I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I am a hobbyist at heart and professional student of art who is interested in portraying nature and life. While I paint mostly for myself, it is the creative PROCESS that motivates me most of all and elements of art that intrigue me, e.g. color mixing and value contrasts, etc. I love the magic of creating, not so much the end results of the seascapes, landscapes and portraits that I paint. I sometimes work at a snail’s pace painting in layers until the final end result, thinking all the time about what I’m doing and often who I’m painting for, e.g. the pet portraits that will be gifted to family members. Art is only one of my hobbies as I have other interests and am a musician also and play regularly with a group. Thank you so much for all that you do to encourage me in art! You’re my man, Dan! God bless you! Does the subject have an interesting design (think about the arrangement of shapes, forms, lines, and colors)? BTW I am 78 and never drew or painted anything at all until 2012 when my youngest granddaughter and I began to learn to draw from You Tube). Reply They are versatile. You can vary the drying time and consistency of your paint dramatically using paint thinners and additional oil. This allows you to work with a wide range of painting techniques, including blending, glazing, and scumbling.

I personally started with acrylics many years ago. Below is one of my childhood paintings in acrylics.Guston’s talks and dialogues explore contradiction, repetition, frustration and the foregrounding of doubt Acrylics are widely favored by those just starting out with painting as they are easy to use and do not require any special supplies. The downside is they dry very fast. Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today. And not just because of the fairly recent hoo-ha about his Klu Klux paintings. Olivia Laing says some interesting things about this in Everybody. Now in my 60’s I started oils last year and found that I am pretty good with that too. So now I’ve moved on to learning acrylics (first attempts came out pretty good so today bought more supplies for this endeavor). After I get to the point of being comfortable with acrylics, I will move on to watercolors. Hue refers to where a color is located on the color wheel. Red, blue, yellow, green—these are all different hues. Saturation refers to how rich, intense, or vibrant a color is. Value refers to how light or dark a color is.

Aloha, Dan! I consider you as a personal mentor who inspires me with a common sense approach to creating art work. I have read your blog article it is very useful article for users.These topics here I found was really effective. Looking for others who love drawing? Join our Art, Design, Photography, and Drawing Club on Facebook! But there is no right answer here. Every medium has pros and cons.Here is a crash course on the different mediums to help you decide which suits you: Acrylics – The Beginner’s Choice

Does the subject provide you with opportunities to challenge yourself and demonstrate your abilities? For example, some people do not have the patience to sit down and accurately render every tone and detail of a subject. Therefore, they may be better suited to learn color and brushwork from the Impressionists rather than the rigorous practices of the Russian academic painters. Philip Guston's work gathers strength with the passing of time. During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. This book captures the breadth and depth of his thinking, and also captures the feeling of an intensely lively era when artists like Cage, Feldman and Guston felt that making art was a branch of philosophy. I think everybody interested in the evolution of culture should read this thought-provoking and timely book Brian Eno Note: These questions are not necessarily there to be answered but rather to make you question and explore the subject before you commit to something more.

And I suppose in the Collected Writings there's a lot of repetition and this smaller Penguin edition has the important stuff; the interview with Rosenberg, and the Studio Notes. I love the contrast between the light greens getting hit by light and the foreground in shadow. This is what I would focus on capturing if I were to paint it – my big idea. It may sound like I’m just jumping from one thing to another but truly am not; I continue to practice with those things which I feel I have mastered and/or find to be comfortable in doing. Thanks to the internet and people like you the speed with which I am able to learn has just accelerated in comparison to years of the past. Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening. And much of it was a clear influence on him. Would he have seemed like such an outsider if he was exhibiting in Chicago rather than New York? Before you go out and buy all your new art supplies and start throwing paint onto the canvas, you should consider why exactly you want to take up painting and what you want to get out of it.Or maybe you have no interest in breaking into the commercial art world and just want a fulfilling hobby. In that case, you may want to take a more relaxed approach to how you learn. Writing this is like starting your first painting! Where to start. I have recently retired and have decided to try painting again. I say again as the last time I painted was for my O levels in 1969! Believe it or not I got a grade 1 along with a grade 1 for technical drawing, unfortunately my other grades were somewhat below these standards and I didn’t take up my chosen career as an architect. My other achievement was to win a local as it was in those days a Brooke Bond painting competition when I was at infant school. This may seem ordinary but the reason for writing is to say that I still find it strange and baffling that I achieved these things because I am profoundly colourblind. I struggle a great deal with recognising colours and it has been the pain of my life as you can imagine. My wife bought me some paints etc for Christmas this year as an encouragement to paint again. Whether or not it was the innocence of youth and not being bothered about being colourblind or not I don’t know but I am in some sort of panic mode as to know how to start now knowing I will most likely be using the wrong colours when painting! Where do I start!!! Reply Philip Guston working on a Federal Art Project mural, 1940. Courtesy Archives of American Art. Photo by Sol Libsohn