Category: Monday Motivator

“What should preoccupy you most is not the grand panorama of the sea environment but the more artistically interesting elements such as the swirling motion of the water, the texture of the bubbles, foam, and spray, the shapes of tumbling white surf … make many drawings, one right after another, until you feel you’ve captured the water movement both in line and wash. … aim for a more ambitious kind of realism, one with higher aspirations and more enduring concerns than a simple description of the scene.”

Edward Betts, “Creative Seascape Painting”, page 60

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A painting that “looks like a photograph” is achievement in terms of painting technique, skill, and practice. It’s skill to be aspired to, celebrated through the steps of its aquisition, and enjoyed doing. But it’s only part of the encyclopedia of possibilities in art, there’s still always lots more to learn about and try.

Tactile things to be done with physical materials, in paint, pen, pencil, and by a hand moving the material across a surface. Listen to graphite tickling the paper, feel the squishiness of a paint tube, the bounce in a brush. Convey the swirl of the wind, the rolling of pebbles on a shore, the squelch of wet mud grabbing hold of your feet, the gentle kiss of winter sun in a high latitude.

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the … crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature.

… Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to … “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Maria Popova, “17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian“

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10 Little Painting Joys

1. .Squeezing the first bit of paint from a brand-new tube.
2. Squishing the very last bit of paint from a tube, then squishing it some more just in case you might get a bit more out.
3. Putting a brush into fresh paint on your palette.
4. The first brushstroke, and the anticipation of what’s to come.
5. Getting absorbed in a painting and forgetting time.
6. Rediscovering a painting or drawing that you don’t entirely remember but know you did and is pleasingly satisfying.
7. Surprising yourself with where a painting went because you followed an impulse.
8. Remixing a colour without struggling because the ‘formula’ has become internalised.
9. Looking at a painting tomorrow and wondering why you thought it still needed something doing to it.
10. You-tell-me. Post a comment below.

“Prioritize friendships with people who encourage your art, because they know how important it is to you. Let them know, gently but firmly, that encouragement is the nourishment you need, rather than expectation or pressure. Because you already excel at expectation and pressure. It’s the gentle stuff you need help with.”

Belinda Del Pesco, Beginner Artist Mindset Tips

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A friend of mine joined an urban sketching group meetup this month for the first time ever, and has found herself thinking about sketching outside during her lunch break. I’d been hoping she might, but hadn’t said anything because going along to your first sketch meeting is stressful enough. I was impressed it only took one meetup; I’d thought it might take a few.

Sketching on location is a combination of so many of the things we both enjoy: being outside, drawing, looking, people/nature watching, tactile interaction with materials, creating something from nothing. But if I’d told her I was thinking of the next step before she’d even done the first, what she might/could/should do, then she’d have felt so pressurised she might have backed out of joining the group’s meetup and how guilty wouldn’t I have felt then.

Now we’re talking about “going for a walk around and looking at the trees with sketching eyes instead of gardening eyes” . About ways to reduce the pressure on herself, such as picking one tree and doing a series of sketches of this. Setting the aim to be not “every lunch”, but “once a week”. Not “sketch the whole scene” but “pick a detail”.

I’m really excited to see where this will take her, but also that it’s already taken her this far knowing what the starting point was. It also reminds me to look anew at trees, and to be gentle on myself when I am trying a new subject (i’ve been putting off sketching fishing boats) or revisiting something I haven’t painted for a while (thinking of figures for the online drawing workshop I’m doing).

“Switching tasks helps reduce something called cognitive fixation, the tendency to get stuck in one particular approach to a problem. Turning to another task gets us out of this rut, seeing different possibilities.”

Russell Davies, “Do Interesting“, page 87

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Applying this idea to painting, don’t change the task (making a painting) but change what you’re using to do the task (the medium you’re using). With oil paint you could use oil sticks or oil pastels. With acrylic paint, you could use ink or acrylic marker pens. With watercolour you could use pencil. With pencil you could add in a wash, or collage. The list goes on and is limited only by what you have to hand (and the fundamental rules about what sticks to what).

The first time I encountered the suggestion of changing medium but to keep working on the same spot in order to solve a problem was in a still life workshop in 2017 in Edinburgh at the Leith Art School led by Kittie Jones. I don’t recall her exact words, but it was along the lines of if you’re struggling to make something work, don’t shift your focus to another part of the painting but change mediums and keep working on that spot.

It’s like changing gears, a fresh start whilst still moving the whole painting forward. It’s become something that’s part of the way I paint, sometimes switching what I’m using to apply paint rather than the medium.

The other thing I remember well from this workshop was tearing a hole in my sheet of paper and solving this by simply sticking another piece behind it and keeping going. What we learn from a workshop often isn’t what we expected!

“The thing about making art is that you’re always looking outwardly, even though you’re also acutely aware of processing inwardly.”

Shawna Lemay, Your Life and the Work of Art

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Next time you’re out somewhere with a friend, ask them what they’re seeing; almost guaranteed they’re not focused on the same things you are. You can play this game by yourself at a location you visit regularly (or even sitting at home) by making a record of what’s caught your eye or by comparing photos you took.

When I walk along a pebble beach I generally find myself noticing one pattern or colour more than anything else on each occasion: wide stripes, pinstripes, single lines, circles, conglomerate, two contrasting types of rock in one pebble, quartz, orange, red, green-grey, blue-grey.

Last time it was the orange striped pebbles I have found only on that beach. I think it’s because I spotted a couple of largish ones early on in my meander, and then my eyes tuned into those colours between everything else. The tide will move and mix them again several times before I walk there again.

“Accepting what your drawings look like now is important. You cannot learn to make more effective drawings if you don’t first draw.

“… The point isn’t to make ‘good’ drawings. The point is to draw. Learn the feel of the pencil against the paper, the different angles you hold your wrist, the motion of your whole arm when you draw from your shoulder.”

Chris Gavaler and Leigh Ann Beavers, “Creating Comics: A Writer’s and Arist’s Guide and Anthology“, page 25

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Note the term “effective” in the quote. Isn’t this far more useful for judging a drawing than “good” or “bad”? A drawing I am unhappy about can still be effective in what it teaches me.

Accepting the gap between where our drawing skills are today and what we wish they were is part of how we narrow that gap. Berating yourself for perceived shortcomings is a misdirection of energy, and won’t solve the issue, so keep the pity-party short and try again.

One of the most frustrating things for me is that when I do try again, I frequently end up with a result I am even less pleased about. I know it happens, I recognise it when it happens, and the more desperately I want something to turn out well, the more likely it is to not. I have a category I file these pieces under: Trying Too Hard.

I also know from experience that if I can keep going, I usually get to a satisfactory result. I don’t always try again, sometimes I stop drawing. Other times I change mediums so I can’t make a direct comparison between my next piece and the previous.

That’s what I did on the morning I drew the two plein-air pieces below. I was a bit ambivalent about my pencil drawing and swapped to watercolour for another go at the scene.

I changed the composition too, focusing in closer on a smaller part of the edge of the bay. I got it to a point where I was feeling happy, and stood up to get a photo, having forgotten how windy it was because I’d been so absorbed in my painting.

As I took the photo above, the wind caught the edge of the paper and blew it onto the pebbles. A bit of wild scrabbling and I was able to get hold of it fortunately. If you compare the bottom of the photos above and below, you’ll see the wind’s contribution to the painting, creating drips off the edge. I rather like it.

“What seems to happen as we grow older is that seeing becomes dulled. We begin to look in a practical manner just to get enough information to function. … We spend more and more time mentally running around, looking at one thing, thinking of another. …

In practicing seeing, allow your eyes to wander over your subject matter. Visually caress what you are looking at. … Realize there is a wholeness, but try not to stare to strain to see everything at once.

— Albert Handell and Leslie Trainor Handell, “Intuitive Composition”, page 12

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It’s no secret that continuous line drawing is a favourite technique of mine, and doing it with ink not pencil, thus eliminating the option of erasing any part of it. While what I’m producing is a drawing, what I’m doing is focusing on looking and feeling my way around a subject rather than on my drawing itself.

Because the technique means the result is never going to be detailed realism, it frees me from worrying about trying to make it so, to simply draw and leave dealing with what I’ve drawn for later. There’s a certain stage at which I switch focus from looking to what the drawing is becoming and where I want to take the piece. It’s hard to quantify; sometimes it’s because I feel I’ve looked “enough” or “at everything”, often it’s because I feel like moving onto the next stage with other colours or mediums.

You don’t need pen and paper to do continuous line; you can draw it in your head, tracking as your eyes shift across and around a subject. It’s a drawing about looking, and looking some more.