I have an inexhaustible interest in painting and have spent years tempering my enthusiasm in conversations, aware that I could become like the photographer who happily chatters about f stop and bokeh or the gardener who delights in discussing compost. Fascinating topics, but definitely niche and capable of clearing a room. Bizarre as it may seem, not everyone wants to hear about my struggle to find the perfect blue or how my interest in highlights has changed over the years.

So it was a rare and delicious experience to talk about those things and more with Simon Renshaw of the Painting Insights Podcast. Like me, he’s someone for whom pigments and process are endlessly fascinating and going into detail about them is our idea of a perfect conversation. (Simon makes his own paint from minerals that he grinds himself. He’s my kind of guy.)

I’ve enjoyed the Painting Insights podcast for quite a while now because it focuses on in-depth explorations of the stuff that matters so much to painters but isn’t discussed much in art books: pigments and process. Though I have many image-rich books about my favourite artists, they tend to be filled with critical essays discussing how political events, socioeconomics, or the artists’ health and family situations affected their lives and careers; not how they made their paintings. Academic essays like this do nothing for me.

I don’t want to know about, say, Van Gogh’s personal life; I want to know about how he made his extraordinary colour decisions. Discovering the fact that he used coloured strands of wool to test individual colours’ effects next to each other was meaningful for me in a way that none of the stories about his tragic, poverty-ridden life were because, unlike Van Gogh’s personal life, this bit of practical information is something that can guide me as a painter and an art appreciator.

Since I learned about the wool, I’ve seen Van Gogh’s work in a new light. Now, when I look at his linear, side-by-side marks of contrasting colour, I picture an artist methodically testing colour ideas like a scientist: What happens when I lay this orange beside that cool green? Do my senses thrill to it or does it fall flat and unremarkable? No longer a one-dimensional, tragic figure, I see him as intelligent, creative and resourceful, driven by a desire to make innovative colour interactions on canvas. Van Gogh’s wool gave me an insight into how a working artist approached a common artistic problem.

Artists usually work alone and because of this, art making is hard to observe. In fact, we seldom make anything truly inspired when we’re under observation; the magic just doesn’t happen. That’s why I rely on interviews like the ones I’ve listened to, and participated in, to teach me new tools, colours, and methods. I learn something from every artist interview and sometimes it helps me solve problems in my own work.

Things I’ve learned from the previous Painting Insights interviews that have stuck with me:

Maggie Siner first paints the outline of the rectangle on her unstretched canvas so that she can compose her painting relative to the outlined, four edges of the picture plane. I’ve done this since listening to her and it’s a massive help in composing. Unbelievably so. Try it!

Peter Van Dyck paints his scenes in curved, fish eye effect because that’s actually how our eyes work. Our eyes are spheres and the world conforms to that sphericality when we view it. Our brains are just so good at compensating that they convice us that walls are vertical, not the bowed lines that they actually are. I’ve been aware of the curvature in my periphery ever since.

Joe Gyurcsak’s favourite outdoor palette is white, lemon yellow, raw sienna, alizarin crimson, and cobalt blue. He swears by the beautiful, high key results and I’m looking forward to trying it.

There’s more but you get the idea. Each painter reveals something of their intentions, interests and practise and, occasionally, it’s just the thing that I need to hear.

It’s my hope that there’s something in my interview with Simon that is just the thing that you need to hear.

The audio version of this podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Happy painting!

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Spring has arrived and with it, the white blossoms that I look forward to all year long with weather that’s warm enough for me to paint them outdoors, from life. Bringing white flowers into my studio defeats my purpose which is to learn as much as I can about how sunshine and ambient colour work on light value objects.

I’ve spent a large part of my painting life trying to find the colour and value range that feels right to me for light subjects. Despite studying and copying many high-key masterpieces, I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeed when I turned to my own light subjects and tried to make them feel airy and honest instead of leaden and mannered. A fractional change in value or a slightly off note in temperature, and the magical luminosity doesn’t happen.

Among the painters that I’ve studied often is the brilliant John Singer Sargent. He’s best known as a tonalist, using a broad value range to paint the rich and famous in indoor settings. Those paintings are almost sculptural: cheeks and noses look pinchable and you get a sense of the solidity of bodies under their silks and suits. There’s always colour but, unlike say, Sorolla, it’s not usually the main event.

That’s because indoor lighting doesn’t reveal a lot of colour. You have to get outside, under the blue sky, surrounded by the greens and browns of nature to really see how much of the environment’s colour a light object can hold and to understand the value range of outdoor shadows.

Indoor shadows are generally darker than outdoor’s. Without the abundance of illumination from the sky, you don’t get a lot of reflected light and colour, even if you shine a strong light on your subject. Many many are the light flowers that I’ve set up in the studio under my expensive, bright lamp in an effort to mimic sunlight and equally many are the paintings that only convey light object under bright light instead of light object under the bountiful blessed sun.

I want the sun!

Sargent also wanted the sun. His society sitters commissioned him to showcase their glitz and glamour so he portrayed them in their luxurious homes. But in his private life, Sargent loved to paint outdoors and that’s when colour really made an appearance in his work; because when he was outdoors he could actually see it.

A few years ago I saw “The Black Brook” at the Tate in London. It’s a masterclass in the potential for light value objects to contain abundant colour and to convey sunshine.

The painting glowed on the wall, looking fresh as new and I spent ages studying it to discover how he achieved that sunny effect. In this piece, Sargent blends his usual strong value range with an Impressionist’s interest in light and colour. The brook and distant rocks lean heavily on tonalism’s browns and black but the dress is an Impressionist’s vision, full of colourful shadows and atmosphere. I imagine that the dress was the inspiration for this painting and he didn’t waste his niece’s modelling time on the surroundings, smacking them in as a simple foil for the main event.

Instead of using a large - indoor - value change to separate the dress’ shadow and light, he compressed his values and showed the plane changes mainly through colour and temperature shifts.

In black and white, you can see the close values of the dress and also appreciate the limited number of values that he confined himself to overall. The piece is divided between dark and mid with just a small amount of light in the skirt Those mids and lights are doing the colour work while the darks are simply acting as deep value. They don’t carry much colour but are. instead, a way to pop the figure out as comparatively light.

In this context, the dress seems lighter than it objectively is. Sargent was able to lower the value of the skirt and fill it with colour and it still reads as a light value when compared to the background. A neat trick!

You can see the array of rich warm siennas, ochres and pinks in the sunlit skirt, while the shaded fabric has all of those colours but in smaller amounts. The majority of the bodice is made up of blues and greens, just tinged with the fabric’s natural off-white colours. Along with the small value change, that large temperature change between the warm light and cool shadow gives a sensation of sunlight. It creates the illusion of abundant, colourful light - sky blue and forest green - bouncing around the scene and into the shadows of the dress.

And he nailed the value of that outdoor shadow. If the bodice were any darker, the light on the dress doesn’t feel as bright.

Likewise, if he had used indoor browns to depict the shadow instead of a delicious assortment of cool colours, he’d lose the sense of ambient colour and the figure wouldn’t feel like she was out in the woods. Rather, she’d look as though she were in an interior space.

The fine balance between value and temperature create an illusion that feels honest and right: sunlight, forest, sky and fabric are made tangible on the canvas. And it looks effortless. (I’d say that it was effortless but I know better. Sargent was famous for his relentless pursuit of the appearance of easy perfection, regularly scraping down paintings to tackle them again and again in an effort to make them both more accurate and apparently fresh).

So I look and admire and, most especially, I copy paintings like this one. There is no single way to make sunlight on light value objects but I find the ones that thrill me and try to figure out how they work.

I bought some white peonies and am hoping that the sun comes out today so that I can bring the bouquet outside. Wish me luck!

Happy painting!

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I critique a lot of artwork both in my online workshops and in person. One of the most enjoyable critiquing experiences for me is when I get asked by local art groups to critique their members’ works, en masse, during their evening meeting. Then, it’s just me, 2 easels and a community hall full of artists and their many paintings.

I spend the evening pivoting between the easels as helpers cycle the paintings across them. In an hour and a half, I may talk about 25 or more paintings in all genres and mediums, trying to say something encouraging and constructive about each one. It’s a high-wire experience for me to size up the composition, colour and execution of each piece in a moment, find the things that I think are working well, and then note a change or two that would make the piece even stronger.

By the end of the evening, I’ll have discussed oil, acrylic, watercolour, ink and collage artworks in abstraction, figurative, landscape, cityscape, animal portraits, still life and every other genre imaginable. My eyes are spinning and we’ve all had some lightbulb moments and some good laughs.

What I enjoy most is asking each artist about their work to discover what they hoped to achieve and what motivated the piece in the first place. Paintings are a form of communication between the artist and the viewer and every decisions the artist makes - from subject to composition, colour and brushwork - has an impact on how we perceive their work.

In my paintings, I’m always trying to convey the beauty of light on colour and form but the children-at-play images also communicate the nostalgia I feel for experiences from my own childhood. Annual family vacations to sunny places by the sea are wonderful memories for me, My parents were uncharacteristically relaxed, we ate restaurant food, watched novel TV shows when our sunburns kept us indoors (so many channels!), and bought shell necklaces and bright clothing that were too exotic to wear back home. Every beach painting that I make is an effort to express the sunshine and ease of those vacations.

So when I talk to the artists about their work, I’m trying to get a sense of the experiences and ideas that they’re trying to transmit; what concepts they’re exploring. For example: a painting of a deteriorating barn in a field could be the vehicle for saying something about desolation and decay or, if the artist has made features of the green landscape visible through empty windows and an open doorway, the image could be conveying the impermanence of human achievements and the return of nature. A shaft of sunlight illuminating rough walls could show us the surprising beauty to be found in unpromising places or the painting could be a formal exploration of man-made shapes contrasting with natural forms. There are endless possible interpretations for a simple image and I want to hear from the artist which ones they were contemplating as they worked.

Experienced artists will be able to say something about their initial concept while inexperienced ones will often just say that they liked the photo reference and so they painted it. Undaunted, I press them to be more specific. Did they love the way light contrasted with gloomy shadow? Did they feel a sense of peace or excitement in the scene? Did it bring up memories or experiences? The world is full of appealing photos and nobody is drawn to paint all of them so what was it about that specific image that called the artist to spend time painting it?

The more specifics I can draw out of them, the more likely they’ll be to ask the same questions of themselves the next time they start a painting. That will launch them down the path of making work that has meaning: deep work.

Deep work is, I think, an aim that artists should strive for but I’m also aware that viewers make their own meaning when they look at our art. A painting of a child digging at the beach which feels like an expression of contentment in my mind might feel like the depiction of innocence to another person and loss to someone else. And, as we get older, the same painting might change its communication with us, bringing up different thoughts and feelings now than it did when we were young. The subjective, shifting nature of images makes them tricky to critique but also gives them an expansive openness to interpretation that I love to explore.

When I ask artists to talk about their intentions, I’m asking them to recognize the potential power of what they make. They could simply be painting pretty pictures because they liked the photo reference, but it’s a far richer and more engaging act to paint a picture of your state of mind or your thoughts about some aspect of life that the photo made you think of. Holding those thoughts as we work, causes us to make very different painting decisions than when we’re thoughtlessly copying a photo. We paint to make those internal thoughts visible.

Perhaps I’m deluded, but I feel that we can sense when an artist had deeper motives than just depicting prettiness. Paintings copied from photos without intentionality can often feel like decor while paintings from artists who are aware of their power to communicate seem to have gravity and presence; they linger in our minds and bring up associations from our own experiences.

We can all make deep paintings. The first step is to ask ourselves why we want to paint the picture in the first place. Setting aside generalities like “because I like the picture” we can delve deeper. What, precisely, do we like? Is it the sense of airiness? Of movement? The fact that the photo sparks a memory of our mother’s hug? What does the image make us think and feel?

Once we have that, we’ll have a concept to organize your painting around. Our artistic decisions will be made based on whether they serve or hinder that concept. We’ll be able to meaningfully critique ourselves

Happy painting!

PS: I offer individual online critiques for artists who would like me to talk with them about their work. If you’d like to know more, you can find the details on my website.

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I recently completed this painting and it really pleases me. It’s filled with complex layers of warm and cool vibrating side by side to create a shimmering glow that perfectly conveys what I feel about the magic of flowers. I’d be delighted to paint more in this vein, amassing a collection of florals that lift my spirits. If only I could remember how I did it 😳.

The painting started from a cropped detail from a larger photo of a tree that I shot last spring. (Don’t ask which species because I’d only guess). After zooming in on many areas within the chaotic, pink canopy, I found this little arrangement that felt almost musical.

The rhythm and sense of airy lightness caught my imagination and I wanted to try it. Crucially, it also had a very nice focal bloom with some supporting flowers arranged asymmetrically around it. I could have cobbled together something similar but it was a happy gift from nature to find the flowers so beautifully composed.

After that, well, I must have started painting but the mystery of how remains.

I’ve examined the painting at length, looking for traces of my first marks. Did I tone the canvas? Did I block in the shadows on the petals in warm or cool before developing them? How did it grow from white ground to what it is now? I could only guess until I found this video saved in my Procreate files. It appears that I used Procreate right from the start instead of in my usual way which is to bring it onboard when I run into problems.

I digitally figured out how I wanted to simplify the vast amount of information, finding larger patches of colour and value to surround the complex little flower shapes. The resulting image - rather than the photo - became my starting point.

It appears that I stuck pretty close to the Procreate version in most places save the lower middle of the painting where I deviated from dark purples to a mid-value green. Going back through my photos, I found this in-progress shot from April 1 which shows how problematic the purple area was when executed in paint rather than on a backlit screen. The area feels weak and doesn’t support the concept of sunlight hitting the flowers. As well, it’s just too much purple and pink for my liking. So, at some point between the 1st and the final photo of the completed work on April 16th, I covered the purple with green which enhanced the sensation of sunlight and created a complexity conveying tangled of branches, blooms and leaves.

Good call, Ingrid!

But it bothered me that I could recall none of this because I can usually remember almost every stage of a painting; the bad choices, the scraping off and trying again, the trialing of colours, everything. Not so with this one.

I’ve finally figured out that it has to do with that first digital step. I came to the canvas with such a clear plan that I eliminated all of my usual explorations and missteps. Because the painting came together easily, it left no battle scars on my psyche and I’ve forgotten the process.

This got me thinking about when my kids were learning math in elementary school. It was the early 2000’s and computers dominated their classrooms. Instead of manipulating physical objects to learn addition and multiplication - I remember adding up little round chips on my desk when I was a kid - they were expected to understand concepts by looking at 2-D objects blinking on screens. They struggled terribly and I wonder if they’d have had an easier time understanding and retaining lessons if they’d learned through their hands, not their screens.

I’m undecided about what this means for my future painting planning. Will I avoid digital plans or embrace them? As with everything in life, it’s not black and white. Procreate has saved countless stalled paintings for me over the years and I love it. It allows me to test ideas without mucking about on the canvas and it lets my experiments range freely in a way that irreversible mediums don’t. And, honestly, a lack of struggle and indecision is not a bad thing!

Still, I do love process. Standing at the easel, pondering what ifs, testing ideas, putting paint on and scraping it off again are my rhythm and I enjoy every frustrating minute. I have no urge to give that up.

I think that complex images like this one will definitely benefit from digital organizing and simplifying but for images with fewer shapes to sort out, I doubt I’ll make a change. That will give me a nice balance and feed my apparent need for artistic frustration:)

Happy painting!

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The paintings were a small sample from an auction that will happen at Cowley Abbot auction house in Toronto, brought to Calgary to give us a taste. There were Group of Seven landscapes, a minor (very) Renoir landscape, a Van Gogh etching and an assortment of pieces by Canadian artists that I had little or no previous awareness of.

This quiet, grey piece by Doris McCarthy held my attention for ages. It’s a series of receding ice floes differentiated by their varied shapes and the colours of the ice along the edges where the floes have split from a larger mass. I had a sense of space, solitude, stillness and peace - feelings that surprised me because I tend to be unmoved by snow and ice, especially at the end of a long winter.

Searching more of her work online, I found a lot more colour but always a love of simple, clean shapes and of the snow.

And then I turned around and saw this. The antithesis of simplicity and shape clarity and absolutely fabulous. I could have looked at it for hours but the gallery space was small and crowded and I was mindful of hogging the view.

Gordon A. Smith’s painting is about 6’ wide, acrylic, and filled with marks and broken layers. No two branches or tree trunks are the same in size, shape or angle and it perfectly captures the experience of standing in a winter forest.

Attracted by two monochromatic snow scenes! I must be losing my mind.

I caught a couple of close ups so you can see the complexity and variety of his marks.

To achieve this texture, the canvas must be fairly coarse and his paint application was dry. I’d like to have seen his brushes but I imagine them to be large and hog bristle. Maybe chip brushes.

The piece is abstract up close and comes together into an illusion of reality from afar - chaos organizing into a hillside and a central path for the eye to follow.

John Singer Sargent did the same thing with his pieces. From across a museum hall, they look polished and refined but the closer you get to them, the more you see how rough and abstract his thinking and mark making were. (Brian Neher posts the occasional Sargent detail shots on Instagram and they’re always an education. I’ve posted some at the end)

I can picture myself in these woods, trudging through the snow, pushing saplings aside, and heading toward that distant opening. Why I’d want to be out there is, again, beyond me, but this is a piece I’d happily live with if I had the estimated $70,000 - $90,000 bid price.

The painting reminded me of the Han Sungpil’s mesmerizing photos of burned woods in winter. Looking more like charcoal drawings than photos (apt, given the subject ), they form recognizable land masses and rhythms from a distance but look like abstract calligraphy up close. Each individual tree is poignant, unique, and even beautiful in the way that death masks can be beautiful. They hold the memory of life.

So I fell for a simple, shape-based piece and then fell harder for a complex, line-based one. It was a dizzying and delicious experience.

The first thing I did when I got back to my studio was to draw many lines onto the large blank canvas that has been waiting for me for weeks. Maybe it’s a start.

Happy painting!

The promised Sargents:

My writing helps me become a better painter and instructor as I think deeply about matters of art. It will always be free, but if you’d like to support my efforts, I’d be honoured.

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All of the books on composition trot out the same warning when it comes to tangents: they’re awkward and distracting and you should avoid them. I’ve dutifully taught this, figuring that every single book can’t be wrong. But then I started looking closely at Richard Diebenkorn’s work and changed my mind. Every book can be wrong.

First, a bit about tangents.

Tangents are two or more lines that touch or interact in a way that creates unintentional tension or ambiguity about relationships between shapes. Since visual artists deal in shapes, tangents can make our work illegible or awkward, drawing viewers’ eyes to places that we don’t want them to linger. And they’re sneaky little devils, creeping into the work of even the most alert artist.

Here are some common tangents that I regularly encounter in paintings and photographs:

Disjointing
-Cutting a shape at an important point. In this case a severing at the wrist and a decapitation.
That important point could just as easily be the V of a tree branch or the point where a lampshade meets its stand. They’re moments of potential interest and a tangent adds to that interest in an uncomfortable way.

Continuous line:
Extending a line from one shape into another. In this example, the line acts to flatten the image, creating the odd impression that the plane is attached to the hat brim rather than flying far in the distance.

Antlers:
I see this often, especially in photos. Trees, telephone poles, fences - anything tall behind a person or other subject can look like a growth.

(Trick photography loves this tangent. We’ve all seen the pictures of a tiny, distant person who appears to be standing on a foreground person’s palm).

Active corner:
A corner is already an interesting place because it’s where the two lines of canvas edge meet. Adding a third line to that point really draws the eye.

Symmetrical cropping:
I’m a fan of a partially cropped object or person, but there’s something uncomfortable about a crop that leaves exactly half of the object in the picture. Asymmetry feels much more natural.

Enclosing line:
Closely related to the continuous line, this is one that I see often in clouds or hills that look like helmets on a person’s head.

The Kiss:
Two shapes that just touch (or almost touch) without overlapping create visual tension. In this example, there are three tangents in the elbows.

Michelangelo provides an example of this tangent used to great effect. There’s so much anticipation in the space where divine and human fingers almost connect.

Tangents can be unsettling but they can also be powerful if we use them with intention. It’s the deliberate choosing that makes all the difference.

Like Michelangelo, Richard Diebenkorn was well aware of the power of tangents to activate shape relationships. He incorporated them liberally into his realist work and, to my eye, they are precursors to the explorations of his later abstractions.

Diebenkorn’s tangents flatten space, joining shapes in foreground and background to create deliberate ambiguity and tension. In time, his work became entirely an exploration of flatness, colour and shape.

I like Diebenkorn’s paintings for their playfulness and for the way they remind me that I’m looking at a 2-D picture plane. He’s creating a sense of depth at the same time that he subverts that depth with calculated tangents.

So you can imagine my delight in finding these photos of the artist on the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation website. His view of the world was infectious.

Expect to see some intentional tangents in my work in the future :)

Happy painting!

My writing helps me become a better painter and instructor as I think deeply about matters of art. It will always be free, but if you’d like to support my efforts, I’d be honoured.

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I recently had the pleasure of jurying entries for Modern Impressionist Magazine and it was both fun and revelatory.

Looking at 325 images of paintings was the fun part. I saw a huge range of styles across all genres: landscape, portraits, figures, animals, urban landscape, interiors, abstraction and still life. Painters worked in oil, gouache, watercolour, pastel, ink, and mixed media. It was a smorgasbord of art.

The revelatory aspect came as I had to pare down those hundreds of works to a top 40, top 20 and then first, second, third place and 3 honourable mentions.

Where to begin??

Jurying happens in stages with my first view of the works being in small thumbnail form. I could scroll through those, getting a sense of what the entries were like overall. Checking out paintings in thumbnail size is something I always do when I look at gallery websites. Those little pictures are surprisingly good at showing the overall effect of shapes, values and colours. I can’t see brushwork, edges, line work, or any detail at that scale and that’s a good thing because they’re the embellishments, not the structure. It’s like looking at a house. First we notice the big stuff: how many stories; the size and placement of windows; the shape of the deck, whether the roof is pitched or flat…. We don’t look at the colour of the siding or the finials on the railings because those are small things and we know that they’re not as important as the big, overall structure.

This little image is the view that I’d have of the paintings if I saw them from across a large room and, just as in life, some painting caught my eye even when they were so reduced. Those were the ones with clear shapes and values. Decisive compositions and colours will always command attention when compared to works that have a similar tonal value or colour palette throughout.

After looking over all of the entries, I moved to a detailed examination of each one in turn, opening the images to the actual size that artists uploaded. Online entries always have a file size limit and I recommend taking the time to meet that limit. Seeing works enlarged allowed me to appreciate the subtleties that the artist fleshed out their compositions with. Did they have edge variety or rely on a single type of edge - hard or soft? Did they move colour through the composition in an interesting way? Were the marks varied or all the same? Did they show any unique stylistic choices such as line work, texture, varied paint thickness, etc.? This stage is like walking across the room and looking at each piece close up.

Some of the pieces that I’d noted for their strong compositions held up to close scrutiny by providing rewards in the enlarged view. They had sophisticated edges, interesting movement of colour, and a sense of confidence to their paint application.

This latter element is actually quite important as a work confidently done has an appeal that a tentative one does not. The late Canadian painter and writer, Robert Genn, called it “wrong and strong”. You can get away with broad paint handling and overshot shapes if it looks like you were fully committed and intentional in the marks you made, not dabbing cautiously to the very edge of a shape and trying to fit it politely into its perfect position. Even highly realistic work, filled with hard edges can feel relaxed and assured in the hands of a confident painter and laboured in those of a tentative one. I was looking for individual artistic skill and expression in these expanded views.

Getting the top 40 was relatively easy though there was still a lot of soul searching and moving paintings in and out of this top bunch. I looked back at thumbnails to see their overall compositional strengths and then switched to large view to verify painting skills and inventiveness. One thing that I didn’t think about was subject matter. A flower, a face, a boat in harbour - it’s all the same to me. A well-composed and interestingly-painted piece in any genre is a good painting. That’s what I was picking out of the crowd.

In a side note: consider your signature as a part of the composition. There was a sweet little painting that didn’t get a top spot because the signature was so large and covered such an expanse of the image that it ruined the work. If the Mona Lisa had a massive “LEONARDO 1517”, across the lower 1/4 of the image, she’d have had a different life.

Narrowing it down to the top 20 was still not too hard because some work is just obviously more accomplished and original. Originality matters! I didn’t want to give places to work that I felt I’d seen many times before.

Choosing the top 6 was the real challenge! There were a solid 10 in contention for these spots and I spent a lot of time debating about which pieces pulled ahead by the fraction needed to place. Some paintings moved into the top 3 and back into honourable mentions several times. I needed frequent breaks to freshen my eyes and, when returning to the task, I’d notice new things and shuffle the awards once again.

I finally made my decisions, agonizing the longest over first place which had a couple of strong contenders. Then, I lived with the decision for a day, rechecked my choices and hit the “I’m done jurying” button with relief.

I think I made good decisions but I recognize that there’s a lot of subjectivity in jurying. I was comparing lovely, small watercolours to lovely, large scale oils and it’s impossible not to be aware of the sheer difference of sustained skill that those mediums involve. I’d have welcomed separate water media and oil categories to resolve that conundrum.

I told you at the start that I had revelations during the jurying process and perhaps I meant reminders. I already knew the power of a strong composition and how it can pull a person in from across a room, but, like most of us, I can get caught up in the near view as I work colours and edges from close to my easel.

Seeing how those little thumbnails attracted me - or didn’t - reminded me that I have to find ways to see my work from a distance. That’s how paintings are viewed (unless they’re hung in small bathrooms. I regularly look at my work in a mirror to check its effectiveness from a distance, but I think I’ll start taking photos of them and looking at the tiny phone version as well.

We’re often distracted by our subject matter or the flash of our brushwork and we miss the overall impression of the picture. In my experience, if you have a strong thumbnail view, you’re onto a winner.

Happy painting!

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I’ve been painting models from life during the past few weeks and it’s been fantastic!

Hiring a model is an expense, but splitting the fee with a few artist friends makes it very reasonable. It’s the price of 3 or 4 fancy coffees each week and I wouldn’t blink at that. And, much as I love a fancy coffee, it doesn’t feed me in the lasting way that life painting does.

What I love about working from a real person is that everything I need is visible right there in front of me. I feel like half my studio life has been spent staring intently (and fruitlessly) at photo references, trying to figure out the colours of a highlight in hair or the shadow on a cheek. Staring rarely reveals a thing and I guess at colours an awful lot of the time. But, while staring at the shadow on a model’s face, I see everything. I understand the warmth of the blood vessels under the skin’s surface, the coolness of a reflecting drapery, the little shifts of value and temperature that, if I can mix them, convey the truth of the moment. Photos give so little; life reveals an abundance.

Mixing everything I perceive isn’t always simple, but it feels possible in a way that guesswork never does. That direct communication between my eyes and my hand thrills me. I become a conduit, not an inventor.

One of the most famous life painters in modern times was the British artist, Euan Uglow. His eyes were so attuned to colour and his temperament was so patient that he left us works which depict his sitters almost inch by inch. (In an interview he told the story of how one of his models met a man, they courted and married and, eventually, got divorced - all while she posed for a single painting). I imagine his studio as a place of calm, intense focus and am happy to be doing, in a tiny way, the same thing that he did: looking, mixing, applying and thinking - over and over again and in the hopes of capturing the truth.

Check out the colour changes across a single Uglow hand. Even the cast shadow earned his careful attention.

I don’t have Uglow’s patience or his timeline, but even three hours in front of a model gives me a staggering amount of information. I can’t capture it all, but I love racing to try.

This might sound corny, but I feel completely alive and like a much kinder human when I paint from life. The room goes quiet as all of us painters work, separately yet together, to capture the image of the magnificent person in front of us. Because we are all magnificent! Spend 3 hours looking at a friend or a willing stranger and you’ll find that to be a truth beyond dispute. There are depths to every person and our quick-judgement culture doesn’t encourage taking the time to find them. Looking at a person for 3 hours slows me down and cracks open my mind and my heart.

(One of our models was notably cranky and sharp but even she mellowed as the afternoon progressed and she saw the sincere attention we were devoting to her. We, in turn, began to appreciate her more the longer we studied her and in spite of the rocky start to the session).

At a time when the world is far from calm and people struggle to find common ground, life painting connects me to a community of artists and muses both in my time and in generations past. It brings me satisfaction and great peace.

Happy painting!

*My writing will always be free, but if you liked this post, I’d be honoured if you’d consider supporting my efforts:)

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As part of The Winslow Art Center’s annual, free Spring Fling event, I’ll be chatting with Winslow’s Martha Jordan on Thursday (April 9: 10am PT; 1pm ET; 6pm UK time).

The subject is something I think about a lot: how to become the artist that you are meant to be (or want to be).

I’ve got some great artworks by many painters to show and discuss and I’m really looking forward to a chance to talk art. You’ll have an opportunity to ask questions which would be most welcome. I hope you can join us!

If you can’t make it, though, don’t worry. The chat is recorded and available on the Winslow site.

To take part in all of the Spring Fling demos and events, just register on the Winslow website and you’ll get access to all sorts of free goodies:)

Happy painting!

My post exclaiming over the gorgeousness of R&F Pigment Sticks raised questions from a few readers about the integrity of wax in oil painting. Being deeply concerned with the archival quality of my work, I leapt into the research. And then I waited several months to actually sit down to write this post.

I prefer to call it due diligence - that I wanted to see how the paintings dried over time- rather than the forgetfulness that it actually is.

The main concern that painters expressed was that the waxy stick colour would never completely dry. According to R&F, this isn’t a concern and aggressively scratching the surface of the painting that I posted back then shows that the paint is tough and totally dry. I also bent the canvas to a near-complete crease and the surface didn’t crack.

While oil paintings generally crack over generations - something we’ve all seen in the crazed works on museum walls - I’m encouraged by the toughness of this paint film after 10 months.

What follows is a brisk summary of what I learned from researching the sticks. It will be enough to get you started but I recommend you read as much as you can, starting with the R&F site. I’ve included links throughout.

Unlike watermedia which dries through evaporation, oil paints dry through contact with air, a process known as oxidation. Like a cooling custard, oils form an outer skin and dry downward into the paint body from there. We’ve all seen it happen on our palettes when we leave piles of paint out overnight. Depending on the pile’s thickness and the innate drying time of that colour (more on that later), we may find a skin the next day. Often, we can peel it off and use the wet paint encased within.

The same thing happens in the pigment stick paint film. The binding linseed oil will oxidize and dry to an insoluble film. According to R&F, the waxes within the film “remain solid but locked inside the oil network, giving the film a slightly softer, more flexible character”.

Does this mean we can freely draw with sticks over and within our tube-paint paintings, experiencing the joy of working with no rules?

Of course not! When has that ever happened with oil paint? 😁

R&F stresses - and has heaps of information about - respecting fat over lean and also familiarizing yourself with each colour’s drying time.

Fat over lean means that you don’t want a high-fat layer to be under a lean one. The high fat one will take longer to polymerize (become a plastic-like, dry film) than the lean layer on top of it which will dry quickly and which will be less flexible when it does dry.

I think of it like those elementary school lessons in plate tectonics that we all had as kids. My textbook described the Earth’s outer crust as solid and brittle, prone to cracking in response to shifts in the molten, fluid lower layer. Hence earthquakes and sudden fissures. The same is true of putting a lean, brittle layer over a fluid, (fat) flexible one. It will cause the top layer to crack in dramatic ways.

Fat paint is paint that has a lot of oil binder in it. Some colours (such as trasparent ones like Alizarin, ultramarine, etc) are naturally fatter than others (such as the earth pigments like burnt umber, raw sienna, etc.). Fat colours generally dry slower than lean ones and their resulting paint film is more flexible and less likely to crack over time.

Oil painters should be aware of not only the pigments that they’re putting in the lower layers, but also the medium that they’re adding. We make a pigment fatter by adding an oily medium such as linseed, stand, walnut, safflower, or other drying oils. That’s why so many painters use a solvent-heavy medium in the first layer or use no oily medium at all. They’re trying to apply their paint without freighting it with a lot of extra fat. Natural Pigments has a succinct explanation of the concept of fat over lean here.

So I wouldn’t put a lean paint like raw umber over a dry layer of alizarin for fear that the umber would crack.

However, I could mix raw umber with a fat medium and apply it over a dry layer of alizarin that I’d previously applied thinly and in a lean fashion, either by diluting it with solvent or by scrubbing it dryly onto the canvas without any added medium.

A technical support employee at Gamblin once told me to think of the process of layering a painting as “more medium over less medium”. By avoiding fat in the lower layer and adding it to subsequent layers in increasing quantity, you’ll be following that rule.

But the picture isn’t complete yet.

We have to add the concept of pigment drying times to this mix. R&F has a chart listing each of their stick’s drying times: fast, moderate, slow and very slow with fast drying in under 4 days and very slow in more than 31 days.

This isn’t necessarily because the fast ones have less oil. The site states that chemicals in some pigments “grab oxygen faster than others. For example, (their) Raw Umber Pigment Stick® dries relatively fast because it contains manganese, which acts as a catalyst. Cobalt is also a faster drier. Cadmium is slower.”

Knowing that Indanthrone blue takes more than a month to dry while Prussian blue takes 4 days tells me which one would be the wiser choice in the lower layer of a painting.

So, when painting in oils - with or without pigment sticks - there are important concepts to keep in mind. R&F has a lot of information on their site along with links to informational videos. Like any material, the more you understand it, the more sensibly you’ll be able to use it in your work.

Finally, there is one way to oil paint that allows you to ignore fat over lean : alla prima. Painting your entire piece wet in wet allows you to be free and spontaneous, layering pigment sticks over thicker tube paint with abandon like the acrylic painters get to do. The reason for this is that all of the tube paint and stick paint will dry together, unlike in a layered work done wet over dry. The paints and sticks will cross bond with each other and create a single skin rather than layers of skins. It’s the method that the abstract painter, Jenny Nelson (whose online workshop I took) uses for even for her large pieces, and it makes a sound paint film.

If you’re interested in adding these sticks to your work, there are lots of articles and links in the Resources menu on the R&F site. Learning how to properly use them will calm your worries and allow you to enjoy these sticks and I think you’ll find that they’re a lot of fun.

Happy painting!

* My writing will always be free, but if you’d like to make a donation to support my efforts, I’d be honoured.

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A lot of what I learned from watercolour books carried over into my oil practise. Colour, composition, value - all were something that I was familiar with. But oil paint seemed pretty scary, like a bomb that could blow if I layered in the wrong way or didn’t control paint consistency and added medium; oil paint sounded like chemistry class which had not been my strong subject and I had a lot to learn about process.

The single most useful book that I found to teach me about oils was Richard Schmid’s “Alla Prima Everything I Know About Painting”. It’s a generous, comprehensive overview of painting materials and methods, well illustrated with his work, and including: useful images of different methods for blocking in a painting; the most incredible colour charts I’ve ever seen; information on self critiquing your work, and much more.

If you’re new to oils or just feel you’ve got a shaky foundation in the medium, this will help.

Another great teacher was Charles Sovek. I have 2 of his books found on used books sites and don’t know if they’re still in print but they’re worth searching for. He’s right up there with Schmid and Charles Reid - who I mentioned last week - as a logical, generous instructor. If I hadn’t found Schmid first, I would be calling Sovek my most important oil resource.

“Oil Painting Develop Your Natural Ability” and “Catching Light in Your Paintings”, are both excellent.

The first covers everything you need to start painting: composition, value, colour and temperature, personal expression…. It gives a thorough grounding in oil painting while also being applicable to painting in any medium. His writing is engaging and his teaching method is logical and accessible. He takes nothing for granted about the reader and pitches his lessons to those who don’t have a clue about oils but do have keen minds. He doesn’t talk down and you can sense the enthusiasm he had for painting throughout.

“Catching Light” is about exactly what the title says. It’s a book that delves into the many lighting conditions painters encounter - back, front, overhead, diffuse... His emphasis is on understanding values in order to maximize a sense of light and atmosphere.

Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Paintings is a bible for many painters working in the genre and it’s just about as easy to read as the actual Bible.

I plowed through many parts of this book and loved the illustrations of things like perspective in clouds, values in the various planes of the landscape, designing, using lines, aerial perspective etc. But sentences like: “The student should acquire the habit of facilitating his efforts by eliminating as far as possible all unnecessary handicaps”make this book slow going. It was originally published in 1929 and they wrote differently back then.

It’s a testament to the book’s exceptional content that it holds a high place in many painters’ lists of important resources.

Mitch Albala’s “Landscape Painting Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice” is a much easier read and is also very good. Albala is known for teaching with an emphasis on strong design using notans- a Japanese concept that focuses on using limited values (often to just black and white) to create flat, strong compositions. The Sovek image is actually an example of the notan method in action:

This is Albala’s book which I confess I didn’t read thoroughly as I’m not a landscape painter but, like Carlson, it’s an often-recommended resource on many painter’s lists.

Last is a book that I did read thoroughly: Gregg Kreutz’s “Problem Solving for Oil Painters”. It’s subtitled “Recognizing what’s gone wrong and how to make it right” and the entire book is about self critiquing and improving your paintings. He touches on design, simplifying and strengthening values, colour saturation, paint application and much more. Looking at the book again for this newsletter I realize that I need to revisit it and remind myself of his advice.

That’s it for my medium-specific books, but while browsing my library, I realized that there are a few more general books that are worth mentioning at some point in a future newsletter.

I hope you can locate the above books new or used. It will be a hunt but that’s half the fun.

Happy painting!

*I’ve been happily surprised and deeply touched by the number of people who have supported my writing by buying me a coffee. Thank you for encouraging me in this newsletter project. I really appreciate you.

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I’m regularly asked: “Are there any books you can recommend about: portraiture, figure, colour, temperature, brushwork, composition - or whatever we’ve focused on in the class, and I generally answer with a vague “not really”. It’s not that I’m hiding my secrets, it’s just that no single book has been a game changer (except one that I’ll mention in my next post when I discuss oil books)

I cobbled together an education from coffee table art books, gallery sites, artist interviews in magazines and later, online, artists’ social media feeds; from peppering artists and art store staff with questions, emailing tech support at Gamblin, Winsor and Newton, Golden and M. Graham, and more.

Still, there have been some books that helped me along the way. I confess to never reading a single one from cover to cover, but dipping into chapters and images seemed to be enough to teach me a thing or two and help me progress.

An aspiring watercolourist when I started painting, I found that a clear reproduction of a Sargent watercolour provided a comprehensive education in edges, colour and value as well as an example of confidence and fluency that no how-to book could convey.

I’m providing pictures of some of the books that were particularly important to me when I was learning that most devilishly-difficult medium. Finding links would take me a while and there’s painting to do so google, my friends:)

Joseph Zbukvic’s “Mastering Atmosphere and Mood in Watercolor” which showed me how to let watercolour do its thing rather than tinkering with it. He is an unfussy painter who conveys exactly what the title says and doesn’t get seduced by precision. His level of detail has that magical sense of completeness without actually being complete at all. As always, my iPhone doesn’t do these justice and they’re too crisp by far but you’ll get the idea.

Trevor Chamberlain A Personal View Light and Atmosphere in Watercolour” showed me a soft, smudgy style of watercolour painting that gave me hope when I’d overworked a piece of paper. From him, I learned that you can rework watercolours.

Mel Stabin’s “The Figure in Watercolor” taught me how to simplify features in a way that showed expression and form but didn’t beat the viewer over the head with detail. It was a way of seeing the figure that instantly resonated with me.

And, lastly, every book by Charles Reid. He was a fantastic watercolour (and oil) painter who made everything look easy, drippy, joyful and loose. “Look easy” is a key phrase as I met a painter who took a workshop with him and said that he laboured over each drip and spatter, ensuring their placement and size with excruciating care. It takes skill to look this casual.

This is just one of his many books and all are good.

I probably read Reid’s books with the greatest attention and I think it was from him that I learned about the concept of colour temperature - something that fascinates me to this day.

There were more, but these are the books that stayed in my collection. Since I’m ruthless about purging books I no longer connect with, you know that they have staying power.

I hope these books are as useful to you as they were to me. I still refer to them though I haven’t painted a watercolour in many years.

Next week, I’ll show you my favourite oil painting books.

Happy painting!

*My writing will always be free, but if you liked this post, I’d be honoured if you’d consider supporting my efforts:)

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Harnessing Contrasts for Stronger Paintings
May 12 - June 2
Online at The Winslow Art Center

If you’d like to read all about the workshop, check out my previous newsletter:

If you’re ready to register for this second session, please use this link. It will take you to the correct page on The Winslow Art Center site.

I hope to see you online in May!

Happy painting!

I taught a 1-day composition workshop yesterday for a delightful group of artists who put themselves in my hands for a day spent doing something that few of us actually enjoy: designing an image.

We all love the act of painting, but rare is the painter who loves to make a plan before picking up the brush. Often, we jump straight into painting, figuring we’ll be able to sort out design problems when they arise. It’s a hit and miss approach with a high probability of producing paintings that have a touch of incompetence: focal points that are too close to the edge of the canvas or missing entirely, visual paths that lead nowhere, competing focal points, boring shapes, to name a few.

So it was wonderful and amazing to watch the intent interest that the artists brought to their task of designing pictures based on this deliberately ill-composed AI landscape.

I asked Google Gemini to generate a Canadian landscape with multiple interestingly-shaped mountains, a lake, forests and a busy shore. For good measure, I wanted trees to block the view. After some refining requests, I got this beauty which is not that far from reality but which would make a terrible painting.

I’ve seen places that look like this but I’d never paint them as I see them. There’s no single, obvious point of interest. Instead, there are many potential focal points. Each mountain could be the main event; the lake, the rocky shore, an interesting tree: I could make a case for each one becoming the focal point. But since they can’t all be the most interesting thing in the scene, the shapes and lines around the chosen one have to be edited and altered to stop them competing for attention.

We designed first in charcoal and then in 3-value collages, often tearing rather than cutting the paper because our brains were so busy with the concepts that the mechanics of applying paper were secondary. There were laughs about elementary school art classes and about bringing home our torn-paper collages to show our families what we’d done that day. But mostly there was complete silence with only the rustle of tearing paper as the artists immersed themselves in the world of shape, value and line. You wouldn’t know that they were doing something arduous because it looked a whole lot like playing in a state of flow.

The day flew. I didn’t cover as much as I’d planned (because I always overplan) but our tired brains told us all that we’d done hard work and I heard from many artists that they felt they’d learned a lot and were excited to apply it in their practises.

Here are the elegant, imaginative and beautifully-designed images that they created. They’re far from the chaos of the photo reference and each one could be the source for a painting. They also reveal things about their creators’ interests and aesthetics: whether they like a few simple serene shapes or many small, active ones, if they’re attracted to stillness or movement, whether they’re intrigued by the horizontal layers of the land, the points of peaks and trees, or the organic rounds of rocks. These are personal as all the best art is.

Writing this put me in mind of an article that I wrote a few years ago for Artsy magazine about how artists see the world. You might enjoy it!

Happy painting!

My writing will always be free, but if you liked this post, I’d be honoured if you’d consider supporting my efforts:)

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I purchased the Halide Mark II Pro Camera app, an IOS-specific app to shoot in camera raw format. Raw image are unprocessed and uncompressed, containing all the information that the camera’s sensor captured. The advantage for me lies in the unprocessed feature. That means that my phone makes no preemptive decisions about sharpness, colour and exposure; it’s equivalent to the analog photos I grew up on. But because it’s digital, I can adjust the photo and arrive at a decent representation of the scene.

To adjust the images, I use the Raw Power app. It has more features for me to fiddle with than my iPhone’s native camera editor and it’s meant specifically for adjusting raw files. My favourite is the HSL setting that lets me manipulate individual colours’ saturation, value, and hue independent of the other colours in the scene. Often just one colour is off while the others are fine (for me, it’s often the blues) so this allows me to adjust that problem colour without altering all of the others.

That all sounds like work and baffling work at that, but, once you get familiar with them, these apps are actually easy and intuitive. After purchasing Halide, I received a week of daily emails explaining the various features and how to use them which was helpful for the not-very-tech person that I am. I learned Raw Power through trial and error but I’m sure there are loads of educational YouTube videos out there.

I shot these images yesterday to show you the massive difference that raw files make.

The first is shot with my iPhone’s native camera app, with HDR enabled. Notice how light the “shadow” parts of the scene are because HDR boosted the shadows to a higher value so that we can see into them. The picture seems flat and overall mid value. The light on the fence feels unconvincing because it’s not contrasting with any dark shadows.

Next, I turned off HDR and shot on “Standard” (a setting in “filters” in iPhones). The foreground is marginally darker, adding depth and a touch more tonal drama to the scene but not as dramatic as what I saw. Part of the problem is that the camera is white balancing each area individually. So the overall warmth of the scene doesn’t come through. Instead, it’s a mishmash of warm and cool lighting that doesn’t make sense to me.

Zoom in on both and you’ll see how ridiculously sharp and contrasty each twig and stem are. It’s not how my eyes work and it distracts from the things that I’m interested in: shape, colour and value relationships.

This next image was shot with Halide. This is an old school, unaltered image. It has the overall yellow flavour of the late afternoon sun and there’s an over-exposure problem on the illuminated fence. But, the branches and grasses aren’t as crunchy and eye catching as in the native camera shots.

I had to screenshot this image because raw files are very large and Substack doesn’t allow me to upload them. That can be a problem with sharing your photos so look at your save settings and allow Raw Power to save a copy of your edited image as a jpg. You’ll also want to store your full resolution photos in the cloud to save space in your phone.

Here’s the image after a single adjustment in Raw Power. I darkened the exposure and nothing else and suddenly, it looked like what I was seeing:

Squint at the image and you’ll see that it’s an arrangement of values from light to dark and colours from muted to rich where the light hits the fence. Yes, zooming in reveals more twigs than my eyes and brain would perceive but that’s because of the high resolution of my camera. It can capture a lot of detail - much more than any painter would want. The main thing is that this image doesn’t boost each detail to make it extra sharp or contrasty.

As well, because the camera didn’t try to balance the temperature of each area individually, the picture has the overall warmth of the time of day. And I can visualize how I’d paint it. I’d start with a warm golden tone over the entire canvas then block in the darks. Next, I’d paint big shapes of warm, earthy grasses and a large dark mass where the tree branches live. Later, I’d enjoy building the thick, juicy lights on the fence and dropping some sky holes and a few branch details into the tree.

This is a good painting reference because, unlike the first two, it allows me to imagine it as a painting.

As an aside, I’ve used Halide to take the first selfies in many years that don’t make me feel like shrieking and jumping off a bridge. A little softness is a welcome thing!

I did attempt to adjust the first images in the iPhone editing app but I couldn’t make them look like the scene. The images’ starting points were just too far from reality.

There are many apps that allow raw shooting and a quick google search will reveal them for both IOS and Android. The important thing is to learn about how you can edit your photos after capturing them.

If, like me, you’re looking for paintable images, I recommend taking the time to do some research, watch some YouTube tutorials, and get an app that will help you achieve your goal. It’s a game changer!

Happy painting!

My writing will always be free, but if you liked this post, I’d be honoured if you’d consider supporting my writing:)

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Harnessing Contrasts for Stronger Paintings
April 7 - 28
online at The Winslow Art Center

After a refreshing and rejuvenating winter break during which I locked the studio door, closed the blinds on the winter weather and just painted, I’m jumping back into online teaching with a brand new workshop. And I’m pretty excited about this one!

Along with taking time to move my own art practise forward, I wanted to pause and think about making new lessons that were meaningful and deep. I’ve gotten to know a lot of accomplished and committed painters from around the world in my online classes and I want my workshops to help them progress their art with each new class. My goal is to bring them - you! - fresh ideas and perspectives in the hopes that something I demonstrate or say will bring a lightbulb moment in your own studios.

I believe that this workshop can help achieve that goal.

Harnessing Contrasts for Stronger Paintings is a logical deconstruction of what I consider the most powerful tool to making a good painting: opposition.

Contrasts like: light against dark; warm against cool; colour against its complement; detail against simplicity; high chroma against low chroma, refined against rough… and many more opposites can make paintings that are focused and memorable. But the sheer number of contrasts that we could use can lead us to feel overwhelmed and muddled. We often throw every tool into our paintings and end up with an abundance of contrasts competing and cancelling each other out. Instead of strong work, we end up with unfocused paintings that don’t make a statement about anything in particular. They’re like a dish with too many seasonings: lacking definition and impossible to remember or describe.

In this workshop, we’ll explore a different contrast each week, separating it from all of the others and delving deep into the potential of that single oppositional relationship.

We’ll work from still life (which is the single best learning tool for painters) and from photo references (because few painters are excited by vases and fruit alone), painting two works each week.

Along with still life, I’ll demo figures and landscapes. Participants can choose to work in the same genres that I do, or choose photos in subjects that are the most compelling for them.

By the end of the workshop, we’ll have delved deeply into four different contrasts and learned a lot about the power of limiting our focus.

I assign homework each week and give feedback on every piece that you submit - though I don’t fuss if life got in the way and you couldn’t paint that week. We have a private message board on which you can upload your paintings and communicate with me and the other class members, and, as always, the workshop is recorded and available for 60 days after the final lesson.

I’m very excited to see the work that comes out of this class and I hope you’ll join me for the fun!

To learn more and to register, go to the Winslow Art Center site.

Yesterday I drove out onto the prairies with my family. From our fast-moving car we gawked and exclaimed at the austere and spacious landscape, filled with light, and shifting patterns of fields, shrubs, hills and clouds.

Because I was driving, I asked my son to take photographs with my iPhone, directing him toward particular passages of light and colour that were so brilliant that even a quick glance from the highway revealed their magic. As usual, the photographs did not capture what I saw and certainly not what I felt. Awe was conspicuously absent.

In my previous post I wrote about painting wrinkles and this post is related in my mind. The seductive thinking about detail, whether it’s wrinkles or wheat stubble, is that it conveys the belief that more detail equals greater truth: that details will truly show a viewer what the person or place is. But that’s not my experience at all.

Just as a multitude of wrinkles doesn’t tell me anything about a person’s bone structure or the volumes of their face - which I consider to be more vital to a portrait than crows feet and nasolabial creases - a hundred fenceposts and 100,000 wheat stalks don’t tell me about the land that I saw. In this, I know I’m at odds with my iPhone.

Phone cameras record and then enhance sharp details and strong contrasts and assume we’ll accept the sheer quantity of information as reality. But in my landscape photos, all that detail actually moves me further from the truth of what I experienced through the car windows.

I see a world that’s filtered through the an obsession with colour. I notice light, pattern, shape, subtle shifts of colour and value, and only occasional detail, usually in something close and distinct. A fencepost with a birdhouse nailed to it caught my eye yesterday, while thousands of other fenceposts didn’t even register.

The camera, however, recorded everything indiscriminately: every fencepost near and distant, the barbs of the wire, crisp wheat stubble stretching ridiculously far into the distance, thin plow lines cutting through the fields, and tiny irregularities in the edges of vegetation on distant hills. The images became meaninglessly sharp and detailed. Nothing was more important than any other thing, and so, the vital experience of glowing light, delicate colour, and the sense of vast space disappeared. My photos don’t look like what I experienced and they’d be nearly useless as painting references, at least for me.

While I struggle to make use of my phone’s photos, I do have some strategies to make them less frustrating as painting references.

The first thing I recommend is to look up your particular phone online or on AI and learn how to turn off HDR (high dynamic range).

The HDR function tries to please us by making the entire scene comprehensible. It doesn’t allow a dark, moody part in an image and a brilliant, overexposed one. Instead, it lightens the dark, darkens the light and combines them into a picture that shows everything to us, clearly and all at once. Now, the sky has detail, the shadows are bright enough to see into, and the whole scene looks evenly exposed. But the glowing field no longer pops like a sheet of bright butter against darker, purple shadows in the distant fields and that, for me, was the whole point of the scene.

Next, turn off anything that automatically enhances your image. Iphones have “styles” in the photo settings. They’re filters with names like “rich contrast”, “vibrant”, and “warm” and “cool”. Androids have similar filters but calls them things like “colour profiles”, “filters” and “scene optimizer tuning”. Essentially, they impose a visual style on your picture that often takes it further from what you saw.

These backyard photos are examples of the styles filters in iPhone. The first image is “standard” setting and is closest to life but still, the sky is awfully dark and saturated and I’m seeing individual twigs and edges everywhere. It’s not like what I perceive in life.

These subsequent photo filters are even worse. None of them look like what my eyes see when I look at the tree and its colour and value relationships to sky, fence, buildings and snow.

You can explore your phone’s filters for yourself by capturing the same image with each different style turned on. Then compare the photos to what you actually see in life. It’s important to also ponder what it is that you want to see. Maybe, for you, an ideal reference is one that leans cooler than your eyes see it, or has deeper darks. Maybe you prefer brighter colours. There’s nothing wrong with choosing a modified view of reality as long as it’s you who makes the decision, not the phone.

Photos don’t tell a human truth; they tell us about the device’s truth. To avoid painting a copy of a device’s sensibility, I do one of two things immediately after taking the photo. I either manipulate the photo in Procreate to restate the important, memorable features that I saw or I make a quick colour study, digitally or in oil or gouache. I might also make notes about the colours that I saw and what was so wonderful about their interactions. My digital images don’t often catch the magic but they get me close and my added notes can be enough to make a decent painting.

I’ve never yet made painting notes to remind myself to paint 100,000 brown wheat stalks and 100 fence posts. Instead, my notes tend to poetic descriptions of buttery fields, cerulean skies and violet shadows on distant hills. It’s the poetry that I’ll paint and the poetry that I hope will draw others to my work. No amount of detail can compare.

Happy painting!

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I taught a portrait workshop over the weekend which was, as always, a delight.
I love being in a room full of painters, watching the many different styles and aesthetics emerge on their canvases. A busy studio has such great energy!

My demos were of different faces and ages with my favourite one being of an elderly face. I’ve seen so many portraits of older people in which every wrinkle is engraved into the skin with brutal precision and they make me wince every time.

When I talk to a person I don’t even notice if they have wrinkles. I don’t think that many of us do unless we happen to be in the skin industry. We look at peoples’ eyes to see if they’re paying attention to us, or if they’re happy or angry. We look at their expressions. I love how a smile bunches up cheeks and squeezes eyes into happy crescents, and we may notice things like rosy cheeks, full lips or a particularly interesting nose but we don’t spend our time gazing at those things because that would be weird.

So when I paint people, I paint them the way that I see them. I have a broad, general view of faces in which eyes matter most and that’s what I paint, despite the extra information that’s available in a photo reference. Hence: don’t paint wrinkles! If you’re a dermatologist who paints, I think you might notice and paint lines but the rest of us can easily ignore them. What I paint is light, colour and form.

The portrait above is from a creepy AI image that I found on Pinterest as I was looking for just the right elderly face. I wanted the head to be in 3/4 view, to have a clear separation between shadow and light and to show flesh that has been subject to gravity for many decades. After an hour of scrolling not-quite-right faces, I came across this one. It’s disturbing - one painter said it had elephant-like wrinkles - but it generally fit the brief.

I adjusted it in Procreate using the Gaussian blur tool and came up with what I consider to be an ideal photo reference:

Notice that no wrinkles are visible but we can still tell that this is a person of 80 or 90 years old. (Or she would be, if she were human).

We know her age because of where her volumes sit. As we age, our cheeks lose their round firm structure and slide down to soften our jawline and create jowls. As with all of our bones, we lose bone mass in our faces leading to a sunken appearance around our eyes and mouths.

Fun fact: our noses aren’t growing with age, as we’ve been led to believe, our faces are shrinking, making our noses look more prominent.

It’s such a delight, this aging thing.

But, all of this means that painters have plenty of ways to depict age, none of which require us to carve wrinkles into the faces we paint. We can paint what we would notice in life and create portraits that clearly show any age group and we can stop the cruel practise of carving up our sitters’ skins. The world of portraiture will be a kinder, gentler place.

Happy painting!

In a terrific start to 2026, I’m honoured to be one of the artists featured in this month’s Modern Impressionist Magazine! It’s a digital and print magazine devoted to painters working in the Impressionist manner and it’s great to be included.

Vanessa Rothe’s article has my in-depth answers to her penetrating and thoughtful questions as well as plenty of images of my work.

If you’d like to subscribe to the magazine for this and many other articles, you can find subscription options in several price points here.

Happy painting!

Ever on the lookout for artwork to appreciate, I check out the recommendations and save some eye candy to my Pinterest board under “Inspiring Art”. Over time, this board has become a good representation of my taste in art and a huge help in my art making.

Recently “Tree paintings for you” showed me this selection, all of which were very good, but only one of which I saved to Inspiring Art.

You might be surprised to know that I chose number 4 which is by Tai-Shan Schierenberg. It was the one that caught my roving eye and held it because it was the one that felt the most unique. I’ve seen a lot of painted trees over the years, but I haven’t seen any quite like this. It’s vigorous, crude and rather grubby and, inexplicably, evokes an emotional connection in me. I’d happily hang this painting on my wall.

Knowing what speaks to me is vital as a painter. If I didn’t have a clear understanding of what I liked, I’d struggle to paint an honest painting, one that represents how I see the world - or want to see the world. Self knowledge closes unpromising avenues and funnels me toward my unique aesthetic. And we each have a unique aesthetic.

The more that I make these sorts of selections, the clearer I become in my mind about what I want my paintings to look like. Paintings can go in so many directions. I could choose high chroma mixtures or neutralized colour, hard edges or lost, refined finishes or crude, big simple shapes or small, intricate ones, small details or none…. The list goes on and I can only make decisions based on my knowledge of my preferences.

Over the years, I’ve become clearer about what I like and that’s what I try to put on the canvas each day. Each painting, no matter the subject matter, is a self portrait, showing the viewer what I think is interesting and worth painting.

I’ve just embarked on a practise of small, beachy sketches on inexpensive supports that I do at the end of the painting day to use up some of the mixtures on my palette. Unlike the other practises that I’ve started and dropped (looking at you, daily drawing), this one might be a keeper. I look forward to it every day as an antidote to the intense concentration and sometimes frustration of more significant pieces.

It started with a couple of works on paper done with Flashe paint which went unexpectedly well and made me happy. The paper had a lot to do with that feeling since it’s not the financial commitment that oil primed linen is.

Next I worked oil on paper

And then oil on inexpensive canvas boards

My most recent one is oil on primed muslin mounted on hardboard, a surface that’s new to me and which takes paint in a dry, broken way that’s interesting. It was all that I had in the studio at the time so I broke my cheap surface rule. And I was only day 4!

This last piece is my favourite so far. It hasn’t garnered nearly the views and likes on social media that the wading girl has, but the subject and the way it’s painted all hold my attention and give voice to my thoughts on colour, design, light, and feelings about aging and the human body. This figure is the nearest to a self portrait and he makes me very happy.

I’ve got ideas for how to push these little paintings to be much more expressive and representative of me and my aesthetic preferences and I’m looking forward to seeing how they evolve. I expect that the Jenny Nelson abstraction course is going to have a greater impact as I go because I’m still working my way through her exercises and learning a lot about myself as I do so.

It’s a rich time in the studio!

• I’d love to hear which tree image you prefer and also which daily beach piece catches your attention.

• If you want to check out my “Inspiring Art” board on Pinterest, here’s the link.

Happy painting!