Conversation with a Boomer Generation painting Master

Transcribed from a conversation between Nina Caporale and her father, Michael Prisco Caporale (both artists) on Friday the 4th of December 2020.

Dad: At the time that I was in college, which was the late sixties, maybe 1967 and on, it seemed like there was a general consensus among all my art professors that they had an aversion to teaching technique. They seemed to regard that to teach technique was to, in a sense, crush individualism and creativity. And so technique became an invention of each individual quote-unquote "artist" as a part of the discovery process rather than a formulated process of technique that tended to standardize results. So I never learned, for example, how to paint like an old master.

Me: Like, underpainting and.... Dad: Yeah, I mean, I knew what underpainting was and I understood it, but there's a process of layering the paint and using glazes that produces... uh.... really, uh, uh, a sort of a glow, for example, to fleshtones. And then there is another technique that even the most traditional artists use, which is almost like in modern photography whereby the photographer uses the aperture to control that which is 'in' and 'out' of focus. And traditional artists, academy artists, for example, would start with their underpainting, and then gradually build form, and then spend more time on the details of things -- like face, and hands, and lace, and jewelry, and highlights, and speculars -- and less on the folds of drapery in the background, or on, yaknow, even sometimes the folds of clothing would be more broad and loose strokes that were less defined than a face or hands. And in that way it tended to focus your eye where the artist wanted the focus. And it worked, as a composition.

Dad: But I woulda killed to have somebody to teach me how to paint like Ingres[*]. Yaknow, I mean, I look at, yaknow, his work with human form and skin and the luminescent quality that he achieves, yaknow. And I know that it's glazes, and I can go to [...] a museum and I can look at the paintings, but it's different than having somebody walk through a painting with you that they are doing, and you're doing, and they're supervising you, and you're learning, yaknow, in a hands-on kinda way. Yes, I've studied materials and technique, and I know what a glaze is, but I never knew how to apply a glaze to paint like Ingres.

Me: What is Ingres' full name? Dad: I-N-G-R-E-S, Ingres. I don't know his full name. It's probably something like 'Jean Louis', blabbity-blah...

Dad: So, yaknow, I learned a lot. My materials and techniques course consisted a lot of how to make paint. I learned how to make every kind of paint. Yaknow, cuz, cuz there's a basic principle to paint. It's pigment, or dye, and it either forms an emulsion or a... what's the other word? Not an emulsion, but a solution.

Me: A suspension? Dad: A solution. If it's a dye, it forms a solution. If it's pigment, it forms an emulsion. And you need a binder, and you need a solvent. And those are the three elements that all paint have. And so I learned how to make gum arabic. I learned how to make watercolors. I learned how to make acrylic, how to make oil paint, how to make egg tempera, uhm, yaknow, gouache, whatever. And that was a lot of it -- oh, and we did, like, impasto, wax, painting with wax. But you know what, I never really... it was just a matter of, yeah you had to make a painting with wax. And yaknow, my wax painting sucked. I really would have liked to have had some serious thought about how to best use that, yaknow, to make a painting. Instead, I was just fulfilling, yaknow, a class requirement. And the painting I made was 'eh'. It wasn't really anything that was worth keeping or even looking at, really.

Original audio recording:

* Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French neo-classical painter who lived between 1780 and 1867. Read more about this artist on Wikipedia.

Michael Prisco Caporale holds a Masters of Fine Art degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from Syracuse University. Both of his degrees are in Painting. He is a practicing film-maker, writer, director, photographer, and sometimes AirBnB host who is presently above the age of seventy (70), and does not intend to retire. Ever.