Mysteries of Still Life

By E. J. Gold

Artistic students of all types will find value in this in-depth guide to creating a solid, still life composition. Utilizing a variety of drapery methods and objects found in everyday life, the sequential path to expressive displays are broken down for easy understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gateways Books Tapes
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780895564412

Book preview

SETUPS

PREFACE

I’ve been teaching Still-Life classes to all my art students for the past forty years whether drawing, acrylic, oils, pastels, charcoal, graphite, litho, etching and even 3D CAD game designers, because Still-Life captures the essentials of what the serious art student needs to know.

Many years ago, when I attended the legendary Otis Art Institute, which now celebrates over 90 years of continuous operation, I had the good fortune of being in painting classes with a man that I consider to have been one of the greatest Still-Life masters in America, and certainly one of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered — Robert Bentley Schaad — along with Bob Glover who taught 3D design, which I find essential and foundational for all my computer game design I’ve been doing for the past twenty years.

Recently I encountered the concept of scrapbooking, something to which I had given no thought whatever over the years. In the course of building a scrapbook for my Otis years, I stumbled across my class notes for Bentley Schaad’s classes.

They follow a sequential path through the process of understanding how to use Still-Life painting as a means of gaining understanding in art in general, and painting in particular — not just indoor setups, which means that what I learned in Still-Life painting served me well in my landscape, figure, portrait and abstract work as well.

This book was really created for my present art students, and I know they will appreciate what I managed to glean from the teachings of Robert Bentley Schaad at Otis. He was a wonderful, although strict and demanding, teacher.

He was also very encouraging and acted as my mentor for many years. He was also, in spite of his extreme need for privacy and his rather secretive lifestyle, a good friend.

CHAPTER ONE

DRAWING SKILLS

Good drawing skills are the deep fundamentals to good painting of any kind. As Uncle Bentley Schaad said often, weak drawing produces weak painting. Drawing skills within the painting, even a loose, dynamic abstract, is the skeleton upon which the painting can be fleshed out. Even the abstract expressionists with whom I worked in the 1950s had great drawing skills. You can see these skills in the wildest work of Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Franz Kline, all of whom studied classical drawing with terrific intensity and had backgrounds of very strong artistic training before turning to action painting.

We could easily spend several years exploring the avenues of classical drawing to develop a sense of composition and design as well as color, form, value and texture, but no one today does that — we will content ourselves with an overview of the basics.

I tend to insist on some exposure to sculpture so that the painter can grow to understand that neither drawing nor painting are about line, but mass.

Representing solid interpenetrating masses within negative space brings about an understanding of the basics of light and dark, warm and cool and intense-to-gray, the foundation of painting, regardless of medium. We could just as easily be talking about oils, watercolor, casein, gouache, pastel, pencil or charcoal.

Some of the great drawing masters include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rico Lebrun, Charles White III, Rembrandt van Rijn and Heinrich Kley. I recommend studying their drawings to see what skills I think are necessary underneath good painting. Keep in mind that abstraction does not excuse lousy drawing skills, sloppy work habits and bad attention.

There are three definite types of drawing, all of which I use constantly in my art practice — I refer to my artistic development in the same way that I would if I were a physician or attorney, you’ll note. The fact is that I regard myself as a perceptual scientist, inquiring within