The Complicated Road to Simplicity

One learns sooner or later that the panoply of nature is too large a smorgasbord for one canvas, or even one career. There’s just too much there. And no one particularly needs your complete description of everything you see, or even anything you see. What they want is your elevator pitch. Strip everything down to its barest essentials, and then simplify these as much as you possibly can.

Here’s the evolution of an 11x14” canvas of a complicated scene. It was painted over the course of four afternoons, from life. But just for fun, take a look at a snapshot of the scene:

This reminds me of a book cover my father did for the Army Air Force during World War II. It was an airbrush painting of a rack of clouds, the sort of scene that can only be seen through the cockpit of an airplane. On the periphery were the insignias of the various branches of the Army Air Corps, rendered in micro-detail. If you’ve ever attempted airbrush painting, you’ll have some idea of what this entails. Before his death, my father gave the original painting to my son Dylan, who is a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force. I looked it over and couldn’t help but notice that Pop had painted the damn thing at reproduction size.

I blurted out, “Why didn’t you paint it twice up?!”

”Because I’m an idiot,” my father replied.

I wish the quality of this image was better; you could see how intricate those eleven insignias are, each one perhaps a third of an inch in diameter. To paint them, my father had to cut tiny masks for each component of the design.

And now it’s July of 2020, and here comes the idiot’s son, with an 11x14” canvas, a lot of ambition, and one thing going for him which his father did not. Oil does not demand precisely drawn detail. In fact, it resists one’s attempts at that. What oil is most sympathetic to are color notes, accurately giving the hue, value and chroma of a little piece of the motif, but not necessarily following its exact shape.

If you’re a fan of high-end computer software, my father with his masks and his airbrush could be compared to a vector drawing program, such as Adobe Illustrator. The painter, on the other hand, uses tools which could better be compared to Photoshop.

So there I was with my tools. “Simplify! Simplify!” goes the adage. Okay, but how?

Well, one way is to eliminate color. The French academicians, arguably the most slandered and underrated painters who’ve ever been slandered and underrated, swore by this method. Paint it completely in monochrome, solving every drawing problem before even thinking about color. A full-blown underpainting in black and white is called a grisaille. The procedure makes a lot of sense.

It fell out of favor eventually because Monet and Bazille and especially Sisley, proved that the full blast of nature’s color carried a far greater impact than micro-detailed rendering. But the method still has its adherents, particularly among the students of Jacob Constantine.

But while we’re living in a black-and-white world for the moment, let’s look at an even more extreme sort of simplification:

This is just the above photo, run through Photoshop so as to eliminate all halftones. In this world of pure black and pure white, we can see how convincing an image can be presented with such minimal cues. When I was a teenager, one of the painters I emulated could execute a nude study in oil in two hours using a similar method. He would smear his canvas with a solid body of dark paint, an umber or a heavy green or whatever he wished. I mean solid. This was no earth tone cut with turpentine and smeared thinly with a rag. This was solid wet paint. Next he would paint directly onto this imprimatura with Underpainting White, a fairly quick-drying white lead. The lights of the model were white. The middle tones and darks were the color of the imprimatura. Within the first half hour, he’d simplified the nude into just the sort of binary code we see above. During the remaining time, he adjusted the transitions between the pure dark and pure white. He got what he wanted, every time.

Whether this is your idea of simplification or not, it’s certainly one way of getting the job done.

Or, going back into the world of color, we could simplify by viewing the scene as a mosaic. Each piece of the motif gets its own hue, value and chroma. Read color correctly and aim your brush at the right place, over and over again, and a readable image will eventually result. This is essentially the procedure I favor, and did my best to adopt in handling the scene.

So here I was, on Day One.

Did Hemingway really say, “I’m not a good writer, I’m a good rewriter”? Beats me. But unless you’re Marc D’Alessio, you may have trouble hitting the note on the first try. You can’t even competently judge how close you are to the mark until the canvas is covered. I’m not a good painter, but I’m learning to become a good repainter.

And here it is, simplified about as much as I know how to do. Maybe next week I can see, and paint, more simply. But it ain’t easy.