Visual Language Magazine Contemporary Fine Art Vol 2 no 10 October 2013

Painter’s Keys
with Robert Genn
Mountain rules
August 30, 2013
Dear Artist,
Robert Genn’s
Studio Book
Trudging around in the Bugaboos, I’m thinking how rules are meant to be broken. Having said that, a few
rules for acrylic and oil painters are well worth following. My only reason for backing up my helicopter and
dumping them off on you is that these rules can save a lot of trouble and make work fresher. Up here in the
scudding clouds and creaking glaciers I’m also realizing they’re not my rules but the rules of the truly great
painters who have trudged in humbling spots like this before.
1. Start with a toned ground. It can be grey, brown, red or whatever, and it can be wet or dry. When you
prime your canvas with a coloured ground, you won’t have to fight the tyranny of white. Leave the fighting
of white to the watercolourists. This way, there will be a significant tone on all parts of your canvas--happy
accidents or paucities will occur, and the ground becomes part of the overall effect.
2. Establish your foreground first. We painters tend to start by painting the part of the landscape that first
knocks our socks off, and it’s not always the foreground. Actually, compelling foregrounds are often the most
difficult part, even though they are vital to a strong composition. Foregrounds determine where farther-back
focal elements may be placed.
Painter’s Keys - Robert Genn
3. Plan ahead to one, two, three, four, five. You don’t want to make the painting just a foreground and a
background. Even though your painting may be two dimensional and flat, it needs to have at least five elements
of interest as it recedes. At the expense of being too simplistic, an example would be foreground rocks,
a lake, a mountain range, a distant mountain range and a sky.
4. Establish at least five large complex shapes. Dynamic, even abstract shapes add magic to the magic. Patches
of snow, ominous spires, dark and light rocks are generously pressed into compositional service. Interlocking
with one another, these shapes tease your viewer’s eyes into seeing your magical experience.
5. Take your brush here and there like a bee in an alpine meadow. In other words, don’t laboriously work on
or try to finish off one particular part. Paint promiscuously. Watch the greater image materialize. You need
that thing over there to tell you what to do about that thing over here.
Like life itself, there’s more to this than meets the eye. You can make up a pile of additional basics and rules
for yourself. These five are a good start. Ours is a game of rugged individualism. But even rugged individualists
have a few rules that make their climb easier.
Best regards, Robert
PS: “Oh the difficulties of mountain art for too little genius.” (J. E. H. MacDonald)
Esoterica: Plein air invites a Zen-like attitude and acceptance of the spiritual flow. Lost in a cloud of our own
making, days pass far too quickly. The more I look at this life, the more it seems a combination of inhaling
the gifts and letting your work tell you what it needs.
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