Expressionist Portrait Painting: Finishing

Video Transcript

"Now, finish has been a different concept in different times in our history. In Renaissance times, and into the nineteenth century there was a progressive development of...of building up a painting very slowly...and through layers. You'd lay down a ground, you'd do a sketch on it, and slowly tighten with...with successive layers of glazing, and so your painting was at a point that was considered academically finished. And, uh...in some ways you knew the painting was finished when the last correct amount of paint was applied in the last correct layer, and that was it. And it cast a sort of even light over the whole painting. Um....impressionism really broke with that. Painters would paint out of tubes, not in the studio, but in the out-of-doors. And, they'd paint directly on the canvass without sketching, and they'd use local color immediately, and they'd use the color they saw optically immediately. And their paintings were considered very underdeveloped by academic standards, but now they're pretty much the standard for finished. Looking at this painting, I just see that I want it to have that presence, and when it has that presence, that's when it's finished for me."