Swimming in Oil Soup

I absolutely love the idea of Alla Prima painting—I always have. Directly going at it, no tight drawings beforehand, just you, your brush, and a blank canvas. Discovering the painting as you go, slowly pulling out the painting from a generic rough start, defining it more and more, adding detail and rendering where needed until finally the finished painting emerges. AWESOME.

The reality of it all always looked waaay different for me. It always felt—after a certain point—that I would just get stuck, not being able to push the painting towards a more finalized stage than the initial block-in. There was some kind of invisible wall that I would hit, and I’d always end up just fighting the panel or canvas, not being able to add anything to it. Everything I’d do would just drown in this muddy soup of oil paint. It’s like my materials wouldn’t allow me to proceed.
Not only that, but I would also hit a kind of psychological wall. For whatever reason, I would never be able to leave this wonderful brushy, painterly stage of the initial block-in in order to dive into the realm of carefully rendering out individual forms. It’s like I was stuck in this mindset of “It’s an alla prima painting, hence it has to be very loose and ‘free.’”
Eventually, I just came to the conclusion that the idea of doing highly finished work simply is not really possible through the process of “loose” alla prima painting.
So, in the end, I would always end up with these kinds of cool little paintings that had a lot going for them as far as overall look is concerned, but they would always be very distinctly different from my “real” projects. For my more elaborate work, I’d stick to careful drawings, followed by careful underpaintings, which were then finalized by careful passes of rendering on top. Working like that became my go-to process, and it actually worked out great.
Right now, I am able to execute the work I want to create using a process that feels both safe as well as challenging enough for me to keep pushing towards improving my work.

The results were good, but the way to get there always feels a little like “not me.”
Now, there is a lot to say about pursuing what “feels right” and keeping the process fun throughout vs. buckling down and just doing the work, pushing through the drag that’s “honest and hard work.” Frankly, the dilemma and discussion of these two “paradigms” of working is what I spend most of my time thinking about, and there’s definitely a lot to unravel there, but I’ll leave that for another day.

OKAY, to get to the point. Fast forward to last week. I have been a fan of Miriam Hoffmann’s work (https://www.miriamhoffmannart.com/) for quite some time now, but I was never aware that she had quite a large YouTube channel explaining her process in incredible detail. She does this incredibly carefully rendered portrait work—very soft, oftentimes very classical-looking—and to my surprise, the way she gets there is through an (especially in the beginning) incredibly messy, alla prima–like process.

This. Blew. My. Mind!

Here I was, thinking that I needed to sacrifice my idea of a process that aligns with my sensibilities in order to be able to produce the work I want to create, and here comes this incredible artist, being MUCH more messy than I could ever wish for and then ending up with MUCH more sensitive, soft work than I could ever hope to create myself.

Immediately, this lit a spark. What I want to actually do is possible—I was seeing the proof right in front of me.
In my experience, there are rarely moments that truly change the way you think or approach anything from one moment to another, but sometimes it does still seem to happen. Seeing Miriam Hoffmann paint really did that for me.

Now what does that mean? Easy!

Back to work it goes!

I want to get back into approaching painting on my terms. Frankly, that’s something I’ve been doing over the last couple of months, which have very much been a period of insecurity and rearranging of my brain, in a way. This step is only a logical part of that. It feels very much like a “coming full circle” kind of moment.

Below, you can find a study I started yesterday, and I decided to stop at that painting I mentioned earlier. I adjusted the handling of my paints and brushes quite a bit to at least alleviate the material problems, and it seemed to work out okay. Still, here we are at the psychological wall. I am quite lost on how to proceed from here, but now I know: the only way is through.

Let’s tear down some barricades!!

Detail