Breaking Out

This post is mainly for all the intermediate  or  better painters out there, and collectors who want to understand the painting process

When one paints more and more especially on one topic, you will begin to repeat yourself and begin to make a formula of how you work. What was unknown when you started is now known in the left brain as information and you start to paint from what you know. To be an artist is a skillful blend of what you know and the unknown. If you let what you know start to take over, your paintings will become more and more trite formulas. Unless you are a Kinkade type painter who makes millions of painting the same thing over and over, even he got bored out of his skull and hired others to paint his works. So how do we counter that trend?

The book Your Artist's Brain by Purcell is good place to start. It will tell you exactly how and why it happens.  Then finding ways to access your more unconscious side helps. Here are some ways you can trick that systematic left brain in to letting go more.  One way is to make little abstract compositions first, with no subject in mind. No bigger than 3x5 inches, in say 3 colors finding one that pleases you, and using that to plan your work. Robert Bateman the very realist wildlife and nature painter does this, then figures out what animal will fit that composition... Other ways are the informal divisions, not the classic thirds or even Golden section.  Painting upside down sometimes shakes things up. Changing two of your main colors on the palette, limiting your palette to 3 primaries and white, or if you are a colorist, painting in monochrome, or vice versa. Switch mediums. And for the last really big box buster. Take one painting and go for broke, not just nice, or OK but either really great or completely busted. Do to it everything that goes against little fixes...get a big brush, scrape it off and repaint parts completely, turn it upside down and work on it as an abstract shape. In short go from the gut and see what happens. And then PAY ATTENTION as you are working to see the effects of what you are doing, brushwork, color changes all the things you know. 

You and the painting are dancing partners, you are feeling your way along and listening to what the painting is telling you, not just your mind. If you are dancing with someone you don't push or shove them around, you have a dialog going until the two become one.  You are in the moment painting not following along just in the mind but completely alive and aware in that moment, what is really happening, feeling your hand and the brush connect, the movement and sound all of it, really present Now.

the Grand View and Intervals

One of the hardest things about these very big coastline views is to make sure no two intervals are the same. When our linear left brain gets ahold of things it starts making spaces the same and gets  repetitive. A way you can test this is to take a 4x5 space and put in 9 dots at random...now look and see how many are about the same space apart. Do this again and make every space between every dot different,  You will see this is quite a job.

 Nature does not repeat intervals or shapes, even with thousands of leaves on a tree each one will be different. Our eyes through millions of years of evolution are geared for that.  One of the differences between top professional artists and ranks below them is the pros know this secret. Waugh the great American  seaacape artist  said never repeat spaces or shapes, and if you look at his work you'll see he didn't. (He is one of the greats I study and will speak more of him later)

  So in these grand views, it's very easy to start to make things repeat spaces, both positive and negative. Remember every time you make an edge you make two shapes one of the object and one for the space around it. We painters work on 2 D surfaces. So since the tendency is to make the same spaces, one has to be very vigilant to keep that from happening and killing off some of the pleasure the eye and mind take in looking around our paintings, we have, after all, only a few square inches, and Nature has hundreds of miles. So I have finally hit on a method to help me in this.  Most well trained painters are aware of this same interval thing, and on a simpler work it can be done by eye, but on these very small very complex works of  the grandview, I've found it very hard, so the tool is a big help.

I'll still have to be careful when painting to not put them back the same again.

Above  you will find a beginning painting worked out in charcoal, and a little drafting tool with points. With this I can measure an interval and then take that measure and move it around the painting to see if any spaces are repeated. If they are, then now is the time to adjust them I've found several, and each one I changed  helped the painting shapes be more interesting and graceful