Revelation in the Desert

With my confidence at full throttle thanks to Dan Young's workshop, I stopped at the side of the road in the Superstitions and immediately made a drawing of this scene. My pulse actually quickened. When I got home expanded it into an 11x14.

Again, confidence can make things happen. Moving elements to enhance composition is liberating. After the workshop I fell into a virtual painting frenzy. Inspiration was in plain view. Painting became exhilarating again.

Painting with confidence was always one of those impossible goals to which I paid lip service but seemed too difficult to achieve. Ever since I started slapping paint on a canvas I struggled with the same fundamentals every time. My drawing was poor, my values needed constant adjustment and my colors looked like they should be in a cartoon. If I got something right I was scared to touch it. I painted tight. I painted light. I was always so tentative. I had teachers who would come to my easel, watch me gingerly dab some paint and they would all say the same thing. Put some paint up there. A strong brush stroke is a powerful message. Tentative swabs with thinned out color was not.

Dan Young summed it all up on Day 1 of our Arizona workshop.

“Let’s be clear today,” he admonished, “this is a painting workshop, not a staining workshop.”

As I write this, some weeks later, I am a changed painter . . . at least for now. Some very powerful messages came forward out in the Arizona desert. These were not totally new concepts. In fact, I had heard it all many times before. Maybe I never really listened. Maybe I never really understood. Maybe it was the fact that Dan is not only a master painter, he's a master teacher.

I remember back in my first days of oil painting around 2005 when Karl Dempwolf would stress that a painting without a thumbnail is like a building without a blueprint. Being a terrible draftsman, I tried to do these thumbnails but became increasingly frustrated. Besides, I had such a lack of knowledge about composition and value that I’m not sure I could execute a proper drawing. I would constantly get bogged down, stuck in the weeds with too many lines and too many indefinite shapes. I understood perspective but couldn’t execute properly. I was hung up drawing form not shape.

In many other workshops the instructors swore off thumbnails and advised doing an oil sketch directly on the canvas. As I look back on that period, which may have lasted until a few weeks ago, I think of how many busted paintings I made because I had no roadmap. One teacher, Jim Wodark, was a thumbnail guy. But he had a sixth sense about the simplicity of a scene. He could easily reduce any scene to 5 lines and 3 values without blinking. That kind of drawing intimidated me. Jim helped me to see but I needed a more strict taskmaster to get me to the next level.

So I stumbled down this path realizing quite often that my lack of design was killing my paintings. Ray Roberts always stressed design. Ray taught me to paint. To really paint. He taught me  much about composition, design, value and color. But with Ray I often felt that he was teaching Calculus while I struggled with Algebra. And he left all options open. Thumbnail . . . cool. Oil sketch on canvas . . . cool. Too much freedom for me. 

Dan Young had a different approach. Basically, if you didn’t do a simple and coherent thumbnail, you couldn’t paint that scene! Now, he’s too humble a guy to actually dictate those terms but I believed he meant business. The workshop began unlike any workshop I had ever attended. He wanted 10 or 15 sketches in 30 minutes. I don’t know what happened but that simple exercise opened me up. After 10 or 12 sketches I felt a little confident. I was starting to distill a scene to its essence.

Then he evaluated those sketches and “corrected” some elements even simplifying some elements.

For years I’ve been listening to my painter buddies constantly blabber on about finding shapes. It got to the point where I felt inadequate. "Damn, I don’t really see those shapes." Then the painter would come over to my easel and show me. It was like magic. “Oh, yeah” I’d say, feeling like a dimwit.

Well suddenly out in a parking lot in Peralta Canyon, Arizona I began to really see. This was a huge step. Confidence started to ooze out of me. Then Dan hopped over and offered another liberating concept. Make the rock wall in a shape that works for you. Change the shape. Move the road.  Leave out that big cactus. Make your thumbnail work. Move the little cactus. It’s a painting. Make your thumbnail a true roadmap.

OK, OK. I have heard this all before. But I never believed it. I was stuck in the old school thought that I must render the scene as it appeared before me. Now it was an entirely new idea. Painting from life you can capture the essence of a Palo Verde. You can play with the shadows and sunlight on a rock wall. You can put arms anywhere you want on a Saguaro. You can make foreground and shadows work for you. It's not a photograph. I started to really get in touch with my feelings about the scene. Many times in the past I was too worried about making an exact rendition.

Dan said if the composition isn’t strong enough, change the large shapes. Suddenly I was free. This was the path to the impressionism I sought. This workshop was a game-changer for me.  Now if I can only work on my brushwork . . . .!!!!!!!!

Creating a painting, not making a photograph on canvas is a different perspective for me. This  "On the Spotter" wasn't an exact rendition.