E. J. Gold is a teacher and the author of more than four dozen books, including American Book of the Dead, Darkside Dreamwalker, and More Color, Less Soul. He lives in Nevada City, California.

Mysteries of Still Life

By E. J. Gold

Gateways Books and Tapes

Copyright © 2008 E.J. Gold
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89556-253-1

Contents

Dedication,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
PREFACE,
CHAPTER ONE – DRAWING SKILLS,
CHAPTER TWO – DRAPERY,
CHAPTER THREE – VALUE,
CHAPTER FOUR – STILL LIFE SETUPS,
CHAPTER FIVE – MY CHOICE OF OBJECTS FOR A FORMAL SETUP:,
CHAPTER SIX – OBJECT SOURCES FOR STILL-LIFE SETUPS,

CHAPTER 1

DRAWING SKILLS

Good drawing skills are the deep fundamentals to good painting of any kind. As “Uncle Bentley” Schaad said often, weak drawing produces weak painting. Drawing skills within the painting, even a loose, dynamic abstract, is the skeleton upon which the painting can be fleshed out. Even the abstract expressionists with whom I worked in the 1950s had great drawing skills. You can see these skills in the wildest work of Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Franz Kline, all of whom studied classical drawing with terrific intensity and had backgrounds of very strong artistic training before turning to action painting.

We could easily spend several years exploring the avenues of classical drawing to develop a sense of composition and design as well as color, form, value and texture, but no one today does that — we will content ourselves with an overview of the basics.

I tend to insist on some exposure to sculpture so that the painter can grow to understand that neither drawing nor painting are about line, but mass.

Representing solid interpenetrating masses within negative space brings about an understanding of the basics of light and dark, warm and cool and intense-to-gray, the foundation of painting, regardless of medium. We could just as easily be talking about oils, watercolor, casein, gouache, pastel, pencil or charcoal.

Some of the great drawing masters include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rico Lebrun, Charles White III, Rembrandt van Rijn and Heinrich Kley. I recommend studying their drawings to see what skills I think are necessary underneath good painting. Keep in mind that abstraction does not excuse lousy drawing skills, sloppy work habits and bad attention.

There are three definite types of drawing, all of which I use constantly in my art practice — I refer to my artistic development in the same way that I would if I were a physician or attorney, you’ll note. The fact is that I regard myself as a perceptual scientist, inquiring within the field of art to answer the great questions of life, the universe and everything …

The three types of drawing are:

1. SKETCHING

I use the sketch to remind myself of something that I’d like to develop later on.

A simple gesture-sketch might be a place, a setting, a light effect, or just an idea I dreamed up or thought of. A sketch need not be complete in itself — it can be vague and even almost formless … in short, a sketch can be, and often is, sketchy.

A sketch captures a momentary mood or idea or concept, and can be the result of some fleeting insight or vision.

Sketching is generally considered the easiest type of drawing, requiring the least amount of drawing skills. Quite the opposite; the sketch is the most demanding type of drawing, and depends on a deep level of understanding of the methods of capturing an idea on paper quickly and accurately.

Most people think that abstract art is the easiest. The fact is that abstraction reduces the information on canvas, paper or plastic artform to such an extent that all distractions are stripped away, leaving just pure form, color, intensity, gradation of light and dark and nothing else to lean on. In abstract painting and drawing, there is nothing behind which to hide.

In the same way, a simple sketch might well be simple, might be extremely minimal, but it has in simplicity the same requirements that zen demands; simplicity is simple, but seldom easy, like sumi-e, zen brush-painting.

“Oh, it’s just a little sketch.” How often we’ve all heard that offhand remark by the skill-less wanna-be artist. It’s generally offered as an apology for a sloppy, careless and crummy drawing, clumsily constructed without depth of understanding or, indeed, any talent whatsoever.

My wonderful teachers at Otis — Bentley Schaad, Robert Glover, Charles White, Joe Mugnaini, Renzo Fenci and others said, quite rightly, that there is no such thing as the casual sketch.

A sketch is a serious commentary on the inner or outer world. It is an attempt to capture some useful vision which may be used later on in a larger or more involved work.

I have had the habit since I was five years old — that’d be sometime in 1946 — of carrying with me at all times a small pad, a sketchbook, and a pencil or pen no matter where I went.

I have literally tens of thousands of tiny little sketch-style drawings in my file drawers and refer to them now and then in much the same way that one might record and store events with a camera or these days with a cell-phone or iPod. But in the case of a sketch, the image gets processed through the brain before it is recorded on paper, a process which I personally demand of myself. I often tell my students, “A drawing is not a photograph. What you leave out is as important as what you put in.”

“Uncle Bentley” often insisted that no matter where we found ourselves, we could always find time to record visual ideas, whether in a bus or train or airplane, in a park, restaurant or cafe, doctor or dentist’s office … anywhere.

Recently I found myself in a doctor’s office waiting for an exam related to an eye injury common to aging — floaters — blobs inside the eyeball, in this case, a massive floater which threatened retinal detachment — and while waiting for my doctor to finish her rounds, made nine finished drawings … not sketches, but completed pieces. This included time waiting for the dilation effect to take place.

Skills, if they are there in the first place, are not lost by visual blur. She, by the way, is planning to attend my drawing classes.

Using sketches to begin a study is a very important idea. I might do dozens of sketches of someone before attempting a serious portrait or even caricatures, to develop a sense of what it is I am trying to capture in the portrait — the very basic essentials.

Think of a sketch as a way of trying to penetrate a concept, to isolate very definite and specific elements of some subject, of getting hold of the absolute basics of something.

In the case of a portrait, this is an easy idea to visualize. Everyone’s nose is different, yet there are noses that are categorizable, just as eyebrows can be categorized, ears, jaws, hair, eyes and cheeks and mouths and jowls and skin tones and teeth. There are just so many basic models of humans, and a study of Bertillon Specifications can easily reveal them to the serious portrait painter.

In the case of landscape painting, there are many types of greenery, and each type of leaf does indeed have a categorical fundamental appearance, and therefore is categorizable — deciduous trees, evergreens, broadleaf, spiny, sawtooth and so forth — then there are flowers of every description and every rock, stone, cliff- face and hilltop has its own recognizable form. For examples, see the etchings of Henry Baskett.

The fact is that the sketch helps the artist reduce the amount of information in a painting down to those elements that are necessary to arouse the emotional response and occasionally spiritual cognition of a viewer, which is what art is actually all about in the first place.

For a painter, the idea is reduction; a painting is not, as I said before, a photograph — even a painting which exploits photorealism. The truth is that not every single minute detail can possibly be captured in a painting as it would be in a photograph, and even in a photo, there are limits, whether grain or pixel, to the capture of image — the totality.

I like to say that the painter should reduce the amount of information to the very least necessary to get the viewer into the headspace of the artist at the time of conception. In the case of a very skilled and very lucky painter — because great paintings are as much a matter of a strange combination of luck and skill, provided the skill is also there along with determination and discipline — one can easily see conception and execution as one and the same thing.

All too often, the painting’s execution does not match the conception, and in that sense, the painting has failed. Falling short of the concept does not, however, mean that a piece will necessarily fail; the artist’s skill makes up for that difference in the hands of a professional artist, by making a series of paintings which try to capture the sense of the original conception.

Eventually this pays off. My friend, Disney and Warner animation director Lin Larsen, calls this persistence “pencil mileage”. I call it professionalism. What this really means is an intention to carry the piece to its maximum level of execution, regardless of how many tries it takes to get it there, like not getting out of a car until you arrive at the intended destination.

Drawing study pieces can really help in an understanding of the structure, form, light-effects, textures and basic masses of various elements of a Still-Life piece.

You might select a number of items for your Still-Life painting: shells, boxes, a vase, wineglass, bottle, plants or flowers, animal skulls or bones, a bent and weather-tortured piece of vine or wooden log, a coconut or a chunk of broken pottery — anything that fits on a table or in a room.

Think of a Still-Life as a sort of indoor landscape, but different from a landscape in the sense that in the case of an outdoor landscape you cannot choose the elements that are there in front of you, although you can de-select or ignore those parts you don’t want to include in the painting.

In the case of a Still-Life, you will generally consciously select the elements that will go into the painting, especially in the case of a Formal Still-Life, which we will discuss in further detail as we go deeper into the subject.

Understanding form is the basic reason we perform the experiments of drawing studies, in much the same way that a musician might perform small isolated musical phrases, called “etudes” — meaning, simply, studies.

You might use graphite for the purpose of making drawing studies of items, or elect to use the most demanding and elegant medium, which would be pen, ink and wash. You can see wonderful examples of these types of studies in the great masters’ works.

Your first vague and stumbling attempts to make studies of forms and elements will probably be on rather small pieces of paper. You should soon graduate to much larger fields — 22″ x 30″ or larger, to magnify and thus reveal any structural misunderstanding in your mind’s eye of the item under examination.

Working Big was how we thought of it back in art school. Working big gives you no place to tuck away those fudging things that hide crappy, lazy work habits or bad attention. Magnification reveals all.

2. COMPOSITIONAL DRAWING

Made for the purpose of working out the various elements of any artform on a two- dimensional surface, whether paper, canvas, wood, glass, metal or ceramic. It deals with placement, negative space, textures, forms and a dynamic of light to dark, which we will deal with as we delve deeper into what is Still-Life painting.

You’d make a compositional drawing with the idea in mind that you at some point intend to apply the ideas contained therein to a further finished piece, that it is not necessarily in itself a finished piece, although I would not limit myself to leave a compositional drawing on the shelf if I thought it had some merit as a piece for release as a print.

In a compositional drawing, we take into consideration the entirety of the piece, which is to say, the Picture Plane as a whole; we examine the whole field-of-view from side to side and from top to bottom as a gestalt, a complete thing, something which we view in its entirety.

You could say that it is the work seen in a momentary glance, or in protracted visual examination with diffused vision, where the attention is more or less equally divided among all the elements in the piece.

This means that the movements of light and dark, warm and cool and intense to gray are all included throughout the piece as one single, whole thing.

That, in a single simplified phrase, is what “Picture Plane” means.

When we perform the exercise of a compositional drawing, we actually build, in the sense of construction, a point-by-point analysis of every element of the painting-to-be: form, gesture, value, movement, texture … everything.

It will be within the compositional drawing that we will pursue as many flights of fancy as we deem necessary to gain an overall understanding of what it is we want to include and exclude in our painting.

Here, in this first step toward a painting, we might vary the angles, get different viewpoints, force perspectives, even climb up on a ladder or chair to get above the setup to see what it might look like from above.

We can, at this point, move objects around both physically and within the drawing, and decide which elements we might want to add to or remove from the composition.

Whatever you do, try taking different points of view, moving left, right, backward, forward, get closer, farther away, work from near floor height, anything to expand your awareness of the fullest potentials, the many possibilities open to you, or that is to say, that you have the potential to open up to yourself.

You should now execute very small essential drawings just to get the wholeness of the picture plane all into your view, to easily see the totality. This process is called “apperception” and means simply to see the thing as a whole. This method of perceiving the Picture Plane is a very good beginning and leads eventually to the understanding of what a Picture Plane is all about.

This sort of drawing will not have enough information typically to give significance and understanding of the headspace of the artist to anyone but the artist, but it will give you, the artist, a chance to try several things and to see a holistic view of the piece before attacking the canvas itself.

I like to use charcoal or ink and wash to give myself an idea of what the thing is going to look like in a general way. Often this will suggest other setups or different elements or lighting effects, different backgrounds and even different aspect ratios, meaning what shape of canvas to use, whether vertical, horizontal or square, and also what size I’d like the finished piece to be.

Something I find of great importance is to define the Picture Plane before any attempt to fill it with things. In short, to put a Boundary on your piece, to put the whole Still-Life into a definite box — a box with eight fully-established corner points which define the wall, top and floor planes.

For this purpose, when using a 9″ x 12″ or 22.8 cm x 30.4 cm pad for my compositional sketch, I take a cutout mat board that has outside dimensions the same as my paper and an inside cut that measures 5.5″ x 8.5″ or 14 cm x 21.6 cm on the inside cut. This gives me an inch all around as a margin, which really helps to define the Picture Plane as a picture, and incidentally gives me a frame effect, helping me keep the fact that it is a picture well in mind.

I will often make several or even several dozen compositions of the same subject, some vertical, some horizontal, some square, to see what might work best. At other times, when working on a commissioned piece, I don’t have that choice. The popular concept of a “lazy artist” doesn’t come close to the truth — that a professional artist works as hard as an architect or a software programmer to produce a good product from conception to actualization.

Once you have the composition more or less where you want it and have defined the lights, darks, forms and textures, you might want to take it one more step toward definition, which means getting hold of a piece of paper the actual size of your canvas.

If you can’t match the size of the canvas, then something at least 22″ x 30″ will do. Charcoal and/or ink and wash will give you a very good idea of what problems you’ll be facing on canvas. Try to maintain more or less the same aspect-ratio of the canvas — meaning, keep the proportions the same as much as you can.

Work in masses, not lines. Although inevitably you’ll need them as a guide as the work starts out, lines are your enemy, and you’ll have to work very hard to get rid of them; Michelangelo said, “Only work can erase the traces of work”. Lines need to be massaged, coaxed, into mass.

Add masses of dark, and reduce them with masses of light. This additive and subtractive method is much the same as one would use in sculpting, and sculpting is a very good way to learn this “repousse” system of building a painting with masses rather than with line.

In the case of a charcoal drawing, you’ll want to approach it differently. You can refer to my textbook on charcoal drawing to get an idea of how to coax the charcoal, to massage it gently, into forms.

Working very broadly and expansively, attack the blank page or canvas as a whole, not just one small part at a time; make certain you don’t literally “paint yourself into a corner”, meaning get hung up in detail while blundering into a confused totality.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Mysteries of Still Life by E. J. Gold. Copyright © 2008 E.J. Gold. Excerpted by permission of Gateways Books and Tapes.
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