indirect paintings

 

Indirect Painting

I would like to describe, and for those who have taken my workshops, review the idea of ‘indirect’ painting that comes up so often in questions to me about my painting techniques.  So here is a short story about the ‘indirect’ way to paint:

Like many artists, I started painting before I had any formal training in art.  So, like most people who have a desire to paint in a representational way, I just started mixing and matching colors as I saw them in the photo or subject I was trying to represent.  For example, if I was painting a blue jacket I would mix up some blue and white and perhaps add some red if it was a warmish blue and then I would add some black or purple or green or all of the above for the shadows, lighten it with white for the highlights, and so on.  Then I would proceed to mix and blend them all together to create the curves and folds of the fabric with all the shadows and highlights.  It was a tedious task that required patience and a good eye.  Not to mention small brushes and most certainly oil paints because acrylics do not work well in this method as they dry too fast and are too sticky for all that blending that goes on.  Painting in this way I was able to create very realistic, photographic like representations of subjects.  I have come to categorize this method as the ‘Coloring’ or ‘Illustration’ style of painting and it has been exploited to great advantage by some photo-realism and wildlife artists in recent decades.  It is interesting to note too that this style of painting is new to the 20th century; well-known artists in centuries past did not paint in this manner as a rule.

When I started my fine arts courses in college and university that method of painting was discouraged in favor of the more spontaneous approach made famous by the Impressionists.  This ‘Direct’ or Alla Prima style dictates that we think boldly in terms of simplified forms and color areas and apply the paint with a minimum of blending.  With this method you could paint in a representational way but the image would look more  ‘painterly’ or ‘impressionistic.’ To paint effectively in the Direct method you still need a good eye but instead of patience you had to be clever at synthesizing and simplifying color schemes and forms in a bold and decisive manner.  Are you still with me?

By the time I was a short ways into my university painting courses I had absorbed and understood these two ways of using paints to make a picture.  Then, rather than dose off in my art history classes when the professor turned off the lights to show us slides, I started to notice the painting techniques of some of the painters of previous centuries.  When I saw paintings by artists like Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Rubens I noticed that although they were painted in a very realistic manner, their paintings were not at all stiff and labored like most paintings done by ‘coloring’.  I could see that these artists did not spend hours blending with fine brushes but, like the Impressionists, used bold and direct methods to apply their paints.  In fact Rubens was know to have finished an entire large canvas in one sitting.  The images were dynamic and painterly and with an inner life and depth that amazed me.  This is something that I had never seen in any modern painter’s work. There was nothing that I had learned on my own or in the university painting classes or had seen in ‘how to’ books on painting that could explain how these artists achieved the effects that they did.  I quickly discovered that neither the art history teachers nor the painting instructors had any answers either.   So I got a university degree in fine arts and still didn’t know how to paint to my satisfaction.  As a painter I wanted to know that I had the skill and knowledge to create any effect that I could imagine, or see in another artist’s work, be they contemporary or from as far back as the early Renaissance. 

I had come across the ‘Indirect’ method of painting.  To learn the secrets of the Old Master’s techniques, though, I had to do some serious research.  It was only through years of studying old manuscripts and out of print publications on artist’s materials and techniques that I was able to rediscover for myself  the art of indirect painting.  I spent years studying and painting in the style of my favorite painters of the past like Rembrandt, Carravaggio, Titian, and Rubens.  These were my true painting instructors.  Later I adopted acrylic paints and found that they were, in many ways, well suited to this ‘new’ style. 

In this indirect method of painting the artist would paint in successive layers of transparent and translucent colors (called ‘glazes’ and ‘scumbles’ or ‘veils’) to achieve their effects.  Like with the direct method there was still very little blending of colors; but rather than being applied in opaque layers side by side they are applied one on top of the other so the layers of paint underneath were allowed to show through.  In the case of the blue jacket described above, an artist like Titian would probably have first painted the jacket with all the shadows and highlights but only using gray and so that it looked something like a black and white photo, this is called a ‘Grisaille.’ When that portion was dry he would then apply a blue glaze over the entire area to give it the color. 

What I noticed in studying the paintings of the so-called Old Masters was that you invariably find a mixture of all three painting methods in a single painting.  In different parts of the painting you would find areas of transparent layers (indirect), bold patches of thick pure tones juxtaposed (direct) and occasionally duller areas where the artist blended colors to create a certain effect (coloring).  When I teach painting I focus almost exclusively on the indirect method because I know that these days the other two styles are easily learned.  The way I look at it, the indirect techniques simply give the painter a few more tools to help expand their expressive possibilities. 

If you want to get the whole story on how the old painters achieved their remarkable effects and how this knowledge came to be lost over the centuries, you can come out to my lecture/slide show on Thursday November 15 entitled:  The History of Oil Painting Technique”