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. 

Have you ever been on a painting trip all excited and pumped about what you were accomplishing – visualizing wonderful larger studio paintings — only to get home and the paintings look flat and the photographs, as usual, look nothing like what you remember?  It’s times like these when I have to work hard at improving reference, stretching myself to make more progress as an artist, using imagination to see how many different compositions I can come up with, or forcing myself to do more color sketches with a variety of color schemes.

Two books that I recommend for compositions are John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting which has a good chapter on composition and one on planes and angles of the landscape.  The other is Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne.  I’ve used both of these books to bring out what I needed to work on.