Notesale: Turn your study into money

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The 9 Wondrous Winners of Our All Media Competition

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Wakeham),
two friends discuss the habit of seeing—
and the mystery of teaching art
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WAKEHAM

34

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ABOVE LEFT: Winter

Storm Passing (pastel
on 300-lb
...
Wakeham
ABOVE RIGHT: Gather-

ing Together No
...
“Make
the figure fit between those two
lines,” he’d say
...
I laughed when I
got to college and later when
I started teaching community
college
...
In four weeks at
a commercial art school, I did
more drawing than they did in
a full semester
...

Thus, I have a superficial knowledge of anatomy—I only know
how to draw what I see
...
One week of life drawing in the
studio, five hours a day, five days a week, alternating with a week in the classroom, studying
composition, color, anatomy and perspective
...
We were drawing
in charcoal on full sheets of paper
...
I was drawing
what I saw, but I wasn’t really
prepared to think about composition
...

I wanted to learn: What do you do with
what you see? How do you take what you see,
play with it, alter it, edit, etc
...
At the end of the

Photo by Brenda Mattson

T

here’s a well known encounter you
had with Flora B
...
She was sitting for a portrait with master
pastelists and when the session ended, she
looked at your piece and said, “Where did you
learn to draw?” That’s the question I’d like to
ask you!

Jimmy Wright
(above left) has
paintings in the
permanent collections of the Art
Institute of Chicago,
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the
Center for Book
and Paper Arts
in Chicago and
Springfield Museum
of Art
...
Dempsey
(Chicago) represent
his work
...

Wakeham (above
right) was elected
to the Pastel
Society of America
(PSA) Hall of Fame
in 2000; Pastel
Society of the
West Coast (PSWC)
named him Pastel
Laureate in 2009
...

Wright recorded
their conversation in his home
in the Bowery of
New York City in
September 2014
...
WAKEHAM

1
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2
...
Studies like this allow me to
consider various compositional possibilities and solve problems in advance
...
Diagram: Composition is the structure of
the painting, separate from both subject and
style
...


4
...
rough watercolor) prepared with
gesso and pumice
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5
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What followed was a long process of adjusting shapes, such
as opening up and raising the shape representing water in the middle ground
and deciding where the other narrow horizontal marks representing water
should be placed to lead the eye of the viewer through Twilight Marsh (pastel on paper, 19x29)
...
The last major decision
related to the two large tree shapes at the left
...


session Gustave Baumann turned to the other,
Louie Ewing, and commented that Ewing’s
painting had too many details
...
Mine is a painting
...
Early on, I was painting pictures; now I
attempt to make paintings
...
When I arrived
at Michigan State, I was a fairly accomplished
watercolorist; I hadn’t done that much work in
oil
...
I was exposed to that influence,
but I felt like a fish out of water
...

When I arrived, I was told I was going to
teach an expressive drawing class
...
I didn’t
see why representational drawing couldn’t be
expressive, so that’s the way I taught that fi rst

class
...

Who was that advisor, Matt Kahn?

He had trained at Cranbrook Academy of Art;
he was primarily a designer, but a wonderful
instructor
...
We all came together at his
home and presented our various projects
...
I set it
up in front of the group, then Kahn turned to
the group and said, “What is it?”
Somebody said, “I know what it is—freeway construction,” and he pinpointed the exact
location
...
”
Matt then turned to me and asked, “What
is it?” I replied, “It’s a painting and the subject
is the freeway
...


ABOVE: Above

the Coast (pastel
on 300-lb
...

Wakeham

You understood that distinction, yet you are
still today engaged in observing from life
...
3 (oil on canvas,
72x54) by Jimmy
Wright

painters
...
, I was really getting an intense
art history background, more intense than I’d
had as an undergraduate
...

Mendelowitz
...

Dan had surgery from which he never
fully recovered
...
After one week, I was on my
own
...

You wrote new commentary?

We went through three editors during the time

I worked on my first edition
...
I had
to rethink everything, substituting one drawing
for another and rewriting the text
...
What I did in the
book was group drawings
...

Guide to Drawing is still in print; now it’s in its
eighth edition
...

You are known as a pastelist, although up to
this point, we haven’t talked at all about pastel
...
Returning to watercolor seemed too
daunting; pastel offered the other choice
...
At that time, commercial
artists used pastels only for “comps,” proposed
designs or illustrations to present to the client
for approval
...
Two years later
the first painting I submitted to the Pastel
Society of America was not only accepted but
also received one of the top awards—and I’ve
been part of PSA exhibitions ever since
...
So let’s talk about composition!

The pitfall that so many landscape painters
fall into—most have not had formal art training—is that they feel they have to close in the
view they’re looking at
...

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Certainly that is an approach to composition; that’s closed composition but there’s also
an open composition
...
Many painters
consider it necessary to run a continuous band
across the bottom to establish a foreground
and indicate the landscape beyond
...
I want the viewer to have the
impression of being able to move into the
depths of the painting
...

I was looking the other day at a landscape
posted online
...
That one spot of light would have added
wonders to the painting
...
The whole upper part is just
a mass of dark trees, except right in the center,
there’s a small V-shape of sky color; without
that little shape of sky, the painting falls apart;
with it, it becomes an exciting painting
...


ABOVE: Big Sur

(pastel on sanded
paper, 9x13) by
Duane A
...
It’s almost a mental collage; you’re
assembling the elements of composition,
whereas so many people we know work from
one photograph
...
You get so caught up in
the feeling that you have to replicate the photo
that you aren’t willing to take any chances
...
WAKEHAM

Edgar Degas used photography to capture
gesture, but there was always a wonderful
manipulation between what the photo indicated and what the painting implied; you can
see evidence of the (photographic) source but
it’s never a literal translation of the photo
...


Choosing the Scene:
As a photo (above), it’s pretty boring: the color
is not interesting; there’s no real variation
...
I was actually demonstrating painting a view that required me to keep turning to
the left and looking off to the left
...
The
shapes of the trees were interesting and I
thought it could be the basis of a painting
...
If we look at the
painting I created, you can see I simply got rid
of all of them
...
artistsmagazine
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Some artists would
choose to have this dark mass of trees go to the top of the painting, but that’s
not what the painting is about; it’s about the silhouette of the trees
...
For the painting I worked on 300-lb
...
I was thinking I’d do a reddish underpainting for the greens, but
as I began blocking in the shapes with these warmer colors, I thought, why not
leave it that way? Just because it was green in real life and in the photo doesn’t
mean that that’s what the painting had to be
...
I liked the slight diagonal line
across the bottom of the image that was the slope of the hillside; diagonal lines
are often dramatic, but this one is not
...

Then behind, the hill that’s slightly curved: if you look down below it in the
opening, you can see there’s a slight suggestion of a horizontal light band, and I
love horizontal lines because they suggest peace and tranquility
...

I knew that beyond that hill, the rill drops away to Tomales Bay, which is
affected by the tides
...
As a consequence, I’ve actually shifted the viewer’s position in terms of the landscape beyond: a compositional play between vertical, horizontal and diagonal in Eucalyptus (pastel on
watercolor paper, 19x29)
...
And if you point out bad composition or color, they respond, “But that’s the
way it is
...
Each
has its own reality
...

Your reference to Manet draws upon a vast
visual history in your head
...
We’re sitting in my art
library, surrounded by monographs, from which
I seek information and inspiration
...


That’s how we learn about composition, how
we learn color, and how we learn to see
...
The shapes are primarily rectangular, including a section of bookcase wall, overlapping glass door and shutter
opened against the brick wall, and a large
painting, plus your work table
...

The color, incidentally, reminds me of some
of the Roman wall paintings you and I love
so much
...


reflected into a shadow
...
I doubt that classroom assignments alone prepare us to see such nuances
unless we also learn to look
...


That’s why most people sign up with a workshop instructor—they want to learn technique
...
Students get

BELOW: Sunflower
Cluster (oil on
canvas, 56x44) by
Jimmy Wright

We’re talking about composition as an abstraction, being the base for what essentially
appears to be a realist work of art
...
A
major problem seems to be getting representational painters to understand the need to
establish a strong underlying abstract structure
for their paintings
...
I remember seeing a Sargent portrait at the National
Gallery in Washington, D
...
and being
stunned by the intensity of the color that was
July/August 2015

41

ABOVE: Flowers in

a Murano Vase (oil
on canvas, 72x54)
by Jimmy Wright

caught up in simply trying to replicate what it
is they see, using the technique of whoever is
teaching the class
...
Teachers are
designing content to fit the practicality of the
time
...
artistsmagazine
...

Also, you’re aware that students
expect to come out of the workshop
with a wonderful painting—and
the teaching is geared toward that
...

I once suggested to a group
that what I really wanted to do
was allow them only two hours to
do a painting
...
Just turning
out paintings would help them get
more comfortable with and more
knowledgeable about composition
and color relationships, as opposed
to going away with something
finished
...
I tried to
teach the basics: the steps you had
to go through to create a composition; how you would think of color,
not in terms of representation, but
simply in terms of color relationships
...

Another thing we’re both
aware of—when students who
haven’t had an extensive formal
education decide they want to jump
in and paint, they don’t understand
color other than as hue: red, green, blue or
value: is it light red or dark red? What is the
intensity: bright or dull? What is the temperature: warm or cool? They see a red barn and
they paint it red
...

They put two equally intense colors side by side
without realizing that’s not defining form in
space
...

It’s about subtlety
...

These students aren’t aware of the subtleties of atmospheric or of aerial perspective
either
...

It’s the complexity of working on a flat
two-dimensional surface but ultimately creating the illusion of three-dimensional space,
and how do you do that?
You and I look at paintings in, for instance,
pastel exhibitions, and we are both keenly
aware when a shape that is supposed to depict
a shadow beneath a chin is misplaced
...

How do we communicate to students the
importance of that kind of detail, seeing that
kind of detail? It’s such a basic, formal aspect
of painting
...

Over the years, we’ve spent many hours
conversing about art
...
I introduced
you to Jack Levine, a master of social realism
and satire
...


When it’s beautifully done from life, a portrait
or figure pops off the page
...
If not, the head
or the figure just floats in space
...
rough watercolor paper, 19x29)
by Duane A
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com
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artistsmagazine
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All media, collage
and illustration
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Watercolor, acrylic and
mixed watermedia
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Pastel and pastel
mixed media
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