Event: Madelaine Wood Painting Demonstration
Venue: Opus Framing, Granville Island
Date: Oct. 24, 2009


In my never ending quest to become a better painter, or at the very least define my own style, I have decided to see close up as many painters actually painting as possible. Right now I am rather smitten with Sorolla, and find myself more and more concentrating on the effects of light on the subject. Sorolla seems to have had some very hard and fast rules regarding this: anything which was in a shadow was less than middle grey value, everything that was in direct light was always painted in greater than middle grey value. While this may seem obvious, it is not exactly universally applied. In a recent walk along "Gallery Row" on Granville St., the few representational paintings in galleries which I saw did not subscribe to this concept consistently. This may seem like an old-fashioned idea, but I am going to strive to ensure that all my paintings in the future adhere to this rule, and not just by accident. Flipping though several of my canvases, I notice that I naturally seem to do this, but not always, and in those cases I see now that the colour is too vivid. This is especially tricky where there are bright coloured objects far in the background but in broad daylight. DaVinci would have painted as if there were a veil of smoke between the object and the viewer. Sorolla very cleverly achieves the effect of distance by carefully controlling the tone of objects in that background, but still preserving the luminosity which his paintings are famous for.

This afternoon I sat in on a painting demonstration by Madelaine Wood. I first encountered her paintings at Ian Tan's gallery on Granville, where she had an exhibition of paintings of unmade beds. I quite enjoyed it. She was working on a painting of a detailed closeup of some arbutus tree bark. In general, she tends to look at things on a micro, rather than a macro level, and she mentioned that it was likely due to the fact that as a child she had really bad eyesight. Most of her paintings have a wonderful brightness and fresh quality to them. Really quite beautiful; she obviously knows what she's doing. It was reassuring that many of the processes and techniques which she uses are second nature to me as well: painting on a non-white canvas: she prefers Sap Green as a ground, I almost always use Burnt Umber, but that is something which I probably read or saw somewhere (Cennini? Zurbarán? Vasari?), so I should probably re-evaluate that as well. Apparently it is not that critical. Legend has it that El Greco used left over paint from his last palette.

Madelaine paints exclusively in oils, and apparently almost exclusively from photographs. Members of the audience questioned her about that - there still seems to be a bit of suspicion when photography and painting are mentioned in the same sentence. Artists like Virgil Elliott seem to be categorically opposed to the practice. My own opinion is somewhat like Elliotts, that painting photographs is wrong on very many levels, but I disagree with him on the use of photography - so long as one has trained the eye to see the difference between a photograph and reality, then photographs, most especially digital photographs, are a wonderful tool. To people like Elliott, I would just ask "what has more information, a dozen digital photographs or a quick pencil sketch?" Ten megapixels don't lie, and while sketching does have the advantage that it forces an intimacy with the subject, it simply is not possible to include as much information as a photograph. Consequently I end up taking lots of pictures AND making a sketch, which I subsequently usually don't ever look at again.

I had a brief talk with her regarding Gamblin products, and she is also quite impressed with their quality. I am particularly happy with the Gamblin Ground for Oil Painting and I think that is pretty much going to be my standard issue canvas prep from now on. I took a canvas apart recently as an experiment, and was rather shocked to discover that I could peel the entire coat of oil paint off the acrylic "gesso" ground quite cleanly. I always suspected that the interaction between acrylics and oils might lead to problems, but this only confirmed my worst fears. In the future I plan on stretching my own canvas (or linen) on frames and hammering the whole thing together with solid copper tacks. If I'm going to put huge hours into something, I don't want it to be on some mass-produced, made in China, stapled, off the shelf canvas. Those might be alright for quick exercises because they are so inexpensive, but realistically if I'm spending hundreds of hours on a painting, I want everything on it to be the best I can make it.



Madelaine was very generous with her advice, and she is a very lovely and gracious person. I really enjoyed my time with her, and wish I didn't have to rush off at the end, but there was a literary event I had tickets for - part of the Writer's Festival now on at Granville Island.