Brushstroke by brushstroke, this insightful study shows how famous artists painted some of their greatest works.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable -- but mixed,
By DGehman "Dave" (Framingham, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Studying with the Masters (Hardcover)
Dean Larson is a realist painter, proud to have trained at a school that upholds 19th C. academy standards -- plenty of drawing, much tonal handling, careful rendering across the entire canvas. He even points out that he uses Maroger medium, that unhistorical concoction invented by that poor, defrocked Louvre wannabe expert.
As he says, academic training asked students to copy masters from the past -- and all the painters in this book did just that in their formative or student years -- and, he posits, you'll learn a lot, too, if you follow suit. But he's not this year's Bouguereau, pursuing empty detail (or Playboy-like nudey spreads for Victorian gentlemen), and the painters he selected for this book didn't mean much to the 19th C French Academic Painters -- too sketchy (except Rubens) and for the later painters, too heretical. After a bare-bones biographical sketch for each painter, you get good discussions of each one's style, the painter's palette, and other considerations around materials and painting supports. There are then step-by-step buildups of a copy or two for each master, pointing what what came first; what areas were developed later and how; and overall, how a given artist handled paint and brush strokes. Overall, the discussion of materials and methods is good, and apparently based on good research. There is much to think about regarding a given painter's times, stated objectives (when available from original sources), and painting approaches. Even the bibliography contains some gems from journals that would be hard to roust out otherwise. So, it's a mystery to me that nobody has yet reviewed the book, and that its resale value is extremely low. Granted, no beginner is likely to gain a whole lot, but for artists into their second or third year of painting, even at a less than Acadmic art school -- one of those where self-expression takes the place of training or history -- the book offers a ton of useful exercises and considerations. That said, there are some downsides. For one, the majority of the captions outside of the step-by-steps are woeful, mainly the kind of thing you used to see in art museums: title, year, size, who donated the painting and the museum where it's found (at least as of the date of this book, 1986). Whatever lesson each picture is meant to give us is left unsaid. For another, the step-by-steps tend to fall back into mere descriptions of the sequence of pigments used (to be fair, the pictures allow you to see the brush strokes and effects that are left unsaid in the caption). Still, overall, this book offers some good, solid historical background, and a whole lot to think about and try, to an artist who wants to explore a broad variety of approaches.
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