Gari Melchers

by

Armand Cabrera

The Artist known as Gari Melchers was born Julius Garibaldi Melchers. He was named after an Italian patriot Giuseppi Garibaldi. Gari was born in 1860 in Detroit, Michigan. His father was Julius Melchers a sculptor, and he nurtured Gari’s interest in art.

At seventeen, Gari went to Dusseldorf to study painting at the Royal Prussian Academy of Art in Germany with Peter Johann Theodor Janssen and Eduard von Gebhardt. His studies focused on academic figure painting.

Following his study in Germany, Gari enrolled at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris in 1881, studying under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. In Paris, Gari adopted the style and motifs of the French Naturalist painters, specifically Jules Bastien-Lepage Lepage. His focus now was an unromantic view of contemporary peasant life.

In 1884, Gari and American painter George Hitchcock travelled to Holland. The artists founded a studio and an art colony and painted scenes of Dutch peasants. Here Gari painted The Sermon, 1886 It received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon that year and a gold medal in Munich at the International Salon there in 1888

At the 1888 Salon in Paris, Melchers received a third class medal for The Pilots, securing his reputation as a chronicler of Dutch peasant life.

In 1889, Gari exhibited four paintings at the Salon in Paris. They were The Sermon, Pilots, Communion and Shepherdess he and John Singer Sargent became the first two American painters to be distinguished with a Grand Prize at the Paris Universal Exposition.

Back in the United States Gari painted murals for 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and Two Murals for the new Library of Congress in 1896 Peace and War. He also painted many portraits the upper echelons of American Society.

After 1900 Gari’s painting adopted the brighter palette and looser brushwork of the impressionist aesthetic. In 1909 he became professor of Art at the Grand Ducal Saxony School of Art in Weimar Germany until the outbreak of the first World War.

In 1915 Gari returned to the United States eventually buying Belmont, an eighteenth century estate in Falmouth, Virginia, near Fredericksburg. He was elected an academician of the National Academy of Design, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as president of the New Society of Artists from 1920-1928. Gari was also named to the Virginia Art Commission, chaired the Smithsonian Commission to Establish what would become Smithsonian American Art Museum and was a trustee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Gari Melchers died in 1932. In 1942, the artist's widow, Corinne Melchers, deeded the property and its collections to the Commonwealth of Virginia as a memorial to her husband.

Bibliography

Gari Melchers: A Retrospective Exhibition
Diane Lesko
St Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts 1991

Gari Melchers, His Works in the Belmont Collection
B Joseph G. Dreiss
University Press of Virginia. 1984

Paris 1889; American Artists at the Universal Exposition
Annette Blaugrund
Harry Abrams and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 1989

Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse
Gabriel P. Weisberg
Harry Abrams 1992

Gari Melchers Home and Studio

Firnew Farm Demo

by
Armand Cabrera

I had the pleasure of doing a demo for the art group at Firnew Farm Thursday afternoon. Trish Crowe was very gracious letting me come out to their beautiful property and paint, and I think we had about 40 people or more show up.

I chose a 24x36 canvas and the painting time for this demo was 3 hours.

The scene is the corn crib between the main house and Trish’s studio. Because the angle of the sun and its relationship to the scene I had fairly consistent light over the time I was painting.

I decided the placement and size of the elements for the painting. One of my decisions is to leave out the main house on the left since it would be cut in half on the canvas and be a distraction.

I quickly draw my scene and establish my shadow pattern. I am working fast because of the size of the canvas and my unfamiliarity of the place. I would normally paint a small sketch first to get a feel for the lighting shifts during the day before tackling something this size but I didn’t have time for that here.

After the drawing I block in everything with a middle shadow tone. I arrive at this tone by squinting to get just the big shapes of color and value.

I proceed to finish the painting in the time I have left, adjusting values and adding the lights and information to the initial masses.

 

 

The Corn Crib 24 x36, oil on canvas. Although this demo is looser than I usually paint I have captured the light and essence of the scene. I can now use this as a basis for a studio version knowing the colors and values will be accurate something a photo could never give me.

Painting From Photos Part2: Copying and Copyrights

by
Armand Cabrera

In the second part of my discussion on the use of photos for the basis of your paintings I want to talk about copying other people’s photos and copyright in general. Let me make a distinction here so we have a basis for debate or agreement. I think using photo reference or copying paintings while you are learning your craft is fine as long as you never pass the work off as your own or try to sell them. There is no violation of copyright when it is personal use.


When you copy a work from another person you must sign it and add the phrase after (name of Artist being copied).

Using other people’s photos or art as the basis for your own and then selling it is where I have a problem and so does the United States Government. The law is very clear on this; it states

The U.S. Copyright statute, Title 17 of the United States Code, protects original works of authorship which includes original artworks. Section 106 of the Copyright Act reserves to the author, or creator, of a work, the exclusive right to reproduce the work in copies as well as to prepare derivative works. The definition of copy in the Copyright Act includes any "material objects... from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated...".17 U.S.C. Section 101.The definition of derivative work includes "a work based on one or more preexisting works."

Copying another artist's work either as a copy or a derivative work under the Copyright Act, is stealing. The right to either copy or produce derivative works from an original artwork is solely and exclusively owned by the original creator of the artwork. This means you have no right to take someone else’s work either as a direct copy or as a derivative work and sell it, ever. There is no percent rule, there is no different media rule and it doesn’t matter if someone else you know does it. It is illegal.

I know wildlife photographers who now make a substantial portion of their income selling their photos to artists and suing artists for stealing their work off the net. If you want to paint wildlife you should be able to afford to go where the animals are and gather your own reference or pay for it.

Artist Jeff Koons was sued for his work ‘String of Puppies’ by photographer Art Rogers; Rogers claimed copyright violation of his photo ‘Puppies’. Rogers won.

The so called artist Shepard Fairey, is in a lawsuit right now over his use of an AP photo of Obama which Fairey made into a poster without permission.

Harlan Ellison the great American writer sued James Cameron on the Terminator movie for stealing from his teleplays for the Outer Limits television show from the sixties ‘Demon with a Glass Hand’ and ‘Soldier’. Harlan won.

A.E Van Vogt sued Ridley Scott and Fox for stealing his story of an alien, Ixtl from Voyage of the Space Beagle and making it into the movie Alien. A.E. Van Vogt settled out of court with Fox for an undisclosed sum.

It didn’t matter that the movies or the photo were a different media. It was a clear violation. This also applies to photos and sculpture being used as the basis for paintings by artists who were not the creator of the original work. If you want to paint, be honest about it and paint things you have actually experienced, take your own photos and do your own paintings; what could be more satisfying than that?

Painting with Photos

by
Armand Cabrera


I’m a big proponent of working from life or memory. There are so many benefits from working from nature that it would be hard for me to list all of them and how they affect your painting. Having said that there are times when working with photos can be helpful.

Because of the lens, the background appears larger than it really is

Photos are great for capturing fleeting effects, movement or details and when used as a tool to help in the completion of a painting, they can save time. Using photo-like processes as an aid in painting has been around for probably close to two hundred years.

one type of lensflare

There are drawbacks though and one of the biggest problems with a reliance on photos is you never really learn to paint or draw. Painting and drawing from life is translating three dimensional objects onto a two dimensional surface. Using a photo is just copying, it doesn’t matter if you change it so it doesn’t look like the photo, you are still just copying two dimensional shapes and making other two dimensional shapes. This will always limit your ability as an artist.

Depth of field blur; the background trees were only a few feet away

Photos are not a substitute for thinking, so if you use photos you need to understand what the problems are with them. Watch out for mechanical photographic effects in the image; focal length exaggeration from zoom lenses which will cause the background to look larger than it really is, lens flare, and depth of field blur; these are caused by the equipment and should never be included in your painting. Shapes can be distorted too; this is usually from being too close or at an extreme angle to the object or objects. Knowing some perspective and how to draw helps correct these problems.

 perspective distortion and extreme value shifts

Watch out for values; the range is small for cameras and so the low or high end gets lopped off and things turn black in the shadows or white out in the lights. It is better to look at the relationships of the lights and darks and use that as your guide instead of copying them exactly.

the camera can't capture the value range in this scene so color is washed out

Digital cameras use interpretive algorithms, so color is not accurate either. They have to take what are essentially continuous tones and colors of nature and chop them up into little squares of color and value, to do this they average things, sometimes this works but most of the time it doesn’t work well enough for painting things only from a photo. It is better to use photos for shapes and details and outdoor sketches and observation for color and value accuracy.

I painted the background for this painting on site marking the color notes of the boat as it passed by; 

 in the studio I painted it again on a new canvas adding the boat using photo reference for details and my outdoor painting as a guide for color

Most of my paintings are done from life or memory. When I do use photos I limit them to the things I know they are good for and use them in conjunction with color sketches and drawings. They are never a substitute for painting from life but in their proper place they can be another effective tool for your art.