The Green Lane

                                     watercolour on hand-made paper

'Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green; though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that's all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the causes of beauty, and penetrate the minutest loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and sub-divided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming, leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see, here and there, a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.'

John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) 

quoted in The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

My Intention

Not to make paintings of the world but to make a world out of paint.

The Fruit of All Knowledge - Part 2

Paul Klee said, 'To paint well is simply this: to put the right colour in the right place.'

That's something I've never found easy. To me, composition has always been a hit-and-miss affair. If a painting niggles me and I can't seem to get the colours or the brushstrokes right, it's usually because I haven't paid enough attention to the composition. This summer, I turned to Cezanne. I was curious about why these slightly strange, cropped and distorted paintings work. Look at the picture, bottom left. What's happening with that knife? And then that mark to the right of the tin doesn't seem to go anywhere. And the bottle in the painting, bottom right, is smack-bang in the centre, isn't it? Time and again, Cezanne puts something in the middle of his painting (the apple's core, the stem of the goblet) which acts as the pivot around which the picture revolves. He avoids symmetry by placing stronger, more eye-catching elements to one side, like the red apple to the left of the goblet, or the red tin, or the metal pan.

In Italy, I try it myself. The copper pot is way too big and the apple way too small, but by cropping the pot and placing the persimmons on the diagonal, it seems to work.

Back home, I rummage through the kitchen drawers at the village hall where I teach and find this magnificent kettle. The spout makes my picture too complicated, so I turn it around until it can't be seen. That night, just by drawing two diagonals on their paper before they begin, everyone in the class gets a decent result. And they finish their pictures in fewer strokes than usual, too.

The Fruit of All Knowledge - Part 1

I spend five weeks in France at chateau L'Age Baston. I teach from 10 am until 6 pm every day, six days a week and paint picture after picture. And of the dozens of pictures that I paint, which one do I like the best? This sour-looking windfall apple from the twisted tree outside the studio door. Cezanne said he would 'astonish Paris with an apple'... and he did; time after time. With Uglow, it was pears. Morandi, of course, couldn't leave the bottle alone. Forget 'annunciations' and 'depositions'; never mind about the big themes: loss, genocide, mortality, love; how much meaning can you pack into a solitary fruit?

By the end of August, I'm in Italy for two more weeks of teaching. Not really apple country, Italy, but at Casa dell' Unicorno, the persimmons are already heavy on the trees. My favourite is neither green nor orange, but somewhere in between and bears a fabulous, purple scar; and so fickle is the colour that I struggle with it for an entire day. When I return to the painting the next morning, I discover that the cleaner has thrown my persimmon away. To me, it was the fruit of all knowledge; to her, of course, it's just a hideous, unripe kaki.