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

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

Bottling Your Painting Holiday - Part 2

I've just returned from ten fantastic days at Studio Paradiso with our hosts, Dermot and Kathryn. As we were operating out of a new venue this year, on the Torrentello Estate in the Lunigiana, we gave ourselves a little time before the students arrived to make notes and prepare...

Then all we had to do was wait for our guests.

With all the usual domestic chores taken care of by someone else (thank you, Sarah) and delicious, local food put under their noses at appropriate hours of the day (thank you Dermot and Kathryn), artists of all abilities could look forward to a whole week of undiluted, uninterrupted art... and a landscape that transforms from beguiling beauty to recalcitrant wretch with every stroke of the brush.

The problem?

Well, just what are you going to do with all that scenery?

Just how are you supposed to get all that green, all those trees, mountains, footpaths, telegraph poles and bee orchids onto your little bit of paper? Suddenly, all your colours are wrong and while you see magic all around you, all that ends up in your sketchbook is scribble.

Funny how all the "me" time that you've been looking forward to for weeks, can turn into "poor me" time in less than twenty-four hours.

Thank goodness for vino locale and Torrentello's wood-fired pizza oven, is all I can say.

 So, what's the answer?

Temper all that ambition with a little realism, I say.

The landscape is a complex phenomenon of shadows and light, of colour, sensation and memory and you're going to capture it all on a bit of mashed up wood pulp, a stick with some animal hair tied to one end and blobs of different coloured dirt mixed with glue?

 I don't think so.

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss born sculptor and painter, said that "in order to realise something" you had "to transform it." In other words, stop trying to get what's 'out there' onto your canvas and start trying to get what's 'in there' out. Pay attention to yourself and your materials. And keep asking the following question:

The fact is, the landscape will keep on changing while you're working on it. It is a repository of infinite moods. Your painting isn't. Every year, wherever I teach, I write this on the board in bigger and bigger letters.

What you end up with won't be the landscape you saw - leave that behind you, in Italy or France or wherever else you find yourself - but it will be what happened when you tried to paint the landscape you saw.

That's valid, isn't it?

Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky wrote a tremendously difficult solo for the bassoon at the beginning of his masterwork, The Rite Of Spring. Rightly daunted by the prospect of playing it before the maestro, the chief bassoonist went away and practiced and practiced until he'd got it note perfect. At the next rehearsal, however, Stravinsky was far from satisfied with the bassoonist's efforts. When he remonstrated with the composer that he'd worked hard until he could play it perfectly and that in his opinion, he'd played it faultlessly, Stravinsky told him that he didn't want the sound of someone playing it perfectly; he wanted the sound of someone trying to play it.

Every landscape is perfect, but you are only human. That's the kind of realism I admire.

Set painting for Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring by Nicholas Roerich

Knowing Your App From Your Elbow

Besides the sweet shop shrubbery and tree trunks the colour of liquorice allsorts, the other abiding image of Hockney this year has been of the maestro himself, sitting and sketching, with a fag in one hand and an iPad in the other. It's enlightening to see an acknowledged great working in a medium that hitherto has been the province of children, geeks and fantasy artists. One imagines it's a bit like watching that other David - Beckham - playing Subbuteo; only less likely.  But there it is, hundreds of Hockney's iPad images have been appearing in respectable art galleries as well as online, so like it or not, thanks to Hockney, iPad art has achieved legitimacy with astonishing rapidity.

But what about the feel and the smell of oil paint? purists may say. How can these images be unique? Where's the skill?

Anyone who's tried to navigate the slick surface of an iPad screen, leaving a vapour trail of coloured pixels beneath their index finger, will know that the business requires a fine degree of manual dexterity and hand/eye co-ordination. The thing doesn't draw for you and if you're no good with pencil and paper, you'll be even worse with an iPad. Of course, it's a mass-produced item, but so too, is a tube of oil paint; at least since Winsor and Newton started making them in the 1830's. The nostalgists among us may lament the iPad's lack of tactility and its odourlessness but neither of these things are, in my view, prerequisites for great art. It has to look right way before I care whether or not it smells right. And as for the work's presence, its hand-made, artisan-crafted look, this has been a debate in art long before Damien Hirst started paying people to paint his dot pictures; before Warhol, too, in fact, when Pieter Breughel the Younger set up a factory to reproduce his dad's masterpieces back in the sixteenth century.

Although the iPad signals a huge change in the way we make art, it is not about to replace other paint media - yet. It is, however, an extremely valuable tool for the artist to add to his or her kitbag. Most usefully, it is paintbrush, pencil and paper combined. Most powerfully, it is both shop window and gallery, too.

So let's not spend too long worrying about whether or not the iPad signals the end of art any more than Vincent Van Gogh fretted about having his canvases shipped ready-made from Paris. Let us concentrate, instead, on the challenges that new technology offers the artist. By far the biggest for any iPad artist, has to be to give their work character, to transform that immutable little rectangle into a magic window that makes us look, with a fresh mind upon our world.

So what's new?

All images © David Chandler created on ArtRage for iPad.

David Chandler will be teaching art for iPad at Studio Paradiso (23 May - 2 June and 21 September - 5 October 2012), Chateau L'Age Baston (23 June - 21 July 2012), Exeter Phoenix (19 February 2013) and Dillington House (2 , 23 March & 4 July 2013).