How Ateliers Teach How To Paint
This is about learning how to use paint at my atelier.
I started off being a self taught painter. I use to collect tubes of paint and I would put a small dollop of paint from every paint tube I owned on my palette to work with. I probably had 20 or more colors on my palette. The problem was I didn’t love my style of painting. I painted thinly which gave a timid look to my style.
I wanted to paint like the old masters. Masters like Rembrandt and Sargent have thick brushstrokes in their paintings. This style gives a sense of life and freedom with how the paint is handled.
So I went to The Ravenswood Atelier to learn how to handle my paint better. Ravenswood is all about mastery. You master the smallest, simplest thing, and then you can build upon that.
Before I was allowed to touch paint I had to master drawing with charcoal.Ravenswood has another philosophy that you can only paint as well as you can draw…. But that’s a story for another time. With charcoal drawings you are working in a black and white value scale. It took me 2 years to master a black and white value scale. Then I was given paint.
3 colors of paint to start: White, Black, and Raw Umber. With the white and black paint I am working in a simple black and white value scale, but why Raw Umber? Raw Umber is a brown color and that simple brown let me play with temperature shifts in my paintings. So building on my now mastery of a value scale, these three paint colors let me explore and learn to master temperature. To break it down, black is a very cold paint color. It’s so cold if you mix black with white it can appear as a blue color. In contrast raw umber is very warmI which gives you a nice temperature scale to work within. It’s actually pretty incredible what can be done with those three colors.
Once I mastered those three colors I was given actual colors to play with. Mind you a very limited palette of colors. Now I had White, cadmium Red, Yellow ochre, and black. I learned how to stretch these four colors and use them to their full potential. I thought I could do amazing things with just white, brown, and black, but now these four colors were incredible!
Again once I mastered this very limited palette I was slowly given more colors. I remember getting to add Ultramarine Blue to my palette. I could finally use an actual blue pigment and not just use black and white with color relativity to give the appearance of blue.
This style of learning is hard and extreme. However it let me really know the colors on my palette very deeply. This knowledge of my palette gave me so much freedom with how I could handle the paint. It was understanding my tools at such a deep level that gave me the ability to paint thickly, with freedom, and life.
Your artist friend,
Jennifer Marie Keller
P.S.
Click here if you want to watch my 3 minute video on this.