Scumbling the Lights

Here’s a painting exercise that really works well with people who are using oils for the first time.

1. Starting with gray-brown chipboard, do a careful pencil drawing of the model about 22 inches high. The model should be lit with a single clear light source.

2. Seal the drawing with shellac. The shellac should be brushed on and squeegeed off with a piece of cardboard.

3. Squeeze some titanium white oil paint onto some blotter paper, or other absorbent paper to remove excess oil.

4. Using a bristle brush, scumble the white paint only in the areas of the form that are touched by light. Make the paint thin for the darker halftones and thicker and whiter for the highlights.

5. Leave the shadows untouched with paint. The result should be a photographic look, with an attention to variations in the light.

This exercise was taught at Art Center College of Design by the instructor Paul Souza. Mr. Souza studied with Millard Sheets and Frederick Taubes and died in 2007 at age 89.

Victorian Painting Exhibition

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington is currently hosting a fine collection of 60 Victorian paintings from the Royal Holloway Collection at the University of London. The exhibition will continue through April 12.



The paintings include rural genre, animal painting, marines, landscapes, and historical scenes, like the The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875, by Edwin Longsden Long (1829-1891). Many of the paintings are driven by storytelling and an awareness of the social conditions of Victorian Britain.



When we visited the exhibit, museum goers were electrified by the narrative aspect of the paintings to the extent that spontaneous conversations sprung up between delighted strangers. The Railway Station by William Powell Frith (1819-1909), above, is so full of as many intriguing subplots as a novel by Dickens. I never appreciated this painting from small reproductions. Bring your kids; they will love the stories.

The April issue of Fine Art Connoisseur has a feature article on the collection written by Tim Barringer.

The exhibit will tour extensively through the USA:
The Yale Center for British Art, May 7 - July 26, 2009.
Brigham Young University Museum of Art, August 15 - October 25, 2009.
Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach FL, March 12 - April 18, 2010.
Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Palo Alto, CA, May 19 - July 25, 2010.
Fresno Metropolitan Museum, CA, November 20, 2010- January 30, 2011.
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, February 18 - May 1, 2010.

Charley Parker of the blog "Lines and Colors" also covered the show: link.

The Saint John’s Bible Project

The Saint John’s Bible is the first hand-lettered and hand-illuminated bible commissioned since the invention of the printing press five centuries ago.

The Bible is being written with feather quills on lambskin vellum. The final work, dubbed the “Sistine Chapel of Calligraphy” will require 1100 pages of lambskin.

The project has involved the talents of many artists and calligraphers, spearheaded by by Donald Jackson, working with a team of master calligraphers in a scriptorium in Wales. The illuminations range from decorated capitals to full-page botanical drawings, made with hand-ground inks and gold leaf.

Far from being a revival of historical styles, the design of the book reflects a contemporary and eclectic vision. The project was commissioned about ten years ago, but it is not finished yet. As each section is completed, a full-color printed facsimile becomes available for sale. The last installments, expected in 2010, are the Historical Books and Letters and Revelation.
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Wikipedia article, link.
Official website, link.
Catholic News Service article, link.
Photo courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, link.

Plein Air People

There’s no rule that you have to paint only landscapes or cityscapes when you’re outdoors with your oil kit. You can paint people, too.

French academic painter Jehan-Georges Vibert executed this 9x14 inch oil study called “At the Corrida” outdoors at a sporting event in 1875. Evidently he painted each figure spontaneously as they struck momentary poses.

Click to enlarge. There's a man leaning over the railing, cheering, and three different women holding up their fans to shield their faces from the sun. Each is a study in character, each sketched from candid subjects.

The piece shows signs of being painted in a slotted box, a typical plein air set-up from the time. The study was probably finished out to the edges later.

See 29 images by Vibert at Art Renewal Center, link.

Botanical Illustration at Denver

I'm at the Denver Botanic Gardens today, doing a workshop on water-soluble colored pencils.

The Denver Botanic Gardens one of America's most extensive botanic gardens. The garden headquarters, which are currently being extensively renovated, also hosts a certificate program for botanical art and illustration.

Students who enroll in the program get a chance to study watercolor, pen-and-ink, scratchboard, colored pencil, and other techniques, as well as botanical science. For more information, visit the page on the DBG site, link., or the Botanical Illustration Blog, link.



The picture above is from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time. It's painted in oil on illustration board. The pencil drawing was sealed first with acrylic matte medium.

Denver Event Tonight

If you live in Colorado, I hope you can come to the event tonight.

From the Denver Botanic Gardens blog: "Denver Botanic Gardens’ Botanical Illustration program brings James Gurney here for “Dinotopia: Behind the Scenes” on Thursday, March 5 at 6:30 p.m. Registration is $10 for members and $13 for non-members." More information here.

Montgomery College

Painting teacher Ed Ahlstrom of Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland had to solve a problem: How do you manage a workroom full of more than 20 student easels?

People were tripping on them, and the heavy easels were falling over and hitting other students on the head.

He invested in a number of aluminum Stanrite easels, which are light enough to pick up with one hand. He attached a hook to the top of each easel. Then he built a storage frame in the corner of the room with a long bar where all the easels could hang together out of the way. The rack is visible behind us.

Palettes were also a problem. How do you store dozens of fully-loaded palettes? He built a special storage cabinet with slots for the rectangular plate-glass palettes. Each student writes his or her name on a piece of tape on the edge of their palette, which then slides into a numbered slot.

Taped beneath each glass palette was a gray piece of paper with a pre-printed gray scale and circles to guide the placement of the paints.

A fireproof cabinet houses the brush washers, another invention of Professor Ahlstrom. The students make the brush washers themselves out of coffee cans with lids.

At the bottom of each coffee can is a brush-scrubber made out of a 5-inch-square piece of ¼ inch gauge hardware cloth. A 1.25 inch notch is cut out of each corner so that the flaps can be folded down.

During the warm weather months, Mr. Ahlberg takes his students outdoors to paint en plein air. “We go from sunny greens to the dusty tones of autumn,” he said. Mr. Ahlstrom himself paints outdoors nearly year round (below), enjoying the colors of December in this work "Strawberry Field."

The art department has a fully-equipped jewelry shop and a graphic arts lab. “We’re one of the few schools that teaches stone lithography,” he said.

A separate building houses the communications arts department. Illustration department chairperson Martha Vaughan showed us the gallery, the computer rooms, and a room full of drawing tables.

Montgomery is a community college art program, with many hard-working commuter students who often hold down other jobs. It’s a two-year program; the students move on to many of the other art schools that have been profiled on GurneyJourney.

Montgomery College gives them a good grounding in traditional skills, and vital contact with art mentors who equip them with practical knowledge that they can use in their life work.
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Ed Ahlstrom’s website, link.

Art Department – Rockville, link.

Martha Vaughan's Communications Arts Technologies Department, Rockville, link.

Behind the Scenes at Gurney Journey

Several of you have asked what goes into the making of this blog. How is it possible to do all those groundbreaking, authoritative posts on a daily basis?

Of course it would be impossible without the help of my production staff, so I thought I’d introduce them to you.

Here’s Clifton, our Art Historian and Image Sleuth. He is an expert on obsolete traditions and hot new trends, which in the art field are one in the same.


Jonathan is our Writer. I keep telling him to keep it brief, cut out adjectives, and eschew obfuscation.

Donna, on the right, is Manager of Comments and Analytics. She tracks reader response and compiles the weekly Boredom Index to remind me which posts fell flat.

Margie, on the left is in charge of Blog Revenue. Or I should say "was in charge." Because of the economic downturn, I had to let her go last week, so she's sniffing around for a new job.

That’s about it. I don’t do much on this blog, just let it run itself.

Beaux-Arts Architecture

Architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris studied the proportions and the ornament of Greek and Roman buildings, and they became masters at rendering them in ink and watercolor.

The winners of of the Prix de Rome competition were sent to Rome at government expense to do extensive studies of famous monuments. They periodically sent back drawings showing ornamental details, reconstructed facades, or perspective scenes of famous vistas, like the Forum or the Acropolis.



Artists adhered to particular conventions for representing architectural forms. The light had to come from the left at a 45-degree angle. Values lightened systematically as they went back in space. (Above: Constant Moyaux, Below: Normand, 1852)

Students developed concepts in relatively loose sketches. Then they began the presentation drawings in line, usually in grayed-down India ink, with a series of very light washes of tone to build up the modeling gradually so that the tones seemed to reside in the paper rather than being superimposed over it.
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There’s an affordable book from Dover that reprints in black and white a famous set of prints assembled by Hector d’Espouy, link.
Wikipedia on Beaux-Arts Architecture, link.

Giant Spider in Liverpool

The people who brought us the street theater marvel of the Sultan's Elephant recently unveiled a new miracle: a giant spider that visited Liverpool. The response was not fear, but love. (Thanks, Jason!)

More about artistic director François Delarozière and his theatrical machines here.