Mysteries of Still Life 9780895564399, 9780895562531

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Mysteries of Still Life

To “Uncle Bentley” Schaad Teacher, Mentor, Friend

MYSTERIES OF sTILL LIFE e j gOLD

gATEWAYS BOOKS AND TAPES NEVADA CITY, CALIFORNIA

Copyright © 2008 E.J. Gold, All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the copyright holders, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, internet publication, or broadcast. Distributed by Gateways Books and Tapes P.O. Box 370 Nevada City, CA 95959 1-800-869-0658 http://www.idhhb.com http://www.gatewaysbooksandtapes.com ISBN Softcover: 978-0-89556-253-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gold, E. J. Mysteries of still life / E.J. Gold. p. cm. Based on the techniques presented by Robert Bentley Schaad at Otis Art Institute. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-89556-253-1 1. Still-life painting--Technique. I. Schaad, Robert Bentley. II. Title. ND1390.G65 2008 758'.4--dc22 2008026731

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Drawing Skills

1

drapery

45

value

61

still life setups

89

MY CHOICE OF OBJECTS FOR A FORMAL SETUP

97

OBJECT SOURCES FOR STiLL-LIFE SETUPS

105

Index of images

113

PREFACE

I've been teaching Still-Life classes to all my art students for the past forty years whether drawing, acrylic, oils, pastels, charcoal, graphite, litho, etching and even 3D CAD game designers, because Still-Life captures the essentials of what the serious art student needs to know. Many years ago, when I attended the legendary Otis Art Institute, which now celebrates over 90 years of continuous operation, I had the good fortune of being in painting classes with a man that I consider to have been one of the greatest Still-Life masters in America, and certainly one of the best teachers I've ever encountered — Robert Bentley Schaad — along with Bob Glover who taught 3D design, which I find essential and foundational for all my computer game design I've been doing for the past twenty years. Recently I encountered the concept of scrapbooking, something to which I had given no thought whatever over the years. In the course of building a scrapbook for my Otis years, I stumbled across my class notes for Bentley Schaad's classes. They follow a sequential path through the process of understanding how to use Still-Life painting as a means of gaining understanding in art in general, and painting in particular — not just indoor setups, which means that what I learned in Still-Life painting served me well in my landscape, figure, portrait and abstract work as well. This book was really created for my present art students, and I know they will appreciate what I managed to glean from the teachings of Robert Bentley Schaad at Otis. He was a wonderful, although strict and demanding, teacher. He was also very encouraging and acted as my mentor for many years. He was also, in spite of his extreme need for privacy and his rather secretive lifestyle, a good friend.

CHAPTER ONE 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 1

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 intenseto-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 daVinci, 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...

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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 5

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. 7

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 9

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 11

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 13

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 15

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.

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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 fieldof-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 19

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 21

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 23

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. 25

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 27

confused totality. The idea is to perceive the entirety of the Picture Plane, the whole canvas all at once. In sculpture, this totality of perception is very, very important, but includes an in-the-round appreciation of what is happening at every moment. The wholeness of the Picture Plane must grow all at the same time, not piece-by-piece or section-by-section. Although of course you’ll start your attack somewhere, making a beach-head, but then quickly expand your attention everywhere as you construct your drawing or painting. You must make certain to hold the entire Picture Plane as a functional single Unified Field, in the Einsteinian sense. Everything is related to everything else, in the same way that a car's parts relate to each other, and every adjustment you make within the contained universe of the picture plane affects all the other parts by the Einsteinian law, “spooky action at a distance”. Even though you might stress small areas of attention-getting interest or sectors of the painting to keep the eye roving and ever-moving, in the final analysis, there should be a sense that the painting grew as a whole entity, all at once, all over itself, all in the same moment of creation, like the “Big Bang”, or in the case of a small work, a “baby bang”. 29

You don't want to focus down on one sector at a time, getting trapped in some area, ignoring the totality. This will certainly lead to one common problem, which is distortion. Many mural painters fall into this trap, and you will often see a change in perspective or scale from one area to the next if the mural artist failed to get this concept of working in the totality all at once. The only remedy for unwanted localized distortions is to back up frequently to see the whole effect. You just can’t fall into the lazy habit of painting right up close and standing still, all the while just guessing what a mural will look like from a distance. Every single square millimeter of your canvas is in full view, so every part must play its part, meaning that even a minimalist canvas will reveal minor flaws, if not obviously, at least subliminally, to the viewer. I like to draw my basic compositional structure with ink and wash, using a really big brush — a housepainting brush for canvases 24” x 36” or larger or, in the case of a 9” x 12” workup on paper, a number 24 round watercolor brush or sumi-e brush is what I generally employ here — blasting off with big, broad strokes of black to establish my darks, then one single shade of gray to indicate where I'll want my mid-tones, and only then adding white as necessary. Generally 31

I prefer to let the paper provide the lightness, but once in a while, I might have to wade in with white to re-establish my light values. This first approach to a workup piece on the way to another, finished work can be called a "Gesture Drawing", although many artists reserve that term for Life Drawing. I use the term to mean both a gesture of a figure, and/or the light and dark interplay in a landscape or still-life. After I've got my big forms and movement of light and dark all gestured out, I'll go into the drawing with charcoal — I use a nontoxic brand of charcoal called "Char-Kole" because it gives me very deep dark tones — or sometimes I'll use ink on a brush or stick, to get tighter, to define specific forms, spelling out exactly what I want them to be and how I want to separate my figures or forms from the background. After having produced over 210,000 catalogued works of art over the past 63 or so years, I very seldom use the paper method. I wade right into the canvas with brush and wash to get the basics, then blast into it further, right to the finish, but that's with a lot of "brush mileage" behind me. Some artists will paste collage cutouts of paper or tissue onto a masonite board or cardboard to get the idea down a bit more to their liking. “Uncle Bentley” 33

thought it best to keep those pieces of collage into a limited palette of black, one shade of gray and white. Construction paper works just fine for this, although some artists get a better result by painting their own paper and making cutouts from that — I do both. In my classes today, I have my students prepaint paper and make cutouts from those, just because it gives them a better sense of what the actual result will be. I note that artists’ construction paper and scrapbook papers, which also work well, are now all quite archival — not so in the past. Doing cutouts might remind you of Matisse. In his case, the cutout was often the final result, but he started out doing cutouts to work out the shapes, masses, colors, light and dark and textures of a proposed painting. I recommend a hard surface such as gessoed masonite or chipboard. Fritz Schwaderer and my friend Jan Zaremba both preferred its non-yielding response to brush-attack and I used it for years until I started working in sizes far beyond eight feet by four feet, mostly backdrops for jazz musicians. Some folks like door or panel skin sheathing, but anything firm will do the job including mat-board or stiff cover-stock, railroad board, construction paper, foam-core, or alligator board.

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This cutout method forces you to really confront the elements of your painting as pure masses, and eliminates the confusion of line and fancy drawing technique to mask bad composition. You can add some brown Kraft paper, “natural jute” or “paper bag” scrapbooking card stock here, to give the idea of warm tones as opposed to the cool tone of the gray. This will also provide a concept of variation of texture as well as color. Using cutouts helps to understand the Picture Plane as a whole, because it is a broader and faster way of laying out the composition, making the perception of the complete entityness obvious at a glance. Seeing light and dark and medium tones as pure shapes helps us to perceive the movement of light and dark across the canvas. It also gives us some understanding of the totality without the distraction of detail. We can, once this totality of gesture of light and dark is achieved, begin to adjust it with white gesso or heavy-body titanium white acrylic paint as needed, applied gently and with restraint with painterly brush strokes, leaving some streaks and feathering.

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Using the "repousse" method of going back and forth between light and dark, adding and subtracting dark and light in turn, working the entire Picture Plane as a whole, not getting caught up in any one area or sector, we can build a composition that has many aspects of interest. The most important thing to remember about the collage technique of layout of the Picture Plane is that collage is meant to simplify the elements of the painting, not as decoratives. Use of newspaper or printed matter will certainly confuse this issue, although some painters, notably Braque, make a point of using collage as a means of denial-of-form, but this is a matter for very advanced painting, not beginning Still-Life. Mass and shape are what we are after here, not line. This insistence on non-dependence on line is the only reason I suggest the use of paper cutout collage to work out the problems of the piece, and then, only for the beginner. Later on, when you’ve developed good compositional habits and have a backlog of experience-points as a painter, you won’t have to rely on mechanical composing devices such as cutouts, although you might use cutouts from time to time as a technique to achieve a specific effect.

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3.

FINISHED DRAWING

This is a drawing which is a complete artform in and of itself. It is not a sketch; it goes far beyond merely sketching, and is only recently accepted as an end product. For many centuries any drawing in graphite, charcoal or sepiatone would have been considered a workup for a finished piece such as a painting. Typically the drawing was in preparation for a further work and was called technically a "cartoon". A finished drawing can be very involved, calling for great technical skills and one must be prepared to spend many hours laboring over a finished drawing, if called for by the piece. To produce a finished drawing requires a special vow to not abandon the piece, to continue with it until it is done. This demands discipline, the kind of discipline that is expected of any professional. Discipline simply means the continued effort without “burnout” — the ability to keep with a project. The Big Secret is “hanging in”. In the study of Still-Life painting, we will be primarily concerned with the concepts and skills required by the painting modality, which will be Compositional Drawing, which may begin with a sketch, but definitely does not require the fin41

ished drawing, although some artists will certainly find their way to a painting through a finished drawing now and then. We can study how the light plays across the canvas through a compositional drawing. We can also juggle the various elements of the painting without too much commitment. I have several times now used the word "element" to describe something, and I should take a moment to define what I mean by it. An element of a painting is a specific form, area, lighting effect, dark effect, color, texture, or indeed, anything that can be pointed to as a Ding an Sich, a thing-in-itself. An element can be taken as a separate entity and looked at, examined, and its position or interpretation changed by the artist.

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CHAPTER TWO DRAPERY Sometimes drapery is important and sometimes not. Often I find that the things I learned from Bentley Schaad, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock — who was a student of Thomas Hart Benton before joining Hans and Maria Hoffman’s action painting movement — and Fritz Schwaderer about drapery will be reflected in how I handle other things, such as mountain ranges, hills and even rooftops in my landscapes. At other times, such as some of my drawing classes, the situation and environment don't allow nude Life Drawing, but fully clothed figure drawing is just fine; in those cases, I use a draped or clothed model, and then drapery becomes vital. Drapery should be part of every painter's skills. Not only in the obvious applications, but in the sense of how to portray a three-dimensional form on a twodimensional Picture Plane. Drapery is just folded space distorted by gravity-wells. Costume is a very important element in figure painting, and the simplifica45

tion of dress in terms of drapery is a key to understanding costume, even very complex forms of costume. Here, I must point out what “Uncle Bentley” taught — that drapery can be thought of in much the same way as the human body — it has its own definite rules of anatomy, scale and form, its own dance of light and shadow. I like to think of drapery in sculptural terms, as solids, 3D models or plastic forms. Most artists ignore drapery as something optional, but it really shouldn't be left by the roadside. In my experience, bypassing the mysteries of drapery is part of the impatience syndrome of today's young artists, who will generally treat clothing or drapery as random blobs or slushy strokes of white over color, something belonging to that school of old artists; something to be ignored as unimportant and irrelevant to the theme of “self expression”, which is, in my opinion, generally a very thinly disguised form of patient-directed therapy. Art is an industrial occupation, a business serving the architect, decorator and framer. Clothing is a direct result of the skeleton and flesh underneath it. It does not just hang there without an underpinning. There is mass in there, filling out the form of cloth, and it cannot be completely ignored. Drapery that is hung has weight, and where it is not directly supported, it 47

will sag. There will be strain, contraction, transitional hang, and drape effects of various kinds. The best way to understand this is to study fashion design. Drapery in a Still-Life can serve several functions. It can itself be an element of the composition, or be used to transition from one element to another. It can be portrayed as complex and sticky to the eyes, or as a stark device for a large area of flatness, or as a foil against which other forms may interplay. Sometimes drapery can be used to focus the eye on something, to avoid distraction, and even to add mystery to the composition. Drapery does not need to be included in every Still-Life you compose, but you should certainly know how to put it in there if you want to. Skills in drapery are easily transferred to other forms, such as clothing on a model, or earth mounds and ruts, and to textural treatments such as tree bark, furniture and even animal and human forms, especially "saftig" or hefty human models, pets and wild animals. Good handling of drapery can bring an understanding of how to handle foliage. While drapery can add wonderful textures and mass, variations of light and dark and pattern, it can easily become a cliche, a way of avoidance and lack of skills, and it should be used sparingly, like a spice. I tend to use drapery very little, but I have spent a great deal of time learn49

ing what it is and how to create the illusion that it is there, and even in my wildest gesture paintings and JazzArt backdrops, I must and do take into consideration how fabrics hang and move. In your experiments, you'll discover what the fashion designer knows from the very beginning: that every fabric has its own characteristics, yet the draping effects remain more or less the same throughout. Some fabrics drape softly and sweetly, and some are stiff and formalized, angular and rough, crisp and neat. Think of crepe versus celluloid collars and you'll get the idea. Silk is very different from felt, cotton brocade and wool. Some fabrics are bright and flashy, some are translucent or transparent, some are thickly warm and broadly weighted. A gown falls and drapes very differently than a tuxedo. Try a number of different kinds of fabrics in your studio; drape some stuff over a box or hang it on a small table rack or folding easel. Don't actually try to render it photographically. Use it to suggest forms, shapes, color and texture. If you have a dressmaker's form handy, or can get hold of a store mannequin — they're quite cheap nowadays, about fifty bucks for a new one — try draping fabrics over it, noting how the folds emphasize the figure underneath. 51

You'll be learning what every woman knows almost from birth; that some fabrics reveal, and some hide bodily features. To paint heavy velvets, you'll want a strong heavy stroke. A very complex textured fabric such as brocade will suggest the use of a tightly compressed thin stroke with a much smaller brush, pen or stick. You might want to try solids, particularly an off-white fabric, to achieve an understanding of folds. Then you'll want to explore what happens with a patterned fabric. A strong simple pattern, not a complex one, will produce better results, unless you’re a retro painter who revels in the throes of mid-Victorian or pre-raphaelite works of art. You'll also want to vary the amount of light and dark. Light compositions will be very different from darker ones, and the same fabric will look very different in varying light sources and intensities. One idea is to compose the fabric behind a setup, and another is to enfold the subject items within the ripples and valleys of the textile somewhat. An alternative would be to place some fabric underneath the subject items in the Still-Life composition. Fabric can be used to isolate elements from each other or to eliminate dis53

traction from a background. For examples of this with human forms, you would do well to study some Vermeer paintings; it won't take long — very few have survived to the present day. Never get hung up in rendering fabrics too precisely; this causes the painting to look too "designy", like something you'd get from the local framer's shop or from a mail-order furniture catalog. Working with drapery at first, you'll want to start with something simple; either black, white or gray will do the job for your beginning efforts. What you're trying to do here is to get some control over the drapery, its folds and stresses...the main thing here is to keep it very, very simple. Notice the tensions in the fabric, and find out why those tensions happen...what causes them to fold and hang that way? Just as a golfer studies the green, notice the "breaks" in the field of fabric. Notice the effect of gravity as it hangs from a suspension point, as the material follows the space-distortion caused by the gravity-well. Think of fabric as water going over a waterfall; it splashes and sputters and rolls and twinkles and plays hide-and-seek with the light and dark. Visualize fabric not as cloth, but as a problem in portraying a piece of 55

sculpture. If you think of the fabric as a solid roma-plastilina modeled clay form, you'll get it right the first time. Reduce the sense of the fabric to folded interpenetrating masses. Don't focus on the tiny creases and minute surface textures that develop; they're not important and just as you would simplify the form in sculpture, meaning, to eliminate the fussy little surface wobblies, the tiny hills and valleys and crevices, you're going to ignore them and cut to chase, bottom-line your efforts to just the basic forms. Just as you approach the holistic Picture Plane as a totality, you'll want to establish the drapery as a whole thing, as a broad gesture and movement across the canvas, pure form, just light and dark with mid-tones, a thing in itself of rolling, twisting interpenetrating stuff that has mass, not lines, although it might at first be defined as lines. As we do in finished drawings, look for opportunities to exploit the folds of cloth as you would the hills, valleys, rivulets and folds of earth and trees in a landscape or folds of flesh and pockets of darkness in a figure drawing. Limiting your values of light and dark to a maximum of five — I myself prefer three values to start with — build the structure of the cloth as you would a 57

mountain range or a human body. Think mass, mass, mass. Avoid line like the plague, and keep your sense of the wholeness of the cloth as a single mass accentuated by folds, caused by drag and pull of gravity. Then, when you have firmly established the totality of the fabric as a sculptural form, go into it and work into it with detail if you wish, showing us some subtleties of the fabric, if you feel you must. Having developed serious skills in the working of drapery and fabrics, in general, as sculptural masses rather than lines, you will undoubtedly transfer those skills to the portrayal of landscape, human and animal forms and eventually abstract forms. Certainly, once those skills are mastered, you will never fall into the Black Hole of vague dabs of pigment that all-too-often are what artists mean to be drapery or costume.

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CHAPTER THREE VALUE Light and dark combined make one of the Three Dimensions of Painting, which I have described in detail in my DVD course, "You Can Paint". But to establish the basics here would serve to define what follows: When attempting to portray three dimensions on a flat two-dimensional surface, you'll need three dimensions of something, even if those apparent dimensions are purely illusional. Of course, one element is perspective, another is planarity, meaning one plane ahead of or behind another, but the real dimensionality is provided by three definite doors of perception: 1. Light and Dark. One creates a movement, a gesture, of light and dark across the canvas. This is equivalent to width, or in trig terms, the "x" factor. Look to El Greco, Rembrandt and Rico Lebrun for these effects in their most understandable form. 61

2. Warm and Cool. This provides a sense of environment, enhancing any light and shadow effects, and is the equivalent of height, or the "z" factor expressed as a vector. Most notably you can see this effect strongly in the works of Maxfield Parrish. Warm generally refers to reddish tones, earth tones, sienna as opposed to umber, pinks, oranges, cadmium yellow as opposed to lemon yellow, but right there lies the actuality — that warm and cool are relative terms. Any color can be warm or cool in relation to another that is even warmer or a bit cooler... To add to the confusion is the manufacturer’s intentional blur between true pigments and “convenience colors” which mimic them and are cheaper and safer to use. 3. Intense to Gray. Grayness indicates distance. Intensity tells us something is closer, regardless of rendering or perspective effects. This is the "y" factor. Here you might study the works of J.M.W. Turner and the Hudson River School. Value is a better term than tone, although both are used quite inter63

changeably in the art community. I prefer to reserve tone as a reference to the emotional impact of a piece of art. Value is specifically the position on a gray scale, which is determined by the frequence of reflected light from a surface. The frequency or wavelength of reflected light will have a very specific place on the EMS, the Electromagnetic Spectrum, within the range of visible light, meaning light that can be detected by the human eye and interpreted by the human brain as color, shape, texture, value and as a figure/ground relationship. The eye sees much more than what the brain says it sees, but we'll leave that for another discussion when we're in the optics and artificial intelligence lab. The Optical Value Scale of painting ranges from darkest black to whitest white, and that would all be expressed as value, not color. We use the term "Value" to mean a specific place in the frequency or wavelength scale from black to white in the visible light spectrum. Of course, value is totally relative; it has no meaning in and of itself except to the optical scientist, so I don't give it a frequency number; I refer to it in relation to other values in that particular work of art, in that specific picture-plane. Painters, designers, printmakers, film-makers, architects, stage technicians 65

and photographers refer to values that are dark as "Low Key" values, while those that are lighter are called "High Key" values, but keep in mind that these are relative terms, meaning taken in relation to other values on the canvas and only on that particular canvas. You'll see some "high value" paintings that simply have no dark tones or accents whatever; they will all be far up within falsetto or soprano range of visible reflected light. Some examples of "High Key" value works can be found in Rembrandt's etchings, such as Cottages and Farm Buildings with a Man Sketching, (Bartsch 219), Old Man in a Long Cloak Sitting in an Armchair (Bartsch 160), Old Man in Meditation Leaning on a Book (Bartsch 147), The Large Lion Hunt (Bartsch 114) and St. Peter in Penitence (Bartsch 96), which give good examples of pieces with little or no dark values. "Low Key" artworks will be deep and dark and mysterious, such as many Rembrandts, particularly his etchings, such as Saint Jerome in a Dark Chamber (Bartsch 105), Student at a Table by Candlelight (Bartsch 148), Negress Lying Down (Bartsch 205), The Entombment (Bartsch 86), The Star of Kings (Bartsch 113) and finally, The Flight into Egypt (Bartsch 53), which are excellent examples 67

of pieces almost totally enveloped in darkness. Many of my painting students — I currently teach some 155 folks a variety of subjects — graphite drawing, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, acrylics, sculpture and graphic arts ranging from classical etching with burin, drypoint, burr and aquatint all the way to adobe photoshop and CAD levels and models for first-person 3D action videogames — think they're having trouble with pigments, meaning color, when in point of fact, they are actually lost in the jungle of relative value. You can have the same color in the whole range of value and not recognize it, and that's the primary problem I have with even very advanced students. It just doesn't make sense until cognition comes...that colors don't in themselves produce values. The easiest way for me to learn this was to assist Max Oseran, Mike Todd's partner, in black and white films, using a smoked “director’s” glass to try to understand how a scene would translate into black and white from its natural colors, at a time when color production was out of the question due to the exorbitantly high cost of technicolor processing. I'm always translating any color painted work into black and white in order to understand the values, to see the actual problems, not the perceived and imagi69

nary ones generated by differences in color. Blue is not necessarily darker than red, and purple is not a value. The problem is that most artists don't have a clue about value; all they think about is color and line, usually outline. In order to understand value, it is necessary to see values in relation to the totality of the value scale from absolute black to absolute white. The shortest route to this understanding is to do some value charts, first in black and white, and then do some relative charting with acrylics on paper in colors along the frequency scale, using cobalt blue and burnt sienna at first, and then the primaries — cobalt blue, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and then later adding black and white for value changes. Most students don't want to do all this — they tell me it’s tedious and boring — but I point out that doing the visual scales and keys would be exactly the same exercise you'd be expected to do if you wanted to play piano or any other instrument, and it's the same as the plie positions, jettee and elevee and such that you'd practice if you wanted to be a professional ballet dancer. Of course, if your goal is to just fool around, you won't develop the discipline that will take you to the place where you do your exercises, your warmups, 71

every single day without fail. Tedious and boring are not part of my vocabulary. Real change comes only with deep levels of repetition, leading to deep levels of penetration. Color is an obstruction to the understanding of value; it distracts the eye and makes us think we see things we don't really see. Experiments with pure color at the same values can be seen in the works of many of the fifties and sixties artists, notably Albee, Reinhardt and Rothko. Every dab of paint establishes some value. When we place a second dab of paint on the canvas, it will have relative value in response to the other dab of paint. This powerful relationship shows up especially powerfully in non-figurative abstracts, where form is not suggested by expected or familiar forms, such as can be found in the works of Paul Klee, Diebenkorn, Albee, Krasner, Jenkins, Motherwell, Miro, Rothko, Guston and Milt Resnick, but not Pollock — a study of “Jack the Dripper’s” paintings will reveal them to be highly figurative and very controlled. So, too, are the “abstracts” of Franz Kline, which were actually giant magnifications of parts of larger things such as portions of bridge constructions, beams and girders, all very figurative, under careful and informed scrutiny and very serious and highly-educated analysis. 73

High contrast paintings will have extremes of High Key and Low Key, with few or no transitional grays. Most paintings have mid-scale values to make the transitions easier on the eye. Some photography in high-contrast produces interesting results. Squeezing the range of light and dark down to a smaller spectrum is called "compression" and can be very effective in paintings, drawings and photography. The whole idea here is to maintain the lightsource and to be true to it; if a painting, even an abstract, has a confusion of light-source, it will look bizarre and feel very uncomfortable, unfinished and blotchy, reflecting the confusion and light-source disorientation of the artist. Only a very dedicated and advanced art student can work well with a full scale range of light and dark. It's best for the beginning student to use a limited palette of extreme light, extreme dark and one, two or three midscale values of gray, not delving broadly into a wide palette of colors quite yet, if ever. Frankly, I like to keep my palette down to a few favorites — a deep, rich ivory black, prism violet, cobalt blue, brilliant blue, emerald green, burnt sienna, cadmium red, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow and titanium white. If you have trouble understanding values, or can't quite control them yet, 75

keep it simple. Use only black, white and gray until you cognite fully on what value really means. Use a strong light-source, a lamp close to the setup — (not too close if the cloth is potentially flammable, and here I’d always recommend caution — it’s alltoo-easy to walk off for a cup of coffee, answer the phone or doze off for a nap and to forget to turn off the setup lamp). A strong light-source will give a powerful easy-to-understand lighting motif to your composition. I like to have my students use the white of the paper as their lightest area, not to add white to the mix at this time. The dark areas will not actually be intensely black, but that's how we will represent them in the painting — as black — until we fully understand how to get that deep punctuation of extreme dark as a pulsating rhythm of accents dancing across your paintings, drawings and graphics. Midscale values will be one value of gray. We must first establish this gray transitional area before we can find the sub-scale tones between white and gray and black and gray. When we reduce the elements down to black, gray and white, it becomes somewhat easier to understand values throughout the Picture Plane. 77

I have my students work at this stage strictly with black, white and gray until they are ready for our limited palette of cobalt blue, burnt sienna, black and white. You'd be surprised at the range of apparent colors you can get from just those four tubes of paint. Using mixes of just those four pigments, you can develop a very wide range of light to dark, warm to cool and intense to gray, much more than you would ever think, but regardless of the apparency of color, never forget that you are working not with color alone, but color under the aegis of value here. For cool colors, add more cobalt blue; for warmer colors go heavier on the burnt sienna. To make gray, use white and black alone, or add white and/or black to your cobalt blue and/or burnt sienna, which will reduce the intensity and give the effect of more distance the greyer it is. The more black and white you use, the grayer it will get. To increase intensity, leave out the white and black. This will bring your intensely colored figures right into the foreground, in the viewer’s face as it were... For mid-ground, use a bit of black and/or white, but just a bit...much less than for background, which should be very non-intense, therefore, very gray. Mixing cobalt blue and burnt sienna into your black and white will produce 79

a very large variety of relatively-valued colors, meaning that more sensitive, organically powerful and emotionally provocative paintings can be produced than with just the coldness of black and white, although some painters can produce astonishingly emotional works in simple black, white and gray. Color automatically introduces shades of temperament, of emotional content. Black and white in general produces purely analytical reaction — emotion in black and white comes strictly from the content and composition. In photography, I am a profound believer in black & white, and prefer it over color. My friend Al Leslie works in black & white watercolors and the effect is absolutely mind-blowingly stunning — what folks today would call “awesome”, but I prefer to reserve the term “awesome” strictly to colliding galaxies, supernovae, and quasars. But the actual problem here is to understand how color can range through the value scale, and that's what I'm presenting. How you apply this later in your own work is up to you. Don't believe for a single moment that black is always dark and that white is always light. Black forms will be lighter closer to the light source, and white objects will darken when facing away from or being placed farther from the light source of your painting, and will vary with the reflected "Bounce Effect" of the 81

surrounding space and other elements in the setup. A white object in deep shadow will be grayed down to near-black. A black form or object or planarity such as cloth or tabletop will be grayed upward in value to almost white when very close to the light source. It helps to know that the actual color or value of an object will vary depending on its distance from the light source according to the formula that the object will darken more rapidly by the inverse square formula: Basically, the inverse square law is used to work out how intense a wave will be depending upon how far away you are from the source and the power of the source. Light will move outward as a sphere with a growing radius which grows at the speed of light. The further away from the light source, the less intense the light will seem, by an inverse proportion to the square of the distance. What this means to you, the artist, is that light intensity will drop more rapidly than you'd think it would, the farther from the light source a reflecting object is. The actual values of colors of all the individual objects in a Still-Life setup will vary quite widely from the perceived values of the colors when taken in relation to a light source. That's the point in a nutshell. 83

Surprisingly often, very different colors when placed together on the same plane relative to a light source, will give the appearance of a similar value, the difference being merely their colors, yet identical colors can appear very different under different light conditions, meaning distance from light source. Sounds terribly technical, sure, but these ideas can be worked out by experimenting with similarly colored and differently colored items and a light source such as a small spotlight or goose-necked desk lamp in your own optics laboratory, meaning your studio. Even with light source influence, you can be pretty sure that a red object will never appear blue just because it's closer to or farther away from a light source. The local color, meaning the color of the actual object disregarding effects of shadow, light and ambient reflections, does not change merely by varying the light effect. It can seem to change by hitting it with colored direct radiated light or some colored reflected light. The distance from a light source will not in itself throw an object into a different coloration. A red object will not become yellow or blue or black or green or purple as a result of its distance from, or shadowing from, a light source.

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Most of my students find it easy to work out the value problems when they take the time to act it out in the studio, meaning to try actual hands-on experiments with placement of objects closer to and farther away from a light source, and by casting shadows on them with objects placed between them and the light source. There's no substitute for direct, hands-on subjective, personal experiencing. It should now be easy to prove these ideas by overlaying a variety of colors onto a purely black, white and gray composition. When you feel ready to work directly with value-mixed colors, go ahead and try it — but don’t bypass the value-driven canvas experiments before you decide to “wing it”.

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CHAPTER FOUR STILL LIFE SETUPS There are basically two kinds of Still-Life Setups, the Formal and Informal. In the Informal, we respond to something that we did not make or control; we paint what we find. This "found objects" type of Still-Life is an artistic response to something we have encountered. Informal Still-Lifes (or is it Still-Lives???) have a quality of spontaneity that formal setups all-too-often seem to lack. Getting a formal setup to look accidental is part of the mysterious art of the modern Still-Life. Of course, Stuart, Edwardian, Victorian and Tudor Still-Lifes are intended to look stiff and formal. The Formal Setup, on the other hand, is something we put together, an Assemblage, in fact. We have in the formal setup total control over the objects selected, and their placement relative to each other and to a single or multiple light source which we put wherever we wanted it to be — it can be a lamp or a window or, indeed, any other light source we wish to use. 89

Your direct physical contact with the objects in the Formal Setup is very important. As you handle each object, you become involved with its weight, size, shape, mass, volume, density, tactile effects, local temperature and structure both internal and external. Your direct physical, emotional, mental and spiritual contact and actioninvolvement with each object will help you to understand its essential beingness. The Formal Setup also gives you direct control over the negative space, the stuff that surrounds the objects in your setup. You are in fact the local god of that highly localized universe. We can weave the objects through the setup space to create internal structures of negative space, meaning ground in relationship to the forms of the objects within the space. As an artist you become a Space-Weaver. It is easy to understand how we control the space by visualizing the entire setup as a cube containing all the objects and negative or surrounding space which we have defined as our setup space, a universe unto itself. What this means to you is that contrary to a landscape, the artist defines the front, back, sides, top and bottom planes of the space, its eight defining cornerpoints. These points and planes in turn define the outer limits and the internal con91

tent of the setup environment. Generally, we will be controlling several factors: 1.

Placement of a single light source.

2. Placement of objects relative to light source, which in turn determines their relative values. 3.

Type of object including color, texture, volume or size and mass.

4. Color relationships determined by local color and placement closer to or farther from light source and each other. 5. the setup.

Perspective determined by the point of view of the artist relative to

A setup may be tabletop, but it can also be a roomful of stuff or an object 93

held in the artist's hand or a single object on a desk or a floorfull of stuff that got piled there or dumped by uncontrolled action. There is virtually no limit to the type of setup; it is strictly determined by the imagination of the artist.

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CHAPTER FIVE MY CHOICE OF OBJECTS FOR A FORMAL SETUP: I prefer objects that are not overly decorative, but that's my personal choice. If I were a mid-Victorian painter, I would not be able to afford this preference by force of popular taste, if I wanted to actually market my work to the public. In today’s frantic, expedient money-driven art market, I like to find objects that are pleasing to my personal aesthetic, which means to me simple and wellformed to my own internal artistic temperament. I like plastic fruit rather than actual fruit. I can paint it as-if real, and some of the plastic fruit looks actually better than what they sell in the produce department of most food chains these days. I don't know if that's a result of the improvement in plastics or a reduction in food quality, but the fact is that the plastic stuff lasts a lot longer, looks and feels better and actually doesn’t taste all that bad when poverty strikes, or when unexpected company shows up in the studio. I tend to limit the number of objects in a setup, and to arrange them in a 97

way that is not boring, meaning to me that they are not the same exact distance from each other, and that they are not lined up in a neat orderly row and definitely not on the same planarity or architectonic. If your setup resembles a shelf at K-Mart or a Macy's window, you probably haven't yet grasped this idea fully, or there was a sale on — although once in a while, a Macy's window or a Martha Stewart display can be pretty stunning. By the way, a K-Mart shelf or Macy's window would be two examples of an Informal Setup, something you encounter and can't control the content, but can control your painted result suggested by the setup, meaning what you choose to leave out, ignore or alter, and the point of view you take toward the setup. Storytelling in a setup means placement of objects that are directly related to one another by obvious visual connection, whether by their significance, color, shape or other relationship. Telling a story is a profoundly important part of painting — some would argue that the whole point of painting is that it is actually in point of fact a story told as illustration. Relative size and volume will be important. In other words, things in your setup should not all be the same size, shape and color unless there's a specific reason for it; for example, Mu Chi's Six Persimmons. 99

Playing with relationships of objects can be fun and will directly affect the outcome. Contrast is very vital: light against dark, warm against cool, rough against smooth, round against angular, crinkly against fuzzy, red team against blue team. Imagine the effect of a group of apples and a rough, old red brick. Or a bunch of fruit on and around a book, a bottle, some old onions with intact stems, a crumpled food wrapper, a gourd and a pack of vintage Lucky Strike green, the famous WW II cigarette package designed in camo as a prevention against snipers. The original package featured a bright red target. Even though it may seem awfully contrived, this strong contract of opposites in the Formal Setup is not merely for experiment and the learning process. We should consider the juxtapositions and dichotomies in every canvas, pastel, charcoal, drawing or sculptural form we produce now or later in our professional career as artists. It's always curved against straight, soft against hard, light against dark, warm against cool, intense against gray, skull against teddy bear, metal against skin. How you paint will also directly affect the outcome; whether you apply the paint massively with a palette knife or a large brush or heavily or in thin wash or 101

splashily or stipple it or scrumble it on or dab or swash it with great gusto in a taichi dance or apply it carefully and minutely in hundreds of oily layers with all the obsessive compulsive disorder you can muster or squeeze it out of turkey-basters or icing dispensers or splatter it, fuss with it, finger-paint it or lay it on over tissue paper, your painterly qualities and personal touch will profoundly change what the viewer sees. I have noted in my long exposure both as a student and teacher to art classes that no two students will ever produce the same exact product from any given problem, even if they try hard to do so. It's a matter of personal touch, internal responses, perception, brain processing, hand-eye coordination, brushwork and experience, meaning brush-mileage and past events recorded, recovered and analyzed by the salt-water computer we call the human brain, plus a lot of other things not easily categorizable that result in the artist being an artist.

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CHAPTER SIX OBJECT SOURCES FOR STILL-LIFE SETUPS I have over the decades surrounded myself with thousands of objects that appeal to me for some reason. Not their intrinsic financial value, although many of them actually are rare and valuable antiquities for which I have a great affinity. Keeping them around gives me a familiarity with them; they have become Old Friends, and I have a good idea of what they seem to be to me, at least. My spaces are like a Prop Department in a movie or TV studio. I'll use objects that are new to me and contrast them with my Old Friends as well. Where do I get them? From all over, everywhere. Some were gifts from traveling friends who picked them up in Bali, Thailand, France, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Paramus, New Jersey or Afghanistan. Other items I found in antique shops or recycle stores. My shells, driftwood, interesting rocks & strange crystalline minerals and meteorites and glass objects came from so many sources, I’ve lost track. I recently bought several hundred dollars' worth of stuff from Ben 105

Franklin's art and craft supply store, where I teach classes these days. As an exercise for myself, I intentionally limited my shopping spree to just what I could find there on that particular day in that particular shop. I've used everything from bear skulls to Medieval, Ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman arms and armor. Parts of things work well, too; chunks broken of cars, appliances, home devices such as a washing machine, sewing machine, telephone apparatus, even a junked iPod or elderly Apple II computer. Isolation and Magnification of objects helps to understand them. Try a painting of a pomegranate at fifty times its actual size and it’s bound to remind you of Georgia O'Keeffe. You can build a stack or a whole setup of miniature dollhouse furniture to create a very believable layout. I use a roombox for the purpose. In fact, miniatures are a great way to collect a manageable and affordable collection of furniture objects. Almost anything can be had as a miniature, even Louis XIV, Directoire, Bedermeyer and Charles and Ray Eames. Catalogs and online collections will yield an amazing result and if you shop carefully, they will be a lot cheaper than the originals, especially if you want 107

a hand-made miniature 12" Navajo loom like the one I got two decades ago from a German craftsman at only $450. It is made of wood and has every single detail of the full-size version, including a handwoven partly completed Navajo blanket, actually woven on the miniature 6-inch loom. Place your objects anywhere: on a table, on or under a chair of any kind including a beanbag or woven basket chair. Put them on a windowsill or in a doorway or on a mantel or in your backyard on a bunch of building blocks. Don't limit your perception of a Still-Life to a bunch of fruit, wineglass, book and bottle on a tabletop. There's much, much more to Still-Life than that. Try to develop a sense of good design without becoming a decorator. Most artists have gotten the popular wisdom that north light from a garret window, especially one in Paris, and more specifically on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank in the Fifth or Latin Quarter, and even more artistically, Montmartre in the eighteenth Arondissement, home of Dali, Picasso and Van Gogh is the ideal. Popular Wisdom is an oxymoron, as is Army Intelligence. The fact is that any light source will do. You're the artist; if you don't like the actual effect, change it with paint. Think of your brain as an organic form of Adobe Photoshop. Alter things as you'd like them. A painting is not a photograph, 109

and even a photograph can be radically altered to suit the fancy of the artist. In addition, if you must have daylight, there are now artificial light sources that match daylight precisely. You can find them at any Staples store for about a hundred dollars a pop. As far as composition, choice of viewpoint, selection of objects and style of painting, I always, except in the case of a definite class problem, leave it completely up to the student to decide. There are so many styles of paintings acceptable today that there is no real sense to making a student conform to a style or approach, so long as the technical aspects are being mastered. In short, everything goes in today's art marketplace. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Marisol, deKooning, Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Goya, Miro, Chagall, Grosz, Pollock, Kline, Kandinsky, even Thomas Kinkade and Bev Doolittle. It's all a matter of skills, luck, marketing, connections and public appeal. Keep in mind that Still-Life painting is only one of many keys to artistic skills, but that the student who masters Still-Life will definitely have the edge on someone who has bypassed these skills. What you learn in Still-Life will help you to master landscape, figure, portrait and abstract — the other four of what I call the “Five Major Food-Groups” of Fine Art. 111

INDEX OF IMAGES A Brace of Vegetation In Vino Veritas Spiny Plant Still-Life View Point Soft Pot and Onion at Window Upshot Still-Life Tobacco Leaves on a Brick Wall Nest Egg Chair Stack with Easel Rough Sketch Simple Layout Stem and Leave Empty Table Lab Beaker and Squash at Window Finished Food Cascading Forms Soft Forms, High Contrast Edwardian Setup Two Pears, Three Peaches, Water Bottle and Brush Four Variations on a Theme Three Pillows in a Windstorm Somebody Ate My Porridge All Up Five Pomegranates Still-Life Roses in Moonlight Apple, Green Pepper and Pomegranate Dining Room Portrait Five Stacked Pillows Flowers in Vase on Harpsichord Roman Armor, Brush and Bottle

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ii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Piano Stool in a Corner Five Bottles in Strong Light Sticks, Ball and Vase Construction Two Jars with Turkish Flute Five Paintbrushes in a Hand-Thrown Pot Objects from My Desk Three Celery Stalks and Two Onions Bell, Skull and Candle Candles, Jar and Pomegranates Clock, Mouse and Teddy Bear Zen Ritual Objects Five Handmade Pots Wombat Riding on Striding Leaf-Man Beakers, Bottles and Fruit Tabletop Geometrics Orange Log Twist Sagging Textile Parisian Lunch Textile Cathedral Candle, Textile, Bottle and Box Glass Beaker with Sticks Three Erlenmeyer Flasks and Cherries Theatrical Curtains Impasto Fabric and Fruit Mountain of Fabric with Three Onions and Bottle Fruit, Fabric and Lanterns Textile Mountain with Cognac and Pickle Bottles Abstracted Furniture Forms Textiles and Wine Glass Soft Fabric Forms Pomegranates, Lime, Cherries and Cheese

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Eagle of Thistles Book on Desk at Window Mantle Clock, Typewriter and Tea Vase and Flowers with Wallpaper Swiss Cheese on a Butcher Block Piano at the Window Waffles in the Toaster Book, Bottle, Candle and Veggies - A Study Soft Forms in Semi-Darkness Tweaky Table and Chairs Norton Street Van Gogh’s Chamber Soft Chair My Summer Cottage The Broom in the Corner The Dreaded #11 Soft Forms in Moonlight Flying Forms Dancing Bottles, Fruit and Lantern, Forced Perspective Android Before the Curtain Food on the Table Portrait of Dali as a Soft Something Ink and Wash, Dark Gesture Miro, Picasso and the Bull Opera House Object of Daily Use Water Bottle Contemplating Infinity Grapefruit Wrapped in Paper Cheese Slices on an Empty Stomach Kitchen Utensil Meltdown Cosmo Hallway

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