Painting The Object

So I spent the day examining the same old object with different lighting.  Barnard Dustan advises in his book on painting portraits to place the mirror and the canvas close to each other so that one has to move the object's eyes as little as possible going from one to the other. 16x12 inches, oil on panel.

Studying An Object

In his book on painting portraits, Bernard Dustan tells us not to worry about getting a likeness in a self-portrait.  "...[V]ery few self-portraits are good likenesses..."   "It doesn't matter whether you like your own face or not - you are simply an object to study."  Here I am studying an object.  12x12 inches, oil on panel.

Flowers at the Window

A variation of the flowers in a glass vase.  Bernard Dustan, in his book on Still Life, says that the painter doesn't appreciate his flower painting until the actual flowers are gone, and he no longer has to compare.  12x9, oil on panel.

Whose That?

Still working on this one.  The English painter Bernard Dustan commented in his book Starting To Paint Portraits, "Remember that very few self-portraits are good likenesses, so you mustn't mind too much when you show the result to someone who says 'Whose that a portrait of?'"

Just Gray.

A view from my studio window.  Not particularly sexy.  First, I thought I would do a painting, harmony in brown, green and gray.  Then, a drawing.  Just gray.  I've been reading a book by one of my favorite painters, an English artist who died in 2017 at the age of ninety-seven:  Bernard Dustan.  He did a lot of his paintings from drawings.  The drawings leave much to the imagination. 

Hidden Order

Here's a key statement by Bernard Dunstan from his book Painting Methods of the Impressionists:

"However much a painter thinks he is recording with total objectivity, he cannot help bringing out certain aspects as he works from nature; he will emphasize a connection between different parts, or 'lose' one tonal area against another, or stress a contour that forms an important direction.  Even the fact that some parts may give him trouble and have to be repainted adds to this process of emphasis. 'Rhymes,' connections, rhythms are discovered in the scene as he goes on working, for to any subject there is bound to be more of what we may term 'natural design' than we think at first.  This gradual discovery of order which was hidden from the casual eye is surely one of the greatest satisfactions of working from nature."

The accompanying painting is a 9x12 oil on panel done at Haley Farm at the end of Hopper Road in Williamstown, MA last week.  The weeds have overtaken the place obscuring the 'natural design'.

Do Them!

Inspired by Bernard Dunstan, I'm feeling irreverent today.  I offer one last ironic thought from his how-to book, Learning To Paint.  Referring to the "rules" about painting, Dunstan writes, "Think of all the things you were told... not to do, and do them!

Alas, this 9x12 oil on panel is an indirect irreverent view of a street in Provence.

Accepting Chaos and Clutter

In his book Learning to Paint Bernard Dunstan writes:

"Choosing a motif from the chaos and clutter of the visual material that surrounds us is, obviously, the essential decision in all painting based on nature.  What is not always appreciated, though, is that once you've made this choice, you'll probably have a greater chance of creating an interesting design if you accept all the accidental oddities that your motif contains, instead of trying to tidy it up by leaving out elements which seem unessential or tricky to handle...

The desire to label everything in a picture--this is a tree, that is a fence, and that is a house--can be a very limiting approach to selecting a motif.  Don't forget that leaving out invariably means making blanks, which your imagination or memory will the have to fill.  Most painters, experienced ones as well as beginners, aren't nearly as ingenious as the accidental effect of nature at producing formal relationships that are lively and interesting."

Apropos to those words is the accompanying painting, which I painted yesterday afternoon at the farm at the end of Hopper Road in Williamstown, MA, while hearing thunder claps slowly approaching.  I didn't want to paint the wagon by itself, so I moved slightly to the left to include a portion of a tractor (a wheel with a piece of plywood behind it).  Old farms always have equipment and junk strewn all over the place.  The painting is a 9x12 oil on panel.

The Hopper and Learning To Paint

By chance, I discovered that one of my favorite painters, Bernard Dunstan, had written some of those 'how-to" Watson-Guptill books.  Here's an excerpt from the book "Learning to Paint":

"It isn't until we start painting that we find out how little we have seen before...

The painter, perhaps, is almost the only person in our very specialized society who uses his eyes really objectively and without blinkers.  He is able to accept without choice or preference all the visual stimuli that come to him.

This type of looking is one of the justifications for drawing and painting in a figurative way, however bad the results may be.  At least the painter uses his eyes in a way that they can seldom be used in everyday life: at full stretch, accepting and examining a totality of experience.  This visual experience can be an important extension of the human consciousness, one that requires a certain humility on the part of the artist--an absorption in the character and reality of the subject, rather than merely in the production of an acceptable end-product, the picture."

Today's painting is a 9x12 oil on panel that I did yesterday morning at Haley Farm at the end of Hopper Road in Williamstown, MA.  It's a hot, steaming view of the Hopper.