Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Artists Magazine

LIFE-CHANGING MOMENTS are rare, yet we all can identify points in our lives that altered our subsequent paths. Joseph Raffael’s series of small, single-flower paintings began when a blossom within a large work called out to be painted by itself (“In the Now,” page 30). As a young student, Roger De Muth took on an assignment to “hop on a bus, get off anywhere and do a painting.” He’s been creating ink and watercolor paintings of architectural treasures ever since (“Artist on the Go,” page 54). In “Giving Voice to the Soul,” page 46, Margaret Bowland tells how she fled art school, where instruction centered on abstract art, to teach herself representational painting. Emil Robinson reserved this order; having established himself as a successful representational artist, he heeded an inner…

GOLD LEAF is perhaps best known historically for its use in Christian icons and paintings. The early Italian Renaissance tempera paintings of Fra Angelico are magnificent examples. For the use of gold leaf closer to our time, look at the work of Gustav Klimt, who integrated gold leaf with oil paint. Contemporary artists are making the use of gold, silver and copper leaf in painting more common again. With products now available, leafing is a fairly simple craft, and with practice and creativity, it can add a striking element to your artwork. Choose Your Desired Effect Over the past few years, I’ve experimented with various approaches to applying gold or silver leaf to my paintings. In the manner of medieval icon artists, I may use the leaf to surround and…

I want to paint nocturnes en plein air. How would you recommend I light my surface and palette? Lighting is all-important when it comes to painting a plein air nocturne (night scene). Basically, you want enough light to paint by, but not so much that it affects your vision. Shine too much light on your surface and palette, and your eyes will take too long to adjust when looking back at your subject; shine too little light, and you won’t be able to see and mix color accurately. Getting a single portable lamp to illuminate both surface and palette is difficult. Two lamps are better. Conveniently, the Mighty Bright Duet2 LED Music Light has two lamps, each on a flexible gooseneck that lets you put the light where you want…

“I have been criticized for making ‘uncomfortable’ paintings,” says Margaret Bowland, whose narrative portraits are riveting dramas played out on canvas. “In my opinion, if a work of art does not stop you in your tracks, make you question, make you feel, then it is mere decoration, not art,” continues the reluctant but self-confessed contrarian. “I have sought all of my life to be in a community, to feel like others feel, think like they think,” she says, “but as a line in Saul Bellow’s Augie March states, ‘The soul wants what the soul wants.’” Having learned to trust and tap into what her soul demands, Bowland infuses her work with uncompromisingly honest and perspicacious imagery that cuts to the core. “I am drawn to the tangle that is life—the…

I STUDIED BIOCHEMISTRY IN COLLEGE, but art was always a leisure activity. During the four years while I was working on my Ph.D., I began painting more and tried to improve by studying other wildlife artists. The predominent medium in Happy-Go-Lucky is watercolor. I generally follow the classical approach of light-to-dark; I typically don’t use any white. Several layers were required to get the final colors. I only use Schmincke watercolors; here I used a layer of gouache for a dusty effect, which also helped push the other elephants further back. I used gouache to put sunny highlights on the elephant’s wet skin and for the reflections in the water. I knew it would be a challenge to paint so many elephants, and indeed, it was challenging to focus on…

1. UNDERPAINTING: For the most part, when you intend to add gold leaf to your oil painting, you can prepare your surface and paint your subject in your usual manner. I began with a light underpainting of a vermilion flycatcher on a prepared copper plate. 2. ADDING LEAF: I completed my painting and let the oils thoroughly dry before applying size around the bird and branch. When the size became tacky, I applied white gold leaf. I needed several full and partial sheets of leaf to surround the bird and the branch. You can see the seams on the left where I haven’t completely worked the leaf into the size with a brush. In the lower left corner, you can also see a bubble in the leaf over an area…

GROWING AS AN ARTIST IS NEVER EASY. MAKING RADICAL CHANGES in one’s work not only involves venturing into the unknown and risking failure, but it can also alienate followers and collectors who have become fans of earlier work. For many a creative spirit, however, the need to change is paramount. In fact, there’s no real choice, and the joy and excitement of exploring new territory far outweigh the risks. So it is with Emil Robinson, an artist who relinquished early success as a realist painter for an adventure that has brought him through more intuitive representational painting to reach his current abstract work. His Doorway series presents compositions of bare rectangles in brilliant flat color, a rigorous enterprise that is about as far from realism as it is possible to…

1. LAYING THE NARRATIVE GROUND WORK: Two days into creation, I’ve begun a block-in over the streaky gray ground that I often use. I choose pale versions of what I want for the final colors. I know the entire left side of the painting will be cooler and darker to underscore flames I intend to add to the right side. The subject will wear a wreath made of paper money. On her left I’ve begun painting a $20 bill, which carries the image of Andrew Jackson. In my opinion, he was a barbaric President; I have Cherokee ancestry, and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Native Americans. 2. THEMATIC DEVELOPMENT: The block-in is complete. The left side of the wreath is filled with $20 bills, but as…

IN 1832, SCIENTIST WILLIAM WINSOR AND ARTIST HENRY NEWTON established a partnership; together they founded the company in London known as Winsor & Newton. Since its inception the company has been well known for its dedication to artists by providing some of the finest art materials on the market; however, no matter how trustworthy a brush, paint and paper manufacturer may be, it must continually move forward—making improvements, developing products and changing formulations. Currently Winsor & Newton has revamped its line of watermedia papers by way of partnership with a new mill. The former student-grade paper (Cotman) will now be known as “Classic,” and the higher-grade paper (Artists’) will be known as “Professional.” Winsor & Newton sent me several samples of their Professional paper: a 300-lb. cold-pressed sheet, a block…

6,000 MILES didn’t stop Parisian artist Thomas Romain from immersing himself in Japanese culture. “I grew up watching Japanese animation on television, and playing Japanese video games as a teenager,” says the artist. “I’ve always been influenced by Japanese culture and French comic books.” His first artistic goal was to become a comic book artist, but after crossing paths with a French animation producer, his dream evolved and put him on a career path one might call fateful. “I had the incredible opportunity to move to Tokyo and collaborate with a Japanese studio. I was co-director, character designer and art director of an animated TV series called O - ban Star-Racers. I fell in love with Japan and decided to continue pursuing my career here.” The idea to collaborate with…

CONTRAPPOSTO (LITERALLY “COUNTER-POSTURE,” IN ITALIAN) is, in the most basic sense, a standing pose in which the weight is shifted to one leg while the position of the upper body is adjusted to balance the weight. The Greeks were the first in our cultural memory to depict contrapposto. This mode of expressing the human form dovetailed beautifully with the Aristotelian ideal of a mean between extremes or balance of opposites. Contrapposto contains a number of opposites, such as bent versus straight, flexion versus extension, active versus passive, tension versus relaxation and tight versus loose. Many of the most celebrated and commonly known works of art in history were contrappostos, including Donatello’s David, Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and the Venus de Milo. One could wonder, however, why it took…

I painted these four works over a six-year period. All of them show a shallow interior space, and the frame of a doorway is consistent throughout. The paintings, however, became more abstracted as the years passed, the interiors depicted becoming more those of the psyche as opposed to interiors in physical space. First came Doorway Number Nine (top left), which I spent a couple of weeks painting in 2011. I used naturalistic color, and the title refers to a specific place, an open doorway as seen from my studio, where I created the painting. I painted Winter Morning Four (middle left) in 2014. It’s the work of a couple of hours in my apartment. The color is interpretive, and the title refers to a season that held a particular feeling…