Committed to Knowledge and the Bravery to Experiment: Dean Mitchell Teaches Us How to Work Towards Being a Master Painter
Watercolorist Dean Mitchell (Ep. 30) did not start out as watercolorist Dean Mitchell.
He started out as oil-painter-in-training Dean Mitchell.
Mitchell was in art school and as often is the story, art schools point their students toward the medium of Caravaggio and Rembrandt: Oil.
But one day Mitchell was walking down the hall and ran into a friend. That friend was holding his portfolio and it was filled with watercolor paintings.
“I was so fascinated with this student's work,” says Mitchell, ”that I went to the library and I checked out every book I could possibly check out on watercolor.”
Dean Mitchell watercolorist, got to work.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
In order to learn, Mitchell turned to other artists working in the watercolor medium and studied their work.
“There's nothing like seeing an original, where an artist may have dragged the brush a certain way,” says Mitchell. “Certain parts of it are more dense than other parts that are more translucent. And so you get this nice, interesting push and pull kind of thing depending on what the artist is doing. And you don't always get that in a book.”
Mitchell didn’t just look passively at the work he loved. He studied every inch of it.
“I was constantly dissecting something mentally whether I knew exactly how the artists did it or not. I was looking at a possibility where I could get the same effects.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIMENTATION
When he wasn't analyzing the work of others, Mitchell was painting. At first, he threw his focus into finished paintings that were based in realism. However, he quickly realized that wouldn't get him where he wanted.
There was a watercolor foundation that he didn’t understand and he needed to.
“I found that extremely frustrating, because I didn't understand how much to wet the surface and what the paint would do if I wet it too much...And so I moved away from just trying to make an image into just playing with the paint.”
Mitchell moved back and forth between non objective experimentation and working to create a likeness of something.
“I could look and say oh, I could probably use that effect to get this and so I began to actually analyze what I could do trying to recreate reality through this experimentation.”
Mitchell began to understand the power of these efforts.
“I cannot push that enough,” says Mitchell. “Because through experimentation, you become more daring. You become more intuitive when you experiment a lot.”
Experimentation allowed Mitchell to learn to do just that. And when years later he’d see his workshop students get nervous, he’d remind them that it’s just paint.
“So often a lot of people when they first start using watercolor, they're very extremely careful,” says Mitchell. “If you really want the work to have some emotion and some meat to it, you have to really let it go.”
STUDIO WORK
If you saw Mitchell in his studio, sometimes he is working across dozens and dozens of paintings at a time.
“I am probably working on 40 to 50 things,” he says. “I don’t have the ability to just work on one thing. I tend to jump around a lot.”
He’s not just moving between paintings, he’s moving between media. Watercolor, acrylic and oil. He also moves how he works.
“I never stay at the easel. I’m usually on the floor overtop of it, dropping the paint. Sometimes it’s upright, and then I can’t get the effect I want and I pull it off the easel. I drop it on the floor, throwing water at it. I’m putting paint on and I’m letting it drip from my brush….And that’s why people see that spontaneity.”
DEEP KNOWING
Mitchell’s work reflects his incredibly deep knowledge. He knows his subjects extremely well. He knows his materials extremely well. And every stroke is knowledge.
Even the ones that don’t work as expected.
“Sometimes when I've started something, and I've done something, I know right away in a few strokes, it's not going to work, I got to start over, I got to stop, this isn't gonna work.”
Mitchell grabs another piece of paper and does just that. He starts over.
But the artist doesn’t let this slow him down in the slightest.
“I can use that information... and incorporate it in the other work,” he says. “So that mistaken work becomes like a study.”
That new study goes down on the floor, next to his drawings and experiments and anything else he needs to have on hand to be ready to create the painting in his head.
And this is maybe the most powerful thing to learn from Mitchell as an artist learning to paint:
“I have no problem starting over if something doesn't work,” says Mitchell. “Starting over from those mistakes, it gives you confidence. It just does.”