A Landscape Painters Guide to 52 weeks on the Easel – Easel Talk #52
I’ve been in this studio since 2011, roughly 15 years now. We’re over 10 years into the channel, and this 52nd Easel Talk marks a full year of weekly conversations about painting.
The Foundation: Process Over Mastery
Painting isn’t hard, and it isn’t easy. It’s somewhere between the two, leaning toward wherever your head is at. If you want a good time making images, it’s not hard. If you want to touch the hem of people like Georgia Inness, it’s hard.
The foundational pillar is having a process. Mine starts with finding inspiring reference, photos, generated images, things that strike a chord with you. But here’s the thing: inspiring reference alone doesn’t make good paintings. Bad paintings have great references too.
What matters is that the scene resonates with you, and you’re responding to the composition inherent in it. You need to be cognizant of the issues and problems it might have. This kind of awareness comes through experience. You can’t read a book on composition and walk away knowing how to paint well. You just can’t.
Consistency Builds Everything
I’ve shown up every week for a year. Maybe I had a little illness here or there, but for the most part, I got in here and did my thing. It’s good to be consistent. It’s good to persistently go after things, especially if it’s in alignment with what you want to do.
Painting is what I want to do. Teaching is my avocation. I love to impart hard-won knowledge.
You’re the Only You
You’re the only person that’s ever going to be like you. You don’t need to worry about what’s come before or what’s going to come after. You can express yourself now. If you work at it, your expression of what you are will be something other people want to tune into.
Attention is the currency of our age, and it’s a limited resource. But don’t get too hung up on reception. Create your wonderful paintings and keep going. Just create. You care about your last painting and how your next one’s better, and that’s what gives your life meaning.
Mastery Is a Journey, Not a Destination
Don’t spend time going, “Oh mastery, mastery, I’ve got to get there.” Masterpieces are byproducts of the process. They almost never result from sitting down thinking, “Yeah, this is going to be my masterpiece.” Usually they just happen because the stars aligned. You had the right energy. You were conscious that day. You had an amazing reference.
The journey is the point. The paintings are artifacts of the journey. They’re the rings of a tree building up and up and up. I sell some work, but I create a lot more paintings than I sell. This is the beauty of it, it’s a process, it’s a journey.
If I go a few days without painting, I start feeling weird and not good. Get yourself to that place. That momentum will carry you forward. It will give your life immense amounts of meaning.
The Practice: Paint Every Day
Do one a day. You want involvement with life. You want to make things happen. You want meaning. Paint every day and throw the bad ones away.
If you’re only doing three paintings a year, you’re going to be loathe to throw away the bad one. You’ll get attached. Meanwhile, you’re in a negative reinforcement loop: “You suck. You suck, bro.”
But if you do a painting a day, it’s easy to throw it away. You’ll have a big stack of good paintings. People will come around and say, “Wow, I didn’t know you were so good.” Yeah, you’re good, because they don’t see the crap.
All those bad paintings, you’ve got to make them. You’ve got to get them out. The experience of making that bad painting is incredibly valuable.
Materials Matter, But Not How You Think
You don’t need the finest materials. As a matter of fact, when you’re starting out, make paintings with what you have. But don’t go too cheap on brushes. Don’t grab the office Depot brush or the dollar store Chinese brush. Those won’t work.
A decent bristle filbert costs six or seven bucks and works great. You’ve got to know what to buy and try things out.
Super cheap brushes will make you struggle. Dollar store painting knives with no flexibility are bad news. But don’t think you need the very best of everything.
A limited palette is where I recommend starting:
- Titanium White
- Ivory Black
- Cad Yellow and Cad Red (or substitute Alizarin Crimson for the red)
- A blue (Ultramarine, Phthalo, or Prussian)
Then add:
- Burnt Sienna (so useful for landscape painting, earthy reds are everywhere)
- Yellow Ochre (challenging to mix with a limited palette, which is good for you)
Don’t think there’s magic in any individual tube. What matters is pigment. Crappy student paints don’t have enough pigment, they’re filled with filler. It’s a false economy. Dealing with quality paints early on will make you strong.
Technique: Vary How You Hold Your Brush
The best advice is to try different things. Play around. Have fun with it.
Don’t expect to match a master stroke for stroke. That doesn’t work. What works is learning to change how you’re holding the brush. At first, like driving, you’re conscious of everything. Push the gas. Push the brake. Turn the wheel. But a lot of that becomes automatic. The same happens with brushwork.
A Filbert has a little toe that acts like a small brush. It has a bevel, that’s another size brush. You can use the flat or even that area. A lot of things you can do with your brush. Your brushwork will be completely unique to you.
Modulation: Always Be Modulating
ABM: Always Be Modulating.
Whatever you’re painting, a tree, a cloud, grass, you want colors moving. Cool and cooler greens, bluish greens on one side moving into warm orangey-yellow greens. Modulate from warm grays into cool grays. Modulate from warm whites into cool gray-whites.
A cloud moves from warm grays into cool grays. The blue sky itself modulates from darker, more indigo tones at the top down to more ochre, hazy, whitish blue at the bottom. Always be modulating anything you do in your painting.
Landscape-Specific Insights
Sky Payoff: Make sure the sky is going to pay off. The area of most contrast in your painting is basically where the subject will be, usually your darkest forms or vertical forms. Lightest sky, darkest tree. Push your lightest lights usually right up against the tree. Don’t worry it too much, but do realize that’s a good way to go.
Grass and Soil: Don’t go with the dull, boring stuff in the reference. Charge it up. You can saturate any color more as long as your whole painting isn’t saturated. Maybe you’ve got a big expanse of grass. Try putting a slash of red in the middle. See what happens. You can paint over it with green later, but it’ll be way different than green, green, green, green, green.
Work with Your Reference: Mess around with your reference in the digital world. Juice it up. Put a color cast into it. The masters didn’t have this ability, but they would have used it if they had.
That said, no reference image is perfect compositionally. You’re always the arbiter of what does and doesn’t end up in your painting. It’s your world you’re making.
Finding Your Voice
You have a style when you can’t escape it. Don’t worry too much about style. Worry about making your paintings. Make a lot of them. Your style will coalesce. People will see it, maybe before you do.
Analyze what you respond to in the compositions and structures of the masters. Drill down to the soul of it, the meat of it, the structure. That’s what carries the day, not the surface techniques or colors, but the structure that makes the work vital and enduring.
Embrace Limitations
Limitations are strength. For me, my number one limitation is oil paint. I don’t worry about acrylic, pastels, pencils, charcoal, watercolor. I’ve messed with all that stuff, but it’s a distraction. It’s already difficult enough to build mastery and facility with oil paint to make good work.
Another limitation: landscapes. I do figures and things, but landscapes are challenging enough for me.
I don’t mess with soft brushes. I work with hog bristle. You do what you want. If you want to express yourself as an artist, that’s fine. But if you want to get into mastery and create a body of work with substance, start limiting yourself.
The Production Mindset
I used to manage a manufacturing operation. A production mindset doesn’t mean the work has less meaning. It means I prep 10-20 boards instead of one, so it’s not an impediment to expressing myself. I clean all the brushes at once instead of one at a time.
I don’t have multiple canvases lined up on the easel. What I’m talking about is economizing on the things you can do all at once, so you have more time to express yourself. That’s what painting’s all about.
You Are Completely Fresh
There’s no person that’s ever been like you. Looked like you. Talked like you. Thought like you. Dreamed like you. Or will paint like you.
Artifacts are great because they’re tangible, real things in the real world. That’s why I keep making them. By your very nature, by the very nature of your existence, you are a fresh wrinkle. That’s what matters.
The Year Ahead
I’m going to continue to paint. I’m going to continue to record my process and pass along insights. Same stuff all the time: painting trees, skies, paths, rivers, streams, the occasional rock. We’ve got things to say about all of it.
There are more topics in the book we haven’t discussed. There’s more to say about painting. I don’t know how many skies I’ve painted, thousands. Does that mean I’m done? Does that mean I don’t want to paint another sky? No, it doesn’t mean that at all.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence