Teaching Realism

There are many degrees of realism in art, from almost photographic depictions to very simplified, abstracted, but still recognizable interpretations.

Most of my students know my work before they take my classes, so they expect to be taught how to paint in a more or less realistic style.

However, style cannot be taught, it has to be conquered by years of work.

What I teach is how to get there:

First, an understanding of color and its three properties: Hue, Value and Chroma, and second, how to truely see and observe: How to use what the right brain senses and what our eyes see, to create on the canvas, through a pattern of shapes and colors, the image exactly the way we want it to look.

Knowing or seeing every detail of the subject is not only unnecessary for the painter, but often undesirable. The left, logical side of the brain interferes in such a way that it blocks the right side, which is more creative. What we know (or think we know) gets in the way of real observation and without real observation there is no true realism.

White - is it a Color?

No, it isn´t.

Many years ago, when I studied oil painting with Sebastian Capella, I learned that White and Black are not colors.
Let me explain:
Color has three dimensions, hue, value and croma.
Hue, as in the tone like red, yellow, blue, etc.;
Value, referring to the degree of light or dark on a scale between black and white;
And Croma, as in intensity or purity of the color.

White fits within the first dimension, it does have a name, so it qualifies as a hue, but it does not have any variation in value, nor in croma. White will always be the lightest on the value scale and there is no more than one intensity - white is white.

Any color, added to another one, will change that color´s hue. For example, if you add red to yellow you get orange, blue to yellow makes green, and so on.
White, added to any other color does not change that color´s hue, it will only affect its value and diminish its intensity.

I don´t use pure white when painting a white object, pure white is rarely found in nature, there is always a hint of another hue present. Shadows and reflected colors will show us the white object in a lovely variety of colors! It´s only our brain which reads them as white.