A Landscape Painters Guide to Indication vs. Delineation – Easel Talk #58
Transcript and Key Insights
What I like to do with my painting is indicate the forms and features of the landscape that I might be painting. I work in a somewhat loose, fractured manner that is still highly indicative of the forms being portrayed. However, I do not care to delineate. By delineating, I mean to define things in a detailed manner.
There are going to be times in your painting where you do need to do a bit of detail work, but for the most part, where painting excels is the indication of forms, not the getting in there and doing precise draftsmanship, that’s illustration.
From Detail to Suggestion: My Journey
I excelled at delineation for the majority of my life as an artist. I was a drawer and I always had a great love for accuracy and detail in rendering. I got fairly proficient at it, good enough to get a job doing illustration for a living. After many years of toiling away at that, it occurred to me that as much as I loved detail and as much as I thought it was very worthy to chase after that as a goal, a lot of times I’d be handing my big book of art to people and they would just be leafing through it. There might be a drawing that I spent 14, 15 hours on, and they’d go flying right past that yet they might linger on something else that only took me five minutes and that put a little bugbear in my mind right there.
And that is; time and attention spent on draftsmanship doesn’t necessarily equate to emotional resonance with the viewer and that’s what art is all about. That’s why people will spend time with your work and will care about it, because you struck some sort of chord. I eventually went from really appreciating and pursuing detailed sorts of art styles to loosening up more and more.
When I got to painting, I started out with little sable brushes and doing, you know, kind of a more illustrative approach, but increasingly I could see that wasn’t the way to go. It’s been a real progression from back in 2009 or so when I started with the landscape painting to where I am now.
Just Through Suggestion: The Viewer’s Experience
When creating a landscape painting you want the viewer to be very clear about what they are looking at. You also want there to be an aspect of loose flowing energy that pulls everything together, creating a whole picture rather than just the sum of its parts. The tighter that things are rendered, the less room there is for the imagination of the viewer to fill the spaces in between.
Many of the landscape painters before the 1800s definitely chose delineation. Constable, as loose as some of his stuff could be, his finished work was always pretty well rendered. The evolution, the advancement of landscape painting into realms of more natural quality, definitely involved painters leaning more into indication. When a painting is overly detailed, our minds will tend to block out most of that information and instead start scanning the work section by section. What you really want is for the whole painting to just go in to the viwers mind, in one go.
The Power of Suggestion: Invitation and Participation
The approach of indication over delineation connects directly to Tonalism’s philosophical underpinnings. The Tonalists came in after the Hudson River School and the Hudson River’s guys were very similar to the Tonalists in that they were after a luminous, emotional and spiritual sort of approach to the landscape. However, the biggest difference between them was the delineation over indication factor. For the Tonalists, it was through the influence of the Europeans coming in, the Barbizon guys, which metastasized into the French and American impressionists and the Tonalists. That was just a looser approach to painting in general.
By suggesting rather than explicitly defining every detail, as painters, we invite the viewer’s mind to participate in completing the image. Every person looking at your work has a giant unconscious reservoir of archetypal trees, rocks, ponds, roads, you name it. That’s why it’s incumbent on you as the painter to play on that, to use that reservoir they have, to indicate things in your work then let them complete the painting in their mind.
When you can indicate things with a few strokes and allow the viewer to complete the picture, there’s a greater communication between you and the viewer. There’s more of an emotional exchange between the two of you now. It’s a different sort of discipline than just working everything out. It’s a lot more open and free. Also, it requires more practice because for you to put the stroke down and to leave it alone and have it communicate to the viewer what you’re trying to express means that you’re going to have to practice quite a bit. This approach allows painting to become more than just a representation of reality. It becomes an exchange of internal states.
Visual Coherence and Psychological Impact
A greater reliance on indication yields a more cohesive and unified scene. Subsuming detail allows the forms to more easily interact and resonate with each other and for the variances in color and modulation to play across the paintings forms in a way that’s appealing. Excessive detailing of forms creates a constipating effect on the visual cortex. I’ve done paintings myself where the whole painting is looking okay, but there was maybe some rocks and with rocks is that because of their nature, it’s really easy for them to take on too much detail, too much significance in the painting. And then it’s like they’re the focal point of the painting, which a lot of times isn’t what you don’twant.
How We Actually See
It’s always good to remind yourself as the painter that you only see a certain amount of any scene in focus at any given time. You scan and your eyes adjust incredibly quickly. We bring things into focus and adjust the impression of the light and dark values incredibly rapidly. And that projects a whole scene that’s actually created in our minds.
As a painter that you don’t really want people looking at your paintings like that. The Hudson River School, which created these giant paintings designed to be much bigger than we are, were scaned and paned much like nature itself. Even when tonalist work is painted large it is designed to work so the whole scene can be apprehended in one go. And then you could get closer and maybe delve into the more mysterious aspects of the composition or the colors, themes and subjects that were being explored in that painting.
It’s important for you as the painter to always have just one area of real focus in your painting and the rest is just indicated. So just one area that’s somewhat delineated, but even there, don’t get crazy with working out everything because when you do that, that becomes distracting.
BTW, If you’re trying to paint something, but some particular aspect of the painting is hard for you to pull off, maybe do some little studies or sketches off to the side. But when you go for it in the painting, just try and do it with the same sort of loose approach that you did everything else, because if you start worrying or over working that aspect, that painting is basically not going to be good.
Japanese Influence and Design
We look at artists like Vincent van Gogh and Whistler, and one of the reasons why these artists’ names have come through the ages and have lasted is because they were, in different ways, very critical in bringing the Asian influence together with the Western influence in art.
Japanese art came to Europe mostly in the form of woodblock prints and the Japanese woodblock artists were masters of simplification and design. The Japanese had their own version of perspective. It wasn’t as scientifically accurate as what we had come up with in the West, but in a sense, it was accurate for showing the way that people actually saw things. They were masters of the atmospheric perspective and importantly, they were not shy about flattening the picture plane.
This is one of the hallmarks of Tonalism. Tonalism doesn’t always care about giving you a 3D sort of perception of the scene. There’s a lot of flattening and design that goes on. This is just one of the ways that a greater emotional impact can be conveyed to the viewer. Van Gogh, a collector of the Japanese woodblock prints was also a big designer of his paintings.
The Tonalists understood this intuitively. Their misty atmospheric scenes were more stylistic than what had come before and reflected a deeper understanding of human perception and consciousness. A lot of what we’re trying to do with Tonalism is to raise the veil and show the reality behind perception. We’re trying to reveal the poetic and emotional reality of the landscape with paint.
The Working Method: Mass and Form
The predominant way that I create Tonalist paintings is by working with mass and form. I work with loose, large forms and a rough approach in the underpainting. Some of the underpaintings I’ve done in this recent four by six series have been incredibly loose. But that’s fine because I can just start letting the brush and the paint come in to define areas as I’m painting. You don’t need to actually draft or delineate everything in that underpainting stage.
I have done underpaintings in the past that were incredibly detailed and mapped out with tight grids and things like that. Sometimes I will do that, for some scenes that might be appropriate. Say I’m doing a real feature of the landscape out here for that tourist market. It needs to look like the actual peninsula that I’m painting. But a path coming out through the forest into the light? No, not really.
Reference in the Digital Age
In this modern digital age we have high resolution photography. But you don’t need super high resolution photos to paint from. You don’t really need all that detail. The main thing that’s going to make a successful landscape painting is going to be the interaction of the masses and forms in the scene and the variation and modulation of the colors. That may or may not be present in the reference image. You might need to bring that in as the painter.
A lot of times what people start doing, when they don’t know what to do while painting. Is to start bringing those bits of detail from the reference over into their painting, but of course it’s exhausting painting everything, so they can’t actually carry it through the entire process.
I pass this tip on a lot: you need to paint all the time, because you’re going to make paintings that are going to be bad and you’re going to struggle, you need to be able to just throw those away or paint over the top of them. The problem with painting only intermittently is that you’re going to be attached to those stinkers and they’re going to bring you down.
Generally for me, resolution, anything above a thousand pixels is fine. But I’ve worked with even less. I’ve worked with super minimal, tiny reference, especially when it comes to the master studies because so many of those cooler master paintings, there’s not a great, excellent detailed photo of it.
The Discipline of Restraint
A significant part of my personal journey as a painter has been learning how to leave things alone and let the big shapes come through. So many times when I’m going to repaint a reference, I just crop in on the focal point a lot tighter. I have a greater understanding of the relationship of the amount of tree to amount of sky to amount of road to where the horizon line needs to be now.
Learn how to leave things alone. Many artists begin with a desire to demonstrate technical skill, detail and precision. Don’t get hung up on what other people can do. Start thinking about what it is you do and get better at doing that. Once you find an area or type of painting you like to do, you should always be looking at ways of expanding, but expand what you do with the thought towards where you’re strong and what you have to express uniquely to the world as an artist and as a painter.
I’ve had people walk into my studio and call me a technical painter and “I gotta laugh.” What I do is not technical painting at all. I just have an ability to put things together. People will say ‘It’s detailed,’ but you just got my whole talk on indication versus delineation here, it isn’t. We want to go the opposite way. We don’t want to get into that delineating mode. We want to get into the indicative mode.
In a sense, all of us modern painters are impressionists even if we’re tonalists. We’re working with impressions of what we’re perceiving. We’re making impressions of that. To the degree that we keep those impressions looser and more expressive and less tight, we’re going to be able to convey a lot more emotion with our work and we’re going to make a greater connection with the viewer.
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