The Path to Professionalism

[Janel Maples]

Originally Posted by Paul Foxton

I find this both humbling and inspiring in equal measure

My feelings exactly. Thank you Bill and Mari.

[Richard Bingham]

Excellent thread, excellent work. Many thanks to Bill and Mari both !

[Sharon Knettell]

The sensitivity of this piece takes my breath away.

It has inspired me to just draw.

You have endowed this face with inner feeling as well as drawing it beautifully.

There is so much trash out there I admire artists like you and Bill who are willing to sacrifice and not compromise to add real treasures to human civilization. It is sometimes a difficult and thankless task.

I hope this is not a digression, but I just came back from a trip around New England. One stop I made was at the Sterling Clark Museum in Williamstown Mass.
They have some of the most exquisite paintings like Tissots, Monets, Degas. I could have just LIVED there.

One painting stunned me with it's unparalleled beauty. It was a Bouguereau., "Nymphes et Satrye". This was a surprise as I am not a real fan of his work. To me this painting was the result of a consummate artist who never took shortcuts. He could not have painted this picture if he did. Anyone that does figurative work should make a pilgrimage see this painting in person. The outrageous DRAUGHMANSHIP! The figures going in and out of the dappled light! The buttery rendering of the skin in all its delicate permutations of color. You felt like they would continue out of the canvas and spill their joyful play onto the floor of the museum.

[Linda Brandon]

"Joyful play", indeed! That satyr is outnumbered. It's one small step to Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs... .

By the way, this question is for Bourguereau fans: am I correct in thinking that all his figurative work was done in his studio under a skylight? How, exactly, would he have gathered information on his landscapes?

[Richard Bingham]

That stinky li'l goat-guy doesn't want a bath! - OK ? And we know Hylas will be in over his head in more ways than one if he goes swimming with those babes. I really, really like both of these.

It's my opinion "Nymphs & Satyr" is Boug's best effort. Somewhere (I don't recall where exactly) I've seen photos of his studio while he was posing models for this piece . . . Linda, I sure can't answer for Bill, but I presume he'd approach the problem logically . . . i.e., plenty of serious observation of outdoor natural lighting in many different circumstances, probably scads of "on scene" sketches and color notes, then control of his studio lighting to suit his purposes.

What I can't imagine is surmounting the extreme difficulty of working "from the life" in natural light outdoors to bring a painting of any size to a higher finish than a mere rapid color sketch. . . sunlight changes incrementally with that minute hand on the clock of course, and with the calendar too. You can't even go back tomorrow (assuming the weather is identical) at the same time of day because the angle of the sun will have changed. These changes are especially radical at the extremes (nearest to dawn & dusk, and around the equinoxes, moreso in northern latitudes). My hat's off to them there "Plenty Airy" folk who paint landscape outdoors from the life . . .