A few years ago, having painted a few pictures, I wanted to learn to paint with oils. I decided I didn't want to attend classes in an academy, partly because of embarrassment, I suppose, and partly because I doubted I could find an academy teaching the things I wanted to learn. So I started to read books on oil painting and the result was disappointing: after reading quite a few I still didn't know what to do with a blank canvas. In addition, I didn't like the pictures presented in those books as examples.

But I had the luck to acquire (by Internet, of course!) "Painting the Impressionist Landscape", a book by the painter Lois Griffel. This book was completely different from those I had read before: the paintings of this painter were phantastic and from it I learned how to paint pictures. Pictures that I really like.

Lois Griffel defines her book as a combination of a theoretical part, where the author stresses the influence of Hawthorne, and a practical part, in which she explains its own teaching method. The result is a very useful book for the beginner, you can trust me, and probably also for expert painters wanting to improve their pictures.

This artist sees his work as trying to bring to the canvas the light, the atmosphere of the landscape. Thus, said Lois Griffe, "painting is nothing more than learning to see the color and light in nature". If light is the motif, details become irrelevant, and we must focus our attention on the broad masses of light and color. On the other hand, as did the Impressionists, we should use pure colors and quality paints, avoiding mixtures that reduce unnecessarily the brightness of the work. Under the artistic philosophy explained by this painter, virtually any subject is beautiful, because we don't paint the object or person that appears on the picture, but its light.

Lois Griffel, The Moors Bright

In order to translate the light of a landscape on a canvas, said Lois, we must go beyond the "local color" of the object, that is the color we would say an object is, if asked, because that color is unable to convey the effect of light on the object. There is an additional reason for not doing so: our perception of a color depends on the colors around it, so before choosing a color we must analyse the painting as a whole. According to Lois "the first step when translating light to pigment is understanding that color can't be painted as we believe we see it".

Winter Shadows, Lois Griffel

Once the philosophy that would guide our steps is set, and after giving us some tips on the material, the book explores the learning method. This method is based on five stages that are applied to increasingly complex motifs: a) a few pieces of wood painted in flat colors, b) still-lifes with rounded objects, c) portraits and d) landscapes. The only ones that are not explicitly covered in the book are portraits.

For those motifs, Lois Griffel explains in full detail every decision that she takes while covering the following five stages:

    1. Establish a color for the sunny "masses".
    2. Establish a color for the shadow "masses".
    3. Refine the color of the sunny "masses".
    4. Refine the color of the shadow "masses".
    5. Final notes

In the Amazon online bookstore we can see the back cover of the book, that shows us the look of the painting at the end of each of the five stages for "blocks of color on a sunny day". The final result is really nice. The book also develops with great detail the process of painting a set of blocks on a cloudy day, a still life composed of bottles and jars of colors, and three landscapes. In all of these examples you are learning how to apply the ideas of the theoretical part in the realization of the painting.

The most valuable aspect of this book is that explanations are so detailed that the reader can get into the mind of the author and follow the decision-making process used to develop the painting, thus the reader learns to paint: he knows what stages or steps he must cover and he knows how to make the decisions on the colors to be used in each one.

After applying the philosophy of this book in 3 or 4 paintings (one of them a set of colored wood blocks) I decided to paint a portrait. Putting aside the issue of resemblance, I was really satisfied with the result because I could paint with "impressionist" style, which was my wish, and I think it reflects fairly well the light of the scene. This is the portrait (please note that this picture is mine, not Griffel's):

Retrato, Gustavo 2007

Finally, I just want to comment that "Painting the Impressionist Landscape" is very well illustrated with works by Lois Griffel and other painters; an additional attraction of this book, which can be purchased at a very reasonable price at Amazon.