Categorie: Techniek

Sound familiar? You’re listening to someone’s words, but you notice contradictory signals in their attitude and behavior. The unspoken, non-verbal reality hiding behind those words is what really matters. It’s the same in the fine arts. The eye only records superficial facts, but your mental eye, your feeling and intuition record the essence. Your interpretation, your response to the subject is what counts. You record not what you see, but what you feel. Let your intuition speak: add, change, remove. In short, select and reduce until only your personal interpretation and response remain. Of course, the subject should be recognizable to some extent, but abstract qualities like a balanced value pattern of large shapes, a limited palette, and few details are more important to me personally than an exact likeness.
For me, watercolor is like a short poem, an aphorism. Forceful and compact. I would like to let you look through my eyes, even if only for a moment, because verbal communication is simply inadequate. The enjoyment, the pleasure in a concise, almost banal rendering of reality. But it must be your reality! How do you do that in practice? Try to let go of reality more. Feel free to select and reduce even more. In my experience, it is better to do this from preliminary sketches than in direct contact with reality, with its abundance of information! In such a sketch, reality has already been somewhat compressed, “condensed”. If you work from photographs, use several shots of the subject and combine elements. It can be helpful to make black and white copies, so you can disregard the subject’s actual colors. Keep experimenting and searching. You learn a little more every day. Don’t worry too much about the outcome, but paint for the sake of painting. You will get more enjoyment from it that way. You’ll never reach the ultimate goal. THE WAY IS THE GOAL. You’ll never make your ideal, ultimate painting. You’ll make your best painting TOMORROW. “When you think you have found it, you haven’t searched well enough.”

Best regards
Kees van Aalst

 

Les 7: “Luisteren met je ogen”

U kent het wel. Je luistert naar iemands woorden, maar tegelijkertijd ontdek je in houding en gedrag tegenstrijdige signalen. De non-verbale werkelijkheid die achter de woorden schuilgaat, dat wat niet wordt gezegd, daar draait het eigenlijk om.Zo is het ook in de beeldende kunst. Het oog registreert slechts de oppervlakkige feiten. Met uw geestelijk oog, gevoel en intuïtie legt u de essentie vast. Jouw interpretatie, jouw reactie op dat onderwerp is wat telt. Niet wat je ziet, maar wat je voelt leg je vast. Laat hierbij je intuïtie spreken: voeg toe, wijzig, laat weg. Kortom, selecteer en reduceer tot uw persoonlijke
interpretatie en reactie overblijft. Hierbij dient enige herkenbaarheid van het onderwerp nog wel intact te blijven natuurlijk. Voor mij persoonlijk zijn abstracties als een evenwichtig toonwaardepatroon in grote vormen, een beperkt kleurpalet en weinig details belangrijker dan een exacte gelijkenis. Aquarel is voor mij een kort gedicht, een aforisme. Krachtig en compact. Ik zou u graag, al is het maar voor een moment, met mijn ogen leren zien, omdat je met woorden nu eenmaal gebrekkig communiceert. Het genot, het plezier in een summiere, bijna banale weergave van de werkelijkheid. Maar wel jouw werkelijkheid! Hoe doe je dat nu in de praktijk? Probeer de realiteit meer los te laten. Voel je vrij om nog meer te selecteren en te reduceren. Mijn ervaring is dat dat beter kan aan de hand van voorschetsen dan in direct contact met werkelijkheid, met zijn overvloed aan informatie! In zo’n schets is de realiteit al enigszins gecomprimeerd, “ingedikt”. Als je aan de hand van foto’s werkt , gebruik dan meerdere afbeeldingen van het onderwerp en combineer elementen. Maak zwart/wit copieën om je los te maken van de werkelijke kleur. Blijf experimenteren en zoeken. Je leert elke dag weer bij. Bekommer je daarbij niet al te veel om het resultaat. Schilder om het schilderen zelf. Dan zal het bezig zijn je meer plezier verschaffen. Het einddoel zal je nooit bereiken. DE WEG IS HET DOEL. Je zult nooit je ideale, ultieme schilderij maken. Je beste schilderij maak je MORGEN. “Als je meent het te hebben gevonden, heb je niet goed genoeg gezocht”.

Met vriendelijke groet
Kees van Aalst

Because entire libraries have been written about the technical aspects of the fine arts, and just as many DVDs on the subject are available, I will limit my contribution. I do still owe you the last bit about color. Later in this series, I hope to discuss some ideas about composition, the organizing element, and everything that goes along with it.

However, the essential part will concern a mental approach: how do I transform reality, how do I make an artistic connection between image and reality, how do I achieve my own style. This part, which has been wrongly left out of the literature about the fine arts, will come from a philosophical/psychological perspective rather than a technical one.

But before we start on that, first the icing on the color cake.

Color choice is very personal, so follow your own taste and don’t lean too much on another’s palette. I am not giving out recipes, just a few personal hints.

Limit your palette to the three primary colors in various shades. Blue can be cobalt or indigo, red can be madder or burnt sienna, yellow can be lemon or raw sienna. These are only examples. There are many more choices, of course. Some painters have a cool and a warm version of each primary on their palette: madder besides burnt sienna, phthalo next to ultramarine, and lemon besides raw sienna. Others use only the so-called printer’s colors: magenta, cyan, and primary yellow. The choices are unlimited, so experiment for yourself.

Don’t turn art into trickery by imitating others too much, including in your color choices. There are plenty of epigones already. Don’t become yet another Zbukvic or Castagnet. Become yourself by rising above technique through trial and error, thus developing your own handwriting. But be aware that developing creativity takes time. You don’t help an emerging butterfly by prying open its cocoon. This rarely serves the butterfly well. Art teachers should therefore limit themselves to being guides along the way. In fact, too much knowledge can be a hindrance to creativity. Your joy in playing must show in the work, not just how cleverly you have created that atmosphere again. Trust in your inner voice rather than in fads and brief successes based on secondhand examples. The results can look quite good at first glance, but closer inspection reveals a lack of soul. An experienced viewer will notice this. Therefore, I don’t teach merely the development of technical skills. I gladly leave that to other teachers. It is more important to me to change attitudes and provide the right conditions. I know from experience the false starts, the pitfalls, and the urge to imitate which threaten your creativity.

More next time about this mental process which gets little to no attention in the literature and DVDs, in “Listening with your eyes”.

The Image is a perfect example of a limited palette

We will keep it simple again, I promise. So, no words like complementary, tertiary or analogous. They don’t add anything to your work and only give you a headache.

As I argued in my first book “Succesvol Aquarelleren” (“Successful watercolor painting” – not yet translated) we do need cohesion and variation in our use of color. A seemingly paradoxical demand, because too much variation leads to lack of cohesion, and vice versa. Hence, we have to provide a balance between the two.

You can achieve cohesion in color by using a mother color as a unifying factor. For example, when we take blue as the starting point, on the color wheel we can go via blue-violet and violet to red-violet. In the other direction, we can go via blue-green and green to yellow-green. This entire spectrum from red-violet to yellow-green contains blue. It is this blue mother color that ensures unifying cohesion.

A colored ground also provides cohesion. This can be colored paper, or paper to which you apply an underpainting. In that case you can save the whites, whereas opaque colors must be used for the lights when using colored paper.

Likewise, a thin glaze applied afterwards gives cohesion as well.

Always provide an echo in your use of color: repeat every color elsewhere in the painting, even if it is only a simple touch.

Two example sketches in phthalo blue and burnt sienna. In one of them blue is dominant, in the other brown. Never use colors in equal amounts


Also notice the mistakes in the sketches.
A fleeting overall impression is more important to me than a realistic pretty picture.

Variation in color comes down to warm versus cool colors, using the simplest possible palette. Just as two left-hand gloves don’t make a functional pair, some color combinations work while others don’t. But you have to try that for yourself. I am not giving recipes here, just a few personal tips. But remember, don’t believe anyone, not even me. Only your own experience will tell you if something works for you. A few simple combinations that I use sometimes are Paynes grey and sepia, or phthalo blue and burnt sienna (see example sketches) or, when I’m feeling adventurous, quinacridone gold, brown madder, and indigo. As you can see, a very limited color palette, which to me is a condition for a style characterized by a simplicity that seems almost banal in its austerity.

One more thing: use color expressively rather than realistically. This increases the abstract quality of the work. If you paint from a photograph, use a black and white copy.

To give our English speaking friends the opportunity to follow these lessons as well, Mineke Reinders is kind enough to provide the English translations..

Here an example of simplicity in value, color and details (you could do it in Paynes grey and sepia). Notice that alternation and contrast in tonal value (light/dark/light etc.) is more important than so-called “beautiful colors”. The work of beginners (i.e. not yours) often lacks sufficient light and – especially – dark tones.
(Edward Wesson)