Painting a figure wrapped in plastic

(Video link) This video by Robin Eley shows the process of painting a figure draped in plastic cling wrap.

Berlin museum to sideline old masters

The cultural ministers of Berlin's Gemäldegalerie have generated a storm of criticism from art historians and the public as a result of their decision to place in storage one of Europe's great museum collections of traditional paintings, replacing them with a donated collection of fauvism and surrealism.


The 3,000 heritage works include Giotto, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Canaletto, Lucas Cranach, Rogier van der Weyden and Rembrandt. The plan calls for relocating the old masters into a smaller, temporary space, where only a fraction of the works will be accessible to scholars and the public, and where no funding is yet in place to build a new exhibit space.

The Gemäldegalerie's 72-room museum space will be cleared to make room for an offered gift of twentieth century works. The donor, Heiner Pietzsch, who made his fortune in wholesale synthetics, placed the condition that all the works in his bequest must always be on public view.

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Article on the subject by Christian Schlierkamp

Photo from "What to See in Berlin"
Article in the Guardian "Berlin plan for Old Masters to give way to modern art angers historians"
Gemäldegalerie on Wikipedia 
Thanks, Christian!

Matching dappled light to projecting leaves

On a recent sunny day, I noticed this pattern of light and shadow cast across a road. The shadow looked like a piece of dark paper with holes punched out of it.

The circles of dappled light were about three inches in diameter, and they were all of constant size. However some circles were brighter than others.


I looked up to see what was casting the shadow. It was a maple branch 18 feet above the ground. The branch presented a fairly flat projecting surface with a fixed distance from the ground. This is why the circles were the same size.

Typically a tree or a forest presents a variety projecting of surfaces positioned at many different distances from the ground, so the circles or ellipses vary in size and focus. The farther from the ground, the larger—and blurrier—the circles.

I wondered if I could match up the projecting surface of leaves with the pattern on the ground.

It's a pretty close fit, but doesn't match exactly because they aren't shot at exactly opposite angles. At the bottom of the photo on the right you can see the sharp cast shadow of my arms holding up the camera.

Anyway, it's clear that every opening in the leafy surface, regardless of its size or its ragged shape, has its corresponding circle or composite blob of light on the ground.


The branches aren't thick enough to block the sun from that distance, so they disappear completely in the shadow. 

Previously on GJ: Dappled light
More information about natural light effects in my book "Color and Light"

Classic Art Instruction: The Crowd-sourced List

A week or two ago, I shared a list of my favorite classic art instruction books from Dover Publishing. In the comments, I invited you to suggest the classic art instruction books (more than 50 years old) that you thought were particularly helpful. Here's the list you suggested below. The links take you to Amazon pages where you can read more about each title. On the left is a poll. Please vote for your favorite books. You can vote for more than one. An Atlas of Animal Anatomy for Artists by W. Ellenberger et al.  Animation by Preston Blair   Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist by Peck  Bridgman’s Life Drawing by George Bridgman  Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting by John F. Carlson  Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne Constructive Anatomy by George Bridgman   Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis   Creative Perspective for Artists and Illustrators by Ernest Watson   Drawn to Life by Walt Stanchfield Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth  Famous Artist’s Course by various authors Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth by Andrew Loomis  Fun With a Pencil by Andrew Loomis Hawthorne on Painting by Charles Hawthorne Hensche on Painting by John Robichaux How I Make a Picture by Norman Rockwell Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson  Light and Shade by Mrs. Mary P. Merrifield Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure by Edouard Lanteri   Oil Painting Techniques and Materials by Harold Speed   On Drawing Trees and Nature: A Classic Victorian Manual (Dover Art Instruction) On the Art of Drawing by Robert Fawcett Pencil Drawing by Ernest Watson Pencil Pictures by Theodore Kautzky Perspective by Rex Vicat Cole Perspective Made Easy by Ernest Norling Pictorial Composition by Henry Poore Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur L. Guptill Successful Drawing by Andrew Loomis   The Art of Animal Drawing by Ken Hultgren The Artistic Anatomy of Trees by Rex Vicat Cole The Classic Point of View by Kenyon Cox The Human Figure by John Vanderpoel The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides The Painter in Oil by Daniel Parkhurst The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed The Practice of Tempera Painting by Daniel Thompson Twilight of Painting by R. Ives Gammell

Ten Top Tips in International Artist

The upcoming issue of International Artist (August/September #86) has the final feature in my 10-part masterclass on atmospheric effects. I share my ten top tips to keep to keep your color on track.

Also in the same issue is a feature on Petar Meseldžija showing how he painted his recent fantasy painting "The Frost Giants," a report on John Howard Sanden's portraits of George and Laura Bush, and a report by Matthew Innis on the recent Art of the Portrait conference.


I'll be kicking off a new series with the magazine in the following issue.

The Burial Vault

Last Sunday, while my wife sang sacred harp music with Bard College students in the meeting hall, I sat outside nearby painting the burial vault. 

As the shadows flickered across the stones, I could hear the music and words of a song called "Greenwich" drifting out from the chapel.

Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I,
To mourn, and murmur, and repine,
To see the wicked placed on high,
In pride and robes of honor shine! 

But O their end, their dreadful end.
Thy sanctuary taught me so;
On slipp'ry rocks I see them stand,
And fiery billows roll below.

—Words by Isaac Watts, 1719

Bard's sacred harp (Shapenote singing) club is led by Benjamin Bath and is open to all.
Bartlett Burial Vault.
Sacred Harp music on Wikipedia
See and hear a group singing Greenwich 183 on YouTube

Visualizing Sound

Sound propagates outward from its source more like a bubble than a wave, according to John Stuart Reid.

He uses a Cymascope to capture the patterns of sound in a membrane of water, whose behavior is photographed, and, in this case, superimposed over the image of the violinist.

The technique has been used to study the patterns of sound made by birds, elephants, dolphins, and human vowel sounds.
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Gallery of history of Cymascope images

Concertgoer

Here's a sketch I did of a gentleman who was sitting in front of me at a concert.

I loved the way his tendons showed up on the back of his hand, the way his fingers bent slightly backward, and the way the skin of his cheek wrinkled up as he pushed on it.

Of course he didn't hold this pose for the whole time, but he returned to it a few times through the concert.

Here are the tools I used: Yasutomo Niji Waterbrush, Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils, Moleskine Watercolor Notebook

Part 5: Foliage / Mønsted

It's easy to fall into the tendency to paint foliage in a relatively cursory or generalized way, compared to the way we would paint a figure. If we were to give the same loving artistic attention to a tree or a bunch of leaves that we give to a face or a nude figure, then our foliage painting would take a huge leap forward.

One artist who took such care was Peder Mork Mønsted (Danish 1859-1941). In his long career he painted landscapes of all sorts, and managed to blend painterly handling with conscientious rendering. 

In this foreground detail of the painting above, he observes the character and the color of each leaf, and records how the colors change as the leaves move in and out of shadow.


But a forest is more than the sum of its leaves, or even of its trees. Mønsted improvises a different toolset for the far masses of foliage, generalizing and softening where he needs to. 


Improvisation and resourcefulness is vital to painting foliage. The tools and methods that we learn from painting casts or figures in the academy don't really serve us outdoors as we face the changefulness and immateriality of nature.

As we've seen in this series, complete imitation of every leaf in a lush landscape is probably not possible or even desirable, nor perhaps is the other extreme of ultra-softness and generalization. One can be faithful to the character of the plant without copying or imitating every detail. Instead, nature must be re-created or "represented" in paint on the canvas.

Asher B. Durand, in his influential 1855 essays "Letters on Landscape Painting" draws this very distinction between imitation and representation. When painting a tree, he says, “direct imitation is impossible." Instead the artist should strive to “represent this foliage in every essential characteristic, without defining the forms of individual leaves. To do this, some analysis of its structure is necessary.”

There's more to say about structure, but I'll save that for future posts.
More on Mønsted on Lines and Colors
Full text of Letters on Landscape Painting in The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand

The Artistic Anatomy of Trees (Dover Art Instruction)
More on leaves and foliage in my book Color and Light, which you can get signed here.

Foliage Series
Part 1: Painting Tools

Part 2: Every Leaf
Part 3: Super Soft
Part 4: Forest Interiors
Part 5: Monsted
Plus check out the earlier posts on GJ:
Transmitted Light
Transparency of foliage
Painting Snyder Swamp (video)