Just how do we get from this...
To this?
"I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck."
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) on Matthew Smith
I remember as a child, the excitement of producing a drawing with which I was really pleased; one that was so good, I thought, that it cried out for the addition of colour. Even then, I knew that colour was the ultimate test of my artistic skills. How often had I heard adults say, "That's lovely. Are you going to colour it in?" Eagerly, I would get my crayons and begin. But before long, my art would turn from absorbing pastime to tedious labour. Far from improving my picture, I felt as if I was defacing it and all my lovely lines would disappear under an increasingly frustrating tangle of incoherent scribbling.
For most of us, our relationship with art begins in a disappointingly similar way. We begin with lines. We understand them. Lines describe things. They have definite boundaries. But colours blend and blur. Colour is exotic, complex, and psychological. With colour an artist can make magic; for most of us, all we manage is mud.
If I can draw, I remember asking myself, why can't I paint?
Thinking in blocks is the key. In the same way that we speak in sentences rather than single words and composers write phrases rather than notes, painting requires a leap into a fully integrated way of picture-making where every colour, every stroke describes every other colour and stroke. And that is why it is so difficult. Colour can exist in the mind as a formless quality of light, but when we bring it out into the world, it must possess a shape. Even Rothko, who did his best to create shapeless paintings, was restricted by the rectangular proportions of his canvases. Colour and brushstroke, therefore, are inextricably intertwined and to separate them out leads to the tyranny of the colouring book. When I paint a pot or a pear, I imagine I am loading my brush with that object which I then mould onto the canvas. I am not filling in a pre-ordained shape; instead, I invite the object to manifest itself and work hopefully towards that magical moment when, as Francis Bacon said, "the image is the paint and vice-versa."
From Pencil To Paint
2 July
10am to 4pm
photo credit: Debbie Hart at Studio Paradiso painting holidays in Tuscany
