Oil Painting

I have heard many artists say they wish they could loosen up in their work. Certainly, many of us aspire to create paintings that look effortless, but we find that doing so is easier said than done.

It is easy to assume that in order to paint loosely, you have to paint messily. The faster the better. Energetically fling the paint and watch as a fantastically loose and effortless painting appears within minutes.

Have you ever tried that approach? Something messy does appear, but not in a good way.

So how is it done?

On many occasions, I have had the opportunity to watch other artists paint — many of whom I admire for the looseness of their work. And I discovered that they do not paint in a sloppy fashion at all. They actually paint relatively slowly, taking time to execute the right brushstrokes. They have mastered their drawing, value and color skills, and have chosen to use their brushwork to create a loose appearance.

I realize that I am not the loosest of painters. However, as I have progressed in my painting efforts, it is becoming clear that loose brushwork is the result of restraint, not speed. More control, not less. Better planned strokes, not thoughtless dabbing or flinging.

Remember that we cannot ignore the fundamentals. If we don’t know how to draw accurately, compare values or understand color relationships, loose brushstrokes are not going to help.

Once we have a good handle on the fundamentals, what can we do if we want to loosen up?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Give yourself permission! The only one making you put in all that detail is you. Experiment by purposely leaving out details, and see if you can make the painting work. You still need accurate shapes, values and colors. But paint them simply. Discern which details you really need.

2. Mix up bigger piles of paint. It is tough to make a painting look loose with too little paint. Squeeze out more color from your tubes and use it in your mixtures. Having plenty of paint ready to go makes it easier to apply it liberally.

3. Let your big brushes do the work. You can achieve a remarkable amount of detail with a large brush. Smaller brushes mean smaller brushstrokes, which probably mean less simplicity. Use your smaller brushes only where you really need them to achieve important details.

4. Allow a few well-placed brushstrokes to carry the painting. These might be early strokes you laid down in the beginning stages that you allow to show through at the end. Or you might purposely add a few larger brushstrokes near the end of the painting session to increase the look of looseness and simplicity.

Look for ways to loosen up.

One of the reasons I love painting figures in the landscape is that they provide an opportunity for me to loosen up. A landscape made from simple, large shapes is a nice contrast behind the tighter rendering of a figure.

Plein air painting is also a great opportunity to loosen up if you allow yourself to simplify all that outdoor detail.

Do you have any other tips on how to loosen up our paintings? Feel free to share them in the comment section below.

Happy painting!

We are pleased to share this week’s blog from OPA Master artist Albert Handell.  Albert will be giving a live demonstration at the upcoming OPA National Convention in Santa Fe, NM, August 24-29, 2021. Tickets and more information are available through the OPA website.

As a sought-after workshop instructor, Albert is accustomed to answering student’s questions. For this week’s blog, we share his response to two commonly asked questions: 

Question: When do you know when your painting is finished?

Answer: When I do not wish to paint on it any more.  However, my advice to my students is to see the big picture…

My students seem not to understand the importance of carrying power. How a painting reads from a distance is much more important than the way its details look up close.

I have noticed that the aspiring artists who work with me are glued to their canvases and hardly ever step back…they do not take into consideration how important carrying power is to their paintings.  They do not take breaks to walk around and see what other people are painting.  NO, NO!  They are glued to their work, frantically trying to finish.

Let’s look at what happens in the process of creating a painting.

Perhaps your subject includes a distant mountain with a field in front, and a little house somewhere in the background. What a large amount of space you are tackling!

You are placing all of this on a 16” x 20” surface which means you are condensing it quite a lot. Also, you are standing and working at arm’s-length from your surface to create a painting that is meant to be seen from 15 feet away. 

All this takes a lot of visual adjusting. I wish students would get into the habit of stepping back from time to time SO THEY CAN ASSESS THEIR PAINTING. They cannot get a fresh look at things if they constantly stay and paint only at arms-length.  They cannot correctly analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their work, so they very easily end up noodling the paint in a frantic attempt to finish.

If they lose sight of the carrying power of what they are creating, they are in trouble without knowing it and cannot satisfactorily complete the piece.

Every good painting must read from a distance to be a finished work of art. My advice for everyone: do the best you can and do not worry about completing your painting in one session. When your work time is over, simply turn your painting to the wall.  The next day, or whenever you come back to it, do not look at the painting as you turn it around. Take a few steps away and then turn around and look.  If you have a good instant reaction, the painting could be finished…or it might need a little tweaking.  Make sure you do not over work, for if you do, you will weaken the painting.

Question:  You have said that when oil painting, you prefer using a combination of transparently applied and opaquely applied oils to achieve textual beauty. Please explain. 

Answer:  I will answer this question by giving a few visual examples. 

First, let’s take a look at the painting Deep Shadows.  You can clearly see the transparent application of paint which gives it the atmosphere that is so important in almost all of my paintings. In Deep Shadows I let the opaque flutter of leaves rhythmically stand out and complement the solidity of the massive tree trunk.

Next, let’s look at the painting Wind Swept where this technique is more subtle. I began painting it by establishing the sky and the rest of the scene transparently and smoothly without any brush marks using Windsor Newton’s Liquin as the medium.

Then I painted the tree, landscape and earth with a combination of transparent and comparatively opaque application of paint and brush work.  My aim was to delicately show the contrast between the sky and the tree. 

Now let’s look at Chamisa. Here is a robust example of using transparent oils with opaque brush work. The lower right-hand part of the painting is transparent so that the opaque application of yellow chamisa and other colors will stand out in contrast. The opaque, vivid chamisa and a few of the façades of the building attract the viewer’s attention and come forward. The background mountain, which has a blue-grey atmospheric quality was applied transparently so that it would recede. The sky is also mostly painted with transparent applications of paint with a few touches of opaque paint here and there, again to keep the sky in the background. 

In Invitation to Spring the transparency and contrasting opacity is quite obvious. 

When I was at the Art Students League in New York, I remember engaging in endless discussions in the lunch room about art and about when a painting is finished. Somebody said, and I could not get it out of my mind “A beautiful painting has an inner light all its own.” As you can see, I never forgot that idea.  I have always leaned towards transparent paint, doing so was part of my nature from the very beginning. I also have always liked textural contrasts. I believe using and combing transparent and opaque passages in a painting help me achieve the inner light I desire in my work. 

Stay tuned for more questions and answers with Albert Handell OPAM, coming this summer on the Oil Painters of America Blog.

If your 2020 calendar looked like mine, it was packed with paint-outs, workshops, and gallery openings, as well as family and social obligations. Part of that was, what I thought, a “healthy dose” of travel. I am a full-time painter who runs his own gallery. I am also the co-founder of a busy studio school. I had just started my tenure as President of Plein Air Painters of the Southeast. Besides the workshops I had planned to teach, I was regularly mentoring artists in my studio. All of that came to a screeching halt last March.

In the beginning it was, of course, really frightening… the fear of the unknown for our entire world. It was also very complicated from the standpoint of home logistics. At that time our kids were ages 4 and 1, and my wife worked full time. For almost five months all four of us were at home 24/7. My wife and I were taking shifts, both trying to squeeze in each of our 8-hour work days while being full time stay-at-home parents. This included trying our hand at being our son’s prekindergarten teacher. I was the P.E. coach, art teacher, cafeteria manager, and music instructor. Luckily, my wife could handle the math and reading. We had daily picnics and spent a great deal of time digging in the dirt. 

Our story was the same as many other people in the world. Just trying to do the best with the situation in which we had found ourselves. We cooked a lot of beans and made our own bread. The hermit in me certainly had no issues staying put. Once we got in the groove, the staying home part became a blessing. One of the most unexpected gifts I gained was the clarity and focus that had been so elusive while in the weeds of daily life. Many of the obligations and distractions were gone. My wife and I talked about goals and how we would see this time as an opportunity.

I could not really leave the house to paint in the early days, but I had a lot of fun going through photos from past trips. Trips that I had all but forgotten I had taken. I do not know about you, but my current camera roll on my phone has more that 42,631 photos. I tend to take trip after trip getting great reference material that ends up being eclipsed by the demands of everyday life. I come home, play catch up and things get buried. Eventually, I take another trip and do it all over again. The pandemic gave me an opportunity to go back and see those trips with fresh eyes as the painter I am today (even for trips I took ten years ago). And even better: to actually use that reference material. Finally.

What grew out of revisiting those photos was a desire to PAINT. I once heard someone ask Françoise Gilot if she painted every day, and her reply was, “Well, I breathe, don’t I?” However, finding the time to paint was a huge challenge. There were not enough hours in the day between parenting and trying to figure out how to sell paintings. Were collectors even going to be buying paintings? The pandemic meant that everyone was online, which increased the number of emails and comments that needed replies. Not to mention, if I was going to keep teaching I had to master the technology of the virtual session. There were always the evenings, but once the kids were in bed, I was too drained to even think about painting. At that point it was just nice to have two hours of peace and quiet to sit and stare at the television with a bowl of ice cream in my lap. I knew the next year was going to be a marathon, but each day felt like its own sprint.

I got my start as a daily painter about 15 years ago. At one time, I remember reading that Carol Marine would paint during her children’s nap time. I stayed home with my children when they were newborns, and I applied Carol’s method. It was true that the only time I had energy to paint was during their naps. So, I painted something every day during nap time. I would have 60-90 minutes to make something happen, never knowing when the baby monitor would “call time” on my session. I worked small and fast. I started out using mostly oils outside in the spring and summer. When the colder months hit, I experimented with gouache and acrylics in the kitchen. 

During the pandemic, I revisited the method of nap time painting. I had the luxury of getting away to my quiet studio and spending hours marinating in my process, taking breaks whenever I wanted. Besides revisiting photos from past trips, I also tried new techniques and challenged myself with new subject matter. This has not only been a great exercise, it has also become part of my process: many of these nap time paintings have turned into references for larger studio paintings once I could get back to the studio.

In August, my wife went back to work, the kids went back to school, and I went back to the studio. The gallery still is not open at its pre-pandemic frequency. My studio school partner and I have decided only to host two workshops later in 2021, as we continue to prioritize safety. Now that life is beginning to get back to “normal,” how do I keep these gifts that I have been given? Now I am more calm, centered and focused than I have been in a long time. I realize my kids will not be little forever, so I want to take advantage of these times when we can play tag in the yard and dig in the dirt. When my son returned to school we purposefully chose a half day program so that he could spend time with me in the afternoon. Nap time painting is a practice that continues to serve me, even as life has adjusted once again. And when our family of four is all home again for the weekends, I still try to accomplish two or three nap time paintings. 

This year has given me a lot of time to think about what is important and to create a world where those things are protected. At the same time, when I really needed it, painting small each day made my world larger. The daily practice has become a habit and really given me some peace in a time of chaos. If you have been squeezed by the current conditions in this world, I hope you can find time to steal away and paint something, anything, even if its small. 

I have a determination to keep distractions to a minimum. Before we know it, distractions will creep back in… like kudzu. Now, when opportunity comes knocking, I am being more thoughtful about what I accept and add to my calendar. I am keeping in mind that the most important opportunities I have are right under my roof. I have proven to myself that meaningful painting time does not have to be long to be fruitful, and inspiration is a mindset and not a destination.

Creating a successful painting not only requires focus on technical skills such as drawing, color, values, edges, and composition, but also on emotional impact. Incorporating metaphor, mystery, and memory into your work will help develop a dynamic image that resonates with the viewer. 

Metaphors

“A visual metaphor is an image that the viewer is meant to understand as a symbol for something else. Visual metaphors can be obvious, subtle, funny, or scathing, but they form a nexus of imagery that artists have used across the centuries to help communicate information without words.” (What does imagery mean? https://www.omniverse-plastikos.com/top/what-does-imagery-mean.html)

Visual metaphors can add depth and meaning to a painting and create food for thought for the viewer. Also, through the process of creating these metaphors, artists often form a deeper connection with their artwork. 

In my painting, Containment, I chose snakes as a metaphor for anger and internal emotions. The woman tries to contain the snakes in a canister, but they spill out onto her arms and table. I used snakes to portray her internal struggle, which would not be easy to depict from facial expressions or body language alone. 

In Still Life with Fruit, I placed the fruit in a way that creates an unusual tension and suggests a deeper narrative. Since I did not have the human subject matter I needed when I developed the painting concept, I used metaphor to express my idea instead. I positioned fruit in a way that alludes to a particular dynamic between people. Instead of being hindered by limitations, let them inspire your creativity!

Mystery

Unanswered questions and unexplained circumstances can help create a sense of mystery. Try incorporating something unusual in your painting, and leave the viewer guessing about its meaning or connection to the narrative.  You will create interest by leaving something for the viewer to figure out. 

When I first started painting, the mysterious quality of Balthus’ paintings influenced my work. His paintings intrigued me because of the psychological drama and unanswered questions. He explained his approach by saying, “I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always with a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.” (https://www.theartstory.org/artist/balthus/)

Alan Feltus is another artist whose work has a sense of mystery and hidden significance. In his memoir, he explained that “it would be wrong to paint mystery in a deliberate, conscious way. Subconscious imagery lives within a person’s mind on a subtle level, and I would have to find it as I worked on paintings, allowing it to emerge almost on its own. I wanted imagery that would work as an unreality in which things didn’t have to make sense in terms of real space or the laws of gravity.” (Home [www.alanfeltus.com]. http://www.alanfeltus.com/)

Viewers often question what is happening and what the figures are discussing in my painting, Conversations. The unanswered questions keep people engaged, trying to guess the answer. The painting encourages the viewer to bring his or her own perspective and experience into the narrative. 

Since my own memories and private speculation fuel my work, a sense of mystery often occurs naturally. I am not so much trying to tell a story as I am reflecting on experiences from my own life. Like a work of fiction, the external narrative shrouds my perspectives.

 I would not recommend trying to manufacture mystery in your artwork because it may come across as contrived. Instead, let it manifest naturally as you work on your painting. If you choose a subject matter that is personal, or close to your heart, you may be more inclined to conceal the aspects that make you feel vulnerable. Your secrets will likely create ambiguity and intrigue. 

Memory

Another element that can enhance your work is incorporating your own personal connection to the image. Letting memories inspire your art can play a similar role as mystery, but it originates from your unique experience. A painting based on personal memories can be more literal, but the inspiration and meaning will not be obvious to the viewer. 

Reisha Perlmutter, a contemporary artist living in New York, paints women swimming and submerged in translucent, blue water. She describes how her work is inspired by her childhood memories. Her paintings have an intimate feel as the viewer identifies with the sensation of water and light. You can view her artwork on her website, www.reishaperlmutter.com.

My painting Fresh Fallen Snow was based on recollections of my childhood being in my yard with friends on a snowy day. I remember lying in the cold snow with the icy scent of winter in the air as my friends ran off. In this painting, I recreated a memory using my daughter as the model. The painting originated from a personal experience, but now takes on a life of its own.

There are numerous ways to create a dynamic work of art, and each person will draw inspiration from various sources that reflect their unique view of the world. As an artist, it is essential to take time out of your busy schedule to listen to your thoughts and process emotions without distractions. By delving into yourself, you will imbue your art with a sense of meaning. I find that infusing metaphor, mystery, and memory into my paintings gives them more depth. What inspires your artwork?