Dear Molly,

I hear that you are a promising young artist. Your grandmother, Jeanette, asked me for a few tips from a seasoned veteran. Well, as you are not yet ten years old and I’m nearly 73, I guess I’m pretty seasoned and I’m thrilled that you are interested in art. Most of my remarks refer to painting, but many of the same points are true of other forms of art as well.  I made lots of mistakes along the way and so will you, but the important thing is to learn from them and move on. Don’t beat yourself up. Just figure out what went well and what went badly and chalk it up to experience. Someone once told me it takes miles of canvas to make a masterpiece. Sorry if this letter got a bit long but maybe it takes miles of typing to pass on a few tips.

Make art all the time, not just when you think you have spare time. Time fills up with all kinds of other priorities, so unless you fit art into your life regularly, it becomes like a language learned long ago but not spoken, and you will strain to find fluency again. Even if it’s just doodling in the margins of a math book or keeping an art journal without lines in it, keep doing art. I used to draw cartoons of lecturers during boring talks. Improvise if you don’t have art materials close to hand. I’ve used leftover tea or coffee as paint when nothing else was handy and a ballpoint pen can be terrific if brushes and paints are not practical.

Don’t expect everything you do to be amazing. If you do, you will get frustrated and spend too much time on details that really don’t matter. Its okay to have just one thing that you like about a piece of your work. Its okay to have work destined for the recycling bin or the trash can. Enjoy the process of making art and don’t get hung up on making perfection. It’s all good because you are getting better and better.

Nurture your talent with excellent teachers. Art is not inborn. Talent is a skill learned by following an educational path with dedication and will. After you learn the principles and practice them until they become automatic, a magical world opens up to you, the world of color and light and transformation of materials into stories never told before. Drawing, painting, sculpting and making music all require study and practice. The best teachers will open the tools of the trade for you and show you how to express yourself. Don’t just have one teacher. They each have insights to convey and ways to help you learn.

Beauty can be found in unexpected places so look for interesting subjects. It can be a corner of a basement or a majestic landscape. The face of an old person can be more interesting than a perfectly angelic child. A twisted tree can be a better subject than a perfectly cone shaped Christmas pine. A piece of cake can be as beautiful as a vase of flowers.

 Pay attention to the shapes and edges of shadows and how light behaves. An apple beside a shiny cup will be reflected in it and vice versa and if you find those tiny reflections people will gasp at how real your paintings and drawings look. Watch how shadows are sharper and darker in bright light, softer and subtler on cloudy days. Notice how the edges of shadows are dark and sharp near a form and get softer as they get farther away.

There are no lines around shapes in nature. When we start with lines around shapes the result is like a coloring book. The shapes are recognizable, like illustrations, but don’t look real. Instead, notice the shapes of spots of color, the light and dark areas, and how they relate to each other. It’s okay to start with a drawing but don’t get precious about it and don’t feel you have to color inside the lines.

Paint what you see, not what you know is there. Observation is key to rendering things that look impossible, like glass or water. Trust your eyes more than photos. Photos don’t capture everything and can fool you. Use them only as reference points. A photo is flat and you won’t see into the shadows or see how light bounces between forms in a photo. The camera only has one eye. You have two.

Unless you have a good reason to sit, paint standing up. That way you can step back often to see your work from a distance and you can engage your whole arm in making marks. That way your brushstrokes will have more energy and it’s much easier to draw. Arrange your easel so your non-dominant arm is facing your subject and you don’t have to peer around your hard-working painting arm.

Hold a paintbrush loosely like you would hold a fishing rod, not a quill pen. Use the biggest brushes you can manage first to get the big shapes in. Only at the end do you reach for the detail brushes and make sure you only get details where they count. Not every leaf on a tree or petal on a flower needs to be painted separately. Details draw the eye so only use them where you want the eye to go.

Practice using a limited palette. One red, one blue, one yellow and white can make an amazing variety of colors. Switch them from time to time. Maybe a stronger red, or a paler yellow or a warmer version of blue. Then mix all the colors in between to make a color wheel and label it so you remember what you used. Limiting your palette ensures a unified color scheme throughout your painting and is more pleasing to the eye than a confusing variety of color. So, you don’t need a huge number of paints to get started.

Art is like a language and like a language it is a two-way conversation, so read about the masters, go to museums and galleries and even follow artists you admire on social media. Read the words of artists who became famous. The letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo are a good example. See how artists express themselves and learn from them.

If you find a piece of art that holds you, take time to study it. See if you can tell how and why it caught your eye. Step back and see it from a distance to see what it is. Step nearer to see how it was done. Try copying master paintings. Your copies might not please you but you will learn a lot while you are trying.

We all love praise, but constructive criticism from someone knowledgeable is really valuable. So, don’t cry when a piece you worked hard on gets suggestions from a teacher that make you squirm. Remember you can’t be an expert right away. Learning goes on and on, and the purpose of expert criticism is to make you better, not to tell you that you are a genius.  My best work emerged from criticism that was sometimes hard to hear. Your family will always love your work because they love you, but to be really fluent in the language of art, you must hear both about the strengths and the weaknesses in your work. Learn to criticize your own work as you make it, but make sure your inner critic is constructive and encouraging and finds the strengths as well as weaknesses. If your inner critic is overly negative, tell it to be quiet.

If you hit a dry spell and need a break, use that time to learn in other ways. Find books like “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri that you can dip into for inspiration and encouragement. Watch an art related movie like “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Take a video art class, or take a museum trip, even just a virtual one. But don’t stay away from art too long. Its amazing how fast skills get rusty and need a tune up. Try to spend a few minutes every day doing something to make your art better. If you do feel rusty do a few quick exercises to get you back in tune. Maybe a 20-minute study of a simple subject done just as a practice piece will get your spirit flowing again. Maybe mixing colors to make a color wheel can inspire you, or maybe going back to only black and white can get your eye seeing light better.

If you want to practice portraits, start with anyone who will hold a pose. Maybe a family member watching TV or reading will be patient for you, but if nobody else is available look in the mirror. You are your own best model. Dress in a costume or wear a hat. It makes you less self-conscious. Give yourself some distance and a clear light source hitting just one side of you. You don’t need to show every eyelash. Just the big shapes of light and shade tell most of the story.

Respect your best work, and learn from the rest. Not everything deserves a frame but almost everything looks better in a frame. I keep a few empty frames in standard sizes around so I can try them on pieces that I’m not sure about. Sometimes they sing once framed. Sometimes I notice that they are not terrific and they go back in the experience pile in the basement. I generally sign only what I consider my best work, and sometimes only sign on the back if a signature is going to spoil the look of a piece.

My best advice is to love the journey and not be too focused on the destination. Art is the language of the human soul, a language spoken all over the world and in every age. You may just learn a few words, become a good conversationalist, or become a poet. Art is a way to connect with others and a form of meditation in solitude. I love that you are embarking on this journey and wish you as much joy as it has brought me.

With much Love,

Your cousin,

Katherine

How lucky we were to have just got back from two sweet trips when the pandemic locked us all in our bubbles. My husband and I had visited the Harvard Art Museum with a friend who had moved to Boston last year. This was followed by a weekend in Mystic Connecticut where we caught the outstanding JMW Turner exhibition. A couple of weeks on we got to Chicago for a conference he attended while I wandered around the art museums there. The news of Coronavirus was starting to break, and from then on it was one cancellation after another. My open studies classes at MICA were cancelled and so were all our travel plans for the year.  

Amazingly, everyone including myself, adjusted to new realities and my classes moved online during the summer. Even as a tech impaired boomer I became familiar with Zoom and even learned how to photograph my work, air-drop it from the phone to the computer and load my homework assignments into the right folder.  I kept on making art and taking classes even as my rented studio became essentially off limits. The easel moved from room to room as I painted still life, interior scenes and even a few portraits of my household members. The trees and shrubs I could see from my windows called out to me and the arrival of flowers and a gift of toilet paper made interesting subjects. Painting was my antidote to isolation.

But it was plein aire (outdoor painting) that made life finally feel normal and hopeful again. At first it seemed impossible that we could have an online class on outdoor painting but after downloading zoom to my phone that miracle actually happened and I was painting in Ellicott City and zooming back and forth with my painting buddies and our instructor who had easels set up in Baltimore parks and alleys or in their own backyards.  On a rainy evening, I painted from our garage with my daughter’s van parked outside making interesting reflections, then on a mild spring day it was on to a little pond in our neighborhood. I started a portrait of our house that probably will never see the light of day and tackled a few other projects in nearby places with classmates and buddies with social distancing and mask wearing. My Fall classes have ended, but privately taught workshops have continued to be blessed with clement weather so fingers crossed for a few more before winter closes in. I’m not bothered by cold but wind and rain are unpleasant so I draw the line there.

 So, as the season for outdoor painting draws to a close it will be back to moving my easel around the house until this crisis ends. I took the opportunity to build myself an art website in the last few weeks and I regard it as a new window on the world. I hope to find new ways of connecting safely and helping my art business to thrive.

I hope you will follow along on this adventure.

Katherine Farrell