Formulaic painting...

Horse s**t aside David . I think some people find this a good learning aid . And I’m sure it is , though someone tried to persuade me to have a try...I did to be polite but really couldn’t be bothered. To much faff. I trust my eye and thumb at arms length , I measure angles against another angle as I go along. I hated geometry at school ,I’m not an architect . I rely on experience and enjoy what I am doing. So what if it doesn’t always work out , ... . Every drawing every painting is a learning exercise ..jeez if I had spent my life drawing lines and following formula I would be churning out stiff copies of what I consider lifeless junk.

Formulae of various kinds are often just means of maintaining confidence - a bit like rubbing a rabbit's foot before you venture out onto a football pitch. It might be (very vaguely) interesting to ask if this artist still uses the same methods today. People do tend to move on from they 'always' do: they get bored wit the sameness of it.

A process can be helpful, I was just watching a documentary about a guy who acid etches pictures of the coastline around the British Isles and he has a process yet his work is still more artful than some people who apparently have no set process. I also watched a few video's from a Cuban American artist who learned classical painting in Florence. The video underneath is him promoting a DVD where he is doing a charcoal of a nude from a photo. He clearly has a formula of working from the general and refining it each time towards the specific and though he had a photo reference he drew the underlying muscle structures and construction such that the finished image had far more form than the photo he was working from. Such a process is not something to be sneezed at whether one thinks it is too much faffing or not it clearly works. Not that I am suggesting anyone rush out and buy his DVD but you can see the sort of thing I am talking about. Even simply constructing the masses of a figure or head is in some ways using a formula (ever put a centre line down a head or divide it in thirds to help you get the alignment?) I should think that everything you do to construct a painting is a choice, a formula is only a problem when it stops being a choice and just becomes a habit or procedure because then you are manufacturing a product not making art.

I think you have a point here. What is a formula; what is a system; what is set practice? I know of many painters who lay out their colours along the edge of their palette, always do this (sometimes irrespective of whether they're actually intending to use those colours or not), and some even have little minarets of colour built up - it reminds them where to squeeze fresh paint so that the hand goes to the pile automatically without their having to look. (Which I don't, for the record, do.) Others always lay down a coloured imprimatura - ie a base coat - because they say it makes it easier to judge tone; it might well.... and then again, I've never found it made a lot of difference. Is that a formula, a method, is there good reason for it? Or is it just a reassuring habit? The trouble with assessing any method, or almost any, is that you can assemble a fair amount of convincing-seeming explanation to justify it - but I have a feeling, that's been growing on me for some time, that much of this is more ritual than method. Acid etching, on the other hand, clearly requires a very definite method, a set of steps without which it can go badly wrong. There is cross-over between method and habit, analysis and the comfort of the familiar - I think your last point (DB) is apposite, particularly: "only a problem when it stops being a choice and just becomes a habit or procedure because then you are manufacturing a product not making art". I don't adhere to too many rules, and deliberately vary what I do, what I use, how I start, taking into account so far as I can only those things which have to be observed to prevent my painting falling off the support or cracking.

I baked a cake once .... I did adhere to a formula: I suppose it was just about eatable (well, I ate it). But somewhere along the line, I must have got the ingredients a bit wrong - light and fluffy it wasn't; it would have been very useful, though, if I'd run out of cannonballs at the siege of Namur........ The analogy isn't entirely effective, though - painting does depend on ingredients, among other things, but not to the same degree. So - had I got the basic formula right, I could perhaps have made a cake that wouldn't have doubled as a concrete plinth. But it might still have been a boring and uninspired confection, lacking the hand of experience and artistic flair. Which I think takes this metaphor just about as far as I can get it without it collapsing to the ground and gazing reproachfully at me with its dying breath. What I think I mean is - structure and method may be one way forward; inspiration and flair another: but better by far if you can combine those ingredients. And as a beginner, you won't make progress without some understanding of basic principles, even if it's possible (and it is!) to be constrained by them as technical progress is made. Going back to David GY4VM's (or something's) post (I scrolled to the top to check, scrolled down again, and had forgotten his username already...) then: what he read in that old copy of The Artist was a description of a process that might well have served a useful purpose for the artist employing it at the time; might have been helpful to anyone trapped in an unproductive place and wondering how to break free from it; but as a general theory of how to construct a painting didn't work, as indeed it wouldn't: because there is no one universal theory. And it would still be of some interest to find out whether that artist still used the method today - or whether s/he'd moved beyond it. Formulae and theories can be very useful for their time - and then turn into rigid rules which you need to break: one moves on, in other words - and one HAS moved on, so to dismiss a theory or method as a waste of time, or horse-dung, or faffing about might well miss a useful point. Which I have now laboured to death.......... you should never have let me begin..

Truly creative people can do more with less. BB King used an extremely limited palette of notes and was still expressive and soulful. Sometimes a framework or limitation can actually free you to be expressive.