What Is "Painterly" Painting?

“Painterliness” generally refers to works with visible brushstrokes, “the result of applying paint in a less than completely controlled manner, generally without closely following carefully drawn lines,” in the apt words of Wikipedia.  

I’d like to offer a possibly clunkier, but arguably more useful working definition. Painterly paintings openly express, rather than absorb or synthesize, the aesthetic choices made at each stage of the creative process. 

Henri Matisse, Fruit and Coffeepot, c. 1898

In painterly painting, the painter’s presence is palpable in various aspects of the work (especially brushwork, but also composition, coloring and object relations, and tonality). The artist gives us the object depicted dynamically, the depiction visibly fused with the thought process behind depicting it.

William Nicholson, Still Life with Cup and Books, c. 1910

Such painting is often said to be primarily “about” painting or “about” seeing rather than primarily (or just) about the subject chosen. It invokes and includes the process of painting (as well as the more or less conscious act of "seeing") in the service, simultaneously, of realism, subjective expression, and an exploration of the processes at the heart of art and perception.

Stuart Shils, Big Sky, Sun Breaking Through Lackan Haze, 2003.

What's your take, and could you suggest any favorite "painterly" painters or paintings we should know about?

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house

Bavarian Gentian

in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom, ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Persephone (Rossetti)

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September

to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride
a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again

and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark
among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding
fathomless darkness on the nuptials.

Bavarian gentians, tall and dark, but dark

darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed hellish flowers erect, with their blaze of darkness spread blue,
blown flat into points, by the heavy white draught of the day. 

- D.H. Lawrence

Blue Morning Glory (La Farge)

The First Abstract Painting

Casper David Friedrich, The Monk By the Sea, 1810

"No situation in the world could be more sad and eerie than this—as the only spark of life in the wide realm of death, a lonely center in a lonely circle..." wrote an early admirer of this painting. "Since in its monotony and boundlessness it has no foreground except the frame, when viewing it, it is as if one's eyelids had been cut away."

The tiny figure of the monk (simultaneously a symbol of the spiritual inner life, a self-portrait of the artist, and a stand-in for the viewer) is dwarfed by three different kinds of voids, land, sea, and sky: the bare and pallid grassless foreground, the iron-black bar of the sea that shuts down the middle, and the amorphous expanse of vastness that is the sky which occupies the majority of the painting.

Without a repoussoir—a framing device that leads the viewer's gaze into the image - the emptiness of the foreground disrupts the viewer's relationship to the picture's space. One cannot mentally "penetrate" the image: Friedrich has created an unbridgeable gap between the monk and the viewer. The monk is cut off from us spatially and existentially, and there are no traditional landscape elements that might soften the effect. 

In June 1809, the wife of painter Gerhard von Kügelgen, an acquaintance of Friedrich, visited him and later wrote in a letter how shriveling she felt the loneliness of the setting to be, deploring the lack of consolation that a little more content - some sort of movement or narrative - might have brought to the painting's "unending space of air." If only she could have read Nietzsche or Sartre!

Critics have described The Monk By the Sea, painted between 1808 and 1810, as "perhaps the first 'abstract' painting in a very modern sense" because of its radical composition. Friedrich purposely left out the conventional devices that create depth. Friedrich wants the viewer to feel confronted by the question of mankind coming up against a vast and quite possibly "empty" universe. It's been compared to many other more or less abstract paintings, right up to Whistler and Courbet and, perhaps most significantly for our appreciation of a still often misunderstood artist of our own time, abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.

Gustav Courbet - The Beach at Palavas,1877

James MacNeil Whistler - Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, 1865 

Mark Rothko - Light Earth and Blue, 1954
& above Rothko: William Nicholson, Mending the Nets, c. 1910

The Most Beautiful Painting in the World... According to Proust

Jan Vermeer's View of Delft (1660-1661) may just be a perfect landscape painting. Once you've really looked at it, you realize it's the kind of thing you don't forget, that you could spend hours - a lifetime! - dreaming over it and still not have your fill. I've never seen the actual painting, but I'm captivated by the images of it that I've seen.

No great painting emerges out of pure invention, and Vermeer was building upon the solid foundations of the Dutch landscape tradition here. We can see this in the painting's scale, its low horizon line, the overall color and luminosity, and the big cumulous clouds casting their shadow on the waterfront while the area awash in sunlight peeps out behind. Here's a landscape by Van Ruisdael that puts the foreground in cloud shadow.

Jacob Van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields, 1671

Yet, the poise, charm, and energy of Vermeer's design, makes View of Delft unique. It's got an incredible degree of balance and integration between highly varied yet somehow harmonious elements!

It's arranged in a series of broad and irregular horizontal bands,"counterbalanced by smaller varied vertical units" (I'm relying for most of this on A.C. Barnes analysis which appears as an appendix to his quirky yet rigorous The Art in Painting. And this series of graceful rhythmical divisions and subdivisions interpenetrate and integrate with each other so as to unify the whole.

Radiography shows that Vermeer deliberately extended the reflections to the extreme right, the effect of which is to unify top and bottom and further anchor the whole design.

The cloud band forms "a series of three predominately vertical units; the row of buildings and trees is rhythmically subdivided by a more pronounced and varied pattern of upright elements, the gables, steeples, towers.

The reflections in the water carry the subsidiary vertical elements of the pattern to the area of the canal, and the figures (there are 15), the two posts, and the prow of the ship function likewise in the foreground bank." (Barnes, p. 455)

Each band's color notes contrast with those of the band it touches, and the general color tone thus produced for each area of the painting (the sky, the blue-red-green masses in the center, the water, the bank) contrasts with and sets off that of its neighbors.

Throughout, the drawing, which is accomplished through color and light, is expressive and not overwrought, highlighting the essential character of each aspect of the subject, whether the sun-baked brick, the green masses of the trees, the slightly blurred reflections, the figures or the space-relationships between them and the posts, etc. 

A treatise could be written on the how Vermeer expressed "the theme of blue and red, varied with minor motifs of gray and green," in the row of buildings and trees. The color notes are predominately brownish red and a blue "of extraordinary sensuous and structural quality, which is the key-note in this part of the design, and indeed is so powerfully eloquent as to be chiefly responsible for the individuality of the entire picture." (ibid)

French novelist Marcel Proust pits the exquisite beauty of one minute detail of the painting against the life of a character in one of his stories. The painting wins.

For a delightful commentary on Proust's use of the painting, along with the relevant excerpt, you have to check out this person's blog entry (and don't miss the comment on Aldous Huxley's pick for the most beautiful painting in the world.) 

How to Be Original

Aspiring artists often imitate an admired artist’s style. It's a great way to learn to paint and permanently  adds to one’s store of available techniques. 

Rembrandt. Self-portrait. 1666

Paradoxically, in most cases the admired work ultimately came to the admirer’s attention because it resonated with enough people as unique, deep, or original.... So not only the technique but the quality of originality itself can inspire emulation without one even realizing what one's actually responding to. And of course we prize originality in art over imitation. All artists probably have to some degree a desire to express their own unique vision of the world; presumably, over the course of artistic development, emulation ceases to be as powerful a force.

Robert Henri. Figure in Motion. 1913.

It’s like American culture - too often we emulate others who we imagine are enjoying “the good life” by wishing we were (or actually trying to become) as wealthy as we think those other people are. But it's really the wrong goal - that is,  it's a goal that isn’t really suited for what we want to achieve. 


Instead of focusing on becoming as wealthy or secure as we believe “the beautiful people” to be, we should try to focus on our ability to deeply enjoy our present life first. We will then have achieved the desired end without even trying. So with art. 


Would-be artists often begin by emulating the style of a particular artist or group of artists (plein-air painters who emulate aspects of the Rockport or the Impressionist style, say). Later, through the doing, comes one's own unique style. 


Says Robert Henri in the invaluable The Art Spirit: "Don't worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick to you and show you up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do."

Monet. Water lilies. (detail)

I think one does best, in life as well as in art, to focus on one’s own likes and loves, enjoying the pursuit of idiosyncratic experimentation. My own new goal is to live as much as I can in the work I do when I’m in love with what I’m doing for its own sake.

A Striking Couple

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Peasant Boy at a Market (l), Peasant Girl Catching a Flea (r). c. 1715.

These two caught my eye at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts the other day.

I love their simplicity. I think it's a large part of their power. 

The painter, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, is remembered as a successful artist of the late Baroque/Rococo period (c. 1680-1750). He studied with Crespi, one of the "Caravaggisti" (basically, hundreds of artists who painted in the Italian Baroque style of Caravaggio - i.e., darkish canvases in which piercing directional light dramatically pulls subjects out of the engulfing shadows).

Piazzetta here applies his own version of the style - but with his own sensibility. Where Caravaggio and most of his followers went for highly dramatic, often religious or mythological canvases, Piazzetta and to some extent Crespi sought a quiet serenity to be found in the unguarded moments of everyday lives.

Piazzetta, Peasant Boy at a Market

Perhaps the lack of pretense in Piazzetta is what makes him so different. Here, Piazzetta's, Peasant Boy at a Market appears simply at home in his own world, unconcerned by his own poverty as he is momentarily preoccupied with digging a presumably single, small coin from the folds of his little satchel. The same poise and unconcern radiates from the woman's face in the work's companion piece.

Piazzetta, Peasant Girl Catching a Flea.

In the painting of the woman, Piazzetta treats a theme that Crespi had also tackled - a woman removing a flea from her person. But whereas Crespi's painting candidly details the process with a rather harsh degree of realism only partly softened by the warm, womblike light pooling around his subject, Piazzetta's bolder, more stylized art fully and lovingly transforms the moment. It's Piazzetta's painting that more whole-heartedly redeems the common and sordid, the "all-too human."

The MFA suggests that as the son of a woodcarver, Piazetta brought a sculptural sensibility to the modeling of figures with light and shadow. Perhaps his humble origins informed his whole approach to painting, i.e. his "naturalistic images of ordinary life that are characterized by a dignified, sympathetic portrayal of his subject, often peasants," as the MFA says.The poetry in his work is wholly his own.

I think these paintings' lasting value springs not from anything innovative in Piazzetta's style but in his feeling for the world he knew, his sincerity. Sincerity in art is something one must feel or sense rather than see. La Farge defined it as the intention "to express what you care for most by the simplest means that will avail you... not your knowledge (of artistic representation) but your way of using it."

There's a sort of archetypal, universal quality in these two works, born of rendering ordinary people's lives with almost religious dignity, much as Millet did in the 1800s. They work beautifully together too. 

Glazing for Mood

Evening landscape by George Innes, 1890, produced by glazing.

In his biography of his father, American landscape painter George Inness, Jr., recounts the following anecdote concerning a demo his father performed for a student who'd come to call:

He squeezed a lot of raw umber on his palette, picked up the largest brush he could find, and with the aid of a medium that looked like Spaulding's glue he went at the canvas as though he were scrubbing the floor, smearing it over, sky and all, with a thin coat of brown. The young man looked aghast, and when Pop was through, he said:

"But, Mr. Inness, do you mean to tell me you resort to such methods as glazing to paint your pictures?"

Father rushed up to the young man, and, glowering at him over his glasses, as he held the big brush just under his visitor's nose, exclaimed:

"Young man, have you come here from the Art Students League to tell me how to paint? Then go back there and tell them that I'd paint with mud if it would give the effect I wanted."

****

Glazing - the technique of applying thin, translucent washes of oil color in layers - became a common technique for oil painters shortly after the Northern European artists of the 1400s re-introduced oil painting into general artistic practice.

Tonal painting by George Inness

Inness used it habitually, casting about his studio for a likely victim, selecting a finished painting, a hillside in morning light, perhaps, and proceeding to set the sun on it, "painting, glazing, and scumbling, scratching, and scrubbing" right over the already dry paint, until he was satisfied and the morning had turned to dusk. 

I'd had this overly cool-toned marsh in my studio for too long, so I decided to try the Inness-esque glazing technique as I'd watched Dennis Sheehan perform it in a workshop last week. 

Cloudswept Marsh (before)

Going at it with Winsor-Newton Drying Linseed Oil (Sheehan uses Grumbacher's pale drying oil, btw) I combined a transparent or semi-transparent yellow mixed with a little red (in my case Cadmium Yellow and Alizarin Crimson) for overall warmth, and then painted more darks into the wet layer of tinted oil (I used M. Graham's transparent Olive Green) - "painting into the soup," as Inness called it. Personally I like it a lot better now.

Late Evening Marsh (after)