 Next week, also right in this very room, we are going to have a talk about, it doesn't say Vermont CCD, but that's what it means, Plan V. It could be Plan V, but I think it's Plan V, the case for a second Vermont Republic. Yes! So this is Professor and Publisher Robert C. Williams. He will present a 12 point program, this has nothing to do with drinking, for a second Vermont Republic, a plan for interdependence. So that is here, right at the Aldrich, and I might as well go on to the next week, but I know you can't hear me past that. I can't even remember until next week. Next, our March 4th week, also right here, is a program on the American Elm Tree, given by conservationist Gus Goodwin, who works for the Nature Conservancy. I hope you know us still. And three days after that, it's Bob's birthday. It's Bob's birthday. You should really love your country. Thank you. Okay, there are two entry seats down here if anybody wants to use them. Are there any other entry seats? Yeah. You've got one next to you, Priscilla? No. Oh, there's two over there, but you have to send our various people's messages in there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You'll be called over. Okay. That's about me. So, today we are very lucky to have Susan Abbott with us. Susan Abbott has a BFA and MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and she has worked as a professional artist since that time. She's exhibited in galleries and museums around the country. Her paintings are represented in numerous corporate and individual collections that have been featured in many publications, and even on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Susan is a popular teacher of art workshops both in the U.S. and abroad. So I give you Susan Abbott. Thank you. Maybe we can just dim these lights, because this talk is all about the art I'm showing. So, originally we were going to call this... Oh, sorry. Yeah. From Pitch's beginning. So, is that good? Everybody hear me okay? Okay. So, originally I was going to call this how artist see, and then I thought I'm a little averse to the word artist. It's a very highfalutin term that has a lot of kind of baggage loaded into it. So, I really want to talk about how people in my trade painting see. And what I want to do is talk about the very specialized language that a visual art uses. And I know that there are people here who paint, because some of you have taken the classroom with me, and so some of this will be familiar to those that are actually also artists here, or painters here. Others, it might be a bit of a revelation. And when I'm done, you might feel like some of my students do, who first start painting and ask me, oh, come on, painters aren't really thinking about all that stuff. Are they? Yes, they are. Different degrees in given painting. So, part of, I think, the mythology that surrounds painters is, well, there's a lot of mythology. That would be great for a whole other lecture. But one of the myths, I think, is that we're just born talented, you know. And sort of like we spring out of Zeus's forehead, and we know how to do all this stuff. And those civilians, as my husband who's not a painter, calls non-painters, just don't have it, and they don't know. And, you know, there's a little truth in those, but also a lot of falseness to both of those ideas. So, if you look up at the slide here, and actually, I didn't have to show this because we're surrounded by great kids out in this room. But there is truth that we do start out as natural painters. If a kid is given a piece of paper and paint and pencils, they will do the right thing with that paper and paint. And what they do is, they use the whole piece of paper. So, because in a child's mind, because of the imaginations we have, until it's kind of crushed out of us later on in life, we feel as though when we're little, like you could watch your grandkids paint, that piece of paper is a world. It's magic, you know. So, if they're going to put something in the upper left-hand corner, they're going to put something in the lower right-hand corner. And that's what in the language of painting we call the format. In other words, it's the page. It's the canvas. And what happens is we get a little older, say about eight, seven, eight, nine. If we keep drawing, which kids will do, if they're given the equipment to do it usually, it would start to get interested in stuff. It usually divides into ponies or dancers for girls. And I would have to say having raised two boys soldiers or raised cars or, you know, and I don't mean to make unfair generalizations about that. But, you know, I think ponies are big. I'm sure there are a lot of little boys that draw ponies. But what happens is that we get interested in what it is cataloging the world and we forget about the format. So if you look at this drawing, like there's nothing going on at the edges. And that's a natural kind of progression we go through. But then what we have to do when we lose not only the magic of the page, which we're back after a long training, we have it again, is we have to relearn like in this Franz Klein painting, we have to relearn that kind of animating of the whole page. Like it's a world that we create. Another thing that kids have is tremendous gesture and action and a lack of inhibition. When people say, I can't draw a straight line, I bet, how many of you feel that way? I can't draw a straight line. You know, it's not that damn easy to draw a straight line. And it's actually, if I gave you a piece of paper and said, if you put the pencil at the bottom and push it up to the top, there's a kind of inhibition that we can feel about making a mark on a page. Look, kids don't have that. Here's a Joan Mitchell drawing. And, you know, she got that back after self-consciously training to be a painter. Here's another child's drawing. Here's a de Kooning painting. So it's something, this kind of ability of an uninhibited gesture is part of our language that we train for, that comes back to us over time. So artists do train. I mean, that's another kind of myth is that it's easy to be a self-educated artist. Actually, very few artists are self-taught if you look at those who end up making a profession or whose work is in galleries and museums. We tend to start in grade school. We're the class artists oftentimes. We go on in high school where the misfits hanging out in the art room. Then we often specialize at college and it's basically a trade school of four years. And then many of us go on to grad school. So we've got about as many years as a lawyer does into our field. And part of the way we learn is by past art. So the language of art is not sequential. It goes back, artists today are learning from cave paintings. So here, you know, copying is one way. Here's a you and you glow wonderful painter copying of Poussin. Here's a Dutch still life that Matisse copied. Matisse actually made a living copying in Belouf, doing very realistic copies of paintings. So that's, you know, that learning this language takes years and it's something we learn from dead artists basically. And speaking of art school, Matisse was in art school so long doing studies like this, they finally kicked him out and said go try to figure out how you're going to make a living at this. So another thing that's interesting about painters language is why do painters paint the way they paint? You know, paint is basically everybody's using the same kind of paint. Why do some works look so different between Van Gogh and Rembrandt or Matisse and Wyeth? Well a lot of it is what the artists are taking in for, you could say inspiration, you could say guidance, you could just say what they're passionate about. For Matisse it was these icons in a certain period of time. African masks were very influential for Matisse and Picasso and other painters. So these different cultural influences also changed their language. I'm only going to be talking about western art, but you know, that's my frame of reference. But some of what I'm saying does hold true for other art cultures. Some of it is very specific to the way we as westerners see, which is different in terms of what our painting looks like than from the way other cultures see. So if you look at this long career of Matisse you can see he changed his language in different ways. And sometimes he was emphasizing a round form, sometimes he's emphasizing a flat form. I'm going to talk about all that kind of switching how we see based on what it is we want. Another thing in a painter's work that's interesting to look at, and maybe you're not aware of, is how much experimenting a professional artist does. I get the feeling like for my students that they think, oh there's going to reach a point, I'm going to know just what I'm doing, and I'm going to go to my studio and every painting is going to be great, and there's not going to be any, and so if you look at Matisse you can see you know all through his life I'm going back to these same themes and trying them different kinds of ways over and over again. So that's part of the language. It's also an experimental kind of language. Some of the way a painter's work looks has to do with where they are in their life. When I had small children I switched to watercolor because I could put it up and take it down. It was very easy to keep having small increments of time. Now I'm back to oils because I can concentrate for six or seven hours at a time. Matisse at the end of his life was paralyzed and so he did these cutouts that built on everything he had done before. So an interesting thing to look at is how you go from, for a realist painter let's say who's getting their cues from nature, how you go from a kind of chaotic scene like this that actually nature's very chaotic when you go out and try to figure out what to paint and how do you go through those steps to flatten it out because that's part of, that's the language of painting is to take the three-dimensional world flatten it out and reorganize it and add color. So I want to kind of walk you through some of those steps of the different vocabularies that we learn when we learn to be visual artists. So if we take away color now and just look at line. So this is a contour line. I don't know if you've heard of contour lines before. Yeah, contour lines are a very magical thing. It's a straight line that's not an outline. It's got three-dimensionality to it. How do you learn to do that? That's not something little kids naturally do. That's a very learned way of seeing. Well, part of it is doing exercises. For a lot of these kinds of vocabularies we practice them separately and then later after we're more adept we start putting them together. So here you can see here's a continuous contour line. This is an exercise starting from the finish to the end. Here's Matisse doing a contour drawing two feet from a nude model. People who are civilians look at this and go ooh-la-la, but actually when you're a visual artist the nude model, it's like you're in med school. I mean, for me anyway. I can't speak for Picasso on that necessarily. But by and large it's clinical. It's like something we work with. And you can see here he's really staring at her and nodded his paper. And that's contour drawing. That's how you learn this vocabulary is that you look at what you're drawing and you don't look at your paper very much. It's counter-intuitive, but what it builds is a very strong sense of the object as a sculptural three-dimensional thing and a hand-eye coordination. So your pencil sort of traces around that shape. And your eye and your hand and the shape are all one. And that sounds sort of like pocus pocus, but again it's actually a skill that we develop. This is a cross-contour drawing. That's another kind of movement out on contour and into shading and three-dimensionality. And this is something computers now do very well. You know, where they can make three-dimensional shapes out of contour lines. But we visual artists do this with our hand and eye, and sometimes like in this case we take shapes that are already striped, that are actual contours. There's a beautiful drawing by Watto where he's posed the model in a stripe. And you can see that by following the stripe you follow her form. So the stripe moves as her form moves. And that, again, that's something we get better at that we can kind of move with those shapes and describe a form by describing contour. Here's a rember. Sometimes there are no actual lines and that's where we have to intuit the shape. So as we learn to draw better, we become almost like sculptors. We become very good at the sense that we're touching the form with our eyes. And again, it's not metaphysical. It's like a very, it's a skill you develop that any of you can develop over time. Drawing is a very teachable skill, very learnable. So when you find somebody who's really, really a great draftsman like Rembrandt, you see them putting these different types of seeing together into a beautiful drawing like this. And if you go down this model's back, imagine you could do this with just one line that wouldn't have any sense of dimension. But if you go down her back, you can see he's got on the shoulder one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ten lines going down her back, all of which are different in weight so that he's not only showing you what's closer to the top, he's showing you what's underneath all through line weight. So that's somebody who's really, really sensitive with using cross contour line and contour line. Also in that Rembrandt drawing was a sense of gesture. Did you notice it looked almost like a Japanese calligraph in a way, the way he used his brush? So gesture is another one of those horses we're driving when we've got that whole chariot of drawing going. And what gesture means is sort of what it sounds. It's like if you look at the bow, the bow on the top left is drawn with contour, the bow on the bottom right is drawn with gesture. You see how it's like another lens that we've got on? So we're not on the bottom right, we're not doing a line description of exactly where the edge meets space. We're showing what that bow in a sense feels like as it's moving through the space. So you can recognize a gesture drawing when you see it. Here's one where the model's taken three poses and gesture drawings when you practice them in school are done really, really quickly. And then if you've got somebody like Rembrandt who's really good at them, they can go out on the street and draw fast. And again, we're not trying to get detail with gesture, we're just trying to show the whole picture of how a form is moving. Okay, so it's a different kind of vocabulary. It's like a different lens we're putting on the camera. Rodan is another wonderful gesture drawing. He would have a model just move around to the studio and work on big sheets of newsprint and every time she changed a pose it was like a 30 second pose he would do a drawing. So gesture drawings are typically 20 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe a minute. And usually in art school you start a life class with 20 minutes of gesture. So, you know, it's a great thing to do in your sketchbook. So how that translates to painting can be, in this case of an abstract expressionist painter, it's all about gesture. Again, having that movement of the arm become the mark. Gesture can, but also gesture works into all kinds of painting. It works into landscape, it works into oil painting. And it's one thing that creates a more interesting kind of surface for a painting, more engaging. Gesture isn't just the line quality though or the way the artist is looking at shape and space. It's also within paintings to create movement. So part of our language is how do we compose? How do we create both stability and balance in a painting but also create movement? So I think about this as being composition and painting is like composition in anything. It's like your life. It's like you don't want so much stability but if you've got too much movement in your life, well, you know, it's like your bills aren't being paid and you've been evicted and you've run off with the secretary or whatever. So you're looking for something in between, you know, and that's sort of where painters too are in that language of composition, they're trying to create enough movement that you get from, say in this case, Christ figure to the Apostles figure. And the way they're doing that is by actual hand gestures. So these are all things that we're not looking at a painting aware of but the painter is and that's why we're sucked into the painting and engaged with it. Very complex paintings like this Poussin which used to be back when history painting ruled when painters were supposed to be able to tell stories with their work more than they are now. There was the need to orchestrate a lot of figures in space and gesture became really important for that. Here's an analysis of that through Photoshop and you can see all the different arm gestures and figures going one way, figures going another. Again, all orchestrated by Poussin in order to create these old age kind of intersecting gestures through the painting. Okay, now let's put gesture aside and when we learn this language we have to compartmentalize too. So we can't be thinking about gesture if we're thinking about this next thing and that's negative space. It's a whole different lens we're putting on our camera. How many of you know what negative space? Anybody ever hear that? Okay. It's a very interesting concept. It's a completely unwestered idea. We're not interested in the empty stuff in between the real thing. That's an eastern idea. You think about an eastern garden. It's all about those empty spaces between the rocks. Our gardens are about the plants, right? But negative space is a huge, huge tool. It's essential for painting and drawing and seeing accurately. Our big job when we paint, when we're painting realistically especially, is to take three-dimensional reality and flatten it out. And then when you look at it it looks three-dimensional again. So we've got to go through all these kinds of tricks or vocabularies in order to get there. So negative space, if I have a student and they're not seeing negative space yet I know they're going to be struggling with their drawing. What does it mean? It means that you're flattening everything out to the extent that what you're interested in is the stuff in between the shapes. So that in this case like the gaps in the chair and the background are as important as the furniture is. It's an interesting thing but the chair and the table and the umbrella they share an edge with the wall, right? It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Does that make sense? So if I draw that nameless flat shape the big jigsaw space on the left-hand upper side it's much easier to draw that than to draw the chair and the umbrella. It's not cheating. That's what makes us able to draw complicated things. Does that make sense? So if I flatten it out and turn it all into a jigsaw puzzle then I can deal with the negative shape. So if you squint at that and squinting is a great tool for painting if you squint at it and try to make the blue the real thing and not the vase and the flowers in the scarf you can see it would be much easier to deal with that blue shape than trying to figure all those flowers out. Really that really it comes home when you're dealing say with complicated New England perspective-wise what's going on with that but I can do a painting and turn that sky into a puzzle piece and I can paint the sky and I'm painting the roof at the same time without having to figure out the perspective. So you can see what a huge tool negative space would be. In design, in the Swissler painting that's another place where negative space comes in where he's creating this design with these big negatives and here's a Johnson or Sargent watercolor. This watercolor is not finished but see how he's drawing the figure by drawing the landscape first. Does that make sense? Does that figure complex? He's really putting more time into the negatives here than into the very simple shape-positive shape of the figure. So we've got these different tools that help us with shapes and edge and now we've got to turn it all into a painting somehow and we've got to go back to that idea that we've got this piece of canvas or piece of paper that's watercolor or pastel and it doesn't have limitless edges. I mean that's our format and so what are we going to do if we're painting outside like this and we've got to figure out what we're going to paint and this is something that painters are always thinking about. It's essential it's like one of the main points is what's going to fit on the canvas and what am I going to leave out and here you can see Monet figuring that out and this is a gesture drawing see how sketchy it is and here's one of the many paintings he did of the Garcin-Lazar so he's thinking right from the get-go about what goes in and what stays out now if you take the subject this is a place I go into the Bahamas to teach every winter and here's the place I painted before before you start to think about what painters are doing you have the idea that they just kind of go and sit down in front of something and copy it well you've got to decide what it is you're interested in here's a lot of stuff here's a painting that's about the shadows more of that subject here's a painting of the same subject that was more about the sky or the same subject that's more about the land right so it's like again with the camera I'm shifting my point of interest depending on what I want to get into the composition so there's a tremendous amount of editing that goes into speaking this language in this case you can see that it's like if you're outside painting thinking about where's my viewfinder going to be what am I going to paint people especially when they're first learning to paint outside they take on way too much it's like we just want oh yeah I want to go all the way from that house to that apartment building over there and put the entire parking lot in between it's like you know they they're not thinking so much about what am I really interested in here maybe it's something like this that has a kind of compositional idea to it rather than the whole thing so what we learn to do is not to think about subject we think about composition if you go to an amateur painting show you're going to see many many paintings of red barns in Vermont if you go to Maine they're going to be a lot of seagulls you know every part of the country's got its tropes that a lot of people will paint and they're painting subject they're not painting composition right so if you're painting composition you're thinking more about what you're going to leave in and what you're going to what you're going to take out based on creating that composition that's got both balance and movement and all this other stuff I'm talking about now let's think about value how many of you have thought about value and painting at all anybody now value doesn't mean the worst when it's a painting term it means dark and light so it's if you think of it like a musical scale there and here on this sketch I've done I've got five notes see on the right I've got five values going from white to black with a middle gray in between and then a middle light and then a middle dark that's called a value scale and photography can be ten values working one or two here's Winslow Homer using a value scale that's called a ink painting so value is absolutely essential for painting value comes before color what it's like black and white photography comes before color photography painters get so that they see their compositions in terms of value oftentimes before they see them in terms of color and they get so they can organize really complicated things with darks and that's where the design comes from it's also where a sense of space comes from so right from the when landscape became its own subject in the 16 15 late 1500 1600s painters started to set up this kind of diorama space with value where there'd be dark values in the front and then light values in the back and that's how nature is the lighter values are farther away of all the atmosphere in between us and that stuff back there so even up with the impressionists you can see that Monet here he's much more interested in color but he's organizing by value with the trees on the right darker and the that island in the back is a mid value and the sky is lighter value sets up landscape space it also creates design if a painter doesn't have strong underlying values even if the painting is taking the color there's not going to be a design there and here's a painting by Wolf Kahn who's working me know that I've taken the color out of in Photoshop and here it is with color so the color adds a lot but the underlying bones of the painting is in the values here's a Vermeer that I've desaturated in Photoshop and you can see he's got these big movements of dark middle and light value that are underlying that painting we all know so well so when we're out in nature we're not only imposing a kind of grid on what we're seeing that takes all this chaos out there and focuses right down to a small composition that's got balance and movement but we're also imposing or we're pulling out from what we're seeing values here's just two values the Japanese have a term for this notan which means a design of just two values where all the darks link together and you can see it's satisfying like there's a structure there and then the painter will take that same design and break it down into a middle value couple middle values to kind of flush it out so if we go from say painting standing in this alley painting like I was doing we see it in full color but in our mind we desaturated into value and into shapes and then it goes back into color again when we paint it now another aspect of this language is a sense of how one thing leads to another in your painting and in nature in life here we see Leonardo analyzing the human face with a series of lines see how he's saying okay what's underneath the iris okay the corner of the mouth what's over the nostrils okay the insides of the eyes everybody's got the same basic head proportions and kind of webbing so if you think of webbing it means it's this underlying structure in nature that you don't see unless you look for it and it makes the world a pretty interesting place to see that anytime you sit down and look at something and you start to overlay in your mind's eye relationships of where things lie in relationship to each other there's a kind of order that starts to emerge that we're trained as painters to see some artists use webbing as part of the way they paint this is Ewan Uclo a British artist and if you see in between the pairs you see that line so he's with somebody who did measurements for everything in a painting he came out of the time when abstract painting had become kind of the eminent and he wanted to return to perceptual painting where he was really observing while he painted and so he started to do these very obvious kind of grid and web lines so that he was drawing that straight line and then holding his pencil or brush up to the pairs and really seeing where did they lay along that central line and all those little marks in the pairs he's doing as notations on where one thing is in relationship to another who knew that kind of looking is going on underneath that painting so I mean Cezanne is somebody that it's very easy to see that he's doing something that's got a whole lot of structure underneath it you know and here's somebody who's analyzing the Cezanne painting how all these different shapes are lining up and how they are in relation to each other here's another Cezanne Bathers so I mean I guess say one way I would define painting is about the of shapes and colors on a flat surface you know that it's all about relationship how one shape, how one color relates to another and relates to the edge now how many of you have noticed on a drawing this is a Degas drawing but on an old master drawing this grid that's lying under yeah ever see that grid that's like on this Degas drawing well look for it if you're in a museum or looking through a book of drawings what the grid is done after the artist does the drawing in order to blow it up in size on to the canvas so you see it a lot in paintings or drawings from like the 14, 15, 1600s especially when frescoes were being used where the master would do the drawing that required the skill and the assistant would grid it and then let's say on this Degas drawing every grid is a half inch or let's say an inch and then on the painting he would do a foot grid and then he could blow it up just using negative space and looking very abstractly he didn't have to rethink the work of how do you draw that arm and how do you draw that head does that make sense so he's looking very abstractly and at just line angle and negative shape to blow the drawing up now another thing to think about in painting is diagonal lines diagonals are how we do perspective perspective again means taking how three-dimensional objects vanish away from us in space and turning that into flat nine times out of ten I'm going to say ten times out of ten if I take somebody who's never drawn before and I put them in front of this road and I say draw the road they're going to have the bottom of the road come off the bottom of the page in other words they're not going to see how extreme the angles of the road are going back the world is a much weirder looking place than we think it is so in our left brain way thinking about roads we never really see that these angles are very very cute and they're actually going off the sides of the page not the bottom of the page right so as we're trained to speak this language we learn to not trust our brain we learn to rely on our eyes right and what that shows us is that the road is doing something that doesn't make any sense it's disappearing into a dot and then it's getting really really big when it hits the bottom of the page we learn not to second-guess that and just go with it you know so if it's who you're going to believe me or your lying eyes we believe our eyes now in terms of buildings and perspective we're not architects okay what we learn to do is cite perspective if I had to explain to you why in this sketch I did in Paris why all these buildings are going back like that I really would have a hard time explaining to you but I can see it because for one thing I'm using the negative space of the sky and I also have general ideas about how diagonals work as they go back and how they switch direction from the bottom to eye level when they become level and then above eye level they start to go the opposite way for diagonals so that's another lecture but that's something that's an important part of diagonals in painting so it's perspective but that's not the whole story of diagonals in painting they're also used to create movement like I talked about before that need to keep the eye going around the page around the canvas here's a diagonal anybody see a diagonal in this painting yeah where is it this is a Chardin painting a brilliant wonderful still life painter from the 1700s in Paris and it's a really shallow space he's working on he's just working on a ledge by a window and yet there's a lot of thrust in that space and that's that diagonal so when you look at still life that's an interesting thing to see is how does the artist create some movement back into that still life another this is Mark Adams so this is a watercolor great big watercolor those of you that do watercolor know that this is a technically extremely difficult watercolor and he got so sick of people asking him how are you doing that in watercolor he switched to acrylic but here you can see just that little bit of tilt how that creates so much dynamism in that shallow space in that open book you know he pulled around with that book a lot till he got that diagonal I'm guessing that worked for the rest of that grid sort of layout here's a British painter who's learned a lot from Chardin I think and here you can see how the shadows are diagonals that are creating thrusts in the space so it's not only in landscape and figure painting and still life it's not only the stuff it's also shadows that can work for you here's a diagonal being created moving us back into space by the access of the figure so when Wyeth was laying this out he thought a lot about where those two hands were going to be he just didn't tell Christina go plop down in the field I mean he did a whole lot of drawings trying to figure out what would give the best kind of webbing line the best access that would move us right back in space like a laser to the house complex Baroque paintings like this Caravaggio which again they're like symphonies as opposed to like a solo cello piece or something like these are like these complicated movements diagonals become extremely important as ways to create bridges between the figures now in painting there are many many analogies with music how many of you musicians are playing music in here so I find I'm not a musician but I find that when I talk about painting I'm often using musical terms and because musical terms are embedded in visual art they share a lot of characteristics in terms of how the language we speak so this is a nocturne by Whistler. Whistler called it a nocturne and why is it a nocturne? Well it's a night painting but it's also a very kind of peaceful composition it's a restful composition here's another Richard Diebenkorn painting that's similar to that nocturne it's got a lot of space in it a lot of peace if you think about it in a musical composition it would be that's the adagio right that's got kind of a different rhythm than the faster parts of the string quartet here's another painting that fits right in with being a quieter kind of a movement but some painting is very discordant it deliberately discordant since jarring it has to do with value it has to do with color the intensity of the color it has to do with the smallness of the shape it has to do with not having big unified movements also in painting is rhythm so this is a John Selcottman a wonderful British landscape painter from the 1700s and it looks very modern to us because it's kind of a painting about nothing it's something we'd see out in a field here but it's beautifully orchestrated and part of what he's doing are these rhythms you see that so a rhythm would be the same kind of shape repeated at regular intervals here you see it in this Maurice Prendergast with these flags marching back so a painter doesn't always use rhythm in a painting but they might find hey this is a place where rhythm would work or this is a subject that's about a rhythm here's a Fairfield Porter painting with a very distinct almost like a little drum punctuation isn't it going across the field there of those trees also in painting you see parts of the composition that are quiet and parts of the composition that are active right so here this John Singer Sargent it's got so much going on in the bottom half the top half is a place we can go to and take a breather alright again it's that's a deliberate thing painters do is to set up active areas and quiet areas in a painting now one thing you got to remember is that painting is made out of paint you know it's like it's very physical like it's this is Winslow Homer's paint box what a mess you know it's his little paint box it's all you know like I want to just get in there and clean clean that thing up but what Homer had was here's Homer a Homer painting beautiful clean color is he had a very strong knowledge of color theory of how to use his colors I want to segue out of the drawing and the value in compositional aspects we've talked about now talk about color so color starts with the color wheel for painters paint is just kind of a jumble on your in your paint box I mean it doesn't have any order to it and what the color wheel does is it puts paint in an order that we can use to create different very clear relationships between the colors it can be a color wheel of any colors here's a color wheel of duller colors kind of earth colors and you can see you've got the reddish color the bluish color and the yellowish color and they mix to secondary colors they mix we know purple in there because of the triad is very neutralized but you're mixing them together to get intermediate colors and a palette like that that's this palette in this little watercolor it can give you a lot of variety in the color right but it's limited it's limited so you can have paintings and color wheels that are really based on only two colors but if they're the right two colors you can get a tremendous amount of movement and variety and space in the painting why is that well that's because of temperature okay so we talked about value color is actually the third thing that a painter will think of often times they'll start with value in the design then they'll think about this temperature what's warm what's cool then they'll plug color into that so these these paintings I'm showing you are British paintings that were done with just burnt sienna and ultramarine blue just a brown and a blue and here's another more modern painting and you it's I mean you'd probably be surprised that it's only those two colors right but what they have is the the the brown has warmth in it and the blue has coolness so the bold the brown has some yellow and the cools have blue and that creates the blues tend to be a little more recessive the warms they go back in space more the warms come forward and it also just creates a kind of rhythm again a back and forth rhythm there's the the first coat sometimes painters will start this is an oil painting where I've started with just a brown and a blue to get my drawing and my values established and then it's going to go into full color so that's one approach to working on a larger oil painting so if you if we go back and think for a second about composition one of the ways that composition why we think about it is or even care about it is it creates a psychological impact in the painting so if you look at this you think about Hopper he's often given the wrap well it's he's all about human isolation and he kind of is you know and one reason that we get this strong emotional impact from Hopper is how he tends to set things back away from you so you have to work to get to the subject you know you gotta go over those rocks in that field to get to that house and again that's a very deliberate part of Hopper's vocabulary you see him using it over and over again you also see with some painters this use of a limited palette you know to create a kind of unifying mood in the painting here's a sergeant this painting has six little kids camouflaged and I don't know if you can see them down there that's sergeant here's another painter from Quebec using just that limited palette here's a painting that's based more on the warmth and a painting that's based more on the cool so this is something to look for when you're out looking at paintings ask yourself what color am I seeing in this painting because you'll be surprised very often the painter is working with only three four colors but they're doing it very very skillfully here's a Miranda who worked his whole life moving the same little still life objects around his studio you know doing this fantastically beautiful body of work about them so when we go to art school here's something I had my students do is to take a Marie I gave them paint samples and had them analyze a Miranda painting and then do a kind of copy of one and just try to hone so what we're doing is we're trying to hone our eye for subtle differences in color not just the bright colors but the subtle colors now those are two monnaies and you can see the warm and cool the difference that you get in mood that's another use of warm and cool warm colors are much more exciting they're in your face more cool colors are more relaxing like they don't paint Bordello's light green and they don't paint hospital rooms bright red right for a reason those of you that have been in a Bordello lately would know that so here's the same scene done in two different colors with two very different color palettes one warm and one cool sometimes painters you can see that a painting painters tend towards warmer colors or sometimes cooler colors in their work and again there's a lot of mood that comes through those color choices so on the color wheel all the colors on the left are warm because they all have some yellow and all the colors on the right are cool because they all have some blue complementary color is another color theory that's used it's completely always in a painter's toolkit and it's very important for a couple of different things one is creating contrast you get the most contrast between compliments and they're opposite on the color wheel so yellow and purple you really see the yellow more because of the purple so this goes back to the idea of relationships being so important so that we the purple makes the yellow look more yellow and vice versa so you'll see painters who'll build a whole color composition around a complementary relationship like this painting I knew I wanted a lot of purple because of that yellow sign where I pushed the shadows much more purple than I might have in another painting because of that chartreuse yellow grass here's a Joan Mitchell we see the yellow we see that background is being more yellow because of the purple so we have a hardwired relationship with complementary color and a skilful painter will make these yellows look the sun look more like it's in on that grass will feel the light more because they can push those shadows a little more purple so that we read that yellow more intensely same with green and red you see now that you can look for it start to see how often painters will base compositions here's orange and blue on complementary relationships another last thing about compliments they create the most contrast they also this is the second thing they talk to each other because we're kind of if you ever look at a green red light and close your eyes and see green my only weird child that did that with like this pair says on put the blue plate down there so that we would it would talk to those orange peaches lastly compliments when you mix them together go neutral you take a bright red and a bright green like at the top and you keep mixing the two together and this goes any medium you're working in watercolor oil and you end up with basically gray so that's a very helpful thing for creating what we call chromatic neutrals those are neutrals grays, blacks, browns that are just packed with color and sometimes also a skillful painter can tone a painting down and do these kinds of mixes that we like it we could look at this Miranda and think it's bright color but it's not you can see if you superimpose a white black and ochre on top those are very muted colors so that's another good thing to look for is like the color you're looking at is it is it intense and vivid oftentimes it's more muted now painters have that are working with realism have the issue of what do you do with those nameless things like concrete walls floors there's no like concrete paint you got to mix it yourself and that's where it's fascinating there's a subjectivity that comes in in this painting I pushed it more violent because I love color and I like making this whole kind of vibrant color composition but that isn't the only solution here's a George Bellows so these are just some examples of that nameless stuff that a skilled painter can push into these beautiful nameless kinds of colors also you'll notice that a lot of these subjects are not telling big stories and they're not heroic like they're looking at very ordinary stuff and making beautiful paintings out of them so when we look at the relativity of color like we saw the relativity of other things those three bottom colors are all the same colors the squares in the middle see how different they look depending on what's around them I don't know if you know Joseph Albers work but his whole life was painting these squares to show you how color changed so much based on what it was next to so if we go back again to the idea of a limited palette part of what a painter learns is to do a lot with not a lot like how to make the most of limited means can be a really good exercise so just taking red, yellow, and blue that's a Jasper Johns painting and working with those three colors red, yellow, and blue are what we call a triad and they're farthest apart as you can get on the color wheel so they have a whole lot of energy you know if you're trying to find a couple colors to use like this painter just use red, yellow, and blue because you know that they use limited color at the time this was painted but if you want to create a lot of energy in the painting this is Broadway Boogie Woogie by Mondrian he picked a red, yellow, and blue here's a watercolor this is just three colors and you can see the variety of color you can get this is a painting done with those three colors so again it's kind of knowing how to make the most out of that mix it can be a great exercise and actually you know a really wonderful way to approach a painting here's this painter does all her work with three colors an amazing amount of color she gets out of that now one other color theory and probably your ears are glazing over so I'll go through this a little quicker is analogous color analogous colors are colors that are next to each other right next to each other in the color wheel like notes, do re mi fa so and what analogous color does is it creates again a kind of unity and harmony in the painting and it depends like how far you you can see here that analogous the whole color wheel is really analogous so if you hit every note you can have many many hues in your painting but the painting will hang together you know because you're playing all the notes you're not jumping from one side of the color wheel to another so you can see painters when a painter painting looks extremely harmonious like this Paul Clay if you sat down and you cut up a reproduction and laid all the color out you'd see he's got very close steps of all of these different colors to turn of form you're often using analogous colors in this case I think these peaches I'm going from purple to cool red to warm red to orange to yellow now if you look at harmony again here's a painting that doesn't have enough movement it's like it's very boring in a way because it's sort of all on one side of the color wheel and here the student has put in a color but now it's unbalanced and now these analogous colors extend the color wheel but relate help to pull it together so that's another thing that we think about now I just want to talk for a minute about color as color in different periods of art painters have approached colors in different ways back at this time when Giotto was working in the 1300s color was king I mean color was bright then we get to the Renaissance when artists are more interested in turning a form they discovered anatomy they discovered after losing it for a thousand years how to make a form be in the light and go around and they get less interested in color now they're interested in tonal painting mostly earth colors and then we go back to the Impressionists and this is a Cezanne and with a Poussin on the other side and we see that all of a sudden the world has become this really colorful place that it hasn't been for 500 years okay so we think it for granted that when the world has always looked as colorful to people and maybe it has but the way they interpret it has changed it's like when you see World War II in color photos it's very disconcerting to us right because we think of it as a black and white war so now when we look at a landscape yeah we can have all that color but that wasn't true for 500 years of landscape painting here you can see a transitional painting that's moving into Impressionism the generation before the Impressionists who started to go outside it's still like the Dutch painting was it's still really not about color so what made what changed how did Monet get there well in a nutshell a couple things one is the scientific revolution where painters started to study optics this is by the writer Goethe who is interested in optics it's technological change during the industrial revolution where there started to be paint tubes and a wider range of color all of a sudden we ever had before and it's artists going outside and painting directly from nature like John Constable did in England that was revolutionary to go outside and paint and that influenced the Impressionists and Monet who started to look at the world as a really really colorful place so now when we're looking at foliage we're not just looking at light green and dark green and brown we're starting to pack like Monet did a lot of color and we're starting to see it more this is Cézanne who was completely observational in his painting he did not make things up he always had a reason of observation to paint a color and that's how he painted foliage and here's the painting of mine where I think I'm painting what's there but it's a lot more colorful than a Dutch painting would have been because I see the color and I have the means to express it color value last thing I want to talk about is the darkness and the lightness of color and it's something I'm going to bet you hadn't thought of before but it's there so that pure color itself has color has value has dark and light very interesting how again whole periods of art see are interested in color value and then aren't and then are again other cultures are more interested in color value this was a painting that was done Europe had no interest in this kind of color in Holland not about color it's about value this Rembrandt painting now painters we can talk in any language we want to because there isn't any academy anymore or any anybody kind of monitoring who can call themselves a painter or what their painting should look like so you have painters like Wolf Kahn who are really all about color so when you're looking at painting it's very interesting to think about a couple of things one is how do painters work how does their work change in their long life with painting Matisse at this time was really struggling for a long time with no recognition no money a family had to go back and live in his parents house was painting up in the attic and he kind of lost his interest in color in doing that and a lot of his earlier painting has this more tonal like this later on when he moved to the south of France and other you know he became much more of a colorist so painters change their language you know as they go and sometimes they're really focused on seeing the world with this kind of color and sometimes they're focused on pushing the color so far that it starts to lose an attachment to the world and the painting becomes its own thing now the very interesting thing as I close is that we buy this right it's like we accept this world when we see it in a painting we accept van Gogh's way of looking at the south of France it's not what the south of France looks like this is not what Couillir looks like where Matisse and Duran painted one summer and Matisse almost lost his mind because he'd gone so far literally he'd gone so far off the color and they didn't know if he could get back on and never sell a painting again but we buy this because it's consistent and that gets us right back to the first thing I was talking about about child's work is that idea of being totally committed to the magic of that format of the kind of realness of your materials so we'll buy this pink sky you know if you create a whole world that's consistently that keyed up in color and if you look at paintings it's very interesting to like try to do some analysis to sit there you know have some origami paper or whatever and take a favored painting and just match color and cut it up you know and see and I bet you'll see if you get a color wheel that there are rules on that of color theory that that painting even when it looks as intuitive as this Richard demon corn he's using color theory to plan that painting in ways that feel intuitive to you and hopefully when you see the painting it will look intuitive but there's a whole kind of thought about how colors are relating to go into the painting in ways that you wouldn't necessarily believe just looking at the painting so you can take that same subject here's some student paintings from the same photograph and you can do different kinds of color palettes and make all different kinds of worlds and you can also have great technique and do a really stupid painting and that's one thing I wanted to you know I also want to say if this is not all about technique and training I mean this painter was at the top of his profession and very well trained before he was brought down by the next generation of French painters who just thought he was an idiot so it's a funny thing it's like sometimes paintings can look crude and yet be very powerful conversely to the one I just showed you sometimes here's a good exercise look at a painting and let's say you look at the painting it's like meh try to think about okay why does this painting maybe and I hope nobody here painted it because I pulled it off the internet as an example of a not very good painting why does this like and this is like to me anyway and it's got to do with the first thing I talked about this painter isn't painting a barn this painter is painting a painting he's setting up a whole kind of structure and world there and doing a lot that isn't really clear until you start looking and you know the language like a child's drawing so just to wrap up as I said 10 minutes ago when you look at when you look at a subject like this another interesting thing for you to do is to think about how different painters can take sometimes a very mundane subject and interpret it different ways all valid you know full of skill all creating a kind of world some you like more than others but there are different lenses they have on that's what I want to get through to you look at how a painter's work changes in the course of their life two debon corns this is Mark Rothko how did he get to hear you know whole different way he's speaking the language Van Gogh who has a Rothko behind him it looks like and so you know it's like the main thing in painting is it should move you that's the whole point of this is that you should feel an emotional connection and I urge you when you go to museum next time don't read the headphones don't put the headphones on don't go with the friend so you talk just go and pick a painting you like and just stand in front of it and it's going to be different for everybody in this room or sit down is even better and take your time with it it's like you it should be like you're listening to music and just let the painting wash over you you know and all that that I've talked about that language it's in that painting but sometimes if you don't speak the language then you just got to let it kind of wash over you like Italian or something beautiful and you're going to start to see relationships if you take the time to that are going to make you understand why you love that painting so much and and and look things like what's happening at the edge of that painting you know how are different parts of the painting talking to each other what's active what's quiet and you know if you sit there and suddenly the painting starts talking to you and you're feeling something from that conversation then you know you're you're looking at the painting the way the painter wanted you to see it thank you sure oh yeah sure if any people who would like to talk to us we get time for a couple of questions who has a question you know everything now right did I have a question for you did anything I say really surprise you about the way painters are thinking when they paint oh absolutely oh yeah right and oftentimes it's a very it's a very organic thing where they'll become for some reason dissatisfied with what they're doing it's a hard thing professionally to change your work mid-career though because you get known for an image you know and it can be difficult painters that did radically change their work it was sometimes a struggle professionally for them but you know you got to do what you got to do also yeah I thought they were I mean sometimes those paintings are so predictable so I like that they were unpredictable and I like the work of those two painters so but a portrait is John Singer Sargeant said a portrait's a painting where something's wrong with the mouth in other words you know you just can't ever get it right in a portrait it's the one time the model pays you and you don't pay the model and it's a whole different relationship you know yeah and both of those painters do very active patterning in their work and they they both use very strong color so I think that was one thing that you're right it took you off the features and then the other way that portraits are usually painted that's more predictable is a dark background most of the real estate's just dark and everything's in the face in the hand so you're right that was very observant of you that's very different from most painting portraits anybody else yeah well you're a writer you're a writer and you keep as a writer which is your profession you've been doing for a long time you do it becomes something you naturally keep in your mind and I think it feels overwhelming kind of to when people laid out in a sequential way but when you work with something and everybody in this room has skills you've worked with your whole life that are second nature to you and that's why it does become second nature to use this language I mean speak it in a way that people speak a foreign language don't have to struggle with it it doesn't mean it makes painting any easier I mean there's a whole other thing I could do a lecture on which is like why painting is so hard and mysterious and you never really understand what you're doing yeah Agnes Martin she's an interesting painter she died maybe in the 80s and her abstract painter she's called a minimalist painter because when you first look at her work it looks like oh well I could do that it's like a bunch of pencil lines with some paint kind of on it and what her work I find it's really grown on me you kind of seeing it in the flesh is a little more powerful because it's big and you just sit in front of it and you just kind of get sucked into it so to me it's a great example of a painting that you can be meditative in front of I think one of the real keys to looking at art and enjoying it is don't rush like take your time and sit and just let it soak in and don't try to understand necessarily it's like a lot like listening to music I don't know what I'm listening to with music but I know I can listen to a Beethoven string quartet and you know just sit and it's a great way to just lie in bed and just let it wash over me and I'm ignorant about what's happening structurally but I still can appreciate it yeah well it goes way back in art to have an atelier or a studio like all the Renaissance painters or Rembrandt where you have artists or flunkies as we call them now it's become extremely among people who are you know in the New York and European elite as visual artists very very often they are doing basically maquettes or sketches and having MFA students doing their work I don't like it I wouldn't work that way because it's to me it's a hand you know it's like the hand of the art I want the from me I want my hand in there I would find it very unsatisfying to farm that out sometimes work especially like textile or sculptural work is extremely labor intensive and so subcontracting that couldn't you know could make sense I think but no I think it's kind of a scam when it gets to the point where you know yeah I don't understand it I don't that's not the artist I respect you know so much anybody else well thank you so much thank you so much that was great thanks a lot