Discussions with Mark Norseth

Sunlit Surf-Lana’i Lookout 28 x 32″  Oil on Linen

Other than some minor adjustments, I consider this painting  finished. Now is the time where I move on to another painting and get this off my mind.  I love this point, because ironically, that  helps me come back to this piece with a fresh, objective eye after some time has passed, to see if it’s really finished.

I make that judgement based on a couple of factors. Going back to my original intentions, that sense of weight, power, and energy are as close to what I’m after as I think I can manage.  I’ve made some changes from the sketches; choosing to keep larger areas in shadow, shaping the rocks differently than I planned.  The main thing is that the eye moves through the composition as I wished it to, and the handling of the paint seems to me to be energetic and varied, without arresting the movement of the water more than necessary. I remember while doing the plain air sketch that there was a sense of the water actually “galloping” forward,  and I’ve tried to capture some of that.

While I move on to the next painting, I may come back to build some of the impasto areas more heavily after some drying, and possibly a warm glaze over the rocks in sunlight.

I always seem to hold out the great hope that “this time, I’ll really get it.”  ”It”, for me, is the sense of creating a convincing, shimmering reality, all the while keeping the viewer fully aware that this is “only made out of paint.”  It’s the duality that one gets with good impressionism…it’s the absolute look of the thing being painted, and the paint itself, and you can’t decide where the thing ends and the paint begins…the awareness of both are simultaneously present.

I’m not there yet, but trying.

I managed to get a couple hours of work done over the weekend on stripping the old paint, plus a chat with a friend who refinishes old pieces on a professional basis.  I think I’ m on the right track, and I’m looking forward to getting a bit more time in removing the last of the old finish.  It’s come a long ways.

The next step, after I finish the stripping, is to wet the wood down and steel wool the entire piece after sun drying it briefly.  Then will come the finish, which I  think will be simple warmed linseed oil followed by a light wax.

Here’s a shot I found of the great Aaron Shikler working on the identical easel in the 1960′s.  The only difference I can see is that mine has this threaded hand-screw instead of the knob on the top canvas holder. I have to say that  the hand-screw has a disadvantage in that it casts a long shadow, depending on the light source, but it also gets me wondering: how old  is this easel?

About eight months ago, I had the opportunity to acquire this beautiful old Freidrichs easel. It’s in good shape for it’s age, which I guess to be pre-WWII, though I don’t know for sure.  The manufacturer  at some point changed it’s name from Freidrichs to the familiar (to artists) Frederix company.  It’s solid oak throughout, and the crank mechanism works well.  I’ve  always  hoped to find something like this wonderful easel and bring it back into service.  When I discovered it, covered with dust and tucked away in a basement, I was delighted. Thanks again, Brad!

After a good amount of deliberation, I decided to strip and refinish the easel myself, and try to replicate a couple missing elements.  This is the easel in the condition in which I received it. I’ll post some shots of the refinishing as it gets farther along.

Today is a dedicated watercolor day. My friend and fellow painter Roger Whitlock and I have a project we’ve developed in which we get together and paint a wide variety of subjects, each delivering our own take on the theme or locale. The final intention is to show them side by side.

A watercolor magazine is interested in our project as well (which means an upcoming publication deadline), and so I have a lot of partially completed things to pull together from our outings.

Today will see me working on three paintings;  the one illustrated here is a plein-air piece done just after sunrise this morning at a very dramatic location, Makapu’u beach.  We’d worked there yesterday, where  I took a stab at this subject after a false start on another piece. Basically, I hadn’t followed the advice which I give my own students, which is to avoid “drive-by” painting, where you rush into something without sufficient preliminary thought. Circumstances being what they were, I plunged ahead, which rarely yields the best results for me.

But I used yesterday’s flops as a stepping stone, and decided to return bright and early and see if I couldn’t get this worked out a bit better.  I’m pleased with the result, a vertical sea painting with a lot of rather foreboding darks. I think it will nicely compliment the beautiful piece Roger is sure to paint when we return here Monday.

Now, I’m off to tackle two more half finished pieces before sundown.

Fifth day’s painting

After some delays, I have images from the last two sessions.

There has been more work in every area, beginning with a scumble over the foreground water of Viridian mixed with some Cerulean blue.  This allows me to deepen the tone,  which needed to go a bit greener,  as well as giving me a thin layer of fresh paint to work into.  From there, I brought down the shadows in the whites of the waves to a deeper value, and added more warmth to the whites with the addition of Cadmium Scarlet and some orange and yellow as well.  I’m still utilizing my original plein air sketch as a guide for color, as well as other sketches from that area and my recollections.

I love building these whites slowly, adding a bit of linseed oil in the impasto areas, and developing texture in them with some selective painting- knife work.  I admit I originally was a bit biased against the use of painting knives, associating them with method-painting approaches, until I became aware of some marvelous effects in older landscapes (William Lamb Picknell easily comes to mind). These were strong effects that I couldn’t get with brushes, and so  I decided that I’d better get of my high horse and start making use of them.

I needed simplicity and roominess in the sky to create some relief for the chaos in the water, but at the same time the strong warm notes of orange in the low lying clouds were great to complement the blue-green sea mass.  The clouds I chose to paint are simple, directional, and typical of that time of early evening.  I’ve  allowed a bit of the warm undertone of the sky to show through the pale blue, which lends a subtle vibration in an otherwise quiet area of the painting.

An interesting lesson in how I paint skies…we were members of a wonderful  German church when I lived in Brooklyn NY, and they had some fabulous stained glass windows that had been imported from Germany back in the 19th century.  I noticed that to get a particular sky effect, the glass artists had cleverly juxtaposed various pieces of warm and cool blue of the same value against one another, in varying sizes, which from a distance gave an optical color effect unobtainable had a single blue been used. That’s an idea I’ve used since then, placing brushsrokes of varied blues of identical value side by side.

Here’s  a reminder.  It’s good to see how far things have come since the original sketchbook drawing of late August.