A bit of backstory:

When I was five my dad took me to the MFA in Boston. I remember walking up the steps, walking into a hall with an arched ceiling and paintings three high, and knowing that painting is exactly what I was born to do.

That desire never wavered. It only strengthened. Everything that was not becoming a painter was unimportant, even though I couldn't quite articulate it.  School completely bored me, even though the school admins put me two years ahead, to challenge me. I was one of those students who never lived up to my potential, or the potential predefined for me, because it wasn't for me.

During high school I developed the goal to travel to Europe and find someone who could teach me to paint. Parents were not at all thrilled with that idea.

So I chose to go to Pratt, because it had a great reputation. But when I got there not only did no teacher have the least clue about how to paint, I was mocked for wanting to learn to paint. It was supposed to be some epic internal journey that had zero methodologies associated. 

I did manage to teach myself to draw, though all the paintings in my head remained there because every attempt at painting them ended in an ignorance-based failure. Yet I knew from museums and galleries that there were methods and approaches which worked. 

I just didn't know them. By the time the first atelier I ever heard of, Water Street Atelier, popped up I was commuting into NYC and supporting my family on a little farm in CT.  No way to attend Water Street even if I could get in, because Jacob was keeping it small and select. 

But the emergence of a new, radical realism, which popped up like an ingrown hair on the butt of the modern art world inspired me to start teaching myself to construct my own methods. 

I met with immediate success, which in the long run was not what I needed because I didn't know what I didn't know. I've got a better idea of that now, but at the time there were some potholes in the speedway I had made for myself.

It wasn't until I deliberately set out to fill in the missing bits that I felt I had accomplished my goal to develop a painting approach that is independent of subject, is based on an understanding of how to articulate colors and forms beautifully, accurate drawing, and is fast and vibrant, and produces consistent results. 

Inchy by inchy, Leonardo daVinci

Why are painting methods important and why shouldn't we just make it all up as we go? Paint what you feel. You can't make it all equally beautiful. Brown paintings suck.

This is the sum total of what I was told by a series of Pratt's painting teachers. Obviously not helpful for someone whose goal was to paint like the masters they despised. And why was I so set on a painting method that would allow me to paint anything I wanted? 

Because if I did not know how to approach a painting, even of a subject I had painted before, then I was doomed to reinventing each subject, struggling with materials and brushes, repainting, burning failures, etc.

Endless frustration was baked into every attempt. And this while I'm showing at some high end galleries like Spanierman, Arcadia and Principle. I even turned down an invitation from Gagosian because I doubted my ability to fulfill.

I wanted to have a method that allowed me to solve any painting problem with a minimum of trouble, and that could even be satisfying and fun. Because why shouldn't it be fun?

I wanted a fast reliable method because otherwise it's like being sentenced to invent entire alphabets, use them to create new languages and tell stories in them. 

Showing and selling work successfully requires a painter to produce work of an expected quality, and if it can be done fairly quickly and enjoyably all the better. A robust method allows for this. 

How to set painting goals and achieve them

I'm going to start off with a technique which may seem non-painting related. I didn't realize it was a thing until recently. It's the core of my approach, though.

My wife has developed an app to help people set goals and achieve them by scheduling practice sessions during their day. Last week she told me about a study demonstrating that if you want to reach a goal motivational cheerleading is worse than nothing. But there is a way to significantly improve your chances of making it happen:

Define it.

Write it down.

Schedule a time to do it.

This simple method increased success 2.4X! It's also what I've been doing intuitively, though getting me to write down anything is a struggle. When I am composing a painting I set a goal for it. I decide what effects and reactions I want it to stimulate in those who see it. Is it poignant? Will it be lush? A vanitas? That becomes my main goal for the piece.

There are secondary interests also. Textures, the material nature of my subject, its fragility or weight, the way it turns in space. So many things, and essentially what I would like a viewer to notice and consider.

Every day I set a goal for the new area I will work on during that session. And this is where the value of separating your painting process into defined stages first becomes clear. Since I have already defined my large-scale goals -- even though they may change -- I can focus in on my small-scale ones. Because I know where I am in the painting process and what my short term goal is I can put all other concerns aside and really focus on nailing the form.

A bit about Form Painting

Form painting is an approach that focuses on developing each form on its own. Each subject is made up of large and small forms. This is true of both the lemon and the cloth. The lemon has bulbous ends and a subtle ridge that runs horizontally across the middle. I also considered each local -- YR, Y and GY -- to be forms of their own because their hues will arc toward each other and merge in interesting ways.

The cloth's forms are much easier to see and imagine. The challenge it presents is to adequately present the full whiteness of it. That requires a darker value for the whites to contrast against. I painted each one individually through the three stages.

The Four Stages of Painting

Knowing which stage of the painting process you are in adds to the clarity necessary to execute your vision. They are:

Drawing

Underpainting

Finish stage

Adjustments stage.

When I am working on the drawing, especially of a complex subject I'm only focusing on locating the large and small forms in the space I am creating. This process brings me very close to the way the subject exists in three dimensions, how its form subdivides, curves and straightens, etc. I'm not thinking about the finish stage, underpainting, or anything else (go Red Sox!) I make the drawing as good as possible, and just focus on that. Likewise for the other stages, though as I go through them I will be looking for any corrections I need to make.

Once I have set my goal for the entire painting, and set my goal for each stage and my goal for each form in each stage all I need to do is show up and paint.

Thoughts on using Photo References

This used to be much more controversial than it seems to be now, but it doesn't matter. Everything I'm showing you can be done working from life as well. In fact, I do work from life sometimes and have tested that claim.

Working from photos -- once you are liberated from the prison of painting a photo -- has advantages that working from life does not:

Much cheaper than hiring a model to sit for you.

Allows for adding other images to create complex compositions.

Consistent lighting.

Capture of ephemeral subjects.

The Drawing Stage

It might surprise that I've included drawing as a painting stage, but drawing for a painting is a different animal than a drawing that exists for its own reasons.  When I am drawing something to paint I will emphasize things like form intersections, think about edge planes, notice where a curve flattens then recurves, and focus on edges.

It's how I become familiar with all a subject's characteristics, including its sub-forms, their sub-forms, etc.

Drawing is also important because if I fail to create the container, the big form, accurately the small forms will not fit properly within it. When I add color to the small forms it will appear incorrect also.  In this way I can get quite far from my original vision, 1/32" at a time.

To prevent that, and have a form I can trust, I use an X, Y, method that is fast and precise. I look for important intersections of forms, or significant termini. For example, in drawing the lemon I found the center points in each bulbous end; the highest point of the lemon; and where the lemon and cloth meet on either side and in the middle. Everything else I drew by observation.

A phenomenon I experience frequently is that drawings that I know are correct appear to be quite wrong UNTIL the last form is placed. Then it snaps into correct alignment. It's not necessarily crucial when I'm drawing a lemon, which is why I only measured a few points.

A natural limitation: Those of you know me know how I chafe at the notions of limitations. But all humans seem to be working with a visual system that can see over three million different colors yet only just over 1,000 distinct gradations of value. This is true no matter what the lighting is. In fact, our eyes seem more in a reduced light setting. Dealers and collectors are excellent at seeing where my values are off, so I prefer to avoid as many mistakes as possible when it's still easy to correct them.

But if indeed the difference between genius and mediocrity is 1/32" then my figures need to be drawn well and accurately. For example, the top eyelids are critical in conveying emotion. Holbein lowered the eyelids in his portrait of Anne of Cleves to indicate her sleepy personality.

The upper eyelids of a person who is very interested in what she is seeing will flatten, while those of a person who is extremely frightened will rise to the same height but be higher in the middle. The amount of sclera we see is an indication of how much fear they feel. The difference, in your drawing, is minute.

Humans are excellent at spotting misshapen forms, especially in other humans but also in subjects we are very familiar. At one time lemons were so expensive only the richest people could afford them. Those peeled lemons decorating a platter in 17th cent. Dutch still lifes were there as a demonstration of the owners financial status. They could not only purchase a lemon, they could choose not to consume it.

Even though I have more leeway in drawing a lemon I want it to be within the bounds of lemon-ness. This is purely personal and you of course can paint as you wish.

Slowing down and getting the drawing right is perhaps the most boring yet important stage of a painting.

The Underpainting Stage

Before I get into underpainting, a subject I am still learning much about and am super-fascinated by, I need to talk about the difference between detail and information.

Detail is defined as: extended treatment of or attention to particular items.

a part of a whole: such as a small and subordinate part, a part considered or requiring to be considered separately from the whole.

Information is defined as: facts provided or learned about something.

what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

Similar, but in a broad sense details are equally important while information is clearly hierarchic. Thinking about information is an easier to decide what to include, what is important, than detail, which tends to be painted at a sometimes repulsively intense level.

I want to consider what is important to include at every stage, but the underpainting stage is really the information stage and I have many degrees of freedom in it. So much that it's really fun to play around with.

For instance, in a lemon painting I wanted to nail the reflected light off the white cloth on the left and middle corners of the cube the cloth is sitting on. In the underpainting I shifted value and chroma there, laying the groundwork.

I also wanted to hit the high chroma 5YR dark edge on the right side of the lemon, knowing that I'd go over it with 10YR in the finish stage.

As the hues shift so do the values. This is very tricky painting. I really didn't think it would be so rough...apologies!

But most of the underpainting effort on the lemon involved laying in a decent amount of information about the deceptively tricky hue shift in this lemon. It goes from 5YR on the right to 5Y on the left side to 2.5GY along the top.

Second underpainting:

I often (almost always) come back to my first underpainting and develop it further. Colors, especially those applied thinly, are always affected by the ground or tone of the canvas. The lighter it is the higher in chroma your colors will be.

Painting over dark colors is way too much work for me. Not that it can't be done, but I find it much easier to work on a lightly toned or white canvas and darken values as needed than begin with a dark tone and try to raise the values and the chromas at the same time. That's really uncertain work and lots of it.

In the second underpainting I will emphasize the goals I began the underpainting with.

As difficult as the colors are in the lemon, and as easy as the cloth looks, this is still a pretty straight forward underpainting challenge. It's very hard to make a mistake in this stage. Try to have some fun with it.

The Finish Stage

This is the really fun stage. The medium (50:50 Venetian Medium to Galkyd Gel) is wonderful to work with and depending your brush choice I can work very thickly or smooth it out to join any seams or edges.

The lemon has side light that rakes across the top and even down into the shadows. This brings out the texture of the lemon's rind and the cloth, which are quite different and equally important to me. I want a viewer to know that I've chosen white cotton, not silk, satin or felt.

The finish stage is when that texture reveals the material nature of the things we are contemplating. Hopefully this implies that they are chosen consciously, not randomly. Not that there's anything bad about random. It's just not what I'm interested in. I'm not sure if I need to point this out, but I'm not trying to get everyone to paint like me! That would be a fail. I hope to give you some tools so that you're able to paint like you.

As in the underpainting stage I will do my best to fully develop the forms each session, knowing that if I don't I can come back.

I was able to do just that with the lemon but the cloth was just too slippery to take enough paint to become as close to full white as I want it to be. You see, the cloth is possibly a star in this little stage play, equal to the lemon, which of course pretends that is impossible.

In this stage I'm using enough medium to make each color manipulatable. If I need it to be think in some area I'll choose a stiffer brush rather than add more medium.

Each of the tiny brush marks indicating texture work because they are slightly lighter in value and higher in chroma than the previous layer, and that was slightly lighter and higher in chroma than the one before. If I want more texture in a form I'll not lay in a couché, which is meant for areas of really smooth value transitions and surfaces.

The delicacy of the touch is helped by using the Rosemary Rigger brushes. I know there's some issues with quality control so feel free to substitute any other brand you prefer if they give you the marks you want.

The Adjustment Stage

Usually, assuming I've done my work well, this is just time for touchups, popping chroma, etc. I always use the same medium as in the finish stage, 50:50 Venetian to Galkyd GEL.

Color Mixing

As mentioned above, the average human can see over 3,000,000 colors, with some being able to see 4,000,000. With contemporary paints it is possible to mix a range of 3,200 colors, .1% of what we can see.

If my visual system system allowed me to lock onto a color I want to mix and hold it in mind while I turn away to my palette then I would not need Munsell at all. However, humans recalibrate what they see constantly, within microseconds. Another survival benefit which makes our goal harder to reach.

Learning colors from a 2D wheel just makes it worse. We have only the crudest of naming systems to work with. Color as it is usually taught is a 3D model, minus one dimension.

Those three dimensions are hue, value and chroma. Albert Munsell divided the available colors, which are keyed to those that can be mixed with oil paint, into 10 major hue groups, each of which is divided into 4 sub-hues. Though the book separates chroma strings into two-chroma steps, if I were to mix every color in the book, and the interim steps, I would have just over 3,200 total.

Structured Color

This isn't a course in color mixing, or Munsell, but it's important to have an idea of why using structured color is so valuable.

Structured color allows me to work much faster. I need to go back in and remix colors very seldom. I achieve consistent color, and if I do need to remix I can go back in with confidence.

I know how to mix colors in order to extend my value ranges -- the biggest problem we face -- and hit the chroma targets I want.

I waste very little paint.

I am independent of paint makers. I don't care if one changes their formula for any tube of paint because it's found a cheaper way to make paint but the color is different and does unexpected things. I can shift hues and chromas at will, independent of a model or photograph. My color is what I want it to be, not what's in front of me.

Edges

Edges are one of those unconscious aspects of painting. Once HVC is mastered edges become the frontier. I work them constantly. My focus is on turning edge planes, making sure that my curves are not rounded and the edge planes reflect the material nature of my subjects.