Finding Your Way: Jed Dorsey’s Path to Painting
There’s a picture Jed Dorsey (Ep. 27) has on his website. It’s of his wife standing in front of an art store in Whistler, Canada.
Dorsey is a professional artist. It makes sense that he’d be at an art store.
But this is different. Dorsey had his wife, Renae, pose in front of this particular art store because he knew this day was the beginning of something significant. This was the day he discovered the medium that would change his life.
FIRST LOVES
Dorey grew up in an artistic family. Both his mother and father are watercolorists.
Dorsey showed promise with the medium and his family was anticipating he’d take up a life of art...and he did. It just wasn’t watercolor. At 16 he discovered the power of the guitar and music became Dorsey’s passion.
Fast forward to the fateful Whistler trip. The Dorseys went into a gallery and Jed couldn’t believe what he saw. The show was a mix of oil painters and acrylic painters and Jed Dorsey had never really seen work like it. He hadn’t realized art could look like...THIS.
“I absolutely love watercolor...But I don't love painting in watercolor,” says Dorsey.
He returned to the gallery day after day after day. Talking with the gallery owner about these artists and asking her how she thought he could learn to paint like that.
She told him to check out the work of Mike Svob.
THE RIGHT MEDIUM
Christmas of that year Dorsey received an art book from his mother. It was Svob’s book. On the back, in the bio was an email. And Dorsey thought, “Hey why not.”
This connected Dorsey with his first acrylic influence and mentor.
He always loved watercolor but he knew that it wasn’t the right medium for him. He had found his medium, and it was acrylic.
“I absolutely love watercolor...But I don't love painting in watercolor,” says Dorsey. “I love looking at watercolors. They're extremely beautiful for me.”
But watercolor takes planning. You need to save the whites. You need to think ahead in a very particular way. You need to have patience for drying layers.
“My personality is very spontaneous,” says Dorsey.
With acrylic, he liked that you could water them down or work with thick impasto paint. And mostly he loved that you could fit mistakes.
“Acrylics really fit my personality super well,” says Dorsey. “It's just such a forgiving medium.”
THE POWER OF INFLUENCES
Dorsey never went to art school. He built his artistic knowledge first with his artist parents.
When he began his own serious forays into acrylic painting he decided to do it his way. He’d find the instructors whose work he loved and learn from them. This brought him to Svob, John Michael Carter, John Poon, and Michael O’Toole.
“Acrylics really fit my personality super well,” says Dorsey. “It's just such a forgiving medium.”
Dorsey learned you could paint on a colored ground in that first Svob workshop. His process is an iteration of something that started with a lesson from Mike Poon.
Another instructor, O’Toole, set him on the path to finally understanding greys.
“I had all this color,” Dorsey says of his palette at an O’Toole workshop. “ Everything was bright. Everything was colorful. And he [O’Toole] said, You don't know how to use gray.”
O’Toole had him work on greys for the rest of the day. First mixing up a pile of grey from black and white. And then mixing that grey with every color on his palette.
O’Toole told Dorsey, “I want you to see how they all work.”
And he did.
5 STEPS
Dorsey's landscapes emerge in five steps: (1) design, (2) draw, (3) block in, (4) refine and (5) finish.
“It's helpful to think about it in stages because you can evaluate your painting in those stages,” says Dorsey. “At the end of each stage you can think about, Well, how's it looking?”
Dorsey’s process originally came from Poon, but after internalizing the steps, Dorsey realized he needed another, step 5, finish.
“Often I find that if you have been looking at the same thing for a really long time, you stop seeing it for what it is.”
Dorsey recommends to himself and others to take a break between steps four and five. A break could look like a walk. Or it could be to call it a day and go to bed.
Dorsey knows that when you come back to a painting after taking a break, you’ll realize that maybe the painting needs a lot more work. Or maybe you’ll realize it doesn’t need anything at all.
And that’s exactly the point. That break allows you to see what the work actually needs.
The danger of not taking a break is that you begin painting just because you’re unsure what to do next.
“I'm going to end it with kind of the same energy that I started it with.”
-Jed Dorsey
“When you lose the intentional purpose of what you're doing, those brushstrokes become repetitive, and they actually hurt your painting. You're not refining it anymore.”
For Dorsey, who wants loose impressionistic paintings, this can be especially bad for the intention of his work.
“I'm going to end it with kind of the same energy that I started it with.”
STEP BY STEP
“It’s that very first step that’s the hardest to take. Once you take that first step, it’s easier to take the second and third.”
Dorsey knows that painting isn’t always easy. In fact, he fully admits the doubts and questions painting can bring up in a person.
For Dorsey, and the students he teaches, it’s about finding systems that help you through especially those first steps. You don’t have to paint the whole painting. You just have to design a single thumbnail. Easy. (Or easier.)
Then once you have your thumbnail (or thumbnails), next it’s about getting that onto your canvas.
And much like taking the steps through a painting, Dorsey’s career has been the same. He has had to work to find what is right for him. And it's what he encourages all those who follow him to do the same.
“We need to learn as much as we can from other artists. But we also, at some point, realize that we don't fit into anybody's box completely. And we kind of need to build our own box and say, this is where I fit. And this is what works for me.”
Listen to Jed Dorsey’s interview here.
Get articles like this sent straight to your inbox. Sign up for the the newsletter below.