Course Review - Ian Roberts' 'Brushwork & Color' Course

Earlier this month, I finished a Brushwork & Color painting class with Ian Roberts.  It was transformational.

There were a few challenges:

• Ian is an oil painter and all the demos were in oil.  I am a watercolorist, not interested in working with oil.
• We had a specific set of primaries to use.
• I am an inveterate comparer of my work to others'.  This does not go well for me. 
• I wanted to stay caught up despite a number of other things going on:  big house projects, kids dealing with covid & college/job stresses, my own job, etc. 

Some of my aha! moments:

• A good Standard Operating Procedure will get you a decent painting regardless of whether you're having a bad day or a bad attitude.  Follow the SOP.  
• Green in bright sunlight can be represented by a number of colors that aren't actually very green.
• Start by thinking about the focal area; let the rest fall into place after that.
• You can't ignore backgrounds.
• Sometimes the 6th version is when you get it.
• Value studies are very enjoyable.  I don't need an excuse to do them.   [I feel a series of value studies in purple coming on....]
• I'm better at still life than I think I am.
• It is perfectly acceptable to mix all the colors I need to get a color/effect, despite the watercolor 'rule' to never mix more than 2 or 3. 
• Purple vines are freaking awesome. [I already knew that.]
• Evening light goes really pink.
• I know my watercolor pigments well and have an excellent grounding in color theory.  I can trust my choices in primaries that are appropriate for watercolor. 
• It is possible to paint flowers in large simple masses and have it work
• Consider everyone's piece on its own merit, not on how closely it matches the ref photo.  Look for the genius in their work.
• Goal:  Sing the song on the paper, with gusto, my way.   It doesn't matter how everyone else is painting the same scene.

Now that the course is over, I'm formulating my goal for the next few months.  It will probably have something to do with working through my own reference photos and seeing if some of the bad ones can be salvaged.  [Seriously,  Ian had us working with nothing but greeeeeeen ref photos that had good bones, and showed us ways of tweaking them to make them really interesting.  I am sure I can find ways to do that with my own ref photos.]

Here is some of my work from the course: 

Value Study

Muting Color: Still Life with Squash

Muting Color Exercise 2

Limited Palette: Purple/Blue instead of greens.

Painting Light 1

Painting Light 2

Poppy Field

Daisies

Ease

I've been thinking a lot about ease lately.  

This year has been the antithesis of ease.  Mostly I do just fine, until suddenly I find that I am so very not fine.  Navigating the roller coaster is uncomfortable and difficult.  

Everything seems harder.

Over and over lately I've been repeating the question:  How can I make this easier? How can I make this easier?   How can I make this easier?   What am I doing wrong?   How can I make this easier?

Which begs the question: What is ease?  

For me, ease is the quality of a process that obtains maximum results for minimum effort.  

Maximum results.  Minimum effort.  

Five apricots.  Reference photo.

I'm at that stage in my creative process where I'm painting a lot of stuff that ends up in the dud pile, to be cut up and used for journaling pages later.  It's discouraging.  I'm trying to be focused so that I can use this time to learn, practice, and refine new skills.   But the duds keep coming.   

Piles of them.  

And in my mind the constant refrain:  Why is this so hard?   What am I doing wrong? What can I do to make it easier? 

I started examining my stories around ease.  I have familiar ones:

• Work is good. Good people work. If I work, then I am a good person.
• In order to be a good person, I have to work.
• The harder I work, the better person I am.
• I have achieved some awesome stuff by working hard. Therefore, great achievements only come after hard work.
• I am really good at making things harder. 
• I don't know how to make things easier.   

And I discovered some new ones:

• I feel like I have to MAKE things easier.  
• The more I control things, the easier they are.
• Control = ease.  Ease = control.

What if I changed things up a bit? 

Make it easier.

Make Let it be easier.

Let it be easier. 

Let it be.

What if ease is about letting things be instead of controlling them?

Honestly, I actually have no idea, at all, if that's true or not.

Five apricots.  Drawing.

I am all about the plan.  Getting a specific outcome.  

That requires control.   If I let go of control, I let go of the specific outcome.

New Question:  Is the point of ease to learn to let go of a specific outcome?  

I'm not so sure.

Is that the kind of doctor you want?   The kind of auto mechanic?  The kind of builder?  I don't think so.  Specific outcomes can be very important.

Maybe the point is to understand where it's important to have a plan and keep your eye on a specific outcome and where it's important to let it go and to work with the flow instead.

That feels much more a yin/yang thing, requiring judgment, intuition and balance. [That doesn't sound easy, but perhaps it does fit the requirement of maximum results for minimum effort.]

This begs new questions:  

• What am I doing that requires a specific outcome?  
• What requires flow?  
• What can I learn to just let be?
• What am I doing that needs to change categories? 
• To what extent does 'habit' contribute to ease?
• Is ease a function of one's ability to make something a habit?

Which brings me to art.  It's a perfect place to learn to go with the flow, especially since I'm a watercolorist and trying to literally 'go with the flow'. 

I can't seem to do it. 

There is So. Much. Pressure. to produce photorealistic art, regardless of your medium.  [Look at the gorgeous piece that took Best of Show at the Hoosier Salon:  https://hoosiersalon.org/portfolio/96th-annual-exhibition-2/] 

Photorealism is a specific outcome that requires a lot of planning and work.   Not a lot of flow.  

Even if I decided to shoot for impressionism or tonalism or some other -ism, that, too, is a specific outcome, which by extension, requires planning and work.

So again, I return to the questions:  How can I get maximum results for minimum effort?  How can I make this easier? --> How can I let this be easier? --> Should I just let this be? 

And that in turn begs another question:  What is it exactly that I am trying to make easier?  What is it exactly that I could possibly just let be? 

Am I trying to make each piece easier?

Am I trying to make the whole process easier? 

That last one especially resonated.  If I am trying to make the process easier, and the way to 'ease' is by letting it be, then the trick is to recognize what my process actually is and just flow with it.  Accept it; embrace it; go with it.  Even the hard parts.

Part of my process is the exploration phase.  It's the hardest part for me.  

And then this question shows up:  Why is it so hard - What makes it so hard?

Is it because exploration needs an element of play and I'm just not good at playing?

Is it because I am I trying to make myself/my art/my process something that I'm not/it's not? 

There are some big things that resonate for me here.  For the next while I'm going to be thinking about what makes a piece easier and what makes the process easier.   

What does 'ease' mean for you?

Keeping it Simple

I'm taking a drawing class right now and for the next year will be doing a drawing a week like this one.

This time the reference photo was provided by the instructor, Ian Roberts and the exercise was in cropping.   The ref photo was a bigger scene of a French village.   

I'm pretty familiar with simple architecture and roof lines, but this piece gave me fits. I wasn't sure I could do it. I struggled. I fussed and fussed and fussed.  I made many disparaging remarks about French villages.  

In the end, I got the darks and lights in the right places and it looks as intended - like a French village.  

I learned more than drawing in this piece.   I learned that I can do more complicated, fussy compositions IF I remember to leave large areas very simple and to focus only on the details in the focal area.   

I have to keep repeating that to myself .   Keep it simple.  Keep it simple. 

I have a tendency to expect things to be hard.  Part of me wants them to be hard so that when I finally get it, it feels like a huge accomplishment - one deserving of a large reward.  [Which I never give myself, btw.]  It's how I prove my worth.  

However, over the years, this habit of doing hard things has been accompanied by a goodly amount of fear. I am always battling to prove myself. I'm always afraid that this time I won't be able to pull it off.

 

I need to stop.

I keep wondering if there's a way to make things easier and I think this is the key:  Keep it simple.  Keep the harder work just at the focal area.   

In this drawing class we spent a lot of time learning to intentionally focus on the important stuff and to intentionally simplify the rest. 

This is a strategy worth cultivating in many areas of my life.

Andy Evansen Workshop

Last week, I spent a few days in central Michigan at a workshop given by Andy Evansen [pronounced even-son].   I can't say enough good things about the experience.

There were 14 of us in the class, all skill levels.  Andy demonstrated at least 6 paintings and we had a chance to do dozens of practice blurbs, as well as paint 3 or 4 pieces like these to take home. 

Andy was prepared, dynamic, funny, open, kind, and happy to be there.   It was one of the best workshops I've ever attended.

Here is some of the work I did during the class.  These first two pieces below were first demo-ed by Andy, then we went back and tried them ourselves.




Our focus was on really understanding and practicing the use of value studies as we prepare to do a piece.  The object of these activities was to do a value study first, then paint the color study on the same page.

This barn scene was a reference photo of Andy's.











This Puerto Rico street scene was one of Andy's reference photos, too.   We spent a lot of time practicing cars, people and wires. 

I'm loving that line of cars.

Finally, we worked on one of our own reference photos.  It was a totally different experience to have to choose the shapes, do the value study, then add the color on our own.

One of the things I liked best about the workshop was the very realistic and kind mindset Andy brought to the group. 

We were there to experiment and learn, not produce masterpieces.   There was no pressure to do something fabulous and no public critique.  Andy was there to answer questions and to offer suggestions.

This was really one of the best learning experiences I've ever had.