I had an art teacher tell me "Stop doing halo's around objects and people" ... I wish i could go back and tell them "that's not a halo..that's a BRIDGE!!" ---I have learned that instructors and teachers who tell you to "never do this or that" do not understand art. They weaken artistic abilities almost as bad as the parents who tell their kids that art is not a vocation.
You are right that Keating used a lot of tempera and sometimes his mix was just water and pigment so that it dried quickly. He doesn't say in this video what he is using but it blends readily and he did the painting in two sittings allowing the first layer to dry but it's not too flat and can be built up just a bit so it's probably a light bodied oil.
He is using an egg/oil emulsion hand ground temper paint. He knew his craft well. When a classically trained artist says tempera, it means egg yolk and pigment or egg yolk emusified with linseed oil. Both are water soluble, permanent, and dry very fast. Since he is painting on canvas, it is definitely an egg/oil emulsion tempera paint as all other type of tempera paints would crack very quickly.
I love these videos, however he is very vague and it leaves a lot of questions. his use of the word tempura means different things depending on the episode.
There are quite a few unfinished Cezanne paintings that help give us a great insight into his mid to late painting methods. Obviously Tom was forced to paint this quickly for a tv show but Cezanne was the polar opposite- very slow and considered- he would not paint the (mid) local colour of any single object in the way Tom shows here. He would move around the whole canvas with accents of colour and tone. Each single object would slowly develop and take shape. There would be no pre pencil drawing of the composition. Cezanne would use a broken line now and then to define and ‘pin-down’ certain edges. These are made with a dark mixture of colour using a very worn thin sable…. Maybe a rigger( I can’t be sure). Don’t get me wrong, Tom Keating definitely knew his trade but in this instance I suspect the production company behind the show pushed for him to cover artistic styles that he otherwise wouldn’t have had as much interest or expertise in. His Titian and Tutner episodes are particularly outstanding
I’ve tried to add some images but unfortunately I can’t. If you Google image ‘Cezanne unfinished paintings’ you can see more clearly what I have tried to explain
This is the third video I try to watch about Cezanne and his paintings that just talks about the techniques. I dont care. I want to know what makes it so great, what is the history involved, what is the thought process. Can anyone give me any recommendations of understanding Cezanne and/or any other great artist?
Cezanne goes far beyond quite simple philosophy of Impressionism. He had a very active mind, was fond of classics, poetry and music, and wanted to grasp how natural objects become shapes in mind, how far they can be abstracted and still remain recognisable. Best example of this are his paintings of the Mont Sainte-Victoire; he made dozens of painting of it, and that effort tells more about his deep ideas - he did not come to sit, paint using predefined style and go, but he was solving a problem. The paintings are made of a few main fields of dominant colours, but which inside them contain smaller fields, and still those smaller fields are made of smaller fields of colour, all juxtaposed angularly. Because in nature there is no perfect curve, nor perfect plain - all is made of patches of imperfection, so to speak. Patches are so abstract, but still bear some resemblance of nature within them. The result is almost fractal-like structure, perfectly stabile design, that is same on the inside as it is on the outside - at the threshold of abstraction (idea) and nature. Therefore they are (1) not sterile and boring like pure abstract painting, nor are (2) too literal like overly academic approach, nor (3) too puerile, like an Impressionist approach.
@@zvonimirtosic6171 Cezanne's use of patches also makes his canvases incredibly active, almost scintillating, in the same way that vision is active and fluid. And the patches allow him to apply color in such a way that it is color, and not line, that the eye uses to define objects and their relationships -- there is a lot to say about Cezanne's use of color, such as what Keating talks about in this video. It is the techniques that make the painting great, because they convey Cezanne's deep consciousness of his vision to the viewer in a way that the viewer can learn a lot by studying.
