From Pencil To Paint

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

Dillington House

2 July

10am to 4pm

photo credit: Debbie Hart at Studio Paradiso painting holidays in Tuscany

Briefly In Sicily

The idea was to put David Chandler (art tutor, watercolourist and lover of anything that will fit on a plate or in a wine glass) together with Loredana Waters (unsurpassable Sicilian chef, professional enthusiast and lover of all things Italian) in a villa in Sicily and invite a bunch of people to join them for a week of fine art and fine food. What could be more enticing? Painting under the palms by day and supping under the starry sky by night on a Mediterranean isle, saturated with culture, where Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans had left their antique mark...

That's how I found myself heading out of Palermo through rush hour traffic in a little Lancia; Italian rock pounding from the car stereo and gallons of rain water hammering onto the windscreen.

Our destination that first evening was Messina, where we would be staying with friends of Loredana. The only thing between us and a bed for the night? Two hundred and twenty kilometres, fifty tunnels and raindrops the size of baby birds, plonking onto the car roof.

Two things I learned during the first hour of our trip:  

1. Road-markings are for decorative purposes only and it's okay to reverse on Sicilian motorways if you are in dire need of a coffee, a doughnut and another CD of Italian rock music.

2. Said coffee, obtained over the counter of a late-night service station shop, will probably be the best you've ever tasted. The doughnut will be pretty good too, but the CD is likely to be quite another matter.

Cefalù, where we planned to stop for supper, was strangely difficult to find. After Taormina and Palermo, it's probably Sicily's most visited town and during the summer, owing to its mediaeval charm and sandy beaches, the population triples. But it seemed to me and even to the Sicilian at the wheel, that any connection between the road signs and the destinations they bore was entirely coincidental. Mercifully, after only one U-turn on a fairly quiet stretch of dual carriageway, we stumbled upon it and splashing downhill through pond-sized puddles, we found the ancient port sparkling in the darkness, its streets glossy with rainwater.

Our restaurant was a faintly chilly and cheerless place and would have been improved by the presence of a few more diners besides us. With the whole of Sicily awash, however, it was no surprise that we should be entirely alone. I looked around the room, counting the vacant chairs and tables and feeling embarrassed for the staff whom, I supposed, were feeling equally embarrassed for us. When my companion became embroiled in a long argument with the waitress who then stalked off, I was convinced that I had discovered the real reason for the restaurant's emptiness. But it turned out that Loredana and the waitress had just been discussing the squid. When I tasted it, I knew exactly why this little envelope of rubbery looking-flesh had aroused such passion. It was fabulously, mouth-meltingly fresh and as with the service station coffee, quite surpassed anything I had ever tasted - caught that morning, apparently; the only condition under which the chef would cook it.

After supper, Loredana announced that no visit to Cefalù would be complete without a visit to the old lavatoio, a kind of mediaeval, stone-built washing machine, which utilises the water that runs from the enormous rock which towers over the town and escapes through vents in the sea wall. So we ventured out into the tipping rain again and after losing our way only a couple of times, found the correct gateway. Descending the steps to the lavatoio, with the waves beating heavily against the old walls, we gazed thoughtfully at the ancient stones upon which equally ancient scrubbers got their clothes only slightly less wet than we were then. 

Drying out in the car and back on the road again, we found our way out of Cefalù on our third attempt. We were driving up a mountain in a rain storm, in the wrong direction, but hey, Messina had to be out there somewhere. And we were dry. 

Paccamora, as they say in Sicily.

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.