Pencil To Paint Redux

The aim of my Pencil To Paint course is to explore the essential differences between the two disciplines and shed light on why many of us find it so difficult to move between the two. I meet many skilled draughtsmen and women who shy away from colour, saying that they either don't like it or need it or (more honestly, I think) confess that they don't really understand how to use it. When I was not so very much younger, a fellow artist who was looking over my work, stung me to the core when she remarked, "You're not a colourist, are you?"

It was true. I was fearless with a pen or a pencil, but with a brush and a set of paints, I descended into panic, swirling the brush around and around on the canvas as if I was stirring porridge, in the hope that I might get lucky and a brilliant painting would appear as if by magic.

All I ever got, in fact, was mud. Colour eluded me.

So what we'll do in Pencil To Paint, is begin by looking at what we do when we draw and we'll start by putting a line around things. It's what children do, quite naturally and it's also what Pablo Picasso did.

  

Part of the problem is that we know there isn't a line around real people and real birds: it's a convention. But it's one that will give us real trouble when we try to paint, if we take it for granted.

So, here's a way of depicting things that doesn't require a line:

 

In these drawings, we're looking at the spaces that things occupy as well as the relationships between them. In Japanese brush painting, this is known as Notān, which literally translated, means 'sparse/dense' or 'light dark harmony.' It's a simple binary that will really clarify the compositional elements in your painting.

This is a piece of Notān that everyone knows. The black describes the white, which describes the black. The elements are perfectly interlocked and this must also be the case for your painting. When you fill a canvas, the spaces around things are as important as the things themselves. As with the sentences in a novel or the phrases in a piece of music, every part of the picture plane has to be considered.

 

So I map my picture out in black and white and then add grey. It's much easier to tweak the composition at this point, when you've only got a few values to deal with. Note the addition of the black strip, the introduction of a table edge and the slight dropping of the 'horizon' line to the left of the bottle.

The next step is something of a leap, but this is where constant practise and familiarity with your chosen painting medium comes in - although, it will help if just this once, you forget the extravagance and squeeze out four times as much paint as you usually do onto your palette and (now you've thrown caution to the wind) use a brush that's at least twice as big as you ever thought you'd need. 

It's no good dreaming big if all you ever do is act small. 

We will, however, be keeping things simple and in Pencil To Paint, we'll play with just a couple of colours at first.

This is Process Cyan and Burnt Umber and with them, you can run the gamut of cool and warm tones, while making colour adjustments quite quickly and easily. Your  browns, for example can only be bluish and your blues only brownish and if this feels restrictive, let's take another look at maestro Picasso again:

When I painted my demo' piece at Dillington House last week, I spent as much time on the space between the bottle and the jug as I did on either object. Using just two colours plus white enabled me to concentrate on how I was painting rather than what. And thinking about Notān (the harmonising of lights and darks in my composition),  I soon realised that I needed to place the apple where it would lighten a part of the picture that would otherwise be quite dull (half-closing your eyes and squinting at the picture will help you to see this light/dark distribution more clearly).

With the tonal values of my colours balanced in this way, I needed only to add a thin glaze of yellow to my blue apple to complete the composition.

Okay. It isn't very elegant and it's certainly isn't realistic, but at least it looks the way I meant it.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."  Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

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.

The Camera Never Lies, But Only Tells Half The Truth

"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?"

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.

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.