Boredom And Bile Green

On my last painting holiday in Tuscany, I managed to produce this:

I painted it after one of Dermot and Kathryn's wine-fuelled lunches, on a gloriously sunny afternoon in front of about a dozen people. I'm sure the experience was an edifying one for my students as they watched their so-called teacher getting into more and more of a muddle with his colours and the entire painting went from bad to worse.

I did the same thing in the Loire Valley ten or twelve years earlier, the incident, unlike the many decent demo's I've done, forever etched onto my mind. Then, a student and dear friend told me that my appalling demo' was the most helpful he'd ever seen. Learning from my mistakes was far more salutary, he said, than watching me slickly execute a masterpiece that he felt, in those early days, he would never be able to emulate.

There was some comfort in his remarks as I ruefully went over the events that led to this most recent disaster. It was an unpleasant and cringeworthy experience for me, but if the point of a painting holiday is instruction, then why not acknowledge and accept that one's students can learn just as much from your bad art as your good?

This is a worthwhile idea, but only if we can bear to face up to our mistakes and without any unnecessary breast-beating, dwell on them a little, learn from them and move on.

In one of my local classes, at a quarter to four every thursday afternoon, I would hear the sound of tearing. The perpetrator was Patricia, for whom part of the packing-up procedure was the ripping up of whatever she'd spent the last one and three quarter hours painting. She never liked what she produced and didn't see the point in taking it home, so into the waste bin it would go, in a dozen tiny pieces. She looked blissful while she was doing it, too.

I was never able to convince Patricia that she should hold on to these 'ghastly' creations of hers and attempt to glean something of their merits as well as their de-merits. In this way, she might have learned what she needed to do in order to produce work that pleased her. But no, no work of art could be more pleasing to her than the sound of tearing. In the end, with nothing to show for all the days she spent labouring at her watercolours but a full waste bin, she gave up.

So what are the particular merits and de-merits of my own watercolour disaster?

Well, now that I look at it with a degree more objectivity than I possessed after three glasses of vermentino, I can see that it might have worked. At the time, however, it wasn't the picture that I wanted to paint.

But what did I want to paint?

That it seems, is the crux of the matter. I don't think I really knew. Apart from the fact that I wanted it to be terribly impressive, the rest is a little vague. I just started flinging paint around and hoping for the best. It works sometimes, but not necessarily in front of a dozen people on a hot hillside. On that particular day, I did not get lucky and I couldn't see any potential in the marks I was making. There were no serendipitous insights and then I committed the greatest of all cardinal sins: I got bored.

The purpose of painting is not to show that you are good at it, rather it is to engage with your subject on an intimate level and communicate that engagement.

“In painting," said Matthew Smith, "the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point.”

Salient words, but dipping your paint brush in bile green doesn't help either.

And here's an excellent RSA video on making mistakes by Kathryn Schulz:

http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/kathryn-schulz

Why Choose That?

I judged the Black Swan Open Art competition recently, along with Irena Czapska (Director at Spike Print Studio in Bristol), Dr Jo Dahn (Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies in Art and Design at Bath Spa University), Charlie Thomas (Photographer and Awards Manager at The Association of Photographers Limited in London) and Tom Bayliss (Sculptor and co-founder and curator of the Tool Shed gallery, Frome).

To the surprise and dismay of many gallery-goers, we awarded the Open Art Prize, worth £750, to Neill Fuller, for the painting above. The decision came in for a great deal of criticism. People hated Neill's painting. They didn't like the colours, they didn't like how it made them feel and they certainly didn't want it on their wall. 

"So why," as one woman said to me, "choose that?"

Here's what I said at the preview:

To enter an art competition you need to be really courageous or deluded. But I expect that most artists are both.

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

And then there are the judges. In a wide-ranging, 20-year-long study of experts in numerous fields, their opinions were found to be no more reliable than the toss of a coin.

Aptly-named, David Picker, who worked in the motion picture industry for more than 40 years confided that if he’d said ‘yes’ to all the projects he turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones he took, things would have worked out about the same.

Certainly for me and my fellow judges, with 400 works of art to study and only enough room in the Black Swan for about 80 of them, the most effective use of our time was to say ‘No’.

I’ve entered the Black Swan Open on three occasions and scored two ‘No’s and a ‘Yes’. But it wasn’t ‘No’... ‘No’... ‘Yes!’ it was ‘No’... ‘Yes!’...  ‘No’. 

When I complained, rather sulkily, to the then centre manager of the Black Swan that I had been rejected, she responded with a nicely-nuanced admonition:

“David, you’re work wasn’t so much rejected as not selected.”

But here’s the thing. It’s your work that is not being selected. Not you. You are still the same courageous, deluded, misunderstood artist you always were. But you’re also resilient.

The American composer, John Cage, came in for a fair amount of vitriol during his lifetime for his demanding, sometimes unlistenable music. When he was asked how he felt about all the criticism, he said that once he finished a piece, it was no longer anything to do with him. Like your children, you have to let your art go and find its own way in the world.

So how did we select? With Kandinsky’s warning in mind, what were the criteria?

Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? It’s all a matter of personal taste, surely?

Think about all the people who bet on the Grand National. How do they pick a winner? Most of them know nothing about form, so what they do is choose the horse’s name that  they like the best. Now, you can pick a work of art like that. We’re all allowed to say what we like. But no amount of liking will make it a winner. 

I’ll tell you what I was looking for.

The work had to be well-made. By that, I mean that the sculpture, print, painting, ceramic was put together by someone who had an intimate relationship with their materials.

Whatever the work had to say, it had to say well. If it was fresh, startling or original, so much the better. If the work was beautifully executed, but merely re-hashed the same old artistic tropes, then it probably wouldn’t make the final selection.

Confession time. On one occasion we selected a work because the title was so amusing, another was just plain bizarre and we chose another because it was small.

Thirdly, it had to be intelligent. It had to be something that we could turn to again and again, rather than give us a temporary, rather superficial thrill. 

Art evolved from primitive mating rituals and displays to become the highly-specialised way that we explain ourselves to ourselves. That’s how we bond. That’s what culture is. No matter how much you might like the idea, other animals just don’t do it. Culture, said Fitzroy Somerset, is roughly everything we do that monkeys don’t. Take tonight and all the conversation that’s been going on. If it was only about the £750 prize-money, nobody need say a word. 

Finally and most importantly, for me, the selected work had to be aesthetic. A word that comes from the Ancient Greek, meaning to feel, to perceive, to be conscious. The opposite, of course, is anaesthetic. Art should wake us up, rather than put us to sleep.

The winner of the Black Swan Open Art Competition 2013 is Neill Fuller for 'Goin' Down To The Country'.

Thank you, Neill, for waking us all up.

Neill Fuller and the public reaction to his award-winning painting at Black Swan Arts is the subject of my next Seeing Things podcast for FromeFM. You can listen here.

Change your mind. Do it again, differently.

This study was made in about ten minutes at my Thursday morning Life Class.

What's really useful about the Brushes app for iPad is that it allows playback of the entire drawing process, from start to finish and in this way, my constant revisions and changes of mind become apparent.

Drawing is not like tightrope-walking. It is not something that will result in a broken neck if you don't do it properly. Unlike the tightrope, there is no line out there, waiting for you to make a slip; the line is something you create as you go along. You find out where it needs to go and put it there, and how you do this is a process of discovery.

We're not used to this idea, of course. Our school days and working life may have convinced us that everything we do is a kind of test (as Ken Robinson would say, there's one answer and it's at the back, but we're not allowed to look). Someone, a teacher, an employer, a loved one, is expecting the right answer from you and you'd better perform. The white paper, or the empty touch screen, however, is expecting nothing. It is a risk-free zone in which you may experiment with one mark after another. When you look at drawing in this way, your love/hate relationship with your eraser will come to a merciful end. That eraser, whether palpable or digital, is not for correcting mistakes, because there are no mistakes any more; only lines of discovery; signs along the path that may read, 'This way, not that.'

Change your mind. Do it again, differently. That's creativity.

Shedding Light On Masking Fluid

Probably the quickest, most soul-destroying way of wrecking your latest watercolour creation is to tart it up with masking fluid. Whenever I uncap the stuff and draw out yards of quivering goop from around the neck of the bottle, I'm reminded of the time I recklessly decided to clean out the plughole in someone else's bath. Oh and did I tell you that it smells? The ammonia is to preserve the shelf-life, apparently, but every time I take a whiff, I feel like it's shortening mine.

If you own a bottle of masking fluid and you go to a watercolour class regularly, my advice is, be generous with it. Let everyone have a dip. I've never got to the bottom of a single bottle before it has dried out and begun to reek like a drain.

Leave masking fluid on your brush for too long and it will harden into a yellowish bogey that nothing will dislodge. And one last thing: it can tear holes in your paper, too.

So why use it?

Well, it's an effective way of creating highlights and details without having to painstakingly paint around them. It's hard to use it subtly, however and it will conjure up toothpaste more readily rather than either apple blossom or snow.

Here's a simple exercise that gets you used to handling the stuff and will give dramatic results relatively easily.

Sketch your old building lightly. This is HB pencil on Neil Hopkins' finest 300lb Two Rivers hand-made watercolour paper. It's so well-sized that even the finest line will sing out at you (the size also makes the surface so hard that the masking fluid will lift off like a dream). Now, the idea of the pencil sketch is to give you a delicate framework on which to hang your colours. Anything heavier and you'll end up with a design that would look more at home in a colouring book. And colouring-in is not painting.

Don't use your finest sable for the next bit, just in case. I used a 1/4 inch Daler Rowney, one stroke nylon brush, which I first dipped in washing-up liquid. Then I gave the brush a cursory wipe so that my painting didn't start to foam when I added water and... poked it gingerly into the masking fluid. Work lightly over the roof and put a flick or two on the door and window it you like. You don't need to cake the stuff on and if you do, well, it takes longer to dry than margarine. This is the thing. It'll harden onto the hairs of your brush faster than you can say 'chewing-gum', but on your paper, it's a different matter. And your paper should be bone dry, by the way.

Rinse your brush in water immediately and thanks to the patina of Fairy Liquid, every single hair will be pure and unsullied by its baptism in masking fluid.

When the masking fluid is dry, it might still feel cold and tacky if you tap it lightly with a finger, but none of it should come away. Wait longer than is absolutely necessary if you like. Mind-bending boredom is far better than the agony of swishing your finest sable impetuously over a patch of nearly dry masking fluid and watching little gobbets of jaundiced rubber spring onto the hairs of your brush and cling there... forever.

While you are trying to coax the paint to go where you want it to, there are two great, natural forces at work on your watercolour which will pay no heed to your wishes whatsoever. These are gravity and entropy. We all know what the first one does, even if the greatest scientists aren't sure of the details and the second governs the way that things, when left to their own devices, tend to dissipate and become chaotic. Think about how a curl of smoke from a cigarette will eventually fill a room. The curl has gone, but the smoke hasn't; it's just spread out all over the place and given us all cancer. In the same way, pigment will travel, will-nilly through damp paper, bumping over the grain and settling in minuscule nooks and crannies. You don't actually need a brush. Just leave your watercolour to gravity and entropy and the result will be far more natural than you could ever aspire to. So, turn your paper upside-down and wet it, from the foundations of your building to the sky. Then, tip the painting towards you and run palette mud right across it. 

I have another term for palette mud. I call it Colour Remain After Painting. That way, when people ask me what pigments I used for my latest masterpiece, I can say, "Oh, just any old CRAP."

But if you don't have a brownish, greyish leftover stain in the lid of your watercolour box, then try gamboge, sepia and a little paynes grey. Actually, I used Schmincke Translucent Yellow. It does exactly the same job at half the price. Oh, and I used Neutral Tint, not Paynes Grey, but I thought you might not have that one in your box.

This is important: Use the softest, thirstiest brush you own for this wash or you'll put streaks in your sky. And once you've put the colour on, prop up your painting and walk away. You might need to guide the colour over the masking fluid but after that, do try to leave the rest of the work to those natural forces. If you're British, you'll make a cup of tea at this juncture. I'm convinced this is the only reason why the British, more than any other nation, have taken to watercolours so thoroughly. Their only rivals are the Japanese. And they have made such an art out of their tea-making that the watercolour hardly gets a look-in.

Once your background is bone dry, more 'crap' can be added to the building and the horizon. You'll need to heavy up the consistency for this bit as it needs to sit over the previous wash. And I've used the same flat brush as before to get a graphic, hard-edged look to the work.

I've put even more 'crap' on the gable end of the building and on the barn doorway. By now, you'll need fairly inky paint. If the first wash was milk, these little details should be in single cream. The mess in the foreground is me experimenting with an old, plastic credit card. Just a little random tone here will make your paper look more like snow and less like, well, paper.

And now for the best bit.

Gently rub the masking fluid with your finger or a putty rubber, to reveal the shockingly white surface beneath. And if the paper should come away with the mask, then perhaps the fluid was too old or the paper was damp or simply not of a good enough quality.

Finally, the telegraph pole. It's there to balance the composition, actually and heighten the loneliness of the scene in an ironic way, not to provide the irascible old misanthrope who lives in my shed with a way of communicating with his loved ones.

You've come a long way since your piece of paper was nothing but virgin wood pulp and cotton; you've negotiated the manifold dangers of working with a gimmick like masking fluid and now you're going to ruin it all with one of those finishing touches that will, rather than enhance your painting, reveal your ineptitude to the rest of the world. The devil, they say, is in the details and this one was done with the credit card again, dipped in the same kind of 'crap'. If it looks slightly ragged and incomplete, leave it. Reality isn't pin-sharp everywhere all the time.

The colours look different on this final image, by the way, because I scanned it rather than relying on the dubious picture quality of my 'phone.

Here's another, more complicated effort. The trees are little, random gaps between broad applications of masking fluid and the twigs, branches and details on the barn were put on with a cut up credit card and a palette knife. The paper, once again, is 300lb hand-made cotton and flax from Two Rivers.

iPad Art Step-By-Step: A Tuscan Chapel (Part 2: Hills)

Continuing from my previous post when we created the glowing orange background to this little, Tuscan cliché.

 Tap on the Layers icon. This should be a little '2' in the bottom right corner. Add a new layer by tapping '+' in the top right corner of the new pop-up window.

Now select black by tapping on the tablet in the bottom left corner.

Now, let's edit another brush. Here are the settings you'll need (click on this image to enlarge).

Draw your hill using a big, wide brush (about 330). You can edit the shape with the eraser (80) and don't forget, there's always the undo function!

Tap the cog, then 'Transform' and with one finger, move your hill into place. Using two fingers will re-size it.

Duplicate your hill, by tapping the icon to the left of '+' in the pop-up, Layers window.

Tap the cog again and select 'Flip Horizontal' from the menu.

Tap the cog yet again and this time, select 'Transform' to move and resize your hill.

Tap the Layers icon, adjust the transparency of each layer with the slider and merge the layers by tapping on the twisty arrow. The Brushes app has a limit of ten layers, so it's a good idea to merge them occasionally. Make sure, however, that you are merging the correct layer by checking which one is highlighted in blue-grey. Make certain also, that you no longer want to edit the layers you're about to merge or you'll be hammering that Undo icon!

Duplicate your merged layer and adjust its transparency by dragging the slider in the Layers menu.

Transform and/or flip it by tapping the cog.

Add a road by erasing a section of the first layer of hills. It's easier to do this before you merge them, but if like me, you've gone too far, by pinching and dragging with two fingers, you can zoom in for some fairly precise work.

For your PDF copy of the complete tutorial, please visit www.davidchandler.net/shop.html.

iPad Art Step-By-Step: A Tuscan Chapel (Part 1: Sunset)

Created on the iPad using a Wacom Bamboo stylus and the Brushes 3 app.

Before you begin, you will need to have downloaded the extra layers for Brushes, available as an in-app purchase.

Create a new image by tapping '+' in the top right corner of the menu screen. Then tap 'Create'.

Tap the coloured tablet in the bottom left corner of the next screen and select a bright red. Check the position of the three little circles as shown.

Tap the cog on the bottom right of the screen. Then tap 'Fill Layer'.

Red!

Tap the little '1' in the bottom right corner of the screen, then tap '+' as shown. This adds another layer to your image.

Now tap the coloured tablet again (bottom left - it should be red!) and this time, select a bright yellow.

Tap the cog again, then tap 'Fill Layer'.

Here, on the layer menu you can see the two layers you have created. On the main screen, however, because the yellow layer is at 100% opacity, you cannot see the red layer beneath it. Move the slider (circled) to 50% and the screen should go...

...orange! 

Select the eraser (3rd icon from the left along the bottom), then tap on the brush-shape icon, immediately to its right. Next, select any brush and tap on the arrow to its right to edit it.

You are now in brush edit mode and the top of the menu has changed from 'Brushes' to 'Brush'. Select  the first brush-shape in the row and set all the sliders as shown.

Tap and drag to see all the settings for the brush you're editing, then set the brush-size slider to maximum.

Re-size your image by pinching the screen with two fingers. By working on a smaller image, you can make longer strokes with shorter movements!

 Now sweep backwards and forwards over the screen...

Sunset!

Pinch and drag with two fingers to restore the image to 100%.

For your PDF copy of the complete tutorial, please visit www.davidchandler.net/shop.html.

Dinosaur Feathers

I gave this talk at TEDx Bradford On Avon last November and again, last weekend at TEDx Warminster School, with a few adjustments. I made the accompanying illustrations on the iPad using the Brushes 3 app, in real-time, as I spoke:

Let's begin at the end.

I teach people how to paint and draw.

I’ve done it for nearly twenty years now. 

And lots of people seem to want to do it, but it isn't easy.

Wassily Kandinsky said that you could learn the craft of carpentry and be fairly certain of being able to make a table, but you could learn how to paint and draw and never be sure of creating a work of art.

So it can be really frustrating and you can't make any money at it. So why do it?

After a few years I began to think. All these people; If I knew why they really wanted to make art, then I might become better at teaching them how.

From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the crayon drawings of our children, the desire to make marks is fundamental. But why?

Imagine a world without birdsong.

About 230 million years ago. 

230 million is such an enormous number. It’s hard to conceive what it really amounts to. 

So, start counting now, take your nourishment intravenously and don’t sleep. 

You’ll arrive at 230 million sometime in 2017.

230 million years ago.

No birdsong.

No birdsong because there were no birds.

So here are the dinosaurs. 

10 million years go by, still no birds.

100 million years go by. 

Still no birds.

A highly intelligent dinosaur wouldn't be looking up at the empty trees and thinking that a few birds would brighten up the old swamp a bit. Birds would be completely outside the dinosaur frame of reference.

So too would a giant asteroid.

Anyway, about 60 million years before a giant asteroid changes the world of the dinosaurs for good, along comes caudipteryx. Caudipteryx lived in the Cretaceous Period. Its fossilised remains were found in China, along with thirty other species of feathered dinosaur. 

It was about the size of a peacock and couldn’t fly.

So the feathers were useless then.

Well, not really; they were for sex.

Display.

That’s what artists do, isn’t it? Display.

You know; pictures at an exhibition. It’s another kind of display.

Colour and movement. The sophisticated mating rituals of an advanced civilization.

You may not like the idea that the same primitive drive that put feathers on dinosaurs puts pictures on your walls, but a Damien Hirst spin painting is pretty and so too are feathers.

Birds, however, were not expected.

They just happened to happen.

Over time.

Huge amounts of it.

But dinosaurs had to happen first.

Here are some more numbers and another bird.

The billiard ball experiment is cited by Naseem Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

The black swan is a good analogy for those things that happen that are outside our frame of reference because in the Middle Ages, the defining characteristic of a swan was that it was a large, white bird. If it was a large bird of any other colour, it couldn’t be a swan. And that was that. 

Then along came a black swan and that was the end of the “all swans are white” model.

The “flat earth” model worked really well until Columbus stumbled upon America. 

On a daily basis, does it matter to you if the earth is round and not flat?

I wonder, how many models do we carry around in our heads that are actually redundant, unhelpful or simply untrue?

Okay. Some more numbers. 

The billiard ball experiment uses a computer model, created by the mathematician Michael Berry.

The question is this:

Can we accurately predict the movements of billiard balls on a billiard table? And if so, how far can we go?

You know. You whack the first one and off it goes, but where will it end up?

Okay. It turns out that mathematics can reliably predict the outcome of 2 impacts. That’s it.

If you want to predict as many as 9, you have to factor in the gravitational pull of anyone standing near the table. 

And to compute the 56th impact, according to Berry, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions. An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome.

And that is why billiards is a game.

How many billiard balls do we have in the auditorium today, I wonder?

All bouncing around.

So it seems that the unexpected is all around us.

And not just all around us, but in us, too.

JBS Haldane, eminent geneticist and biochemist said that after years of study, he still didn’t know why he did what he did. That it was a matter of chemistry, he thought.

And Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor in Neuropsychology at UCL said recently that actually, "We have very little access to what we're doing."

But here’s the thing:

"We think we do.”

And that’s the problem. We only think we’ve got it all worked out. We only think we know where we’re going.

And what’s on our minds.

But 90% of what the brain does is outside of our consciousness. We don’t know what it’s up to. You’re sitting on the sofa watching TV and it’s getting up to all sorts of stuff behind your back.

Like the family cat.

It's a kind of arrogance to believe that all you perceive is all that there is to the world. It's like saying that you know all there is to know.

I believe it's up to our scientists and our artists to show us otherwise.

But how?

“Fortune favours the prepared mind,” said Alexander Fleming.

Fleming was a great scientist, but a sloppy one. He left his laboratory in such a mess one weekend that when he returned on the Monday morning, he found mould growing in his petri dishes.

But Fleming didn’t bin the lot and say, "That was a waste of time." No, he studied his Mould Juice as he called it.

Later, he called it penicillin.

And in case you’re thinking that's an isolated incident:

Of the thousands of drugs on the market today. How many are used for the purpose for which they were originally developed?

Four.

Steve Jobs said, we think life is like a big, cosmic dot-to-dot drawing.

GCSE’s, A levels, a degree, a career, a pension. Do these things really tell the story of your life?

There aren’t any dots. 

Out there.

Waiting for you to join them up.

A painting isn’t like a dot-to-dot drawing either. If a painter knows exactly where every dot is going to go, he or she isn’t really being creative. They’re just doing again what they’ve already done and we know that if you do as you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

No. Being a great artist requires “giving to art what art does not have.”

Those are Francis Bacon’s words.

Give to art what art does not have. How do you do that?

Here are some more great artists:

“Make the accidental essential.” Paul Klee. 

“I never lose an accident.” JMW Turner.

They’re both saying the same thing as Alexander Fleming, aren’t they?

Some more words and some numbers about JMW Turner.

Turner was painting for more than 50 years and in that time produced 24,000 watercolours.

Under those conditions, accidents will happen.

He was inviting the unexpected. And he knew, that when you invite the unexpected you must expect the uninvited. It isn’t all good. And it doesn’t always seem to make sense.

Like dinosaur feathers.

That’s why so many of the artists I know are this complex mixture of arrogance and humility. They know about the accident thing. They know that they have to be both sloppy and great and that art, like life isn’t a dot-to-dot; it’s a messy branching bush and no one knows when or where the fruit will develop; nor how it will taste.

But they work hard to make it happen.

For sex, drugs, rock’n’roll... even for art.

Music, dance, drama, poetry, literature. As Professor Mark Pagel, head of the Evolution Research Lab in Reading says in his book, Wired For Culture, this is the glue that binds our society together.

And it’s as useful as feathers on a dinosaur.

Sometimes, when look at art...

We may hear birdsong

 Sometimes, when we make art...

 We fly.

To see the original talk at Bradford On Avon TEDx, click here.