My early still after Manet

When I was a youth, I made this still life of things around the house.  (The pink sloping surface on the right represents a typewriter covered with cloth.)  I was trying to do something Manet-like.  The particular painting I had in mind is Manet’s Still life with Melons and Peaches at the National Gallery.

As you can see, I didn’t quite finish my painting.  Lost my nerve, I suppose.  Or ran out of ideas.  Probably a little of both.  Still, I find that I like the painting as is.  It has all sorts of visible pentimenti — even in that respect it’s Manet-like.

[Top of the post:  Author's early attempt at still life in a style of Manet, by Aletha Kuschan, 28 x 28 inches, oil on canvas]

Copying Monet

With further research, I find that the Monet Sunflowers lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  It is cropped in the image I used in the earlier post.  Click on the word “Sunflowers” in the previous sentence to see what the Met has to say about the painting, as well as to see a full image of it.  Meanwhile, I found this sketch after the painting by Karen Wall Garrison at her website.  She made the drawing after visiting the Met.

Ms. Garrison says of copying (in regard to a different picture, but the principle holds): “As I often like to do at museums, I stood in front of the painting … and sketched it. Not so much to make an accurate rendering, but to anchor into my memory the details.” [My emphasis.] 

All the drawing one does might be so described.  We “anchor” the images of things into our minds.  What an eloquent expression.  It goes to the very heart of why one paints at all.  We are grasping directly at aspects of life when painting, anchoring ourselves into the life we are living.

[Top of the post:  Drawing after Monet's Sunflowers, by Karen Wall Garrison.]

Attention’s Gaze

I thought I’d give some advice.  This is free advice.  In a world where so many things are advertised as free, while so few things actually are free, I figure I offer people a genuine bargain.  Anyway, I am going to tell you how to begin a painting — for whomever is interested.  However, we shall not so much as lift a brush right now.  This will be mental painting during which time we look at a photo of a Monet still life and imagine various ways that we might paint something similar.  Are you game?

First, let me say, I took this image from the internet and am not familiar with the actual painting.  Looking at it here, it looks cropped on at least three sides.  Still, it’s quite lovely so let’s take it as it is.

I would urge you, artist, to begin by noticing the largest elements.  In first marks on a canvas one does well to heed the largish elements of the motif and place them first.  The reason is fairly obvious: that way, as you make changes you are less likely to have to move around those same largest things because they’ll already be firmly situated where you want them as opposed to their being where you don’t want them.   More significantly, the raison d’etre of the whole picture (in a great painting) is locked into the large elements from the outset.  And such is the case with this Monet painting.

Even allowing for the cropping I spoke of, this fragment of the painting shows its structure as being so solid that I think we could make fairly good educated guesses from this core as to how much the painting extends beyond what we currently see.  Certainly within this core, you can really sense the factor that gravity plays.  All the flowers are balanced with respect to the vase so that we know the vase will not topple, though notably the arrangement is very natural and asymmetrical.

One clump of flowers sits just above the vase and others radiate from this clump at irregular intervals.  The vase itself has been realized very simply as a smallish cylinder, its rim partly hidden by the lower most leaves of the bouquet.  One could indicate the edges of the cylinder with just a couple strokes in the beginning.  One side of the cylinder is lit and is lighter than the background.  The other side is in shadow and the edge of the background just adjacent to it is slightly lighter than the background overall.

Above this cylinder, I would — if it were me — scrub in a little green in droopy passages to represent (in the most amorphous way) the lovely green leaves that crown the vase – from which the flowers emerge.  I would, if I were beginning, keep things simple.  I would make the green very generic and the white of the vase just a little warmed by a little yellow.  The background is mostly grey, which you could get with black and white if you like — though a combination of yellow ochre and ultramarine blue, or of orange and blue, or some other combination of opposites or near opposites that have been diluted with lots of white is probably better, freer and optically more complex and pleasing.

Some of the leaves are dark, some are light.  For the dark, I would thinly scrub in some veridian or phthalo green from the tube.  And the lighter leaves can be made lighter with an addition of pale yellow and white.  At the outset, the point is to mark the contrast — leaving the nuances for later.  Similarly, I would put the flowers in early, trying to position them with precision — though not a precision that is obtained by hesitation and worry.  I would approach it like target shooting.  Aim, fire.  If you think the flower is “this big,” make it “this big.”  If you think it goes “here,” put it “here.”  Don’t take all day.  Stick ‘em in there like you were arranging flowers in a real vase.  If they don’t look right, move them before the painting gets complex.  Use a thin amount of paint at first, draw lines, be spare and free about it.  Get them as close to their relative positions as you can discern and then move on.  (It is just a painting, after all.  First of many.)

The curve of the round table is very gentle, and it takes up very little of the composition as we see it here.  You could draw this contour in with a red line – or a grey line.  This contour intersects the vase at just below the half way mark so that’s a helpful landmark.  I would ”measure” these things optically, however, in our target-shooting spirit.  The point of drawing things directly is that you teach yourself to sense proportion and shape in a natural way — you begin to internalize a gesture that matches what your eyes see.  Whenever you let hesitation and fear of mistakes scare you into grabbing tools or using all kinds of hand gestures and whatnot to get the proportion, you might as well be sending yourself an engraved invitation to be timid.  Put the things where they seem to belong.  The worst you do is get relationships “wrong,” though later this “wrongness” may turn out to be interesting.  It will at least reveal to you what you thought you saw, which admittedly has some meaning of its own.

Indeed, the advantage of copying something is that the source remains stable.  If art conservators do their job well, Monet’s painting is not going to change.  Thus the differences in how you perceive the painting can always be measured against the stable image.  For that reason, it’s good to recopy a painting that you copied “incorrectly” in the past.  You begin to learn the painting, just as a musician learns a piece of music.  It’s a good exercise and through a succession of variant copies, you can watch yourself making progress.  Later at some calm junction of your life, when you have gained experience and are ready to forgive yourself for making mistakes, you can also look quietly and objectively at the distortions or errors that you introduced into the image, and sometimes it happens that you discover a distortion that you actually rather like.  At that moment, congratulations!  you have found a new source of invention!  Matisse built a whole career on expressive distortion, raising it to a high level of enterprise.

From first gestures like these, you build up more and more information about the image you are copying.  You begin by putting in the first biggest “things” and the biggest relationships between things.  Please note that the empty spaces of a picture are as much a part of the image as the stuff is.  Yes, there are flowers.  And there are spaces between the flowers.  One paints the whole thing.  A wise artist will realize that the spaces are not insignificant.  Quite the contrary, as in real life, the spaces determine that the “things” will be where they are and will be what they are.  Where would we be without all our lovely molecules, I ask you?  Where would the flowers be without the air that surrounds them, without the shapes that press upon their locations?  The painting is “everything,” and you must be aware of this “everything,” even if only subliminally.

You deal with the big things first:  the big shapes, the main colors (let your green be green and your yellow, yellow, and add in the nuances after).  Later you look at each of the many parts, and you treat each of the parts as though they were the whole (for in a sense of course, they are). 

Now, you might ask (I hope you’re asking), which parts are parts in an image where everything matters?  When the spaces between the things are as much factors as the things themselves, how does one demark the difference between part and whole?  Oh, this is where painting becomes very philosophical and personal.  What is a part, you ask?  A part is anything that you perceive as being a part.  Even in making a copy, you are doing something very personal.  For you will notice different things, in a different order than Monet noticed even in copying his painting. 

This order of attention, this order of operations, this “I notice this” and “now I notice that” is your individual mind at work.  It’s a lovely process.  Don’t mess with it, just indulge it.  Try yourself, test yourself to see how much you can notice.  Try to notice more and more.  Record what you notice, as you notice it.  This journey into perception is “the beginning of knowledge,” for the painter.  Take it.  It’s a fabulous trip.  Believe me!

Once you start paying attention to the visual world in this manner, you will see things differently around you.  What you first see in a copy of a Monet still life, will reap observational benefits of intensified awareness all around you.  The world is a beautiful, subtle, technicolor place.  We just have to learn to see.

There’s much more to say, but this is a blog.  So, that’s all for now, folks!