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.