lightness, colouring, truth

Providence And The Failure of Eccentricity

2012-01-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." Goethe

I love this quote. Whenever I share it with those who are unfamiliar with it, I sense they have an instant feeling of kinship with it and a keen hope that it might, in fact, be true. But what does Goethe mean by Providence moving? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Providence as: the protective care of God or Nature as a spiritual power. That's a bit of a fuzzy notion for a rational, skeptical 21st Century human being, isn't it? Given that it will rain on your washing and toast always lands buttered side down, how can the whole universe get going just because you've made a decison? - a very dubious notion indeed, when you consider that there are now supposed to be more than 7 billion of us all trying to get God and Nature to dance the way we want them to.

My own explanation is a little less grandiose and based on recent findings in neuroscience about cognitive disinhibiton. According to Harvard University psychologist, Shelley Carson, 'cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival' and artists, apparently, have it in spades. Put simply, because artists are distracted neither by the rain on their washing or carpet fluff on their toast, their brains are free to concentrate on other stuff; stuff that other brains are filtering out: colours, textures, relationships, the strangeness of the familiar, the beauty of the banal and most importantly, new ways of doing things. Cognitive disinhibition also explains why so many arty types and geniuses are just that little bit eccentric.

If you want examples of the way the brain filters out 'irrelevancies', check out The Monkey Business Illusion or think about the last time you drove a new car and then noticed, as if for the first time, how many others just like yours were on the road.

I visited my oldest daughter in Manchester recently and we took in the Ford Madox Brown
exhibtion at the fantastic Manchester City Art Gallery. When Harriet got home, she realised that FMB's The Last Of England, was on the cover of a book she's been reading for quite some time. 'I must walk around with my eyes shut,' she lamented. Not really. Ford Madox Brown's masterful evocation of the great emigrating movement of the 1850s just wasn't important to her.

Now it is.

Providence moving? It's been moving all along. I think what Goethe was talking about was giving ourselves a chance to catch up with it...

None So Blind...

2011-11-20T10:23:00.001-08:00

Esref Armagan is an artist from Istanbul who paints pictures of sailingboats and lakes; quaint, red-roofed houses; windmills dotted on thehillside and multi-coloured fish swimming in the deep blue sea.

Armigan's paintings are charming but not remarkableenough to warrant all the fuss that’s been made of them, unless you are aware of the fact thatthis particular artist has been blind since birth. Then you may wonder at the way he is able toincorporate into his paintings so many elements that cannot be felt. His clouds, for example are fluffy and vapourous but how can a blind man feel his way around a cloud? An apple, yes - but a cloud? He gives everything its correct colour has a reasonable grasp ofthree-dimensional space and he can deal with perspective; his roads narrow intothe distance, his houses diminish in size. His pictures are as credible as those of many sighted people and infact, a great deal more competent than most. When asked how he does it, he says that he was taught, not formally, butby casual acquaintances who told him what the world looked like.

Obviously, the mechanics of actually getting the paint onto the paperand in the right place, is for him, a laborious matter and he’s had to memorisethe location of all the colours in his paintbox.

But what intrigues me, is not how good he is, but how bad most of therest of us are, if we can only produce art that is as good as a blindman’s. Does this not illustrate thatwhen it comes to picturing the world, we’re most of us hardly using our sightat all?

Our brains are swamped with so much informationat every second of the day that we only take from a given situation thoseelements that are absolutely essential to the moment.

The rest we discard.

And this is how we negotiate our way through the hazards and the humdrum of life; withincomplete information and assumptions about things rather than truths.

So while we’re swarming across the globe at ever-increasing speeds,pausing only to squeeze the button on our digital cameras, the artist must stop and taking his time, allow the world to slowly manifest itselfaround him. He or she will look at all theinformation that the rest of us have discarded and give it their full attention.

Because the artist knows that if you want to be able to paint the world youhave to learn how to see it. And in order to truly see it, you first have toovercome your own blindness.

The Power of Art and the Art of Freedom

2011-10-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

The one work of art I should love to see, that Iknow I never will see, is FilippoLippi’s drawing of his Moorish master. Done in 1423, when he was seventeen, with a fire-blackened stump on awhite-washed wall, it was the portrait that freed him from slavery and savedhim from a premature death, chained to the oars of a Moorish galley. Regardless of it’s technical merit, it mustrank as one of the most sublime examples ever of the power of art.

Filippo probably had little idea that thedrawing would earn him his freedom, but something drove him to produce it allthe same. Perhaps he had some notionthat by flattering his subject he might make his own life a little easier. He had been a compulsive scribbler since theage of eight. That is why when the Prior ofthe Carmelite Convent where he was educated, found that little Filippo had drawn all over his prayer book, he turned him over to a drawingmaster. Now, with things at their worst,Filippo Lippi simply turned to what he knew best.

What’s certain is that we cannot ascribe to Filippo, at that time, the popular view of the artist as concupiscent, tormented genius churning out expensive artefacts for the privileged few. And I doubt very much that his master had any thoughts about preserving the drawing or dismantling the white-washed wall and selling it. As an investment then, it would have been worthless, but by granting him his freedom, Filippo’s owner made a direct investment in the life of the artist himself. The whole of Filippo Lippi’s life’s-work sprang from that moment, when the master of slaves gazed at his portrait and recognised in it more than his own face.

So how does this square with today’s painter? Many of us paint as a hobby, a pastime - and we feel there’s something inferior about that idea, don’t we? But is that actually any worse than painting for money?

What would you rather be? A professional whodoes it for money or an amateur who does it for love?

Many of us, like Fillippo Lippi, simply feelcompelled to do it. But why? Are we day-dreaming? Merely doodling our time away? Do we mind at all if all we create fulfilsits destiny in the dusty space under the bed? If that’s so, is painting for us just an elaborate form of therapy?

Good paintings, though, seem to work on severalother levels too.

Firstly, the colours and marks alone may engageus with their vivacity in the same abstract way as music can.

Secondly, there is the story that the artist isattempting to tell. It may sound banalbut every picture does tell astory.

When Monet paints a landscape, for example, hemight be telling you a story about the passing of time; when Millet paints alandscape, that story might be about the life of the French peasant; whenVan Gogh paints his landscape, it could well be the story of his own mentaldisintegration.

Thirdly and most importantly, every paintingneeds a viewer, just as every piece of music needs a listener or it might aswell never exist.

And what happens in the mind of the viewer canbe utterly magical.

Think of the Moorish slave master.

Be aware of the power of Art in the minds ofothers.

And draw and paint, if you feel so compelled,but do it like Filippo, as if your freedomdepended upon it.

The Camera Never Lies, But Only Tells Half The Truth

2011-09-29T01:57:00.000-07:00

"Incredible oil painting that is so realistic it could be a photograph is voted the national gallery's best"

This banner headline was posted in the Mail On-line just over a week ago. You can read the full article here.

When it comes to depicting things, the camera is hard to beat. For speed, ease and the relative accuracy of the images it reproduces, whether as a still, a film or video, the camera is king. You point, you click and the entire scene is swallowed up by the lens and converted, in the blink of an eye into millions of coloured pixels that melt in your mind into the thing you think you saw. By the time even the most cack-handed amateur has done this, the artist hasn't even begun to unscrew the cap of his tube of titanium white, let alone lay out his brushes.

It wasn't always like this, of course. Time was, when the photographer was burdened with a debilitating amount of kit, his subject had to remain still for an age and nothing would end up on the photographic plate unless the whole scene had been lit by a small explosion of magnesium. Nevertheless, even in those days, artists knew that their days were numbered and sought ways to depict reality that went far beyond the scope of the camera. That is why we have Picasso's Femme Qui Pleure, Quinn's Blood Head and Emin's Bed, to name but a few (they're all portraits aren't they?).

What troubles me, about the Mail's headline, is that it uses photography as some kind of benchmark for reality. The people who voted for Jan Mikulka's painting are judging the artist on his ability to copy a photograph, not on his contribution to portraiture or even on his ability to capture his sitter's personality. Mikulka should be applauded for his craftmanship and his attention to detail, but beyond that, the exercise seems entirely pointless. There are however, many painters of Jan Mikulka's ilk filling exhibitions like the BP Portrait Award with their work. I admire their skill, but at the same time, I'm dismayed that they have relegated painting to the act of reproducing what the camera already does so well.

The camera, meanwhile, is so ubiquitous and moderates so many aspects of our lives, that it has become the arbiter of what constitutes our reality. We live in an age that is dominated by the flat screen (I'm typing this on one). Flat screens, littered with photographic images, provide us with our news, our information and our entertainment, so it's little wonder that the boundaries are becoming blurred. The trouble is, that the camera still doesn't do reality that well. Aside from the obvious fact that the images it produces are flat, the quality will depend entirely on your photographic paper or the resolution of your screen; camera lenses can still only focus on one thing at a time and they're still very bad at dealing with contrasting areas of light and shade (just try taking a photograph of a sunset). And if you've ever bumped into a TV celebrity in the street, weren't you a little surprised at how unlike their on-screen persona they seemed?

If photographs are really realistic, why do plant scientists find botanical illustrations more reliable than photographs when identifying specimens? And why does a urologist I know, eschew the camera and paint watercolours of the operations he performs for the edification of his students? Perhaps it all depends on what aspect of reality you're interested in. For most of us, the glossy sheen of a 6 x 4 print will do.

Picasso was once upbraided by a man for not painting realistically. When the artist asked him what he meant by 'realistic', the man reached in a pocket, produced his wallet and took out a photograph of his wife. Looking at the photograph, Picasso said, "Why is she so small?"

Bottling Your Painting Holiday

2011-07-19T03:01:00.000-07:00

When I began teaching on painting holidays, my preoccupation, quite naturally was with the imparting of technique. I took it as a given that our novel surroundings would be uppermost on students' minds and that the main object of a week abroad would be how to depict the trees, the mountains, the rooftops, the locals; you name it, to a foreigner, even a doorknob can look fascinating.

Painting holiday students are acquisitive creatures, as devoted to the idea of making everything subject to their paintbrush as the most avid Japanese tourist with a camera.

At Chateau L'Age Baston, even before they've unpacked their suitcases, students' eyes are alighting on the geraniums in pots by the Guardian House, the well in the courtyard, the pigeonierre with its pagoda roof, the ivy around the pantry door, the big gates to the walnut orchard and Napoleon and Picasso, the baudet donkeys. But while a serious study of any of these subjects is valuable, not a single one of them makes a picture.

The strangeness of our surroundings can put our acquisitiveness into over-drive. Everything that flits into view must be netted, put in a jam jar and logged. It's what our sketchbooks are for, after all. But I've acquired the pigeonierre ten times over and the geraniums and the well. My I-Spy collection of L'Age Baston artefacts may be complete but I'm not necessarily any nearer to creating a single work of art.

Something else happens on a painting holiday. Amateur artists who only snatch a couple of hours a week to paint (if they're lucky) find themselves with time on their hands. They sit in the garden under the walnut trees, with the morning sun upon their faces and all the ideas they thought they had evaporate like yesterday's dreams. The little sable brush they couldn't wait to pick up begins to feel as unwieldy as a tree trunk and the lunch bell dangles mutely outside the kitchen door. Time to ourselves, you see, also means time with ourselves. There are no distractions now. For the first time in years, perhaps, we are alone with our wishes, but what exactly are they? The colours glow brightly and the paper is waiting.

So these days, I place more emphasis on what motivates us and the sleight of hand, or trick of the mind, that turns a picture into a work of art.

There is, as far as I know, only one way to jump out of an aeroplane. It cannot be done by degrees. You are either trembling on the threshold, with several cubic tonnes of air rushing by you and the ground, a hazy notion at your feet or you are falling - or is it flying? And so, the artist must take a leap too. The white paper is a void as big as the sky. Choose the brightest, boldest colour in your paintbox. And just as the skydiver has no choice but to let the air carry him or her where it will, so you let the colour lead you across the paper. It may not be the shape that is in front of you, but it will be your shape. Do not be too ambitious. No need for somersaults. It's enough that you have at last, jumped.

These are examples of Day One exercises at L'Age Baston. Students were asked to choose no more than three colours and to put paint directly onto the paper without any preliminary drawing. The only other rules were 1) to ensure every colour shape related to the one next to it as well as to the boundaries of the picture itself and 2) to leave a narrow gap between different colours. This would ensure that our pictures would be as bright as possible. Unnatural and inaccurate, they may be, but we had all stopped collecting things and instead of bottling the world, we had begun to add to it.

Isn't that what being creative is all about?

The Grammar Of Drawing Part 2

2011-04-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

From the Oxford English Dictionary, to draw also means to pull, to extract, to take in and to disembowel.

When I uploaded these drawings to a Facebook album, they provoked a flurry of responses, from downright indignation to outright enthusiasm. Perhaps they could spark so much in people's minds because they were of so little; a few random scribbles that hinted at forms and suggested narratives but ultimately refused to reveal their hidden message. There was no message, of course and those who require some kind of polemic from their art felt cheated, while others who are happy with mysteries and unanswerable questions, felt liberated.

The drawings were made by five students who attended my Grammar Of Drawing course at Dillington House (see the previous post). Standing in a circle at their easels, I asked them to draw me in long, flowing lines that filled the paper as I moved about the studio. After a few marks were made, they were required to pause, then move in an anti-clockwise direction to the next easel, where they picked up the drawing tool that had been left by the previous student and continue drawing.

My intention was to acquaint my students with the physicality of drawing. It is not like writing a cheque; something to be done with the fingers and wrists, alone, but with the whole body. If a singer can produce their voice from below the diaphragm, why can not an artist draw with his or her entire being? A singer may make us fully aware of the quality of their voice, without having to frame a single word. Is it necessary, then, for the artist to draw a pot, or a person or a pomegranate before we take any notice of the kind of mark they are making?

The first drawing tells you something about how well I can draw pots, but seems to stop right there. This is drawing, simply as a means of transferring data from one medium to another. The second drawing hints at something more elusive. We study the line in its quest to give form; we see ebb and flow and the traces of movement, at times hesitant, at others, sure. It may not tell you much about pots but it is quite eloquent about what it means to confront the void, to hold onto that charcoal and draw.

The Grammar of Drawing at Dillington House

2011-01-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

This course seeks to re-establish the centrality of drawing to art practise. Using everyday objects and the landscape around us, we will learn how to measure and to accurately depict our world.

We will learn which marks to use when we wish to evoke light and shade, for example, or when we wish to create texture or movement.

We will learn how to create spatial depth using the rules of perspective and discover what is meant by chiaroscuro and nōtan.

We will come to understand the difference between line and tone, and study the fine difference between reality and abstraction.

But we will also play, for in play, we may discover how drawing can help us to create a language that is uniquely our own. No previous art experience is necessary, only an enthusiastic an open mind.

The Grammar of Drawing is a four day residential course in a superb country house setting and runs from 21 February to 25 February 2011.

For more information visit www.dillington.com

Beauty In The Eye Of The Beholder?

2011-01-17T00:19:00.000-08:00

Pick any object. The chances are, the longer you look at it, the more interesting it will become. Drawing and painting help to focus the attention and coax the mind into seeing the beauty that is always present. Beauty, however, is not an attribute of the object in view and to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is merely to suggest that everyone's appreciation of beauty is different (I think sprouts are beautiful, but you might not). Rather say, beauty is in the mind of the beholder; the result of deep understanding, when one at last becomes intimate and fully acquainted with one's subject.

Talking To My Wall

2010-12-06T03:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

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

2010-09-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-14T01:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-10T00:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-12T13:53:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-07T01:20:00.000-07:00

Click here: Image Wall

100 canvases for Black Swan Arts, November 2010.

Dogs and Cats and Chemistry

2010-04-16T00:44:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-05T01:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

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.

A Christmas Card

2009-12-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

Something provocative and challenging for Christmas, I thought, instead of the usual snowmen, Santas, cribs and candles. At some point or other, in just about every household, someone has to negotiate one of these things, put one hand on that cold, clammy breast while the other, charged with herby breadcrumbs, ventures up its vent. What could be more redolent of Christmases past, present and to come? In my mind, it was to be plump, appetising, innocuous; humorous even. The reality was a bleak and cheerless memento mori; a Goya under a fluorescent light; a Freud of the kitchen counter top. Not really Christmas card material at all.

And so, I retreated to the safety of something more traditionally iconic. Mistletoe is culturally replete; pagan, Christian and parasitic, all at the same time, but it only looks right when its hanging upside down.

I've also become overfond of phthalo green mixed with white and a little red. The result is antiseptic rather than festive.

Out came the watercolours, a soft, fat nylon brush and a determination to finish the whole thing in as few strokes as possible.

At last, something neither coldly clever nor vapidly original. I find its green grin uplifting. Or are those arms outstretched? A child could have done it in a few minutes but it took me the entire day.

How I See It

2009-12-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

These four words are the last recourse of the cornered student, whose painting has not gone as they had intended. Looking defiantly up at me as I gaze down at their work, they fend off any criticism with the phrase, "But that's how I see it."

Really?

Is this how Picasso actually saw his women? Or is it the result of a radical new approach to painting after the camera had cornered the market on single viewpoint images?

And is this how Bacon saw people? Or is it a commentary on humanity after four years of world-wide warfare?

Are these great artists, in fact, doing anything different to the child who painted this, who was working with her colours and her feelings at the same time and giving them both equal sway?

Isn't it also a matter of what happens when you just put the paint on?

Bacon said that he worked with what the paint suggested. Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us realise truth.

Are their paintings how they saw things?

No, but it's how they meant them.

The Green Lane

2009-11-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

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

The Fruit of All Knowledge - Part 2

2009-11-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

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.