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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 9
Lesson 1: Abstract Expressionism- Abstract Expressionism, an introduction
- Finding meaning in abstraction
- Norman Lewis, Untitled
- de Kooning, Woman I
- How to paint like Willem de Kooning
- How to paint like Willem de Kooning - Part 2
- Willem de Kooning, Woman, I (from MoMA)
- Barnett Newman
- Newman's Onement I, 1948
- The Painting Techniques of Barnett Newman
- Restoring Rothko
- Why is that important? Looking at Jackson Pollock
- Representation and abstraction: Millais's Ophelia and Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis
- The Case For Mark Rothko
- Rothko, No. 210/No. 211 (Orange)
- Mark Rothko's No. 3/No. 13
- The Painting Techniques of Mark Rothko
- The Painting Techniques of Jackson Pollock
- The Case for Jackson Pollock
- Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
- Jackson Pollock, Mural
- Paint Application Studies of Jackson Pollock's Mural
- "One: Number 31, 1950" by Jackson Pollock, 1950 | MoMA Education
- Lee Krasner, Untitled
- Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57
- Franz Kline
- The Painting Techniques of Franz Kline
- Hedda Sterne, Number 3—1957
- "Low Water” by Joan Mitchell
- Beauford Delaney's portrait of Marian Anderson
- Abstract Expressionism
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How to paint like Willem de Kooning
Explore the art of Willem de Kooning, a master of the New York avant-garde. Dive into his use of fluid paints, large quantities, and body movements to create powerful strokes on canvas. Discover his techniques of mixing colors, using different consistencies, and alternating between painting and drawing.
Want to join the conversation?
- I don't quite understand why, if we engaged in this style of painting, we would have to adhere to de Kooning's time frame for the picture being finished. If it took two years or two months, what is the difference? Also, isn't saying that an abstract piece of art doesn't seem finished a common criticism of that style, justified or otherwise? Not withstanding de Kooning's genius, a painting having been worked on continually doesn't necessarily mean it will be better when the artist tells us that it is finished, or when it escapes from the artist's studio.(8 votes)
Video transcript
You should really have a lot of fun
this week because we'll be exploring some really wonderful viscus 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. 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 damar varnish here. And I do have one typical baker's pan
here, which I'll be using as a pallet 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. A 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 thick 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. 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, it's 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, and
let's work with some kind of flesh tone. Now, for a 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. 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, once I add a little bit of
varnish into there, make it nice and glossy, this is Dammar varnish,
it's a natural resin, comes from trees. Dammar is D-A-M-M-A-R. Let's 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. How about this one? We'll start getting some of
these colors mixing here. Now, that mixture of solvents and media
that I added here, remember that's 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. To 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 worked with are often extremely glossy in character. Okay, so here's 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. going to be working with
cadmium red hue here. Any time 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 okay because the hue
of that color is going to be exactly the same as cadmium. In other words, gorgeous,
stop sign red, or Coca Cola red. We're going to add a little
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 liked to violate
these rules because he liked to have really interesting paint textures,
sometimes frothing up on the surface. Now, because I've mixed water and oil, you
can see this texture is 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. And 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 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'll 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. Just out of convenience. This is going to help me blend this
paint a little faster, a little better, 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. Okay, so we have a nice pallet going here. Let's move to the easel. Okay, so large format canvass, a little
small here, but roughly human scale here. Interesting to note,
that recent research at Guggenheim Museum on a painting
by de Kooning from the 1970s, 1975, if I'm not mistaken,
called Who's Name Was Writ on Water. We looked at that painting, an abstract
painting, in infrared light and actually found an under drawing. Now, usually an under drawing is made and
then a painter exactly paints over that drawing but, of course, for an improvised,
gestural abstract painting, why would you use an under drawing? It's actually akin to a dancer
warming up before performing. It's a way to get loose. It's a way to stretch, to get limber. And to kind of rehearse some of
the same physical gestures that you're about to perform, not with a drawing tool,
but with a loaded brush. 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 grade. This is the stuff that if you
rubbed on your own hand would hurt. And what I want to do is, basically
make this canvas very absorbent, rub off any sheen so that my paint is going to
be nice and roughly attached to it. [SOUND] And now I'm going to get lose 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, I get use to that
idea, get use to those range of motions. But now, with charcoal. [SOUND] [SOUND] [SOUND] All right, a good
time to step back from the painting and take a look. And this is actually 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 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 is a very
linear element of all these different gestural marks aligning in a vertical way,
this is artificial and it 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. Although there are some nice moments 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 it's complement yellow,
some gorgeous mark making. Also, there are very 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, scrapping it or smearing it back off. So let's get into some
of those activities now. [SOUND] And already, what you see me 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. Skinning, flaying some of the white of the
canvas here and giving us some transitions between thickly painted, thinly painted,
opaque, translucent, luscious, fat paint, glossy, and dry,
scratched kind of 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 just scrub back into the surface. And this is really going to remove paint
and also make the paint bleed together, very aggressively. [SOUND]
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 problems weren't as
strong as the original set, but now they're the strongest ones left,
so time to attack them, too. [NOISE] Wow, and now we have a nice start
to a painting. What before looks red or
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. de Kooning was a huge fan of really,
really long brushes. This is a pretty long brush,
it's a 35 brush size, here. But de Kooning had brushes that literally
were as tall as I am, six feet tall, something like that. The reason was, he liked to be
painting on a canvas from a distance. Why? Because he wanted to have this global
perspective over the work while he was working. I'm going to do my best
approximation here and start painting from arm's length anyway. Remember, that de Kooning is taking
advantage of this distance, but from even further back to really
understand how the entire painting is evolving as he's adding or
subtracting gestural marks to it. 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 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 it
in some very dark colors. Now, there are two ways to rectify that. One, scrape it off. This is the wonderful thing about
oil painting, you don't like it, well, get rid of it. Number two, you can wait for
that paint to dry. Now, this is oil paint,
it's going to take awhile. 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 this 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
escaped 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, in fact, soft charcoal here. Now, when drawing into wet paint,
you lose your mark quickly but you begin to gouge into the surface and
some interesting things can happen. [SOUND] 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. Now, 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, a down and then back up, so
I'm going to reenact this mark now, but with a hard tool rather
than that wide fluid brush. And you can see that the edge here is
far sharper than anything I did before, as 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 purplish color, but I brought it back into the canvas,
commingling 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 the yellow on the left hand side of the painting,
especially at the bottom. None on the right, none at 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, it looks simple compared to a de Kooning,
for a couple reasons. This is all done alla prima,
it's all done wet in wet. And really de Kooning alternated periods
of working wet in wet within working wet over dry and 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 two inches 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 a painting that, in de Kooning style, should really
be allowed to grow in the studio for a month, if not really a year.