Hopping along

I’m back at art school after taking a 6 month break; however my documentation of this has suffered due to life happening.

The birth and death of my son has caused my online-self to retreat. Documenting my work was once a joyous task, which now feels laborious and almost triggering. Nevertheless, I am determined to make a shot of it once more to both serve as a record of where I’m at, and to connect with those around me interested in my progression.

Being back at art school has been fantastic. I feel like not only a more balanced person, but I feel I have a new richness to draw on as an artist. Several friends have placed bets on whether or not I’ll turn in to a deep dark tortured artist after suffering great loss. I predict not – I have a whole new repertoire of love and joy to draw on now since becoming a mum which overshadows the rest by far.

I’ve been dying to get back in to painting, so much so that I dedicated several personal projects to the art during my break, which I have begun to document and will post shortly.

Following on from these projects, I have started taking a course in Tonal Realism. Basically that means painting things in a “realistic” style, the definition and methods of which varies. In first term, we were tasked with researching the work and methods of a well known tonal realist – an “old master”, if you will. It could be any artist, provided their methods and materials were accessible, and they were not contemporary.

I decided to pick an artist whose style visually appealed to me, in hope of finding joy in not only the research and development, but in the final product too.

So, I started to get to know this guy

Image result for edward hopper

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was an American realist. Here’s one of his most well renowned paintings, Nighthawks, which has inspired an array of cinema film and literature.

Image result for nighthawksI won’t bore you with biographical information here because it’s not all that relevant to our exercise. What I was interested in were his methods.

Luckily, Hopper’s wife was quite the avid documenter during his career. Check out these beautiful sketches:

Image result for edward hopper documentation

Now, if only I could read her handwriting… Maybe she was a doctor. Doctors have terrible handwriting.

I was also lucky enough to stumble on a series of books and articles to further my research; the most useful being an oral history interview with the man himself (which can be found online courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, here).

Hopper says:

“Well, I have a very simple method of painting. It’s to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that’s my method. It’s very simple.”

To paraphrase the other important points:

  • Zinc white is shit, it cracks over time.
  • Lead white is the bomb, it powders off instead of cracking. God damn it Hopper, that stuff is hundreds of dollars per tube. Why… why?! (spoiler alert- there’s a cheaper substitute for it these days, hooray!)
  • His palette has 12 or 13 colours on it – Windsor and Newton. He can’t remember which though, so I guess I’ll have to put my detective hat on. Naples yellow seems to be thrown around the place like crazy. It’s unfortunate that there is very little information on his pigments beyond his wife’s mutterings.
  • He uses the finest Windsor and Newton linen stretched support. Cool. I’ve actually always wanted to try painting on linen but never found an excuse to do so. The weave is different to a regular canvas, and it costs more, which in the past has turned me off. Let’s give it a shot in linen!
  • Hopper trusts whatever ground Windsor and Newton put on their canvases. Excellent. I shall do the same. *puts trusting hat on*
  • No glazes – ain’t nobody got time for that. Hopper was a simple kind of guy. I imagine he’d have meat and 3 veg for dinner every night.

Anyway, that’s all for now. My next post will talk about my chosen painting, and my plan of attack based on research. Toodle-oo

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