Robert Francis James

I’m pleased to announce the release of my first e-book, Paint Licks . Paint Licks gathers insights by 30 painters, living and dead, into the whys and hows of painting. Download your free  copy now . Share it with a friend. And let me know if you enjoy it . The post Paint Licks appeared first on Original still life oil paintings for sale l Robert Francis James .

With the aid of my trusty spatula , I am attempting to paint only in planes. I’m taking my lead from  Cape Cod School founder Charles Hawthorne , whose wisdom is captured in Dover’s diminutive Hawthorne on Painting . Hawthorne asked painters to “forget drawing” and “see color planes.” By encouraging painters to “paint in planes,” he hoped to abridge and distill the process of painting a convincing work. Don’t struggle to “make a thing,” he told followers. “Let it make itself.” In other words, don’t construct a thing; reveal it. Don’t draw it; unveil it. But how does the painter reveal ( φανερόω in the Greek of the Bible) a thing? To the best of my understanding, Hawthorne’s advice boils down to this: eschew outlining . Easier said than done, because we learn to draw by outlining. We thus have to “unlearn” drawing to paint. Here’s Hawthorne’s formula in a nutshell: Load your brush—or better, a palette knife—and put down a plane, starting from the center of ...

Influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind. — Jean-Michel Basquiat Robert Rauschenberg once told art historian Dorothy Seckler it was okay to swipe from another painter because “one can use another man’s art as material, either literally or just implying that they are doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.” Swiping is the subject of Soutine/de Kooning: Conversations in Paint , a blockbuster show now at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. “This show is the reason there are shows,” Forbes said of Soutine/de Kooning . Soutine/de Kooning asks you to see for yourself the many ways Willem de Kooning swiped from Chaïm Soutine, 11 years his senior. And swipe he did. Soutine’s paintings, with their impastoed surfaces and high-energy brushwork, were eye-candy to de Kooning, and influenced most aspects of his abstract figurative paintings of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. The influence is hardly imaginary. There’s historica...