Guilty and Gruppe

The Gloucester painter Emile Gruppe once complained that students "... tend to make their ships too big.  Instead of a composition, they end up with a portrait of a boat."   I'm guilty here of trying to do both (no pun intended).  This is a 12x16 oil on panel.

Here a few more words from Emile Gruppe:

“… every student paints a masterpiece sometime during his years of study; only in most cases he doesn’t know it.  There is no one around to tell him—and he keeps working till he spoils it!”

“…the single most important fact to remember when painting outdoors: in order to get a feeling of sunlight in your pictures, you have to paint in terms of warm and cool.”

“Remember when you’re outdoors, you have to be open to the character of the site.  I’m reminded of a friend of mine, a friend who painted marvelously sensitive tree studies—and who was so poor that he would scrape off masterpieces so he could reuse the canvas! I went to his studio one day and saw a large picture of some beech trees, with the light filtering down them.  The subtlety of the piece took my breath away.  I remember standing there in silence for a minute.  Then I thought to myself, “This is God!”  That’s all I said.  And that’s all I needed to say.”

“The more you paint outdoors, the more you’ll notice that you can pass a site a hundred times without its affecting you.  Then, on the hundred and first time—with the right light and atmospheric conditions—the spot comes to life.  It suddenly has to be painted!”

“Simplify the scene in front of you by squinting at it.”

“I find the more paint I have on, the better the painting.  I tell students to paint like a millionaire.”

“Painting is supposed to be fun, after all.  When it gets to be work, it shows in the picture.”

“At best you have about three hours in the early morning and three hours in the late afternoon when the light is fairly consistent.  So three hours is the maximum amount of time you can spend on your painting.  You can’t do much detail in that time.  And, besides, most people can’t draw well enough to do detail anyway.  So why bother?  There’s nothing worse than a picture full of flyspecks!”

“It takes years—maybe even a lifetime—to learn to see in a simple way.  You have to be as old as the hills, sometimes, before you really understand what art is all about.”

Eyes Moving

This is an 8x10 oil painting that I did a couple weeks ago trying to capture as quickly as possible the clouds forming over the mountain top.  There's a row of trees bordering a pasture in the foreground.  As you can see I painted the trees quickly as well.  Gruppe in his book on color says that the eyes move quickly over what they see, and he advises doing the same when painting.  The brush doesn't move as quickly sometimes.

Squinting and Looking Elsewhere

This 9x12 painting I started last week and completed yesterday morning, going again to the same spot at the same time.  I just kept squinting the whole time in order to see the landscape.  I also experienced that if you look at something for a while like the stream, it loses its color, but if you look elsewhere for a few moments, and then suddenly look at the stream, the color comes back.  Emile Gruppe, in his book on color, writes about that, and now I believe him.  

Here's what he said, "The longer you stare at an area, the grayer it gets.  Your eye becomes used to the color; it fatigues; your sense of color dies.  The only way to judge the color of an object is to compare it with the color of objects near it... That's why I constantly move my eyes over a scene, comparing values and colors.  If I'm stumped by an area, I work on another spot; then, when I turn back to the troublesome place, I'm usually able to see the color."

Hopper, Haley, Hopper

A 12x24 oil on panel depicting the end of Hopper Road, Haley Farm and the Hopper, which I completed yesterday.  I used the Emile Gruppe palette, consisting of a warm and cool blue, red and yellow.  Gruppe also added cadmium orange and used flake white.  I'll probably stick with titanium white for now.

Two Barns and Gruppe's Advice

Two 12 x 12 oil paintings, one slightly revised from an earlier posting, and the other from a drawing previously posted.

The following quote is from Emile Gruppe's Brushwork: A Guide to Expressive Brushwork for Oil Painting: "...my closing advice to you is to paint what you like--don't worry if anyone else likes it or not. And study nature carefully, so you know what you're trying to do. Maybe you'll eventually agree with me: if there's a heaven, it must be here on earth. The world is so beautiful! Everyone subconsciously appreciates this beauty. But the painter's appreciation is more conscious--and he spends his life trying to communicate his feelings to others."