Phil Starke Art Talk

There are three reasons why I spend time drawing when I have so many paintings I want to work on.

First is compositional drawing.  These are thumbnail sketches for larger paintings, trying to come up with new ideas.  These are usually done with markers or 6B graphite.

I like to fill notebooks with these for future ideas for paintings.

The second reasons is to sharpen my ability to see, using line or massing darks and lights to render objects or figures.  I use an extra fine line pen or a medium or heavy graphite pencil to set a variety of thick or thin line.  This could be drawing figures at the mall or spending the day drawing landscapes in the mountains.

The third is drawing just because it’s fun — subjects I don’t usually paint or by sketching my kids.  This can be with charcoal, conte crayon or watercolor.  Drawing is a chance for me to see thrings differently, change things up and practice rendering without thinking of color or temperature.  Plus, I don’t have all that mess to clean up.  Two books that I’ve been reading lately are the two volumes of The Drawings of Rembrandt by Seymor Slive  and published by Dover.  The other is The Language of Drawing From an Artists Point of View By Sherrie McGraw. 

 I’ve been using a limited palette for a number of years, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.  It started as a reason to get rid of some colors on the palette and to try and achieve a little color harmony.

For a while I got paintings that were mostly secondary colors, too green or orange.  After a time and a lot of help I started using all three primaries in every mixture with one predominate color.  That allowed me to control the intensity of the color plus I could make innumerable subtle color changes by just adding more of the predominate color or the other two remaining primaries.

It was helpful to make color charts to see how far I could go with all the subtle variations.  I did sacrifice the pop that a prussian blue would give a sky or colbalt violet would give a shadow, but the color harmony and the subtle grays you can achieve is worth it.

So more color without all those tubes. 

As an artist I’m drawn to a variety of subject matter, from mountain ranges to my wife cooking in the kitchen. There is conventional beauty as in a sunset or arrangement of flowers and beauty found in the arrangement of shapes, values and subtle changes of color no matter what the subject. The best subjects are the ones I stumble upon when I don’t have my paint box, drawing pad or camera ( yes, I do use photography). Being unprepared is the  best time to exercise your memory and imagination. The camera is too static, it’s hard to break away from the framed image and use your imagination to improve on technique or composition.

All the things I do when I’m not painting offer the best chances for exerciseing my imagination. Sitting in church and watching the light from the window fall on the side of someones face. The arrangement of vegtables at the market, or traveling through New Mexico on my way to Oklahoma City, which I do several times a year, and seeing all kinds of compositions along the Rio Grande. During these times I play the scene over and over in my head trying to remember large shapes and tempature contrasts. Then when I finaly pull into my cheap motel in Tucumcari I can put the scene down in pencil or on a 6×8 panel in oil or pastel, again just the major shapes that made up the quick glance out of the window.

I was at the dog park recently close to sundown, the park sits on top of a hill with a great view of the Tucson mountains. Since July is in monsoon season the clouds were beautiful and instead of fooling around with the camera, adjusting aputures and shutter speeds I could just watch the last 15 minutes of the sunset, making mental notes of simple shapes and color notes, thinking in terms of primary and secondary colors. Then drag my dog home and do a quick 6×8 color scketch and do 3 or 4 more to see how I can improve on technique or texture.