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How To Make Waves

In a little garden behind the Susan Powell Gallery in Madison, Jeanne Rosier Smith is showing us how to make waves.

In this case, she is painting waves she captured in a still photo she has propped up on a table next to her. She has been working on the painting for a little more than half of an hour when she turns to us and says, “now for the fun part.”

And she starts to work on the foam dancing at the top of the wave.

“Our brains understand sea foam to be white,” she says, scrutinizing the choices available in her box of pastels underneath her canvas, both mounted on a camera tripod. She picks up a pastel stick and turns to us, pointing at a part of the wave in the photo. “And it is white up here. But here it is blue-ish. So accuracy in value is key. This white is different from this white.” She points to another part of the photo. “This white is illuminated by the sky.”

She looks up from the photo and turns her gaze on us.

“You start to notice these differences,” she says. “The world becomes a much more interesting place. Nothing is boring because you are noticing these little things.”

Step One: Have Faith

Painting the foam on top of the waves is the fun part, and it’s the place where some of us might be tempted to start when it comes to painting a wave. But it’s important to lay the groundwork first.

The groundwork for Smith started when she decided to study art in college and then afterwards as well. She then put her trust in people who told her she could not make a living making art and, after getting a Ph.D in English, she taught English at the college level. Then her uncle sent her a present in the mail: a box of pastels. The gift reignited her passion for art.

“I think I just didn’t realize when I was growing up that it was something that people actually got to for a living,” she says. “I just didn’t know you could do this as a job, as a career.”

She now does just that, by selling her paintings and by teaching, and by creating other related income streams. We agree that most artists who make a living with their art likely won’t be the people with the biggest house on the block. But it is possible to make a living and that’s something she tries to model for other aspiring artists.

“I’ve made that a priority,” she says. “When I know of other people in my circle who have daughters, or, you know, anybody who is young, who thinks they might want to go into this as a career, I say, ‘why don’t you send them to me for a week or two because I want them to see what this life looks like.’”

Step Two: Gather The Right Materials

Smith says set ups and materials vary from one artist to another, but she does have some advice for those who might be interested in becoming a pastelist. For today’s demonstration, she uses a Heilman plein air box attached to a camera tripod, with a Heilman easel attachment. She is working on sanded pastel paper, 320 to 400 grit, mounted on an acid-free foam core.

On a table nearby, she has 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, used to transform the pastels into the undercoating on her paintings.

As for the pastels themselves, she favors Terry Ludwigs, but cautions they might be hard for beginners because they are soft. She says Richeson hand-rolled soft pastels are better for those just starting out. She has, in fact, created a “land and sea” set of pastels, available through Richeson for those who are starting out. In addition to the Terry Ludwigs, she also sometimes favors Diane Townsends and Maison de Pastel Henri Roches, but she cautions that the latter, while quite lovely, are also very expensive at about $20 and up, each.

Those who are starting out should consider getting the widest range possible of pastels. And keep the pastels organized. She favors Ikea dinner trays, with a different color in each tray. “Painting in pastels is like playing a piano. You wouldn’t want to have any missing keys. Also, you want all of the keys to be in the right order. You want them organized,” she tells us.

She also uses paint brushes, it doesn’t matter what brand, to soften the strokes, to add fine detail, and sometimes as an eraser. One brush she finds particularly useful for her work is a thin fan brush. She also uses a toothbrush and, again, it doesn’t matter what brand for that.

Another important tool is her arm. “So when I hold a stick, I’m holding it as if my arm is the paintbrush and the stick is the pigment at the end of the brush. So I’m using it like a painting tool.” She says painting for her can feel meditative and that using part of her body as a creative tool adds to that feeling. “It’s a very physical thing,” she says. “Your whole body is engaged in the process while you’re doing it.”

Step Three: Lay A Foundation

Once you’ve gathered your tools, it’s time to lay a foundation.

Starting with the darker colors, and the moving to light, she creates big shapes on the canvas by layering the dry pastel on the canvas and then washing it down with alcohol, using a brush. “As you wash it, you’re dissolving it, and it turns into a paint,” she says.

“In creating a foundation, you are setting yourself up for success, she says...You don’t want to think about the details at this point,” she says. “It can be tempting to add in the details at the beginning, but you’re better off just building that foundation first and then putting stuff on top.”

The combination of the pastels and the alcohol creates a glaze on the paper. “It makes it into a kind of thin paint,” she says, one that helps create the big shapes in the foundation, without entirely filling up the sanded tooth of the paper. If you created these big shapes with the pastels, without using the alcohol, you would run the risk of filling up the tooth of the paper, “and you couldn’t put much on top.”

While creating this foundation for this painting, she says, it’s important to make sure the entire canvas is covered.

Also: Select The Right Values

It’s also important to select the right values or, in other words, to create the foundation with shapes that are the correct value of light or dark.

“It’s really important to get the value right at the beginning,” she says, even more important than getting the color right. “If you have dark colors on there, for example, and then you try to put a lighter color right on top of it and mix them together, it can get cloudy. So it’s important that when you’re layering and mixing colors that they stay color in value to each other.”

“The other thing about value versus color is that we tend to see, even in low light, our brains recognize value before they recognize color. So when you’re looking at a composition, you generally see value before color.”

Once a painting has the right relationship between darkness and lightness, she says, “you can change colors and push them in different directions more easily than you can change values. So if you get the values right, the colors are easier to adjust.”

Step Four: Work From Top To Bottom

Just before the half hour mark, waves begin to emerge from the shapes created earlier. With her pastels, she works from top to bottom filling in more detail. She says little pieces from the pastel stick can crumble off and fall to the bottom, so she fixes that as she moves down the painting. If you go in the other direction, “you might end up getting stuff all over what you’ve finished.”

The top to bottom approach also allows her to move from what is furthest away in the scene, to what is closest. “So typically in a landscape, what’s furthest away is going to be the sky,” she says. “So I start with that and move forward.”

At this point, she is creating the detail in her painting by using mostly horizontal strokes, occasionally stopping to rub at a little spot where she wants a softer edge. But she uses that technique sparingly, “because it crushes the little crystals of the pigment.”

Her goal at this point, is to create a sense of light and movement. “I like the ridge of white on this wave,” she says as she creates it. “It’s kind of softly folding.

Also: Trust Your Eye

After she creates the ridge of white on the wave, she creates green highlights in the body of the wave. “There is green in this main wave. And so I know there is green in the waves behind it. So I’m putting a few strokes of green in the back to bring unity to it. They are all part of the same body of water,” she says, adding that she’s moving quickly at this point, because she wants to complete a version of this painting in the hour we have together. “If I had more than one hour, I would spend more time there.”

As she looks from the picture to the painting, she says it’s more important to trust your eye than to copy colors. She says students often struggle to match colors exactly. But even photos can fail to capture colors exactly. “So you have to release yourself from feeling like you have to copy exactly what is in the photo. What’s more important is that you’re getting across the way you feel about it. And the way you remember it.”

Color can be expressive and somewhat subjective, she says. “It’s not necessarily going to the same for each person, you can experience it differently. So it’s okay to take a bit of artistic license with your color, as long as you’re within the realm of reality.”

She pauses, then adds that, depending on the kind of painting you are working on and the effect you are going for, “you don’t even have to be within the realm of reality” if you so choose.

Step Five: Take Some Risks

Smith starts to create the sea foam on the top of the wave. “You get bounced color as well as reflections of white,” she says. “Now I’m putting in some lights for contrast, one with peach. Here is one with yellow at the top. And at the bottom I’m seeing some pink. And, here, I’m going with lavender. There are also some nice blue shades in the foam up front.”

She takes a minute or so to create the different shades of white. “Now I’m working at the dancing line,” she says.

She steps back and evaluates her work so far. As we sit there, the sky starts to darken and clouds roll in. No one seems to notice. A few rain drops start to fall. No one moves.

As she starts to finish the work she is doing today, she holds up a toothbrush. She dips it in the container of alcohol on the table, taps it so it is not dripping wet, and then scrubs one of soft white pastels like she is scrubbing a tooth. “What this does is liquifies the pastel until it becomes a paint and you can use the toothbrush to release little droplets by running your finger along the brush. Your just flick it, and it flicks all over.”

She says adding detail to the foam in this way enlivens the painting, but that it also means taking a risk. “If it seems uncontrolled, it’s because it is kind of uncontrolled. So it’s a risk putting that on the painting. You don’t know exactly where things are going to fly,” she says.

While risky, she says, the technique feels like a good fit for the part of the wave that is starting to break. “Waves are created when water moves. It’s a moving thing. And in order to paint something that is moving, you need something uncontrolled. So you’ve got to get a little loose, you really do have to take a risk that it might not turn out the way you want it. And sometimes that happens.”

And when it does?

“I brush it off,” she says. “And try again.”

Does She Ever Get Tired of Waves?

Smith has been painting seascapes for about 15 years and in that time, she estimates, she’s painted hundreds of waves, maybe even more than a thousand. She is sometimes asked if she ever gets tired of waves and painting the ocean.

“No. Because I feel like I’m learning more all the time. There are nuances that are different each time that deepens my understanding. And every time you have changes in the light, and changes in the tide, and during different parts of the day, it’s all new,” she says. “It’s a very, very complex subject and a big challenge.”

She says waves can feel like different moods. “No matter how I’m feeling I can find a wave that’s applicable,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’m ever going to get tired of it. And I’m just kind of thankful that there are a lot of collectors who really resonate with wave. I’m just lucky that I love to paint something that people seem to want to put on their walls.”

The information in this story was gathered at the artist’s demonstration at Susan Powell Fine Art gallery on July 16, 2022, and afterwards in a phone interview.