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...

Attention is the beginning of devotion. — Mary Oliver Oil paint was made for depicting flesh. — Willem DeKooning Compared to, say, watching a fireworks display, painting is a decidedly jumbled way of perceiving. Watching fireworks is just that— watching. Eyeballing a show, a spectacle, a rebus (from the Latin non verbis sed rebus , a presentation “not by words, but by things”). Painting, on the other hand, is a carnal affair. Painting palpably immerses the artist in what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “the flesh of the visible.” Unlike merely spectating, painting touches “the very pulp of the sensible.” Painting is up-to-your-elbows a mess, plunging the painter into what I’d call the “thick stuff.” Many artists I know like to paint from observation (as opposed to photographs); but there’s really no such thing, once you get going. Once you get going, you become too immersed in the very pulp of the sensible to call what you’re doing “observati...

It is better to be fervent in spirit, even if one accordingly makes more mistakes, than narrow-minded and overly cautious. — Vincent Van Gogh It’s juvenile to think so, but a fortune cookie has provided my new mantra. I paint for the most part alla prima in oil, a technique and medium that suit me because they let me approach every painting as a single experiment, one whose outcome—moment to moment to moment—remains sketchy. I never know whether the next dab, jab or stab will sharpen the painting or spoil it; whether a thin wash or thick gob will help or hinder; or whether the addition of, say, violet is luscious or ludicrous. But I know I can’t be timid or let worry stand in my way, because worry—rooted in fear of others’ harsh judgments—leads to self-doubt and discouragement. If I’m to survive as an artist, whenever I go to the easel I need to remind myself: don’t worry , this painting’s an experiment; there’ll be another . Were the painting anything else, I’d freeze. In 19...

Humanity is not produced by the way our eyes are implanted in us. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Writing in The New Yorker this week, art critic Peter Schjeldahl says of Cezanne, “He revolutionized visual art, changing a practice of rendering illusions to one of aggregating marks that cohere in the mind rather than in the eye of a viewer.” I am striving to exaggerate my marks, too, in hopes they cohere. A palette knife and a spatula are helping me do so . But, to get technical, I think Peter Schjedahl has the locus of the impact—of the coherence—that Cezanne’s exaggerated marks achieve backwards . Eye knows before mind. Before we see it, the eye magically compiles our world. The mind is last to “get the memo.” Seeing itself is clairvoyance , as the Existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty so eloquently said. We don’t see the world. We inhabit it via an “ intertwining ” [ entrelacs ]. Our humanity, our being-in-the-world , begins and ends at the point where the visible and ...

A painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen. — Paul Valéry Every painter—even realists—spends years training to “abstract” scenes; to cease to see only objects and begin to see only lines, shapes, contours, and shadows. Ceasing to see only objects is not an innate skill. (The caveman who paused to admire the shape of the sabretooth’s cast shadow probably became dinner.) The training pays off when the painter’s work allows viewers to see constructions, rather than things. In 2006, University of Oslo psychologist Stine Vogt compared the eye-movements of nine artists to those of nine “artistically untrained” subjects after showing them 16 pictures. She discovered “the artistically untrained participants showed preference for viewing human features and objects, while the artists spent more time scanning structural and abstract features.” Vogt concluded that while people convert scenes into concepts, artists reduce them to their geometric elements. She called that...