Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Artists Magazine

FROM NEW YORK CITY AT NIGHT on the May issue’s cover to zebras in the African savannah now—our vistas are wide! For this issue John N. Agnew chronicles his trip to Africa, where he and eight other artists observed and painted with the intention of bringing the massacre of beautiful, benign elephants to light (“Art Safari,” page 28). Even farther afield is China, as we showcase nine paintings from the Shenzhen International Watercolour Biennial (“Nine from China,” page 46). Closer to home are Gregg Kreutz’s lessons in painterly expressiveness (“Against Precision, Toward Expression, page 38) and Warner Friedman’s unusual way of presenting landscapes (“Framed Perspective,” page 54). And as always, there are lots of lessons: in making classical drawings your own (Drawing Board, page 14) and planning compositions according to…

In many ways, Niam Jain is like any other teenager. He enjoys swimming, playing video games and seeing movies, but being on the autism spectrum entails limitations, and Jain sought an outlet to help him communicate his feelings. “People tell me all day long how I should behave, how I should speak, what I should be doing and when,” says Jain. “In art, there is no wrong answer. It’s a true expression of who I am.” Jain began making art in August 2015. He picks the size of his canvas and his colors, and paints in layers that express what he’s feeling. “When I think it’s complete, I simply stop,” he says. What results are abstract images with various colors working together, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes chaotically. Is this not…

Academic figure drawings can be simply gorgeous. You feel that satisfaction in seeing a perfect contrapposto—the undulation of muscle and bone as seen in a side plane atop a ribcage described in halftones. When the artist begins exploring the expressive possibilities of drawing, however, there are endless possibilities for how line, value and form might carry or convey emotion. Leonardo da Vinci: There’s an atmosphere of stillness and contemplation, yet potential energy, in Leonardo’s Madonnas. Michelangelo: His tumultuous ripples of muscle and bone deliver the artist’s feelings of distress—from 500 years ago—straight to our hearts, landing like a punch as his feelings stir in our own bodies. Käthe Kollwitz: The forceful density of line and value found in Kollwitz’s work tells a tale of suffering and loss, identifiable through the…

I’VE PAINTED IN A FEW PLACES THAT REQUIRED FREQUENT GLANCES OVER MY SHOULDER: IN WYOMING — LOOKING FOR GRIZZLIES, AND IN EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK — EYEING PANTHERS AND CROCODILES. Until the fall of 2013, though, I’d never had to worry about elephants and lions. I was in Tanzania, a country on the east coast of Africa. Along with eight other artists from several countries, I was taking part in an Artists Ambassadors Against Poaching project dedicated to elephant conservation. PUSHING BACK POACHERS Tanzania, noted for its “big five” game animals (lions, elephants, Cape buffaloes, leopards and rhinoceroses), boasts of 16 national parks. More than a third of the land area is protected for conservation. In spite of this, elephants are at enormous risk from poachers because the price of ivory…

1. POSITIONING: First Kreutz lays in a rough approximation of the general shape of the model. At issue isn’t accuracy or finesse but positioning the figure comfortably in the canvas: not too big, not too small. At this stage Kreutz finds that turning the visual information into simple, readable geometric shapes is helpful. In this case, he generalizes the figure’s shape into a triangle. 2. ROUGH-IN: Kreutz then gets a little more specific with the rendering and, after that, roughs in the background. Trying not to get too caught up in detail, he simplifies the complexity of the trees and terrain into simple, big shapes. 3. DARK/LIGHT PATTERNS: Moving on, Kreutz begins to lay in the shadows and then the lights. The light and shadow pattern is tricky because the…

Blick French Easel by Jullian It's no secret that many manufacturers are cutting corners and creating French-style easels that make a mockery of the original Jullian French easel. Don't let the bad drive out the good! Blick asked Jullian to make a French style easel with all the original workmanship and details, plus a few modern innovations that just make sense. This classically designed easel combines a sketch-box, easel, and canvas carrier in one. Made by hand with naturally dried, oiled and polished elmwood, it includes a weather-resistant, metal-lined box, a wood palette and free carry bag. For more details, visit DickBlick.com or call 800-828-4548. Jack Richeson & Co., Inc. Enjoy canvas in the traditional style of hand priming and stretching. Jack Richeson’s canvas is carefully hand-primed with 3 coats of…

A WIDE RANGE OF ART Articles about artists like Hildy Maze and Sam Goodsell (January/February 2016) are what make me subscribe to your magazine. If all the articles were about representational artists whom readers Mike Carter and G. Franklin approved of (Letters, April), I might find your magazine narrowly focused and quite boring. Please keep up the good work—and the wonderful variety of articles. BERT STEVENSON WHITE PLAINS, MD. There is so much intolerance for varying points of view now. You don’t have to like it, but look at it anyway! What can you learn? I would point M. Carter and G. Franklin to Sheldon Tapley’s Ask the Experts (March) from which I quote: “Spend more time looking at the difficult work than at the art that immediately pleases you.”…

WHAT IS THE SECRET TO BEAUTIFUL COLOR? Artists sometimes look for the answer in tubes of intense, high-chroma paint. In fact, pleasing color may depend less on a hue’s inherent beauty and more on its relationship to the colors that surround it. For example, two equally strong hues placed side by side can compete for attention. Instead, place a bright color next to a dull one, and you’ll enhance each by the comparison. Another powerful pair of opposites that play off one another have to do with warm and cool color temperatures. HOW TO FIND TEMPERATURE PATTERNS Most people perceive that the colors red, orange and yellow appear warm, while blue looks cool. These correlations are known as “color temperatures.” A color’s temperature is relative and may be influenced by…

THE TECHNIQUE OF WATER-COLOUR PAINTING, originally published in 1926, by L. Richmond and J. Littlejohns is a classic, still replete with useful information, in spite of a flowery style characterized by words like “bain,” “distress,” “disaster.” Several passages have stayed with me since I first read the volume. One quotation on brushes is particularly amusing. Under the heading, “Of Brushes,” the authors proclaim: “Fine pictures can be painted with ill-prepared colours, but inferior brushes will severely handicap a technical genius.” BRUSH BASICS We all know that artists have been known to use sticks, feathers, fingernails and other parts of their bodies as instruments to make marks with paint on surfaces. Traditionally, painting with watercolors in China, Europe and North America required brushes made from animal hair. Probably the most…

SO YOU’RE BEGINNING to get a handle on the figure: Your proportions are getting better; you’re able to simplify the forms of the body into a few planes moving in space and see form as masses of light and shadow; you can spot and name important bones and muscles; your figures are beginning to take on the feeling of living, breathing flesh. The eyes look back at you, and the gestures of the body feel natural. It was not an easy road getting here, and it will take regular practice to keep these skills sharp, but you now feel that you’d like to express something more in your life drawings. In my own work, I don’t consider that I’ve made a real drawing until I’ve included a bold statement of…

Magpie and Peonies (above left) shows my efforts to orchestrate warm and cool color relationships in a painting. I opted to paint the bird’s black feathers in warm tones, in contrast with the cool white feathers. The pink peonies, with hints of warmth, emerge from a relatively cool gray vase and are set against a blue background. I glazed the butterfly, bird’s beak and table with a yellow earth color, distinctly sunny compared to the nearby cool temperatures. With the exception of the green leaves, every part of the painting is either a distinctly cool or warm color, and the parts play against one another in a varied, yet organized, pattern. I then created a variation of the painting in Photoshop (above right), replacing the yellowish tabletop with a cool,…

1. The four stages of painting are placement, background, shadow and light. 2. To paint something convincingly, you have to determine local color, shadow color, turning color and highlight color. 3. Dynamics (high contrast, color, paint thickness, and so forth) bring passages forward (see Fish Market Dawn, page 42). 4. Paint relationships—not isolated things or people (see The Critic, opposite). 5. Everything is either light against dark, dark against light or same against same. 6. Paint passages in the light thickly (see Fall at the Farmer’s Market, pages 38–39). 7. Light turns gently into shadow and emerges crisply from the shadow (see Checkmate, at right). 8. Every object needs a form shadow (see Up the Lane, page 44). 9. Shadows are dark versions of local color. 10. Highlights are never…