Discussions with Mark Norseth

Haven’t posted recently…busy with show arrangements for “A Sideward Glance”, my next show at the Gallery at Ward Centre in October.

I’ve  been working on some quiet, smaller paintings to go with a couple fairly involved pieces I’ve posted over the summer.  They round things out nicely when (and if) successfully painted.  I enjoy doing them very much, but I find myself somewhat in the minority amongst outdoor painters (I think it’s time to give “plein air” a little break) in that I have no reservations about working on them over as many sessions as necessary.

Anyway, when I get the gumption I’ll write out a cranky p.o.v. piece about the whole thing of outdoor painting devolving into something resembling a sporting event.

This morning, I returned to a location I worked from a couple of  years back. I actually began the rough drawings a few days ago, and from those I felt I could attempt a small painting that explores the possibilities evoked by this place. I do this a lot, and think it’s actually a healthy sign. It’s not that the “scene” changes, but certainly the artist does, a fact that becomes evident to any painter who revisits a favorite painting in a museum after a long absence and sees it differently.  The painting hasn’t changed, but it looks different. You find your emphasis and taste has evolved, or that you identify with the artist in a new way. It’s sort of the same thing with some locations.

Here’s the final of a half dozen little sketchbook drawings, followed by the inital lay-in of what I’ll be working on most mornings next week.  I’ll try to remember to take a photo of the place and the painting setup I’m using these days.

The painting, on a flake-white primed birch panel, is 11 x 14″, and I’ve tipped it into the frame that will be developed as I work on the painting. At least that’s the idea.

I could easily spend a week of mornings  on this piece, in one hour snippets,  depending on the weather and consistency of the light effect.  Ten minutes from home, so not a big problem.

A secondary point of interest is that a big gathering of AA folks meet near where I’ll be working, and years ago I noticed what I considered a particularly strong attraction to my painting activities from some of them, which I welcome.  I have a hunch that some seekers, perhaps in a cul-de-sac of addiction,  see something special in the involvement of a painter and nature.  The comments I’ve received from them has often seemed unusually respectful, almost reverent.  Am I off base?

Willard Metcalf (1858-1925) has been one of my favorite American landscape painters since I first encountered his work at the Spanierman gallery in the 1980’s. I never tire of him, and love to introduce him to modern painters who don’t know his work.

Metcalf was chiefly a painter of the New England countryside, and his works possess a spaciousness and  beauty  that seems to be the result of massive natural affinity for his subject, talent, and a tremendous grasp of essentials.

Here, we  have the opportunity to examine one of his outdoor studies and then be able to compare it to a finished painting.  Both works were painted in 1887, when the artist was twenty nine, and working at Giverny, France with the group of painters attracted to and surrounding Claude Monet. What a time that must have been!

My often repeated (to myself, anyway) statements about the value of seeing “unfinished” works by great painters holds true here.  It’s like a backstage pass to a magic show, where the hidden apparatus of how things are done is more easily discerned than from  the audience side.

In this study or sketch ( I think of it as more than a sketch) all the basics of the location and  the movement of the eye in the composition  are evident, but are painted pretty bare-bones, everything being reduced to values and rough hewn shapes.

Giverny, oil on canvas, 12 x 16″

After the initial attraction of the foreground shadow leading to the tree and the shaded area left of it,  the dark passage attracts us to the right side of the canvas.  This strategic element has a great effect on the balance of the picture, both by contrast (it’s the darkest spot directly next to a light)  by weight (it’s close to the edge), and line (the shape of the river).   Without that dark, I don’t think the eye would have much incentive to do anything but zoom right out on the upper left hand corner and be gone. But because of it, we cross the canvas to see what’s going on, and then walk our way back across the picture to the exit provided by the interest of the buildings and patch of sky.  You can test this easily by covering the dark patch with your thumb  and observing what your eye does.

The answer to the question of how Metcalf decided on such things and makes them operate without us even noticing is that it’s all planned.  The initial thinking for this painting had to include where the eye would be led.  An enormous part of the pleasure in experiencing his works is this marvelous business of composing carefully.

Giverny , oil on canvas, 26 x 32″

And here, we see what he eventually arrived at in his finished painting.  I have no way of saying for sure that this was painted  directly from nature or was a studio work from the study above, which is,  by the way,  about one quarter size of the final painting. It could easily be both, and that’s my guess.  But the question I have is this: would he have possibly arrived at the beautiful completed work without the initial study effort? We can see that his generation of  well-trained artists moved slowly and thoughtfully, and that their work reflects this.

The continuing lesson is about  planning our work carefully, slowing down, equipping ourselves with experience and knowledge of composition, and giving ourselves the best possible chance of  a worthwhile outcome for our efforts.

Today, so many painters of the landscape seem burdened by the belief that a painting increases in artistic merit by being completed in one session. The evidence of the late nineteenth century indicates quite the opposite, does it not?   I suspect that current practice is more a function of our culture, pushed by inner restlessness, and  I believe that this confusion of a sort of alla prima painting with plein air painting needs a second look.   I don’t believe I’m qualified for the job, and can think of many who are,  but since they are quiet maybe I’ll attempt that another time anyway.

I’ve finally gotten two compositional sketches for my next potential painting together.  That business with the tsunami put a hold on things; we who dwell near the sea were directly confronted with how uncertain a place that this world (even in the best and most beautiful of places ) can be at times.  A sobering experience, from which I hope I’ve gained an appreciation of just how blessed we are.

Which is all the more reason to seize the day.  Believe it or not, during those hours when none of us in Hawai’i knew what was going to actually occur, I found myself thinking of the courageous musicians on board the Titanic who, accepting their fate, performed chamber music on deck as she took on water…art revealing it’s significance at a point when mankind’s other devices had failed dramatically.

Of the two rough compositional sketches I’ve completed, I’m showing the one I will pursue.  I’ve learned over the painful years to never commence without the preliminary drawings and groundwork to figure out where I’m heading.  Thanks to all the old painters I’ve been privileged to study…they left behind a pretty clear map of what to do if one is willing to take the time.  That topic gets into a whole “plein air” rant that I’m storing up for a future disgorgement.

Back to the positive:

Kailua beach pencil sketch, 9 x 12″

This painting will be a color piece.  By this, I mean that the delight of the painting is primarily in the color and the subsequent values and shapes.  The color is really exquisite here when the light breaks through, with the dusky orange-greens and strange violet-grays that  the Ironwood trees and their shadows have at this time of day, mid morning. Cool pinks pop about. There’s an aquamarine blue/green in the water that is extraordinary, especially as it’s placed against the warm-colored  light sand.

I’m constantly amazed at the elegance and sophistication of God’s color choices. Combinations of colors reveal themselves that would never occur to me if I hadn’t pursued them through direct observation. Lately (meaning the last couple years!) a blue/violet/orange thing has been happening…who would have thought of it?

But perhaps most exciting to me are that there are also wonderful opportunities for dramatic paint handling and a staccato impressionist light/shade treatment that will reveal forms and movement.  As a composition, it is very rich in that regard, and I hope that I can avoid  allowing the freshness of the vision to get bogged down in “issues”,  other than capturing a joyous and dramatic slice of life.  That’s the point, entirely.

If the weather and light are cooperative, I plan to start tomorrow morning and see if I can lay the painting in.  I have my eye on  an oil-primed linen 22 x 28″ canvas that’s been “aging”  in the studio for many months.  It’s on heavy stretcher bars, which I may replace later…they’re a bit much for that size.

We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.

As I begin this small series investigating the drawings of Rembrandt, it would be helpful for me to mention where this great interest of mine comes from and why.

In my own search to become a better draftsman, I’ve looked at everything I could find to try and learn what distinguishes the good from the great.  Of all the many known good draftsmen in Western art, I personally find Rembrandt to have the best documented and largest body of work that is capable of speaking to us today.

Many of Rembrandt’s subjects are right in our own living rooms, or outside of our own front doors. His drawing practice overflowed with all of the good lessons of  picture making; we simply have to look past the funny clothes and the rugged handling.  Rembrandt’s is not the beauty of Raphael and the Italians, his is a streetwise, subway-platform to Starbucks mirror of our existence.

I’m so enthused because I’ve learned so much from looking at these drawings and asking the right questions.  Compositional lessons abound.  Rembrandt is entirely capable of leading your eye without your even knowing it.

A confession…I don’t find most of Rembrandt’s drawings very beautiful at first sight, like I might with Raphael or Michaelangelo, or Ingres or Degas.   I find them fascinating; it’s sort of like comparing the appearance of Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig as James Bond.  One’s pretty, but the other’s got character and looks a bit crazy.

Okay, that’s the pitch.  Let’s see what we can find  in this drawing.

First thing we all notice is probably that it’s badly cropped by another hand…I don’t know why, but it happens. A lot. Monks cut a doorway into the bottom of Leonardo’s Last Supper, because sometimes you don’t know what you have.

The drawing can be divided and viewed in two parts, foreground and background planes, and the thing to examine first is the foreground group.

Rembrandt groups things carefully, and below is what a diagram reveals (another use for your sketchbook, students).

There’s a clear triangular arrangement, (art experts love to add “the most stable of the basic shapes”) I suspect you might even be able to say conical if the cropped off feet made up an eliptical arrangement, which I bet they once did.

All four of these figures connect physically…I mean that they touch, and your eye, beginning on the left with dad, goes up, down, and through, very rhythmically,  to the actual reason for the grouping…the toddler being helped. The central-most figure in the whole piece is the one we see the backside of, which is a Rembrandt kind of touch.  I think that’s Grandma on the right.  Mom has the bucket, and I hope it isn’t dinner in there.

Speaking of Mom, previously all of my attention in this drawing had been focused on this fantastic woman with the bucket in the background.  For so few lines, most all straight and thick, she possess the perfect feel and character of someone carrying a heavy load.  The straight arm carrying the bucket, upraised arm counterbalancing, the slightest rightward tilt of the figure…we can feel the strain in her arm.  Head looking down slightly…just what you do when you’ve got a heavy burden in one hand.

Did you notice that none of her ink lines touch those of the other grouping? The effect is to create an atmosphere between the two planes.

A couple of other things: Rembrandt manages to show us the human  figure from the front, profile, backside, three quarters (the toddler), and another profile.  That’s clever.  And the drawing, from side to side, balances perfectly.  I also admire the sense of near-balance in the toddler, just slightly tipping forward in the masses of head, thorax, and pelvis. She may stumble forward if not supported.  Those are the three masses that create rhythm and balance in the figure, arms and legs just follow where they are told.

And finally, here’s a good question. Do you think all these folks were posing?

I’ve yet to find a larger or more convenient portal into the mind of a great artist than to view the drawings of Rembrandt Van Rijn. I often say that if one looks carefully,  there is almost certainly a lesson in any of them.

The more I’ve allowed myself to cross over and enter his world through his drawings, the more I learn from them. His mind, eye, and hand were never idle, and it’s great fun to think what he would be doing in our world today.  He was the type of man who was never bored by everyday life.  Whenever he wasn’t planning a painting in his sketches, he would be  drawing a child sleeping, a maid working, working out Biblical subjects from imagination, or observing a couple.  When weather was cooperative, he would be  out drawing the neighborhood, from kids shoplifting to minor construction projects.

At other times, he wandered beyond city limits to the countryside,  for  a great portion of his drawings are devoted to the landscape, although he rather rarely painted it. Is it reasonable to wonder if he’s among the first of distinguished artists to draw for the love of drawing and observation alone?
A Child Being Taught to Walk Pen and Ink

In upcoming posts, I’m planning to offer some of my own thoughts and examinations of drawings by Rembrandt in hopes of getting newcomers excited by this very accessible artist.