
RULES FOR PAINTERS
Being advice and encouragements from my tutor in Painting and Colour Theory, from October through to December 2021. Some are highly practical others knowingly philosophical.
- Ensure your easel is set up correctly, for you. Is there enough space around it for you to work?
- Stand back from your work every two minutes to take stock.
- Don’t tickle your painting. Instead, go somewhere one it, do it and then again, stand back.
- Painting is active practise not meditation.
- Start with overall form then go to detail at the finish
- Negative shapes are as important as positive shapes.
- Focal point – that is your decision. Consider Van Eyck, his paintings held your eye.
- Shadows, any shadows give you form.
- Transparent effects are as important as saturated paint.
- Speed: What can you do to speed up the process? Avoid making the paper too wet for example.
- Time management. Meaning1 tactics to ensure you are not waiting around. Instead have several pieces on the go at once.
- Backgrounds – are you loving the backgrounds to your paintings enough?
- Never stop making work.
- The last surviving painter on this planet is the one truly driven to paint.
- What strategies can you develop to deflect influences that stop you enjoying painting?
- Never stop making marks.
- Look for tone, e.g., the small shadow or shade
- Mapping – the vital process of mark making. This is not to be confused with sketching or drawing or illustration.
- Composition: if you put the main thing in the middle, you get stillness in the composition, and it may also be dull. Off to one side gives you surprise and thrust.
- Whites, colours tinted with white paint and hot colours come forward. Cold colours go back. This is part of the push and pull of colour. E.g., purple forward yellow back.
- Painting demands huge reserves of energy, mental and physical.
- Look for blocks of colour. E.g., *the painter Keith Vaughan. (*Writer’s addition)
- Raw colour (i.e., no added white or black) so, not a tint or shade, exudes confidence.
- Don’t sit to paint, it drains your energy.
- Painting is knowing we have done our best.
- Painting is the belief that if there is a problem in our painting and we can patch it up.
- Don’t worry about the system, worry about being an artist.
- Study Claude Lorraine, Constable, J M Turner. ‘They all understood the Godliness of nature’2
- Again, shape not line drawing.
- Painting is about discipline, the long haul and going through hell and back.
- Painting is about how you see the world around you.
1meaning mass production
2 direct quote from my tutor
Category: Art Practise