PleinAir Magazine picked up a post I meant to put up on the blog last month for one of their weekly e-Newsletters. You can click here to read the post as it was published, or read the same text below – should the original link-back to PAM break in the future. 

I hope that if you were pulled in but the e-Newsletter, and are new to my blog, that you will take a moment to drill down further and uncover some nifty oil painting tips and tricks. (Hey, here's an idea: why not subscribe to the blog and not miss a post?) If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments area below. 

And now that the cat's officially been let out of the bag (see below) I can share that PleinAir Magazine will be offering a more in-depth article on what I've been up to lately.

...from the folks at PleinAir Magazine:

"Oregon artist Thomas Jefferson Kitts offered a wealth of good advice when he was interviewed for an article by Bob Bahr on marketing plein air paintings that will be included in the April/May issue of PleinAir. We decided to included more of his helpful comments in this issue of the PleinAir Today e-Newsletter. Kitts will be a valuable demonstrator during the  Red Rock National Conservation Area during the 1st Annual PleinAir Convention & Expo."

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PleinAir Today's eNewsletter:

How You can Succeed at a Plein Air Event:

Yes it's me, photo-bombing my own picture!

1. First, do your homework. Research the events you want to do and contact some artists who have done them. Most will be happy to share what they know. Then submit your work. If you get in, awesome! Start packing. If not, don't get cranky or despair. The "no" wasn't about you, it was about the work. Enter more events to get a second opinion. Keep working on your painting ability. This is where a workshop may help. Pick a painter you admire who is known as a good instructor. He or she can show you what you are missing and help you grow. (My advice for how to choose a workshop is the same for picking a plein air event. Call a few previous students and ask them for an opinion.)

But Okay, What do You do After You've been Juried Into an Event?

2. Take a moment and feel great. It means somebody believes in your work. Next, call the event organizers to get more information. At this point they know who you are and they want you to succeed as much as you do. Ask about painting locations. Ask about framing preferences because they can vary by region. Ask about collectors, your fellow artists, your host, cheap-eats, the fly-in-and-out logistics, traffic, and whatever else that pops into your head. Learn as much as you can about what to expect. You want to be ready to go after check-in. You don't want to waste daylight.

3. Show up knowing there will be an element of competition, but maintain a sense of fun and respect as you engage. Laugh a lot. Be open and enjoy yourself because if you do you'll at least go home with that. Fun breeds more fun. Some of the best times you may have may happen between sunset and the nocturne you and your new friends decide to paint after dinner. And remember, you aren't just painting, you're networking too.

4. Understand that the competitive feeling you may experience is real, but manufactured by the event itself. I look at these paint-outs as the plein air equivalent to "The Iron Chef"™. Great art can result from such forced interplay, but don't lose sight of the fun as you go. People can sense that.

5. Appreciate how everybody around you is working to make something happen. You are creating art on the spot. Money is being raised for a non-profit. Paintings are being hung and buyers are leaving with something they will treasure forever. Everybody is happiest when everyone works together. You are a part of that. You may be the headliner (or not) but the volunteer who signed up to sweep the floor is important too.

6. Nobody likes a sad-sack. Nobody. Painting en plein air is hard enough under normal circumstances but doing it on demand around a cranky-pants only makes it tiresome. When you submitted you volunteered to work hard within a short period of time under pressure. So go out and do the best you can without bumming anyone else out. No matter what happens, keep a smile on your face and have fun. Did I mentioned the fun aspect enough times yet? Last year, at a big event, a friend's paint didn't arrive in time. Did he complain? No, everyone rallied around and gave him what he needed. That is less likely to happen if you are a moaner.

7. Do not change or compromise your art to make a sale. Go do that voodoo you do so well. That magic is why you were invited and that magic is what you should hang on the wall. If you decide to take a chance and paint something entirely different, well, then do so. You are the artist, after all. But paint better than you have painted before. Hanging the best is how you win a competition. (One caveat: The best doesn't always win. So what. Celebrate every artist's win. If you have a problem with that then go back and reread number 4.)

8. Enjoy the people you will meet: your fellow-artists, the event organizers, the collectors, your host, even the person on the street who has to share how much their great-aunt loved to paint puppies. (I have picked up a few nice commissions from such exchanges.) These events are extremely social. It's in the DNA. Every night will transform into a moveable feast so sleep when you get home. People will be genuinely interested in you so respond in kind. Be confident yet approachable.

I have been painting en plein air for almost three decades but only began doing these competitions and invitationals back in 2010. I can't think of anything else I've done since then that improved my work more than these intense (and sometimes wild) events. Three years ago I took a workshop from a well-known painter and he suggested I give them a try and I am thankful for that push. If I had the past two years to do all over again, I'd not only do it I'd double-down and jump in earlier. Everyone I have met has been wonderful and I am grateful for their support and attention.

For more information, visit www.thomaskitts.com.

The Wisdom of Rothko...

photo-credit: APIC/Getty Images

I went to a major Mark Rothko show at the Portland Art Museum yesterday. I've always felt a strong attraction to his work but not known much about the artist himself beyond the obligatory things one must study in a Art Since '45 class as an undergrad. This exhibition was deep and cohesive. Most of the paintings came from the Rothko family and the National Gallery in DC. The show began with paintings from the early days and it kept going until just before his suicide. Right from the first thing you saw, a nascent still life, you could lock onto a thread and follow it through the galleries – a thread wending its way through the various Modernistic styles Rothko appropriated over the years. That thread was his own voice building over time. From Cezanne, to Miro, to Clifford Still, to Milton Avery, ultimately Rothko found his own place in his final and monolithic paintings. A beautiful and spiritual crescendo.

On my way out, I was struck by a quote the museum had placed on the wall:

"The progression of a painter's work,
as it travels in time from point to point,
will be towards clarity; toward the
elimination of all obstacles
between the painter and the idea,
between the idea and the observer." 

– Mark Rothko, 1952

/ / / / /

Update: A good friend just sent me a link to a terrific online article about Mark Rothko's early days in Portland, Oregon. A good read, and it offers insight into his work and life. Click here to read it.

TJK

Speculating on Sorolla...

Okay, if you are an artist or painter and have met me in person, or if you are a friend, or know of me by reputation – then you probably know I am a certified Sorolla Nut. Meaning, a slobbering fan of the Valencian Spanish painter, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, who's life and career spanned the late 19th and early 20th century.

There isn't much print out there in English on Sorolla, and what there is can be rather expensive to get your hands on.  And there aren't many paintings by him to find in North America. You may find the a Sorolla or two included in a traveling Spanish exhibition, and there are his large murals installed in the Hispanic Society in New York City, but that's about all you'll see without flying off to Spain. So Sorolla is another great European painter largely unknown to most Americans, waiting to inspire anyone willing to suss his work out.

This morning I was sitting in a Starbuck's waiting for my wife to finish up her Barr 3 class and googling JSB on the iPad. (My goodness, we are the contemporary couple, aren't we?) I was mostly fooling around, killing time, and enjoying a cup of coffee when I stumbled across the blog The Art Contrarian. And on it were some wonderful images of Sorolla's studio in Madrid – which, according to the accepted story – was shuttered by his wife shortly after Sorolla experienced the stroke that ended his career and then his life three years later. And to elaborate upon the story, the door remained locked until the Spainish government agreed to turn his studio into a museum without moving or altering what had been left in place. So this means – assuming this anecdote is true – that Sorolla's workspace is exactly as it was when he dropped his brush. (Sorolla was working on a portrait of Senora de Perez de Ayala when had his stroke.)

Apparently, about two years ago, Donald Pettenger toured Sorolla's studio and shot photos of how things were laid out. Images which include a rare unfinished work, an indoor palette, some brushes and tools, and a taboret. A veritable time capsule for a painting-geek like me. So I thought we could take a brief and somewhat imaginary tour of Sorolla's workspace using the following images gleaned from Donald's site, and have a little fun speculating as we go.

Let's start with Sorolla's palette,
since so much of his voodoo started there.

Image credit: Donald Pettenger

1. I can't identify all the colors on Sorolla's palette but it looks like a fairly standard set of earth colors for his time. But what immediately interested me is how this palette was biased towards the warm. Sorolla's career spanned late Impressionism, Post-impressionism, and the advent of Post-WWI Modernism . I know we are looking at his indoor palette and that his outdoor palette also included cooler colors. We know from examining his outdoor work he painted with cobalt or ultramarine blue, and certainly made use of a lot of cobalt or manganese violet as well. But the limited earth color palette you see here seems consistent with both his indoor and outdoor work.

The agreed upon Sorolla outdoor palette: cobalt violet, rose madder, all the cadmium reds, cadmium orange, all the cadmium yellows, yellow ochre, chrome green, viridian, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, French ultramarine and lead white. 

 Image credit: Donald Pettenger

2. But what is of more interest to me is how Sorolla placed his black next to his white. (see the yellow arrow) This suggests he may have been mixing a number of gray values first and then pushing purer hues into them. (mental note to self, give this a try...) The large area of silvery gray in the left area of the palette supports this theory. This in contrast to the complementary mixing method often taught to painters today. Having said that, I wouldn't assume for a second that Sorolla always mixed a gray and added a hue because his paintings don't support that simple an explanation. But the light and dark masses which made up his powerful compositions were always calculated to leave a value gap between each other and that is one of the things I believe contributed to his astounding ability to conjure up the illusion of bright sunlight. So I find it intriguing that Sorolla placed his black next to his white when all his other hues moved clock-wise from light to dark around the palette. Most artists would put that black the far end to maintain the logic.

Image credit: Donald Pettenger

3. It appears Sorolla used as many as four reservoirs when he was painting indoors. I assume that is why they are there on the taboret since room is limited. But reservoirs of what? And why as many as four? That would be a lot of turpentine to slosh around. More than necessary to paint even a large painting. But perhaps that much solvent was helpful after all because much of Sorolla's artistic finesse is to be found within his carefully modulated warm and cool whites. A delicate relationship that is difficult to maintain when working wet-into-wet, especially with a lot of lost and found edge work. So perhaps Sorolla was not just segregating his light and dark or cool and warm brushes, but he was also segregating and dedicating certain reservoirs of solvent to specific brushes as well. I dunno, but this seems like an good idea to try out sometime. (Arg! More stuff to schlep out into the field...)

Image credit: Donald Pettenger

4. It appears that Sorolla also had a preference for filberts, and rather long ones by today's standards. Not as long as eggberts, since those brushes tend to become floppy or splay, and thus make thicker paint harder to push around. But it appears that Sorolla was painting with something akin to the filberts we have available today. Again, perhaps not exclusively, since we only find a few of his brushes in these photos. But when you look at the surfaces of his work, the bumps and valleys created by the lift and pull of his touches don't suggest the use of feathery or soft haired brushes, or short stiff brights, or flats either. Instead, his surfaces suggest the use of a filbert. And one filbert can create a wide range of touches without becoming monotonous in the repetition. This may be a reason why we see so few brushes here.

Image credit: Donald Pettenger

(A rare unfinished sketch-in. Note the thinness of the paint

and the bluish schematic line work below the figure.)

5. It is extremely rare to come across an unfinished Sorolla. But when we do find one it becomes clear he was a Classicist in his approach to how he constructed his work. Sorolla clearly preferred to paint from thin-to-thick and build up his painting carefully, saving the juicy bravura top  work for the finish. Much like Sargent and Zorn. Or, for that  matter, any other oil painter who owes a debt to Velasquez and Franz Hal. Sorolla was a painter who became interested in aligning the directional gestures of his pulls with the surface planes of his subject; whether he was painting a sail, a cloud, or the shine of wet human flesh. In this way Sorolla instilled a sense of life into the paint itself.

Image credit: Donald Pettenger

(click image to see hi-res version of Sorolla's sketch-in)

(click image to see a hi-res version of Sorolla's thicker finish)

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Can I say with authority this is how Sorolla painted? Well, not really. I've not had enough original Sorollas to look at, or enough time to be with the few I've been lucky to come across. Plus it is important to remember very few painters painted the same way their entire life. Painters tend to evolve over time, often going back and forth between a number of established methods, maturing as they go. But speculations like the ones I have shared can spark our imagination and set us on a new path. They can suggest something new to try, or change the way we paint, or perhaps simply cause us to think about a painting in a new way At least they can for a geek like me.

Whoops, I meant a Sorolla Nut instead.

Thomas

Making Turtles – Or Saving Your Grays...

I've been squeezing a lot of paint out onto my palette over the past week because I took a workshop from a guy who likes to paint fast and thickly. 

I chose him because I wanted to learn how to paint fast and thickly too. And I learned the secret to doing so is simple: empty your tubes out before you begin pushing it around. Why be so excessive? Well, any oil painter like myself who wants to work at a large scale en plein air, or using alla prima methods just doesn't have time to be uncapping and capping tubes all day. Plus, there are color effects that only happen if you slather it on. (Think Sargent, Sorolla, or Zorn...) But it has only been seven days since that workshop and at the rate I'm going to start buying paint by the pint. Or gallon. Clearly, this will get expensive.

Question: I want to lay out a lot of paint but not waste what laid out at the end of the day when I go home. How can I keep my leftovers from prematurely setting up?


Answer: Make turtles.

If you are like me, you tend to stab your brush into a pile of color – which means that by the end of the day you are left with a spread out and peaky area like this:

The problem with leaving your paint this way is it leaves a lot of surface area for oxygen above to do its business. (Oxygen is what causes your oil paint to 'dry', not evaporation.) So, the less surface area you create, the less the paint is exposed to oxygen. Get it?

So, at the end of the day it is helpful to shape your color piles into what a friend of mine likes to call a 'turtle'. If you minimize the surface area it will significantly inhibit the drying time. And if a pile of paint sits around long enough to skin over you can peel it back to get to the fresh(er) paint below. Of course, should that happen there will be some shrinkage, but not as much if you leave your paint all peaked and flattened out like the top image. You can even pour a little walnut oil on top of your turtles to further slow the drying.

Here an example of me making a turtle, using a medium-sized palette knife on a paper palette. The gray you see me pushing around is one of my working mud piles. It started out as pure tube colors squeezed out seven days ago. Yes, you read that right, I said one week ago. It is this fluid because I've been making turtles at the end of every day. All my other piles are the same. Pretty nifty, eh?

I should admit  I've been using walnut oil instead of linseed oil as a paint medium this past week. Walnut oil 'dries' more slowly than linseed oil does. Something to consider if you want a longer open time to work.

So go ahead and start painting like a millionaire! Squeeze generous piles of your color out onto the palette! Stop starving your brush and canvas and get expressive! Because now you know how to save that leftover paint for your next session!

– Thomas

Whiter than White, Brighter than Bright...

[Post update: 2/1/2012] 

Shortly after I uploaded this tip the well-respected blog PaintingPerceptions.com asked permission to quote it at length in an in-depth story on lead white oil paint. The formula I offer here for creating a lead white substitute has been quoted extensively towards the end of PaintingPerceptions' article, but I recommend you read PP's entire post anyway as it raises legitimate concerns about the future availability and uptick in cost of lead white paint. Here is a direct link to the information:

http://paintingperceptions.com/sounding-technical/the-great-lead-white-shortage

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When it comes to using white, oil painters are faced with two choices: to paint with a titanium (or titanium/zinc) white, 

or to paint with a lead white. 

The majority of contemporary artists choose to paint with a titanium for two main reasons: titanium is less expensive and it is considered less toxic. Both may be true but to completely forego the artistic potential of lead white – also known as Flake White – means never exploring some of the most interesting painterly effects that date back centuries. Lead white was, after all, the first white for oil painters...

But if you are adamant against working with lead white, yet wish titanium had some of its working properties, what can you do?

First, let’s begin by identifying a few qualities that distinguish lead white from titanium white in an artist-grade oil paint:

1. Lead white is the warmest white available to the oil painter (see illustration above). Because of that warm cast lead it can play nicely with light values and weaker tints, the kinds of delicate passages you find in many skin tones and neutral colors. Especially if you paint with a lot of classic earth colors.

2. Lead white paint is less opaque than titanium white. Unless the white in question has been unduly adulterated by its manufacturer. At first you might consider lead white’s weaker tinting strength to be a bad thing but a lower tinting strength can become an advantage when attempting to replicate traditional effects produced by Ye Olde Masters. Effects such as such as overpainting, scumbling, or the laying in of a semi-transparent color on top of an earlier passage. Often, modern titanium white is too strong or too blue and overwhelms the color it is mixed into. Often it makes that color appear, well, chalky.

3. Lead white exhibits a distinct thixotropic property as you move it around with a brush or palette knife. Lead white tends to glide in a unique manner while it is in motion. When the motion ceases the paint drops or freezes. And lead white can transfer some of this effect into another color it has been mixed into. The titaniums I have painted with do not exhibit this behavior. And finally, lead white tends to be stiffer than most titanium whites and is less likely to level out as the paint film dries. This retains a crisper impasto.

4. Lead white will gently accelerate the drying of the oil film and strengthen the film as it does so. Without going into the chemistry of it all, the lead is a through-drier so it can speed things up without the structural dangers normally associated with using a surface drier such as cobalt, or other metal driers which pull in oxygen from the air above the film.

For Those Who Refuse to Paint with Lead 

but Wish They Could... 

You can create your own "Mock Lead White" with the following:

First, mix a tiny amount of ochre paint into a generous amount of titanium white. This will shift the cool bias titanium pigment has towards the warmer cast of lead. Just a tiny amount of ochre will do. Mix it in thoroughly using a clean palette knife on a clean surface. The slightest addition of a second color will send the white in the wrong direction. (You are just trying to shift the white from cool to warm. Compare your mix against unmodified titanium white. You’ll see how little ochre is required.)

Next, you need to reduce the tinting strength of the titanium in your titanium/ochre white. To accomplish this, you start by mixing some linseed oil into a pile of finely-ground marble dust. (aka, calcium carbonate). Use a hand muller on glass if you have them, or a substantial palette knife on a clean surface if you don't. Exert a fair amount of pressure as you mix everything together because it must all be well incorporated before the next step. (BTW, marble dust is inexpensive and available at most art stores. Or it can be ordered online.) The consistency of your final oil and calcite blend should equate the consistency of your titanium/ochre white. Now, begin mixing a little of the oil and calcite blend into your titanium/ochre white. As you increase the amount of calcite you are lowering the opacity of the titanium. (As a point of historical fact, Velazquez often worked calcium carbonate into a number earth colors to affect their opacity. Much of the transparent beauty found in his limited palette comes from this trick. You can use you oil and calcite mixture for the same purpose).

And finally, to emulate the impasto effect lead white imparts to a brush stroke, try incorporating a small amount of artist-grade beeswax. (You will find that very little wax is needed to mimic the peaking effect of lead white.) The wax creates a shorter pull to your paint mixture and thus your mock lead white will sustain sharper peaks and striations. Good enough for impasto work. I recommend you add the wax on your palette as you need it and not incorporate it into a tubed mixture. That way you will always have the option of working with a short or long mock lead white.

You will likely want to experiment with different proportions of these additives to find your preferred mock lead, but once you find it take note for future reference. You can then make a large batch and tube it up for later convenience. Sealed properly, your mock lead white should last as long as any other oil paint.

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Note: Modifying a titanium white paint as described above may be considered within the bounds of sound painting practices so long as the resulting paint doesn't become oil-starved by the addition of too much calcite. Or, that the integrity of the dried paint film is not compromised by the addition of too much beeswax. But those caveats hold true for any kind of oil paint, not just your blend. The usual and customary cautions regarding the thickness and application of impasto work still apply.

Have fun, and keep painting!