44 Artists Magazine January/February 2020
needs of the painting. In rendering flat
surfaces—for example, roads or large
roofs, he’ll often exaggerate the color
change across the area to add greater
vibrancy to the painting. At other
times, he’ll heighten the saturation
of a local color, often a strong red, in
order to activate more subtle colors.
He points out that one of the issues in
painting cityscapes is the large amount
of gray in the subject matter.
The artist’s license to exaggerate
and change is not used so much in the
drawing itself. “I do keep the drawing
as accurate as I can,” he says, “espe-
cially with architecture.” Perspective
and recognizable buildings must read
for the viewer, while distortions that
sometimes happen with photography
must be adjusted. “I tend to do it byfeel rather than in any mechanical
way,” says the artist.RESTRAINT
Throughout the painting Laguë works
hard to retain the directness and life of
his attack. “Almost always, the biggest
challenge for me is not to overwork
the painting,” he says. “Sometimes
I come up with a fresh and spontane-
ous block-in; the drawing may not be
perfect, but it stands up as a bold and
strong composition. It’s difficult to
avoid ‘fixing’ the imperfections, which
invariably leads to a weaker painting. If
I had a nickel for every time I’ve ruined
a painting by trying to fix things, I’d be
a rich man.”
Part of the success in keeping
things loose and direct is Laguë’scommitment to using large brushes.
“I don’t teach much anymore,” he says,
“but when I did, my constant refrain
was, ‘When in doubt, always grab a big-
ger brush.’ The minute you start with a
small brush, you can get into trouble.”
The issue of overworking arises yet
again toward the end of the painting,
when the artist must decide when to
stop. “Stopping is a challenge,” he says.
“There’s always the temptation to
tighten. It’s almost always a bad idea.”ADROIT MANEUVERS
Laguë’s finished paintings retain
a joyous record of the artist’s engage-
ment with his subject, even as they
display his powers of invention and his
command of the laws that govern light,
color and perspective. In his painting
NYSE Light (page 43), for instance, the
facade of the New York Stock Exchange
is shown with a dramatic vertical per-
spective. A broad shadow on the left of
the painting is fringed with a stroke of
brilliant orange, an exaggeration of a
color effect that often occurs in strong
light. “The painting was calling out for
it,” says the artist.
In another painterly maneuver he
has partially obscured the line of win-
dows at the bottom of the work with
energetic horizontal scrapings of
paint from a palette knife. “The main
focus of the painting is the light and
the flags at the front of the building,”
says Laguë. “Early on, the windows at
the bottom probably felt too promi-
nent, so I knocked them down.”
In this painting the artist also took
on a perennial problem in representa-
tional artwork—how to paint printed
patterns on objects. “The American
flag is always a challenge,” he says.
“You have to find a way of knitting
the stripes into the painting. I always
used to tell students that you never
want something that feels cut out and
pasted onto the picture.”
Laguë’s handling of spatial depth is
on full display in Over Arc De Triomphe
(above). Here the famous monument is
rendered in high contrast with an
active paint attack. Meanwhile, theLEFT
Over Arc de Triomphe
oil on panel, 40x30OPPOSITE
Over Florence
oil on panel, 30x40