Tips for Improving Your Paintings

Class notes from art camp classes with George Liebert and Dan Gustin, Oxbow, MI, summer 1991.

Make a list of verbs and adjectives about your own work.

When struggling with a work, isolate parts of it and do lots of sketches to come up with a better composition.

What are your personal, specific goals?

Colors: similar vs. somber vs. stronger.

Realism vs. abstraction – both successful, maybe in combination. (one of my teachers, Dan Guston, and a visiting artist got into a discussion about a painting I did of a girl in the landscape – she was wearing a bandana on her head, which I painted as a flat triangle on top of her more realistically rendered figure).

Consider the excitement of surfaces vs. complex images. Patterns on a blanket, individual parts developed, keep to whole color – add pink, red, clear blue, zingier color.

Keep exciting in earlier stages.

Develop through a series of big changes to work out issues.

Series of patterns; sincerity, passion.

Beware of making shadows that are a hole to hell (too dark) – a gap in thinking color rather than value.

Take inventory – look at beautiful drawings in museum.

A strange mix of sacred and profane.

Baroque art: look at Poussin, Rubens‘ sketches, Rembrandt, make drawings about what interests you — movement, etc.

Overlap some things.

Check a variety of approaches; work on a sense of design.

Look at Eric Fischl – palette in a realistic landscape.