The River Crossing
Using Painting Knives in Landscape Painting - A Step-by-Step Reveal
I am often roaming the countryside and the country itself, looking for landscape inspirations. It’s a great job. When I bought my first car, an Austin-Healey Sprite, I drove that fun, but horribly unreliable thing, all over the back roads around Kansas City and beyond. I loved to explore and see new places—had an unquenchable thirst for it—still do. But my art practice didn’t shift to landscape painting until a decade or so later, when I was living on the incredibly scenic Hudson River, right across that river from West Point Military Academy. My studio then was in a New York Central train station which had been a movie set in Barbra Streisand’s 1969 film, Hello Dolly. It sat on a park on the edge of the river. Each day, as I created art for book covers and magazines (remember those?), I looked out my windows at the river, longing to be Out There. So, one day I quit that work and went outdoors to really learn how to paint. I never looked back.
Fast forward 1200 miles and forty-two years, and I’m still fascinated by landscape in general, rivers in particular. This set of images is from the development of a recent 12 x 24” oil, The River Crossing, using painting knives. I started with a 6 x 9” oil study.
I began by drawing my composition on a 12 x 24” Centurion oil primed linen panel with a blue-grey oil pastel crayon. The crayon gradually dissolves and mixes into my paint application. That done, I mixed a series of color strings in my palette and using a couple of round-bottomed tapered knives, began “frosting the cake”. Painting with knives requires particular techniques anyone can learn, with guidance.
Knife work is so much fun to do, in part, because it is fast. I have a large set of knives with different blade shapes and stiffness which allow me to vary my strokes, layering and scraping to suit the image shapes I need. Selective scraping is used throughout my work, along with plastering, spreading, frosting, blending and dragging, among other useful techniques. Not anything like brush work. More like sculpture. Here are some details to give you an idea of what these techniques look like in the beginning.
I love the unpredictable skips and marks a knife can make. In many instances, it can suggest all sorts of textures, surfaces and details better than my brushes. If you need precision, a knife can do that as well. Just takes some know-how.
At this point I am softening and blending a few areas before the wet paint stiffens up. I prefer not to use a brush for blending unless a knife just won’t create the effect I need—like those sunbeams as they disappear. (Don’t tell anyone). As you can see, already this painting is getting some real presence.
As soon as I could, I moved on to develop the water and reflections. With a brush, this would be a slower, more careful process. With knives, it is all about having fun laying in big juicy globs of color and spreading and dragging them until they look good. Made the wrong shape? Either scrape it off and re-lay it, or over-lay it. Beautiful, clean blends of color can be made right on the panel. Fun!
To bring it to a finish, I concentrate on all the smaller shapes, adding touches of color over existing colors, softening here and there, sharpening any edges that might have gotten lost. The result is a realistic landscape which, when looked at up close, has a very tactile, almost abstract surface. The best of both worlds.
In The Artist’s Road Store
In honor of Van Gogh’s birthday, March 30th -
Dear Theo - The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh edited by Irving Stone
Vincent van Gogh, the great but tormented artist, bared his soul in his letters to his confidant and companion, his beloved brother, Theo. These letters reveal the man behind such masterpieces as The Starry Night and The Bedroom--a desperate man whose quest for love became a flight into madness and for whom every day was a “fight for life.” Irving Stone, acclaimed author of Lust for Life and other remarkable biographic novels, has collected Vincent van Gogh’s fascinating letters to Theo. These letters are outpourings of his soul that paint a vibrant self-portrait in words equal to the intensity and emotion his painting created. This is the personal story of a legend.
“An extraordinary book . . . and a great one . . . Written from the heart and without restraint, alive.”— The New York Times