What Makes a Painting ‘Expressive’?

It’s natural to assume that the subject of your painting (what it’s a painting of) is what affects your audience and gets feeling across. For example, you might expect a vase full of flowers to inspire in viewers the same or similar sense of joy and serenity you felt when you decided to paint it. However, this is a common misassumption about painting.

Painting’s purpose to a large extent comes down to expression of one kind or another. The expressive artist sets out to paint “the truth of” (or at least their truth of) the vase of flowers. This means showing us, the viewers, why we should care about any bunch of flowers at all. No degree of sheer accurate observation and rendering will achieve this. As Matisse said, “Exactitude is not truth.”

“Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement,” says Matisse. “The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share.”

Asking, “What can I do with this subject to make people care about it as much as I do.”

In Pat Fiorello’s watercolor In the Window (above) the subject is a vase of flowers beside a sunny window. But because of her expressive approach, it’s much more than a copy of what was there. It would probably have been impossible (were it even desirable) to create a precise, photorealistic rendering of the objects. Even if someone could, it would look nothing like In the Window – and would be missing everything surprising and delightful about this painting.

Pat Fiorello, Summer in New York, 10 x 8 inches, oil

That’s because Fiorello worked with something like a “vision” of a vase of beautiful flowers drenched with morning light beside a window. She didn’t copy the flowers; she painted how beautiful they looked to her in the light, and to do so she made a multitude of in-the-moment “editorial decisions.” To immediately see this, consider how much more her vase of flowers acts like a fountain of colored light than a gathering of botanical specimens.

Furthermore, she didn’t just simplify, bring out, or downplay certain details, edges, colors and shapes according to some outside formula or “principles of design.” Her choices were expressive.

“The entire arrangement of the picture,” as Matisse would say, “is expressive”: her choice to foreground splashes of white and bright yellow and gold-ochre in both the big central daisy and the sunlit side of the vase; the way the space around the flowers is filled with the play between warm bars of light and cool planes of shadow; how proportionately, the mass of bursting flowers takes up more space than anything else.

There’s something very similar at work in Fiorello’s homage to Claude Monet, Autumn in Giverney. Here again, she is not concerned with accuracy, copying, or “being faithful” to her subject. (Monet’s waterlilies and garden blooms). She uses “the entire arrangement of the picture” to expresses the feeling of seeing them.

Pat Fiorello, Autumn in Giverney, 9 x 12 inches, oil

It comes down to starting with an “artistic vision” (i.e., the “truth” you feel in front of the subject), combined with whatever degree of technical ability you’ve developed in support of aesthetic choices in the moment that will allow your paintings to speak to the viewer. The goal is to express what you feel and think about what you see in the world. It’s that simple and that tantalizing a challenge.

Pat Fiorello will be a part of this year’s Realism Live online conference. She teaches a very specific method for depicting the beauty and essence of flowers with expressive composition, color, and dramatic light and shadow. Learn how to apply vibrant, clean colors and a luminous glow with a loose and fresh attitude (instead of getting hung up with every last detail) in her video, Vibrant Flowers: Paint Your Garden!

Australian Portrait Artist Blends Tradition with the Contemporary

Artist Vicki Sullivan is an award-winning portrait and figurative artist based in Melbourne, Australia who brings old master techniques to bear on contemporary subjects. This year she is an instructor with Realism Live, the fourth annual online conference scheduled for this November.

“As a contemporary classical realist painter, my artistic approach merges the timeless aesthetics of the old masters with a modern sensibility.,” Sullivan says. “My ultimate aim is to evoke within the viewer the same sensations and connection experienced in the presence of living individuals. With every brushstroke, my intention is to engage the viewer on a profound level. I want them to be drawn into the artwork, to immerse themselves in its narrative, and to embark on a journey of their own imagination. Each piece I create is a vessel for storytelling, a visual medium through which I convey emotions, ideas, and themes that resonate universally.”

Realism Live is a three-day online conference live streamed via free software to your preferred Internet-ready device. The conference includes demos, presentations, lectures, break-out sessions, a private Facebook community, and roundtables in which the artists have in depth discussions that give an inside look at their lives and their work.

Participants will have streaming access from home on the Streamline virtual event platform, designed to be compatible with the largest number of devices. For any networking components, the conference will be using Zoom free meeting software. The bandwidth will vary depending on connection speed and many other factors — we would estimate around 5GB of data will get used for the event. The conference is NOT delivered via Facebook or YouTube.