Contemplative Realism: An Interview with Ken Salaz

Hi John,

Today's newsletter is an interview with Ken Salaz.

Ken Salaz is a fine artist and author specializing in landscapes. He graduated from the Cooper Union and then continued his education with Leonid Gervitz of the Repin Academy and Nelson Shanks. He trained for three years at The Water Street Studio with Jacob Collins and spent two summers with him at the Hudson River Fellowship in the Catskill Mountains. He is currently a Senior Fellow and instructor at the Fellowship. His mastery of technique shows a diverse flexibility of expression, allowing him to capture a wide range of light effects.

His solid background in traditional techniques used by the "Old Masters" also allows him the groundwork to create works that have a unique poetic expression. His work is held in numerous prominent collections across the United States. His work and processes have been featured numerous times in notable Magazines and Publications such as "Fine Art Connoisseur" and "Plein Air". Mr. Salaz is seen by many as a new and unique voice emerging from the tonalist tradition, such as George Inness, and breaking into new ground with his own modern voice of Poetic Realism. He published his book "Landscapes in Oil" in 2019.

In addition to being a masterful Artist, Mr. Salaz is a highly accomplished Magician, Mentalist, and Pick-Pocket, entertaining such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon. He currently lives with his wife and sons in the beautiful Hudson River Valley.

We hope you enjoy today's selection,

BoldBrush Studio Team

Contemplative Realism:

An Interview with Ken Salaz

What is it that draws you to landscape?

I was trained as a figurative artist originally; I studied with Jacob Collins at the Water Street Atelier. Although I was trained classically in the figure, I always did landscape on the side and for several summers I did the Hudson River Fellowship, which is six weeks up in the Catskills paining from 7:30 in the morning to 9 at night, which was a great way to get a jumpstart on a career in landscape painting; it was intense but awesome. Part of my childhood was in Arizona - my father is Native American - so I spent a lot of time on the reservation and remember walking through the overwhelming beauty of the desert landscape with my grandmother. I loved those moments and like any good artist, I wanted to find a way to make permanent that which is fleeting. Those experiences, along with my reading of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, were my entryway to landscape painting.

There's a lot that goes into inspiration. I think 'making permanent that which is fleeting' is a very common motivation for artists. What are some of the moments that rivet your attention?

Well, there's the landscape itself, the light and the atmosphere, and the clouds; all of those fleeting things that interact to create a moment of beauty. They create this harmonic radiance. With the landscape there's this demand to remember the way the light was at a specific moment. For a classically-trained painter like myself, I liken myself to a classically-trained actor. If you go to the Globe Theater in London and ask an actor if they can do the third scene from the second act of Henry V, they'll say it. They have it in them, and as painters we have to reach that standard as well, where we can summon how the landscape can be recreated in ourselves. So I have a high standard that I'm shooting for.

But that's what it takes; in a landscape things shift so quickly, a particular light effect might last for only fifteen minutes at most. It demands that kind of training. What do you do to train your memory?

Well, I always tell my students 'Don't chase the sun'. And then there are specific techniques that can help you capture those momentary effects. For one, you can start painting in a middle range of value and chroma, and then when that light effect hits the landscape just right, you can put in those highlights really quickly. That helps you stay in control of your values and not blow them out or ruin the light effect. Another thing I do to train is to never take photographs when I'm out painting. I just don't do it. I'll start a lot out in the field and take it back to the studio to finish from memory. Working from memory and color notes is so helpful for training the memory. When I'm doing plein-air work I'll have my larger 11x14 size canvas, but I'll also have some smaller boards that are already toned sitting next to me. When the light effect strikes, I'll take the 11x14 down, put up the smaller board and do a super fast impressionistic study of the light. Then I'll move back to the bigger canvas. Another light effect might happen a bit later, and I'll pick up the next small board and do another quick study. So now I have beside me two color notes as well as the larger piece that I'm painting more slowly and accurately. And then it's a triangulation between my painting, what nature's doing, and which color study I want to work from. Plus when I get back to the studio, I have several color notes as well as the solid structure of the 11x14, if I want to make a larger painting out of it.

Is this something the Hudson River Painters would have done?

Yes, Cole would travel and do copious amounts of small quick studies, but nothing finished. Then he'd come back home to the Hudson River Valley and set aside the studies for a few months to sort of let it sink into his subconscious. Then he'd do a large finished painting from his color studies and his notes. It's fascinating how he would let it sink in and then recall it. And then Church, his one-and-only student, travelled all over the world painting. Church is an exception in this universe because the guy could do a color study and it would look like a finished painting, he was just a genius. There's a bunch of his color studies at Olana, his home up the river.

On the topic of the Hudson River School, I can see the influence of both the Tonalists and the Hudson River School in your painting style. They are two very distinct styles of painting, and I'm curious to know what in each style attracts you and how you synthesize them?

I think I'm influenced by the Tonalists by default, because I don't try to do any kind of Tonalist work but it just comes out. Back when I was in art school I loved George Inness; I had a book of his complete works and would look at it all the time, so I guess it made a deep impression. But to be more specific, this is an idea I discuss in-depth in my book, Landscapes in Oil, published in 2019. All the decisions on a painting are determined by the vision or the idea of the painting. I'm always painting from an idea or concept, like 'grace' or 'forgiveness', and when I'm painting these ideas guide my decisions. So, I don't try to paint either Tonalist or Hudson River School in style; the style of my painting is determined by whatever best captures the quality of the idea I'm trying to represent. And you can quote me on that. All the decisions on technique need to be determined by the vision of the painting. That way you're not distracted by isolated passages but keep the whole in view. I get philosophical really quickly when it comes to painting!

If the idea is the defining element in your work, do you begin the painting with the idea already in place or does the idea grow out of the work as it progresses?

The latter. It's an immediate response to nature. I'm not here to make pretty paintings or just copy nature. I'm having a response, a dialog with nature. This is where Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman come in, because the Transcendentalists had the idea that everything in nature was the reflection of higher ideas. So rather than copying nature, I want to see nature and represent it as the crystallization of a universal idea. For example, I'm painting a plein-air study of a tree in a park near my home, and when you paint you get into these amazing states and the emotionality of light and nature is so amazing - it's transportive. I'm painting this tree and it's not just a tree in a park. It could be the tree that Newton's apple fell from. It could be the tree in the Garden of Eden. It could be the tree that Buddha sat under. The idea starts to expand. If you read Emerson, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. On page 60 of my book, I have this quote by Emerson: "Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused in every form." These guys were mystics.

Obviously you have many thinkers and writers who have inspired you. What inspired you to write a book?

There's three reasons why I wrote my book. One was that I had received a lot of training from Jacob Collins, and when I spent time with him painting in nature, I realized there was a whole tradition of landscape painting that was never going to be passed on, really. I mean, he still teaches and I teach and others teach, but there's no book that really explains these techniques. So I started writing this book on my own, for my students, and then I got a call from a publisher saying they loved my work and asking if I would be willing to write a book. Funny, I said, I just wrote one. And it's the book I wish I had had growing up.

The second reason was that I wanted to write a book on painting that was akin to The Art Spirit. Everyone who paints knows that book, and I wanted to write a book equally inspirational that was just for landscape painting.

And the third reason was that I feel I've found a way to break down the landscape in a way that is very clear and that I feel no one has ever done before, ever. I don't say that from bravado, but I took the lessons I learned and synthesized them and laid them out into a simple, clear method. I felt there's never been a book that simplified landscape painting into a simple, clear technique. In the book I break landscape itself down into three basic elements - just three. And then I break painting down into three basic elements. That's it, six things you have to deal with. Instead of floundering in the complexity of nature, you get this process to guide you.

Painting is hard to teach because it does have so many elements, and it's so helpful when they can be broken down into bite-size topics.

It is. For example, the three things on a painting: value, color, and drawing. All the mistakes on your painting are going to be one of those three. The three things on a landscape are the light, the atmosphere, and the objects. That's it. In the book I discuss how I break the landscape down, how Church did it, how Bierstadt did it, how Cole did it - they all did it in their own individual way. Having these six elements doesn't limit the creativity, it clarifies the creativity. For example, Charlie Parker Bird, one of the pioneers of Jazz and arguably the greatest alto saxophone player of all time, played a "A Night in Tunisia" in F major. He was infinitely creative with that key. So we can play within a key and have tons of creativity within that. One more thing about the book itself, you have drawing, value, and color. There are no books on value, by the way - ever think about that? - so there's this gaping hole on one-third of how to paint. But then there are also no good books on how to synthesize the three elements in a painting. So part of the reason I wanted to write this book was that I wanted to discuss how to combine these three elements in order to create not just a composition but a specific light effect, as well. Which is something else no one has ever gone into.

It sounds like your book covers in-depth the basics of painting in general, not just landscape painting. Are there any areas where a technique or concept might apply exclusively to landscape?

Yes, but it's a question of degree. When I paint the figure or still life, the objects are relatively constant and the light is fairly constant, and the atmosphere is completely constant. So landscape is actually the hardest of the subject matters because landscape is the only subject matter where all of the elements are changing. You can take these techniques and apply them to any subject matter - figure, still life, or if you're really gutsy, landscape!

For a beginner, do you recommend that they start with still life or figure before going into landscape, because there are fewer variables?

This is a big question of education because if you want to paint landscape well, you really have to study classically how to draw and control color and value, and that's usually best to learn with still lifes. But you also need to paint what you love; if you don't have the patience to sit and paint a cast, then find someone who can guide you in the classical tradition in regards to landscape. For example, another thing I discuss in my book is the seven aspects of drawing. What? There's only three elements in painting and seven in drawing? Those seven can be studied in landscapes and not just in still life. The seven aspects of drawing: shape, proportion, perspective, structure or anatomy, form, materiality, and character. Character isn't mentioned often but it's really the thing that determines all of the others.

You talk a lot about authors you like to read - who are some of your favorites?
I love Emerson and read all of his essays; I love Walt Whitman, particularly Song of Myself. I love my Dostoevsky - Russian literature is incredible - and Les Mis, I love Victor Hugo. I read the classics. I'm an avid reader of Plato; you just can't get better than him.

Why should people read the classics today?
Well, there are a couple of reasons. What the classics do that makes them so great - take for example Herman Melville's Moby Dick or Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov - the classics take a character, show you their inner world, and then show you to yourself in that character. The people in the classics become archetypes of humanity. Billy Budd is a great example of that. The one individual becomes the possibility yet unrealized. Jean Valjean in Les Miserablés - he's a criminal at first, but his story becomes the triumph of goodness and the redemption of a soul. So the topics they choose are of the greatest importance and the biggest thoughts. They address what it means to be human in relationship to the transcendental values.

How does that understanding of the human condition relate back to painting?
It relates back to painting and my book, because in my book I discuss two types of painting: poetic realism, which is that you're not copying nature but revealing the meaning, the poetry of nature. That's what the great haiku poets of Japan did, and that's the job of poetic realism. The other type of painting is contemplative realism, a term I invented for my book, and I think this is the way the Hudson River School painters worked. Because as a painter you're contemplating nature and existence; you're contemplating the elements, seeing the objective truths of reality. In that process you run against the shortcomings of your own nature, so that there is no true painting that doesn't have to do with self-knowledge. You reveal to yourself that which blocks you to knowledge, wisdom, and true beauty. If I'm painting the harmony of nature that I see in front of me, I become ever more aware of the disharmony of my own being, the disharmony of my own thoughts and feelings, and that pushes me to become a finer being so that I can get closer to that beauty myself. And reading the classics will help you get there.

One last question: who are your three favorite painters?
Frederick Church, Fra Angelico - if you see his paintings at the San Marco Church in Florence, you'll cry, he's my favorite painter of all time - and Rembrandt, what can I tell you? It's a close tie between Velazquez and Rembrandt for me, but you can't beat Rembrandt. And Ivan Shishkin, If I'm allowed four. Those are my favorite painters!

Many thanks to Ken for this interview! You can view his work or sign up for classes on hiswebsite, or stay posted with latest updates on his Instagram. His book, Landscapes in Oil, can be purchasedhere.

Eager to Learn More?

The BoldBrush Studio Blog is a great way to learn more about art and art history. If you'd like to read other interviews and posts showing great artists and their stories, please click the button below.

BoldBrush Videos are available for unlimited streaming. This is a DIGITAL CONTENT ONLY product. You will not receive a DVD.