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Attic Scene in Allentown

A few days ago, Jeanette and I stopped in Allentown, Pennsylvania for a slide lecture that I gave at the art museum there.


We also visited the exhibition of National Geographic artwork. I blogged more about the show in a previous post.

In 1988, in honor of its centennial, National Geographic asked me to create a painting to express the magazine’s legacy of adventure and discovery. Instead of portraying some bold explorer, I thought it would be fun to show something more poignant and homespun—an old man looking back on his life and his world through the pages of old magazines.


In the exhibit, my painting hangs alongside the preliminary sketches, letters, and photos that went into its creation.

The painting shows an old man and his grandson in an attic, surrounded by the mementos of the man’s life: a military uniform, an old family photo, and a ship clock. I searched out all those items from real attics in my hometown and asked two friends to pose.


In early concepts for the painting, the man sat all by himself. The idea didn’t quite work. It was depressing because the man looked lonely, despite the cat rubbing against his leg.

Here’s a small early charcoal study. I did several of these, and a few small color sketches in oil. I also drew a full-size charcoal comp, which appears alongside the finished painting.

Of course comparisons to Norman Rockwell are inevitable with a subject like this. His work comes to mind whenever you paint American characters in a narrative setting. I love Rockwell’s work, but I wanted to make a picture that was authentic and not derivative, so I closed all my books on him while I was working on this piece and tried to find my answers in real life.


The finished painting is in oil, 24x36 inches. This detail shows the cool light from the window and the warm illumination bouncing back from the attic space. I tried to capture the boy’s faraway expression, as if the magazine and his grandfather’s memories were taking him to another world.

Installation photos courtesy Allentown Art Museum. For any museum interested in booking "National Geographic: The Art of Exploration," contact Mary Dawson at the Norman Rockwell Museum at mdawson@nrm.org.

Tomorrow: More Art By Committee

Sketchbook Scrapbook

Why leave the endpapers of your sketchbook blank when you can fill them with ticket stubs?


Life, you might say, consists of all the dull moments suspended between the Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Hot Rod Motor Jam, and Flubber.

Healing Colors

Can certain colors—or certain groupings of colors—promote well-being, or even healing?


I created this montage of photo samples by snipping random bits from the pages of a single catalog from the mid 1990s called the Red Rose Collection, consisting of products designed to promote inner peace.


The photographer and graphic designer were evidently working from a controlled chart of colors, which I’ve graphed with the color wheel mask, above. The color scheme includes violets, greens, and cool reds, but avoids hot reds and yellows.

An entire field of alternative medicine called color therapy or chromotherapy has grown up around the belief that colors have specific therapeutic properties on the mind and body.


These practices are rooted in very old beliefs of the Ayurveda in India, and in ancient Egypt, where rooms were built with colored glass windows to promote effects on the body. In China, specific colors were associated with certain organs of the body.

In various practices of color therapy, patients observe colors through special viewers, or colors are applied to accupoints on the body, using gemstones, candles, prisms, penlights, colored fabrics, or tinted glass.


Although not all systems of color therapy agree on the associations of each color, most agree that red signifies blood and the base passions, including anger and power. Orange is associated with warmth, appetite and energy, followed by yellow, which represents the energy of the sun, and which is used for glandular problems.


These bright, warm colors are also almost univerally used by advertisers to sell fast food and soda pop.


The spectrum of colors continues through green, blue, indigo, and violet, moving more and more toward states of serenity and meditation.

This progression corresponds to the ascending chakras of yogic practice, and can be charted on the body by superimposing the progression of hues on each of the seven spiritual centers of the body.

The association of spectral color with chakra centers has recently been taken up by mainstream marketers, even appearing on the website of major interior paint manufacturers. (Link).

Critics of chromotherapy argue that these designations are nothing more than pseudoscience, because the health benefits can’t be proven by clinical tests. If the contemplation of certain colors has any effect on a patient’s recovery, they would argue, it’s simply due to the placebo effect.

To some extent, the color symbolism of catalogs like the Red Rose Collection owes as much to fads and fashions as it does to physiological response. Recent catalogs, like Gaiam Harmony have a rather different palette than we would have seen ten years ago; these days health-promoting catalogs tend to sport golds, dull olives, and venetian reds.

I haven’t made my mind up about all this, and would be curious to learn more. In any event, I believe that we artists, designers, and photographers should remain open to the general idea that color can affect us at a physiological level. Color can stimulate us, and it can soothe us—not just psychologically and emotionally, but at even deeper levels.

We should fine-tune our awareness of how we are influenced by the colors around us—not isolated individual colors, but combinations of colors.

Further reading
Interior decoration and associated chakras, Link
More on associations of each color, Link
Outline of contemporary theories and equipment, Link

Ranger Rick, April 2008

The April issue of Ranger Rick magazine devotes eight pages to a portfolio from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, exploring how dinosaurs help humans and vice versa. There's also a page with an exclusive feature: "Where did the idea for Dinotopia come from, anyway?"

Ranger Rick is my favorite nature magazine, and this issue has plenty of other fun stuff, like advice on how to properly skip a stone, catch a frog, make a dandelion chain, and whistle with a blade of grass. Do any of those things, and you'll know that spring is here at last.

Gouache on Tone Paper

Most people think of tone paper as a vehicle for figure drawing with charcoal and white chalk. But it’s also a great base for landscape sketches in gouache. Here’s an example of a view of Prescott, Arizona, painted a while ago ago in opaque watercolors.

The trees in the lower right were scrubbed in with a big bristle brush, and the sky was painted thinly with white gouache. I laid down the semi-opaque ribbons of roadways with a white nylon flat, and came back with whiter touches for the cars and lines. At the end I placed just a couple of red accents in the central area.

The paper wasn’t a typical drawing paper, but rather a heavyweight stock that I got from a limited edition publisher. It’s thick enough that a sheet can stand up without buckling over. I had Kinko's bind up a sketchbook out of the stuff.

There must be commercial tone paper pads that have similar paper which can take a little water without buckling. Maybe someone can suggest sources in the comments.

Rainy Alley

Yesterday was a steady downpour, but I had most of the day free before the Malaprops bookstore signing in Asheville, so I headed out to the nearby town of Black Mountain in search of a non-touristy motif.


I found an alley with a good view of the backs of the shops. There was also a convenient public restroom close by—something to factor in after several cups of coffee that morning. Jeanette wisely opted for a ballpoint pen sketch from inside the car.

I figured I had only two hours before I would be completely drenched.


Here’s how the painting looked after a quick block-in. I’m using a method recommended by Richard Schmid, where you start a tight rendering in one area of the picture, and work the area of finish across the canvas, rather than moving the whole picture loosely along.


The wind was starting to pick up, knocking over the umbrella every time I took my foot off the C-stand. By the time I had to pack up, the paint tubes were swimming in water that had collected inside the box. The lower areas of the picture are just blocked in with tone, with no attempt at rendering.


By two-thirty in the afternoon, as the thunder and lightning started up, we staggered into the Dripolator coffee shop, my old raincoat covered equally in rain and paint.

Sargent at Biltmore

It would be natural to assume that when John Singer Sargent painted a portrait, he had everything his way. After all, he was the most sought-after portrait artist in the world. You’d think he could set everything up exactly the way he wanted it.

But in fact he often had to overcome huge obstacles. His resourcefulness under trying conditions makes his accomplishments all the more admirable.


On Tuesday we visited the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the sumptuous mansion of American millionaire George Vanderbilt, above.

In 1895, at the height of his powers, Sargent came to Biltmore at the invitation of Mr. Vanderbilt to paint a full-length portrait of Biltmore’s landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.


But Olmsted was not in good shape. He had been injured in a carriage accident in Central Park, and was beginning to suffer from dementia. His sons were running his business in New York. His wife was insistent that Sargent paint Olmsted to look healthier than he really appeared. She worried that if he looked weak, it would injure the business.


When Sargent arrived, the estate grounds were a muddy, barren construction site, not the verdant wilderness suggested in the painting. Sargent found some mountain laurel for a very unconventional portrait background, and he depended on one of Olmsted’s sons as a stand-in for the figure.

Sargent also painted Richard Morris Hunt, Biltmore’s architect. Hunt was also in very poor health, and could not stand for long periods. He died later in the same year.


Hunt’s wife also had demands. She insisted that Sargent paint him looking robust and young. It was hard to get Hunt's availability to pose. The trip from New York took a week by train.

The Biltmore itself was still under construction, most of the building covered with scaffolding, so Sargent had to imagine how it would look. Instead of showing the whole building, he used a corner of the structure as a backdrop, just enough to suggest the Gothic revival flavor.

Jeanette and I found the exact spot where Sargent posed Hunt. You can see exactly what Sargent was looking at. He pushed the architecture back a bit to introduce the ornate balustrade at the upper left and the second column at right.

The canvas is almost 8 x 5 feet. It was painted on location, far from the artist’s comfortable studio. Sargent had to travel with his entire setup, and had no photos to fall back on.

Because Hunt couldn’t hold the jaunty pose for long, a surrogate stood in for the body. The head had to be painted in a completely different location. The reason it looks pasted on is because the light on the face is coming from the left, whereas the rest of the picture is lit from the right, as it is in the photo. I don’t know why Sargent set up this contradictory lighting, because it compromises the painting, and keeps it from being as successful as the Olmsted portrait.

Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, Sargent scored two brilliant works, masterpieces of economy of handling and originality of design.

Tomorrow: Rain Work

Business Cards, Illustrated

A restaurant in our hometown long ago established a tradition inviting people to shove their business cards in the cracks between the shingles covering its interior walls. The result was hundreds of cards festooning the walls beside every table.

From time to time I plucked a few of cards at random and stuck them into a sketchbook, wondering what was the secret behind each business. Here are two examples.

Dappled Light

Light coming through trees results in the spotted light we know as dappled light. The painting below is by Ivan Shishkin.


The circular spots of light shining on the ground vary in size depending on how high the canopy is above the ground. A high tree canopy leads to larger circles with softer edges. Below, in this early Albert Bierstadt painting called “Sunlight and Shadow” the effects of dappled light are worked out extremely convincingly.


When bundles of light pass through small spaces between the leaves, each of those spaces act like a pinhole camera. The parcels of light are essentially like conical shapes of illumination radiating from each pinhole in the foliage.


The circles of light touching the ground are actually projections of the disk of the sun. In fact on days with a partial eclipse of the sun, the circles of light will appear as half circles. In the 8x10 inch oil study above, the circles of light on the roof of the shed are about a foot in diameter.

When each cone of light intersects a sloping surface like a wall, it results in an elliptical shape. On a vertical surface parallel to the picture plane, the long axis of that ellipse will always angle back toward the source of the light.

In the detail above from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, the light is coming from the right. The circles become ellipses as the form of the ship's red hull curves away on the left side.

Therefore, ellipses of light projected on a wall in front of us will slope upward to the right only if the sun is also coming from the right, as it is in this photo also.

Apparently N.C. Wyeth was unaware of this principle when he designed this otherwise fine illustration of Ben Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia. The result is an error in lighting. According to the cast shadows from Franklin’s leg and from the tree branch at the bottom of the picture, the light is coming from above and to the right. But the ellipses of light on the wall point impossibly to a light source above and to the left.

Further discussion of dappled light, with photographic examples, on Edward Tufte's website, link.

Tomorrow: Business Cards, Illustrated