Journey Without Maps

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

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

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

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

                                     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

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

The Fruit of All Knowledge - Part 2

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.