All Things Painter Putting Your Best Stroke Forward by John Derry

Whenever I finish a new image, I tend to compare it to my earlier work. If I judge the image to be successful, I categorize it as one of my better works. This scale of success implies personal creative growth over many images. This got me to thinking about how we, as artists, make a commitment to our efforts before, during, and after we create artwork. Where does this sense of commitment come from? How do we utilize it as we create a piece?

The Abstract Expressionist painting movement of the 1950's was all about commitment. A painting was a visual record of the artist's intent and commitment to the strokes made on canvas. Once the paint was applied, there was no going back. The unforgiving nature of paint requires a serious level of steadfastness by the artist when making the myriad of decisions that constitute an image. Each stroke has meaning and carries an emotional commitment.

This commitment of effort on canvas goes back to the advent of oil painting itself. The haphazardly flung paint splatters of Jackson Pollack and the deliberately placed strokes of Jan Vermeer were both carefully considered acts. The wild abandon of Pollack's dripped and splattered paint was a visual translation of his emotional state. Likewise, Vermeer's exact precision of optical modeling via painted tonalities communicated a mood that the artist intended to express. We can learn from this earlier era in the present world of the computer's effortless "undo".

Corel Painter offers the artist many advanced compositional tools. The ability to undo an applied stroke (or a series of strokes) and reconsider its usefulness in a composition is a valuable feature of Painter. Similarly, breaking up a painting onto several layers enables an artist to later edit and recompose these visual elements. However, this type of editing still requires the artist to make artistic judgment. These decisions will ultimately be viewed as one's final commitment to an image.

Earlier artists used sketches and color studies to prepare and organize a painting before committing final strokes to canvas. Painter's layers and multiple undo function enable a similar preliminary visualization with the advantage that the visualizing is done in place. Flattening and saving an image, however, does constitute an act of commitment and this is where the artist virtually states that this image is the final record.

I've written in an earlier column about the undo function and the layers as a kind of safety net that enables the artist to try ideas without fear of commitment. What I'm proposing here is that it can be valuable to work without a safety net (or at least with a minimal one). Removing additional undos and working on a single canvas layer, one is required to work at one's best by individually considering each stroke and compositional addition. Work done in this manner is likely to exhibit greater emotional appeal as a reflection of the artist's commitment.

If you are in a malaise with respect to the current state of your art, consider putting your best stroke forward by reducing the size of your Painter safety net. A little bit of danger can add a great deal of vitality to your artistic decision-making.

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, he has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Fine Art and is a practicing artist and photographer. John's Web site is at www.pixlart.com.