After my darks are laid in, I paint a series of vertical lines intersected by horizontals, which are quickly smeared away with paper towels; I go through a roll or two every day. The painting doesn’t even start until I’ve wiped away the whole image a few times. My compositions are constructed by placing thick, muscular paint at the bottom with thinner veiled washes at the top to orient my viewer the same way that they experience the real landscape, with the certainty of foreground under their feet and the eye searching the upper distance. Thicker paint at the edges also creates a framing effect, suggesting a picture within a picture, a lurch from one realm to another. Such conventions are nothing new: look at an Asher Durand composition or a landscape by the Swiss painter Alexandre Calame and you will witness the masterful use of pictorial elements (rocks, trees) arranged in a proscenium that frames a view of distant interior space. When composing, I observe the rule of thirds, which divides the canvas into thirds using two vertical lines and two horizontal lines. They intersect in four places, each one a detonation point of energy in the composition.
With the chassis of my image beginning to take form, I inject a sudden blast of intense, saturated color such as ruby red or teal, what a friend of mine calls “letting out the monkey.” Doing something crazy and random in the beginning will make you less precious later.
Although I work all day, the majority of my time is spent sitting in a battered rocking chair looking at what I’ve done. Office workers across the street from my studio have stopped me in front of my building to say they’ve enjoyed watching me paint, noting how much time I spend backing up and sitting down. Scary, huh? It is important to step back every forty-five seconds to see the entire image. If you don’t have a large enough space (I didn’t for a long time), then take a picture with your phone. Shrinking the image is a good way to spot compositional flaws; my entire subway ride home from the studio is spent looking at paintings on my iPhone. Most smart phones also have a mono feature, which is good for checking values.
Sometimes all the effort in the world won’t fix a dead composition. When that happens, without hesitation, I slice the painting to ribbons with a box cutter, because sometimes a flat line is better than life support.
Day one. Salad tongs and sponges. 2015.
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
—Ray Bradbury
Thick Paint
Anyone who has seen my work knows that I pile the paint on, some areas up to three inches thick. This technique is called impasto. I loathe impasto. Other than Frank Auerbach, I don’t like artists who paint thickly. I’d rather look at a George Tooker than a Chaim Soutine. I am not interested in using color in the service of form but as the form itself. Color and form are inseparable.
In his book Art (1914), Clive Bell wrote, “You cannot conceive a colorless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colors.” Contrary to my reviews, I don’t use thick paint out of passion, energy, emotion, or bravura. I use it to establish spatial orientation; thicker is closer and thinner is farther away. Content is a function of how near or far things appear from your face.
Some painters work to remove any evidence of their hand, while others allow the process to be an integral part of their conceptual framework. Although my facture is painterly, I’ve learned a lot by looking at minimalism. As I stand before an Agnes Martin painting, my physical relationship to and awareness of the space around me is amplified because of the deliberate lack of the artist’s hand; I become aware of my body standing in the room with an object hanging on the wall. My work thrives on such heightened awareness. I’m a minimalist who doesn’t know when to quit. I overemphasize the physicality of my materials to connect the painting to the tactile world that we all occupy. When I throw a fistful of vermillion at the canvas, it splats; if I add thinner, it runs, and one color appears to pass over another because it really does. Think of colors as a pack of playing cards dumped out on a table, a pile of overlapping layers, some visible and others partially concealed. I spend all day stacking color.
I’m obsessed with materials and process, but I don’t like technique. This notion sounds ridiculous because anyone who sees my paintings immediately notices the manner in which I apply paint. However, one way to draw attention away from something is to exaggerate it. As the ventriloquist Otto Petersen, of Otto & George, said, “I exaggerate to clarify.” Repetition also clarifies. I’ve always admired arduous, repetitive jobs such as those of traveling salespeople, lounge comedians, or birthday party magicians, who do the same gig three times a day, 360 days a year, perfecting their moves to the point of effortless delivery without a trace of technique. When I washed pots in restaurant kitchens, I took masochistic pleasure in the monotony: dirty pots went in, clean ones came out, and one thing became another through clear intention.
The reason I cultivate a rigorous work ethic and am prolific is to become so fluent with my materials that I can just show up and be with paint. Bob Dylan said, “I want to play guitar without tricks.” Picasso spoke of possessing so much technique that it vanished. An artist should never let the audience know how much technique he or she possesses because, if an artist is truly communicating, the content is automatically built into the process; the artist uses precisely enough technique to tell the truth, no more, no less. Practice constantly so you can develop such fine muscle memory that you don’t think while you paint. Practice to lose technique instead of acquire it. When the effortless appears difficult, it’s entertainment. When the difficult appears effortless, it’s art.
H.I.T.
Here is a helpful acronym to keep in mind as you paint: H.I.T.
Hue: Is it warm or cool?
Blues, violets, greens, and raw umber are cool. Reds, yellows, oranges, siennas, and burnt umber are warm. However, such categories are not always intuitive. For instance, cerulean blue is cool because it is closer to green, while ultramarine blue is warm because it has red in it. Alizarin crimson is cool red, cadmium red is warm, and lemon yellow is cooler than cadmium yellow light because it is closer to green. As Hans Hofmann demonstrated, warm colors appear to advance, while cool colors recede.
Intensity: Is it bright or dull?
Think of intensity as a sponge. When the sponge is full of liquid, it is of the highest intensity. Squeezing the sponge drains the intensity. Color straight from the tube is of the highest intensity. Tinting with white will lighten the value but dull the intensity. The trick is being cognizant of value and intensity at the same time.
Tone (or value): Is it light or dark?
Tinting with white or shading with black lightens or darkens the value. Titanium white is the most opaque and brightest white, while zinc white is semitransparent and dries more slowly. Use white sparingly, especially in the beginning, as it can make color chalky and lifeless. Try substituting other opaque lights like flesh pink, Naples yellow, or royal blue for white. Placing the lightest light next to the darkest dark creates a sense of drama and sculpture, while gradations of value feel calm and atmospheric.
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
—Henri Matisse
Light
Hans Hofmann said, “In nature light creates color; in painting color creates light.” I learned to render light by drawing moss-draped live oak trees in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Everything a painter needs—direct and reflected light, shadow, volume, and line—is bundled under their ancient canopies. Sunlight scatters and drips like glowing, melting desserts when it passes through Spanish moss, and drawing it taught me how to objectify light.
In oil painting, luminosity can be suggested by adding or removing pigment. For instance, begin with washes of transparent color (alizarin crimson, Indian yellow, ultramarine blue, etc.) mixed with Gamsol thinner over white gessoed canvas. After fifteen minutes, remove some of the wash with a clean rag. Wiping into transparent color is a gor
geous way to suggest glow. Conversely, adding layers of saturated opaque color will give a painting the appearance of being lit from within. The thicker the paint, the brighter the color. To suggest light in painting, you must also recognize the absence of it. Shade is not the absence of light but a different kind of light; Claude Monet showed us that shadows can be full of color and dimension.
Geography plays a fundamental role in an artist’s treatment of light and dark. For example, East Coast light is moist and silvery, hues of cobalt blue, pewter, and mollusk. Southwest light is bright and dry, the color of egg yolk and raspberry. Willem de Kooning’s transitions are deliquescent compared to Karl Benjamin’s crispness because they were painted in different lights. Benjamin lived and worked his entire career in Claremont, CA, near Los Angeles. His hard-edged, exquisitely colored compositions are rinsed in sharp desert light as a reaction to the gestural, smoke-mirled vernacular of the New York School with its East Coast humidity. In the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, American Scene painters such as Dewey Albinson, Floyd Hopper, Henry Keller, Edna Reindel, and Charles Burchfield also made significant contributions to the treatment of light with their broad skies, long shadows, and crisp lines.
Painters must concern themselves with the laws of two lights: real and depicted. Is your painting about the light or the thing being lit? Comparing two contemporaries, such as Winslow Homer and Claude Monet, reveals two distinct types of pictorial light. Homer’s luminosity is a product of direct observation; he paints objects that have mass and cast shadows. Form is revealed through dark and light modeling, symbolic of the clear morality of a young nation. In France, Monet also began with direct observation but used light not to discover form but obliterate it in favor of a flatter, more democratic picture plane constituted of rapid, staccato brushstrokes.
The treatment of light in nineteenth- and twentieth- century American painting by artists such as Frank Benson, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Rembrandt Peale was concerned with identifying and rendering the observable world, while the French Impressionists explored light’s optical effects, commenting less on what we see than on how we see. Most painters use light in both ways; witness the work of Giorgio Morandi, whose paintings seem to have light without luminosity. He doesn’t rely on light to find form but stacks brushstrokes like strips of masking tape until light becomes form. Morandi isn’t painting a picture of things, but constructing a thing standing in for a picture, thus granting us access to something far more provocative: reality.
Compress and Release
Squeeze one end of a water balloon, and the opposite end will bulge. This is a good way to think about pictorial space. Tension can’t exist without release. When I apply color, I ask, Is it squeezing or bulging? The water-balloon analogy dovetails with Hans Hofmann’s theory of push and pull, in which objects appear to advance when we focus on them, while those in the periphery recede, just as warm colors appear close and cool tones farther away. As I paint, I try to imagine each greasy brushstroke as a three-dimensional object, like a fistful of cake icing. What would the back of the stroke look like? What happens when you stack one on top of another? The viewer sees just the front of a brushstroke on a flat surface, but the painter has to consider all sides, as if standing inside the picture looking out.
The only truth a painter possesses is the flat picture plane; it is the great democratizer, the glorious limitation that joins all of us who dream of light where there is darkness and space where there is flatness. When you observe an artist close one eye and hold out his or her thumb, you are witnessing a violent, destructive act; a Category-5 hurricane, a bull shark attack, and the overthrow of a government all wrapped in a simple gesture that blasts the painter from the three- dimensional world into the two-dimensional plane. The laws of nature are bent to fit the laws of art. Every painting bears the evidence of destructive behavior and violent thought, a breaking down of one thing to expose another. You have to kill something to make something.
Mediums
I spend a great deal of time experimenting with mediums to slow down or speed up drying, and much of my day is spent rotating paintings around the room depending on at what rate I want them to dry. My medium of choice is three parts Galkyd and one part walnut oil. Walnut oil doesn’t yellow like poppy and linseed, but, like many nut oils, can go rancid if not refrigerated; it also dries with a brilliant gloss, which keeps colors rich and saturated. Galkyd is a synthetic alkyd resin made by Gamblin Artists Colors that adds viscosity and speeds up drying time. Other siccatives include Japan dryer and copal. I like to mix Galkyd and paint on a palette. Then I let it sit for ten minutes before scraping the semi-dried color up with a knife and applying it directly to the canvas. The resulting color has a sticky, skidding quality that arrests the eye.
When I want to slow drying time further, I add extra walnut oil or put a sheet of plastic over the painting to seal it until the following day. Willem de Kooning laid newspapers across wet paintings as insulation from moving air. Peeling off the paper sometimes left residual texts and photographs, which became secondary images. I love how self-generative de Kooning’s paintings are, as if they are part of nature itself, growing and evolving.
If there is a color I need the next morning, rubbers are handy. I drop a big load into a condom, tie the end, and go home. Sometimes I’ll saturate a large brush with a dollop of Gamblin’s Neo Megilp, no paint at all, and pass it across the wet paint, dragging everything in its gooey path. Neo Megilp, a contemporary version of Maroger medium, is a silky gel medium that maintains body and increases flow. I also use cold wax medium, which is a soft, translucent wax with a peanut- butter-like consistency and which, when mixed into pigment (70 percent paint to 30 percent wax), creates a stiff, matte quality that is useful for making thick layers of color.
Another way to thicken oil paint is to squeeze out blobs onto sheets of newspaper and wait a couple of hours for the paper to absorb the oil and leave dense biscuits of color. Bottom line: the best way to understand mediums is to try everything and not limit yourself to art supply stores. I’ve mixed oil paint with gasoline, Vaseline, Mazola, pluff mud, Knox unflavored gelatin, salad dressing, dirt, motor oil, blood, and saliva. Yep, it was gross.
Just-spring when the world is mud-lucious . . .
When the world is puddle-wonderful
—e.e. cummings
Glazing
Walter Sickert referred to the question of glazing as “fresh or pickled.” I like pickles. A glaze is a thin layer of transparent color suspended in a medium (linseed oil, Galkyd, Liquin, Neo Megilp, etc.) and applied over a dry surface to create a luminous glow, because light hits the paint surface and bounces back to our eyes through the lens of the glaze like a gel on a theatrical light. Alizarin crimson, quinacridone magenta, ultramarine blue, pthalo green/blue, and Indian yellow are excellent for glazing because they are already transparent; however, any color can be made transparent with enough medium. Before glazing, it is best to let the picture dry for at least a week and then, with a wide, pliable brush, apply thin veils, always ending on a vertical stroke to conceal marks.
Glazing with opposites can also dull colors beautifully. For example, a purple wash over yellow paint will bend toward brown. Conversely, applying a transparent glaze in the same hue, such as Indian yellow over cadmium yellow, perylene red over cadmium red deep, pthalo green over permanent green, or French ultramarine blue over cerulean blue, creates saturated blasts of color that leap off the canvas.
Transitions
I keep a bucket of brushes in my studio specifically designated for transitions, the cheap hardware-store variety that are wide and pliant. When blending, I pass the brush over the pigment once and switch to a clean one; if you hit it a second time, you’ll kill it. My advice is to kill it. That’s how you learn when to stop.
Making convincing transitions in a painting requires being mindful of them in daily life. When I walk New York streets, I pay attention to subtle changes: sidewalks laced with shadows and bla
ck blisters of chewed gum, or kneecaps pressed side by side on a crowded subway. As I descend into a station, I close my eyes to heighten other senses, taking in the smell of industrial cleaner and electricity, the clicking of turnstiles, and the warm breath of an approaching train. Every morning, I take the number two express from 72nd Street to Times Square–42nd Street, bypassing 66th Street– Lincoln Center, 59th Street–Columbus Circle, and 50th Street. As we roar past those local stations, I try to read the billboards that adorn the white-tiled walls, but they flicker by in a prismatic blur. I can recognize partial shapes and colors, but not enough to describe them. Painting is partial recognition. Regardless of whether it is representational or abstract, if your viewer can identify and describe everything in your painting, then something’s wrong. An eye not told what to see sees more.
I’m often asked if events or transitions in my life influence my paintings. How can they not? Everything makes itself apparent at the appropriate time—not only marquee events, such as births and deaths, but the tender moments that we take for granted, such as watching soap bubbles sliding down a baby’s back into milky water, or walking barefoot in the grass on a summer night, or making someone you love laugh really hard. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” The good stuff occurs in the transitions, and art magnifies them; a painting is a compressed version of an entire lifetime. I’m paraphrasing Johnny Carson, who said, “If you’re on television long enough, you’ll end up doing everything you’ve ever done.” Every painting I make taps into everything I’ve ever done, all the places I’ve been, and every person I’ve met along the way. The longer I paint, the richer the soil.
Clear Seeing Place Page 8