Jove Wang: Emphasizing Instinct and Feeling Softcover Book

Thinks thoroughly about design, mood, color and subject matter before applying paint to canvas. Follow feelings. Keep initial feeling about pose/design in mind throughout painting process.

Step 1a – Using reference photo, preliminary sketch indicating basic shapes, compositional lines and geometric elements 

Step 1b – Develop value pattern, select shapes and join darks [for contrast and to imply distance] Be passionate.

Step 2 – Color sketch establishing warm and cool areas. Add color notes.

Its’s obvious that he emphasizes color variation.

Uses palette knife frequently to help de-emphasize areas (such as distant eye or side of the face, [flowers] away from focal point) Also seems to use it to develop a ghost of an image that he can improve.

Pushes subtle warm/cool differences to “sculpt” the face.

Takes great care to ensure that dark pigments (mixed with Liquin) do not include any white, a key to richness and translucency of his style.

Composition first, then color and value contrast as well paint, line and mass. Finally, subject matter and mood.

In areas away from focal point, he “pulls some of this into that”.

In some areas [scarf and flowers] he lays down thick paint [with palette knife], slightly blends [with brush], reworks adding more [remixed] paint, and reworks again, but never totally obliterating what went before.

Palette arranged with darks on one side and lights on the other – but, pulls warm and cool pigments from opposite sides of his palette and mixes them in the middle.

Often holds brush loosely at the very far end.

Often eliminates harsh brushstrokes [as for the eyes] with a quick flick of the brush with one edge precise and one feathered

Often uses thumb to blend [tone down] unwanted [usually incorrect value] brushstrokes into adjacent value.

Before starting spend time setting up and thinking about model (the feeling [melody] you want to retain). Retain that feeling throughout the painting. If you loose your feeling, go to another area to recapture, then return when you recapture feeling.

“Don’t be so calm when you paint, bring your passion into it”, but understand form and structure without treating mechanically.

For his brushstrokes he is “thinking about power and variety”. Also, evidently, using thick paint to portray form by contrasting thick (coming forward) with thin (pushed back). For variety he uses a multitude of brushstrokes (calligraphy, big, small, tiny, forcefully pushed in/delicate, slow/fast, thick/thin, jagged/sharp/broken/soft) but the basic contrast was between scraped (over all of an area/plane such as the front of a face) vs thick (in those areas coming forward, but not in the scraped area)