In life we are always forced to make compromises. Imagine trying to make your way in this world without compromising. My wife says that it is my inability to compromise that makes me so hard headed. But the reality is that I have learned to go along to get along just like everyone else. In art there can be no compromise.When I look at the paintings of Steven Levin or Jeffrey Larson, two artists who both trained at Atelier Lack, I can see how their training has enabled them to pursue their unique visions of the world with art that needs no excuses. I can see that near enough is not good enough. I'm not talking about an exacting realism. Both of these painters can be considered quite painterly. It's that striving to hit the nail squarely on the head. Every time. Recently, I've discovered the work of Luis Melendez, who has an exhibit at the National Gallery, and I'm just blown away by the completeness, for want of a better word, of his paintings. Not one element could be changed without destroying the whole, and yet the paintings look very fresh and not labor intensive. Not at all.
          And so Classical Atelier training  becomes something other than what one might at first suspect. The hours spent on a block in, and then refining the contours, and spending eight hours to model about a square inch of form aren't really geared towards making you into a "super realist". It's about getting an attitude, getting your mind right, that will ultimately help you make the kind of art that you want to make, if you are open to it. And it isn't easy. We have been so conditioned to expect to compromise that are brain is primed with easy rationalizations. The hardest thing for me has been to stop letting myself off the hook. But I'm working at it. I'm getting the sense that If I can be conditioned to accept easy solutions than my brain can also be programmed to always strive for my very best. This is not to say that one should constantly beat oneself up. You don't want to be like the character in the Emile Zola novel who destroyed every painting because he was never satisfied.
          I guess the idea is to not take a work to completion that has so many flaws that you want to burn it and kick it out into the street. Look for ways of improving the earlier stages and the later stages will be stronger for it. This is where the block-in becomes so helpful. It is a simple armature on which your painting will be hung and fancy brushwork and bright colors won't help if your armature is weak. I have made the block- in an integral part of my drawing process. Whether I'm doing a still life, portrait or landscape, I always start by marking off a base line and an envelope and proceeding no further than that until it feels exactly right. And by slowly going from the simple to the complex without hurry or anxiety, I try to hold myself to that standard through each stage of the process. Like the prisoner on death row, I am always waiting for that phone call from the governor. I am always looking for a "reprieve". What I mean is that I know something isn't going to be right that I may have missed. I'm only human after all, I'm not a computer scanning a scene.  But I know there will be a problem area that I will have missed, there always is. In a sense that's what keeps me coming back. What fun would it be if it wasn't challenging. Sometimes I get the reprieve. Recently I was at the stage of tracing a drawing to transfer to canvas and when I flipped the tracing over to put charcoal on it, there it was, the "flaw". So I was able to correct it before I had inked in the tracing. Sometimes a mirror will help, but a mirror can become a crutch, that can also be a weakness. Why " get it right" when you know the mirror will reveal the problem areas. When I really work hard on the block-in, when I really push myself harder than I thought possible, I know that the mirror isn't going to tell me anything because the drawing will already have the "rightness" that I'm after.
             Painting isn't drawing though and even a control freak like myself will have to come to terms with the greased pig that is a brush stroke filled with paint. Even so, the best way I find to  deal with this is to try and make each stroke count for something. I don't want to just fill in areas like a coloring book. I guess that's one of the reasons that I prefer a closed palette, to mix color strings for each area of the painting. I try to stay focused on one little area at a time without, of course losing sight of the whole. I tell myself that I'm going to paint this little two inch area today and I'm not going to leave that area until I'm totally satisfied. It seems somewhat ironic that the slower I go the more I accomplish and I actually end up working a little quicker than than if I use an all over approach. In the same way that a landscape painter will block in a color scheme and lay in a wet ground for an entire painting I will lay in a base of tile like brushstrokes for an area and then work into that until it feels unified and complete. I have always sort of worked this way but I think that cast painting has really helped me to intensify my focus.
         It's funny how many artists there are out there today that want to paint like Sargent. If I had mentioned Sargent to my professors back in the 70's, I would have been laughed out of art class. Yet many of the artists who strive to emulate Sargent fall short. Why is that? Is it Sargent's super talent that makes it so?. Maybe. But I also think it has to do with Sargents uncompromising vision. I have read of many instances where Sargent would wipe off a days work only to start completely over, sometimes doing that ten times to a single painting. When artists go for the bravura brush work of a Sargent and fail to see the underlying armature that keeps the brushstrokes from falling apart like thrown confetti, It's no surprise that they come up short. I know that this is a battle that I will always be having with myself. What constitutes real expression as opposed to lazyness ? The best thing I think, for myself at this stage anyway, is not to worry about expression. Let it come of it's own accord. It's there. It's like handwriting, unmistakeable. I think it is possible to re-program ourselves as artists. Sometimes after a long day at work I will think to myself that I am really too tired to go into the studio today. I will make excuses for myself. And then when I catch myself doing that I will remind myself that I now have a new motto " make excuses to do something, not to get out of doing something". It sounds crazy, I know, but more often than not it works. The energy behind the impulse is there it just has to be re-directed.
         Anways, the point of this whole, somewhat rambling diatribe, is really just to clarify some of the misconceptions that people may have about how art should be taught. When I am teaching my students how to draw, I will not let them proceed further than each given stage without my approval. Now some might say that I am killing their creativity. Well, if my classroom is the only place that they're choosing to be creative, how creative can they really be? A lot of students are put off by art because they feel that it's something that you should just be instantly good at, and when they're not, they become discouraged and quit. How creative is that? But if I can break the process down for them, de-mystify it, and show them how to take small steps, with achievable goals, it builds up their confidence and they discover that they have a lot more ability than they imagined. And like kids with a new toy they want to use it everywhere. That's how I have learned and am still learning, I wouldn't want anything less for my students.