TheArtistsMagazine_Freemium_July2015

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Bugs &Butterfl ies!BEYOND THE PHOTO: How to Compose a Landscape

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Hailing from New York City (Jimmy Wright) and San Francisco (Duane A. Wakeham),

two friends discuss the habit of seeing—and the mystery of teaching art.

JIMMY WRIGHT INTERVIEWS DUANE A. WAKEHAM

ABOVE LEFT: Winter Storm Passing (pastel on 300-lb. rough water-color paper, 19x29) by Duane A. Wakeham

ABOVE RIGHT: Gather-ing Together No.2 (oil on canvas, 54x44) by Jimmy Wright

Painting WithoutPAINTING

34 www.artistsmagazine.com

34_tam0815Wakeham.indd 34 4/24/15 11:34 AM

There’s a well known encounter you had with Flora B. Giffuni, who founded The Pastel Society of America (PSA) in

1972. She was sitting for a portrait with master pastelists and when the session ended, she looked at your piece and said, “Where did you learn to draw?” That’s the question I’d like to ask you!I give most of the credit to the brief six

months I spent at Meinzinger, a commercial art school. One week of life drawing in the studio, fi ve hours a day, fi ve days a week, alter-nating with a week in the classroom, studying composition, color, anatomy and perspective.

In the life drawing sessions I had the good fortune to have an instructor who had been classically trained in Europe. We were drawing in charcoal on full sheets of paper. He would come by and put two marks on the paper: one was one inch from the top and the other, one

inch from the bottom. “Make the fi gure fi t between those two lines,” he’d say.

In the process, I learned to see quite well, learned how to measure, learned how to be concerned with relative proportions and then at the same time, I was beginning to under-stand how to defi ne volume in terms of value,

because we worked totally in charcoal. I laughed when I got to college and later when I started teaching community college. Students would take a life drawing class that met six hours a week over the course of 18 weeks. In four weeks at a commercial art school, I did more drawing than they did in a full semester.

I never really learned anat-omy, though I had an anatomy class, which only required us to draw a front, back and side view of female and male nudes and then the skeleton, but the draw-ings were copied from anatomy books without any discussion of what we were doing or why. Th us, I have a superfi cial knowl-edge of anatomy—I only know how to draw what I see.

Being able to draw what you see—how did that translate into your interest in landscape?I’ve always loved landscape; mine were always based on direct observation, though the landscapes weren’t always really well observed. I was drawing what I saw, but I wasn’t really prepared to think about com-

position. Th ere came a point when I realized that description wasn’t suffi ciently satisfying to me; I wanted to start creating more than just recognizable imagery.

I wanted to learn: What do you do with what you see? How do you take what you see, play with it, alter it, edit, etc., to create a stron-ger, more interesting composition?

Th ere was a story from the 1930s about two Santa Fe painters who had gone out paint-ing en plein air together. At the end of the

Jimmy Wright (above left) has paintings in the permanent col-lections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and Springfi eld Museum of Art. DC Moore (NYC) and Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago) represent his work.

Duane A. Wakeham (above right) was elected to the Pastel Society of America (PSA) Hall of Fame in 2000; Pastel Society of the West Coast (PSWC) named him Pastel Laureate in 2009. He is a member of the PSA Board of Governors (along with Jimmy Wright).Wright recorded their conversa-tion in his home in the Bowery of New York City in September 2014.

Phot

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35July/August 2015


5. Final: By the time the demo made its way to my studio, I realized I liked the

quality of color. What followed was a long process of adjusting shapes, such

as opening up and raising the shape representing water in the middle ground

and deciding where the other narrow horizontal marks representing water

should be placed to lead the eye of the viewer through Twilight Marsh (pas-

tel on paper, 19x29). Every time I stopped working, everything in the painting

had been developed more-or-less to the same degree. The last major decision

related to the two large tree shapes at the left. I pushed them farther into the

distance through a change of color.

Bolinas Marsh from Photo to Diagram to PaintingBY DUANE A. WAKEHAM

1. Photo Of Bolinas Marsh: The challenge

is to transform the information at hand into

an interesting painting.

2. Study: From cropping, repositioning and eliminating shapes, I divided the

space in Twilight Study (pastel on paper, 9x11) in order to move the viewer into

the foreground and pull the background closer. Studies like this allow me to

consider various compositional possibilities and solve problems in advance.

3. Diagram: Composition is the structure of

the painting, separate from both subject and

style. Superimposing the diagram over the pre-

liminary study reveals the underlying structure

intended for the painting—a rectangle divided

into four bands of varying widths, three of

which are subdivided, creating a total of seven

shapes, no two of which are the same.

4. Block In: For this demo at an International

Association of Pastel Societies conference, I

worked on a middle-value, burnt sienna-toned

paper (300-lb. rough watercolor) prepared with

gesso and pumice. I loosely indicated the dark

and light shapes, otherwise leaving much of

the ground untouched: a complete change in

overall color between photo and sketch.



session Gustave Baumann turned to the other, Louie Ewing, and commented that Ewing’s painting had too many details. “Louie,” he said, “Yours is a picture. Mine is a painting.”

I became interested in exploring that idea. Early on, I was painting pictures; now I attempt to make paintings.

How did you learn to make paintings rather than pictures?When I started at Meinzinger, my intention was to become an illustrator, but I realized I wanted a broader education. When I arrived at Michigan State, I was a fairly accomplished watercolorist; I hadn’t done that much work in oil. Abstract Expressionism was taking over; almost all the instructors had jumped on that bandwagon. I was exposed to that infl uence, but I felt like a fi sh out of water.

After I got my degree, I was off ered a teaching assistantship at Stanford University. When I arrived, I was told I was going to teach an expressive drawing class. Uncertain what that should be, I asked two instructors for guidance and both said they wouldn’t pre-sume to tell me how to teach my class. I didn’t see why representational drawing couldn’t be expressive, so that’s the way I taught that fi rst

class. You, however, would have known how to teach expressive drawing.

Who was that advisor, Matt Kahn?He had trained at Cranbrook Academy of Art; he was primarily a designer, but a wonderful instructor. He conducted a creative projects class for grad students in painting, printmak-ing, design, etc. We all came together at his home and presented our various projects. I went in with a fairly large oil painting. I set it up in front of the group, then Kahn turned to the group and said, “What is it?”

Somebody said, “I know what it is—free-way construction,” and he pinpointed the exact location. Matt said, “No, it’s not the freeway.”

Matt then turned to me and asked, “What is it?” I replied, “It’s a painting and the subject is the freeway.” His point was that there’s a diff erence between the subject matter and the object, which is a painting.

You understood that distinction, yet you are still today engaged in observing from life. Whose paintings were you looking at then?I was looking at everyone’s paintings; one of my responsibilities as a graduate assistant was to work with the art historians who were also

ABOVE: Above the Coast (pastel on 300-lb. rough watercolor paper, 19x29) by Duane A. Wakeham

37July/August 2015


painters. While I was pulling slides, grading papers, etc., I was really getting an intense art history background, more intense than I’d had as an undergraduate. Th e fi rst semester, I took a seminar in art history from Daniel M. Mendelowitz. Th rough the years Dan, his wife and I built a deep friendship, which led to my being asked to collaborate on the revision of his book, A Guide to Drawing, in the late 1970s.

Dan had surgery from which he never fully recovered. I agreed to work with him, and then he died. After one week, I was on my own. Th at was prior to our computerized age.

You wrote new commentary?We went through three editors during the time

I worked on my fi rst edition. Th e editors wanted half of the drawings of the original edition deleted, which meant selecting new drawings to replace them; they also wanted to reposition as many of the remaining images as possible. I had to rethink everything, substituting one drawing for another and rewriting the text.

How did doing all that work on the book affect your studio process? Certainly the way I thought about how you paint a painting changed. What I did in the book was group drawings. I wanted to show two or three drawings that approached the same problem in order to explore diff erent ways to deal with the problem.

Guide to Drawing is still in print; now it’s in its eighth edition. By the time of my third edition, I’d taken early retirement (in 1986) because I couldn’t teach, do the book and my studio work at the same time.

You are known as a pastelist, although up to this point, we haven’t talked at all about pastel.I began working in pastel in the late 1980s, when one of my dealers asked if I could pro-duce some works on paper in addition to the oil paintings to give buyers a less expensive option. Returning to watercolor seemed too daunting; pastel off ered the other choice. I’d had a limited introduction to pastel at Meinzinger in 1950. At that time, commercial artists used pastels only for “comps,” proposed designs or illustrations to present to the client for approval. Th e fi rst time I included pastel was in a gallery show in 1989. Two years later the fi rst painting I submitted to the Pastel Society of America was not only accepted but also received one of the top awards—and I’ve been part of PSA exhibitions ever since.

Artists as dissimilar as Hans Hoffmann and Edgar Payne have stressed the importance of composition. So let’s talk about composition!Th e pitfall that so many landscape painters fall into—most have not had formal art train-ing—is that they feel they have to close in the view they’re looking at. Th us, they get a tree mass that goes up at least one but sometimes both sides with the result that the viewer is looking through a tunnel, sometimes even with a proscenium across the top, almost like an old fashioned stage set.

BELOW: Floating Sunfl owers No. 3 (oil on canvas, 72x54) by Jimmy Wright



Certainly that is an approach to composi-tion; that’s closed composition but there’s also an open composition. Almost all of my paint-ings are based on open composition, meaning that I want the viewer to have the feeling that the landscape extends not only into space in terms of depth but also off to the sides, so that the view is not restricted. Many painters consider it necessary to run a continuous band across the bottom to establish a foreground and indicate the landscape beyond. In con-trast, I choose to leave my foregrounds open and accessible. I want the viewer to have the impression of being able to move into the depths of the painting.

Some of that has to do with drawing; some has to do with the positioning of shapes, and a lot has to do with manipulation of color.

I was looking the other day at a landscape posted online. My immediate response was that I wanted to add a square inch in the upper left hand corner to break up that tree mass to suggest that there is space beyond those trees. Th at one spot of light would have added wonders to the painting.

I kept thinking of a painting of Manet’s, of all the people in the park, a frieze of fi g-ures (Music in the Tuileries, 1862, Th e National

Gallery, London). Th e whole upper part is just a mass of dark trees, except right in the center, there’s a small V-shape of sky color; without that little shape of sky, the painting falls apart; with it, it becomes an exciting painting. Th at sliver of sky adds a diff erent dimension.

When you’re taking photos and doing studies you’re thinking in abstract terms: what is the scale; what is the density of mass, the value of mass. It’s almost a mental collage; you’re assembling the elements of composition, whereas so many people we know work from one photograph. Yes, you get the feeling they start at top, work their way to bottom, and when they get there, the painting is fi nished

Some of these artists show, I think we would agree, tremendous technical skill, but when you set out to copy a photograph, it doesn’t leave you any options. You get so caught up in the feeling that you have to replicate the photo that you aren’t willing to take any chances. So what happens if you’ve painted this beautiful sky and beautiful trees and then you get to where something is wrong in the photo? What are you going to change?

Beginning artists copy photographs—too

ABOVE: Big Sur (pastel on sanded paper, 9x13) by Duane A. Wakeham

39July/August 2015


Edgar Degas used photography to capture

gesture, but there was always a wonderful

manipulation between what the photo indi-

cated and what the painting implied; you can

see evidence of the (photographic) source but

it’s never a literal translation of the photo.

I was reading the other day that Manet

used photos a lot more than I had imagined,

and so, of course, did Gustave Courbet and

Thomas Eakins, but they were selecting

elements from the photos, not copying the

photo; they were selecting forms that they

incorporated into their work.

Choosing the Scene:As a photo (above), it’s pretty boring: the color

is not interesting; there’s no real variation. I

took this photo when I was teaching a work-

shop near Point Reyes National Seashore in

California. I was actually demonstrating paint-

ing a view that required me to keep turning to

the left and looking off to the left.

As I was turning back and forth from the

easel to the group assembled behind me, I

kept noticing this cluster of eucalyptus trees,

and when I fi nished the demo, I took out my

camera and photographed the scene. The

shapes of the trees were interesting and I

thought it could be the basis of a painting.

Studying the Scene:One of the things that bothered me when I

looked at the photo, and what I eliminated

immediately, was this group of dark trees on

the left side of the image. If we look at the

painting I created, you can see I simply got rid

of all of them.

Composition & Color: Photo to PaintingBY DUANE A. WAKEHAM

The photo has the sky going from side to side, and I like open compositions; I

like to suggest that the landscape extends in all directions illusionistically, so I

try to create that movement into the depth of the painting. Some artists would

choose to have this dark mass of trees go to the top of the painting, but that’s

not what the painting is about; it’s about the silhouette of the trees.

The color in the photo is not interesting. For the painting I worked on 300-lb.

rough watercolor paper toned with a mixture of burnt sienna and Venetian red,

a warm tone. I was thinking I’d do a reddish underpainting for the greens, but

as I began blocking in the shapes with these warmer colors, I thought, why not

leave it that way? Just because it was green in real life and in the photo doesn’t

mean that that’s what the painting had to be.

Analyzing the Scene:One element I liked about the photo, in addition to the wonderful silhouette,

was the vertical elements of the tree trunks, particularly left of center; verti-

cal lines suggest stateliness and monumentality. I liked the slight diagonal line

across the bottom of the image that was the slope of the hillside; diagonal lines

are often dramatic, but this one is not. It does, however, provide an interesting

relationship to the verticality of the trunks.

Then behind, the hill that’s slightly curved: if you look down below it in the

opening, you can see there’s a slight suggestion of a horizontal light band, and I

love horizontal lines because they suggest peace and tranquility.

As I was painting, I was concentrating on establishing these shapes and

relationships between more animated foliage masses, the vertical lines of the

trunks and the diagonal line in the foreground.

I knew that beyond that hill, the rill drops away to Tomales Bay, which is

affected by the tides. When the tides go out there are these rivulets of light; I

took the lights on the hillside and transformed them into quite undefi ned bands

of light that suggest mud fl ats of a bay at low tide. As a consequence, I’ve actu-

ally shifted the viewer’s position in terms of the landscape beyond: a composi-

tional play between vertical, horizontal and diagonal in Eucalyptus (pastel on

watercolor paper, 19x29).



often bad ones. And if you point out bad com-position or color, they respond, “But that’s the way it is.” You want to say to them, “Do you plan to exhibit the photo next to the painting to justify what you’ve done?”

A painting is separate from a photo, just as the photo is separate from the actual place. Each has its own reality. My concern is the painting.

Your reference to Manet draws upon a vast visual history in your head. That’s another thing the two of us share. We’re sitting in my art library, surrounded by monographs, from which I seek information and inspiration. You’ve spent a lot of time, as well, looking at original paintings, studying reproductions and selecting slides for your art history lectures.Th at’s how we learn about composition, how we learn color, and how we learn to see. Even as we’ve been sitting here talking, I’ve been looking past you at a wonderful tall, narrow, geometric abstraction that’s framed by the doorway behind you. Th e shapes are primar-ily rectangular, including a section of book-case wall, overlapping glass door and shutter opened against the brick wall, and a large painting, plus your work table. And the rich color, especially of the wall and painting, is all infl uenced by strong sunlight being refl ected off the wall of the building across the way. Th e color, incidentally, reminds me of some of the Roman wall paintings you and I love so much. What I’m doing is painting without painting—and when not doing that, I draw without drawing, which involves measuring—studying structure and volume, size and spatial relationships.

We’re talking about composition as an abstrac-tion, being the base for what essentially appears to be a realist work of art. Can you talk a little more about that?My concern is that formal education in compo-sition and color is primarily theoretical, often based on two-dimensional design projects. A major problem seems to be getting represen-tational painters to understand the need to establish a strong underlying abstract structure for their paintings. As for color, you learn not only by studying your subject carefully, but by looking at other people’s paintings. I remem-ber seeing a Sargent portrait at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and being stunned by the intensity of the color that was

refl ected into a shadow. A shadow you would think of as being dark had the most intense color in the painting, and it had to do with refl ected light. I doubt that classroom assign-ments alone prepare us to see such nuances unless we also learn to look. Although our paintings are quite diff erent, don’t they both stem from the same impulse—the thoughtful manipulation of shapes and color?

When artists are teaching, particularly in a workshop situation, they seem to focus on teaching technique.Th at’s why most people sign up with a work-shop instructor—they want to learn technique. When you’re working with a large group of people, you don’t really have time to recognize the need to go back to the basics. Students get

BELOW: Sunfl ower Cluster (oil on canvas, 56x44) by Jimmy Wright

41July/August 2015


caught up in simply trying to replicate what it is they see, using the technique of whoever is teaching the class.

Don’t you think so many classes are geared to technique because of the severe time limitation? Precisely!

You may have four hours with your group or one day or three days, at the most. Teachers are designing content to fi t the practicality of the time.

You’ve said it better than I did. Also, you’re aware that students expect to come out of the workshop with a wonderful painting—and the teaching is geared toward that. Th ey want a “success experience” so they feel they have come away with something worthwhile to justify the time and the expense.

I once suggested to a group that what I really wanted to do was allow them only two hours to do a painting. Whether they had a fi nished painting or not, I didn’t care; I told them I was convinced they would learn much more about painting by doing a new painting every two hours than by labor-ing away on one painting over the course of fi ve days. Just turning out paintings would help them get more comfortable with and more knowledgeable about composition and color relationships, as opposed to going away with something fi nished.

I never taught technique in all the years I was teaching. I tried to teach the basics: the steps you had to go through to create a composi-tion; how you would think of color, not in terms of representation, but simply in terms of color relation-ships. And I told my students my defi nition of landscape painting: an arrangement of shapes and colors.

Another thing we’re both aware of—when students who haven’t had an extensive formal education decide they want to jump in and paint, they don’t understand

color other than as hue: red, green, blue or value: is it light red or dark red? What is the intensity: bright or dull? What is the tempera-ture: warm or cool? Th ey see a red barn and they paint it red. Th e fi eld is green or yellow. Th ey put two equally intense colors side by side without realizing that’s not defi ning form in space. Th en they rely on an outline to separate the two.

It’s about subtlety. You can draw a build-ing, a structure as a shape, very accurately—but if you haven’t observed the color as accurately, it’s not necessarily going to come across as

ABOVE: Flowers in a Murano Vase (oil on canvas, 72x54) by Jimmy Wright



an illusionistic landscape in terms of three-dimensional space.

Th ese students aren’t aware of the subtle-ties of atmospheric or of aerial perspective either. Colors that are supposed to be in the background come jumping into the foreground.

It’s the complexity of working on a fl at two-dimensional surface but ultimately creat-ing the illusion of three-dimensional space, and how do you do that?

You and I look at paintings in, for instance, pastel exhibitions, and we are both keenly aware when a shape that is supposed to depict a shadow beneath a chin is misplaced. Th e shape will pop in front of the face instead of sitting below and going back beneath the chin.

How do we communicate to students the importance of that kind of detail, seeing that kind of detail? It’s such a basic, formal aspect of painting. To what extent is not seeing due to their dependence on photographs?Many artists—and not just students—seem unaware that photographs fl atten three-dimensional form and compress space so they

are unable to compensate for that in order to convey a convincing degree of volume and space.

Over the years, we’ve spent many hours conversing about art. Do you remember our fi rst meeting at the opening of a Paul Cadmus exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, New York City in September 1999? In the crowd we recognized each other as fellow members of the Pastel Society of America. I introduced you to Jack Levine, a master of social realism and satire. Since today we’ve talked about the importance of drawing and the forethought required to devise a composition, I’d like to end by telling our readers that, although you paint mostly landscapes, you attend a weekly life drawing session that you’ve been going to since 1987.When it’s beautifully done from life, a portrait or fi gure pops off the page. Th e form is posi-tioned interestingly within the format of the painting, and the color is adjusted to make the form three-dimensional and to make the back-ground work with the fi gure. If not, the head or the fi gure just fl oats in space. ■

BELOW: Ocean Light (pastel on 300-lb. rough water-color paper, 19x29) by Duane A. Wakeham

43July/August 2015


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