««««« Scott Christensen’s DVD, “Three Landscape Studies,” is for anyone interested in plein air painting, using plein air sketches to work up a studio painting, and painting with a limited palette of 3 primary colors.  He explains his process in a way that is interesting and easy to understand. The filming is also excellent, frequently using a split screen so the viewer can observe Scott selecting and mixing paint as well as watch his painting technique. 

Scott uses three primaries, red, lemon yellow, ultramarine blue, titanium white and black. The harmonious range he achieves from these few colors is extensive. He uses color tonally with subdued results, and explains how to maximize the punch of an accent color in a tonal painting.

Years ago I experimented with three primaries and detested the results. After watching “Three Landscape Studies” I selected three primaries from my paint collection (only the red differed from Scott’s palette), and made some puddle color charts, labeling each addition of color. The results surprised me with their delicacy and range of color.

Four years ago I began having difficulty mixing color from my old familiar palette. I changed the bulbs in my studio lights and got a new pair of glasses, but nothing helped. My world was beginning to look depressingly dingy. I was diagnosed with cataracts. Cataracts are famous for making vision fuzzy, but their worst characteristic for a colorist is that they are yellow to brown. The ophthalmologist warned that color perception would be affected. It was. This may sound familiar to baby-boomer painters.

Scott’s “primaries only” palette may compensate for damaged color perception by limiting the potential for unbalanced hues. I am setting myself a challenge to do more puddle charts and to paint only with this trio of colors for the next few months. I’ll post the resulting paintings and my thoughts about the learning curve.

Although not new, “Three Landscape Studies” is worth viewing. I rented it from www.SmartFlix.com for $10, a handy way to view a DVD before deciding to add it to your permanent library.  Visit Scott Christensen’s paintings at www.christensenstudio.com

Symbolism can dramatically enrich your work if you know how to use it. It can also invade your work unconsciously, sometimes contributing to the painting, or sometimes undermining it. As you critique your paintings in progress, include a search for inappropriate use of symbols.

For example, I had only been painting a couple years, and was working on a large landscape in a workshop. As the painting developed, so did a prominent pubic shape right in the middle of the subject mountain. I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to be seen painting anywhere near that shape! But it had to be altered without damaging the believable contours of the mountain, the quicker the better. It was a self-taught lesson I never forgot.

Other shapes and relationships have caused me trouble from time to time: Utility poles that look like crosses, boulders that look like Volkswagens (maybe I wanted one in my youth.) And barriers: Barriers frequently impose themselves in my paintings, forcing me to break them for the viewer and for myself. Occasionally I leave barriers in place when they work for the painting.

Symbols came to humans before language. They developed in various forms: Religious, cultural and personal. A few are universal, such as the circle. Some become tainted by history, such as the swastika, an ancient widespread symbol of the whirlwind and the four cardinal directions.

Some artists develop a code of personal symbols and definitions. How you explain these to your collectors is a personal issue. I align myself with Native Americans who believe that revealing too much too often diminishes the power of the symbol. Other artists believe the story would be lost without explaining the symbolism. Know where you stand.

I’ve deviated a little from my original point. But I guess I wanted to stress that symbols and shapes in your paintings contain incredible power for the people who view your work.  When you find inadvertent symbols and shapes that distract from the meaning of your work, adjust them out of existence.

Who would have thought art history would engage readers of The Palette Keeper, my monthly e-newsletter? The vocal positive response surprised me, and is a lesson in casting a wider net for topics of interest to readers.

I wanted to write one brief article about reading American paintings. It can’t be done. So last March I wrote about the Freake family paintings, the earliest surviving portraits from the colonial era.  The April Palette Keeper compared and contrasted the extravagant display of wealth of one citizen with John Hancock’s more politically correct conservative attire just prior to the Revolutionary War. I will continue the art history theme until my readers say, “Stop! Please stop” or until I tire of it. Meanwhile, it is a provocative topic: What prompts a society to display or hide wealth? What can a painting say about the artist, the model, and conditions during their lives?  How can a viewer read a painting to get the most information out of it?

If you blog or publish a newsletter article give your readers a valuable experience. Look off the beaten track for rich topics. Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower, African slave ships, or Cambodian rescue boats, or all of them, there are stories in your history that define you as an artist. Look at your art. Look at your family history. Look at your heritage as far back as you can go, and listen to the echoes that are there. Then write about it. Your readers and collectors will treasure the experience.

Every once in a while artists will ask what I look for when judging a show. I like that. It gives me a chance to teach artists to consider their work as a whole package. I feel disadvantaged, however, because oils are my specialty and other mediums and art forms are not. As a result, I’m a much harsher judge when it comes to oil painting.

When judging unfamiliar art forms such as weaving, I look for uniformity of weave, unless variation is a contributing factor in the design. In woodworking, I look for fine finish and smooth curves, unless ruggedness is critical to the sculpture. Also in woodworking, I look for how the grain of the wood is incorporated into the planning of the piece. Traditional quilting asks for fine small hand stitching, a plus over machine stitching. In contemporary quilting, I am tolerant of a wider range of stitch types. Watercolor is perhaps toughest for me to judge, and here I simply look for how well the painter supports the subject and mood with the paint.

In oil painting, brushwork and application of paint are important to me. Oil painting by its very nature is luminous, and I want to see that. Oil paint that is watered down with turp or clogged with sand had better have a reason to be so, and that reason must be more obvious than that the artist is cheap.    Required reading for all oil painters should be Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.

In all work I look at the total presentation—how well the artist’s use of materials supports the underlying concept of the work. Do the color and composition get the message across? Do I recognize copied (or nearly so) work in an original category?  Does the work adhere to the rules of the competition? Generally, I try to give latitude in the choice of frame, but if several works are of equal quality, presentation becomes the determining factor. Sloppy presentation is always a negative, and includes dirty mats and glass, poorly cut mats, paintings that are loose in frames, dusty old Mediterranean frames from the 1970’s. Kitsch is a major turn-off.

I suspend my personal preferences as much as possible. They are not relevant when judging a show. Every time I judge a show I am humbled, and wish I knew more about art. I would like to leave comments on many of the entries as to why they won an award—or why they didn’t. Without that, what is learned?