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08

How to Compose
a Landscape

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BEYOND THE PHOTO:

74470 02306

Display until August 3, 2015

Roadside Weeds (detail; watercolor, 14x12) by Mindy Lighthipe

Painting Without

PAINTING

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

34

www.artistsmagazine.com

ABOVE LEFT: Winter

Storm Passing (pastel

on 300-lb. rough watercolor paper, 19x29) by
Duane A. Wakeham
ABOVE RIGHT: Gather-

ing Together No.2 (oil

on canvas, 54x44) by
Jimmy Wright

I give most of the credit to the brief six

inch from the bottom. Make

the figure fit between those two
lines, hed 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 understand how to define 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 anatomy, 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 drawings were copied from anatomy
books without any discussion
of what we were doing or why.
Thus, I have a superficial knowledge of anatomyI only know
how to draw what I see.
Being able to draw what you
seehow did that translate into
your interest in landscape?

months I spent at Meinzinger, a commercial

art school. One week of life drawing in the
studio, five hours a day, five days a week, alternating 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

Ive always loved landscape;

mine were always based on
direct observation, though the
landscapes werent always really
well observed. I was drawing
what I saw, but I wasnt really
prepared to think about composition. There came a point when I realized
that description wasnt sufficiently 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 stronger, more interesting composition?
There was a story from the 1930s about
two Santa Fe painters who had gone out painting en plein air together. At the end of the

Photo by Brenda Mattson

heres 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? Thats the question Id like to
ask you!

Jimmy Wright
(above left) has
paintings in the
permanent collections of the Art
Institute of Chicago,
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the
Center for Book
and Paper Arts
in Chicago and
Springeld 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 conversation in his home
in the Bowery of
New York City in
September 2014.

July/August 2015

35

Bolinas Marsh from Photo to Diagram to Painting

BY 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 preliminary study reveals the underlying structure
intended for the paintinga 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.

36

www.artistsmagazine.com

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 (pastel 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.

session Gustave Baumann turned to the other,

Louie Ewing, and commented that Ewings
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 hadnt 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 influence,
but I felt like a fish out of water.
After I got my degree, I was offered 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 wouldnt presume to tell me how to teach my class. I didnt
see why representational drawing couldnt be
expressive, so thats 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, printmaking, 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 isfreeway construction, and he pinpointed the exact
location. Matt said, No, its not the freeway.
Matt then turned to me and asked, What
is it? I replied, Its a painting and the subject
is the freeway. His point was that theres a
difference between the subject matter and the
object, which is a painting.

ABOVE: Above

the Coast (pastel

on 300-lb. rough
watercolor paper,
19x29) by Duane A.
Wakeham

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 everyones paintings; one of

my responsibilities as a graduate assistant was
to work with the art historians who were also
July/August 2015

37

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

painters. While I was pulling slides, grading

papers, etc., I was really getting an intense
art history background, more intense than Id
had as an undergraduate. The first semester, I
took a seminar in art history from Daniel M.
Mendelowitz. Through 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. That was prior to our computerized age.
You wrote new commentary?

We went through three editors during the time

I worked on my first edition. The 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 different
ways to deal with the problem.
Guide to Drawing is still in print; now its in its
eighth edition.

By the time of my third edition, Id taken early

retirement (in 1986) because I couldnt teach, do
the book and my studio work at the same time.
You are known as a pastelist, although up to
this point, we havent talked at all about pastel.

I began working in pastel in the late 1980s,

when one of my dealers asked if I could produce some works on paper in addition to the
oil paintings to give buyers a less expensive
option. Returning to watercolor seemed too
daunting; pastel offered the other choice.
Id 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. The first time I included pastel
was in a gallery show in 1989. Two years later
the first painting I submitted to the Pastel
Society of America was not only accepted but
also received one of the top awardsand Ive
been part of PSA exhibitions ever since.
Artists as dissimilar as Hans Hoffmann and
Edgar Payne have stressed the importance of
composition. So lets talk about composition!

The pitfall that so many landscape painters

fall intomost have not had formal art trainingis that they feel they have to close in the
view theyre looking at. Thus, 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.
38

www.artistsmagazine.com

Certainly that is an approach to composition; thats closed composition but theres also
an open composition. Almost all of my paintings 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 contrast, 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. That one spot of light would have added
wonders to the painting.
I kept thinking of a painting of Manets,
of all the people in the park, a frieze of figures (Music in the Tuileries, 1862, The National

Gallery, London). The whole upper part is just

a mass of dark trees, except right in the center,
theres a small V-shape of sky color; without
that little shape of sky, the painting falls apart;
with it, it becomes an exciting painting. That
sliver of sky adds a different dimension.

ABOVE: Big Sur

(pastel on sanded
paper, 9x13) by
Duane A. Wakeham

When youre taking photos and doing studies

youre thinking in abstract terms: what is the
scale; what is the density of mass, the value
of mass. Its almost a mental collage; youre
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 finished
Some of these artists show, I think we
would agree, tremendous technical skill, but
when you set out to copy a photograph, it doesnt
leave you any options. You get so caught up in
the feeling that you have to replicate the photo
that you arent willing to take any chances. So
what happens if youve 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 photographstoo
July/August 2015

39

Composition & Color: Photo to Painting

BY DUANE A. WAKEHAM

Edgar Degas used photography to capture

gesture, but there was always a wonderful
manipulation between what the photo indicated and what the painting implied; you can
see evidence of the (photographic) source but
its 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), its pretty boring: the color
is not interesting; theres no real variation. I
took this photo when I was teaching a workshop near Point Reyes National Seashore in
California. I was actually demonstrating painting 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 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.

40

www.artistsmagazine.com

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 thats
not what the painting is about; its 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 Id 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 doesnt
mean that thats 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; vertical 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 thats slightly curved: if you look down below it in the
opening, you can see theres 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 undened bands
of light that suggest mud ats of a bay at low tide. As a consequence, Ive actually shifted the viewers position in terms of the landscape beyond: a compositional play between vertical, horizontal and diagonal in Eucalyptus (pastel on
watercolor paper, 19x29).

often bad ones. And if you point out bad composition or color, they respond, But thats the
way it is. You want to say to them, Do you
plan to exhibit the photo next to the painting to
justify what youve 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. Thats another thing
the two of us share. Were sitting in my art
library, surrounded by monographs, from which
I seek information and inspiration. Youve
spent a lot of time, as well, looking at original
paintings, studying reproductions and selecting
slides for your art history lectures.

Thats how we learn about composition, how

we learn color, and how we learn to see. Even
as weve been sitting here talking, Ive been
looking past you at a wonderful tall, narrow,
geometric abstraction thats framed by the
doorway behind you. The shapes are primarily rectangular, including a section of bookcase 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
influenced by strong sunlight being reflected
off the wall of the building across the way.
The color, incidentally, reminds me of some
of the Roman wall paintings you and I love
so much. What Im doing is painting without
paintingand when not doing that, I draw
without drawing, which involves measuring
studying structure and volume, size and spatial
relationships.

reflected 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
reflected light. I doubt that classroom assignments alone prepare us to see such nuances
unless we also learn to look. Although our
paintings are quite different, dont they both
stem from the same impulsethe thoughtful
manipulation of shapes and color?
When artists are teaching, particularly in a
workshop situation, they seem to focus on
teaching technique.

Thats why most people sign up with a workshop instructorthey want to learn technique.
When youre working with a large group of
people, you dont really have time to recognize
the need to go back to the basics. Students get

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

Were talking about composition as an abstraction, 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 composition and color is primarily theoretical, often
based on two-dimensional design projects. A
major problem seems to be getting representational 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 peoples paintings. I remember seeing a Sargent portrait at the National
Gallery in Washington, D.C. and being
stunned by the intensity of the color that was
July/August 2015

41

ABOVE: Flowers in

a Murano Vase (oil

on canvas, 72x54)
by Jimmy Wright

caught up in simply trying to replicate what it

is they see, using the technique of whoever is
teaching the class.
Dont 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 t the practicality of the
time.
42

www.artistsmagazine.com

Youve said it better than I did.

Also, youre aware that students
expect to come out of the workshop
with a wonderful paintingand
the teaching is geared toward that.
They 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 finished painting or not, I didnt
care; I told them I was convinced
they would learn much more about
painting by doing a new painting
every two hours than by laboring away on one painting over the
course of five 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
finished.
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 composition; how you would think of color,
not in terms of representation, but
simply in terms of color relationships. And I told my students my
definition of landscape painting: an
arrangement of shapes and colors.
Another thing were both
aware ofwhen students who
havent had an extensive formal
education decide they want to jump
in and paint, they dont 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 temperature: warm or cool? They see a red barn and
they paint it red. The field is green or yellow.
They put two equally intense colors side by side
without realizing thats not defining form in
space. Then they rely on an outline to separate
the two.
Its about subtlety. You can draw a building, a structure as a shape, very accuratelybut
if you havent observed the color as accurately,
its not necessarily going to come across as

an illusionistic landscape in terms of threedimensional space.

These students arent aware of the subtleties of atmospheric or of aerial perspective
either. Colors that are supposed to be in the
background come jumping into the foreground.
Its the complexity of working on a flat
two-dimensional surface but ultimately creating 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.

The 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? Its such a basic, formal aspect
of painting. To what extent is not seeing due to
their dependence on photographs?

Many artistsand not just studentsseem

unaware that photographs flatten threedimensional 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, weve spent many hours
conversing about art. Do you remember our
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 weve talked about the
importance of drawing and the forethought
required to devise a composition, Id like to
end by telling our readers that, although you
paint mostly landscapes, you attend a weekly
life drawing session that youve been going to
since 1987.

When its beautifully done from life, a portrait

or figure pops off the page. The form is positioned interestingly within the format of the
painting, and the color is adjusted to make the
form three-dimensional and to make the background work with the figure. If not, the head
or the figure just floats in space.

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

July/August 2015

43

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