I recently suffered a debilitating injury to my neck, which will require wearing a brace for several months until my “Hangman’s Fracture” can heal up. Although It sounds far worse than it is, I still have had to change my world around to accommodate my restricted mobility. This is a challenge for any creative person, at any stage of life, especially for those, like myself, who have always painted on their feet, walking back and forth all day from palette to easel. It will be some weeks before I am able to paint again, even sitting. What to do?

I am seventy-two this year, still physically fit, aware of time slipping away, and motivated by the many, many things I wish to say in my art. It has taken me a lifetime to get here and to understand what is important to say and share, and I am suddenly sidelined from my goals. Frustrating. Challenging. Perhaps even life-changing, but strangely, not depressing. Some part of me recognizes that this is an uninvited opportunity to once again look for creative opportunities which I would not otherwise have discovered. This is not the first time in my fifty-plus years of living the “artist’s life” that I have been forced by one thing or another to flex into something different or new. Always before, that uncomfortable new direction resulted in a widening of my artistic world into new forms of expression, new tools and new avenues of thinking creatively. Why should this chapter be any different?

So here I am, thinking that I can also express myself with my writing instead of painting. Sixteen years ago, when we started The Artist’s Road website, we wanted to acknowledge that this life is a journey, not an end point. It is time to recognize that many folks in my age group are probably also experiencing or have had some health issues, maybe significant, in some cases. Living and working with chronic pain is difficult, but giving up the creative life is even more painful to contemplate. It is a common occurrence with aging artists. Renoir had to tape his brushes to his arthritic hands to paint. See The Artist’s Hands. Bed-ridden Matisse turned to cutting shapes out of colored paper to create astonishing new paintings and stained glass church windows. See The Best is Yet to Come. Chuck Close suffered from dyslexia and prosopagnosia (face-blindness), which left him unable to recognize or remember faces, even his own. That disability led him to develop his grid system for painting his signature giant portraits. Years later, he had to strap brushes to his wrist after a stroke put him in a wheel chair. He often spoke about how his disabilities forced him to develop his unique techniques and turn his limitations into assets.

What creative challenges have you faced and how did you adapt to them?

Best,

John

In The Artist’s Road Store

Awe - The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It can Tansform Your Life by Dacher Keltner

"Wonderful . . . Eye-opening science and Keltner's appropriate sense of wonder add up to an enlightening take on the importance and potency of awe. Readers will be enchanted." — Publishers Weekly

At turbulent times such as these, it is art that we return to for comfort and inspiration. Like old friends, our favorite paintings calm and soothe and empower us in our own work. A dedication to our art sometimes forces us to not be able to make as strong of a commitment to other important issues as we would like. Although we try to be of service as often as we can and to be thoughtful citizens, we sacrifice for our passion as artists and sometimes question if it is enough.

However, we know through long experience that following our passion, even in difficult periods, is important and can be inspirational to others now and in the future as well. The history of art is replete with similar lessons to which we can turn for guidance.

Monet’s massively gorgeous Nymphaea paintings have inspired generations and have become some of the most recognizable and iconic paintings…

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Fast forward 1200 miles and forty-two year…

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We are always trying different painting tools in an effort to discover new ways of image making. Different tools can help us get out of our comfort zones, where we are divorced from familiar, reliable techniques and perhaps even a little uneasy with the process. This is good! Good art can come from being “in the zone”, or highly focused on what we are doing, but it can also come from a place where the outcome is highly uncertain and we no longer have the accustomed control of our materials. This is the area where the mind can play more freely with ideas, because our expectations of so-called success are different than when we work with our usual reliable techniques. The only way to learn about a new tool is to experiment, play, have fun and see what is possible. If you have never tried painting with knives before and you’d like to shake up your painting style a bit, we hope this article will encourage you to do so.

Before I begin painting, I prefer to develop the main mass-tones on my palette by mixing color strings. This is my initial string which covers the first lay-down of cool yellows and greens. Here I have started the string with Cadmium Yellow Medium into Cobalt Blue, then Cadmium Lemon in the center into Cobalt Blue and then Ultramarine for the deepest blue-greens. This string is about 24 inches across.

I will use this palette mix for the entire painting, adding or side-mixing additional warmer or cooler passages from this master string as needed. For example, when I need a very warm orangeish color, I’ll draw paint from my master string off to the side and add Cadmium Orange or maybe a bit of Cadmium Red to create what is needed. In this way, my palette remains harmonized to the original color string and that harmony unites the painting.

This is my 11.5 x 27.5” masonite panel which I have sealed and triple-primed with gesso. My drawing is fairly precise, having worked out the composition in sketches. I use charcoal or pencil and seal that with a light spray of fixative. My initial paint strokes go down in the center so that I can work out gradually to the ends.

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In a still very relevant article from The New York Times titled, “Why We Love Beautiful Things”, the late architect and author, Lance Hosey, wrote about research findings and his opinions on the subject. Lance Hosey, former chief sustainability officer at the architecture firm RTKL, was the author of the book “The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design.”

The focus of his article is on all the effort and money that is being applied to attempt to quantify and systematize the sort of designs and images which appeal to most people. Studies have found that workers tend to be more productive when they can see the outdoors from their work spaces and that images of landscapes can help to speed patient recovery in hospitals. Hosey writes that findings also show that the visual patterns of fractals in nature at a particular mathematical density can reduce test subjects’ stress levels by as much as 60 percent, simply by being in view. The …

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Artists often search for ways to expand their creative expression through experimentation in new mediums. In the case of working with glass, artistry is combined with specialized technical skills and sometimes even complex engineering equations (large stained glass windows, for example) often requiring collaborations with a team of artisans and craftspeople. We were fascinated to discover a small group of post-Impressionist European painters who expanded their artistic oeuvres by making glass artworks and windows.

The art of stained glass has a long ecclesiastical history. Early church windows (dating as far back as the fourth and fifth centuries) were made with thinly sliced alabaster creating translucent light effects. Advances in glass making throughout time have allowed for great ranges of color to become available to artists. Traditionally, stained glass is made by adding metallic salts to the glass during its manufacture. Another technique used is to paint specially formulated colors onto glass directly. The painted colors and glass are then fused together by heat.

Gemmail (from the French for “enamel gem”) is another glass working technique developed in the 1930s. It employs layering hundreds of pieces of colored glass with adhesives onto panels illuminated from behind. The technique was first used by artist Jean Crotti in collaboration with lighting expert and artist, Roger Malherbe-Navarre. Their studio in Paris employed specialists working with artists to recreate their paintings in the new glass medium. The glass layers were put into an enamel-like solution and heated in kilns to fuse them all together. Initially the process was used mainly to reproduce existing paintings. However, young artists began to experiment in the process with their own original compositions when the technique became more well known.

Henri Matisse - 1869-1954

“Creativity takes courage.”

Matisse changed everything. His bright colors and decorative abstracted forms redefined contemporary art at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a prolific artist, much admired by Picasso and others who followed. Late in his life, after serious complications from cancer surgery left him bedridden for several months and then wheel-chair bound, Matisse funneled his creativity into paper cutouts. It seems a natural transition to see his work then progress into stained glass.

Matisse Chapel Stained Glass (Monica Arellano Ongpin via Flickr)

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One of the things we would very much like to see in person, is the light effect created by the solstice sun through the stained glass windows of Antoni Gaudí’s fantastic Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

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Monet was, of course, exactly right about that. He understood that flowers are among the most difficult subjects to capture—far more demanding than landscapes or a still life without them. The task is similar to portraiture with a heavy dose of artistic interpretation and finesse thrown in. To truly create a floral work of art requires immense skill, experience and intense focus and the best examples of the genre are artistic revelations. Whenever we learn about a major exhibition of still life works by the modern masters, we clear our schedules and pack our bags.

Not long ago, we traveled to see a national traveling exhibition, Working Among Flowers - Floral Still Life Painting in Nineteenth-Century France. Among the many wonderful works in the exhibition were paintings by one of our favorite artists, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836 - 1904). The show included works by dozens of artists including Matisse, Bonnard, Redon, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Cassatt, Renoir as well as earlier works by artists of the eighteenth century including Chardin and Redouté. It traveled from the Dallas Museum of Art to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, where we had the opportunity to view it, and then on to the Denver Art Museum.

It was comprised of far more than what the title conveys, including works from nearly two centuries, a time during which still life and landscape subjects were beginning to supplant the traditional historical and religious subjects of paintings. The still life was being reinvented and elevated beyond its previous classification of decorative to a new acceptance as important and serious work.

Fantin-Latour was a master of the genre. His exquisite floral still lifes have captivated and inspired us for years and it was a special treat to see this grouping of them in person. But we were not familiar with the equally brilliant work of his wife, artist Victoria Dubourg Fantin-Latour (1840 - 1926). Although the exhibition included only one of her paintings, it spurred us to learn more about her life and work.

Dubourg was born in Paris. It was at age 26 that she met Fantin-Latour at the Louvre, where they were both copying master paintings as part of their study. After a long engagement, they were married in 1876. The painting above was Fantin-Latour’s gift to Dubourg upon their engagement. Dubourg and Fantin-Latour were central to their circle of friends, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas. Women artists have always had to struggle to get the same wide and lasting recognition as their male contemporaries - even though the quality of their work is equal to, or even surpasses that of the male artists. As a result, Dubourg’s exemplary work is not nearly as well known today as that of her husband or her male artist contemporaries.

The two worked side by side in adjacent studios, both creating paintings that have been called “domestic interior landscapes”, a term which we think demeans the power and artistic expertise evident in their work. For the time, Dubourg’s professional achievements were impressive, indeed. She exhibited at the Paris Salons of 1894 and 1895 and was a member of the Royal Academy from 1882 through 1896. She received the Legion d’Honneur in 1920. She was an award-winner at the Salons and sold works to the Musée de Luxembourg for their permanent collection.

Dubourg and Fantin-Latour, each in their own right, established successful and independent careers. Dubourg was also an avid gardener, and it is believed that the flowers from her cottage garden were those that were used in her paintings and in those of Fantin-Latour.

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Long-time readers of Perspectives know that we sometimes write about inspiring or interesting subjects we discover while on our walks in the country near our home, and today was one of those moments. Our weather is extremely variable, so warm days in March are not unusual. However, this makes it hard to tell when winter ends and spring begins most years. But today, we knew that spring has officially arrived with the blooming of the first Narcissus in the forest.

We are exceptionally fortunate to have Brian, a world-class plantsman, living next door. Over the years he has quietly been planting these beautiful bulbs on both of our adjoining properties. While most everything else in nature is still sleeping, these jovial little blooms have the entire dance floor to themselves. What a simple, yet joyful thing it is to see their bright yellow heads nodding in the warm morning air, signaling to all of us that it is time to shed our winter blues. Winter is the time when we need to draw deeply…

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The sensitivity that is at the core of being an artist is both a blessing and a curse. The paradox seems to be in how to maintain and nurture it while at the same time developing the necessary hardness to protect oneself from the bumps and bruises of life. It is good to refresh ourselves from the reading of other artists’ words. Here is a favorite:

The wonderful poet, William Stafford, said in an interview, “I think what I’m trying to locate is that condition of a being who has not been distorted from the receptive, accurate encounter with experience. It’s possible to overlearn fear or overlearn confidence. The conditions of life are such that they make survival depend on the organism’s ability to come back level again and be ready for the conditions of life as they are on the earth. . . . An individual’s intellect and emotions should be like a good seismograph: sensitive enough to register what happens but strong enough not to be wrecked by the firs…

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Tomorrow, March 3rd, at 4 a.m., ET, painters of moonlight will get a real treat. A total lunar eclipse will occur—“a blood moon”—visible across much of North America. Totality will last from 6:04 a.m. ET until around 7 a.m. ET. It will be the last one of its kind this year, and it will cause the moon to turn bright red orange! A total lunar eclipse happens when the earth aligns perfectly between the sun and moon, casting a shadow which blocks direct sunlight from striking the moon. Instead, the moon is lit by refracted light which has curved around the earth and been filtered by the earth’s atmosphere. This scatters the blue light, transmitting only the red spectrum. The presence of dust and other pollutants in earth’s atmosphere intensifies this effect. This eclipse will be worth getting up for.

We were out last September with some students painting that red-orange full moon, also caused by a lunar eclipse. Because the eclipse occurred …

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“To live out-of-doors in intimate touch with nature,
to feel the sun, to watch the ever-changing face of the landscape,
where waters run and winds blow and trees wave and clouds move,
and to walk with all the hours of the day and into the mysteries of night
through all the seasons of the year - this is the heaven of the Hoosier Painter!”

- William Forsyth

The names of the five artists of the Hoosier Group of Indiana - Theodore Clement Steele, William Forsyth, Otto Stark, John Ottis Adams and Richard Gruelle - may not be familiar to you, but you may recognize their work. During their time they were a regional artistic force of national significance.

By the time William Merritt Chase was well-established in New York and teaching a new generation of young Americans at the Art Students League (1878-1896) the European techniques he had absorbed, American artists from the Midwest were also leaving their home ground seeking advanced training in painting. Some studied in America with Chase. A few others found the resources to study abroad in Paris, London and notably, at the Munich Academy in Germany, Chase’s old school. While in Europe, they were exposed to the new and radical work of the French Impressionists. Many adopted the style of plein air painting using open brushwork and an emphasis on light, as their own. Most of this generation of talented, highly-trained artists returned to America steeped in old world culture and ready to start their professional careers in the large metropolitan art centers of the United States, where they would find a receptive market and audience for their work. However, a small group of these young artists returned to their home state of Indiana to begin their artistic careers. This is part of what makes them so interesting. In 1894 at an exhibition in the Denison Hotel in Indianapolis organized by four of them (Forsyth, Steele, Stark and Gruelle), they were given the moniker “The Hoosier Group” by Hamlin Garland, a Chicago-based art critic and author. He was so impressed with the quality of their work that he sponsored the same exhibit, with the addition of a fifth artist, Adams, in Chicago the following month, thus helping to kick-start their careers.

“. . . their decision to paint in Indiana, to be regionalists, is even more important in defining the Hoosier Group. These were men who had traveled and studied abroad, who had the talent and opportunity to practice their art anywhere in the Western world. They chose to work in their native Midwest at a time when such writers as James Whitcomb Riley and Carl Sandburg were making the same decision. It was this choice that caught the attention of Hamlin Garland, the most vocal advocate of regionalism in art and literature. The Hoosier Group was part of the movement that gave the Midwest a cultural heritage.”
- Ronald Newlin, “The Best Years: Indiana Paintings of The Hoosier Group, 1880-1915”

Even with the help of Garland’s Chicago exhibition, being part of a regionalist movement in Indiana in 1894 was a tough “row to hoe”. In their early years, most of the Hoosier Group artists had to supplement their living by painting portraits and teaching. Their impressionist landscapes had to be done on the side. Fortunately, Indiana was entering a golden age of prosperity and growth. It was also the era when Indiana gave the nation a president, Benjamin Harrison, and three vice-presidents. Powerful Indiana legislators dominated Congress and still others held cabinet positions and overseas diplomatic posts. All this prosperity and political influence had the effect of creating an affluent class of potential art patrons proud of their state and a generation of prospective art students eager to learn from these renowned masters. With the growth of their reputations over time, many of them were able to abandon portraiture and even teaching to the relative luxury of being full-time painters.

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A European Dream

This is an example of the mock-up process for a large oil commission whose subject is the landscape of France. This entire process was carried off through my gallery representative long distance—I never met my clients face to face, or even spoke directly with them. That was not ideal, but I felt that we could make it work. I emailed mock-ups to the clients of several landscapes from my travel photos from which to choose. We eventually narrowed down to an image from the Lub…

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Winter can be a challenging time for those of us who like to paint outdoors. The most hardy souls can always be found heavily bundled up and happily working in punishing conditions. The rest of us wait for the right day, say, when it is above freezing, to go out and enjoy the wonderful winter light and colors. If you have never tried this, we encourage you to invest in a little bit of winter painting clothing and insulated boots, and get out there! You will find that as you begin to really concentrate on your subject, you will forget the cold and begin to enjoy all the charms that a sunny winter day can offer. You will be among the elite few who are working outside in the winter for the sheer enjoyment of it.

If you can get out to the country—even better, for you will begin to notice the interesting changes in the flora and fauna which happen in the winter. If there is some snow, you may find evidence of the animal activities that generally go on unseen around us. We have had bobcats …

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The color green is nearly everywhere we look, and once one begins to notice its presence, the search begins in earnest to figure out the different combinations which make beautiful greens. The absolute best way to become intimately familiar with all the various guises of green is to mix them. Most of us start by seeing what kinds of greens can be made from our blues and yellows, and the first discovery is that our greens can lean either to the warm side, or the cool side, depending on the amount of blue or yellow in the mix. Further experimentation reveals that any green can be both lightened and cooled by adding white, or, conversely, darkened and warmed by adding black. These few simple methods give us an impressively vast palette of green hues and tones to work with. Additionally, numerous distinct hues of green are available premixed in tubes, and in a pinch, are a convenient way to quickly get near to the color needed…

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My Five Essential Rules for a Successful Commission

1. It is important, when considering a commissioned work, that I have a strong affinity for the subject. I have found from experience that if my heart isn’t in the work, it probably won’t turn out well. I have a fairly wide range of artistic interests, but if the subject doesn’t cause any sparks, I will turn it down.

2. I don’t paint from photographic reference supplied by others. If I haven’t personally seen the subject, there is no possibility for me to interpret it creatively.

3. There must be good communication between myself and the client. I explain in detail what I will do, in what order and by what date. They know exactly what the project will cost and when money is due.

4. To make certain that we all agree on the subject, the type of imagery and medium of the final art, I usually create three mock-ups of the potential compositions in color, either in watercolor or in Photoshop. It is important to do this at no charge in order to build trust. Photoshop is useful for the mock-ups because one can re-paint, redesign, recompose and even texturize images so that they are a reasonable facsimile of what will be the final painting. I ask that the client sign off on one of the images before I will take the project any further. If they can’t agree on one at that point, I will consider creating one or two more, if they can be specific about their concerns and if the project is large enough.

5. I don’t get involved in price negotiations. My sizes and prices are posted on my website. I believe that custom work should carry a higher price tag because it is an interruption of an artist’s normal flow of planned work, and some artists charge more for this. The artist needs to be happy too!

A Case History - Read more about working on commission and see a step-by-step demonstration.

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- Henri Matisse

Our ability to see blue is critical, not only for the pure aesthetic beauty of the color, but also for the ability to sense the blue light of dawn (heavily concentrated in the blue spectrum) which sets our inner clocks, our circadian rhythm.

Blue is often cited as the favorite color of respondents to color surveys. Historically, the high cost of Ultramarine Blue pigment created a concept of blue as being the most precious of colors. As with all colors, blue has many associations—the color of depression and sadness, as well as the color of royalty, trustworthiness, wisdom and serenity.

Blue encompasses the massiveness of the sky and its reflection in waters. Although it can be a significant part of what we see, there were cultures who never developed a word for it in their languages. Artists, of course, have always valued the blue in their palettes. “Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones.” - Raoul Dufy

We decided to examine the history of blue in artists’ pigments, starting with one of the oldest, dating from 3,000 BC—Egyptian Blue

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It started innocently enough, as I suppose these things do in the beginning. It quickly grew into something deeper and more complicated, my love for this color. It was a chance meeting, a casual thing I often do, hanging out in art supply stores, introducing myself to other oil paint colors and bringing them back to my place for the night, or maybe longer.

As I look back now, this meet-up was probably inevitable. It was a time when I was restlessly walking the streets at night, searching for the perfect Nocturne subject to spend my evenings with. But no matter what I tried, no mixes could answer my need for the perfect dark color which could express my deepest desires and visions of the night. Sure, I had sampled all the blacks around - Mars, Pyrelene, Ivory, Lamp, even Gamblin’s Chromatic, but none of them could satisfy me. I needed a deep color which could mate up and expand my palette in the darkest way. Then I met Prussian Blu…

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