The Zoom Principle

[^ Study of Brooklyn Rooftops #04072013. oil on panel. 5 x 7". © Bullock Online 2013]

"When the field of vision is confused or the material too close, the zoom principle will be useful --- either a card with a cut-out viewing space, or simply the concentration of sight on to one small area to the deliberate exclusion of everything else."
- John O'Connor, Landscape Drawing and Painting (1978), ch. 3: Selection of Image

I love walking around the boroughs and looking at the rooftops with their haphazard arrangements of walls, ledges, cooling units, skylights, water towers, and window panes. Any monotony that occurs at street-level seems to resolve itself up there. Almost always something interesting is composed against the sky. 

I carry a medium-gray, adjustable view-finder with me to help block in the subject (and block out everything else). I might look a little weird squinting through this with my head tilted back, and sometimes people slow down and look up to see what has my attention. The view finder visually isolates the subject, framing it so that the shapes and proportions of its elements become clear. It is a "5" on the gray scale ranging from "1" to "10", which is very helpful in determining the tones of colors. Whether one is doing a sketch or a painting, mastering tones is important, and something which I still struggle with. You can buy the View Catcher here. 

This small oil painting, a study really, is from notes in my sketchbook from November 2011. Working from notes is a very different process than painting outdoors and, as such, I achieved a different sense than I would have with the plein air approach. I think it has a more calibrated, cubist sense to it, a geometry that I wanted to hold onto as it became more clear. I deleted all minor details like satellite dishes and wires so I could focus on the composition and tonal arrangements.

Annoyingly, my camera has created a slight "curve" effect to the left and right margins.

(Somehow, I had overlooked doing a post for March. This may be the first time in the five-or-so years I have been doing this blog that I forgot to do a monthly post.)

No Better Subject

[^ Lime with Pink Bottle. oil on panel. 5x7". 2013. © Bullock Online 2013]

"There is no better subject than a still-life for working out ideas about painting. It is the one subject that is completely under one's control; provided that the materials aren't perishable, it can be continued day after day under exactly similar conditions, and the arrangement and choice of subject are entirely up to you."
- Bernard Dunstan, Learning To Paint (1970)

These small oil sketches really help me to work through ideas, compositions, shapes, and to gauge colors and values. I have not translated any of them up into larger 'finished' works yet because of space limitations, but just working through these small pieces and having a result in one or two sittings is really helpful. 
In this I wanted to sort of sidestep a complimentary color relationship, and aimed more for a pink than a red, placed opposite a bright, banging green. Accurately rendering the shape of the lime was important because I did not want it to be identifiable only by its color. 

The Evening Mild

[^ When Day and Evening Meet. 12.22.12. 2012. plein air watercolor. 7 x 10". © Bullock Online 2013]

"Hesperus! the evening mild
Falls round us soft and sweet,
'Tis like the breathings of a child
When day and evening meet."
- John Clare (1793-1864)

These short, cold, gray woolen days often end in an explosion of light and color which seem almost absurdly cliché and unreal, like a massive Lite Brite on full power. They are really amazing. With an unimpeded view of where the Hudson meets the East River, I get the full effect and aim only to accurately set down the scene before me, at least for the purposes of this --- plein air painting, which is exactly what it sounds like: direct, truthful, unadorned observation and a simple, straightforward representation of the outdoors and the effect of natural light. Yet, afterward, I often look at what I painted and say "this is too much".

(January/February, 2013)

Organizing & Being Disorderly

(^ Pale Blue Bottle with Heirloom Tomatoes. 2012. oil on panel. 5 x 7". © Bullock Online 2012)

"Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up."
- A. A. Milne

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."
- A. A. Milne (again)

I admit it --- I find painting terribly difficult work sometimes. And if I am painting in oils, then doubly so. On the one hand, staying organized and neat prevents it all from becoming a mess. But painting is also about letting things happen, on their own to some extent, and allowing for unexpected discoveries.

Working small (this panel is only 5 x 7") and aiming to complete it in one sitting means I have narrowed my range of colors to only six (not counting white and black). I can mix clean, bright secondary colors (orange, purple, and green) and some rather pretty muddy kinds of colors, some of which are unexpected and which I get when things start to go awry. We painters love those.

But it is not fun, I don't think. It is hard work. And often frustrating. Yet something makes us painters do it anyway.

The True Basis

[^ Memento Mori, interrupted. graphite on prepared paper. 6 x 9″. 2012. © Bullock Online 2012]

"It may well be said, that anatomy is the true basis of the arts of design. It bestows on the painter a minuteness and readiness of observation, which he cannot otherwise attain."
- Sir Chales Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expession as Connected with the Fine Arts, Seventh edition, revised, 1877.

With an interest towards expanding my abilities as a painter and draftsman in general, and better representing the human figure in particular, I am studying anatomy and figure drawing. It is challenging, and sometimes even discouraging. But it is also rewarding.

The Art Students League of New York and Spring Studio both offer excellent opportunities to draw from a live model, with or without instruction. But there is nothing that beats the models in the Greek and Roman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For years I have been coming here and drawing from the statues. They do not move, which is a distinct advantage when attempting to draw them.

As I, hopefully, improve in this I should find an improvement in my work overall.

Ascending Curves

[^ Storm Clouds Over Brooklyn. watercolor. 9×12″. 2012. © Bullock Online 2012]

"We are little apt, in watching the changes of a mountainous range of cloud, to reflect that the masses of vapor which compose it, are huger and higher than any mountain range of the earth; and the distances between mass and mass are not yards of air traversed in an instant by the flying form, but valleys of changing atmosphere leagues over; that the slow motion of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling energy of exulting vapor rushing into the heaven a thousand feet in a minute; and that the toppling angle whose sharp edge almost escapes notice in the multitudinous forms around it, is a nodding precipice of storms, 3000 feet from base to summit."
- John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Of Truth of Clouds: Ch. III

Reading John Ruskin is either inspirational or paralyzing, depending on what else is going on that day. His five-volume Modern Painters is worth reading just to understand how high the bar is set for the rest of us.

While he would not likely praise my recent watercolor of cloud formations, I think I got a few things right. He comments in the same chapter that "if artists were more in the habit of sketching clouds rapidly, and as accurately as possible in the outline, from nature, instead of daubing down what they call effects with the brush" then there would result more truth and accuracy of form and effect. (By "sketching" he may be referring to oil painting quickly, in an alla prima technique.)

Clouds are extremely difficult to paint "live" because of their continuously changing effects. Generalizing defeats the point of painting them in the first place, but inevitably some generalizing takes place, I think.

With Such A Sky

[^ With Such A Sky. watercolor. 6x6". August 2012. © Bullock Online 2012]

With Such A Sky
It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal moon make
A sound like thunder --- everlastingly

-William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

With the summer beginning to wind down, we have been having some very fine sunsets here in Brooklyn, and it is a short trip for me to the fire escape with my watercolors and some paper. Caught this one that was so strange, with the sun looking like some wounded saint resting in these thick, woolen clouds.