Painting High Peak

On a recent weekend I thought I’d try the idea of painting a landscape area-by-area instead of blocking the whole thing first. It’s kind of like paint-by-numbers, but without the numbers.

I set up the pochade box on an estate along the Hudson with a view toward the river and High Peak in the Catskills.

I took 20 minutes to draw in the tree silhouettes on an oil-primed 8x10 panel. Then I started painting in each area with a small bristle brush, working from background to foreground and trying to get a finished effect right away. This felt weird at first because I don't usually complete one area at a time, but then I pretended I was doing a cross-hatched pen and ink drawing.

Here’s the painting most of the way finished, with the real background behind it. I consciously enlarged the relative size of the mountains compared to the trees, and I cut that slot in the trees leading down to the river.

And here’s the finished painting. Just as I was signing it, a little gnat landed in the wet paint of the sky and got stuck with his wings stretched out in the exact position of a soaring red-tail hawk. I didn’t have the heart to scrape him off. I guess he didn’t die in vain.
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Earlier GJ post on area-by-area painting, link.

John Dillinger

In October of 1980, I was sketching the Sealtest ice cream sign on Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee when a man came up and asked me to draw his portrait.

He struck a pose but jerked around from time to time to look up and down the street. Then he eyed me narrowly. “You’re not a cop, are you?”


I assured him I wasn’t. He asked me where he could get a Thompson.

“What’s a Thompson?” I asked.

“You know, a submachine gun. A tommie gun.”

“Why would you want that?” I asked.

“I’m going to jack a bank.”

He said his name was John Earl Dillinger and that he just got out of the pen. He told me that he had spent time in solitary confinement in San Quentin and that he had been married three times. He asked that I draw a mustache on him so that he wouldn’t be recognized.

I didn’t know how much of his story to believe. The original bank robber named John Dillinger died in 1934, and looked nothing like this guy. Tommie guns were obsolete, even back in 1980. I had the feeling that parts of his story may not have been what he told me, but his face told a story of its own.

Every portrait is an attempt both to study the mask and to see beyond the mask, because every subject is trying to project a persona— at least if they’re aware of being drawn.

In any event, my meeting with “John Dillinger” in Nashville was a prototype for Arthur Denison’s first encounter with Lee Crabb in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

Boulter’s Lock

Imagine that you were an artist from a hundred years ago, and this was the scene that met your eyes.

This is Boulter’s Lock, a popular gathering point for pleasure boaters along the Thames west of London. There’s a mix of personalities and a variety of watercraft crowded together waiting for the lock to be opened. Everyone is dressed for a fashionable day outdoors.

But what chaos! Everything is moving and changing. How would you design a coherent picture out of all these raw elements?

Here’s what Edward J. Gregory (1850-1909) exhibited in 1897, called "Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon." It’s one of the masterpieces of Victorian painting, and today is the pride of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool. But it’s hardly ever mentioned in art history class because it doesn't fit neatly into the streamlined narrative of most survey courses.

That’s too bad, because it’s a supreme example of composition. Note the clustering, spokewheeling and shapewelding in the main boat in the lower center of the picture. As a contrast to that crowded boat, the boats nearby have only single figures in a remarkable variety of postures and expressions, and those figures speak volumes about the social classes of the time. The Art Journal said, "it is in fact the three volume novel in art, the guide book and encyclopaedia of the manners and customs of the English people'."

Gregory worked on Boulter's Lock for about ten years. He was a remarkable painter. How many people would dare to paint reflections and cast shadows crossing in shallow water?
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More details about the real Boulter's Lock on Wikipedia and this local website, link.
Lady Lever Art Museum's page about the painting, link.
Art Renewal Center, three paintings by E.J.Gregory, link.

Art By Committee: Roasted

Wednesday is our day to have some fun with sketching game called "Art By Committee." The challenge is to illustrate an actual quote from a science fiction novel.

This week’s quote about a narrow escape from being roasted called to mind all sorts of images, from marshmallows to dragons. Each one has its own flair and shows how differently our imaginations work.

Roberta Baird

Robert Brown
Topher Sipes

Michael Geissler

Andy Wales

Kristina Carroll

Ryan Timm

Jared Shear

John Randall York

Susan Adsett

Arthur Keegan

Airan Wright

Rob Hummer

Andrew Walker
Paul Bozzo

…and the sketch by Jeanette, me, and a couple friends.

I wonder what strange and wonderful stories lurk beneath the surface of next week's quote: “The man looked bored.”
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Atelier Autodidactique

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I want to take this moment to thank all of you. I appreciate all of you who have taken a moment to share a funny thought, an encouraging word, a philosophical musing, or an expert insight.

Thanks too to all of you who have given your time and talent to the weekly Art By Committee contest. And thanks for linking or putting me on your blogroll. I wish I could link back to each of you, but my sidebar is already way out of control.

I am a firm believer in the value of self-teaching. Whether or not each of us has been to art school, we never get to a point where we know enough. Learning about art is a lifelong occupation.

Right now the history of art is at a remarkable crossroads, with a convergence of knowledge between digital effects innovation, vision research, a new realism in painting, and an outpouring of creativity in caricature, cartooning, and animation. As a result of all this cross-pollinaton, there’s a lot we can learn from each other, and I've been learning a lot from you by doing this blog.

I hope you’ll visit Gurney Journey from time to time over the future months. There are dozens of new topics lined up for future posts, with material on everything from reflected light to rainbows, silhouettes to spotlighting, interactivity to idealization—plus a few bizarre surprises along the way.

Image: Unused concept sketch for The Voyage of Argo, National Geographic, 1985.

Tone Paper Portrait

Here’s a portrait of my friend James Warhola, a children’s book illustrator best known for his autobiographical book Uncle Andy’s, as well as a frequent collaborator on the original Art By Committee sketchbook.

The sketch is from life, and it’s a quick technique that’s halfway between drawing and painting. I used a heavyweight gray-brown tone paper with a rough texture, and did the drawing first in soft pencil.

Then I washed in white gouache over the background using a bristle brush, leaving soft edges on the left side of the hair. For the light side of the face, I used a softer brush to lay down a milky-thin layer gouache, building it up a bit more for the highlights.

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) used a similar technique for this self-portrait, where he indulges a shameless talent for gurning.

Greek Statues in Color

Seeing Greek and Roman statues painted up in bright colors may look a little bit unsettling at first, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has made a convincing argument that they originally looked this way.

Garish? Gaudy? How could the same artists who carved those immortal forms prefer such a tacky treatment? If Brinkmann is right, we may have to revise our estimation of what constitutes good taste in sculpture.

Actually, the more I look at it, the more it makes sense. In fact I love it. Look out, Mount Rushmore, I’m on my way with my van full of spray cans.
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Smithsonian article, link.
Slide show of full-color restorations, link.
Boston.com article about traveling exhibition, link.
The standing figure is Augustus of Prima Porta. The Trojan archer is copyright Stiftung Archäologie, Munich