Painting with Jeff Horn

I really looked forward to attending this mentor paint out with the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association because I  had happened across Jeff painting at Corona Del Mar a couple of years ago during the LPAPA Invitational.  It was nice watching Jeff go through his process. 

I got there a little late because I had to park about a half a mile away.  Because I was carrying my full load, (which weighs about 50 or more pounds) I was fully warmed up and ready to paint by the time I got there.  The challenge for me is to balance my desire to learn with my eagerness to paint.

Here are some of the points Jeff made while doing his demonstration. 

• Starts painting by massing out the darks and then works to the light masses.
• Keep you darks dark and your lights light.
• You never get your darks dark enough if you work a mixture that has white in it into your darks.
• More important than color is value.  Put down you best guess with your color and then mess around with it.  You can mess around with color and not hurt your painting but if you mess your values up you are in trouble.

• Jeff strives to get all of the canvas covered with paint and get the values established first.
• Jeff uses the soup method for mixing colors.  He gets the paint down on the canvas and mixes one color around with others on the canvas.
• He is looking for the big relationships within the painting.
• He said be brave do not be afraid to put the paint down-something he repeated several times during the paint out.
• While looking at the big relationships within the painting he is also looking for the abstract relationships within the composition.

• He quoted Renoir: "I don't paint things I paint the relationships between things."
• He described his technique as just putting down spots of color,
• Mix your paint on the painting.
• Ball park your color relationships in the painting.
• What color is it generally and then go through all of the questions-warmer cooler etc.
• No formula for his approach.

• It's not the color you put down it's the color you put down next to that color.
• Try and paint the relationship.
• Puts down color without judging his effort-too early on the process.
• Keep edges soft to begin with and then decide where you are going to put your hardest edges

• The more you paint the better guesser become.
• The variety of marks and putting down different marks to reflect the rhythm of the painting is what Jeff thinks he excels at.

• If you know what the generalities are then yo know what the exceptions are.
• Always put something in your white.
• Squint to see the general thing and then work to see the specific thing.
• Held brush up with color on it to see if it matched what he wanted to match.

• Put down paint in different ways-he thinks he puts down his paint too horizontally.
• Painting is a series of best guesses.
• In the course of your painting you will add some random elements but never do something absolutely random-see it-refer to theory-or think what if...

• It is a different day and I am a different me and we are all together in this struggle.

I was eager to get my painting started.  As soon as Jeff said we could paint I started painting.  I was too eager and as a result I did not get the drawing part of my painting correct.  If you look at the rock over the arch you can see that it extends too far over the big rock in the water.

 



The overall outcome was not very pleasing.  I had high expectations for the painting.  The subject was one of my favorites and I really wanted to pull off this painting.  The drawing was inaccurate and the overall strength of the painting was not what I had hoped for.  Jeff said I pulled it off but he was the one that first noticed my drawing was off.  I was really happy with the structure of the water in the painting.  The values should have been darker.

24"X 36" soft pastel over a board with acrylic and pumice gel