Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

It’s that time of year: time for my annual summer workshop. For the next four days I’ll be putting my workshop participants through the wringer - we’ll be starting each day at 6 AM to go photograph gorgeous animals in beautiful northwestern Montana settings, then the rest of the day we’ll be drawing, critiquing, sketching from life, and painting. If everyone is still alive by 5 PM I probably won’t have done my job. Then we all go off for beer and food and we talk art until late at night.

I’ll post a couple teaser photos from the workshop next week. In the meantime, you can either be envious or relieved that you’re not with us in Kalispell.

One of the best ways - if not THE best way - to learn to draw is by doing it from life. I can hear my hapless workshop participants groaning right now, since I have so much fun getting out the cattle-prod and making everyone do gesture sketches from a constantly-moving cougar or raccoon kit or whatever.

If you ask my opinion (not that anyone did), a lack of drawing ability prohibits many artists from realizing their vision effectively and fully. Once you know how to draw, and know the anatomy of a given critter, you know what liberties you can take, and to what effect. Bob Kuhn said that he would tweak aspects of his subject to make it look like what we think it ought to look like.

Or consider Picasso. The work he painted in his teen years was beautifully represented; the man knew how to draw…and then spent the rest of his life going beyond just representing his subjects - he got inside of them, took them apart, twisted them around, to get at other aspects of them.

But back to our topic. This sketch is of my German Shepherd girl, Suka, sleeping on the couch next to me. When a critter is awake and moving, the best I can do is gesture sketches; repose offers a better chance to observe details and proportions. So I have a LOT of drawings of Suka sleeping. I once watched Bob Kuhn sketching a lynx from life; the cat was not moving much, but it certainly wasn’t holding still. Bob developed one particular pose, adding to it when he could as the cat moved about; meanwhile, I was scribbling away doing 40 zillion bits of gesture. Bob’s was a helluva lot nicer. Duh.

So this is everyone’s challenge in the next week: get a sketchbook, a charcoal, and a critter, and go to it. I’ll be flogging my summer workshop with the same thing. We’ll all suffer together.

Ten days until the summer solstice and this is what greeted us this morning! The poor bedraggled plant on the right demonstrates why deciduous trees don’t want their leaves in winter. This is one of those days when I feel like someone in the Duckboy card “Montanans for Global Warming” (a photo of a bunch of parka-wearers huddled in deep snow … the Duckboy images are an especially Montana brand of humor).

Yeah, I know, this isn’t really art related. So shoot me. Next week we’ll be back to our irregularly scheduled program, once I’m done with this spate of agility trials taking me away on weekends.

Someone recently asked how I go about preparing my support for a painting - so herewith, I’m inflicting this on all of you…

If I want to paint on a canvas panel:

1. Cut a piece of MDF (from Home Depot) to size
2. Glue army duck (a smoother, tighter weave of cotton duck) to the MDF with Lineco Archival adhesive (pour on glue, spread it out evenly with a wall scraper, lay panel on sticky canvas, turn it over, run a brayer over the whole canvas surface several times)
3. Weight glued panel under boards and heavy boxes overnight
4. Apply first coat of Daniel Smith white gesso, let dry
5. Sand lightly with one of those handy sanding pads from Home Depot
6. Apply second coat of gesso, dry, and sand

If I’m painting on a stretched canvas, then I just do steps 4 - 6. After all that, it’s time to draw the composition on with vine charcoal; this step can take a while to get right. Once the charcoal outline is done, I spray fix it.

Recently, I’ve started texturing the prepared panel with acrylic modeling paste, if I want a surface that already has some movement to it. It’s loads of fun to paint on, and makes me lather on oils more freely for some reason.

After all the acrylic steps are finished, I then do an underwash of very thin oils to tone the whole shebang.

So why a panel vs stretched canvas? I much prefer the harder surface of a panel for palette-knife paint application, but the MDF-based panels get really heavy over a certain size…plus, they’re only readily available in 2′x4′ sheets. Thus, if I’m considering a 30×40 or similar, it’s gotta be a stretched canvas.

Continuing on the theme from the Rungius post a few days ago, I’m including this entry here and in my Artzine so folks can weigh in on the topic.

With “Wildlife Art” magazine closing its doors, and the mere handful of animal-themed paintings in the 200+ works at the OPA show here in Missoula, I have to wonder: should we even be trying to set wildlife (or animal) art apart from other subject matter? The OPA exhibition categories are landscape, still life, and figurative…which begs the question as to what category my grizzly bear or barrel-racing piece ought to go in. Generally, though, it seems that many exhibitions and auctions don’t try to separate entries in this manner.

Quoting once again from the essay by Kirsten Evenden, written to accompany a recent Rungius exhibition:

This is a concern with wildlife art - that isolating works depicting similar subject matter does nothing to move the tradition forward. Artist Robert V. Clem has said, “…I have been increasingly put off at the extent to which…works involving natural history subject matter are relentlessly categorised as ‘wildlife art’, in such contrast to everything else which seemingly qualifies as simply ‘art’.” Indeed, during his day, Carl Rungius confronted the same issue, “What do you mean, Sporting art? There is only art; it may be good or bad, but it’s still art.” [emphasis mine]

So…where does animal art fit? should it be set apart? what do you think?