Getting underway in Teton National Park
Without a doubt, the best thing about attending workshops is having someone with a trained eye look at your work and give you feedback for improvement. Inevitably the instructor will see something that you didn't even notice, something that seems like a glaring error once it's been pointed out but somehow slipped by during the painting process. How many times have teachers pointed out obvious tangents, skewed drawing, or inaccurate values in my work? More often than I'd care to admit. It's almost embarrassing just how blind I can be to these things when I'm in the heat of the moment of painting.
Once the workshop is over, what can an artist do to continue the invaluable lessons that come from critiques? The lucky few will find a mentor or trusted friend in the art world who is willing to give honest, constructive feedback. But even a good friend can't critique everything you do. The key is to learn to look at your work with a dispassionate eye and to develop the art of self-critique.
During my years at the Academy of Art University I sat through dozens of critiques, both of my own work and of others. I learned that the most effective critiques were organized, structured, and to the point. I missed that input so much and realized I needed to find a way to do the same thing with my work once I left academia and ventured off into the world as a professional artist. This is how my Critique Notebook came about.
Just about finished in the field...critique to follow
I critique each of my plein air paintings when I get back in the studio. It's easier to assess a painting once I'm away from the subject matter; I am better able to judge how effective it is as a work of art and not be distracted by how closely I rendered the scene in front of me. With the painting on my studio easel and under good light, I take out my Critique Notebook and write down the date, size, and location of the painting. I then asses how effective the painting is in 5 basic categories: Design, Values, Color, Edges, and Paint Quality. I make quick notes on ways to improve in each of the categories. Sometimes the change will be as simple as "crop 2 inches off the right edge," sometimes as complex as "cool background mountains, add cows to midground fields, add thicker paint in foreground." I turn the painting upside down or look at it in a mirror to help me get a fresh view of the work; I thumb through books to find examples of paintings that accomplish what I was after; I make sketches of better designs...in short, this is my time to study and try to come up with anything and everything it takes to make the painting more successful.
Why bother to write all this down? I know it sounds pretty obsessive/compulsive, but it is so easy to just paint a plein air piece that didn't work, come back to the studio in defeat, toss the canvas in the burn pile and move on. But what have you learned from that? What lessons are lost? If you take the time to critically look at your work and honestly try to figure out what went wrong, chances are you'll do better the next time you get in front of the easel. Conversely, it's just as important to critique paintings that are successful on the first go-round. If the painting was a slam-dunk, why did it work? What happened in that painting that you can remember for next time? Writing down your thoughts is critical: it cements the ideas in your brain and helps to point out areas of weakness in your work. For example, if you always write long critiques in the Design category, then you'll know to work on better thumbnails before you start the next painting and to break out the books on composition to do some intensive study in that area. By repeatedly doing these critiques, you will become better at assessing your work. It will help you go from "I don't like it but I don't know why" to having a roadmap for improvement. Do these critiques as soon as possible after you've painted the piece--that way the subject is fresh in your mind and you will better remember what it was that you were striving to capture in the painting.
Critique your paintings right away but don't paint the changes on the wet paintings--wait for them to dry. Why? Well, that's the subject for my next blog post.....
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