Think of it as ELEGANT NOSTALGIA

Becthle’s paintings are BETTER than photographs. Do you object to the clean discipline of the painting? The odd compositions? The sober color palette? Do you object to the family snapshot nature of the oeuvre; How these paintings touch on the mundane reality of our lives as a sort of "We used to go to the beach in that car." kind of way? Here you find the quiet and paltry order of middle-class lives. Penetrating shadows, blank light on bare walls, storebought design. It's not the whole of life, but it's a picture perfect vision of one solid part of America . . . at least what America was before you-know-who showed up.

Pasty People in Paintings

STARING. It's a problem with a lot of painters, including myself. 

When you spend too much time focusing on one area, your eyes get accustomed to that "exposure reading" and you see subtleties ever more nuanced. 

When you walk away, your eyes focus on other things. As your eyes move around the real world they make a more generalized "exposure reading" for the whole area, not settling on any one thing for very long.

The solution is to stop focusing on ONLY the figure in your painting. You have to CONSTANTLY be comparing the figure to its surroundings. Don't stare into the shadows . . . shift your eyes back and forth from shadow to light so you are painting the relationship between the two and not just the one at the expense of the other.

Also, it helps to have someone more knowledgeable to point out what that flesh color might really be. I had a good teacher at the art students league of new york who stopped me at the last session of a 60-hour figure painting. I asked what amounted to the same question you have put forth here. His answer was to ask me if he could paint on my model. He just made a few marks, but they were the right color as I looked from my painting to the model, and all the work I had done on my painting was very pale in comparison. When someone shows you the color they see in the distant hills and you believe them, you begin to look for it everywhere and find it more and more. When they show you the color of flesh in light and you believe them, you begin to look for it everywhere and find it more and more.

a note to artists

Felicia Forte —
I had YOU in mind today
while swiping back and forth
at a canvas on my own easel.  

(So much to learn from you!) 

I said this to Teresa Oaxaca
and I'll say it to you, too,
and I mean it sincerely : 

A lot of things are crossed now 
which makes it especially tricky for artists.

If I had one hope to pray for, it’s this: 
The best of artists will keep working without impediment. 

The trajectory of Fine Art Painting in America today is promising still
and deserves a generous chance at growth and recognition.

We dare not cut such a vital membrane so close to our beating heart.

All best to you,
John D

I'm in the local news again ! ! !

Santa Rosa artist honored by Marine Corps group

Before he became a prolific, decorated painter of landscapes and portraits, John Deckert was a Marine.

The Rincon Valley resident enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves less than a week after he graduated from high school in 1966. After completing boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, he spent six months training with the Marines, but was not activated.

Fifty years later, Deckert had a kind of homecoming when he was commissioned to execute paintings for the combat art program, sponsored by the National Museum of the Marine Corps, in Washington, D.C. That program showcases the work of talented active-duty Marines, reservists and civilian artists, who depict Marines in a variety of roles and missions.

During a two-week “assignment” at the Marine Air Corps Station in Miramar last July, Deckert made a 3- by 4-foot oil-on-linen painting of Maj. Catherine Burns at the helm of a C-130, out for a nighttime aerial refueling.

Burns and Deckert struck up a friendship. She gave him a challenge coin from her previous deployment in Iraq. The coin has her squadron number and nickname on one side, a skull on the other.

“It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Deckert, 72, who has since written Burns to assure her the coin has “brought me good mojo.”

That could explain, in part, some good news that recently came Deckert’s way. His paintings earned him this year’s award for “combat art,” bestowed annually by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. That group recognizes 19 winners in a variety of fields, including reporting, still photography and poetry, for “using their extraordinary talents to tell a piece of the Marine Corps story,” said Maj. Gen. James Kessler, president of the foundation.

Deckert is in training for the awards dinner, which was scheduled for late May but has been pushed back to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s swimming 2 miles most days in his backyard pool. Turns out Gen. James Mattis will also be getting an award for his recent book, “Call Sign Chaos.”

“I don’t want to stand on the same stage as General Mattis and look like some flabbergasted civilian,” he said. “Out of respect for him I want to be in good shape.”

Deckert explained on his website he is “drawn to intimate scenes and people” and “the slight gesture of unguarded moments, the revelation of vulnerable humanity.”

In addition to his time at Miramar, he was embedded for several weeks at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton north of San Diego and the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, in the Mojave Desert. Marines had been told what he was doing, and quickly adjusted to his presence. His combat paintings were based on scenes and subjects he would photograph on his iPhone.

After taking those pictures, recalled Alec Shumate, a sketch artist who worked alongside Deckert at Miramar, “John would go back back to his study to make these massive, beautiful oil paintings.”

While Deckert’s paintings aren’t minimalist, Shumate said, “he’s a master of knowing when to stop, which in art is a very big deal. A lot of people will paint a painting to death, go overboard with it. John’s work has a very energetic, lifelike quality, and part of that is, he knows enough to quit while he’s ahead.”

In Twentynine Palms, Deckert worked alongside illustrator Victor Juhasz, well known for his cover art for Rolling Stone, among other projects. Juhasz described Deckert’s work as “colorful and coloristic.” Much of the story of his paintings, he said, “comes out in his very careful planning of where he drops the colors, to direct the attention of the viewers.”

He admired Deckert’s knack for combining “realistic” illustration with “very abstract, West Coast approaches to color and composition” that reminded Juhasz of another ex-Marine, the artist Richard Diebenkorn.

Both Shumate and Juhasz expressed wonder at Deckert’s prolific output. “I don’t think he sleeps,” said Juhasz, “which is how he can produce so much quality work.”

Deckert’s energy level on Marine bases belied his septuagenarian status. He is never more animated than when describing the moments he spent essentially hanging off the tail ramp of a C-130 at 10,000 feet while snapping pictures of an aerial refueling.

“It was definitely cool, to see his energy,” said Shumate, 26, who was whooping and laughing along with Deckert on that tail ramp. Both were passengers, also, on an MV-22 Osprey, weaving and banking through canyon country in Arizona.

“I was the one getting airsick,” Shumate said. “John had his camera out, taking pictures, happy as could be.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@ pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/santa-rosa-artist-honored-by-marine-corps-group/

Local Press #1 from 2018

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8470436-181/chris-smith-this-fire-survivor

CHRIS SMITH

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT June 25, 2018

Hank Schreeder, Santa Rosa’s chief of police, was running from one thing to another and was quite surprised when, about a week into the firestorm crisis, a fellow asked to snap his photograph as he was in his car and headed to the county Emergency Operations Center. Schreeder had forgotten that moment when, last week, the nicest thing happened. The man who’d taken his photo, John Deckert, presented him a strikingly true oil-painting portrait of himself. Clearly touched, the chief said, “It’s a picture of me, but ultimately it represents all of the work that was done” during and after the fires. Deckert painted portraits, also from photographs, of Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano, Santa Rosa Fire Chief Tony Gossner and Ken Pimlott, the director of Cal Fire. “It was something from the heart he wanted to do for all of us,” Gossner said.

Deckert is an ex-Long Island volunteer firefighter and Marine Corps reservist who came to Santa Rosa five years ago with his wife, Anne. The fall fires chased them from their home in Rincon Valley but didn’t burn it. As evacuees, they were treated well. “We were deeply grateful and I needed an outlet for that gratitude,” John Deckert said. He looked to his art.

He painted portraits of children to replace ones lost to the fires. He came upon a woman mourning the death of a pet parrot, and he borrowed a photo of the bird and created an oil portrait of it. While at an evacuation center, Deckert gave parents the pen- and ink-wash portraits he’d made of their children. He presented the commander of the local National Guard battalion a watercolor of soldiers he’d met as they guarded neighborhoods. Says the artist, “Everyone that we encountered during the fires was helpful, generous and genuinely kind. I simply wanted to show them how deeply they were appreciated.” Some recipients of his art-as-gratitude eagerly await walls to hang it on.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/chris-smith-this-fire-survivor-expresses-his-gratitude-with-paint-brushes/

It looks just like a photograph

A fellow painter complained that someone told him his paintings look just like a photograph.
Here was my reply.

Go a little easy on your audience. They don't know the vocabulary and they aren't educated about the arts. They mean to give you a compliment, that's all. What they mean is that your painting has some of the pleasing features that they can recognize in a photograph . . . good drawing . . . nice composition . . . color harmonies . . . values well done. Ignore them or educate them instead of insulting them. It's IMPORTANT. They are the audience for ALL PAINTERS, and a snarky attitude will spoil them against all artists and you know we already have a bad reputation for being rude and insensitive egotists. So, just go easy on them. Be kind.

Then came a comment about people who comment on the frame instead of the painting.
I said, “educate your audience. don't make fun of them. they don't know what to say but they do want to throw some attention your way. help them out.”

MarinScapes 2020 – The Grand Finale Goes Virtual Tomorrow!

Join us for the online version of the final year of MarinScapes! Together, we will celebrate 32 years of Art That Changes Lives – and Buckelew Programs’ 50th Anniversary! 

Though we cannot gather together these days as we planned, we can still celebrate community and art, and raise critical funds for the support of essential mental health, suicide prevention, recovery and homeless services that our community now needs more than ever! 

Attend the LIVE event on May 28th- It's Free. Preview Art Here  - Click Here to Register - registration is required to purchase art at the show.

self taught artist- back in the news

 Let's see . . . If I wanted to be a writer, I could take a Famous Writer's Course. And learn what they tell me about my own writing. 
OR
I could read a lot of books that I admire to learn ON MY OWN how a story is constructed and projected to the viewer. This assumes I can figure out on my own how to type on the computer, typewriter or ballpoint pen.  

In a similar way, if I want to be a painter I could spend a lot of time looking at paintings I admire. This assumes I can figure out on my own which end of a brush to use and where to buy a canvas. Let's say I buy a color wheel and buy the "Basic Color Set" will you say I was taught by the manufacturers or did I learn it on my own?

What if I can see the colors in a scene and try to paint them as I see them? Am I taught by someone coming up to admire what I have done as I make a notation that, "People like that part; I'm going to do it again in the next painting. and they don't like this other part, so I'm going to try something else next time." Is that self teaching or has someone given us guidance?

John Colle Rogers Shot Box

I’m a painter of the space with life described on rectangles of canvas. So, what do I know? But my visit to John Colle Rogers is an interesting story; more interesting than rectangles of canvas. Because what John does with a rectangle is another thing entirely -and it’s a wonder.

The room is inhabited by sculpture stands mounted with gun parts in mismatched pairings welded and aimed or broken in knots and twists. They are odd. They are animated. They are instruments of strange music.

He also made a number of rust and steel, shot-at, thin-walled cubes. Three inches on each side. He does this work in an Oakland Fabrication Studio. They present as a step parade of small, dark boxes along a wide wall of the gallery.

Because small pieces always encourage viewers to come close, I went right up. Close enough so the cube frames the inverted blister forms that converge at an opening to the interior. Each unique wound drawn by the brutal elegance of a bullet.  It is a simple narrative of powerful force applied to metal objects. The event: triggered at close range. The target: cold steel and geometry. It yields an exquisite violation of form.

Dark thoughts took me away from a well-lighted gallery; away from a slurry of conversations I didn’t quite hear; the people I don’t know. What would this modern-day spear do to human flesh? Mine is twice pierced with a wide flat sheen between the eyes. All innocence and a blunt protuberance on the opposite face. 

I think there should be a memorial wall for children harmed by guns. Imagine a box appearing at the moment of gunfire to catch a bullet and save a child. The bullet remains and in its enclosing darkness rattles like a toy. With this violent birth it goes quiet and leaves to build a wall of terrible markers; dark, silent, and dignified at last. 

This is fertile soil already tilled. It is a fantasy. Unrealistic. Impossible. A wish.

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Jim McVicker's studio in Eureka, California

It has happened to me before.

I'll bet that if I showed up at Jim’s house, I'd be disappointed . . . hear me out . . . I'd look around and think, "this is all just ordinary furniture and plants in ordinary light! Where is all the beauty I see in his paintings?" LOL

But it's like he swept up all the dust of beauty from the objects in his life and poured it so sweetly onto canvas -such that the ordinary world we see and walk around in is functional, interesting and lacks imagination . . . but our imaginations turn to focus like a lens on those rectangles we call the art of Jim McVickers. https://www.jimmcvickerpaints.com

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Win-Win Customer Service

It’s a Win-Win
Ready to start new work on the new panel, I quite happily unwrapped a 9X12 inch glue-sized, oil-primed linen panel by Masterpiece. and discovered a flaw beneath the label.
After some interesting back and forth over email, it turns out my customer service rep was the president of the company who offered to let me keep this panel and gift me two new. Nice! Hand-delivered at that! -seems he was on his way up to my area and offered to hand them over in person. What a turn of events! We could not work out the logistics of the hand-delivery so we settled back into shipping as usual.
This episode is a great marker for how a turn of events can go from sad to happy with a little trust and a few generous words. Thank you Mr. Sooklaris.

Some say there are too many self-proclaimed "Master Painters"

Yet I see painters coming along with ambitious vision and I wish them well. I want them to succeed. We need teachers who can transmit the essential knowledge of painting. Fundamentals as well as developed research. Teachers who can offer that curriculum would be “Master Painters”
The Fine Art of Painting is something else.

Frank Brangwyn "Art? It's just a job"

 I know a lot of painters who are tireless at the craft of painting, hard at it in the studio. The biggest problem I see is the tendency to become pulled off in other directions by distractions, attractions, and the necessities of modern life. It feels like a shrinking audience too, concentrating a reward cycle in fewer hands. But, the best today are hard at it and the rest keep up as well as they can. Interesting note, there is a large, determined, and ambitious crop of women painters rising up with men pressing forth their story on the canvas.
Ha, ha. So, he was an actor playing the painter. Well, I was happy to suspend judgement and believe long enough to hear the voice of Brangwyn come through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGnlJ1fyFQ&fbclid=IwAR1QAc76AVb_Irxc-Gru-Mrh8O2sqJdwBmeNZMtrEY-PxcYW2KcJoLTEiok

in the news

My painting - Sally’s Kitchen, middle left, from the Treasures of the Bay Area exhibition

My painting - Sally’s Kitchen, middle left, from the Treasures of the Bay Area exhibition