Scumbling

Scumbling is a painting technique largely overlooked in the contemporary preoccupation with alla prima methods. From an 1842 painting manual:

“By Scumbling is meant, the application of opaque tints very thinly, over parts that have already been painted, and that are sufficiently dry and firm, to undergo the operation; it is usually performed with a hog's hair brush, very sparingly charged with the tint to be employed; which is called a Scumble, and must be generally lighter, though nearly of the same tone of colour, as the part over which it is passed.

"Scumbling may with proper judgment, be used in any part of the picture, but it is better if possible to avoid using it over shadows, more particularly such as are wished to be kept transparent, and to confine its application chiefly to the lighter parts where it may be required.

"Its use is to weaken the force of colours that are too strong, and force themselves too much on the eye, for the preservation of harmonious effect; to give air and distance to objects that seem too near, and to soften and unite such tints on the surface of particular objects, as may be too violently contrasted for breadth of effect.


"A Scumble is generally a tint made of some colour mixed with white; its usual effect is to render the part of the picture where it is employed, somewhat cooler, grayer, and less defined than before; hence it is of great service in connecting any tendency to muddiness or dirtiness of colouring; and also to what is called hardness, or over-distinctness of detail.

"Scumbling, in its effects may be viewed as the opposite of Glazing; and if a picture has been injured by too free a use of the latter, it may, in a great degree be remedied by the former; indeed each is to a great extent, calculated to remedy any errors that may be committed in the use of the other; and their judicious combination in the same picture, is found to produce the greatest possible clearness, brilliancy, transparency and richness of colouring."
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Painting by William Logsdail. St. Martin in the Fields, courtesy Art Renewal Center. Second painting by F. Waugh.
Document courtesy Graydon Parrish. Title: The Guide to Oil Painting, page 41. Kownky, Dillon and Rowney, 51 Rathbone Place.

Frazetta's Son Busted for Trying to Steal His Father's Art

Mark F. of BoingBoing reports:
"Police report that Alfonso Frank Frazetta (above) was caught red handed stealing 90 of his famous father's paintings. They said he and an accomplice had broken into the Frank Frazetta museum in rural Pennsylvania and were loading the paintings, worth $20 million, into a trailer.

Alfonso, 52, told the police his father had instructed him to "enter the museum by any means necessary to move all the paintings to a storage facility." But Frazetta, who is 81 and was in Florida at the time of the alleged theft said he did not give his son permission to remove the paintings from the museum."


Above article on BoingBoing.
More to the story:
Pocono Record: Son arrested, Family Feud, Frazetta's art legacy,
Pike County Press
Daily Telegraph, UK.
BBC News.
Art Knowledge News

Face Detection

Yesterday, when I was photographing that sketch of the security guard, my camera automatically switched over into portrait mode. Its face-detection software responded to the sketch as if it were a real face, even though it was looking at pencil scratches on paper, and the “face” was in profile.

It sent a chill down my spine because I sensed the emergence of a mind.

My camera switches over to portrait-mode whenever it sees a painting or a drawing with a face in it. It stays in AUTO mode otherwise.

According to Popular Mechanics: “a chip inside the camera constantly scans the image in its viewfinder for two eyes, a nose, ears and a chin, making out up to 10 faces at a time before you've hit the shutter.”

I decided to test my camera—it’s a Canon Powershot SX120—to see what it decides to regard as a face.

According to my camera, this is a face.

But this is not a face, even though, as Scott McCloud points out, it seems to fit the ideal human cognitive model.

This portrait of Soutine by Modigliani is a face.

And Jawlensky’s Woman with a Forelock is a face.

Jawlensky’s Medusa is also a face, but my camera wasn’t sure. It switched back and forth from AUTO to PORTRAIT a few times.

There are no faces in Oskar Kokoshka’s Loving Couple with a Cat.

And there’s no face here, either.

Popular Mechanics hints at what’s coming: “Sometime soon, face detection may even give way to facial identification, discerning one subject from another. For instance, the camera could retain an image tagged 'Mom' in its memory. Later, the camera would automatically recognize each subsequent picture of your mother and add the 'Mom' tag to it."

Facial identification or recognition is a fast-growing technology that uses 3-D scans or interpolates various 2-D scans to assemble a knowledge of basic structure. Wikipedia says that some of the new algorithms are “able to outperform human participants in recognizing faces and can uniquely identify identical twins.”

You can extend these forecasts to imagine future web-enabled smart cameras that can recognize makes of cars, Zagat ratings of pizza parlors, and movie preferences of strangers in your local Starbucks.

The lesson that I took away from this little experiment has nothing to do with taste in art. My thought was this: as we endow machines with more and more intelligence, we will have to get used to the idea that they will not respond to basic things as we do. Their talents and their lapses will be unlike ours.
Their thinking style— their fundamental orientation to the universe—will be different. They will see the world in a way that will seem at once chummily familiar and creepily alien.
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Read more about face-detecting cameras at Popular Mechanics. Wikipedia on Face Detection and Facial Recognition tech.
Scott McCloud and the ideal cartoon face on Cognition and Culture.
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Added later: Scott's blog reflects further on intelligent machines here.

Security Guard

I sketched this security guard in graphite pencil at a university student center. When I told him I was an artist, he was glad to hold still for a while. The light was bouncing up from a table in front of him, which darkened the planes of his upper cheekbone, brow, and the top of his nose.

Guards and police officers make interesting subjects for the plein-air sketcher. If they have the time, they’re really nice about letting you draw them.

Painted Hands

We've got these funny things at the end of our arms, but who knew they could be canvases?

From Visual Funhouse.com

Mucha's Epic Vision

I just love this photograph of Alphonse Mucha dwarfed by his gigantic canvases from the Slav Epics.

A link-rich post on Mucha on Lines and Colors

Rockwell’s Earliest Reference Photo

There has been a great deal of interest in the recent exhibition and book “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera,” which explores Rockwell’s use of reference photography. NPR radio story here.

Author and curator Ron Schick points out that “his first extensive use of photography came with a 1935 commission to illustrate a new edition of Tom Sawyer.”

But until now the earliest known surviving photographic evidence doesn’t go back much before 1939, when Rockwell moved to Arlington, Vermont, Mr. Schick told me in a phone conversation. The bulk of the earlier documentary records and photos were presumably lost in the 1943 Arlington studio fire.


A newspaper article has just surfaced which reveals what appears to be the earliest known reference photo commissioned by Rockwell. The painting (an alternate version from the one published in the Tom Sawyer edition) shows Huck Finn presenting the dead cat to Tom Sawyer. The photograph was taken by Richard Wyrley Birch, a photographer who has not yet been mentioned in any of the books on Rockwell’s process.

In the 1974 article, Mr. Birch recounts working for Rockwell as photographer, model, and model scout.

According to Birch, when Rockwell was living in New Rochelle he was “having trouble finding a photographer.” Learning that Birch could handle a camera, the artist commissioned him to help on the Tom Sawyer project. Mr. Birch claims that “almost all his art work from the beginning has been done from photographs.”

When Birch delivered the reference shots, made with the benefit of reflectors and lit like a movie shot, “Rockwell flipped. He’d had no pictures like this before. The detail was beautiful. I was his man from then on.”

Mr. Birch worked with Rockwell for about six years photographing “everything from beautiful young girls and children to aging and wrinkled men and women and from chickens and horses to cats and dogs,” until Rockwell moved to Vermont in 1939.

Although Rockwell agonized over his decision to use reference photography, he made no secret of it, at least not after 1940. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, he made extensive changes from the photo reference. But this new evidence pushes back the earliest surviving photo by almost five years, confirming the 1935 date. It also implies that Rockwell may have been using photos at least a few years before that time.

If anyone can put me in touch with Alison Wyrley Birch or Mr. Birch’s descendants, please send me an email (jgurneyart (at) yahoo.com).
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“Richard Wyrley Birch of Kent Once Was The Photographer Behind the Artist’s Brush” by Alison Wyrley Birch. Sunday Republican of Waterbury, CT. November 17, 1974

Repin’s State Council Portraits

When Ilya Repin accepted the assignment to paint the Russian State Council in 1903, one of the terms of his contract was that he would be allowed to paint a life study of each individual member.

This example gives a good insight to what Repin finds essential in achieving a portrait likeness. He probably had only an hour or two to work on this study. He quickly stated the big flat tones of the coat, table, and paper. He defined the structural planes of the head like a master woodcarver.

The effect almost looks like a blurry photograph. He didn’t paint the small details of eyes, nostrils, and lips, but instead concentrated on the overall structure.

The final work, based on many of these studies, is amazingly naturalistic. These large-scale group portraits can easily become stagy and artificial.

Both images in this post are fairly large files, so if you click on them you’ll get a lot more detail.

Image courtesy Wikipedia, link.

Drying Time in Oil

Blog reader Jeremy Ferguson raised a practical question:

"I'm confused about how illustrators work in oils where it's recommended that works are not varnished for 6 months. Does an illustrator get his painting done and then send it off within a few weeks without varnishing after it is dry to the touch...then varnish when he receives it back? What about commissions? Do you tell a client to wait for six months to pick up their landscape or portrait?"

Here are my thoughts, and I welcome yours in the comments:

I usually paint in oil fairly thinly using an alkyd medium (Liquin), so it nearly always dries overnight, or at the most in three or four days. If I want impasto texture and I'm on a deadline I will pretexture with quick trying priming medium. (Previous GJ post on paint texture and pretexturing (part 2) and (part 1).)

If you want to use thicker paint you can put a few drops of cobalt drier into the blob of white paint and a thick passage will set up overnight—or in a few days if it's really thick. Since white is in nearly every impasto mixture, the drying agent finds its way into all the thick passages. Don't use much, though, because it will discolor the mixtures.

Occasionally I shine a low wattage light bulb on the painting (about two feet away) overnight to hasten drying, but you have to be careful on any kind of panel to be sure it doesn't warp. Some people construct drying boxes, with low wattage bulbs to serve as heaters, which warms and dry a painting evenly.

If you have the time on a gallery painting or commissioned work, you can apply thick paint with a slower medium and wait out the drying time.

You do have to wait a few months for the finish varnish. If you varnish too early the wet paint will soak it up and still dry matte. This would be a problem for plein-air paintouts or gallery work if you don’t allow time for it to cure. If you know the buyer, you can arrange to come by and varnish it for them later.

Shipping work to illustration clients is no problem, though. If there is a passage that remains wet, you can build a crate with spacers (or ship it framed) to avoid having something touch the paint surface.

Thick Paint Blog

Utah-based landscape painter Brad Teare has just launched a blog (with some nice explanatory videos) called "Thick Paint" about painting with heavy impastos.

"For the last few years for at least once a month I browsed the internet for articles about Thick Paint or Painting with Thick Paint finding no entries to aid me in my pursuit of painting with a fully loaded brush. Although intitially discouraged, I now take it as encouragement to write about my experience of the last twelve years wrestling with the maddening, yet exhilarating, prospect of highly textured oil paint."

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Thick Paint blog
Brad Teare website