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How to Paint
June 2012
www.artistsmagazine.com
09281 02306
7
Display until June 4, 2012
Still Life with Mozzarella, Sardines and Knife (detail; oil, 16x18) by Amy Weiskopf
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shapes of light
Amy Weiskopf composes spare still lifes
that suggest not the inevitability of decay,
but the enduring beauty of natural light.
BY JOHN R. KEMP
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June 2012
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T
shows flowers and fruits at the moment of ripeness and
thus comments on the imminence of change
and the inevitability of decay. Amy Weiskopf,
in contrast, prefers the moment that stays
still; her pictures depict radiant forms whose
colors and contours conform less to life than
to an ideal. Weiskopf, who divides her time
between Brooklyn, New Orleans and Tuscany,
labors over her setups the way a poet labors over
words for a sonnet. By showing a literal abundance, usually of vegetables rather than fruit—
numerous radishes, leeks, turnips, for example,
in place of the iconic rose or apple—she
emphasizes visual rhymes, a repetition of forms.
Repeating forms, shapes and colors (not
literary or art historical associations) are what
she works with. By arranging the simple fruits
of the earth in austere settings, she concentrates on light as it reveals presence. Her pictures can, at first glance, seem minimal, and
then, upon closer inspection, they reveal her
artistry. Weiskopf ’s paintings, in fact, call to
THE CONVENTIONAL STILL LIFE
PREVIOUS SPREAD:
This composition
juxtaposes an abundance of turnips
with the severity of
a bunch of white
asparagus. Painting
winter vegetables,
which are less
subject to quick
decay than fruits,
allows Weiskopf to
concentrate on form
in Still Life with
Turnips and White
Asparagus (oil,
12x16).
BELOW: “I paint only in natural light; I never supplement
the light but instead realize that it will change in the
course of a day,” says Weiskopf. “I choose the color of
the wall behind my setup in accord with the colors of the
objects; the result is a repetition that unites the background to the foreground, as is evident in Still Life with
Tomatoes, Green Apples and Leek (oil, 13¾ x17¾).
Private collection; all painting images courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York
Photography © Eric W.
Baumgartner; image
courtesy of Hirschl & Adler
Modern, New York; private
collection
mind what Henri Matisse once said about still
life paintings: “The object is an actor [and it]
... must act powerfully on the imagination, and the artist’s feeling, expressing itself
through the object, must render it worthy of
interest. It only says what one makes it say.”
Though the Chicago native has painted
landscapes, she prefers still lifes. “I like to
compose the motif more than I like finding
it,” she explains. “I like the calm, contemplative atmosphere of the studio. I work slowly
and deliberately, and the flux of nature, while
an issue with still life, can be an overwhelming frustration for me with landscape painting.
Still life is more intimate, more about looking
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inward, than other genres. The intimate and
antiheroic appeal to me and are much more
suited to my psyche.”
Chardin to Cézanne
In Weiskopf ’s opinion, Chardin,
Cézanne and Morandi were the
three greatest still life painters. “Each,” she explains, “was
capable of making all formal elements—form, space, light, color
and composition—work in unison
to create a unique, visually complicated and very engaging pictorial
image. It’s not the subject matter,
but the way everything relates in
a very sophisticated and complicated fashion. Chardin’s paintings
are beautiful, but if you analyze
how they’re constructed, it’s obvious how clever and intricate all
the relationships are. Aspiring to
that degree of formal complexity
is what painting is about.”
Formal complexity is at the
heart of her work. The objects are
arranged, seemingly as if scattered
in a random order, but look closely
and you can see that every shape
is repeated. Over the years, other
artists have influenced her work,
including 16th- and 17th-century
Spanish still life painters Juan
Sánchez Cotán and Francisco
de Zurbarán. “Their work is so
beautifully painted,” she explains.
“There’s an austerity that I like.”
Weiskop’s palette is similarly austere. The emphasis isn’t on topical color but on
light as it illumines form and color.
Weiskopf became interested in art at an
early age while growing up in Chicago. Her
father, an architect who also painted, introduced her to the exceptional Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist collections at the Art
Institute of Chicago. He passed on his love
for Post-Impressionism, Modernism and especially Cubism. “However,” says Weiskopf, “it
was Cézanne’s Basket with Apples that was a
very early love and remains one of my favorite
paintings.”
As an undergraduate art student in
the 1970s at Washington University in St.
Louis, Missouri, she studied under Edward
Boccia and Barry Schactman, who gave her
“I like the calm, contemplative
atmosphere of the studio.”
Amy Weiskopf
Private collection
ABOVE: “For Still Life with Cushaw Squash and
Purple Potatoes (oil, 12x12),” says Weiskopf, “I dragged
this southern squash from New Orleans back to Brooklyn
with me. I liked playing with the foreshortening of the
stripes and the strong perspective caused by the purple
potatoes behind and in front of the squash.”
foundations in drawing and composition.
Later in graduate school at the Tyler School
of Art in Philadelphia, teacher and figurative
painter Bruno Civitico had a lasting influence
on her approach to art. “I was floundering
in graduate school,” she recalls. “Bruno told
me to sit down and look at what I was painting. So I did a series of small still lifes, and
I’d never enjoyed painting more. He gave me
June 2012
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direction for painting what I saw.”
Weiskopf spent a second year of graduate school studying art in Italy. After the year
was up, she stayed on to teach art in Rome
and to travel. That year lasted nine years. “I
Materials
Surface: Sennelier oil-primed linen canvas (medium weave)
Brushes: Silver Brush Grand Prix bristle filberts, Da Vinci and Italian Art
Store kolinsky sable rounds, Trekell red sable rounds
Medium: Weber Turpenoid
Palette: large wooden easel on wheels or a half-size Jullian French easel
Easel: wooden palette or sometimes a paper palette
Oil Paints: Holbein (H), Blockx (B), Winsor & Newton (WN), Old Holland
(OH)—titanium white (H), jaune brilliant (H), cadmium yellow pale (H),
cadmium yellow medium (B), raw sienna (B), cadmium orange (WN, OH),
cadmium red (B), cadmium red purple (B), alizarin crimson (OH), oxide of
chrome (WN), cerulean blue (B), cobalt blue (B), ultramarine blue (B), cobalt
violet (B), ultramarine violet (B)
Varnish: Winsor & Newton Artists’ retouch varnish
36
traveled in Italy and around Europe, looking
at European paintings from prehistory to the
20th century,” she says. “The earthy realism
of Italian Baroque still lifes was an important
influence, but I never lost my taste for early
Modernism.”
Against Vanitas
Unlike still life painters who create cryptic
vanitas messages about human frivolity and
the transience of life, Weiskopf chooses objects
based on the aesthetic interplay of light and
shadow. “I have no interest in doing a story or a
narrative,” she says. “Like free association, the
process is intuitive.” That setup process can take
from a few minutes, “literally dumping stuff
on a table,” to several days. “I try numerous
BELOW: “In Italy I look forward to these plums coming
into season every summer,” says Weiskopf. “I pick them
myself so the bloom doesn’t rub off too much. I’ve
painted them in all sorts of configurations, but last summer I spread them all over an old green table, and they
looked great in Plums (oil, 8x12).”
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Working in Natural Light on Two Continents
BY AMY WEISKOPF
For many years I divided my time between New Orleans
and Italy. I had a large industrial space with great northern
light in New Orleans. In Italy I painted in different rooms of
my small house in an abandoned hill town in Tuscany. I liked
both the sparse neutrality of the industrial space and the
cozy intimacy of the domestic space.
In my studio in New Orleans (top right), where I worked
for 17 years, there was a wall of windows, but I painted
most of them out and created three “windows.” The largest
one illuminated the setup and, depending on how close I
wanted to be to the setup, one of the smaller two illuminated the painting I was working on. I never used additional
artificial light. I worked all day until sunset.
In the photo of my easel and setup (middle right),
you can see the painting that I did for the Zeuxis show
“Common Objects.” Everyone painted the same dish towel.
The blocks, the sheet of gray paper and the different colors
on the wall show how I constantly change the colors on the
wall and table for my still life setups.
As for my studio in Italy (bottom right), I have only southern exposures, so I’ve had to learn to manage the shifting light. A carpenter built a rectractable awning for the
window in the living room. He also built a moveable wall
that I can place behind the table since it needs to be in the
middle of the room in order to get the best window light.
You can see that I’m working on Plums (page 36).
In the last photo (bottom left), you can see a small bedroom I also paint in. I’ve covered the windowsill with black
cloth. I learned from a photographer friend to cover the
area where direct sunlight strikes with a black cloth, which
absorbs much of the light; otherwise, the reflected light
washes out the shadows. The tomatoes in this painting
were green when I started; the painting became Still Life
with Green Tomatoes and Bread (page 39).
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possibilities until one feels right,” says Weiskopf.
“I like to step back from the subject, think
about it and come back later with fresh eyes.”
Occasionally, paintings such as Still Life
with Tomatoes, Green Apples and Leek (page
34) and Plums (page 36) have historic references to compositions called “scatter patterns.”
The earliest example of this approach is an
ancient Roman mosaic entitled Scraps After a
Meal, now housed in the Vatican. “It’s a very
conscious decision to spread things out and
abstract the surface,” she says. “I’m trying to
blend my interests in patterns derived from the
Modernist influence and the realism endemic
to traditional Italian paintings.”
ABOVE: “ The Museum of Modern Art has so many of the
early Modernist paintings I love,” says Weiskopf. “Still
Life with Mozzarella, Sardines and Knife (oil, 16x18)
was inspired by a show of Picasso’s Guitars. One of my
favorite collages was reproduced in The New York Times;
you can see the painted newspaper clipping at the top.
she continues, “in one sitting, I block in the
painting on white oil-primed linen. I’m looking for simple shapes that quickly capture the
light and overall tonality. I use bristle brushes
to mix and apply the paint, and I conceive the
subject in a simplified, loose fashion.”
When the painting is completely blocked
in, Weiskopf scrapes it off with a palette knife,
leaving a clean image of very thin paint. After
Simple Shapes
the paint dries, she builds up thinner layers of
For paintings such as Still Life with Mozzarella, paint to develop “color and light, form, space
Sardines and Knife (above), Weiskopf roughly
and detail.” She begins each day by mixing
sketches items with vine charcoal, paying close “an extensive palette” with a palette knife and
attention to placement and proportion. “Next,” paints mostly with sable brushes from this
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point in the process on. “I paint in thin, opaque
layers,” she says. She mixes her paint with very
little medium, usually turpentine.“I think oil
is the most versatile, luminous and best suited
for working wet into wet,” she says. (When the
painting is finished and dry, she applies a coat
of retouch varnish.)
A painting, depending upon its size, takes
from two weeks to two-to-three months to
complete. “I work mostly in the studio and
only from life in natural light,” she explains.
“I like controlled light in a calm, quiet atmosphere. For me it’s all about the light. I need
long hours of consistent and beautiful light
that I find inspirational and that moves me
to paint.” Weiskopf prefers the consistency
of northern light. Though she does paint in
southern exposures and likes the warmer light,
she finds it more difficult to control.
Advice for Beginners
As important as light and composition are,
Weiskopf impresses upon students that “all
painting is abstract.” “Students—and I remind
myself of this all the time—must learn how
to see and translate into paint, the abstract
relationships between colors and shapes rather
than concentrating on what an object looks like.
Practice and lots of fast painting will help.” ■
JOHN R. KEMP is a New Orleans writer and deputy
director emeritus of the Louisiana Endowment for the
Humanities.
ABOVE: “My painting Still Life with Green Tomatoes
and Bread (oil, 14x201⁄8) started like so many—with a
walk over to a farmer’s vegetable garden. I saw this beautiful clump of unripened tomatoes, each one a slightly
paler shade of green. Having found the stars for my
painting, I added contrasting elements, the dark green
cucumber, the eggplant and the crusty bread. The yellow back wall and the wheat-colored cloth on the table
contribute to feelings I have about summer in the Tuscan
countryside.
Meet Amy Weiskopf
In 1991, Amy
Weiskopf was a resident at Yaddo artists’ community in
upstate New York. In
2003, the Louisiana
Division for the Arts
awarded her a grant
for working artists.
Six years later, she was awarded a residency at
the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Weiskopf’s award-winning work can be found
in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City, the Arkansas Art Center,
Artspace NYC, and Hallmark Cards in Kansas
City. Her paintings have appeared in numerous
shows in cities from coast to coast. Weiskopf
currently resides in Brooklyn. Her work is represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in Manhattan
(www.hirschlandadler.com).
June 2012
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