Mid-Ocean

Charles H. Woodbury, Mid-Ocean, 1894. Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.

This is Ogunquit, ME artist Charles Woodbury's "salon painting" and the one that made his name. I'm posting it because I promised to in a previous post - and also because it rocks. 

This painting is owned by the Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.'s public library. Woodbury painted studies for it right off the stern of a steamer that he took to Europe with his wife Marcia Oakes Woodbury a few years after they were married. 

The entire conception of this work was something new. Most marine paintings included some land or some ships; Woodbury suspends the viewer midpoint over the waves. He would use this compositional device many times over the course of his career. It allowed him to treat his theme in a more modern, abstract manner than his predecessors, who wouldn't have thought of composing the canvas with a freedom inherited from  Japanese woodblock design.

Woodbury was trained as a mechanical engineer, so he understood the physics of wave motion and water swell. "Don't just paint a thing, paint it doing something," he said. But it was the influence of French realism that allowed him to see past the romantic visions of the previous generation's Hudson River marine painters. It was Realism, Barbizon, and Impressionism that told him it was alright to paint just what a passenger aboard a modern steamship could see simply by leaning off the rail. 

And yet Woodbury was, at his best, a poet in paint as well; how else could one see to suggest the effervescent trace of human presence vanishing on the surface of the mighty forces and moods of the ocean as they have always been and will be forever more?

Bruce Crane - Quiet Complex Simplicity

The Harvest Moon, by Bruce Crane, c. 1900

A student of mine sent in this autumnal landscape by Bruce Crane. As a prime example of 19th-early 20th century Tonalism, this lovely painting employs soft lines and a minimally limited palette in the service of delicate, subtlely modulated tones to produce an achingly lyrical, melancholy mood, an almost musical harmony of light, color, shape, and line.

The composition, as well as the atmospheric tonality, owes a rather large debt to George Inness.

George Inness, Moonlight, Tarpon Springs Florida, 1892

In both of the paintings above, the horizontal canvas is divided into four quadrants, three of which are blocked-in, atmospheric masses and the fourth of which is open sky crossed by two vertical trees (in both cases, one is dominant and one subordinate, one straight and one curvy). The foreground is in relative shadow and the middle ground gets a stripe of moonlight from one side of the canvas to the other.

Inness used some variation of this composition in many of his most evocative paintings (including one of my very favorites, Summer at Montclair, 1891). He placed spiritual significance on the geometrical arrangements of his landscapes and didn't hesitate to bring the four quadrants together in the exact center of the canvas, balancing out the resulting symmetry with the asymmetrical arrangement of masses and lines, as he did above in Tarpon Springs.

Crane uses some bared rocks and a patch of grass to mark the central dividing line of his landscape, but he raises the horizon line into golden mean/rule-of-thirds territory. Upping the contrast of the image shows that what seems at first to be a straightforward vertical arrangement contains significant "orthogonal dynamism" (High-Falutin for diagonals), achieved not with obvious lines nor color, but with subtle variations in the tonal values. (Hence, Tonalism)

Photoshop reveals the subtle diagonals that bring a sense of movement and life to an otherwise stripy composition. 

Note that, except for the moon, the brightest values appear on the two middle-to-background trees silhouetted against the background shrubbery. Inness placed most of the action in the middleground too, but here Crane, in the absence of figures, uses that technique to draw our eyes even deeper into the painting.

First, the eye strikes the main pair of trees in shadow at the center. It quickly glances along the exposed rock to the more brightly lit pair of trees in the back (which deliver a strong performance for supposedly supporting players). From there the gaze lands on the luminous disk of the rising moon, which Crane has floated quietly in a glowing web of pale violet and orange that's as true as any painting I've seen to the delicate atmospheric color tones of evening in New England.

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."

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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)

Bruce Crane, winter radiance

Bruce Crane stands out as one of the most sensitive and ethereal of the American Tonalist painters who saw themselves as carrying the torch of the American landscape tradition after the demise of the 19th century Hudson River School style. Crane helped found a colony of landscape painters at Lyme Connecticut. Most active as a community during the first decades of the 20th century, they blent Barbizon and Impressionist sensibilities toward a fresh, evocative re-visioning of the American landscape.

His landscapes are spare, poetic meditations steeped in atmosphere. Painting into the 1920s, he increasingly suffused his arrangements of natural elements with a golden radiance suggestive of a spiritual sensibility. His subject is usually common scenery - everyday scraps of nature: pastures gone to seed, tall, thin scraggly trees, collapsing rock walls, fences, and stumps. But he wonderfully half-dissolves his forms in the airy atmosphere he builds around them (for all their subjects' gauziness, these paintings's surfaces are quite thick with substantial layers of paint).

Like so many of the Tonalists who followed in George Inness's footsteps, Crane spent time in Europe where he was awed by the compositions and moods of Barbizon painting. Inness, it seems, had articulated a vision of nature very like Crane's some years before.

The above painting is by Crane. In mood, tone, and even somewhat in composition it recalls a well-known Inness depicting a lone figure making its way through scrappy snow on Christmas Eve (below).

Another Inness in which Crane could have found inspiration for his own work.

I'll return to Crane another day to really get into some of his most interesting later work.

Wyant: Romance of the Real

The landscapes of nineteenth-century American painter Alexander Helwig Wyant (1836-1892) are rich in an emotional response to otherwise "ordinary" natural phenomenon.

Wyant's career took off during the American Civil War, a traumatic period that, in terms of landscape painting, strained the Hudson River School's unquestioning faith in an orderly, harmonious universe built upon a divine First Cause.

Wyant was far from alone. As American ex-patriots returned from studies in France during the 1870s and '80s, they turned their backs on the conventions of the dominant Hudson River School and supplanted it with an entirely different take on nature and mankind's place in relation to it.

Although the approach owes a debt to French Barbizon painting, Wyant's take on it is typical of early American Modernism, I think, in his insistence on the beauty of the un-glamourous, common-place, and neglected. Wyant scholar Anthony E. Battelle finds direct evidence in Wyant's work for the impact of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species on nineteenth century art:

"His alignment with Darwinian concepts as applied to botany and geology, whether or not intentional, left him non-aligned with the conceptual underpinnings of transcendental artists of the Hudson River School. His canvases record the behavior of natural objects according to natural laws in unpicturesque locations where that behavior is most evident."

Batelle is building an online catalog of Wyant's work that you can access here and from which the above quote and these images of Wyant's paintings are taken.

Wyant's Moonlight and Frost

It's easy for practicing artists to get caught up in technical matters of composition, values, color, and light in historical paintings. Scholars such as Batelle remind us that great art reflects the emotions and ideas of its time, and that what paintings say is as important as how they say it.

The Tonal Van Gogh

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, Vincent van Gogh, 1885

Earlier in his career, Vincent van Gogh experimented with the styles of his time, including Impressionism, capturing light and movement with swift, unfussy brushstrokes, and a kind of tonalism, perhaps based on the earth-tone palette of his homeland's "old masters," restricting his colors to just a few related hues and exploring a range of midtones, lights, and darks within them.

Autumn Landscape allowed van Gogh to explore dynamic rhythms not only at the level of the image but on the surface of the painting. The bold, directional way he laid strokes of tone-related color on the sky creates a horizontal rolling "s" motion that hints at the future dynamism in Starry Night.

Just considering the use of line, the sky's undulations are gently counterpointed by the hilly ground. But the vital energy in this painting comes from the contrary directions that the paint takes throughout the whole.

Van Gogh juxtaposes horizontal brushstrokes in the foreground and vertical strokes in the vegetation around the tree trunks and background trees. He mixes the two in the dominant tree's foliage at the composition's center to create a vivid burst of leaves and branches that supports a strong sense of motion in the curvature of the trees toward the left.

In the landscape below, van Gogh uses the same techniques in a more modest application while brightening the intensity ("chroma") of the colors.

Although he's often associated in the public mind with wild, bright colors, he primarily used color expressively - to create emotion-charged visions of his world.

Shoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1888

In the process, he often used what I would consider a tonal approach to convey a subtle, muted complexity and a somber, poetic mood.

Weekend Update

The art history posts I write here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday take up all the time I can devote to my blog during the week. However, I also want to occasionally share news and views related to my work as a painter. Hence a new feature: weekend updates.

So here is a recently completed painting that I'm calling Lamprey River, Dusk. This came out of an oil painting class I'm offering through the Cornerstone Gallery in Newmarket, NH on Wednesday nights. We perched our easels on a floating dock around 6:45 p.m. and raced to capture the effects of the lights and shadows as the evening drew down around us.

I've got a one-night show (and complimentary wine tasting - yes!) coming up in Boston on Tuesday the 28th at the Liberty Hotel, so I'm working to add a few fresh pieces to the selection I've already set aside. I want to put together a show in which all of the pictures work with each other and contribute to a strong, coherent effect as a whole.