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.
3.3 In the Studio: Materials & Techniques of Willem de Kooning
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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
Willem de Kooning
Conoce a los instructores
Corey D'AugustineArt conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education
You should really have a lot of fun this week because we'll be exploring
some really wonderful viscous and fluid paints here,
the whole range of painter's materials.
We're exploring the work of Willem de Kooning this week,
certainly one of the masters of the New York avant garde.
Willem de Kooning, an artist who works in a very wide variety of styles,
working with a very wide variety of materials and techniques as well.
I'm not Willem de Kooning, clearly.
I am an art history professor as well as a conservator of Taught de Kooning.
I spent a lot of time studying him.
I've also treated his paintings as a conservator.
So, this is coming from a place very close to de Kooning.
But, surely, this is not the way to make a de Kooning painting.
It's basically a compilation of many different ways that De Kooning worked.
And we're just going to summarize them here today.
And you can see in front of me a lot of paint,
a lot of oil paints straight out of the tube.
We have a lot of linseed oil here.
We have some Dammar varnish here.
And you'll see, I'm not, well I do have
one typical baker's pan here which I'll be using as a palette for one color.
But really, we're in the realm of kitchens now.
And if you have some old bowls,
or old cans, or what have you,
this is really the quantities of paint that we're going to be working with,
if you're going to be working with a large format painting.
De Kooning painted with his whole body.
He was a gestural painter,
he was an action painter.
And really, using really large quantities of liquid paints here,
allows the body to trace these huge marks,
powerful strokes across the canvas.
So, let's get started.
What I'm going to do essentially is to build my entire palette
first before even approaching the easel.
That way, I know what I'm working with.
Let's start off with a cobalt blue.
Vast majority of the paints I'm working with are going to
be really low viscosity allowing them to be
quite fluid and really translate the power of my gestures on the canvas.
In other words, I'm not going to paint with this really thick toothpaste quality
of artist's oil grade paint right out of the tube.
I'm going to douse it with some nice oil there,
and I'm really going to cut that viscosity,
make it a lot more flowable on the surface of the painting.
And there is something really gorgeous,
really wonderful about this gooey quality of
oil paints which you just can't get in the rather plastic realm of acrylics.
So, here, kind of a medium speed paint if you will.
It's not super thick but it's not super fluid,
its not running off of my brush.
And I'm going to vary my consistency of different paints here,
some of them medium like this,
some of them, as you'll see,
will be a lot more fluid than this.
So I'm just going to save that for later.
Now, let's work on another one.
Let's work with some kind of a flesh tone.
Now for the kind of basic Caucasian flesh tone,
it's nice to use some buff titanium.
This is actually the same thing as titanium white.
It's just not bleached.
OK. So both of these buff titanium and titanium white,
this one gets bleached, titanium white.
Buff titanium has more of a neutral tone to it.
And, then to get a decent kind of Caucasian flesh tone,
believe it or not, you add a little bit of red for warmth,
you add a little bit of yellow for warmth,
and then you add a little bit of green for depth.
And, again, let's add a little bit of varnish into there and make it nice and glossy.
This is Dammar varnish,
it's a natural resin, it comes from trees.
Dammar is D, A, M, M, A,
R. Lets add a little bit of linseed oil in there as well.
And, then, let's add a little bit of mineral spirits or turpentine.
And, let's choose a nice brush for flesh above
this one and start getting some of these colors mixing here.
Now, that mixture of solvents and media that I added here,
remember this Dammar varnish,
linseed oil the typical vehicle or binder of oil painting medium,
and some solvent, some mineral spirits,
that's to do a couple of things.
First of all, it's to make it a lot thinner on the brush, a lot faster.
And here I am getting sloppy.
This is just the beginning. You'll see.
It's make, the viscosity lower,
to cut that viscosity.
Another role of that combination,
is to make it glossy and shiny.
And these wonderful fluid paints that de Kooning work
with are often extremely glossy in character.
OK, so here is the second color of my palette here.
Kind of a murky,
mean-looking skin tone here. I like this.
This is going to look really nice when contrasting with some really hot colors,
some nice warm red colors.
So, let's make one of them. I'm going to be working with cadmium red hue here.
Anytime you see that word hue that means,
well, you cheaped out a little bit.
Cadmium is a heavy metal, it's expensive.
Cadmium red hue is an organic,
read, cheap substitute for it.
Now, it's OK because the hue of that color,
is going to be exactly the same as cadmium.
In other words, gorgeous, you know.
Stop saying red or Coca-Cola red.
We're going to add a little bit of linseed oil and,
then, we're going to add some water.
You're thinking, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Water and linseed oil what is this guy doing?
Well, de Kooning like to violate these rules because he
liked to have really interesting paint textures,
sometimes frothing up on the surface.
Now, because of mixed water and oil,
you see this texture it's an unhappy texture.
It's really not a solution as much as it is a suspension.
In other words, it's just a physical mixture of these things that don't like each other,
they don't play nicely together.
But this weird alligator skin kind of texture here is
going to be really active and really interesting on our surface.
Let's make some nice,
hot light yellow color.
Since, we already have a little bit of white going, let's add to it.
And, now to this one,
I'm going to add just mineral spirits.
No additional vehicle or binder this time,
just some solvent, a fair amount of it in fact.
Then, the reason I'm doing this,
is that I want this paint to be quite thin,
thinner than the paints we've made so far.
Now, when you add binder to a paint, in this case,
that's linseed oil, you make it more transparent and you cut the viscosity.
When you add solvent to the paint,
mineral spirits here, you make it more into a stain.
It doesn't have any additional gloss like linseed oil will provide.
But it really makes it incredibly low viscosity
so it will absorb into the ground or even,
sometimes, the under paint layer that is beneath it.
So what you have left with, is a super thin application of really fast,
really runny consistency of paint.
What I'm going to do to speed up this process a little bit,
is just to transfer this into a mixing bowl.
It shows how the convenience this is going to help me blend this paint a little faster,
and a little better, and a little stronger.
So it's not splashing all over the studio floor.
And if you can hear that sound,
that's what a de Kooning painting sounds like, liquid,
fluid, runny kind of wonderful viscous kind of materials.
OK, so we have a nice palette going here.
Let's move these.
OK. So, large format canvas,
roughly a little smaller but roughly a human scale here.
Interesting to note that recent research at
the Guggenheim Museum on a painting by de Kooning from the 1970s,
1975 if I'm not mistaken,
called Whose Name Was Writ On Water,
we looked at that painting, an abstract painting,
in infrared light and actually found an under drawing.
Now, before I start to warm up with that under drawing,
I'm going to sand the support.
And, this time, I'm using some very rough sandpaper 40 Gray.
This is the stuff that, you know,
if you rubbed on your own hand would hurt.
And what I want to do is make this canvas very absorbent,
rub off any sheen so that my paint is going to be nice and roughly attached to it.
And now I'm going to get loose a little bit,
warm up on the canvas here,
and start thinking about some of
the gestural marks that I will be performing with oil paint.
But now, just kind of get used to that idea,
get used to those range of motions but now with charcoal.
All right, a good time to step back from the painting and take a look.
And, this is actually a really important and
underestimated aspect of de Kooning's approach to painting.
We all think about these explosive moments,
these active moments of painting, and you just witnessed some.
But, really, de Kooning alternated those with some very long, very patient,
very critical periods of careful looking at
his paintings and trying to understand what the painting wanted to do next.
Because this is really not the kind of painting that you can push around.
It's one that you really need to listen to.
So, what I'm looking at when I'm seeing this painting,
are a couple of things that are working and a lot of things that aren't.
What's really sticking in my eye first of all,
is this very artificial line coming straight down here.
Now, when I was painting that didn't even occur to me.
I was so close to the canvas.
But stepping back, there's
a very linear element of all these different gestural marks aligning in a vertical way.
This is artificial and looks bad.
It catches the eye in an aggressive way.
Similarly, there's a little bit too much parallel stuff that's going on here.
Oh, there are some nice movements of paints mixing wet-in-wet into each other.
Some of these really nice color combinations working here.
This kind of beautiful mark here,
wet-in-wet blue into its complement yellow,
some gorgeous mark making.
Also there's some very large flat planes of color that need to be worked in.
But, essentially, what you saw me do in that first step here,
is to knock out all the white to start bringing this painting forward in
space together to really understand what is going to happen next.
Now, it's also really important to understand that in de Kooning's painting technique.
There's as much subtraction of the painted material as there is addition.
In other words, a lot of the marks that are made in
the finished product are a function of labor,
of putting paint on,
scraping it, or smearing it back off.
So let's get into some of those activities now.
And already what you've seen we do there,
is edit out some of the areas that I didn't like,
that I thought were weaker.
Wow. They just got a lot stronger for a couple of reasons.
First of all, colors are mixing in a really interesting way,
look at this chaos here.
Gorgeous. Also bringing back the drawing into the equation,
skimmy flaying back some of the white of the canvas in here,
and giving us some transitions between thickly painted, thinly painted, opaque,
translucent, luscious fat paint,
glossy and dry, you know,
scratched kind of a texture here.
All of these variables here that we're exploiting
are really going to allow this painting to come together as a whole.
Another technique that de Kooning would use is to take some turpentine or,
in our case some mineral spirits,
on a rag and to scrub back into the surface.
This is really going to remove
paint and also make the pink bleed together very aggressively.
And already the painting
is way more active,
way more alive, way more variety going on.
Now, there are areas now that are bothering me,
that didn't bother me a minute ago.
The reason is I just attacked the problems.
But guess what? Now there are new problems?
These forms weren't as strong as the original set,
but now they're the strongest ones left.
So time to attack them to.
Wow. And now we have a nice start to a painting.
What before looks rather spare,
and artificial, almost hackneyed,
or almost sarcastic, now we're starting to really embrace
with the physicality of the medium and things are starting to happen.
Some of this accepted chaos,
as this drip is just cascading down the surface here,
is how some of the most beautiful marks evolve in de Kooning's work.
Now, one thing that will tend to happen when working with so much of
alla prima technique or wet-in-wet technique as I'm working with here,
is that your oil paints will gradually get muddy.
And, in fact, if you've gotten this far into your de Kooning,
you may have already lost some very dark colors.
Now there are two ways to rectify that,
one scrape it off.
This is a wonderful thing about oil,
if you don't like it, get rid of it.
Number two, you can wait for that paint to dry.
Now this is oil paint, it's going to take a while.
We're using a really high quantity of oil that makes the drying time even longer.
But when that paint does dry well,
then, you can work in any color you want over top.
Because since this paint is already dark, if I add,
well this kind of magenta color to it,
it's going to stay that dark and I'm going to lose this lovely magenta hue.
If it dries first,
that will not happen,
since they won't blend together.
It's often said of de Kooning that he never finished a painting,
just sometimes his paintings escape from the studio.
He was relentless in his editing,
going back and forth,
and back and forth.
And, speaking of back and forth,
he also alternated between activities of
not only painting and looking but between painting and drawing.
And then back to painting again and then back to drawing again.
So let's do some more gestural,
mark making with a hard tool,
some in fact soft charcoal here.
Now, when drawing into wet paint,
you'll lose your mark quickly but you begin to gouge
into the surface and some interesting things can happen.
So, these little bits of charcoal that are left there,
you'll often find in de Kooning's paintings.
When the paint is completely dry,
that charcoal remains embedded into the surface.
How to think about what kind of marks to make?
I'm thinking as much about the mark I'm making as
I am my own body and how I'm moving in space.
For example, I see there's some kind of residue of this kind of a mark,
down and then back up.
So I'm going to re-enact this mark now.
But with the hard tool rather than that wide fluid brush.
And you can see, at the edge here its far sharper than anything I did before.
That's the point where the elbow is driving back up off the canvas.
What I'm trying to do is to enmesh all of these marks,
so they don't look like individual planes of color but they start to wrap together.
So, what you can see, is that I pulled
this color not only combining with this maroon, you know, purplish color.
But I brought it back into the canvas co-mingling with some other colors here.
But also starting to highlight that beige tone which is found scattered throughout
this entire painting now which ties things
together visually and allows these to exist in the same space,
rather, than all these interdependent or, I should say,
independent kind of tectonic plates of color sliding over each other.
Now, they're becoming enmeshed in each
other since you see that color throughout the work.
Following that same logic,
I have a lot of yellow on the left hand side of the painting especially at the bottom,
none on the right and on the top, well let's take care of that.
And I think this is a good time to call it quits.
Now, let's talk about how this painting can grow since,
in all honesty, no exaggeration,
paintings stayed in de Kooning's studio for
sometimes two years as he actively worked on them.
So, of course, when looking at this painting,
it looks thin and it looks simple compared to a de Kooning for a couple of reasons.
This is all done alla prima,
it is all done wet-in-wet.
And, really, de Kooning alternated periods of
working wet-in-wet within working wet-over-dry.
I'm having some harsh scraped kind of marks
here but because it's wet it starts to all mix together.
De Kooning would build up these heavily encrusted surfaces so that,
by the end of them, they're thick full of paint.
They're very heavy paintings physically to carry around.
But as you can see here, really,
as much paint comes off of this painting as goes back on.
Really get involved in this process
not only the physical process of painting but this back and forth,
looking, analyzing, and then diving back into the action painting phase of the work.
So, here we have a very promising but a very brief start to painting that in,
de Kooning style, should really be allowed to grow
in the studio for a month if not really a year.
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