Letting the Subject Lead
The focal point dictates the compositions in Nathan Fowkes’ artwork
Welcome to my studio! I live on the farthest Northeast reach of Los Angeles where the city ends, and the neighborhood rolls up into the local canyons. It’s the peaceful life that I’ve always hoped for and finally acquired in recent years after working in house at Dreamworks Animation for many years. My primary work is as an animation artist, but I keep up the traditional painting as much as possible, so the studio is equipped with a digital painting setup on one side and a traditional painting setup on the other. I love both mediums and feel that working in each consistently improves my abilities in the other. My traditional painting setup includes oils and acrylics, but I’ve primarily settled on watercolors and gouache as a favorite medium. My movie painting career began in the early ’90s before digital painting was a thing. We painted everything in acrylics, and I’ve loved the medium ever since, but when I tried to take them outdoors to paint landscapes, I had to fight them permanently drying on my palette and in my brushes. I painted with oils throughout art school and still really love them but struggle with their portability outdoors, and harsh solvents in the studio. Watercolors are immensely portable and unlike acrylics, re-wet quickly and beautifully for on the go painting. I include white gouache with my palette to give me the opacity I sometimes need. So watercolor and gouache became my go to medium for painting outdoors and has now come back into the studio as my primary medium here as well. I prefer painting plein air, on location, but also shoot photo reference so that I can work back in the studio. Whether painting indoors or out, to me, the most important aspect of painting is finding a clear, simple statement. Pretty much everyone has looked at a majestic landscape and been emotionally moved by it, and it’s a normal human reaction to want to hold onto it and make it last forever. We can break out a camera and take a pretty good picture, but the camera doesn’t feel anything, it isn’t selective. We as the artist will always have the potential to be better than the camera, because we can develop the ability to bring purpose and emotion to our paintings.
And my own belief is that the moment you can visually convey emotion to your audience, you are officially an artist. This is the essence of finding the powerful, simple statement in our work. So allow me to make a suggestion. Always stop to think about what it was that made you and want to paint a particular location. Identify that quality and emphasize it in your painting, and your work will be much more likely to become an emotional piece of art instead of a jumble of objects. You’re the artist, you’re the poet, you can have profound emotional experiences, and you must develop the technical ability to communicate those emotions visually. And I believe there’s even further reason to fight for a simple statement in our work, we seem to have a natural tendency to do the opposite. People most strongly notice details and contrasts, then we sit down and paint the scene as a bunch of individual pieces of contrast, and the painting predictably turns into a patchwork of disaster. We emphasized the individual parts without the simple relationships of how those parts fit together. This, in a nutshell is why landscape painting is so very difficult for everyone! We have a natural inclination to approach it in a way that does not work. Let me repeat that, the natural way we tend to look at a landscape is a near guarantee of failure. Personally, I’ve had to fight hard throughout my career to maintain a focus so that every single brushstroke serves my stated purpose for the image. It’s just so easy to drift off course! A word about technique. I’ve found that certain kinds of materials and techniques lend themselves to different subjects; experimenting with them has been incredibly useful because the