Talking To My Wall

A few days before Image Wall opened, Ciara Nolan came into the gallery to hang the show for me and we had a discussion about how she intended to arrange one hundred, very different canvases:

SEEING THINGS: my new series of programmes about the visual arts in and around Frome.

Go to Programmes > Talk > Seeing Things.

Image Wall - The Exhibition

At the beginning of the year, I was invited by Black Swan Arts in Frome to stage an exhibition in their Round Tower Gallery, a unique stone-walled, circular space, that was originally built in the eighteenth for drying fabric. I knew instantly that I did not want the show to be a predictable resumé of all the work I’d done so far. Rather, I found it more appealing to imagine how the gallery would look if it were filled with bright, shiny new paintings, in a medium I was unfamiliar with. And then I took the idea a stage further. A dozen new paintings, I could imagine that easily, but what about one hundred? If I worked solidly from May to November, painting abstracts, still-life, portraits, landscapes and everything in between, what would my one hundredth painting look like? And what kind of painter would I have become?

I chose six slow-drying acrylic colours (including black and white), I bought pots of moulding paste and pumice gel and ordered one hundred canvases. Each one was to be just 30 x 30 cm square, about the size of a vinyl album sleeve.

I painted my first picture in early May:

Thinking of carrots and sticks and Cezanne’s words:

“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”

The revolution did not come, so I painted another carrot and then I hit a snag, in the form of painting holidays and nine weeks in France and Italy.

It was quite a nice problem to have; I worked with so many wonderful people, both at l’Age Baston and Studio Paradiso, but it meant that on my return, if I was to meet my November deadline, I would have to paint at the rate of one and a half pictures per day.

I thought of Turner and the twenty-four thousand watercolours he painted in his lifetime. And I thought of Van Gogh and the eighty masterpieces he produced during the eight months he spent in Arles with Gaugin.

“Inspiration is born of hard work and not the other way around,” said Stanislavski.

If you’re curious to know what the one hundredth painting looks like:

IMAGE WALL

A personal journey in 100 canvases, painted between May and November 2010 

The Round Tower Gallery

2 Bridge Street

Frome

Somerset BA11 1BB

Tel: 01373 473 980

27 November to 24 December (please visit Black Swan Arts website for opening times).

And if Frome is simply too far away, I’ll post the image soon on http://theimagewall.blogspot.com

“This is my way of holding onto things. Friction against the slippery slope of modernity; smooth as a flat screen TV, you can touch but not feel. Painting slows us down, but makes us more alive; opens a window on a world full of possibilities and entirely free of interruptions from our sponsor. Jawlensky described art as nostalgia for God. It's taken me 100 canvases to understand what that meant.

Painting and longing are one and the same.”

Chandler 2010

A Grey And White Matter

To be creative, I'm told, our brains need a goodly amount of low integrity white matter. Grey matter is good for rational, logical thinking but it tends to hold onto concepts too rigidly to create eureka moments. Those serendipitous conjunctions of true genius are caused by the white stuff, leaking ideas all over the cerebral cortex. 


The tendency amongst my students is to approach each painting with their grey matter. They have a concept in their minds of the desired outcome and they see the act of painting as a kind of test of their ability to achieve it. I, on the other hand, am more excited about the white matter; about the possibility that something unexpected may occur; something outside my usual repertoire. The business of painting is ideal for this kind of enterprise. It begins the moment you mix one colour with another and ask the question, 'what if...?' 


Even if there is nothing intrinsically new in art (or the universe) there are still an infinite number of untried, untested combinations for us to get excited about.

Image Wall - Artist's Statement

For many years, I have been a teacher of art, not a practicing artist. My focus has been on how to encourage others to develop their ability and to throw some light on the numerous techniques and processes that may be employed in picture-making. Because I had neither the time or the resources, the question I never asked myself was, what kind of a painter am I?

Image Wall  is an attempt to find an answer to that question.

Painting one hundred pictures, was to be like going on a journey. I could take a few risks along the way and fully explore what happens when you put paint onto canvas. I could work in ways I wouldn’t normally dream of, with colour-combinations I wouldn’t normally dare to use. All judgements were to be treated with suspicion and there would be no plan. I would simply paint whatever I had the urge to and if the work had a theme, it would be an unconscious one.

From my teaching, I have come to realise that there as many ways to paint a picture as there are people on the planet. The canon of Art, moreover, is being constantly up-dated; the first abstract artists are long-dead; installations and video seem old-hat. and the art world is poised for its next big, money-making shock. Meanwhile, all over the world, it is the flat screen, not the canvas, that is king. 

Despite digital sampling, CGI and a thousand images at the click of a mouse, however, painters still hold onto their pigment, their glue and their cloth. Unlike LEDs, these things have substance. A good painting doesn’t only occupy space, it alters it. The brushstroke is an echo of the artist’s presence and his or her colours leave chemical imprints in the mind of the viewer. I was seven years old, the first time a work of art did that to me and I was so thrilled, it scared me.

Pablo Picasso, when asked which of his paintings was his favourite, said, ‘The next one.’ When I began work on Image Wall, I had ninety-nine ‘next one’s. That is a kind of luxury.

I am grateful to the Black Swan Arts for their invitation to exhibit; to Ciara Nolan for her encouragement with my initial idea; to Suzanne Cooke for studio space and to Studio Prints of Frome for their generous support.

Art Words

Eminent: to be nearly as famous as Tracy Emin.
Hirst: funerary vehicle used in the transportation of pickled animals.
Hopper: container for the storage of depressing works of art.
Distemper: the feeling one gets after viewing abstract art.
Schwitters: bowel movement brought on by a visit to a Dadaist exhibition.
Kapoor: (onomatopoeia) disappointing explosion from a wax cannon.
Pre-Raphaelite: someone who leaves a charity event immediately after the buffet.
Monetise: the act of decorating a waiting-room with cheap reproductions of Impressionist art.
Flemish Art: any painting that is predominately snot-coloured.
Boschian Landscape: apocalyptic style of painting in which human figures are devoured by vacuum cleaners.
Postmodern: the junk that arrives on the doormat every morning.
Gormley: to look stupid but to actually be worth quite a lot of money.

Shadow Poetry

Imagine a Cornish fishing village, raked up even more impossibly steeply on its hillside, the grey and white houses dipped in Mediaeval red dye and pushed together so tightly that there is little more than a shoulder's width between one side of the street and the other. Then picture the entire arrangement teetering down to a tiny quayside and the blue-green water of the Mediterranean.

This is Tellaro on the Bay of Poets, where Byron swam and Shelley drowned.

Every year, when I'm teaching at Studio Paradiso, near Fivizzano in the Lunigiana, we bring a group of artists here to sketch and paint. The colours are mesmerising. On a sunny day, the red walls bounce the light around so much that when you escape from their labyrinthine twists and turns and arrive at last upon the quayside, the sea looks even greener.  You get the strong impression that Sixteenth century Italians knew all there was to know about simultaneous contrast.

The quayside is too tiny for all but the smallest rowing boats but there's room for a few sunbathers. The Italians lie upon the rocks, sweltering and evincing a certain reluctance to go anywhere near the water. There are sea urchins lurking there, as I found out to my cost.

But my appointment with the sea urchins has to come later. My students are all settled on the quayside, getting to grips with Tellaro's tricky perspectives and I have to find something to paint.

But it's hot and the sun is relentless. It looks like my choice of painting is to be dictated by something far more pressing than aesthetics: shelter. There's also that constant nagging I give myself when I'm on a painting trip, to do something pedagogical.

The spot I choose is shady enough and the parapet makes a useful workbench. I have visions, however, of my No.12 sable rolling over the edge into the drink. My painting is going to be suitably pedagogic, too. You can see that I've underpainted it in dilute bistre ink. Bistre is an old colour originally derived from boiling soot. This new version is a pleasingly transparent, reddish brown and as it's waterproof, it won't lift when I put colour over it; not that there will be much colour in my painting. Tellaro is a colourful place, I know, but those steep streets and mediaeval high-rises cast wonderful shadows. And it's the drama of light and shade that I want to depict.

The dilute bistre granulates nicely, giving me natural-looking textures and the details are ticked in with a dip pen. Schmincke Translucent Orange on the steps, Cerulean in the sky. I manage to leave just enough white paper around the tops of those buildings to make the whole thing look hot and back-lit.

A Few Portraits

Two paintings of footwear. One by by contemporary artist, Michael Taylor, the other by Vincent Van Gogh.

What is the difference between them?

$ 8,970,000,  you might say as both were sold at auction a year ago and the Van Gogh realised $ 9,000,000. But then, Taylor hasn't initiated a major art movement and changed the course of painting to boot (forgive the pun).

So what is the difference?

I show both images to my students and the Taylor instantly appeals. Alongside it, the Van Gogh appears dour and colourless. The Taylor, on the other hand is beautifully rendered and there are lots of little details to beguile the eye. In his careful treatment of the girl's shoes, the fabric of the chair, the carnations on the armrests, he shows us just how well he can paint - and there it ends; a contrived, yet nevertheless superb demonstration of the artist's skill.

Van Gogh, on the other hand, in painting less seems to reveal more of himself. His shoes constitute not such much a still-life as yet another portrait of the artist who regarded portraiture as the chief genre for modern painters. We feel as if we can deduce the personality who discarded them; we sense the labouring that has been done in them and the landscapes they have traversed. The person here is inferred, painted as it were, from the bottom up. Like all great works, the painting hints at something beyond the mere depiction of the objects concerned.

I bring a few old pairs of shoes to the art class and everyone is instantly gripped. They are such sad things; empty shells.  No props; I try to place them as if they've only just been discarded and it is strangely like having the ghost of the wearer in the room with us.

process cyan, magenta, yellow & black acrylic

neutral tint, sepia & burnt sienna watercolour

phthalo green, neutral tint & quinacridone violet watercolour

Oceans Apart Part 2

Of the paintings I produced for 'Oceans Apart' the new group show at Air Gallery, Wells, this has become the favourite and curiously, it's the only one that ended up pretty well the way that I planned it.

Painting exactly what I had in my mind has always seemed a terribly difficult thing to do. I think I know how my picture is going to look but when it actually begins to take shape on the canvas, it is either a stunted abortion that is fit only to be sacked up and hurled over a parapet or is so astonishingly promethean that it takes on a life of its own and flies away from me.

I take some comfort from these words by the Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti:

"I wanted to know if something could be imagined so precisely that it could be made exactly as imagined.  And that's a very long exercise, because you can be mistaken, you think you see it clearly, but when you want to do it, the whole thing has disappeared.  I know I spoke to another sculptor of this attempt to realise exactly what I saw in my mind.  He said it was impossible; he said that if you really begin to realise, it, your way of seeing changes. And you discover that the vision you thought you had was very very vague, that it has to be transformed in order to be realised."

This is what Francis Bacon meant by working with what the brushstroke suggested.

It seems to me that it's also what Turner had in mind when he said 'I never lose an accident.'

Which equates with Klee's dictum to 'make the accidental essential.'

Plan it, draw it out and colour it in without deviation and you'll end up with something that looks as if it was painted by numbers. Like an over-rehearsed conjuring trick, the life will have gone out of your work.

But if your time and your skill are not enough, what then is required?

Kandinsky said that one could learn the craft of carpentry and be fairly certain of being able to make a table, but one might learn how to paint and never be certain of making a work of art.

The uncertainty, of course, is what makes the whole enterprise so exciting. In my experience, people who can't cope with uncertainty, tend not to become artists.

So what happened this time, when I actually ended up with what I'd planned?

When you look closely at the picture, you'll see it's built up on quite a lot of paint. Under the surface are three or four other paintings that formed as the image took on a life of its own and I followed first one course, then another. To give you some idea of how often I change my mind, here are three other treatments of the same scene; the harbour at St. Ives:

You'll notice that in each of these, the boats are either safe on the harbour wall or tied up along the quayside. In my favourite painting, the boat is at sea at last, but whether arriving or departing, it is impossible to say. Certainly, there is nowhere in sight for the pilot to put ashore.

If your painting ends up as planned, you may well have gone on that long journey that finally takes you home.

But perhaps it means that your little boat never put out to sea in the first place.

Oceans Apart Part 1

Work by Duncan Cameron, David Chandler, Rob Irving, Lorna Heaysman, Jeanette Kerr, Simon Ledson, Melissa Olen

Air Gallery, 6 High Street Wells, Somerset, BA5 2SG

8th May to 12th June 2010

Watch This Space

Click here: Image Wall

100 canvases for Black Swan Arts, November 2010.

Dogs and Cats and Chemistry

It's a relief, on occasion, to turn away from the business of trying to make art and focus instead on simply recording what's in front of you.

When Van Gogh was painting with Gaugin in Arles, he attempted to use the latter's method of painting from memory and imagination. In the end, he had to concede that his best work was done when the subject was slap-bang in front of him.  More than anything, though, Van Gogh wanted sitters to paint from and frustratingly for him, all but a few of the good people of Arles avoided him like the plague. To the great benefit of the rest of us, the isolation forced upon him by his apparent craziness gave rise to the most powerful paintings of objects the world has seen; those iconic, yellow-on yellow sunflowers, for example, that have become universally synonymous with artistic struggle.

So what to paint turns out not to be the issue for most artists. If you love to paint, then you'll paint anything; sunflowers, chairs, boots, even the bedroom furniture. The real issue for most of us is how. Ten years of monkish devotion to art  and Vincent had that down pat, but it's something I've been struggling with for decades.

Thank providence then for the limitations of watercolour. Compared with oils and acrylic, there's so much that they won't do and so much that they do quite readily that is irksome. They stain, they run, they bloom and most vexing of all, they won't let you hide your mistakes. And the Bistre ink that I like to use, flocculates when heavily diluted and leaves texture where you don't want it.

Why use it?

I suppose because some us are dog-owners, while others prefer cats.

Oil and acrylic are dogs. They follow you faithfully, sit down and roll over when they're told and won't do anything without your say-so. Watercolours on the other hand, are cats. Whatever you have in mind, they are on their own agenda; winding themselves around your shins one minute and off through the cat-flap the next.

Van Gogh was a fan of watercolour, although he didn't exploit the medium much, declaring that you needed twenty-seven heads to paint a single picture.

It's Dorothy's birthday. I always paint daisies for her birthday card. Almost overnight, they've perked up all over the lawn and with their bright faces, they match her sunny, uncomplicated disposition. Pinching them out of the soil, however and laying them on the table in front of me, I feel as if I'm performing a botanical autopsy. But right now, rather than any new meaning I've conferred upon them, I'm more interested in the shapes they're making on my paper.

Call it artistic detachment.

After the sketch done in soft pencil, the bistre goes on, speckling, quite predictably in unpredictable places. I'm squinting at my daisies now, cutting down the colour information that's hitting my retina and concentrating on light and shade. Colour, tone, form, texture - Nature delivers them all at once and we separate them out like charity shop workers going through a bin bag. More bistre goes on once the first glaze is dry and then I get to work with thin phthalo green watercolour. Odd names. One ancient; one modern. The bistre, originally derived from boiling soot; the phthalocyanine, a petro-chemical by-product.

It's all chemistry.

Brushing aside any concerns about my carbon footprint, I finish the job with a little Translucent Yellow.

The Bistre, besides texturing the picture has tamed the watercolour; harmonised my colours, modified their tones and given the whole thing structure. The watercolour, you see, didn't have it all it's own way. But then again, neither did I and that's where the real chemistry is.

You Looking At Me?

Self, acrylic on canvas 40 x 40 cm

Ironic, that in trying to get out of the way of the painting and let the materials do the work, I should choose a self-portrait. The important thing here is that the person you see is not scowling at the viewer or at himself, but at the painting.

Angela's Little Red Digger

The last time I entered the Black Swan Arts Open Arts Competition, I did so years ago, with an oil painted specially for the event: a double-portrait of myself, blindfolded, with brushes in hand, being led down Vicarage Street by one of my models, who is wearing nothing but a big blue bow in her hair. In the words of the centre manager, the work was not so much 'rejected' as 'not selected'. The fine distinction was lost on me at the time and I remember feeling suitably stung for several months. I was a local artist, after all; I'd even put the Vicarage Street abattoir in the background. The episode served to persuade me that competitions and awards were not for me; that being a winner meant conforming to a jury's idea of merit and that true artists did not seek prizes.

This February, I entered for a second time and this time, I think, for a better reason. I wasn't out to impress or win a prize; I just wanted more people to see the painting than had seen it so far.

Angela's Little Red Digger is the centre-piece of a series of paintings of my hometown, Frome. The others depict various, well-known corners of the town and as a foil to the quaintness of the buildings, each one features one, two or more young men wearing white hoodies and baseball caps. My idea was to bring the topographical painting of Paul Sandby up-to-date. In his views of Windsor, for example, there is often an old loafer in a soldier's jacket leaning on a lump of masonry somewhere. Today, the white hoodie is ubiquitous throughout the market towns of England and is often regarded as an emblem of antisocial behaviour. The wearers are considered to be ill-educated, uncouth, given to trouble-making and vandalism.

The idea of Angela's Little Red Digger was to place these Frome pictures in a wider context and to contrast the anti-social behaviour implicit in them with the kind that is condoned by society in the name of progress. To research the painting, I ventured five miles out of town, walked for half a mile, tore my jeans on a thorn bush and arrived at the rim of one of the biggest holes in Europe. I felt like Frodo Baggins when he has his first glimpse of Mordor. The day was still and hot, there were buzzards circling overhead and there at the bottom of the quarry was a lone, red digger just asking to go into a picture.

Now the little red digger did not find its way to the bottom of that quarry all on its own. It got there with the aid of a fleet of trucks that are on the road day and night; a private railway line; high explosives; the annihilation of a village community; the compromising of the hot springs at Bath, and as the quarry operators venture below sea-level, the possibility that the Mendips will be heathland in twenty years time.

Angela Yeoman CBE, who sold the quarry recently for £300 million, is influential in many committees, trusts and clubs within Somerset. She is also Deputy Lieutenant of Somerset, a former High Sheriff of the County and is well-known throughout the region for her philanthropy.

Angela's Little Red Digger was selected by the judges of the Black Swan Arts Open Arts Competition and won the Bax Fine Art Award.

Bridging The Gap

This painting hangs in the corridor of the Birthing Unit at Frome Community Hospital. Continuing the theme of the Tree Of Life, which runs throughout the Hospital's decor, the challenge for me was to make a satisfactory composition from a single acorn on a 1.8 metre canvas.

Knowing that it's going to give me a lot of trouble, I buy two canvases and work on two paintings at once. My thinking is that I can play safe on one and takes risks on the other. The hospital will get whichever one that works. But what do I mean by 'works'?

As I begin to put acrylic onto each long canvas, I become aware of two things. First of all, painting is hard work. I'm full of admiration for the sheer physical achievement of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel - here was a man, after all, who could work his way through a slab of marble the size of a garden shed; secondly, there is an aching gap between the picture in my mind and the thing that is appearing in front of me.

After a couple of attempts, this appears. The acorn is suitably egg-like but I feel as if that is all I'm looking at. It's a riot of over-charged hues, too.

On the second canvas, I begin working with unnatural colours, so that I can concentrate more on the forms that I am creating. If I can just get the shapes to work on their own first of all, the colours can come later. When I look at this stage of the painting, now, I believe that a more courageous artist would have stopped right here. But at the time, I press on, because I'm pretty sure that the midwives and ancillary staff would rather look at emollient greens than hospital pink and meconium yellow.

A thin glaze of phthalo green makes the thing look more natural, but the life goes out of it in the process. I'm stuck. If I do any more, I'll cover up all those loose brush marks that are giving the painting its energy.

So I return to the first canvas.  The acorn is better proportioned but the shadowy greens are overwhelming. And there's another consideration. The entrance to the Unit will be to the left of the picture and I feel that in this orientation, the image is turning its back on the visitor.

And so, I return to the second canvas, yet again. I decide that if I'm to keep my colours consistent across such a long stretch of canvas, I either need to mix up huge dollops of pigment or underpaint the entire thing. Underpainting will soften my colours and homogenise them at the same time. I also like the idea of being able to concentrate on an image that has a massy, sculptural quality to it. This isn't to be an attempt at a real acorn, after all, but something more iconic. After the carbon black and titanium white underpainting, I apply thin glazes of phthalo green, hansa yellow and pryrole red to the canvas with a sponge. I mix the colours with equal parts water and gel medium to improve colour flow.

Once it's up on the wall, there are a few complaints:

It isn't big enough; there aren't enough leaves; there should be a branch; one of the leaves is painted incorrectly. 

There is also a suggestion for improving it:

A Lowry-esque stick figure pushing a baby buggy across that empty horizon.

Another aching gap opens up.

Journey Without Maps

At the life-class, Gail is baffled because I've praised her drawing. It isn't accurate, by any means; the proportions are all wrong and her line is erratic and sometimes awkward. At the table next to her is Howard, whose work is praiseworthy for more obvious reasons. It is consummately skillful; faithful to the model's pose and executed to within a hair's-breadth of realism. But what does that realism amount to? The model is flesh and blood and skin and bone; an infinitely complex mass of tissue and microbes. Can Howard draw pores on the skin or every hair on the model's head? And what about spatial depth? How can Howard show that when all he's got is a stick of graphite and a sheet of flattened cellulose to rub it on? Gail, who intuits the limitations of the exercise, uses the life class as a springboard. For her, the model is an opportunity to make a picture from the collision of person, pencil and paper.

Call what Gail does 'abstract', if you like. Howard is uneasy with the term (although he may be quite happy listening to Bruckner ) and attempts to depict what he sees with as little margin for error as possible. With that in mind, it seems to me that while Gail is going on a journey, Howard is content with making maps.

At every life class, whether we realise it or not, we make a decision about what we're going to do with reality. But what is that reality? When Picasso was challenged on the subject, he asked his interrogator what he meant by 'reality' and for answer, the man produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet.

'Why is she so small?' asked Picasso.

If we want to get a grip on realism, perhaps we should look at what really happens when we gaze at the model.

Light from the sun strikes the naked body and some frequencies are absorbed by the pigment of the skin while others are reflected into our eyes. At the back of our eyes, on the retinas, a total of 126 million 'rods' and 'cones', laced with millions of photosensitive cells, convert the sensation of yellow, green and violet light into a chemical that creates electrical impulses in the brain.

Sounds pretty abstract to me.

Back at the life-class and without a map, Gail is constantly getting into one scrape or another. Howard, on the other hand, is never lost but one day, when he's made the perfect map, perhaps he'll go on a journey too.

The Colour of Snow - Part 1

When Andrew announced that he was holidaying in the French Alps over Christmas and asked for some homework, I charged him with the task of finding out what colour snow was. On his return, he emailed me the conversation he'd had with his four-year-old grand-daughter, Jodie, which I reproduce here with his permission:

A: Jodie, what colour is the snow?
J: White.
A: Are you sure?
J: Yes.
A: What colour is the picnic table on the balcony?
J: White.
A: But it's not the same colour as the snow.
J: No.
A: And it's still white?
J: Yes.
A: What colour are the walls of this room?
J: White.
A: And they are a different colour from the snow and the table, and they are still white?
J: Yes.  And those are white (pointing to the kitchenette tiling).
A: But not the same colour as the others?
J: No.

"So there we have a reliable observer,'" wrote Andrew, "unshakeable under cross examination."

Monet, who made a habit of painting the snow, didn't seem to be quite so certain. Here are the colours Monet uses for snow in four different paintings. Of course, they're not single colours but complex juxtapositions of complementaries.

The sample, second from the left looks like the kind of snow that Frank Zappa warned us about and apart from the one on the far right, the others seem way off the mark.  But if we accept that white light stimulates all three colour-sensitive cone cells on the human retina, then looking at snow can give us the impression that we're looking at many colours rather than none. In that case, painting snow need not be a matter of merely blanking in a region of nothingness between other more interesting landscape elements. Instead, like Monet, we can work with every colour under the sun.