The Secret of Good Artwork

Let’s take a moment to talk about what it takes to produce good art. Many of you began studying art at an early age, maybe you took a class in high school or college, but later quit to get a job that pays well for as we all know, it’s tough to make a living as an artist. Or, perhaps you were busy raising a family and didn’t have time to pursue it.

Like a lot of people, I waited a few years, but I always knew I’d return to painting someday. Twenty-odd years ago, I began taking courses and began to draw and paint a lot. Over the last few years, I’ve had people ask me, “How long did it take you to paint that?” And I would tell them, “About twenty years.” Of course, they would frown and say, “Okay, but right now, how long did it take?” The thing is, there’s no way to convince someone who doesn’t understand that creating a pleasing piece of artwork didn’t just happen when I first picked up a brush. I have a lot of paintings that never saw the inside of a frame, and some that shouldn’t have. It took me more than twenty years and more than three hundred paintings to learn how to paint the way that I do. And I’ll never stop learning. In another five or ten years, my style will probably change and the same picture would look completely different.

Slash by Marc R. Hanson.

During those twenty years, I studied with some of the best painters in the East, including Don Demers, Stapleton Kearns, Mark R. Hanson, Richard Schmid and Albert Handel. The reason that I chose these artists is that I admired their style of painting and I wanted to learn how they accomplished their work by watching and listening.

20010637_Big by Stapleton Kearns.

After a few workshops, I noticed that there was a pattern to their information, even though they each had their own individual style. Just about all of them said that, with some knowledge, you will mostly learn by producing a lot of work. The more you do, the better your art will be.

I may have discarded some of this class information, or replaced it with something else, but a great deal of it has stayed with me over the years, and I find myself repeating their instructions to myself as I go about creating art. I highly recommend taking workshops or classes with those artists that you admire, pay close attention to what they say, read and reread their books, and buy their videos. Watching demonstrations is a great way to understand their process, and if you can do it in person, that’s even better. It is much harder to learn on your own. And don’t expect to remember everything in the beginning. There’s a lot to think about.

The Wisdom of Ira Glass

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the popular National Public Radio show, This American Life. Each week, This American Life is broadcast to more than 1.7 million listeners across 500 different radio stations. But it wasn’t always this way.

Glass talks about the process of learning creative work very eloquently:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is DO A LOT OF WORK. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or month, you are going to finish one [story]. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just got to fight your way through that.”

Read more about Ira Glass...

Consider Yourself Challenged!

Okay, I've heard from a few of you, but I'd like to hear from those who have kept silent while enjoying my emails. So, what are you waiting for? If you've been drawing, painting, doodling, etching, coloring with crayons, sewing, knitting, embroidering, sculpting, making origami or any other type of creative art, send me a photo. Send your photos to pmeglio99@gmail.com and I will post them in my next challenge email.

Blind Contour Drawing

Contour drawing was first taught at the Art Student’s League in New York by Kimon Nicolaïdes in the 1920s and 30s. He used it and other exercises as a way to train his students to observe their subjects more closely. His methods are still being taught in art schools today. 

Blind contour drawing involves carefully observing the outline and shapes of a subject while slowly drawing its contours in a continuous line without looking at the paper. By doing so, you are forced to draw what you actually see instead of what you think you see.
Blind Contour Drawing Exercise

You should definitely try this! If you do, please send me a photo of your results, including a photo of your subject. Let me know what thoughts are running through your mind and your observations as you move your pen/pencil around the page.

For this exercise, you will need the following:

• A pen or drawing pencil
• A drawing pad
• A timer
• A simple subject. I suggest your hand, a shoe, or a grouping of fruit. Anything fairly simple will do.

1. Place your subject at a 90 - 180-degree angle away from your forward drawing position, to the left if you are right-handed, or the right if you are left-handed. You need to be looking away from your paper.
2. Set your timer for ten minutes.
3. Set your pen/pencil on a point on the pad and look at one area in your subject.
4. Begin drawing, don’t look at your drawing pad and don’t lift the pen/pencil from the pad.
5. Go slowly. As your eyes follow the line of your subject one millimeter at a time, your pen/pencil will move at the same slow speed.
6. Follow the outline and inner lines of your subject, including the details within the subject, changing direction, without lifting your pen/pencil. Try to follow the lines as if you were actually touching the object with your finger. Feel the item as it curves here, depresses there, and as it twists and turns.
7. Do this without stopping until the timer goes off.

When you look at your picture, it will look like a crazy jumble of lines, but if you look closely, you will see an interesting pattern, one that includes a lot of details that you may not have realized if you had not learned to see it.

Instead of provoking anxiety, blind contour drawing is meant to help you practice your observation skills. If you approach the technique with patience, it can even be a calming exercise. Look at it as a sort of exercise in meditation. The pen goes down on the page and your eye goes to a specific point in your subject and your eye and the pen move in sync.

There’s just something about moving that slowly and that focused that makes you empty your brain of everything else. You will begin to see things differently and your skills in seeing and drawing will improve.

My effort here to do a blind contour drawing. I admit I had trouble doing this very slow and ended up redrawing the images of the carrots, so there are two sets here. I used a Pentel pen, Doing this is a great way to slow down your eyes and check shapes and relationships.

According to Nicolaïdes, “Because pictures are meant to be seen, too much emphasis (and too much dependence) is apt to be placed upon seeing. Actually, we see through the eyes, rather than with them. It is necessary to test everything you see with what you discover through the other senses – hearing, taste, smell, and touch – and their accumulated experience. If you attempt to rely on eyes alone, they can sometimes actually mislead you.”

You can read about this and a series of other drawing exercises created by Kimon Nicolaïdes in his 1941 book The Natural Way to Draw: A Working plan for Art Study.

Drawing Simplified - Part I

I've heard time and time again, "I can't draw." or, " I can barely draw a stick figure," or, "I'm not talented enough to be able to draw." I emphatically disagree. It's not a matter of talent. Drawing, like everything else, must be learned. The thing is, more often than not, we've never been trained to draw. Think about it, in school, we were taught our alphabet, arithmetic, and grammar. We've never been taught how to draw, maybe because it was considered frivolous to know how to draw, or perhaps being creative is not considered useful.

These days, with so much going on in our lives and especially with the fear of the pandemic all around us, it's more than ever important to have a creative outlet to turn to. Art can bestow a calming feeling, and help us to cope with life's struggles. Studies have shown that creating art decreases negative emotions, reduces stress and anxiety, and can help you live longer. Creativity helps you see things differently and better deal with uncertainty. Studies show that creative people are better able to live with uncertainty because they can adapt their thinking to allow for the flow of the unknown.

So, where's the best place to start? Some people jump right into a fun medium like painting or pastels, or print making, whether from life or from a photo. However, if you don't have at least basic drawing skills and create a line and value drawing of your subject before you turn to your favorite medium, there's a good chance that you will struggle with the design and structure of your subject.

Like learning your A,B,Cs, or simple math, you need to start with the underlying structure. In most cases, it's worked out in a drawing. The best place to start with drawing is with simple shapes.

What are Simple Shapes?

Everything we see, whether from nature or man-made, can be broken down into simple shapes. These shapes include the square or cube, sphere or circle, and triangle or cone.

Before you protest that you can't draw a straight line, there are tools for that. If you can draw a straight line with a ruler, you can make a square. If you can use a compass, you can make a circle. From a square, you can make a rectangle, and, if you can draw a triangle, you can make a cone shape.
The Square A container like this tea tin, when viewed straight on, is a square.
Extending the lines of your square upward will help you to draw this canister.

           

The Circle

If you have a compass, you can make a circle. When drawing an apple, start with a circle and add the necessary curves and indents that will make up the bottom and the area of the stem.
Add the lip and handle to make this pitcher. While drawing, think about the placement and size of the negative shapes, the areas around the subject.

  

Use a Guide Line

Draw a straight line up the center of your shape and use it to help guide you as you draw your subject. You can measure from the line to both sides of the circle, square, or triangle to check your shape. This is especially helpful with symmetrical shapes.
The Triangle

Start with a guide line in the center of this conch shell and bottle, then draw your triangle. Curve the short side of the triangle, and you have a cone shape. Do a line drawing, then add shading.
       

Measuring

Whether working from life or from a photo, it's important to check your measurements as you draw. Use your pencil or some kind of measuring device to check both length and width. Check the proportions carefully as you go. When you start with a drawing, it's a lot easier to make adjustments to both the measurements and the composition than it is to make changes in your medium.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil 

-Balthus

Next

I'll continue with some basic drawing techniques in Part II.

Class Schedules

I'm dying to get back to teaching my classes and I know some of you can't wait to sign up.
I've updated my class schedule for the fall. It's obviously going to depend on whether and when the high schools decide to be open for Adult Ed. classes.
If Artsplace is open, I hope to schedule a class there.
For seniors, it's whether the Town of North Haven deems it safe to reopen the senior center.
For now, you can view my scheduled classes on my website.

While you're there, check out my newest additions to my artwork.

Stay safe and be well.

Tell Me What You're Doing That's Creative

I hope you enjoyed this first session of Drawing Simplified. Feel free to share with others. Please continue to send me photos of your work. I'll do another Creative Challenge in a few weeks.

I'd love to hear from you. Are you feeling inspired? What are you doing to stimulate your creative side?

Remodeling Part 1

Greetings! I hope that you are safe and in good health.

I am like everyone else trying to keep busy, stay productive and remain healthy during this health crisis. All of my classes are on hold and there's no way to tell when they will start again. I know a lot of my students are anxious to get back to class and I do miss my students and teaching.
I am not much of a remote instructor. I enjoy hands on teaching and love the interaction with my students. However, that not being possible right now, I think a lot of you would be interested in how I go about planning and executing a painting.

Most of the time, I start a painting from the beginning with a drawing, canvas prepping, transferring of the design to canvas, and then I spend a few days painting and it's done. Sometimes, though, I revisit a painting that started out okay, but then suddenly stopped dead in its tracks. Usually, I am not happy with the direction it's going and rather then go raging mad and rip the canvas apart like Cezanne often did (though I admit occasionally the thought does occur to me!), I set the painting aside and look at it now and then. I think about how I can modify and improve it. I call it "Remodeling," though I don't use a sledge hammer.

By the way, if you haven't seen the Netflix movie, Cezanne et moi, about the friendship of Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola, I highly recommend it! You can find it on Netflix.

But I digress. I started this painting about three years ago, and was unsatisfied with some parts of it, so I have been pondering over it ever since. I'm now ready to tackle it with a fresh new perspective. I thought that some of you might be interested in how I rework a painting, so I'm going to post the original artwork for this first post, and I'm going to show you how I'm planning to change it. I will send out additional emails that will show the steps that I take and will tell you the reasons for my steps.

Here it is:

The Drawing

The first step is to start with a brand-new drawing. I had some drawing paper that was the exact size of the canvas, which helped. I began working on a new design using a soft pencil and a kneaded eraser. I decided that I liked the mandolin and tambourine, so they will continue to be part of the setup. I liked the colorful fabric because it gave an interesting texture to the design but I didn't care for the white fabric and felt the small objects were lost in the design, so I discarded these. I re-positioned the tambourine and added the guitar, sheet music, and pen. The background will be very dark except toward the bottom where the fabric will be reintroduced.

It's important to note that my drawing is not just a line drawing, but also includes the dark and light areas (values) which I believe are critical to the design. If there's a nice balance of contrast, the picture will be more pleasing. This design shows a good mix of light, medium and dark values. The position of the items is also important. The eye should always be "invited" into the picture like a welcome guest and "asked to stay."

In a few days, I'll post the next step in the process. So sit back and relax. I hope you enjoy this free instruction. Perhaps it will inspire you to pick up that brush and paint a masterpiece!

Tip: Measure as you go, check accuracy by turning the canvas upside down and/or use a mirror.

Another Kind of Remodeling

Finally, I managed to get past some of the problems that prevented me from rebuilding my website. I'm happy to say that the new site is up and running. You can now view it from a computer or mobile device. I have a new Art Instruction page and a new Contact page. The dates for instruction and exhibitions are not current since I designed it before the pandemic shut things down, but I will update it when I have good dates.

I'm hoping that classes resume in late spring, but if they don't, I will be offering the same classes in painting and drawing this fall at Hamden Adult Ed, and Wallingford Adult Ed. I hope to offer classes this summer at Artsplace and continue with painting classes at the North Haven Senior Center. Stay tuned for updates.

There’s no such thing as talent. Good art takes a lot of work, a lot of hours, and a lot of patience. A good artist has earned his way.