When you paint, make me believe. A painting attempts to take a flat plane and make us believe images of a three dimensional world. The artist, like the fiction writer, needs to create a willing suspension of disbelief.

For years the wild sunsets often seen in paintings in British and American landscapes from the late 1800s struck me as a fantasy element. I had no problem enjoying the paintings because there was an internal consistency. Under those multihued sunsets and towering cloud formations, deep shadows and rosy or orange hued highlights built beautiful, larger than life landscapes. It was in reading Simon Winchester's Krakatoa, an account of the August 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano and its aftermath that I learned the paintings were much more realistic than I had imagined. In fact British painter William Ashcroft created over 500 watercolor works documenting the view from the London area. Now I admire those artists who captured an amazing atmospheric effect of their time no less than I previously did for imaginative treatment of their subject. I've seen sunset paintings that fail to convince use the brilliant hues of these painting superimposed on a landscape from midday without the long shadows of low sun and light coming from the wrong direction.

The challenge in making my own small pastel painting of "Sunset, Bandon OR" believable was to show effectively the glowing reflections on the shallow water and wet sand in the foreground. I used blues to show the pooled water next to the large rock and the ripples of very shallow water. White marked bits of sea foam. The rocks, being back lit, are dark and somber with a glow at the edge where the golden light touches the stone. This painting worked well enough to get into two juried shows, earning an honorable mention in one, and sell at the opening reception of its first gallery show.

Landscapes depend on our believing in the integrity of their internal world. Light and shadow must be consistent with our experience. Perspective should make some kind of sense, whether we are following the lines leading us through a Utrillo landscape, getting lost in Eschler's world, or the flatter look of primitive art. So also must we be careful of point of view. Some wonderful effects can be gained by looking up or down toward something ordinarily seen straight on. If there are switches in viewpoint within the painting or drawing, it had better be done with purpose, as when M. C. Eschler turns his painting and our minds upside down.

Sometimes we alter reality for a better composition; another reason to do so might be credibility. In life a particular tree, building, rock formation, or animal might be part of the area you want to paint, but if it looks like to just stuck it in where it doesn't seem to fit, leave it out. Chances are the narrow window of the painting made the odd form more important than it was in the actual scene. The light and shadow may make the rock pile and dry shrub in front of the aspens look like a crouching animal. Simplify instead of risking your viewers seeing it as a malformed beast!

Whatever you do remember that picture world must hold together within itself or they won't buy it--critically or at the cash register!

There are no self taught artists, but there are many lessons beyond the formal walls of the classroom. Museums have long been places where artists can sharpen their skills, and many welcome students with sketchbook in hand. Some paintings within the museums you frequently visit may become old friends that you must spend time with even when you are there to view a special show.

At Stockton's Haggin Museum "Sophistication", a 1908 work by Harry Wilson Watrous, is such a work for me. So are the Albert Bierstadt works in the museum's permanent collection. My fascination with "Sophistication" led a young friend to give me the box pictured here from the Haggin's gift shop. Scattered about the world there are several related painting by Watrous depicting a young woman, or women, dressed in black and white, and gazing into their own world rather than out at the viewer.

Characteristic of this painting and others such as "The Passing of Summer" and "Confidences" are an interesting lively use of negative and positive space, lights and darks, sending the eyes dancing around to bits of interesting detail and always back to the faces. Delicate shadows and shadings shape the forms, and despite his love of blacks and white his color choices are excellent.

"Sophistication" represents a young woman who is rather daring for her time and place. In 1908 there is a cigarette in her hand, and she is having tea in a public place unaccompanied, a sophisticated modern woman indeed-- probably wants the vote enough to risk getting arrested in a demonstration. And that averted gaze, off in her own thoughts, also implies story, life in motion both before and after this vignette.

So what do I take away from this painting as an artist? It reminds me to keep honing my drawing skills. It points up the power of strong value contrast and the rhythms of negative and positive spaces. It reminds me that one may not need a large palette, but if little color is used it must be used wisely.

On another level it causes me to think about the importance of observation, not just observation of form and color but also of the body language of people which is so unique and so telling.

Think about some of your favorite paintings. Why do you love them? What can you learn from them?

If I've piqued your curiosity about Harry Wilson Watrous you may want to take a look at the American Gallery website http://americangallery.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/harry-wilson-watrous-1857-1940/

Visual impact is the first thing we work toward in a painting, with color, value, and composition forming a triad of essentials. After the sense of sight, we most often appeal to that of touch. We want the viewer to be able to imagine from our visual clues the silken smoothness of a fabric, the rough bark of redwood or oak, the scratch of a kitten's tongue, the heft of a stone. Less often we spark the senses of taste, hearing, and smell. When I developed "Heavenly Aroma", I hoped to visually depict a smell.

I was afraid the painting shown here was a little too "local" to make it into the highly competitive juried show currently open at Delicato Winery. Only about 30% of the paintings entered made the cut, and I had better hopes for my other entries. "Heavenly Aroma", entered in the whimsical category, relies on those floating Cheerios making sense. What I had not counted on was that while the wonderful odor of baking Cheerios is unique to Lodi CA and a few other communities with General Mills plants, signature odor is a universal characteristic of towns and cities. Gilroy, CA says garlic; Hershey PA is awash chocolate scent; roasting coffee, simmering tomato sauce, cattle pens, oil patches, and other products leave an unforgettable memory associated with various locations. I really need not have worried about anyone not "getting" what the presence of those floating Cheerios meant.

Of course the painting had to have other strengths to make it an acceptable work of art. It works as a composition because the various angles of the structures (the buildings, fence, and sidewalk) keep the eye moving. The seemingly random pattern of the Cheerios also guide the eye back into the painting when it might follow the fence off the page. Verticals break up the long horizontal lines, and notice the runner is moving toward the center of the painting rather than out of the painting. Shadows are not intense, in keeping the the low light of a cloudy day, but there is enough value contrast for the painting to read well from a distance.

I chose ink and watercolor for this work, a media combination I frequently prefer for cityscapes.

Look at your own paintings as well as those of other artists. How many senses do you appeal to in various works? Does viewing Edvard Munch "The Scream" hurt your ears? How often have you looked closely at a painting to see if the artist had built up an irregular surface or created it purely with line and color? Visual art indeed offers a sensory feast.

After deciding which slice of the world will make a good landscape composition, a second problem to be worked out is how much detail to show. When I saw these ducks sitting in the sun on a weathered boardwalk bridge rail at Neary Lagoon I was struck by their bright beauty. There was no doubt they were the stars of the scene. They would make a lovely watercolor painting by themselves. Yet I was also struck by patterns which spoke of the rich complexity of the landscape. The weathered wood had a lavender tone where it had been exposed by the peeling paint, and revealed growth patterns in the wood as the paint held to some layers better than to others. The ducks themselves had an array of colors in their feathers although the male's head and wings made them clearly identifiable as mallards. Beautiful interlacings of reeds obscured the sunny grasses and the trees beyond.

Too much attention to these details would create a chaotic design with no clear focal point. Too little attention to detail would not tie them to their landscape in quite the way I wanted to. Since I was able to get the painting into a juried show shortly after completing it, I suppose I had some success in reaching my goal of detail without distraction.

One way of keeping the spotlight on the ducks was to concentrate light on them, not only are they in the sun casting strong shadows, but the brightest glow of yellow green is in the grasses seen through the reeds just above them. On the boards below them I left no paper white; all of the white has been touched with at least a trace of other color, and the contrasting lavender browns are kept very muted. I tried to show the complexity of the by using negative painting, painting behind the reeds rather than the reeds themselves, and then revisiting those areas with various greens, yellows, and browns. Then a few dark strokes added line where needed. You could count the number of reeds actually shown here. The human eye conspires with the artist to see hundreds.

I find that I am often struggling with how much detail to show. If you are working on scene time dictates simplicity. In the studio working from reference photographs one has time to agonize over the question and ask "What story am I trying to tell in this particular painting? And how can I do it?"

Western Art presents plentiful examples of excellent use of black and white: ink drawings by PIcasso, photos by Ansel Adams, the best of the motion pictures' early decades are but a few examples. It is in Chinese and Japanese Brush painting that the varying shades of black or gray are actually called colors. The classic paintings of China and Japan range from simple bamboo shoots to complex landscapes. What they have in common is the power of color within the blue black or brown black that is used. We see this also in modern masters such as Xu Beihong whose horses I particularly admire http://www.xubeihong.org/

In working with the ink I love the subtle shades made possible depending on the amount of water in the ink and in the brush. Rice paper and silk, traditionally used for brush painting, are thirsty surfaces. Practice, test the flow from the brush on a "scratch" sheet, because you must paint quickly or lose control. Working in monochromatic shades is excellent for developing a sense of value in painting--without it one loses all detail in such a work. The composition itself will demand balance because the negative spaces are so clearly seen in white, and it becomes instantly obvious in a piece is too centered or too repetitive.

There are specific concerns with the colors in the painting of plum trees and plum blossoms as I've done here. Old bark is usually lighter colored than new growth. it is also rougher. The young growth is darker and smoother. Plum blossoms require light ink and may be done in outline to use the white of the paper. Variations in ink color help tell the story of age and scars from disease or injury in the older growth.

I used darker ink in the stump behind the vigorous tree. There were two reasons for that. One is that bark around the base of a tree is often darkened by the damp along the ground. Notice the grasses to help make this point. Plum tree in the language of brush painting represents winter and with it age, but also the promise of spring and continuation in the shoots and blossoms. My tree stump carries this to extreme, we have a fallen tree with that little blossom promising hope for the future. And enter the other reason for the dark ink on the right side of the tree trunk. Painting is about problem solving--either in how to represent the world and our abstraction of it, or how to fix the problems we create in the process. I had a boo-boo because I left a brush in place too long on that thirsty paper when I was attempting to make a cat looking up at that little bird in the plum tree. This mistake led me into a solution that strengthened the age-and-renewal theme. The blob of ink from the cat gone wrong became part of the colors that represent the rough old bark in the stump.

Primary colors attract us from the nursery on up. They are not boring. I read some time back of a gallery owner who said that paintings with each of the three primary colors in them were most likely to sell. I don't know how wide spread this experiences. Perhaps the big three in the world of color used together give the viewer a sense of wholeness, of balance and harmony in the universe. Perhaps they are just bright and jolly and make us want to smile and kick like that infant in the nursery.

Used as all or the major part of a painting strong primaries are exciting. If your painting has been feeling a bit tired, doing a few works strictly in a palette of primaries may be just what you need to shake your art up a bit. Even a small work in primary colors can shout yoo-hoo! across a room.

I've been playing with them a bit recently, looking for pleasing compositions in red, blue, and yellow. A yellow mug, on a blue surface, with a red background painted in acrylic made a good business card picture. It gets attention.

The painting shown here is in pastels. It is only 5×5 inches. It owes something to my recent re-examination of the paintings of Mark Rothko after a friend did an homage piece to him. I find that the Rothkos which please me are those which are like stripped bare landscapes. And as with landscapes, if the horizon line divides the plane down the middle it isn't going to make my favorites list. In this painting I chose a high horizon to emphasize the distance across the fields. My world needs a bit more suggestion of detail, something to evoke a sense of story. There, where the golden wheat fields meet the clear blue sky, red asserts itself in a cluster of farm buildings. The viewer is invited to think of those great prairie distances and what they mean to the people who live with them.

One thing I have noticed time and again in the effort to create better paintings--get the shadows right first. This is particularly important for the plein air painter whose light source is continually moving. With shadows in place, there is support for the memory as the light changes. Once the shadows are in, values can quickly be sketched for light/bright spots hit directly by the light source and the mid-tones between.

This pastel painting was literally saved by the shadows. I began in last October on a sunny day sitting on my patio and viewing long the south wall of the house. Because it was during open studios, it was a demo painting that I couldn't possibly finish on the spot. There was too much hopping up to chat with the visitors and give them the stories of other paintings on display. The interaction doesn't finish a work of art, but it does sell the art. We left on a shot vacation immediately after. By the time we were back the weather had turned and the garden was not the same, with the hollyhocks and zinnias beaten down by rain. One thing I had completed was those shadows on the pathway and the overall color areas were blocked in. Some details of the flowers were established.

Months went by before I got back to it. Then I needed to complete it entirely from memory without any photo references. I worked definition into the elements on the left side of the painting and was pretty happy with that side. The vines spilling over the fence worked into shape that had some depth as darker values moved some areas back and yellow greens came forward. Then I almost ruined it. The right side of the paper looked rather dark. Sitting indoors in a windowless room, I started to brighten the area up. Then I took a second look at the shadows. They reminded me that the plants against the south facing wall were in full sun and those on the right side were self-shading much of the visible area. Thanks to those established shadows I have a charming garden scene on a sunny October day instead of a bright-all-over painting that would not ring true.