Oil Painting: 3 Keys to Formulating An Idea

When you are approaching a subject, or deciding to paint experimentally, based purely on feeling, it is often helpful to ground the work in an idea.

Most of my paintings have been done from memory, so always the dreamlike quality of memory is one of the subjects of my paintings.

Here are 3 Key Concepts to guide you toward a more powerful and cohesive work of art.

1. Base the work on one set of emotions, but challenge it with opposing emotions.
2. Keep a philosophy in mind.
3. If working from life, remember your subject is only a representation of reality, and in the end will be a symbol.

Take the above painting, "Red Light" as an example. My goal was to paint the idea of walking through a city alone, sometime outside of a normal time of day, a time of tension, like 2 a.m. or something, but my interest was not in painting a 'night' scene, rather I wanted to conjure the idea of reflecting light from all around and create a feeling of 'timelessness.'

The emotions - I'll call them that- I had in mind were a blend of individuality and strength; but challenging those feelings, were loneliness and desperation. I was thinking of all the cities I've walked alone in at night throughout the world just trying to make sense of life. The philosophy I had in mind was that we are all in a sense struggling on our own.

It being a cityscape, another main psychological component of the painting is the tension between man and the city of course - I wanted a sense of power and chaos challenging any feelings of beauty.

Now, if I had painted this scene from a photograph or from life I would have arrived at something completely different, and I often paint that way if I am inclined or studying, but ultimately the feeling of memory and transcendence that is evident in this cityscape is was makes it feel 'real' and alive.

Oil Painting: 3 Thoughts

First, a thank you
to all of the new readers of SecretsofAModernPainter, this week saw a huge increase in subscriptions. Please keep the emails and questions coming and I will do my best to answer in my posts.

3 Thoughts on Oil Painting

1. Endings- Know where you are headed and balance repetition and variation. It may change, but try to keep in mind where that final stroke will be, where are our eyes headed.

2. To be successful, all drama requires opposition. When I paint, I consider everything is in opposition, color, stroke, energy, line, format, shape, subject. Smash things together. Don't be gentle, if gentleness arises from the chaos, it may rise to beauty, all gentleness will be empty.

3. Colors should have experience. I'm not a fan of the put it down and leave it school. Get in there and rough it up, get lost, and find your way out through painting, you must learn from the act of painting, give yourself fully.

Oil Painting: On Space and Time Part 1

I'll start as I usually do with a stream and clarify throughout the post sections. What do I mean by defining and having control over Space and Time in painting, or for that matter in any art? Typically, you don't start off with a misshapen piece of canvas or paper, you start off with a shape, more often than not, a rectangle or a square. Right there you have defined space and begin reflecting on your subject, the way the eye moves around a square vs. a rectangle are different and bring to mind varying emotional states and ideas. Always remember, "What are you painting and why?" Think of your piece as a piece of music with an intro, a developmental section-often broken into various parts- a climax, and an end. In screenplay, movie or novel terms, your hero, your main idea, is beginning a journey. You must choose shape and size first, then how do you begin to break down the shape into sections and guide the eye?

Time is controlled with all of the elements of art, you have the opportunity to define them in each piece, create a key or a map, everything represents something special to the work. Think of what goes into a musical composition, somehow, the whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, etc... mean different things in different pieces, Bach, Beethoven, U2, James Taylor, Classical to Hip Hop, Folk to Metal, they all use the same notes but they have a completely different meaning.

Each song is defined in its first moments, then develops, grows, comes to an end. The rhythm and tempo reflect on the words, the words on the feelings, and all comes together to make the piece work, to allow the listener to follow along with the idea of the artist. Make sure we can somehow follow your ideas, give us an opening idea your work hinges on, create a sense of rhythm and tempo with a recognizable series of intervals, whether it be through shapes, lines, colors, or values or something else, give us an idea of what is to come...

Part 2 will further explore specifics...

Oil Painting: Evolution & 5 Key Concepts

If you want to learn to really paint, and not just mimic a style or copy the world or pictures of it, you have come to the right place.

These are the tenets that guide me, what I think about in order to create my works. If you have any questions, let me know. If you like what I have to say, please leave a comment.

Everything you do will make you better. Move forward, learn, grow. Don't worry about over-painting, you must go through that wall over and over again to get at something new. Hesitation will hold you back.

A great artist with a piece of charcoal and a scrap of paper can say so much, can in effect, describe the world, and everything in it.

Begin today by limiting variables.

If you are not yet in full control of your materials, you must take a hard look at what's in your way. How many colors are you using and why? How many brushes? Knives? Mediums? Do you know why you are using this and that, what it does?

Today and tomorrow, think about simplification, subordinating all thoughts and complexity to pure feeling. What you want at the end of your next few sessions, if not all your painting sessions is to be looking at something raw, real, full of feeling and human nature. Evolve onto the canvas.

Start with just black maybe, or just red, or blue, or yellow. Do a 10 minute study of the energy of something immediately available, something solid, or paint a quick sketch of your face. How are you feeling, that's all that matters, not what you look like, but how you are feeling.

1.Power: A painting must be alive, what the painting is about should be in every aspect of the painting, it must embody the power of the subject and be infused through and through with the one feeling the piece is actual about.

2.Energy: Similar to power, but maybe mellow, soft, calm, depends on what you like to paint, how you feel, and how you want to express yourself, works of art span the spectrum of feelings. Some artists seek to disturb, some to offer peace, my goal is to stimulate people to clarity and understanding by translating my real feelings of existence into paint.

3.Weight: What is the substance being considered in your work? Are you painting a sky? Buildings? People? As painters we're all too often thinking about light, shadow, and color, but you must feel the weight of things to get at a new sense of reality.

I want to get beyond representation, symbolism, and metaphor, to get at a new realism, postmodern realism, beyond the idea that what we see through our eyes is all that is real, beyond the idea that what we can capture on a camera is real.

4.Direction: Everything about a painting has direction, even if it is merely implied:line, value, color, brush stroke, shape, everything in one way or another changes as it moves and develops across the canvas. Everything must be controlled in the end, but during the process of creating you must in some ways be out of control, so let it go and bring it back, let it go and bring it back, just be conscious of the way all aspects of the painting are moving the viewers eyes in this way or that, and why.

Don't fear mistakes, you will only get better.

5.Stimulus and Response: Everything is connected, you are telling a story that maybe only you understand, like improvisational music, a dialogue is going on in your unconscious, let it flow but stay connected, act and react again and again, stop thinking, think, stop thinking, think. How do you respond to a hard black line? With a small soft one, or with an equally hard line in the opposite direction. Interacting with a painting is like interacting with people, what is the energy of the piece. Point-Counterpoint, Peace and Struggle, Strong and Weak, Strong and strong.

Are you fighting with yourself or flowing? What are you feeling today? Be yourself, fighting or flowing, let us feel it, be real, become on the canvas.

Show us who you are, evolve now on the canvas and show us your evolution.

Oil Painting: Infinite Color

Infinite Color

This is a powerful, now revised and updated article, on Infinite Color, I had previously published at Helium.com. Make sure to subscribe to Secrets of A Modern Painter to get all the latest posts to help you deepen your artistic sensibility and rapidly improve as an painter.

While learning to mix color from the master oil painter Hongnian Zhang, at the Woodstock school of art, I realized that color variation is infinite. I watched him steer a puddle of color not just to the color he sought, but to the subtle feeling he needed to back up his work.

Every color has a unique personality. Every component of your painting must back up the primary motive behind the work itself, so always keep in mind the overall feeling you want to impart to the viewer with your use of color. Why is having color important to this piece in the first place? Why not just use a range of grays?

Remember, color is relative. I might mix 25 to 100 different little squares of yellow-orange before I find the one that I want. By beginning with your strongest color notes, you can see how the other colors relate to it. So your second color mark, whatever the hue, will only have its own presence relative to the first note.

Anything can be painted in an infinite number of ways.

Try not to limit yourself to first choices.

Forget what you may think of as color theory- beginning from anything else but the infinite is a way to lock your mind in parameters: primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, as well as all of the theories of combining them, while guidelines in understanding the basic fundamentals of mixing will only lead to sublime beauty by accident.

You must learn to feel color to know color.

The way to coax beautiful color and vibrating air from the tip of your brush is to see and feel the color in your mind. One exercise to do is make ten to twelve distinct tints or shades of an individual color. Then write a few words next to the color to describe them.

So how do you mix infinite color? I hope the exercise below to begin to understand the incredible subtleties available to you. Think of yourself as a colorist or a designer and search for unique color choices that have the most meaning relative to the work at hand.

Exercise For Sublime Color Mixing:

Begin with two large pools of complementary colors of the same temperature, such as Cadmium Yellow Light (a warm yellow) and Ultramarine Blue (a warm blue) and mix 5 variations between them, from yellow-green to blue-green, paying careful attention to separating them enough to be recognized as a unique variation. By adding a pin drop of blue into the yellow, then a tiny dab more, then a little more, each variation will be clear. After you have 5 clear color variations between those two, create one in between each (there may be many more than one), until you have 10 variations. Now look at those colors. Are they clean and unique? They should be singing.

If they aren’t singing, try again, take a break and look at the infinite color in nature, find the correct light – If the colors exist - and an infinite amount of colors exist - then you can identify them. Return to your exercise, choose two more colors and continue. Combine as many pairs of colors, creating 5, then 10, or more variations. Gradually you will begin to feel the changes in your blood. Make a ring with your thumb and forefinger and look as if through a magnifying glass at everything inside and outside. See the infinite variations. The same colors you see are available to you for painting. There is no barrier between your mind and your brush. Remember to use plenty of paint, at whatever density of pigmentation you can afford, and mix enough color before you paint to get the main shapes roughed in. Painting, as opposed to drawing, is more of a relationship of shapes and color than of a series of lines. One can paint with charcoal. Remember that colors have values and that good gray values can look like they are colored.

Remember though, when you are painting, using a million colors won't work-the painting would be too chaotic, that's where you have to narrow your choices and lessen the variables. More on controlling repetition and variation in an upcoming post. Also, the key elements of successful color mixing. Make sure to subscribe to get the next installment of Secrets of A Modern Painter, and thank you for reading.

Oil Painting: Secrets of A Modern Painter-On Being Yourself: How Painting is Like Writing

Having spent over ten years writing just about everything: poetry, stories, plays, and screenplays, as well as essays, articles, and journals, before I began to paint in 1999- after nearly a year off- I see many similarities between the construction of a painting and a piece of writing.


As with all of my entries, as in all of my paintings, this will not be completely linear, the process of writing and painting is the process of searching, and what is left on the page is like a translation of my thoughts. There will be dangling phrases and unanswered questions that may or may not be returned to.

Painting is much the same. You can come at painting in many different ways. You could have a style or a set of visual ideas, things you like, and in large part know where you are headed. You might be a plein air painter who ends up after each session with a certain airy 'look' to your work, a kind of impressionism that we are seeing more and more in all of the popular magazines. For you, success may mean positioning the elements of the landscape in a readable and pleasant way. Success for this type of painter is capturing light primarily, among other things, I won't elaborate on this-it's for future more specific pieces- and that kind of painting can be beautiful, sometimes powerful, and at times individualistic, but rarely unique.

The great benefit of popular painting magazines is the contact with the techniques of more accomplished artists, but even a cursory view at the articles from month to month reveal great similarities among the various styles and artists.

Your goal might be to make things appear real, either photorealistic or highly representational, and your feeling of success depends on accuracy. Still, there are those painters who pursue art in those styles whose work transcends the medium and is filled with real emotion.

I am not judging styles, I have often found myself on a warm spring day, out in the field, trying my best to get at that particular plein air quality, and I think it's important to the artist's education, it's just that it can become the be all and end all of an artist's path if he is not vigilant.

The same with realism, at one point a few years ago, after I had attained a level of success with my own style, I realized that I wouldn't be satisfied in the end unless I learned how to paint anything more 'as it is,' in a realistic way, and I honed my skills at viewing the outside world only to once again realize that my true nature is driving me always toward a freer more wide-ranging aesthetic.

Always ask yourself why you paint? What do you want out of painting?

Now, how is painting like writing?

Obviously, there are the elements, the fundamentals, the letters, the words, the phrases, the sentences. Then there are meanings, denotations, connotations, sympathetic ideas, historical references, and modern understandings, each word, each idea, can carry with it hundreds, if not thousands of years of meaning, and every word or phrase has the opportunity to change each day depending on usage and popularity.

Some will just write, words are words. And some will just paint, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit. And of course, there are an infinite number of variations on any theme, but for some the basic is enough, nothing deeper needs to be said, found, or seen, and again, it's not my goal to judge, but I am after something much deeper, and not for the sake of appearances, for the sake of living, because I think human thought is valuable and without constantly questioning, delving deeper, and evolving, we will sink into complacency and uniformity and lose something sacred.

Of course, words have sounds, and as sentences begin to flow together, music is being made.

Do paintings make sound? Do colors have feeling? Does a string of brush strokes create a phrase? Is a painting like a story?

Painting for me is a translation of my experience painting. More than the visual image I seek to create, the finished product, I aim to exist while I paint, to breathe into each stroke and to transcribe my heartbeat, my existence in those hours onto the canvas, the same way a writer might begin a session with free writing only to enter fully into the constant flow of thought, to become one with the passing of time, I as a painter must actually feel myself being human while I am painting, feel the animal inside me, acknowledge the reasonable mind, and breathe, no matter what my subject, I am recording my time alive and seeking to suspend the energy of consciousness and the energy of passionate life on the canvas.

So, as you set out to make your story, to create, as a writer sets out to write, do you look at what words, phrasing, and stories are popular and seek only to mimic what is considered a successful piece. Are you trying to trick people or yourself into thinking you have a certain flair or proficiency, or do you want to create something fresh with your whole being, bringing together your years of experience and inspire your viewers to feel the beauty of life in time?

Oil Painting: Secrets of A Modern Painter

I hope my insights help you become the artist you want to be.

When I began to paint a decade ago, I brought with me 15 years of writing experience, and over 20 years of music improvisation and composition. But nothing really prepared me for the challenges of creating powerful images in paint.

Now, I have painted thousands upon thousands of pictures and made notes of my discoveries. Some of what I have to say I have expanded with my own knowledge from other books, the words of painters and theorists, writers and educators, some of what I am sharing has come from pouring over the great paintings from the past two centuries, but a great deal of what you will find in these pages I don't think you will find anywhere else.

Real painting is all about real life. If you want to rise to the level of being an artist, through and through, then you must learn to call upon your entire being, both good and bad, and your entire life experience every time you approach the easel.

My focus is on painting, but much of what I am writing about will apply to the other arts, and more than that, other professions and other aspects of life, because, ultimately, what I am after is the universality of being, the foundations of harmony and the building blocks of life on which humanity grows.

The Secrets begin with optimism. I began from scratch, with no knowledge per se or formal training; but I had an abundance of optimism and relentless drive. I also considered every failure just another step to success.

If you are a beginner, then consider yourself to have already begun. Now, every hour that passes in reflection of artistry will bring you one step closer to your goal, every day of considering painting, or in the active process of creation brings you one day closer to success.

Thank you for joining me and please don't hesitate to be in contact your thoughts and questions.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Boray