Understanding the Nuance of Painting

      An email conversation with a contemporary of mine has stimulated me to  pass on some of it's content to those of you who desire to reach your full potential as artists. Not everyone is thusly driven. And even though this may show you another side of me and my aggressive side of teaching, I think some of today's content can be beneficial if you can look past my reprimanding manner.

        Rules. Sometimes it may seem like there are too many rules. A clinical approach to painting and  creating any kind of art may be a huge turn off. And as I have shared with many of you before, in my youth I was very puffed up and impressed with my own ability. But I learned that the devil was in the details and those details would be overlooked if I didn't give into the fact that I wasn't above learning procedure and needing to apply rules in order to make a  successful original piece of artwork on my own. I was great at copying but terrible at my own composition. I would do the work and always crop down. I couldn't see it until the work was done. I wasted time , material and money, cropping and remounting work in the beginning of my art career.

   

       Youth told me two out of four efforts wasn't bad having to crop. But as soon as I gave into planning, learning composition and as many rules as I could, it was a shortcut to 100% success without timely cropping and remounting.

      Teaching, I see so many artists not take the time to understand composition and  proper use of thumbnails. They commit to working diligently on  a poorly planned painting that needs lots of fixing that will take twice the time and produce 1/2 the product potential. This all happens because they did not take even fifteen minutes to do thumbnails and answer six basic aspects of the painting they were about to produce. What's my line, color scheme, chroma, values, temperature, and form, are the basics. Mastering the basics first is the only way to understand the nuance of painting. It is the magic you see when a seasoned artist paints with mastery. They don't skip this part!  They have done the planning so many times that they refine planning to in their head or they examine their subject prior to setting up and plan in advance, or they use one of the many mental templates of design they have been successful with in their past, BUT THEY NEVER SKIP THUMBNAIL PLANNING! Minimally it is done in their visual mind. So take time to plan and learn so the FUN can be in the details instead of dread and dissatisfaction and hardship.