Phil Starke Art Talk

I just finished a 5 day, outdoor workshop here in Tucson, AZ for the Scottsdale Artist School.  We had artists from all over the map — northern Canada, New Jersey, Colorado, California and a couple from Tucson and Phoenix.

My goal was to get across the idea of small, timed studies that took about an hour to an hour and a half, and with in that time have the four planes blocked in and the right relationships of value and temperature.  Each day we covered a different location with a different type of subject matter.

I believe everyone came away with ideas on how to practice and have goals on where to take their painting.  

If you get a chance to get out, try visiting an art exhibition.  There are several exhibitions going on or coming up that will provide the opportunity for a little culture.  If you’re going to be in the Tulsa, OK area before March 23, 2008, you should visit the Alberto Zalce (1908 - 2003) exhibition going on at the Gilcrease Museum.  This is a rare chance to see a good body of work by this important Mexican artist.

The Settlers West Gallery will be opening it’s American Miniatures Show on February 9, 2008, featuring new small works by 200 of today’s finest artists.  Many of these artists will be attending.

Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale will be opening a one-man show for Dan Gerhartz on March 6, 2008.

As new events come to my attention, I’ll try to pass them on to you.  It’s always good to get out and see other artists and their work. 

As an artist I have a lot of deadlines, shows and galleries wanting work and wanting it tomorrow.  So it is real easy for me to put off little things that keep my eye sharp like sketching from life, either a model or outside.

I recently went to an indoor ceremony where cameras were not allowed and sketched for a few hours, forcing myself to see only the action and simple shapes.  The mall or a restaurant is a good place for that.

Doing thumbnail drawings outside for design and composition is also important, simplifying large masses and values helps to see the overall design which is what holds a painting together.

That’s where the dog comes in.  My kids have a dog and since they don’t walk him anymore, that chore has fallen to me.  A 45 minute walk that I don’t have time for.  I finally realized it is a great opportunity to do thumbnail composition sketches with a 5 x 7 sketchbook and conte crayon or 6B graphite pencil.  The dog doesn’t let me stay in one place for more than a few minutes so I don’t get too detailed. 

My Great Uncle, Joseph Brooks lived on the farm that my dad was raised on near Kansas City, MO. He tended the chickens and had his own room off the kitchen where he would show me drawings and small watercolors that he would do around the farm. When I was older and serious about art I found out that he had gone to art school at Washington University in St. Louis after World War I. He became a commercial artist in St. Louis doing newspaper ads, labels and brochures mostly in ink and gauche. I inherited a lot of the work he did during those years. One that sticks out is the Clabber Girl Baking Soda label that is still being used today. Sometime in the thirties he moved back to the farm because of family demands.
He had always talked about his Life Drawing teacher in art school, Oscar Berninghaus and told lots of stories of Berninghaus living with and painting Indians in New Mexico, strapped to the top of a train riding throughout the West to get a better view and sketch when the train stopped.
Later, in art school, I found out how important the artist Berninghaus was and I studied his work at the St. Louis Museum and the Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City. My uncle gave me his life drawings from school saying that Berninghaus would often sit down at his drawing to show him a point and end up doing the whole drawing.
Anyway, I’ve said all this to recommend a book that I finally bought, Oscar E. Berninghaus, “Master Painter of American Indians and the Frontier West”, by Gordon Sanders. Berninghaus composed beautiful paintings of Taos Indians in the midst of their element, surrounded by large cottonwood trees, the Pueblo, working with horses or putting up hay. He had a great sense of color that really caught the light of Northern New Mexico.

There are three reasons why I spend time drawing when I have so many paintings I want to work on.

First is compositional drawing.  These are thumbnail sketches for larger paintings, trying to come up with new ideas.  These are usually done with markers or 6B graphite.

I like to fill notebooks with these for future ideas for paintings.

The second reasons is to sharpen my ability to see, using line or massing darks and lights to render objects or figures.  I use an extra fine line pen or a medium or heavy graphite pencil to set a variety of thick or thin line.  This could be drawing figures at the mall or spending the day drawing landscapes in the mountains.

The third is drawing just because it’s fun — subjects I don’t usually paint or by sketching my kids.  This can be with charcoal, conte crayon or watercolor.  Drawing is a chance for me to see thrings differently, change things up and practice rendering without thinking of color or temperature.  Plus, I don’t have all that mess to clean up.  Two books that I’ve been reading lately are the two volumes of The Drawings of Rembrandt by Seymor Slive  and published by Dover.  The other is The Language of Drawing From an Artists Point of View By Sherrie McGraw. 

Have you ever been on a painting trip all excited and pumped about what you were accomplishing – visualizing wonderful larger studio paintings — only to get home and the paintings look flat and the photographs, as usual, look nothing like what you remember?  It’s times like these when I have to work hard at improving reference, stretching myself to make more progress as an artist, using imagination to see how many different compositions I can come up with, or forcing myself to do more color sketches with a variety of color schemes.

Two books that I recommend for compositions are John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting which has a good chapter on composition and one on planes and angles of the landscape.  The other is Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne.  I’ve used both of these books to bring out what I needed to work on.

 I’ve been using a limited palette for a number of years, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.  It started as a reason to get rid of some colors on the palette and to try and achieve a little color harmony.

For a while I got paintings that were mostly secondary colors, too green or orange.  After a time and a lot of help I started using all three primaries in every mixture with one predominate color.  That allowed me to control the intensity of the color plus I could make innumerable subtle color changes by just adding more of the predominate color or the other two remaining primaries.

It was helpful to make color charts to see how far I could go with all the subtle variations.  I did sacrifice the pop that a prussian blue would give a sky or colbalt violet would give a shadow, but the color harmony and the subtle grays you can achieve is worth it.

So more color without all those tubes. 

Sometime back I read an article by Gregg Kruetz.  He was refuting two books that proclaimed that many of the great masters from the Renaissance and beyond used optical aids to achieve the advances in perspective and drawing.

Take a look at www.greggkreutz.com/WrittenBY/camera_absurda.html.  Gregg does a good job of taking them apart with simple logic and a good knowledge of painting and drawing from life.

As I begin to dive into this Blog thing, I’m hoping this will be a place to discuss a variety of ideas and subjects, new and old, that have to do with painting or art in general.  From techniques and materials to art books and artists that have inspired me, this blog will also include a look at museum shows, special exhibitions, books, articles and art news.  I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts and ideas, I hope you are too.

As an artist I’m drawn to a variety of subject matter, from mountain ranges to my wife cooking in the kitchen. There is conventional beauty as in a sunset or arrangement of flowers and beauty found in the arrangement of shapes, values and subtle changes of color no matter what the subject. The best subjects are the ones I stumble upon when I don’t have my paint box, drawing pad or camera ( yes, I do use photography). Being unprepared is the  best time to exercise your memory and imagination. The camera is too static, it’s hard to break away from the framed image and use your imagination to improve on technique or composition.

All the things I do when I’m not painting offer the best chances for exerciseing my imagination. Sitting in church and watching the light from the window fall on the side of someones face. The arrangement of vegtables at the market, or traveling through New Mexico on my way to Oklahoma City, which I do several times a year, and seeing all kinds of compositions along the Rio Grande. During these times I play the scene over and over in my head trying to remember large shapes and tempature contrasts. Then when I finaly pull into my cheap motel in Tucumcari I can put the scene down in pencil or on a 6×8 panel in oil or pastel, again just the major shapes that made up the quick glance out of the window.

I was at the dog park recently close to sundown, the park sits on top of a hill with a great view of the Tucson mountains. Since July is in monsoon season the clouds were beautiful and instead of fooling around with the camera, adjusting aputures and shutter speeds I could just watch the last 15 minutes of the sunset, making mental notes of simple shapes and color notes, thinking in terms of primary and secondary colors. Then drag my dog home and do a quick 6×8 color scketch and do 3 or 4 more to see how I can improve on technique or texture.