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The Purpose of Painting
Painting is an interpretation of tone through the medium of color drawn with the brush. Economy of effort in every way, he preached, the sharpest self-control, the fewest strokes possible to express a fact, the least slapping about of pur- poseless paint he believed, with Carolus Duran, that painting was a science which it was necessary to acquire in order to make of it an art. One of the things that make Sargent such a master is the variety he invested in his edge work. He talks about overlapping the boundaries of his shapes to generate lost and found edges. Sargent liked to paint at what is called sight-size. For portraiture, he would often place his canvas next to the sitter and rapidly step backward and forward as he worked. Moving back allowed him to take in the sitter and his painting at the same time, allowing him to immediately see what to do next.
Sargent preferred to paint as directly as possible, rst establishing the larger shapes and masses in his composition before articulating smaller ones inside of them. He also liked to establish the middle values rst so he could judge how light or dark the nal accents should be.
en he began to paint At the start he used sparingly a little turpen- tine to rub in a general tone over the background and to outline the head (the real outline where the light and shadow meet, not the place where the head meets the background), to indicate the mass of the hair and the tone of the dress e features were not even suggested is was a matter of a few moments For the rest he used his color without a medium of any kind, neither oil, turpentine or any other mixture the thicker you paint, the more color shows.
He had put in this general outline very rapidly, hardly more than smudges, but from the moment that he began really to paint, he worked with a kind of concentrated deliberation, a slow haste so to speak, holding his brush poised in the air for an instant and then putting it just where and how he intended it to fall
To watch the head develop from the start was like the sudden lifting of a blind in a dark room Every stage was a revelation For one thing he often moved his easel next to the sitter so that when he walked back from it he saw the canvas and the original in the same light, at the same distance, at the same angle of vision He aimed at once for the true general tone of the background, of the hair, and for the transition tone between the two He showed me how the light owed over the surface of the cheek into the background itself
As he worked only for the middle tones, to model in large planes, as he would have done had the head been an apple In short, he painted as a sculpture models, for the great masses rst, but with this di erence that the sculptor can roughly lump in his head and cut it down afterwards, while the painter, by the limitations of his material, is bound to work instantly for an absolute precision of mass, in the color and outline he intends to preserve. Don’t be afraid of laying down a lot of paint early as you work. Once you have put enough paint down you can push it around to generate interesting textures and diffused edges. At the end of the day, the primary difference between a painting and a colored drawing is how much paint has been used.
SARGENT’S NOTES
1. Painting is an interpretation of tone. Colour drawn with a brush.
2. Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.
3. Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.
4. The thicker your paint—the more your color flows.
5. Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements—values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.
6. The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.
7. You begin with the middle tones and work up from it . . . so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.
8. Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.
9. It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.
PALETTE: Silver White, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Ochre dew (English Red), Red Ochre, Vermillion, Ivory or Coal Black, and Prussian Blue.
Sargent’s notes above are from George Pratt via James Gurney. He found these nuggets in the library when he was a student at Pratt Institute.
START
According to his pupil, Miss Heyneman, with a bit of charcoal he placed the head with no more than a few careful lines over which he passed a rag, so that it was a perfectly clean grayish colored canvas (which he preferred), faintly showing where the lines had been. Then he began to paint. At the start he used sparingly a little turpentine to rub in a general tone over the background and to outline the head (the real outline where the light and shadow meet, not the place where the head meets the background), to indicate the mass of the hair and the tone of the dress. The features were not even suggested. This was a matter of a few moments. For the rest he used his color without a medium of any kind, neither oil, turpentine or any other mixture.
He put in this general outline very rapidly, hardly more than smudges, but from the moment that he began really to paint, he worked with a kind of concentrated deliberation, a slow haste so to speak, holding his brush poised in the air for an instant and then putting it just where and how he intended it to fall.
PAINTING THE HEAD
He painted a head always in one process, but that could be carried over several sittings. He never attempted to repaint one eye or to raise or lower it, for he held that the construction of a head prepared the place for the eye, and if it was wrongly placed, the understructure was wrong, and he ruthlessly scraped and repainted the head from the beginning.
To watch the head develop from the start was like the sudden lifting of a blind in a dark room. Every stage was a revelation. For one thing he often moved his easel next to the sitter so that when he walked back from it he saw the canvas and the original in the same light, at the same distance, at the same angle of vision. He aimed at once for the true general tone of the background, of the hair, and for the transition tone between the two.