Vincent van Gogh. The Bedroom, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
We all know Van Gogh as a person with a troubled personality, but he saw Art is a vocation not a career, something to be shared with others, not for his own glory.
Vincent van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles is arguably the most famous chamber in the history of art. It also held special significance for the artist, who created three distinct paintings of this intimate space from 1888 to 1889. The exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago brought together all three versions of The Bedroom for the first time in North America, offering a pioneering and in-depth study of their making and meaning to Van Gogh in his relentless quest for home.
Values make our paintings work, so if the values in photographs are not always reliable we have to have a way to adjust the values in our painting. Here is an explanation at my thought process with values.
About 1900, a group of Realist artists set themselves apart from and challenged the American Impressionists and academics. The most extensively trained member of this group was Robert Henri (1865–1929), who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1886 to 1888 under Thomas Anshutz (1851–1912). Anshutz had himself studied at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1876 to 1882 with Thomas Eakins, who had defied Victorian decorum in his teaching principles and in his boldly realistic paintings. After spending the years from 1888 to 1891 working at the Académie Julian in Paris, Henri taught at the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia and gave private art classes in and around that city and, during return visits to France, in and around Paris. Beginning in 1892, Henri also became the mentor to four Philadelphia illustrators—William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1866–1933), Everett Shinn (1876–1953), and John Sloan (1871–1951)—who worked together at several local newspapers and gathered to study, share studios, and travel. Between late 1896 and 1904, they all moved to New York, where Henri himself settled in 1900.
One of the most prominent of American Tonalist painters, Dwight Tryon was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1849. Though largely self-taught, he achieved enough early success painting in a Hudson River style to afford a trip to Europe in 1876. In France, he studied with Henri-Joseph Harpignies and J. B. Antoine Guillemet, but a decisive event in the evolution of his style was a summer spent studying with Barbizon artist Charles-Francois Daubigny. Upon his return to the United States in 1881, he took up residence in New York City. His search for more picturesque settings, however, led him to the fishing village of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where he summered and eventually built a small house. Among the artists he met in New York were Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Robert Swain Gifford, with whom he remained close friends.
Like many of his Tonalist peers, Tryon preferred intimate and lyrical low-light landscapes of rather simple composition. In a statement quoted in a biography published shortly after his death, he summarizes the method which gives his work an uncanny dynamism: “Often in painting a bit of sky, I will put blue on it and scrape it off; I will put pink on it and scrape it off; I will put yellow on it and scrape it off; I will put green on it and scrape it off, and my sky will look almost white-but it isn’t, for it will have in it the vibrations of all those colors.
One of the problems students have in a plein air workshop is trying to make their paintings look like a studio painting. For me painting outside and painting inside are 2 totally different approaches.
When I’m painting outside I’m in practice mode, more so then in the studio. I’m gathering material for larger studio pieces, trying different approaches to color and brushwork, and responding quicker to what the light is doing to my subject. Detail is at a minimum. I do better if I set a time limit to keep things simple and to the point.
Studio painting is more methodical. I spend a lot more time composing and recomposing my subject, more so than outside. Design becomes really important, it’s what carries the painting. I will also give more thought to a color scheme or mood that I want to create. Outside is more about responding to what’s there. Work in the studio generally has more broken color and more attention to edges.
The big difference is the atmosphere, being outside and seeing real color as opposed to being inside with photo references and color sketches. It’s a different thought process. I like both equally, they just have different purposes.
Emile Gruppe painted in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts in the early and mid 20th century. I saw a lot of his work when I was in Chicago and I really liked his strong color and bold brush work. Later I came to realize that it was his accurate use of values that made his paintings so strong.
While we’re drawn to paintings by the use of color, it’s the value relationships between the large shapes that make a painting work. When I’m unhappy with the color in my painting, 9 times out of 10 it’s the values that are off, not the color. When my values are off in my paining it’s usually because I’m looking right at the area I’m trying to mix and the more I stare at the value the worse it gets. When I was told to look at the values next to the value I wanted to mix, then I could get the right value relationship in the painting. This is also true with color.
Gruppe described it as eye fatigue. He has a good paragraph in his book, “Gruppe On Color” that talks about comparing values and color: “You might think that the best way to analyze an area of color is to stare at it intently. But that’s just the wrong way to do it. The longer you stare at an area, the grayer it gets. Your eye becomes used to the color; it fatigues; your sense of color dies. The only way to judge color (and value) of an object is to compare it with the color of objects near it.”
Lets say, for example, that you want to determine the color of the sky at the horizon. It can be anything from purple to green. But to see it, you should first look over your head for a few seconds at the color of the zenith. Then quickly lower your eyes. For a few seconds , you will see vivid color near the horizon. Then the color will quickly fade. That’s why I constantly move my eyes over a scene, comparing values and colors.” — Emile Gruppe- Gruppe on Color.
When we think of contrasts in painting what comes to mind is dark and light value contrast, or cool and warm color temperature contrast, or the contrast of hard and soft edges.
A real important contrast is thick and thin paint. The thickness of the paint, when we apply it to the canvas, goes a long way to suggest form and depth as well as enhance sunlight and shadow contrast.
When we mix a color for a sunlit area the value and the color temperature is really impacted when we use thicker paint. I can mix a color for a light area and if it’s not thick enough it won’t have the impact of sunlight, even if I mix the right temperature and value. Thicker paint stands out more and looks lighter than thin paint.
As a learning tool, thick paint forces you to simplify (it’s hard to get too detailed with a brush full of paint), and helps to understand color better. It’s easier to understand the impact of a color with thicker paint.
Just like watercolor is designed for transparent washes, oil paint is designed for thick opaque brush strokes.
The painting below is a detail from a painting from the Teton Mountains. All the paint is thick but the light areas are thicker so they stand out from the darks. The thicker paint also makes the brushstrokes more important. I’m thinking about mass and value more than detail or trying to render objects.
This is a detail from a John Carlson painting. The darks seem to recede from the thicker lights. The stronger colors have more impact because of their thickness.
I painted this in southern Utah and used the thicker paint to show more form. The brushstrokes follow the shape of the trees and hills to accentuate their shape or direction. This also helps to keep things simple. When using photographs to paint from, it’s more effective to think in terms of the light brushstrokes following the form, it keeps me from being too literal with photos.
At first it can be hard to paint thick enough. Our tendency is to paint thin if we’re unsure, so use a palette knife or painting knife to mix your paint. It’s hard to mix thin paint with a palette knife.
Since we are well into winter, I thought it would be a good idea to post some winter or snow paintings to appreciate.
Snow is interesting to paint because of the strong contrast of value, temperature and texture. Snow is wholly different from all the other landscape parts. It provides instant value contrast, it’s so white, it jumps off the canvas. It’s a different texture than branches, rocks or foliage, it can be as smooth as glass.
The color of snow depends on the type of light that hits it, and reflected light that’s bouncing around in the shadows.
It looks easy to paint but the subtleties in the value and color make it hard to paint well.
This is a George Innes painting. He kept it simple as far as the detail and it has a strong temperature contrast between the warm, yellow orange sky and the cool violets in the snow. What detail there is seems to fade into the soft edges.
Here is a John Francis Murphy watercolor. He really doesn’t paint much snow in it but he suggests the snow with the value of the paper. It still feels like winter.
In this painting by Willard Metcalf you can see the strong design of the light and dark shapes and very subtle value changes in the flat snow. It has an abstract feel to it.
This is a painting by Walter Luant Palmer. Very subtle value changes that give the snow a lot of form, and a strong contrast between the warm water and cool snow and background. He gives the painting a lot of atmosphere by pushing the background cooler and making the edges softer.
This last one is a drawing by Issac Levitan. It looks like a tonalist painting, all the value relationships are there, it doesn’t need any paint.
