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When we first start painting, we’re so concerned with “getting it right” that we paint as tightly as we can. The result is usually a disaster – hard, over-delineated, and brittle. As we grow, we want to become more “painterly”. But how?

In my studies I copied masterworks by Nikolai Fechin and other expressive, loose painters and came to the conclusion that a major key was the treatment of edges.

Master artist, Carolyn Anderson talks about leaving “passageways” for the viewer’s eye to travel throughout the painting. In other words don’t “wall off” each area with a hard, sharp edge. The problem is that each brush mark or pastel stroke automatically creates a sharp edge. So how, and what, and when do we soften them?

If we know what we want to see, there are many routes to get there!

The most important thing I learned was to squint at the subject. With my eyes wide open all edges seem pretty sharp. As I close my eyes the last edge that remains visually sharp is my sharpest edge. I compare all other edges to that sharpest edge and identify the hierarchy. In a deep squint some edges appear “firm” some are “soft” and a great many are completely lost. So now I have a roadmap.

How to actually soften them? There may be an infinite variety of ways; here are a few:

1. Use a loaded brush with un-thinned (no medium) paint. Hold it parallel to the canvas.  Make a light stroke so the paint slides off the brush in chunks…creating a broken stroke.
2. Paint across the edge with a soft brush to break up the stroke.
3. Rub it with your finger or a palette knife to blend the two edges together.
4. Scratch across the edge with the back of a brush handle.
5. Blot it with a paper towel.
6. Run across areas with an ink brayer (a small rubber roller).
7. Drag a squeegee across the painting.

In this demo from one of my workshops, I use several of the techniques I just mentioned.  See if you can figure out which ones I used in each area.

I will cover these techniques at my upcoming workshop at the Palette and Chisel in Chicago. Here's a link https://reg126.imperisoft.com/PaletteAndChisel/ProgramDetail/3336313036/Registration.aspx

Artists (and collectors) seem to start out “tight”. By “tight” I mean hard-edged, delineated, brittle, over-worked…you can see where I’m going with this. At some point we start to look at the work of artists who paint with free, expressive, bold strokes and say to ourselves “I want to do that!” But when we try, we find it’s not so easy.

Jaguar’s new tag line is “It’s good to be bad.” Ours could be “it’s hard to be soft!”

The work of Nikolai Fechin looks as if he threw the paint on the canvas in a burst of creative energy and it all miraculously landed in the perfect places. His edges are (mostly) soft, broken or completely lost. However, when you look closely, you can see that he worked on some paintings for weeks. Sometimes there are three or four layers where he applied wet paint over dry.

"After Fechin" pastel by William Schneider

In Alla Prima II Richard Schmid put it eloquently, “ Loose is how a painting LOOKS...not necessarily how it was painted.” So what is the secret?

Well, I don’t know all the secrets (discovery is what makes art so interesting), but in my Loosen Up workshops I teach 12 “keys”. Here are three:

1. A Hierarchy of Edges – They need to range from razor sharp to completely lost. Fechin’s broken dry-brush strokes are just one of at least a dozen ways to lose an edge.
2. No hard outlines – Once our drawing skills (e.g. proportions) are sufficiently developed, we just need a few marks for accurate placement. You can’t “color inside the lines” if there are no lines.
3. Paint across forms – Especially things like eyes, noses, etc. In other words the strokes are perpendicular to the direction of the edges.

"Red Brigade" Oil

In her book on Sergei Bongart, Mary Balcomb quotes him, Russian accent and all. "Just now I feel I learn how to paint, how to loosen up! Then comes time to kick bucket."

My work is finally starting to get loose...I hope it doesn't mean anything!

By the way,  there are a few spaces left in the June 9 -12^th workshop in Door County, WI.