Karl Zipser » painting feature

Interview with Walter Bartman

Karl Zipser — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:12:10 +0000

Walter Bartman was my art teacher in high school in 1984-86 in Bethesda, Maryland. Students of “Mr. Bartman” were ten times more likely to become Presidential Scholars in Visual Arts than students in other art classes in the United States. Although he retired from high school teaching in 2001, Walter Bartman continues to teach landscape painting in Maryland and in workshops across the U.S. and in Europe.
Artwork in this post is p lein air painting by Walter Bartman [click images to enlarge]. This interview was edited for publication together with Leslie Holt

KARL ZIPSER: Walter Bartman, you give effective training in how to draw and paint, but you also give students the feeling that painting is important, help them find a passionate devotion to art. What are the key ingredients for creating an art community like the one you create among your students in your high school class?
WALTER BARTMAN: Karl, I like to think that all ideas need a catalyst, like a fire needing a spark. As an idea person, I realized I could never see all my ideas to fruition. That is what has made teaching so important to me. I found that I could share my enthusiasm and ideas for discovery with my students. I have always seen myself as someone who puts things into motion. Teaching was the perfect field for me and my temperment, though when I graduated from college, I didn’t value the importance of the profession. That came when I had actually taught and seen my impact.
As an artist, I am striving for a breakthrough in personal awareness. I feel that is what all of the “fields” of creativity are about. That should be their mission, to go beyond what is known. How you get there has many paths. I follow a path that is grounded on “digging the garden,” as Matisse put it. It is the Zen of working. Sharing that with people of similar interest seems so easy. Today, most of my students are adults and they like the younger students have seen what inspiration does at any age.
I have always led my life with six ideas…

You can paint the sky any color you want and it will eventually happen (Any thing we dream can happen because it wouldn’t if we weren’t able to think it).
The color you see is made by the color you just saw (everything is relative).
It is the invisible in art that needs to be found, not the visible (clues are in the visible).
The holy men wrote the books, they didn’t read them (be inspired to express what is in your head).
The universe is inside me (all sensations are internalized).
The mind prevents me from seeing, not my eyes (Getting the mind to see more…gaining a perspective on how you think)…

The most important reason I draw and paint is because I can see my ideas that are in my mind on paper. I came to realize this when I was very young. I could see in my drawings that “my personal ideas come alive”.
I always encouraged my students to build their ideas on their temperament (personal sensitivity). Understanding the perspective each student brings is important, because they share their ideas with others. Like the gardener, the plant needs nourishment at a young age, not pruning to soon. Too much direction is not healthy, I want my students to have an utmost belief in their personal ideas. I helped validate their own discoveries, with that comes personal intellectual growth.

KARL: Walter, your words give me a vivid recollection of the inspiration I felt when I joined your class 22 years ago. In addition to what I gained directly from you in the student/teacher relationship, I also got much support and encouragement from your other students. Do you think this community spirit developed as a side-effect of your method of teaching individual students, or did you also specifically strive to nurture the feeling of community?
WALTER: Karl, Community has always been something I feel has made great movements in the arts, science or math. It was my intention from the very beginning to build a community of young artists as the future generation. I have always felt that human thought is collective. We build ideas on the thoughts of others. If you can bring a group of very creative people together in a sharing environment, they will support each other and challenge each other to go beyond the instructor’s expectations. I was always impressed by the enthusiasm of the students for idea making through the visual art of painting.

KARL: Can you comment on your approach to building this strong community of artists?
WALTER: When I came to Walt Whitman high school, I soon realized that I would build my program around a nucleus of very talented students. That nucleus would pull other students in because of the high standards and enthusiasm of a small group of students. Each year, a new group would follow. They would be identified in the beginning classes and encouraged to challenge the older students. That kept the older ones from being complacent. I was fortunate to have some really fine students. I found that each year produced a strong group of students. Instituting a yearly festival art exhibition at the school gave the students an opportunity to be showcased for their ideas. I feel creative people need to have some opportunity to display who they are.
I always tried to build a community. It wasn’t ever about one student. I find when I teach, I do it to a group, not single students. I also befriended my students. I was there to validate and support each student who gave 100%. If you remember my grading system, students only received A’s & E’s. If they received an E, they could always make up the work. I also found that quantity made quality, so I always required a lot of work.
The work I assigned was based on contemporary movements. I felt my students were a part of that movement and had something to add. It is funny, but looking back on the work in my classes, some of it was very profound for anyone at any age. I guess that is why my program was nationally recognized.

KARL: You have succeeded in building a tremendous environment for your students, a place where art matters. The results are, I think, astonishing.
However, when students left your class, even if they went to a good art school, they might discover that they do not have the same magic feeling about art as they had in your class community. What advice can you offer to your former students, and to those who will never be your students, for building and maintaining a creative environment in which to produce their art?
WALTER: The advice I would give to students is to see themselves as artists. That means they have to have the discipline to make their own work. They must be self motivated. They need to establish purpose and work toward it. They must have an absolute belief in their work and that it does make a difference.
Over the years, I tried to prepare my students for an exciting life full of art. I hoped that their experiences in my classes would prepare them. I realized after talking to a number of students that when they went off to school, many of the programs just didn’t offer that spark they were looking for. After hearing their concerns, on their return from their schools, I counseled them to seek out a community of artists nearby or to form one.
I hoped that their experience of studying with me would be enough to eventually lead them to being productive artists. All I could do was to prepare them. Hopefully, upon leaving my program, they were working as artists and just not students. Artists have to be self-motivated. I tried to instill that in their work ethic.
As their teacher, I know I instilled a guilt complex for not working up to their potential. I guess I had expectations for them. That is something I know is still present in their minds years later. However, if there is one thing I had hoped they carried with them, it would be that art makes for a fulfilling life. It is something they could do anywhere at anytime.

KARL: Will you take questions from readers here?
WALTER: Yes.

29+ comments

[to join the discussion, please go to this post over at Art & Perception]

Blues of the Past

Karl Zipser — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:44:44 +0000

Sometime in the 14th century, Cennino d’Andrea Cennini wrote Il Libro dell’ Arte. The book is a treasure because of its detailed information about a wide range of artistic techniques. For Cennini and his contemporaries, using natural mineral pigments was the best option available to create intense and lightfast blue colors.Mineral azurite yields a handsome blue pigment, somewhat “warm” or inclined slightly towards green. Ultramarine was purified by a labor-intensive process from the lapis lazuli stone, and yielded the most pure blue available. Although the stone itself was semi-precious, the purified pigment was considered a treasure.

These natural blue colors are intense, but not so intense as modern synthetic colors. This meant that painters of past centuries could strive to produce the strongest blues possible, and still arrive at results that were poetic, rather than garish. In contrast, the modern painter, working with colors from a tube, must often fight with the colors, to take away some of their overpowering intensity.

The painting here is an “imaginary portrait” which I painted with oil on panel in 2002. The blues here are underpainted in azurite, and overpainted with natural purified ultramarine, using varying admixtures of white. Differences in the pigment particle size and the degree of purification have an important influence on the colors.

Below are two magnfied views of the painting. In each detail, there is small regions of the warm blue azurite underpainting visible, where the ultramarine (darker blue) does not cover the underpainting completely. Notice the granular quality of the blue pigments, compared to the more uniform mixtures in the skin colors.

(first posted 14 March 2006; update with magnified views, 3 November 2006)

Inspiration from Mr. Bartman, my art teacher in high school

Karl Zipser — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:36:00 +0000

Posted by Karl Zipser

I made this painting in the summer of 1985, when I was sixteen years old. I painted it over the course of several mornings, standing on a dock in Woods Hole, Cape Cod. This is one of my first landscape paintings in oil.

I was able to do work like the above because I was part of a group of motivated students in the art class of Walter Bartman, a high school teacher in Bethesda, Maryland. “Mr. Bartman” inspires his students to believe in art. The picture above I made during the summer vacation, outside of Bartman’s art class. And yet his spirit was there with me on the dock.

Later that summer I made this painting of the Mall in Washington D.C., in Bartman’s summer landscape class. I was most pleased with this picture at the time, and I still think it is pretty good.

Walter Bartman had many outstanding young students during his teaching career at Walt Whitman high school (in a suburb of Washington D.C.) before he retired in 2001. Here is an interview I did with Walter Bartman.

Did you have a teacher who gave you a special inspiration for art?

Critique Me!

Karl Zipser — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 01:14:00 +0000

Posted by Hanneke van Oosterhout

This still life is about 13 cm wide. I painted everything from life. I drew directly on the panel with charcoal, then pencil. Then I made an under painting in acrylic in one day. I made the over painting oil in two days, one day focusing on the berries, the other on the cup. I think this is a good picture. Please tell me what could be done better. Photographers, have you any insights for me?

Pears with personality

Karl Zipser — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 02:00:00 +0000

Now on Follow the Painting.

Pruimen in Kom (prunes in bowl)

Karl Zipser — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:00:00 +0000

Here is an example of a painting by Hanneke van Oosterhout that is good, but still needs something. The painting is well developed for all but the fruit. I think some well-chosen highlights could bring them alive.

Another question has to do with the way the foot of the bowl is reflected in the bowl itself. In the painting it seems as though there is something wrong, but the real bowl looks like this. Should Hanneke leave it as it is, or soften it somehow, departing from reality? [Poll]

Dan Bodner on painting with photographs

Karl Zipser — Thu, 18 May 2006 02:01:00 +0000

“I walked into my new studio and this was the view, these water towers – which are typically New York. I thought, ‘yeah I should do that.’”

In early 2005 Dan Bodner changed the focus of his artwork from the human figure (painted from life or imagination) to cityscape. At the same time he began to use digital photography to study his subjects and his own work.

Bodner often makes photographs under conditions that would be difficult to paint from life, like the night scene above, or snow storms. He is in particular interested in the effects of city lights on the sky. From a large number of photos he selects a sample which he studies by making pencil drawings.

The drawings are not direct copies, but interpretations that combine elements from more than one photo. After he finds the composition, Bodner makes small oil sketches to study color. Then he makes a large painting based on all of these elements. In the end, some paintings are similar to the original photographs, others diverge substantially from the source images.

Photographs are not only Bodner’s subjects, but a way to study his own work. He has found that by making a photograph of a painting, he can see it as though looking for the first time. As Bodner explains, “By making the photographs daily, I can get a distance from the work as I’m painting it.”

Photography is associated with all aspects of Dan Bodner’s cityscape artwork, a connection which he finds appropriate. Bodner explains:

I want to use photography as a source for my work because we cannot separate how we see from the way photography has informed our vision. I think photography allows painting to be what it is today.

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first part of this interview

Painting from Death: Bodner on creating from photographs

Karl Zipser — Mon, 15 May 2006 03:04:00 +0000

To paint from a photograph is inherently different than painting from life. Some artists avoid photos, others use them, perhaps covertly, for practical reasons. But to American artist Dan Bodner, painting from photos is not merely a technique, but a way to focus on his role as an artist. I interviewed Bodner recently at his studio in Amsterdam.

Question: When you work from photographs, do you ever ask yourself, what is the point of making the painting, when the image already exists in the photo?

Bodner: No. A photo is a record of a moment that has passed, a dead moment. I don’t feel that I own the image as a photograph until I paint it as a painting. The photo itself always refers to the past. But a painting of the photo is a creation, which goes on living. The painting defines its own continuing moment in time.

Question: Does painting go beyond the goal of simply making an image?

Bodner: What painting is for me is part of human desire. Every kid smears his food, or shit, and that is really connected to what painting is. A kid makes a mark and has the satisfaction of knowing “I made this and it will stay there.” For an adult I think it is connected to fear of death, which is innate. And it is connected to the desire to procreate. As you get older it gets existential, of course. To take things out of you and put them into the world, there is an absolute satisfaction in that. To do this from a photo emphasizes the act of creation, bringing life to something dead.

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In the next post, more about how Dan Bodner uses photos, his subjects and his methods