and book a shoot.  On the day of the shoot, I would attend, sketches in hand, and the photographer would pose the models to match my sketches — often to a tee!  I would receive beautiful black and white 16×20 prints to take back to my studio as visual aids. The prints had gorgeous values.  I would then create several versions of the cover sketch for the Art Director, who would approve one. I would go and finish the assignment.  The sketches were pretty well worked out, so there were rarely any changes (thankfully) that had to be made on the finished painting. 

During those years, I went from being a pen and ink artist (I thought drawing was always my strong suit), to all the other traditional mediums…and eventually ending up doing my first oil painting that I considered successful in 1983, a portrait of my father. That was it… I have been from that time on predominately an oil painter.

In the mid to late 1980s, while in the midst of a busy illustration career, I started showing small fine art paintings in local miniature shows.  I had some success…which encouraged me to pursue that further.  I continued doing illustration until the business started changing and digital was changing the business as I knew it, or cared for it.  I painted my last commercial cover in 1999.  At that point, I already had a couple of galleries representing me and I never looked back (except in conversation or in rare times like these that make you reflect on your life.)

For some reason, there seems to be, amongst some folks, a negative connotation with illustration, which I never understood.  I can remember an Art Critic in one of the New York papers Sunday section, calling Andrew Wyeth a “mere illustrator.”  I was appalled by a comment like that!  All my art heroes were illustrators back then and Andrew Wyeth is an iconic American fine artist.

I know many ex-illustrators do not mention that period in their art careers, but I always embrace and remember it fondly…it was a hard job with many hours spent making deadlines, but the positive rewards far outweighed the work.  I am forever thankful for the opportunity and for the success I had which enabled me to have a long career.  There is still plenty to be learned on this art journey…and I really don’t know if I could be doing what I do today were it not for the years spent as an illustrator. 

Thanks again to Oil Painters of America for the invitation and opportunity to do another Blog piece…it is always an honor.

Hodges Soileau OPA  

The topic of skies in the landscape comes up all the time with my private students and is a subject with which many painters struggle. I thought I would share a few things I have learned.

I will start with the most obvious, which is that the sky sets the tone of the painting.  If you are depicting a sunset, sunrise, cloudy day, fog or even bright midday sun, the sky should convey that mood. Care must be taken to make sure that the mood established in the sky is carried through the rest of the landscape.

Newer painters often forget that everything in a painting must be bathed in the same light. This means that the landscape must reflect the sky in temperature of light.  This is obvious when painting a strong sunrise or sunset, but can be easy to miss when painting a scene with subdued light, especially when the light is a cooler color temperature.  For example, if the sky’s light is cool and the artist paints the reflected light a warm color temperature, the painting simply will not work. The same temperature MUST be carried throughout the entire painting.

The sky is also an important compositional device and has much to contribute to the overall design. For example, when there are strong diagonals within the landscape, clouds can be arranged to counterbalance with diagonals of their own in the opposite direction (in a subtle manner of course!)  Another example is when the painting contains a series of horizontals in its land forms, the artist can choose to either echo the effect with more horizontals in the clouds, or contrast with more vertical cloud formations.

Often times the sky contributes to the overall success of the painting by being subdued in form, value and color, while still playing an important role in setting the mood.  If the landscape or seascape is very complex with lots going on, the sky needs to be very low contrast and subtle so as not to draw attention away from the busier areas of the painting.

The mistake I see most often with my novice students, and sometimes elsewhere, is the habit of painting a blue sky with a color that is very intense and/or far too dark, particularly a dark Ultramarine Blue.  This takes all the light out of the sky, and makes it look artificial. Remember to squint to see how light in value the sky really is in comparison to the other planes of the landscape.

Also, it is important to remember when painting clouds, our job is to give the impression that they are light, airy and full of moisture; they are not solid objects. In an impressionistic painting, all sorts of colors can be introduced into the clouds, just remember to keep the colors subdued to avoid making them look heavy.  

So…pay attention to the sky in all stages of your painting and do not make it an afterthought!  Better to plan the design, values, temperature, intensity and edges right from the beginning.

Deborah Tilby  SFCA,  OPAM

www.deborahtilby.com

Character, Personality, Spirit, Soul – these qualities cannot be measured by the length of the nose or the distance between the eyes. Yet, they are what a client is looking for when they commission me to paint a portrait. They can be revealed, however, in the movements, gestures and tendencies of the sitter. They are glimpsed when a subject interacts with the world around them, for example the way they tilt their head in response to a question, or nod when emphasizing certain words, or the way they move their hair, or even the way they keep their eyes on a nearby person they love. These small but revelatory motions cannot be captured in a single, still photograph. Yet, they are crucial for understanding personality and for creating a meaningful portrait.

In addition to painting studies from life, I use photographs as reference — multiple photos instead of just a single one. But even a series of photos, after a month or two in the studio, become quiet and stagnant. The memory of the photoshoot is much less in the front of my mind and it becomes harder to recall who I am painting, not just how they look. And it is who I am painting that matters. So that is why I began taking videos during my photoshoots.

Usually, I try to take the video when the client is “off guard”, though I always let them know at the beginning of the session that I will be filming. I want to see the unhindered character traits and mannerisms of my subject because those traits often form a large part of how the person is perceived. Video also helps me better understand the anatomy of my sitter because it captures him or her turning their head, providing a three-dimensional view of the skull, very helpful for understanding the upturn of the nose, or how deep the eyes are, etc., (photos often lack this level of information). 

In addition to life sittings when possible, and after studying the videos to watch for clues of character, I will choose a “main” photo reference that most portrays the sitter and get it approved by the client. Between sittings, I will use this still photo 75% of the time, but also flip through other pictures to see various angles and skin tones more clearly. But there comes a time as I work when I forget what it was like, really like, to be around the person. That is when I re-watch the video and see if I am capturing the spirit of the person. I will study the “hints” (the movements and tendencies) and see if I have captured a sense of personality in the collection of shapes on my canvas. I watch my subject’s head as it turns, and see if I have the skull correctly rendered. I look at proportions such as how the head compares to the body or to the arm length. I pick up the brush and trust myself as I work, using the rolling video which forces me to see the person as a whole. 

Moving beyond still images, I see the need to use more modern devices and watch people move, laugh, talk and breathe, and see if my painting holds the image of a being that loves, thinks and feels. It just makes sense to me. I cannot always have that person, child, or animal sit still for me to paint from life, so the video is the second-best option. 

There are other advantages as well.  When I ask a client to send me a video (so that I can appreciate the character and get a sense of who I am painting), it goes beyond a technical request: it is a tribute that honors the subject. It shows my deep respect not only for the person but also for the art of portraiture. It reminds me to not merely copy a photo and “miss the forest for the trees.” It gives my eyes a break and stimulates my brain to think. 

I do not know what will come next in our options for references when painting portraits – maybe a hologram sitting? But I do know this: we are past the age of still photos. I think the reason we like them is that they are “safe.” Necessary? Yes, I believe so, for a big portion of the painting. But let us also bring out the video and paint, and put the photo on standby for a while. Use the photo for technical information, but do whatever it takes to paint the person. Between sittings, or in lieu of sittings, videos are a great tool to study the unique, subtle, quirky, or beautiful movements that remind us of the breath behind the body, and help us capture it with a paintbrush. 

*This youtube video is an example of my process of taking video for a portrait commission: