Frank Webb-Painting With Expression

A clip from Frank's DVD, Painting with Expression
How about water, what does water do? Well if it's in a waterfall it moves, it bounces off rocks. It's almost like a living thing. It has continuity, it has dash, and then water sometimes can be so level that it almost becomes a perfect mirror. You've seen that and then out in the ocean it's waving and you want to have that feeling like what it's like to be in a boat. You feel that with that empathy and also when you paint water you want it to look wet. When you're working in watercolor wetness is a good idea there because that's very expressive and that's a media consideration. That's important. Now, I want to look at some examples of my work here and point out some of the matters related to empathy and expressiveness.
In this first painting, it's a winter scene, so I have made the sky wet and airy with soft edges. In this particular painting I have also used wet down here simulating snow, and I've used very neutral colors almost monochrome, just blues and a little bit of warms in the darks. This is a point of empathy. See how I've leaned the tree towards the barn and I've leaned the barn towards the tree, that's empathy, that's parts of the painting yearning for each other. That's very important in painting, that parts of the painting have an attraction for each other, and design and empathy helps us to do that.
On my next example here, I have kind of a chalk drawing from a Viennese painter from 100 years ago, Egon Schiele. I would include him as an expressionist painting, if we're going to talk for a moment about expression as one of the art isms in history. He always struck me as someone who always gave his paintings a certain degree of weirdness and otherness. Suzanne Langer called it otherness. She said the chief thing we notice about any work of art is its otherness. It's apart from ordinary reality. I think that's true of even the most representational or realistic painting or abstract painting. It's something separate from the everydayness of life.

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