Oil Painting

[Tristan Berndt]

So I started my underpainting today. The goal of an underpainting can be really different depending on technique/approach. Some prefer to have it focus heavily on the drawing, so that the later painting stage can focus more on colors and values. Others find that they want their underpainting to be a stage where they can explore and experiment more before settling in on the direction they want to take things. Some take the material handling very seriously and set up the underpainting to slowly glaze in their lights/darks over several sessions.

In my case, the underpainting is just to set up context for the paint that goes on top. To establish all the fundamental qualities without going into details or overly defining them. It's also important for me to keep things thin and stable, so as to make a painting that is materially strong and archival. I want the end painting to be something made wet-in-wet so I'm trying to set things up so that later I can go section by section, painting it to a finish without feeling like doing that radically changes the appearance of the painting. If I were to start in one spot and paint it to a finish before the overall impression is established, I'm essentially moving blindly, not being sure where the painting will take me. So that is why this kind of underpainting is important to me, to figure out where I want to take things.

The underpainting isn't done, the light got dark quicker than I expected, but it's not a big problem. Working wet over dry isn't a problem if you later intend to paint over everything anyway.

Something to note, I strongly believe that in order to judge values/contrasts properly, we have to eliminate all lines from our work. Lines are a conceptual tool that is often used to define the contours of things, but it's also used to emphasise the contrast. If we for example have a painting but things are outlined in a black line, every place where one color meets another is divided by a line that increases that sense of contrast. So the line tells us that what we see has a much greater contrast than maybe the colors would naturally have when next to each other. So unless we're planning to have lines in our final painting (which is fine if you want to do it), including them will mislead us to what the visual contrasts are actually like, making it harder to judge things properly.


Now when looking at my painting, we can see that it's very rough. There's not much of a "drawing" going on, the edges of things have all been painted in a patchy, almost vibrating way and there's not much of an attempt to make things pretty. This is intentional and I'll try and explain why things are the way they are.

The broad idea of the approach to this painting is that by painting the big visual impression I see, I am going to end up making something that has all the fundamental qualities of the subject, so the overall form, the proportions, the gesture, the overall sense of light etc. Then once I feel like the big impression is solid, the details will be very easy to put in. In a sense, it's following the idea of working general to specific. (now while I do talk about the visual impression a lot, I do think about the form too. The things go hand in hand but I try to get the light and color down first, then try to turn the form)

By painting in patches of color rather than long brush strokes along the form, I make the painting vibrate and I've found that it's much easier to correct and work on a painting when it has a sense of vibration and dither rather than when things feel too solidly connected. When I was a student doing all my charcoal drawings, I would refine the shapes to be super tight and once they were very clean, I found it very difficult to correct, change or further develop the image, it all felt so "locked in". The technique I developed then was to essentially hatch with my charcoal or eraser over the area I wanted to work on and it introduced this vibration/dither that made it much easier to work.

This idea was very important to me and it's something I've always tried to keep in mind when drawing or painting, as I have a natural tendency to tighten things up over time, eventually making it feel "locked in".

I think this idea of locking in a drawing or painting is one a lot of people share and I think we've all experienced the times when we've attempted to really carefully start with tight a drawing and then developing it into a painting and things go very poorly, it's all dull and underwhelming, and we don't really feel as free to change or correct thing as we are when we just start from very rough sketches and kind of wing it. I think this has to do with how locked in we feel and we don't have this vibration/dither that we do when our work is much rougher.

If we look historically, we actually find a lot of very rough techniques being used when developing very fine paintings. Coarse bristle brushes creating rough textures, big brushes are used to avoid modelling too much of the small finer shapes, the broad impression is more scrubbed in than it is painted. I think these things were done this way, in part because it's easier to work on something when it has that vibrating roughness to it.

All this is to say that the mess I'm creating, is in part intentional.


I think I'll spend one or two more days painting the overall impression before starting to paint it section by section. Next session will be more about correcting the values and colors, today was more about getting it going and finding the proportions of things. I sometimes feel like you need to throw yourself into things rather than hesitate too much at the start.