ART: In Search of Painting Instruction

Last week I networked a Facebook group recommended to me by a former teacher.  She had taught a complicated color theory program that seemed to promise limitless sources of luminosity.  I had become obsessed with the exercises, enjoying the discipline and spectacle of mixing color.  What endless pleasure I get from seeing the magic of color changes.  

That group was the Students of Henry Hensche, who was a Provincetown teacher espousing Charles Hawthorne, an influential teacher also, with roots in American Realism and Tonalism.

I wish I liked Hensche's Impressionist-derived paintings.  It's even harder to like much of his students' work.  It's very high key, strident, and plodding genre landscapes. Some of the colorists remind me of Pierre Bonnard's vivid palette, though Monet's 4 Poplars seems to be the main inspiration - its orange and blue color harmony is endlessly used by HH students to give a kind of unhealthy high key glow to their work, as if it had gotten an airbrush suntan treatment.    

What seemed important was HH's emphasis on plein air discipline and perceptual training, observing color and nuance and translating it from a visual perception to the canvas.

One of the individuals recommended the Perceptual Painters Group, a contemporary realist group making very lovely work.  They send a newsletter which I enjoy seeing very much.  So good to know all these painters in the heritage of American Luminist Realism exist.