There have been a couple of things I’ve wanted to write about, but until I have time and energy to do so, here’s how my finished oil painting turned out:
I started with it dry…
Then started working on it…
And finished with this:
One down and three to go before I get to try color.
Back in college I took art history, in which I learned the astonishing (to me) fact that the old masters had as many as 99 layers to their oil paintings. I always thought that meant they had 99 layers of, say, blue on Mary’s veil, something that would give the color “depth.”
Not so.
As it turns out, the layers have different functions. First comes the primer to keep the paint from soaking in and spreading out in the linen or canvas. Today we buy pre-primed canvas.
Next comes the charcoal drawing (what used to be called a “cartoon”) that serves as a basic outline of the subject. After that comes a fixative to keep the charcoal from smearing.
And then comes the fun part. We start with only one color: raw umber. Thinning it with turpentine makes it translucent, almost like a watercolor, so that you can see the charcoal outline and follow along. You start with a background wash of the middle tone, use paint thinner to wipe away light parts, and add more of the thinned-down raw umber for the darker parts. The idea is to create three tones, one light, one medium, and one dark. Here’s the first tone painting I did:
It’s hard to tell, I know, but that’s a coffee cup, a pear, and a jar lid. Including priming, charcoal, and fixer, we’re already up to five layers at least on the darker parts. And realistically, primer is two or three layers by itself.
Next comes the opaque tone painting. And here’s something really weird: when you mix raw umber with white you don’t get light brown. You get gray. I still can’t wrap my head around that. Here’s the opaque tone painting I’m working on:
Just to be clear: bowl, vase, plum. This is what it looked like after last week’s class. You can see the remains of the translucent painting beneath it.
There was something else unexpected about working in opaque: you add oil to the white paint. It’s oil paint, but you add more oil to it. Walnut oil, to be specific. The goal is to get it from toothpaste consistency to something a little more creamy. Like mayonnaise.
The photo above is of a dried painting. That’s how last week’s painting looked this morning. I continued to work on it today, adding more paint (many more layers) and building more tones. Here it is, still wet, after today’s work:
If you’re impressed by my mad skillz, don’t be. All the good parts were demonstrations my art teacher did. I’m just an apprentice at this point. And she makes it look so freaking easy. It’s like watching the effortless fingering of an expert guitarist. Believe it or not, a lot of the blending was done with fingers instead of a brush.
Next week, I’ll finish this tone painting. I’ve already lost count of how many layers I have. If I were to continue it, I could add color, brush strokes, glazing, scumbling, and a varnish. And now I understand how a painting can be 99 layers.
Isn’t this fun?
As I drove up to my art teacher’s studio this morning, I noticed a young black border collie trotting up the driveway. She looked friendly enough, so I wasn’t overly concerned about getting attacked — more like getting licked to death.
I parked my car, and she came over to my door as I opened it. “Eh!” I yelled at her, making what Diana Gabaldon would undoubtedly refer to as “a Scottish noise.” She ducked off, and I left the door open as I leaned over to gather my art supplies.
A black blur crossed my line of vision, and the next thing I knew, I was looking at a 40-pound dog sitting expectantly on my passenger seat. She cocked her head at me, let her tongue hang out a little, and smiled. Clearly we were going for a ride. Her tailed thumped. Isn’t this great? Huh? Huh?
I burst out laughing.
Here’s the thing about dogs: they know if you’re laughing at them or if you’re laughing with them. If it’s at them, they sulk. If it’s with them, you’ll never gain control. They just want to continue the joke. I was laughing with this dog, and she knew it.
No amount of coaxing while laughing was going to get that dog out of my car, so I went into the studio for reinforcement. I opened the door, and out burst the art teacher’s 90-pound caramel-colored hound dog. Before I knew what was what, he had joined the border collie in my car, and now I had two dogs I needed to get out of there.
I was totally worthless. I couldn’t stop laughing. This kind of stuff just doesn’t happen in real life.
Luckily, my art teacher came to the rescue, and my car is no worse for the wear except for one muddy paw print on my passenger seat.
After I had settled down, I worked on the next step in my tone course, which is to refine my middle tones and learn how to do tone grading on the foreground and background to create a three-dimensional space.
Here’s a shot of today’s work:
I was focused on working the light so that it comes from one source and seems to fall diagonally across the drawing. I feel pretty good about the highlights, but I can see where I need to do more gradients in the foreground to foreshorten it and make the tabletop three-dimensional.
A direct shot:
And so ends today’s adventure in art.
Today in art class I worked more on tone. I’ll show you the progression of a drawing in charcoal on rag paper.
The first step is to determine the average tone of the setup, which in this case was a middle tone, about a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 is the darkest. The setup was a dark wine bottle, a green pear, and a white onion set on a middle-tone cloth.
Once the average tone was determined, I made it the background color. Second step was to make a rough sketch of the setup.
Now that I had the average middle tone down, I did the average dark tone for the picture because in this case the dark tones comprised the next-highest percentage of the overall setup.
Then I did the same with the average light tones by selectively erasing.
And then came the tough part: working through all those subtle changes in tone from the lightest to the darkest. I’m going to need a lot more practice.
My art teacher suggested I pick something a little easier to work with next time, like items that aren’t glass and that have smooth surfaces. There was just too much surface detail distracting me. Anyway, here’s the final product of today with the setup in view:
The wine bottle’s a little fat, and there aren’t enough middle tones, but I think I’m making progress.
More art from me after next class.
I’ve been learning to think about tone in a painterly way.
Tone is the structure of a painting and is what makes objects appear to be three-dimensional. If you think in terms of movies, you’ll notice that a black-and-white movie tells you most of the information you need to know about the environment. You can tell what is grass and what is water and what is skin, and so forth. Color adds a new layer of information, but tone is the foundation underneath.
So that’s step two of my painting course. I learned some tools for better line drawing in step one, and now I’m learning to see the tone in objects and apply it to paper.
Here is a sketch I did this morning in charcoal on news print:
Below you can see where my instructor drew planes on an apple to show how tone radiates from a highlight. One is the lightest tone and 10 is the darkest.
News print doesn’t allow you to go very dark or very light with charcoal, so I moved to a more charcoal-friendly rag paper for the next try. The only thing I dislike about this paper is that it has a very strong vertical grain running through it that gives my drawings stripes.
You can see on the side where I marked off the approximate percentage of the drawing that would be in each tone family — light, medium, or dark. I understand this to be a critical component in oil painting — knowing ahead of time where your tones are.
Here’s a close-up:
You can see the vertical stripe issue. Overall I’m pretty pleased with this one. I especially like how the highlight turned out in the top of the apple and how you can see the shadow of its stem.
The next step is to learn how to apply tone to the surface on which the objects are resting to make it three-dimensional as well. You should be able to see a table top and a wall behind it in this drawing, but I haven’t gotten to that step.
More after class next week.
I haven’t fallen off of a cliff. Just FYI.
Lately I’ve made a change from the art of writing to the art of painting. I’m learning to paint from a classically trained artist in a small, self-paced class. It is absorbing a lot of my mental time even though I’m physically drawing only about six hours a week.
I’d like to post bits and pieces of things I’m learning as I go.
I’ve been working on learning how to draw again. It started with learning to hold charcoal in a painterly way, i.e., not like a pencil. Next was learning to connect with the paper, to feel it physically as I draw. Then learning just rough sketching and then correction techniques for sizing and placing objects. I’m becoming much faster and freer in my sketches. I did this one in under 10 minutes at the end of class today:
This kind of thing would have taken hours in the past, so I feel like it’s a breakthrough. Another angle:
I’ve come far enough that next time I’ll get to start working on tone, which is all about highlights and shade. I’m pretty excited about that.
So that’s what I’ve been up to.
Every now and then I put in the DVD for a lecture series on discrete mathematics and watch one. I like discrete math because a) it’s not calculus and b) it’s all about patterns, so it’s like doing a puzzle. I can actually wrap my head around discrete math. It suits the regimented side of me.
Anyway, today’s lecture started off about recognizing patterns in series of numbers added together. I knew (half my life ago) that there was a shortcut, but I never knew what it was or even thought about it after high school.
Professor Arthur Benjamin* showed an example series. Say you want to add up consecutive odd numbers starting with one. What’s a quick way to determine the sum without physically adding them all? You try to find the pattern.
1=1
1+3=4
1+3+5=9
1+3+5+7=16
1+3+5+7+9=25
and so forth.
If you were to assign the number n to mean the number of numbers (sorry if that’s confusing) in the series, you’d start to see a pattern:
if n=1, then the series is 1=1, which is the same as 1=1²
if n=2, the series is 1+3=4, which is the same as 1+3=2²
if n=3, the series is 1+3+5=9, which is the same as 1+3+5=3²
and so on. So we figure out that if we add together n consecutive odd numbers starting with one, the sum will be n².
Let’s say we have the series:
1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+19+21
We can count all the numbers, and we see there are 11. Eleven squared is 121, so the sum of that series is 121.
But what if you have a series that’s super long, and you don’t want to count how many numbers are in it? You find the pattern for the last number in the series and how it relates to n.
Again, the series:
for 1 , n = 1
for 1+3, n = 2
for 1+3+5, n = 3
for 1+3+5+7, n = 4
so,
when n = 1, the last number in the series is 1
when n = 2, the last number is 3
when n = 3, the last number is 5
and when n = 4, the last number is 7
If we puzzle it out, we’ll notice that by doubling n and subtracting 1, we’ll get that last number. So, for example, when n = 4, we get the last number, 7, by doubling 4 to make 8 and subtracting 1. The last number is 2n-1.
So now we can write the series this way:
1+3+5+7+…+(2n-1)=n²
I now have the shortcut. If I want to know what the sum of all odd numbers up to 99 are, I don’t have to write them out. I can say, “I know the last number is 99, so 2n-1 is 99. I can add one to make 100, divide it by 2 to get 50, and now I know n is 50. So the sum is 50 squared, which is 2500.”
I determined to figure out on my own the pattern for summing consecutive even numbers starting with 2, and in about 15 minutes of drawing it out, I did it! The answer is:
2+4+6+8+…+2n=n(n+1)
If I want to know the sum of all even numbers up to 100, I know that n=50, which makes the sum 50 times 51, or 2550.
I’ve never figured out a mathematical pattern by myself before, so I just wanted to share. It was kind of exciting!
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*Arthur Benjamin is a wonderfully enthusiastic teacher. You can check out his “Mathemagician” web page here.
I love this sign. It’s outside the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. What would Socrates say?
P.S. Am looking through vacation photos now that the kids are in school. I’ll eventually write about The Bath.
I haven’t written part two of the essay. Part of the reason is that I’ve been distracted by something more important, but the other part is that it’s hard and I’m still struggling to overcome my academic laziness.
I am not proud of this. I like to hope that announcing my weakness will motivate me to overcome it. I see it as similar to telling everyone I’ve started a diet. Which I haven’t. Just to be clear. So no weight comments, please.
I was scrubbing the grout on the kitchen floor yesterday and entertaining myself by listening to a lecture about the Middle Ages. (Synopsis: Black Death=Bad; Printing Press=Good)
I was sort of tuning in and out when the professor mentioned the shift in scholarship from the Continent to Britain. For a long time all of the great church scholars had been from Italy, but all of a sudden you had guys like Thomas Aquinas and William Ockham coming out of England and Ireland and taking over the academic world. Why was this?
It’s because they didn’t speak Latin. Rather, they didn’t understand Latin natively. Italian is derived from Latin. French is derived from Latin. Spanish is derived from Latin. But English is not. English is a Germanic language that is completely unrelated to Latin. The theory is that Continental scholars didn’t have to work as hard in their studies (all in Latin) because they already spoke a language that was very close to Latin.
They were lazy students, and the Brits took over the world because they had to study harder to learn anything.
I contemplated this point as my aunt and I met with her surgeon this afternoon. He moved to the U.S. from Vietnam when he was in his teens, learned English, graduated from a local high school, and got a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He spent five years at IBM before going to medical school and becoming a surgeon. He’s been in practice 10 years.
Obviously this man is brilliant. More amazingly (to me, anyway) he’s an incredible student. I can’t imagine ever being motivated enough to get the education required for either an engineering or a medical career. He’s done both.
I’ve read that graduate students in science and engineering at the top American universities mostly come from foreign countries where English is not the native language. I’ve observed that the three local M.D.s I’ve talked to this week grew up speaking Vietnamese, Turkish, and Spanish.
It has me wondering: is there some truth to this theory that people who are forced to overcome a language barrier make better students of subjects that require intense study? Are we undergoing a cultural shift whereby most of America’s doctors and engineers will speak English as a second language?
Something for me to ponder as I avoid serious thinking.
In 1942 in California, John Steinbeck wrote a novel called The Moon is Down. Meanwhile, World War II raged in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.
1942 was a dark year. The Reich was rising. Storm troopers under the command of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had captured and now controlled Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. A little Jewish girl in the Netherlands called Anne Frank started a diary. That summer she would go into hiding with her family while Jews all over Europe would be deported to concentration camps. At Auschwitz, Nazis began gassing the prisoners.
The first American troops arrived in Europe in January. German subs attacked the coastline of North America from Canada down to Mexico. Japan was busy taking over the Pacific. In April they would conquer the Philippines and instigate the Bataan Death March. Japanese subs attacked Australia and islands all over the Pacific.
People were desperate. The outcome of the war was unclear.
John Steinbeck was 40 years old. By 1943 he would be a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, but in ‘42 he contributed to the war effort by writing a propaganda novel, one intended to give hope to the people of occupied Europe.
In The Moon is Down, an unnamed little European town is captured in a nearly bloodless coup by an invading force, and now the people must endure occupation. Resistance is futile, the new leaders tell them. We can all live pleasantly together if you just follow our rules. But of course the people are not happy to have their guns seized, to have their homes occupied, to be forced to work in a coal mine for the new commanders, and to face imprisonment or death for failing to follow orders. They think of themselves as free men, and they resent their captors.
What makes this novel interesting and different from most propaganda is that the occupying force are portrayed as real people, not all of whom buy into what they’re doing. In particular, Captain Lanser of the invading force has his doubts. He has lived through war before and he knows that there can be no bloodless occupation of a country, no suppression of a free people without revolt. He can see the difficulty that will come, and he is tired, and he is frustrated, and he tries to be fair and kind to the townspeople, but ultimately he sees himself as a cog in a machine that is orchestrated by The Leader. He must do as The Leader wills. His duty comes first, regardless of his personal moral standards. He has never been free.
And so he watches without surprise or horror as the townspeople implement their resistance, picking off armed troops one at a time with stones or fists, sabotaging rails and bridges, and performing their required work in the coal mine slowly and badly.
His troops become discouraged. They never feel safe. They receive no human warmth from the townspeople. They know they are hated and they want to go home.
And all the time the Captain must press on because The Leader wills it. He knows his effort is fruitless, that it is a waste of lives on both sides, and yet he cannot leave. He has no power. He is required to occupy the town.
In the final scene, the town Mayor and Doctor are arrested and held hostage, to be executed if another act of sabotage is committed. They know the sabotage will happen and that they will be executed, and while they’re not happy about it, they are resigned to it. They also know that without their leadership the resistance will continue under new leaders, and when those are executed, new leaders, and so forth until the end. It is a fundamental difference between them and their occupiers, who are dependent on a handful of men in leadership position: if those leaders were gone, the occupiers would not know what to do. But free men will rise and lead themselves.
In an interesting little speech, the Mayor remembers back 46 years to his time in school with the Doctor and how they had to memorize Plato’s Apology, the defense that Socrates gave to the senate at Athens when he was condemned to death for treason. The Mayor stumbles over the words as he recalls the speech, and Captain Lanser of the occupying force corrects him, for he, too, memorized Plato in his youth. But the former feels the speech as a free man and the latter only hears it as pretty, meaningless words.
As Captain Lanser tries to convince the Mayor to rein in his people — as though the Mayor had the power to do so — explosions are heard outside. The sabotage has begun again. The Mayor voluntarily leaves with a soldier to face his execution. He pauses to quote Socrates’ final words to his old friend, the words Socrates spoke right before he drank the hemlock.
In the doorway he turned back to Doctor Winter. “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius,” he said tenderly. “Will you remember to pay the debt?”
Winter closed his eyes for a moment before he answered, “The debt shall be paid.”
[The Mayor] chuckled then. “I remembered that one. I didn’t forget that one.” He put his hand on Prackle’s arm, and the lieutenant flinched away from him.
And Winter nodded slowly. “Yes, you remembered. The debt shall be paid.”
The reaction to Steinbeck’s novel was immediate and powerful. The Nazis banned it, and Mussolini proscribed death to any Italians who possessed it. In occupied France and Norway, it became a rallying point for the underground resistance, who translated and distributed it all over Europe. It became the best-known work of American literature in Soviet Russia during the war. In 1943 it was made into a movie. After the war Europeans commented that they couldn’t believe Steinbeck was able to write so realistically about their experience. It was as though he had been there.
I have recently and coincidentally read this and another novel published in 1942, and I’m struck by how the war influenced both writers and led them to opposite conclusions about the nature of man.
In 1962 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his speech he said, “I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
Next up, a novel by a writer who did not believe in the perfectibility of man: The Once and Future King by Mr. T. H. White.
