Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active. The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only. Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module. Learning Objectives: Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings. Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II. Hone your visual analysis skills. Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.
2.3 In the Studio: Materials & Techniques of Barnett Newman
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Del curso dictado por The Museum of Modern Art
In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting
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De la lección
Barnett Newman
Conoce a los instructores
Corey D'AugustineArt conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education
And now finally the fun starts.
And we will finally begin painting here,
the real thing canvas here,
starting with Barnett Newman.
Now for several reasons,
we're going to be painting today with acrylic paints.
One of them is that Newman himself did.
As a matter of fact, however Newman only spent
the final couple of years of his life painting in acrylics,
after having spend the vast majority of his career working in oils.
So be that as it may,
you may choose to work in oil in working in the style of Newman,
or if you choose to work in acrylics such as
these Liquidtex acrylic emulsion paints that I'll be working with now,
you won't be really too far off the mark.
Now the reason why I'm going to be working in acrylics right now,
not really the reason that Newman did,
is that acrylics dry much faster.
As you'll quickly learn,
many of the zip constructing techniques,
and you're about to learn a couple of them that Newman used,
it's really imperative that one layer is totally dry before working on top of it.
Why? Well, because we're going to use masking tape.
And if you apply masking tape to tacky paint or worse to wet paint,
well it's not going to stick.
And second of all, when you lift up
that tape you're going to remove a lot of wet paint with it.
And guess what, it's not going to look anything like a Newman.
So if you choose to work in oils everything you're about to
learn is totally applicable except that you'll need,
five days, seven days something like that,
drying time between each step in this process that we're about to learn.
Now the first step that I'm going to demonstrate
is just putting on a base coat of one color.
In fact, I'm working with a quinacridone magenta.
It's a translucent organic pigment and the color is one of these kind of rose,
pinky colors like this.
A color that Newman used at times although it's not the most characteristic Newman color.
The reason that I'm putting on an entire base coat right now is
not because this is going to be a rose colored painting.
As you'll learn in a moment,
actually just a bit of this color will remain visible in the finished product.
Now one thing you'll want to stay away from when painting,
is putting too much paint on the canvas if you're trying to apply an even coat.
Now if you're working like Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning with
huge swaths of gestural applications of paint, well, then forget about it.
Use as much paint as you'd like to.
Newman typically, although not exclusively,
worked in very uniformly thin coat of paint.
So that if you put on too much paint in your canvas, you're going to have something that,
well looks like it does right now,
streaky brush strokes, lumps of impasto, things like that.
Things that you typically don't find in a finished Newman painting.
So I'm really going to stretch out this paint in
the same way that previously I've encouraged you to just stretch out your priming layer,
so that really we have a quite even coat of paint
and not too many brush strokes at any point in time here.
And one trick to doing that,
is that you can change the direction of your brushwork.
Stretch it out in one direction.
Stretch it out in the other direction.
Now you'll find if you're using cheap brushes like I am right now,
that the bristles will often fall out of the canvas, sorry,
fall onto the canvas like this little guy right here that hopefully you can see.
Newman was driven crazy by that kind of thing.
In fact, Newman had a set of over 20 different kinds of
tweezers that he could tweeze these little bristles,
as well as the little nubs of the canvas out of his canvases.
You don't really need tweezers. You just need a fingernail to be honest.
But it's easier to get that little bugger out of
there when the paint is wet rather than when it's dry.
Why? Because if I were to pull that out of the dry paint film,
I'd rip a little paint off and probably you'd see
a little white line of that priming layer underneath.
And in fact I didn't even get them. But now I did.
So working with acrylic paint
and you'll notice that I didn't add any water,
the solvent for acrylic paint here,
the drying time is quite rapid.
Something on the order of just five minutes, something like that.
So after I finished stretching out this paint and I'm pretty much happy with it here.
We'll just take a cigarette break for about five minutes.
So now that our painting is dry to the touch, and that's really dry enough,
it's not 100% dry but it's good enough for our purposes here,
I'm free to put on our next coat of acrylic paint.
What I'm going to do actually is to mask off with masking tape just one zip of color.
And then I'm going to bring a new field color over the entire surface
of the painting including this piece of tape,
before taking that off and revealing a zip of this kind of rose color that we have here.
Now if it's a small painting like this,
it's quite easy to make a parallel zip to the edge of the painting.
If you are working on, well, Newman scale and a huge scale,
if you're six inches off on the top versus the bottom,
well, your zip is going to be a little wonky, it's no longer a zip.
So in case you are doing that in your studio,
feel free to measure four inches from the edge, four inches from the edge.
Notch off those marks with a pencil and
make sure that your zip is really going to be parallel to the edge.
Now working on this kind of scale,
it's really not necessary
since you can just eyeball it and make sure
that zip is going to be parallel or quite close to it, to the edge.
Now again if you're working with oil paint,
this next step would be taking place a week later,
a week after that first one or whenever that oil was dry to the touch.
So you'll want to make sure that your masking tape is really,
really in contact with the surface of the canvas.
Why? Because if it's not,
we're going to have more and more paint seeping underneath that tape.
Now by the way, Newman actually tried to do that at times.
The so called bad or wrong or poor masking technique, Newman.Used to his own advantage,
because his lines don't always have this very,
very precise, even quality which by the way,
this piece of tape has right now.
Sometimes they bleed inward.
Sometimes they flare outward from the zip.
This one is going to bleed inward just a bit.
If I wanted to bleed inward more,
I wouldn't have reinforced that contact between the tape and the painting.
So let's shift our palette now and we're going to be working in cadmium red medium hue.
You may recall that that word hue at the end,
is like a big asterisk.
It means everything that comes before it ain't true, unfortunately.
So this pigment is the color or the hue of cadmium red medium.
If it were the real thing it would have cadmium in it,
a heavy metal which is quite expensive and opaque.
Rather, we have cheap organic pigments making this up.
Why? Because it's basics.
It's the student grade of acrylic paint.
Now if I had the real cadmium red medium,
without that hue on the end,
this tube of paint might cost $40,
$50 something like that.
This won't cost $6.95 or something on that order.
So a long way to say,
that all of those organic pigments that are in
here has the same color as cadmium red medium,
but not the opacity.
Organic molecules are very, very small.
We see through them. Heavy metals are quite large, like lead.
When you paint your wall in the old days with lead white,
you can cover everything underneath it in one shot.
So it may take two coats, in other words,
of this cadmium red medium hue paint to cover up what's underneath. Let's find out.
And as I'm finishing up here we can see that the color is mostly
changed but because of that translucence of
that organic substitute for the cadmium red pigment,
the expensive one, we have some streakiness.
Now we might like that, we might not.
Personally, for this painting right now that's not what I'm going for,
so I'm going to add one more coat of that cadmium red hue.
Now to do that, I again need to wait for this paint to dry.
So again if you're working in oil paints,
tank on another week to the making of this painting.
So I'm now going to put on a second coat of that same color.
This time I'm going to add just a little bit of water into my paint.
You'll recall that solvent for
the acrylic emulsion paint that I'm using is just water, nothing more.
The reason I'm adding just a little bit of water
is that I'm reducing the viscosity of this paint,
making it flow a little bit better or make it a little bit more fluid in other words,
so that some of these brushstrokes that are left in
that first coat are going to get filled in by this more fluid topcoat.
It also makes it a little bit more streaky, however.
So if your first coat you used a little bit of water,
you definitely have a streaky finish to it.
If it's your second code, you're adding water to it,
well in between those little streaks is probably more of the same color,
so it really shouldn't be an issue. Let's find out.
Because I've added that solvent into this paint,
this paint is really flowing a lot faster than that first one was,
so stretching out this paint is much easier
rather than really forcing a stiff paint across the canvas.
This one is really gliding across and it's a very,
very easy, nice feeling kind of painting going on right here.
So now this coat I'm going to stretch out in the opposite direction again,
just to make sure we have a nice even coat of paint here.
And then finally, I'm going to change directions one more
time and then fan it out in the vertical direction.
Now to reduce the amount of brush strokes that you're leaving,
you can really just glide across the surface,
just skimming across the paint.
Sculpting it almost rather than really stiffly brushing across.
That last one, with all this pressure on it,
you can see it leaves some rather noticeable brushstrokes,
as I kind of cancel them out again, painting horizontally.
Now this time I'm going to really just gently fan out that paint,
skimming across the surface and I'm really leaving much fewer,
or made fewer tracks, behind this time.
And we can see we have a pretty uniform,
opaque paint layer here.
So it's time for,
well unveiling if you will, our first zip here.
And you can take that masking tape off when the paint is wet or dry.
It doesn't really matter.
This time the paint is still quite wet. That's fine.
And we can see that we've constructed our first zip by now revealing that under layer,
that rose color again and we've changed the color of the entire rest of the painting.
So one of several ways Newman can construct zips.
And if we really zoom in here,
you'll see that that top coat of orange,
reddish orange is bleeding ever so slightly
underneath that masking tape back into that rose colored zip.
Now the second type of zip that we're going to construct here,
rather than revealing an under layer,
we're going to add a new paint layer on top of this field color to make a zip.
Now because of that,
rather than using one piece of tape,
we're now going to use two.
And keep in mind that this paint layer we've allowed to dry absolutely thoroughly here.
By the way if you're making this first kind of zip that we had here,
the width of that zip is determined by the width of your masking tape.
So if you get in the habit of using these,
you might want to have several different widths of masking
tape to enable you to use several different widths of zips.
In this form, quite simply,
I'm going to paint right between the eyes here,
right between these two pieces of masking tape so that we
can vary the width of that zip really any way we want to.
And again, I'm going to make sure that we have a nice level of contact between
that masking tape and the paint layer which is dryish to the touch.
And for the color this time,
we're going to do something a little bit different.
I'm going to mix a color.
Newman painted a straight from the tubes many times,
but he did mix plenty of colors as well.
Starting with a little bit of titanium white,
an opaque white color.
Into that, I'm just going to muddy things up
ever so slightly with a bit of an earth color,
which is raw sienna.
In addition, I'm going to change the gloss of this paint by adding medium.
Acrylic emulsion medium comes in,
well, more than two kinds actually.
But to begin, let's think of it as two classes, glossy or matte.
And also comes in various thicknesses that have sometimes other additives,
stuff that's sparkly or chunky.
There's really a whole range of possibilities out there with acrylic paints.
But I'm just going to take some of this medium,
this goop and add it to the palette.
Now you'll see that in the palette, this medium looks white.
In fact, it almost looks as white as titanium white paint.
That's not really a true indicator of what
that color is going to look like because actually this medium when it dries,
dries entirely transparently and clearly.
So again, I almost have to subtract out
that whiteness to really imagine what this color is going to look like.
So what it really is going to do is to make this opaque color,
this titanium white, quite a bit more translucent and to make it quite a bit more glossy.
Newman often using matte-gloss transitions
between various zips that he had constructed and the field
in and around it.
Now because this paint is quite translucent,
I'm going to allow a little bit of "brushyness" to happen in that zip.
And already we can see right now that,
that bright red is peeking through.
It is quite translucent white or off white application of paint here.
And when I remove this masking tape,
you'll see that not only do we have some gestural activity in that zip,
we have red peeking through it and then that zip has bled outward
underneath that masking tape kind of activating that edge.
Now if it's too active for your taste,
and perhaps that little blip close to the edge there is for mine,
we can always go ahead and paint it out again by reintroducing that base color,
that field color around it and just over
painting any of that excess stuff that you don't like.
And finally a third kind of zip.
One that Newman tended to use more and more as his career went on.
A very active, kind of flaming type of zip that we
see really characteristic of his work in the mid and late 1960s.
What I'm going to do here is actually to use a piece of masking tape again,
but to paint off of it.
What I'm talking about you'll see presently.
I'm again going to just make sure that that masking tape is parallel
to the edges and the zips just like I've done before.
I'm going to make sure that that tape is in pretty good contact with the canvas.
It doesn't have to be 100%.
But now something different is going to happen.
I'm going to load my brush this time with cadmium orange hue.
Again, remember that this is an organic substitute for the real deal.
And what I'm going to do is
actually to start on this zip and to paint off of it,
so that this gesture right here will remain on the surface of the canvas.
And as I flare out this edge here,
you can see ahead here that I'm going to be left with a very,
very hard edge on this side and a very gestural loose one on that other side.
Now Newman very often would actually paint with a pallet knife by smearing,
spreading like butter, paint directly onto the surface of the canvas.
So I'm going to give that a try.
The paint is still wet and I'm essentially playing the role of a sculptor here.
The color is done.
The paint is on the canvas but I'm going to change the texture of it.
I'm going to move it around basically treating this canvas almost as if it were a pallet.
So that now, when I take this tape off,
we have kind of a pseudo zip.
Something that is quite a bit more gestural than
even this zip which shows an under layer,
or this zip would have some gestural activity in it
because you'll recall that we made that paint somewhat transparent,
but now really as if it has a hard edge on one side,
and then very fiery,
very active edge on the other.
So kind of an awkward painting that I've made here,
but one that demonstrates the three different types of zips that came to
dominate the way that Newman made all of his zipped canvases.
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