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.

Gainsborough And The Perils Of Broccoli Before Bedtime

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) wasn't much of a one for travel. While other artists were risking their necks and their reputations on the European Grand Tour, Gainsborough wished for nothing more than to walk off to "some sweet Village where [he] could paint landskips."

But, more often than not, in order to paint pictures like this, he would venture no further than his own parlour.

"He would make models - or rather thoughts - for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table... This table, held sacred for the purpose, he would order to be brought to his parlour, and thereupon compose his designs. He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand or clay, bushes of mosses and lichens and set distant woods of broccoli."

The first bit is easy. You pay a visit to your local greengrocer, splurge on broccoli, celeriac and the dirtiest parsnips you can find; buy some cocktail sticks and a kilo of Blu Tack, so that your broccoli trees will stand up straight and invest in a few mirror tiles from Ikea. Garnish with a sprig of rosemary from the garden.

If you're really committed to your art, as Gainsborough obviously was, you can crush the mirrors so that your otherwise unconvincing pond will at least have a few ripples in it. Gainsborough also used sulphurous lumps of whiting and wet coal, but I'd forget about that unless you can equip yourself with a pair of tongs. But if you really want to live dangerously, as Gainsborough obviously did, you may complete your panorama with a handful of brussels sprouts.

It isn't easy to spot the brussels sprouts in a Gainsborough landscape, but according to his rival Joshua Reynolds, that's exactly what he used. Perhaps he used them for the clouds.

Now for the hard part.

Paint your landscape so that it actually looks like a landscape and not, well... chopped vegetables.

A few sketches to check your composition will help, but most important of all...

Use your imagination.

According to Margaret, one of his daughters, Gainsborough had to give up this pleasurable pastime because, "he thought he did not sleep so well after having applied to drawing in the evening not being able to divest himself of the ideas which occupied his mind."

Too much broccoli has the same effect on me too.

Images courtesy of the Claverton Art Group, Bath, Somerset, UK.

The Art Of Changing The World

Chris Wise likes to explore the heavens with his telescope, he likes to play the guitar, and he likes to doodle. More than most, he appreciates the power of the doodle and when he talks, it's like listening to more doodling. You have no idea where he's going or what he'll end up with, but the loops and swirls and branches will develop in the most fascinating way. Sometimes the doodle stops making sense; there are jumps, non-sequiturs, but they always lead back to theme.

The theme is improving the world for benefit of mankind.

Which, he says, is what engineers do.

The Millennium Bridge began with a doodle. So, too, did the London 2012 Velodrome.

Big projects worth millions of pounds that involved hundreds of people with innumerable specialties, that began in a humble way.

With a line.

But how else, is one supposed to begin?

I write this over and over again when I take drawing and painting classes. So often, our attempts to create are confounded by an all-too-reasonable desire to impress.

Chris Wise has won many prestigious awards and is a fellow of RIBA, the RSA and the Royal Academy of Engineering who granted him their most prestigious medal. He has worked all over the world with the likes of Rogers, Foster and Piano. His work is useful, impressive and changes lives and it all began in a back bedroom with a doodle.

The link to his company website is here.

At the end of his talk at Rook Lane Arts recently, a member of the audience asked Wise for some advice about his son, who hoped to be an engineer. He was about to take a year out after his studies and he wanted to know if his son should accept an internship, play his violin or climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Wise replied that if the man's son wanted a job, he should take the internship.

"That's what I told him," said the man, somewhat triumphantly.

"But," said Wise, "If he wants to be a better engineer, he should play his violin or climb a mountain."

Here's a brief animation of the talk that Chris Wise gave. I made it in real-time on the iPad, as he spoke, using the Brushes 2 app.

The Holburne Portrait Prize 2012

Mr Lindsay Clarke, author (acrylic on canvas)

This portrait of Lindsay Clarke is not an attempt to lay bare the character of an award-winning writer but rather to use his magnificent head to make a simple painting, in which no clues are given and the sitter’s gaze becomes irrelevant. It was accomplished after a single sitting, during which more time was spent on conversation, beer and cakes than on art. Emblem or icon; the result looks like it belongs on a postage stamp, a Roman coin or a banknote but somehow, Clarke’s character still seems to percolate through the inert, polymerised pigment.

To see the prize-winning portraits, click here.

Art and Wine

For many artists, matters of the palette and the palate are inextricably linked. Just look at all the sumptuous still-lifes in our museums and art galleries; the tables laden with food; bright fruit on glimmering pewter and glistening crystal cradling darkly glowing wine. Contrast that with the popular trope of the starving artist, bartering a freshly-painted masterpiece at the bistro, for a platter of bread and cheese and a carafe of vin de table.

Although the painter may be wedded to one sense in particular, there is a good chance that he or she is not completely divorced from the pleasures afforded by the others. These two still-lifes by Picasso and Braque are celebrations of all our senses, and a bottle of wine lurks in both. When we are carried away by sound or colour, do we not call ourselves 'intoxicated'?

Google 'art and wine' and you'll get 365,000,000 results. Festivals combining the two abound. At every exhibition opening night I've ever attended, wine is the natural accompaniment. Nothing else quite stimulates the senses while loosening the inhibitions, the tongue and the purse strings.

So when I was invited by Jason Yapp to illustrate Yapp Brothers' 2013 wine list, I didn't hesitate to accept. I knew that I'd be in extremely good company. Willie Rushton, Glen Baxter, John Burningham and Quentin Blake have all illustrated the Yapp Brothers' wine list before. And I also knew that I'd be cosying up to some delectable wines. We're all sensualists. Yapp Brothers care about their taste buds and their olfactory epithelia as much as I do about my retinas.

Wine arouses passion; it has its stories and its landscapes and it's a natural subject for the artist. But where to begin?

I decided to restrict myself to the iPad. With the summer taken up with residential courses at home and abroad, I'd have few opportunities for studio work. As long as I remembered to pack my charger, I could 'paint' wherever I happened to be. And using the Brushes and ArtRage apps would help to create a fresh identity for the list and help to keep the visuals graphically simple. The iPad also gave me an opportunity to make discoveries and to work outside the realm of the frozen tableau that is the artist's traditional domain. 

This is Chateau Fouquet, home of the Filliatreau's and a rather good Cabernet Franc.