Berkey House Portraits

Here are two Victorian house portraits by John Berkey (1932-2008). They're notable not only for the disciplined color gamuts, but also for a particular way of painting with opaque paints which works really well for architecture, hardware, spacecraft, and products.

(Click on the image to see them full-frame) It's really quite similar to the way Canaletto painted, except Berkey was using casein instead of oil. Gouache is perfect for this sort of method. Acrylic usually isn't opaque enough. The method involves doing a careful preliminary drawing, but then being willing to lose parts of your drawing under the paint. Canaletto would scribe lines into the canvas so that he could find his placement lines again.

Start with large brushes at the outset, especially flats. Each edge is cut over background areas, coming forward from the background to the front wall, and then forward again from the front wall to the window bays. Small details like clapboards come last.

For each window, you would paint first the room color, then the curtain, then the shade, then the framing. Each area is painted past the guidelines, so that when you cut edges, they are always clean. 

Beginning painters tend to be afraid of painting over the lines of their underdrawing, but once you get rid of the fear, painting becomes a lot more fun. You can always find details, and correct them, in the paint. In Berkey's case, he often started with little more than a few quick perspective lines, and found the whole painting in the paint.

For this kind of painting, you also need to have a mahl stick or straight edge or bridge that floats at an even height over the painting surface. There are various ways to do that, so that's a good subject for a future post.

Thanks to Jim Pinkowski, who has a great online collection of Berkey artwork

Previous GJ posts on John Berkey

John Berkey art book

Tractor Paintings

 Blog reader Amelia asked to see the results of the tractor sketches Jeanette and I did last Sunday.

Here is Jeanette's painting above and mine below. It's fun to see how two people sitting side by side can interpret the same subject a little differently.

If you missed the original post and video, check it out at "Watercolor Warriors."

Jeanette points out: "Watch the video, and you'll see proof that the tractor really did have an extra set of back fenders and no seat! Jim is a fantasy artist."

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Tools: Schmincke Watercolor Pocket Set , Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils, Moleskine Watercolor Notebook, and a 1/4 inch flat watercolor travel brush. Jeanette was using a Winsor Newton Watercolor Set

Architectural Cast Collections

In the 19th century, several museums assembled collections of full-size plaster casts of architectural details, such as doorways and choir stalls. The philosophy was that "a replica of a masterpiece was superior to a mediocre original." 

I made these pencil studies in the 1985 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. At left is an ornate Celtic wood-carved ornament. On the right is a 15th century Spanish cloister doorway.

In an age when travel to Europe was a rarity for average Americans, cast collections gave everyone a chance to see masterpieces of architecture. They also provided architecture students with fine examples to study, especially when the original detail is high up or otherwise inaccessible.


According to the Carnegie Museum, which has a fine collection, "In the 19th century, the demand for plaster casts skyrocketed. As centerpieces of the great international fairs, casts nourished nationalistic pride, while independent cast galleries served the Victorian fervor for education by providing instruction to both the amateur and the art student. Also, the dominance of historical styles in premodern architecture required that the architecture student study the outstanding buildings of the past; in this pursuit, plaster casts played an essential role."

Unfortunately, twentieth century trends conspired against architectural cast collections. Making casts from fragile originals is no longer possible. The study of ornament fell out of favor in architecture schools. Museums came to prefer originals over reproductions. And casts take up a lot of space in museums.

In 1949, the Art Institute of Chicago intentionally destroyed their cast collection, and many other museums and universities followed suit. In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum dispersed its architectural cast collection. Two of the lucky recipients were the architecture school of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the Institute of Classical Architecture in New York.

If you live near London, Edinburgh, Pittsburgh, South Bend, or New York, visit their collections with a sketchbook, and make sure you let the museums know that you appreciate them keeping their collection on view.
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More info and links:
I just finished writing an article on plein-air studies of architecture for ImagineFX magazine, so that will be out in a couple of months.
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Victoria and Albert architecture collection/ History of the Cast Courts
Carnegie Hall of Architecture
University of Notre Dame Cast Collection
View the UND collection online via gigapan technology
Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in NYC
Edinburgh Cast Collection
George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts
Previous GJ post on figural plaster casts

Visualizing the Mythic Image

A friend of mine, who asked to remain anonymous, suggested that I pose the following question to you:

"Would people in a traditional, non-Western culture visualize a mythic creature from their legends in a more "realistic," or a more stylized way?"

The question is not how an artist from that culture would portray the creature using their traditional art idiom, but rather how the majority of people in that culture would actually visualize it in their mind's eye.

My friend included a series of images of eagles to frame the question. Everyone presumably sees an actual eagle with a similar set of biological eyes, but eyes are not like cameras, and the mind begins shaping the image even in the act of seeing. 

What becomes of that person's mental image of the eagle when it is shaped by memory, imagination, stories, and the exposure to art? When he or she hears the Eagle character mentioned in a folktale, what form does that image take in their mind's eye?

If we start by looking at art, there's a lot of variation in the degree of abstraction, even among traditional cultures. The animals in the Lascaux caves have anatomy that is carefully observed and described, despite its simplification. Other art styles like Aboriginal Australian and Native American petroglyphs are very abstract.

Growing up in our times, our imaginations are influenced by a kaleidoscope of comics, animation, movies, illustration, and the Western obsession with realism. 

A set of related questions emerges. Would a person who has never seen a photograph recognize the eagle in the photographic image more readily than they would in their culture's traditional representation? How does a person's imagination of their mythic beings change once they have been exposed to photography and other art styles? 

Is abstraction or stylization more psychologically realistic? Even to our modern eyes, accustomed to photographic realism, the abstract image sometimes telegraphs its meaning more directly:

Finally, let's apply this thinking to a practical problem. Supposing there were a certain culture with a rich oral tradition but very little visual art and no exposure to worldwide art traditions. If a contemporary artist was given the assignment of painting a mural to represent their myths, how should he or she try to depict it? 

(Example above: When John Singer Sargent was asked to paint the murals in Boston to visualize ancient stories, he could have painted them naturalistically, but instead, he drew upon the styles of Assyrian, Medieval, Egyptian, and Greek art.)

Should it be painted "realistically" according to the artist's own sensibilities, or should it be stylized to better represent how that culture might have imagined the creatures of that story? 

Terence Cuneo's Railroad Art

RAILWAY ARTIST

(Video link) Terence Cuneo (1907-1996) was a British artist known for his paintings of railroads. In this 1960 video we see him at work sketching a train engine from astride a railroad track, while a vigilant assistant keeps an eye out for oncoming trains.

"Apart from being a top-flight artist," the announcer says, "Cuneo is also a practical man, which is a distinct asset when he wants to get an engine into the position he wants." Cuneo then climbs aboard the engine and drives it down the track.

The clip ends with Cuneo showing his finished canvas to the railroad men themselves and inviting their criticism.

Terence Cuneo on Wikipedia
Addendum: Cuneo was also famous for hiding mice in his paintings. VIDEO

The Making of "Watercolor Warriors"

What would a reality show like "Watercolor Warriors" be without a behind-the-scenes special feature?


(Video link) Here's a clip that didn't make it into the final production.

At the Watercolor Warriors studio, we're always pushing the technical envelope to give you those sophisticated shots, like those slowly drifting tracking shots that you see in the high class productions. But as you can see, we're on a budget and we're working out the bugs.

The biggest challenge is that the production team consists entirely of me. Besides painting, I'm also trying to multi-task as director, cameraman, audio recorder, and editor, since Jeanette would rather just keep life simple and just paint.
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See the Watercolor Warriors episode "Bees, Rain, and Wind" on the blog or on YouTube

Watercolor Warriors

(Direct link to video) Painting outdoors with watercolor is a tough challenge, even for highly trained professionals. In this episode Jeanette and I square off against dangerous wasps, rain, and wind in an attempt to paint an abandoned farm tractor.

Tools: Schmincke Watercolor Pocket Set , Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils, Moleskine Watercolor Notebook, and a 1/4 inch flat watercolor travel brush, Matthews Century Stand , Artist Umbrella and a fridge super magnet (thanks, Steve), shot on a Canon VIXIA.

Check out my other videos or subscribe to the GurneyJourney YouTube channel so you can see new videos before anyone else.

Generating Random Faces

These face-like patterns are what you get if you combine a random polygon generator with A.I. facial recognition software.

Instead of using face recognition software, it would be even more interesting to channel the multiple generation feedback loop in real time through the face-recognition areas of an individual human's brain. Depending on how you set things up, it could be a hallucinatory experience, leading either to kittens, monsters, familiar faces, or maybe Alfred E. Neuman.

Code by Phil McCarthy, Prosthetic Knowledge
via BoingBoing
Previously on GJ: Pareidolia and Apophenia
Abstraction Generator

Portraying Character

Russian portraitist Valentin Serov (1865-1911) once said: “Any human face is so complex and so unique that you can always find in it various traits that are worth portraying, be they good or bad.” 

 

“For my part,” he continued, “each time I appraise a person’s face, I am inspired—you might even say carried away—not by his or her outer aspect, which is often trivial, but by the characterization it can be given on canvas.

"That is why I am accused sometimes of having my portraits look like caricatures.” 

Valentin Serov, Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, 1911. 

Quote is from a new book on Valentin Serov 

Kim Jung Gi

(Video link) This 75-minute time lapse video shows Kim Jung Gi drawing an uber-complex street scene out of his head with no lay-in.

The stream-of-consciousness marker drawing covers two walls. Judging from his change of shirts, it took about three days. It includes flying elephants, motorcycles, and an assortment of farm animals, all drawn from interesting angles.

I got hooked and watched the whole thing, listening to Radiolab and Sidebar podcasts, since the video has no soundtrack. It might be better to watch it on the YouTube page to see the video full size.
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Review of Kim Jung Gi's sketchbooks for sale
Muddy Colors post on Kim Jung Gi's books