Paul Ingbretson Talks About Direct vs Indirect painting - No. 14 

I hope you keep these going, these talks are the most important discussions on art happening today

Keep up the good work on getting this info out onto the web.

I haven't quite worked this one out yet, but suspect that one of the core points to this question has to do with the qualities of transparency, opacity, and translucency. In regards to painting (respectively) dark over light(glaze), matching tones, or painting light over dark (scumble). When we paint in one go we often have the white canvas shining through and that gives brightness, chroma, and a sense of unity to the painting. It's thicker in parts and more transparent in others, but it's generally harmonious and tends to work. Nice lively pictures.. hopefully. As far as I have worked out, we run into problems.. we like the quick light sketches for their lightness, but we often feel we can't develop them without losing these qualities. We can't really leave a painting to dry and then rework it.. it just tends to lose vibrancy. Does that have a lot to do with the fact that we start matching tones here, painting light over dark there, etc, etc, and this tends to destroy the quality of light? It is definitely a problem of chroma.. in that any reduction in transparency and the brilliance of the underlying canvas causes a sharp dip in chroma when covered. If painting 'opaquely' (i.e. not worrying about all of this :) ) then it is more important to think about the chroma and not to bother oneself too much about transparency/opacity and all of that. and personally am sticking more to direct painting now.. laying down tones carefully and deliberately. But brewing in the back of my mind are thoughts about indirect systems being a means to regulate and harmonise these qualities of transparency/translucency/opacity, providing a good way to lay the paint down in layers. And when properly understood they could offer a lot of freedom and power, not just a tight technique for rendering polished paintings. A lot of this 'indirect' thinking may have come from tempera technique and there seems to have been a big seamless cross over point when oil painting began. More indirect methods were probably more intuitive due to practical limitations of tempera. For example, the general understanding that you want to seperate your pigments as much as possible and paint in layers rather than mix tones from multiple colours. Is this feeling of transparency/opacity/translucency relative? In the same way that value, hue and chroma are relative. Which means that the key is to regulate them carefully. For example, there is the popular idea that you should avoid white in the shadows, but i have noticed that a shadow tone that has that opaque look can begin to look more transparent as you lay down even more opaque lights next to it. Also, painting water I once began by putting down transparent paints (umbers, etc.) and then started to lay in scumbled reflections over this transparent paint .. the result was that the lights just looked like correction fluid floating over transparent paint. The key may to be what Daniel Thompson mentions in his book on Tempera painting. That opacity and transparency have something like what a middle tone is to light and dark and thats a quality of translucency. That pearly scumbled quality. This as a mid tone base is worked outwards into the lights and the shadows. At least this is one way of creating harmony between these qualities of paint, if they are taken as contrasting opposites in the same way as value/tone or complimentary colours, soft/sharp, etc. I've decided that its best to learn to paint in a direct manner... learning to select and apply tones with purpose and to try and finish in one sitting if possible. But... :)

Thank you! Very useful to listen to your thoughts and experiences.

Hi Paul, thank you for these shop talks and the freely given treasure of insights in them. I have a question and a request: Thinking of art as "the music of colour", please share your views on abstract movements in art. Could some abstract art be seen as a pure form of using colour to generate an effect? Request: please record a demonstration of the impressionistic approach. I think, for many of us, it would help if we can visualise the process

My direct painting goes to complete sh#t when I get passed that first layer or 2. Its a nightmare Help

You look like Noam Chomsky.

You do not answer the question properly or explain the difference in methods. Piles of stuff on top? Noodled?