Backs of Heads

I sketch a lot when I’m sitting in an audience. As a result, I end up sketching the backs of a lot of heads. It’s not the angle you would usually pick for a portrait.


But that’s OK with me because I’m fascinated with the challenge of trying to capture a personality from that angle.

Tomorrow: Perspective Ink Drawing

Color Gradations

Like a glissando in music, a color gradation moves smoothly from one note to another. Gradations can be very beautiful in purely abstract terms. They take you from one hue to another, or from a light color to a dark color, or from a dull color to a saturated one. Let’s have a look at some examples.

This gradation goes from a dark desaturated blue to a pale desaturated yellow. So it shifts in hue and value, but not very much in saturation.


This one is fairly similar, but it moves from a neutral (or grayed down) dark to a warm light tone, passing through a slightly more saturated oranges in the middle of its range.


Here are three gradated strips of color. The top one changes primarily in hue as it goes quickly away from a dull red-orange and gradually arrives at a saturated blue, without changing very much in value. The middle one shifts darker in value, and the third one moves in and around related pinks and oranges before arriving at a paler pink.


Now that you’ve seen some gradations out of context, let’s see where they came from. The first color strip comes from the right side of this painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Note that the brownish color of the trees also gradates as it moves away from the bright center of light. When two color sets move together, I call it a "parallel gradation."


The second color gradation appears in the sky of this painting by Maxfield Parrish. The stone wall also gradates very slightly from warmer at the top to cooler at the base.

The group of three strips are all taken from a single Gerome painting of Arab horsemen. This painting is full of gradations, many more than I’ve shown. It owes much of its luminosity to the skillful use of changing color.


John Ruskin observed in Modern Painters (1843) that a gradated color has the same relationship to a flat color as a curved line has to a straight one. He noted that a painting of Turner—and that nature herself—contains movement or gradation of color both on the large and the small scale:

“I wish to insist…that nature will not have one line nor color, nor one portion nor atom of space without a change in it. There is not one of her shadows, tints, or lines that is not in a state of perpetual variation.”

Gradations don’t just happen. They take planning. In some future post we’ll explore some techniques for painting gradations and look at ways to use them in composition.

More from the Art Renewal Center database on Friedrich, Parrish, and Gerome.

Tomorrow: Backs of Heads

Matania: Without a Net

Fortunino Matania (1881-1963) was a historical illustrator and war correspondent who worked for the British magazine Sphere and other publications.

He had a wide range of interests, and his command of historical detail was unrivaled. He could render costumes, weapons, architecture, and furnishings with authority and assurance. He was equally at home in ancient Rome, in the Italian Renaissance, or in the world of the Aztecs. But his specialty was World War 1.


His instincts for composition and staging came from years of studying the old masters, yet for the most part he managed to avoid conventional compositions or formulaic poses in favor of a relaxed truthfulness to nature and a vivid sense of action.

But his gifts went beyond the pedantic accuracy of documentary detail. He brought a sympathetic heart to his characters; nowhere is this more evident than the unforgettable painting of a World War I soldier lingering behind on a battle-scarred road to comfort his dying horse.


Matania’s ability to paint realistic tableaus from the pages of history would be impressive enough had he approached his craft in the normal way¬—that is, by producing dozens of preliminary studies, gathering actual props, sketching on location, and posing models.

He was fully capable of this kind of comprehensive method, but he more typically worked under tight deadlines, dispensing altogether with preliminaries, and laid down a final rendering on a white surface, guided by a vision fully formed in his head.


This would have been hard to believe were it not for eyewitnesses like Percy Bradshaw, who watched him paint a complex scene of a [] cavalry soldier breaching a [Belgian] barricade. He started with a blank board with no sketches, and just started rendering. This is like tightrope walking without a net.

Here’s the finished picture. Bradshaw documented the process photographically in stages and published it in a portfolio that stunned Matania’s contemporaries.


Thanks to the work of Stuart Williams and Geoff Gehman, an art book on Matania is in the works from FHD Publishing's Book Palace imprint—with much higher quality reproductions than I’ve shown here. They've pushed back the pub date because they keep finding great new works. It will be worth the wait.

Detailed bio and collection of color illustrations, Link.
More from Book Palace, Link.

Other GurneyJourney posts
Matania at Work
Matania on Mary Ann Talbot (we own these originals)
Matania's Models and Props
 

Tomorrow's Event Rescheduled

Because an incoming snowstorm is expected to dump over a foot of snow between here and Massachusetts tonight and tomorrow, the March 1 Dinotopia booksigning event at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA has been cancelled and now rescheduled for Saturday, April 26 at 11:00 a.m.

The Delicate Approach

Some things that you want to paint are beefy and chunky, and they call for a broad handling with hefty bristle brushes. (Below: detail of a rocky waterfall).


But other forms are feathery and delicate. Think of the leaves of a willow tree, the wispy texture of a cirrus cloud, or the waving tassels of a wheatfield. These call for pianissimo painting.


Here’s the view past my easel. I was standing at the river’s edge near Clonmel, Ireland. It was an unusual vista, with intricate foliage framing a light sky. There were no simple blocky masses of tone. Instead there were lots of slender twigs, and there were layers upon layers of leaves.


After a thinly stated preliminary lay-in, I painted the sky with just a thin veil of pale whites and blues. For the willow leaves (detail, above) I dragged a large bristle brush very lightly over the sky to suggest a lot of leaves without actually painting them one by one. I then added a few small strokes at the edge of the mass using a round sable.

The same is true of the upper fringe of foliage. I blocked the big masses of foliage with a large square brush and then added a fringe of individual leaves with a smaller brush. The goal is to give the impression that you’re seeing more detail than is actually stated.


The final painting is 8x10 inches, painted in one session of about three hours. Most of the detail is hinted at. The key to this kind of painting is to use the biggest brushes you can, but to use them very lightly, dragging and scumbling. Then in a few areas, you can use tiny brushes to suggest the most delicate forms.

P.S. Thanks to Kim Barker of LakeTrees for listing GurneyJourney as the #7 Artist's Blog and thanks to everybody who has linked.

Tomorrow: Matania—Without a Net

Reply Card

Here’s an analog-era tip that still works for emerging illustrators who mail portfolio samples to prospective publishers. Include a self-addressed stamped postcard for the art buyer to give you feedback.

The reply card is pre-printed with three lines, each with a box for the art buyer to check.

The first is the most hopeful. It says, “I have a specific project that your work may be appropriate for. Please contact me.”

The second line says, “I am interested in your work but have no specific project in mind at this time. Please continue sending samples. The type of artwork I’m most interested in is: _________________.”

The third is the polite brush-off: “The enclosed samples do not suit our current needs.”

Nearly 100% of art buyers will send back this reply card, and they appreciate having an easy way to give you feedback. Whichever box they check provides useful information to help you target your next mailing.

Tomorrow: The Delicate Approach

Sketchblog Invitation

Blog reader Jen Zeller commented about the recent post "Art by Committee":

It would be quite awesome if you could offer one of these as a weekly inspiration to us sketch-happy blog followers. I get the feeling many of us would love to give back a bit in this job, but on the other hand, you do spend a lot of valuable time with this blog already, and we don't want to go getting greedy. It's a great idea, makes me remember my school days in biology, where I was constantly poking fun with sketches at something the teacher or our text books said.

Thanks, Jen. Let's try it. Here's an excerpt for you, and anyone else who'd like to create a sketch illustrating the line about the Khalians above. No prizes--not a contest. If you'd like to email me your sketch at jgurneyart@yahoo.com, I'll post the results, along with the sketch from the Art by Committee book, on Wednesday of next week.

Bronze Weathering

If you ever need to invent a bronze sculpture for a fantasy or science fiction painting, here are a couple of little tips to make the weathered surface more convincing.

I painted this oil study from observation to study how actual bronze surfaces weather. Note how the upfacing planes of the hat brim, the lapel, and the forehead are all oxidized to a light blue-green color.


The hollows and the downfacing planes weather in a different way as this photo shows. Instead of being entirely covered with a light blue-green oxidation, the downward planes tend to be darker and browner. This is because the downfacing planes are exposed to less rainwater. The top of the ball is also shielded from rain, and lacks oxidation. Wherever the planes face downward, the water is forced to flow in fixed rivulets. Each rivulet then becomes a line of oxidation.


You can play with this effect. This bronze head from the title page of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara was entirely invented. Along the cheeks the rivulets almost look like the path of tears.


If the statue is in a public area, projecting forms are often buffed to a golden sheen from contact with the hands (or hides) of passersby.

As the rainwater drains off the statue, the dissolved oxides leave stains on the white marble below.

Tomorrow: Reply Card

Plein Air Ancestors

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently remodeled its display of 19th century painting. The curators have brought a lot of gems out of storage and put them on permanent display in the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries.

Among the highlights are four rooms with dozens of oil studies painted outdoors by the pioneers of plein-air painting in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Most of these artists were northern Europeans who flocked to Italy for the warmth and the golden light.


Here’s a stormy landscape near Rome, circa 1800, painted by Simon Denis (1755-1813). He was working quickly to capture a fleeting rainbow effect. His work preceded the era of photography, the Impressionists, the Hudson River School, and even Constable and Corot.

Denis was painting four decades before the invention of collapsible paint tubes. He had to either grind his pigments on location or carry prepared paints in pigs’ bladders obtained from the butcher.

Here is a view from the Quirinal Hill in Rome, 1800, also by Denis. He carefully rendered the distant town and the central rooftops. I’m guessing that he was working from the view out of his hotel window, and that he ran out of time.


The alley at right is unfinished, which gives a glimpse into his method. He blocked in the big planes first and probably intended to add windows and other details later.


Antoine Xavier Gabriel de Gazeau (French, 1801–1881), painted this on-the-spot study of the Gate to the Temple of Luxor in 1836. Drifting sand covers the collossal figures to chest height.


At the top of the building at right you can see his transparent block-in, with the lower half of the wall mostly covered with a semi-opaque second layer. I would speculate that this was painted in two sittings of about two hours each.

These paintings look like they were painted yesterday. One of the remarkable qualities of plein air work is that it escapes the conventional formulas of the artist’s own time. It takes every fiber of concentration to capture what you see when you’re face-to-face with nature. All the compositional formulas go out the window.


The Metropolitan Museum has brought a lot of other realist paintings back into the light, giving a much more balanced view of 19th century painting. There are paintings by Gerome, Repin, Leighton, Sorolla, Mucha, Bouguereau, and Bastien-Lepage. All these rooms were crowded and buzzing with energy and interest. At last the tide is turning. Thank you, Drue Heinz, Phillipe de Montebello and the Met curators!

Metropolitan Museum’s press release about the new installations. Link.
New York Times coverage, Link.
Article by A. Malafronte on the history of plein air painting, Link

Tomorrow: Bronze Weathering

More Art By Committee