If you want to loosen up your paintings, here’ a little piece of advice:

“Swing a bigger brush – you don’t know what fun you are missing.”

So wrote Charles Hawthorne in a little gem of a book that should be on every painter’s shelf, Hawthorne on Painting.

That quote says it all – let down your guard! This is supposed to be fun! Let yourself play! But here’s the thing: Many an artist yearning to be free wrongly rejects their looser work out of hand for its supposed inelegance, inaccuracies, and apparent evidence of insufficient skill. Why?

There’s a little bit of a “grass is greener” thing going on here: What looks to you like a painting done by a masterful artist magically conveying so much in a few dashing strokes, looks when it’s on your own easel like “something a little kid would do.” If you want a pet tiger, you must accept that it really is a wild animal.

On the other hand, it may be a matter of degrees – don’t throw out the brushstrokes with the badness just yet. Maybe you just need to dial back the madness a notch or two. You see a painting by Sargent as loose and causal, but when you look closely, it’s mostly loose but tight where it needs to be. In the portrait below, the wallpaper, the chair, the clothes are all made of broad, airy brush strokes, but the sitter’s face is detailed and firmly in focus. 

Detail of a portrait by John Singer Sargent. You can learn to paint like Sargent in the video Sargent – Techniques of a Master taught by Thomas Jefferson Kitts.

For many artists, the first and most important step to a looser style is a mental one. Our “left brains” like things neat, planned out, done by the rules and colored between the lines. Painting loosely requires risking not being perfect and being willing to let go and to play.

In practical terms, loose painting asks you to distance yourself from the surface of your painting and let the paint be the paint. That means letting go of “getting it right” – to whatever degree you can stand.

Technically, this comes down to trying just three or four things: 

  • Use more paint – put out more paint than you need, cost be damned just this once. Sweep it up onto the side of the brush (instead of the tip)
  • Put it on and leave it on – giving yourself one or at most two strokes per brush-load. Hold the brush sidewise and gently roll is as you scoop up the paint, apply it by holding it nearly parallel to the canvas, feeling the paint leaving the brush with the bristles barely touching the canvas if at all
  • Mix carefully on the palette, not the canvas – if it looks wrong, don’t apply anxious after panicky stroke – stop, scrape it out with the palette knife, go back and mix a better color-value (it’s usually a value issue, not a color one) and put that on and leave it on (don’t fuss with it). Getting the value and the color exactly right (in that order of importance) and putting it on and leaving it on without over blending – this is Sargent’s great secret.
  • Use a smaller canvas and “swing a bigger brush.”

Charles Hawthorne, At the Seaside

A big brush keeps you from getting too fussy too soon. “It is the large spot of color that tells the story,” Hawthorne says. “Make the big tone and make it true…Don’t look up at nature and consider an inch at a time.”

Working small and working with a big brush forces you to simplify, which is something every painter must learn to some extent. In painting, unless you’re a hyperrealist, detail is beside the point; making a strong, readable statement with a unified, coordinated field of expressive shapes and colors is the goal.

I’m with Hawthorne in believing that “painting big” is akin to “seeing big” (aka “seeing like an artist”) and can help you put more of yourself into the work. “The big painter is one who looks and does, the little painter is always tickling with a camel’s hair brush,” Hawthorne says. “My plea is 

for something big and fine and honest.”

SPOTS OF COLOR: Howard Friedland, Virginia Falls Revisited (detail).

It’s entirely possible to paint loosely AND accurately. As shown in the detail from Virginia Falls Revisited above, Artist Howard Friedland, whose method is well in line with Woodbury’s vibrant “spots of color” approach, has a video on painting waterfalls applying his “loose but accurate” approach.

Big brushes help you get there by freeing you from trying to “get it right.” Giving yourself the freedom to throw some paint around is a wonderful way to connect what you’re doing on the canvas not just what you’re seeing (or think you are) but with what you’re feeling, which any painter who’s been at it a while will tell you is what it’s all about.

William A. Schneider’s video a shows how to create a portrait that is loose and “tight when it needs to be.” Download the video here.