Lucie's "Finding your Way"

The Final Painting

2011-08-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

With so many different techniques and technical problems to get used to, this was without a doubt the hardest painting to get right.

An unusual aspect with defining the portraits of the figures was the fact that I could only paint the lightest part of the features, as the paint underneath was representing the shadows on the faces, and this was quite tricky to get used to.

Having read Man With a Blue Scarf recently, which is an account by Martin Gayford of posing for a portrait by Lucian Freud, Gayford includes a section from a 1954 article in Encounter where Freud explains his thought processes behind painting a portrait;

"The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist. And, since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model." (Gayford, 2010, p.48)

It must be said that the figure on the bottom left of my painting is the only one who actually looks like the person I was trying to depict. The other three only have a passing resemblance. So it was a reassurance to read the words of Freud with regard to getting a likeness. It allowed me to concentrate on other aspects of the painting, such as atmosphere, colour and tone.

The three dimensional aspect of the painting is obviously difficult to get across in a photo, which is why I tried to take these photos from a lower angle, it can be seen in some places where the pond weed can be viewed both below and above the perspex, which I think is the most effective aspect of the painting. Scratching through the top layer of acrylic was also used to suggest the forms of the grass and this too has worked well.

There are many techniques and ideas used and discovered during the making of this painting that I hope to carry forward into future paintings and future courses.

Gerhard Richter in the Tate Modern

2011-08-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

These are two of my logbook pages sketched and annotated when I was in the Tate Modern on the 13th of August. Above that is a photo of the room in the Tate, featuring paintings Cage 1 - 6, 2006, copyright the Tate Modern.

Seeing the paintings by Richter in the flesh was very different to what I expected them to be. There were a lot more variations and subtleties of colour that the photos of his paintings don't bring across. Two out of the three of my sketches - the green one and the yellow one - can be seen in the photo of the gallery, but the oranges and reds in these paintings seem to have been lost in their translation to photographic image.

The paintings really are enormous, I'd estimate about seven foot by seven foot, there were six in total in the room, two on each of the wide walls and one each on the narow walls. It made sitting on the benches in the middle of the room, where I sat for about an hour, feel like you were sitting in a goldfish bowl, or under the sea, surrounded by water on all sides. It validified my decision to include his work as reference for my under water painting.

Embedding the Perspex into the Canvas

2011-08-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

Once I'd outlined the figures onto the top layer on perspex I could start applying the pond weed to the bottom layer. I did this by painting roughly with a small sable brush then rubbing over it with oil pastels. I then splattered green and brown acrylic paint to represent small parts of duck weed that grow on the surface of the water.

Once I was happy with this bottom layer I started preparing the canvas. I sized, but didn't prime it - as I wanted the paint to be able to breath and not be sealed in by layers of emulsion. I then painted a base coat of brown paint so that the white canvas wouldn't show through. This photo on the left shows acrylic paint squeezed onto the canvas, along with white PVA glue.

This second photo shows the paint once it had been scrapped across with the plastering tool. The reds and greens are contrasting nicely and help to lift the browns and blacks from looking too muddy.

Embedding the perspex into the canvas was an interesting process as it was surprising how many air bubbles got trapped underneath and how much effort was involved with forcing them out. I'm glad that I didn't prime the canvas now because the tiny gaps left in the canvas allowed the air to be pushed out through the back easier than if it had all been sealed with paint.

This close up shows the interesting effect of the flickers of colour from the dried paint on the perspex reacting with the wet paint on the canvas. It reminds me of a nebula.

Starting the Final Painting for the Group Portrait

2011-08-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

This is the first stage of the final painting. This photo on the left shows the A2 acrylic study painted onto card on the left, with the beginning of the perspex painting the right. I used the large study as an image to be traced onto the perspex by laying the perspex sheet on top of the large study and drawing around the image with oil pastel. I worked on it this way because alterations that needed doing on perspex were much harder do than alterations on paper.

Once the oil pastel had been drawn on I applied the first coats of acrylic paint onto the perspex, using the same kind of brush strokes as Miro in his oil on copper paintings, using a hog's hair brush so that each one of the brush strokes would be visible.

Varnishing the Perspex

2011-08-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

There was one more logistical problem with painting onto perspex; the acrylic paint was very easy to scrape off. This was a big problem because of the durability needed for a painting that would be sent through the post for assessment. The only solution that I could think of was to coat the perspex and acrylic paint with a layer of acrylic varnish, but this itself threw up a problem because it resulted in less transparency through the perspex.

This photo on the left shows the small perspex study on the top, with an unpainted sheet of perspex sandwiched up against it underneath. The small study has been varnished, whilst the unpainted sheet has been varnished on only one side - the left hand side. It can be seen that there is a cloudy sheet masking the black paint underneath. I think the varnish on the painted study is slightly more cloudy because the acrylic paint hadn't dried for the full 24 hours before applying the varnish, and so it smudged slightly.

The poor visibility from the acrylic varnish is made even more obvious by the way it distorts light when looking through it into the distance, as in this photo on the left.

However, I've come to the decision that this distorting effect is actually quite appropriate for a painting depicting water in a pond, after all when is pond water ever crystal clear? For the parts of the perspex painting that are left free of acrylic paint, the varnish will act as a thin veil separating the lower levels of paint from the upper levels of paint.

Sample on Perspex

2011-08-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Having never painted onto perspex before, I wanted to be sure that the logistics of it were thought through before starting the full size painting. My plan was to incorporate three layers of paint - the canvas, the front of the perspex and also the back of the perspex - but I wanted to make sure that painting on the back of the perspex would actually contribute something constructive to the image.

This first photo shows one of the portraits roughly painted onto the front layer of perspex. There are strands and splatters of green on the back layer, representing the pond weed, whilst the dark paint underneath is a layer of canvas painted with acrylic, representing the mud. I was satisfied at this stage that these three layers worked well together.

Logistically I had a problem with how to stick the canvas and perspex together to made a solid and sturdy whole. Initially I'd thought to use glue around the edges, but this didn't seem satisfactory as I thought the glue would be visible. Researching further into the work of Brendan Stuart Burns, who also uses perspex in his aquatic paintings, I decided to emulate his technique and completely embed the perspex in paint, thereby using the paint as an adhesive.

This second photo shows the thick layer of paint that was prepared ready to embed the perspex into. I mixed in a lot of PVA glue to make absolutely sure that the two surfaces would bond (Burns also uses wax in his oil and perspex paintings which contributes to the adhesive properties).

This third photo shows the plastering tool, used as Gerhard Richter does, to drag the paint across the canvas - it also served to mix the paint and glue together, creating an even distribution of glue.

The final photo shows the small study embedded in the paint. The effect that I'm most pleased with is that the bottom layer of paint still looks wet and fluid. This is very different to the study shown in the first photo above, where the texture of the canvas can be seen through the transparent perspex. Though the full three dimensional effect isn't noticeable in a photo of the study it is very effective when seen in the flesh. The perspex itself is 5 mm thick, so there is quite a contrast between the front and the back layers, mimicking the effect of looking through water. Seeing the three layers of paint interacting together validated my decision to paint on the back of the perspex, as it would have been impossible to paint the strand and splatters of pond weed onto the wet layer of paint used on the canvas.

Painting on Copper

2011-08-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Joan Miro The Two Philosophers Oil on copper. 1936. Image from the MoMA website.

Painting onto perspex has brough up an issue that needs to be dealt with - should I camouflage the brush strokes or incorporate them into the texture of the painting? In my small perspex study I tried to camouflage the marks by smudging them with a cloth and spraying with water so they would blend together. However seeing this painting by Joan Miro on display in the Tate Modern made me think that incorporating the brush strokes would be worth experimenting with.

The Two Philosophers is painted with oil on a sheet of copper which creates a completely smooth surface for the paint to glide on and prevents the paint from sinking in, therefore each one of the brushstrokes is clearly visible. This smooth non-porous surface is very similar to a sheet of perspex, so it's a technique that I'll be including in my work.

Gerhard Richter

2011-08-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

Untitled. Image taken from the Bridgeman Education site.

Gallery Exhibiting work by Gerhard Richter, Hamburg Kunsthall, Hamburg, Germany, c. 1995. Image from the Bridgeman Education Site.

Gerhard Richter S With Child 1995 Oil on canvas, 52 x 56 cm. Image from the Bridgeman Education site.

http://www.gerhard-richter.com/quotes/

This link to the Gerhard Richter website includes a photo at the bottom centre of the page showing Richter dragging one of the large squgeegee tools that he uses to add more paint to the canvas whilst also dislodging and redistributing paint already applied underneath. It's the technique he would have used for image Untitled which I included above. Though no dimension sizes are given on the Bridgeman site it's obviously very large from seeing it in the context of the Hamburg Kunsthall in relation to the other painting.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=2&roomid=4896

The Tate Modern have a room of his paintings on display at the moment which will be very interesting to view when I go there next week.

At the moment I'm visualising using this technique of applying multiple layers of paint to represent the depths of the water, and on top of this will be applied the layer of perspex with further painting applied on top for the reflections of the figures looking down, and the pond life growing around the edges.

The painting S with Child is particularly interesting for its combination of representational painting and the blurring technique involving the squeegee. This would work very effectively for capturing the ephemeral reflections on the surface of the perspex.

lucien freud and A.N. wilson

2011-07-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1019795/What-dreadful-painting-tells-art-corrupting-power-money-mans-contempt-female-sex.html

The article that I used for the Critical Review on Lucian Freud. Used it as a counter argument for the "truth telling" in Freud's paintings.

The final image for the Minimalist Seascape project

2011-04-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

This photo kind of shows the neon glow that I was referring to in the previous post. I think this has something to do with the fact that there is such a difference between the midnight blue/black on the sides and the shimmering multi hued blue in the centre.

For some reason the posts are showing the photos as verticals instead of horizontals, which they are meant to be, but I have to admit that once I'd finished the painting and was storing it upright to dry I found just as much satisfaction out of viewing the painting vertically was as I did viewing it horizontally. It brings me back to the comments I was making about the work of Barnett Newman and the painting Uriel which has vertical zips but works for me as a valid image of the sea/sky/shore.

When I asked my husband for his interpretation of the painting he said it reminded him of the sea at night, and also the haze of atmosphere above the earth when viewed from space. I like the fact that it can be viewed in these different ways and is open to interpretation.

It also unexpectedly reminds me of the painting Untitled, 1917/1918 by Olga Rosanova, who I also saw in the Abstract Art book by Mel Gooding, and is shown in this link here,

http://radicalart.info/nothing/monochrome/1D/index.html

For a project that could be viewed in quite a limited way I'm pleased with the outcome and the final image.

Dragging the Paint

2011-04-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

I'd done numerous studies in my sketchbook, in oils and acrylics, to experiment with the technique of dragging the paint, but nothing quite prepared me for using the plastering tool on such a big scale. Not even Elfyn Lewis' paintings are as big as the version I did.

This first photo shows the very first swipe that I did. You can see how the blue starts to bleed into the white, which I wanted to happen, but you can also see how there's not enough blue to cover the whole of the canvas. Looking back at the previous photo, on the previous post, I can see that I applied no where near enough paint to cover an A1 image. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. What I ended up having to do was apply more blue paint as I was going along, but this resulted in patchy areas of paint, where they weren't mixed

in well with the rest of the paint, this can be seen on the edges of the final painting.

This second photo shows the middle section after a few most swipes, and it's interesting as it's shows how all the different tones of blue start to flicker when mixed with the white paint. In the final image this results in an almost neon glow which I hadn't anticipated and which I'm really pleased with.

Preparing to Paint.

2011-04-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

This first photo shows the layers of acrylic I'd applied, leaving each one to dry before adding another. They were applied rather thinly, mixed with a bit of water, as I wanted to keep the canvas as smooth as possible in order to not have any lumps that would snag the plastering tool when dragging the oils across the canvas in the last stage.

At the final moment I decided to add a layer of black paint on top of all these colours because I felt that I wanted to preserve the purity of the blue oil paints that would be the top layer. I felt that the mixture or reds and greens would be a distraction and not a complimentary element. I'm glad I painted so many layers of acrylic in the first place as it's given such stability to the painting, and depth of colour that wouldn't have been so effective if I had layered only black paint underneath.

This second photo shows the oil paints laid out on the canvas ready to be dragged across. The four horizontal stripes are the four different coloured blues that I used; french ultramarine, pthalo blue, windsor blue and pthalo turquoise. The white was for the stripe cutting through the middle of these blues. You can see the black paint underneath, still showing glimmers of other colours such as the reds and blues, but I'm now glad in hindsight that I made it this dark.

Preparing the canvas for the Minimalist Seascape

2011-04-19T05:54:00.000-07:00

Having also studied the work of Mark Rothko, who was linked with Barnett Newman and the Abstract Expressionists, I'd noticed the layering of coloured paints that Rothko used. Newman's work had much cleaner lines and a thicker, less transparent layering of paint, possibly applied with a roller as it looks so smooth. Rothko's was more likely applied with a large brush, ground and rubbed into the canvas to create areas where the base coat of paint was allowed to glimmer through, affecting the colour that was applied on top, either making is darker or lighter.

After experimenting in my sketchbook with the different versions of the composition and technique that I was going to use for the final painting, I decided that I needed to introduce colour into the ground for my painting. So I layered black, green, red and blue acrylics. This was also in order to make the oils on top richer and and more glossy, so creating a thick luminous sheet of paint, imitating the sheen of water.

This photo was taken before I'd applied any paint, apart from a base coat of emulsion, and it shows the support that I'd stuck the canvas to in order to keep it completely flat, and it also shows the builders plastering tool that I was going to use to scrape the paint across. I didn't want to stretch the canvas onto a wooden frame because the fabric would have sunk in the middle when dragging the plastering tool across it, and there would have been lines on the edges where the wooden beams underneath would have touched the canvas with the force of pressing down. So the best alternative I could think of was to measure it up based on the biggest wooden stretchers I have, so that it could be stretched at a later date, and to tape it all in place, masking off the areas that I didn't want paint on, which corresponded with the edges of the wooden frame.

Barnett Newman and Franz Kline

2011-03-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Uriel, 1955, by Franz Kline and Zinc Door, 1961, by Barnett Newman at the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Education.

Reading the book Abstract Art by Mel Gooding I became interested in the work of Barnett Newman, which seemed to have such an immense scale and an interesting use of splitting the canvas up unto smaller strips, which were called "zips." Seeing them in a book is very different to seeing the real thing, and this photo form the Bridgeman site gives a good idea of the scale of the painting. It's dimensions are 243.8 by 548.6cm which is impossible to visualise from the close up photo of it which is also on the Bridgeman site.

Uriel By Barnett Newman, photo courtesy of the Bridgeman Site.

However this detailed photo does give more information about the colour and construction of the painting, again showing zips on the side, though instead of the standard one zip in most of his other paintings, this time there are five; two black, town white and one blue.

This painting stood out for me as an abstracted view of the ocean and shoreline, even seen with the lines vertical it seems to shine with light and water. Viewed on its side, so the stripes are horizontal, creates an even more convincing illusion of the sea. This also fed into my interpretation of a Minimalist Seascape.

Paint a Minimalist Seascape

2011-03-15T05:56:00.001-07:00

http://www.oriel.org.uk/Gallery/Gallery-ARTISTS/Profiles/Portfolio/Lewis.aspx#/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=e30aec5a-73bd-4fed-a4c1-03a8cc9eb395

I've decided to do the Minimalist Seascape project for this part of the course. I was drawn to it at the thought of booking the day off from the children to go and draw by the beach. But reading the coursebook I realised that representing the view isn't the primary aim of this project. So I filled pages of my sketchbook with images based on splitting the rectangle into different shaded sections.
The colours and the application of paint came next and this is where Elfyn Lewis' work came into play. I copied a few of him images in my sketchbook and even tried to emulate the way he drags the paint across with the scrapers and squeegies that he uses. But there's nothing like the real thing, and this link above shows a selection of his actual work in a recent exhibition.
The third painting down (or third on the right of the small boxes on the bottom of the page) is called Moel Y Mor which is welsh for mound of the sea. Admittedly the painting doesn't look much like a mound or the sea but it has really intriguing use of paint and a solid sense of movement because of the way the paint has been dragged, so the allusions to water are there in an abstract way. The tonal contrast also really draws my to it and I see it as a valid beginning to experimenting with the Minimalist Seascape.

Working on The Finished Painting

2011-03-02T03:54:00.000-08:00

I added another layer of thin oils here, using Sansodor, a low odour thinner by Windsor and Newton, rather than turps.

The hand is looking a bit odd because it wasn't added in the original charcoal drawing on the canvas, so is a different colour to the skin on the face, plus the shape and size is wrong in composition to the head and body.

I added more layers of charcoal on top of the original layer of oil as I wanted it to mix in and accentuate the texture form the canvas.

More detail was added to the face, hair and hand. I wasn't able to change the proportions of the hand because it was already close to the edge of the canvas, plus the angle of the arm couldn't be changed any more because it was already bent quite far in. So I ended up making the head smaller which has made it look more in proportion to the body and hand.

I painted the detail for the eye, nose and ear quite quickly with thinned down paint. The ear was just a few squiggles, painted from memory, and I'm pleased with how much it looks like a ear. The contour and shadows on the face also work really well.

Keeping the bottom part of the painting loose and thin was important for me, having seen and studied the work of Augustus John and Eugene Carriere. The charcaol was left quite conspicuous here, which acts as a contrast to the detail in the top half of the figure.

Oils on the Portrait

2011-03-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

This is the first layer of paint, not that I'm planning on adding many more layers as I want to keep it thin and translucent like the work of Augustus John and Eugene Carriere. I purposefully didn't prime the canvas, just sized it with a layer of slightly watered down PVA glue. I did this for a few reasons.
Firstly I wanted to keep the texture from the canvas grain (it's heavy weight canvas with two threads woven in each direction) as this adds flickr to the texture of the paint, a bit like the texture of watercolour paper, where the paint doesn't sink into every part of the paper.
Secondly I wanted the more natural colour of the canvas to show through, as opposed to the clinical looking white primed canvas. I thought this would add to the skin tones, and also I've been inspired by the work of Augustus John who purposefully didn't paint every single part of the canvas or board, which I find interesting.
Thirdly, inspired by the later paintings of Gwen John, I wanted a dry matt finish for the paint, as opposed to glossy and shiny. There is a painting by hers called Girl in Profile which I'm slightly obsessed by. It's on display in the Museum on Cardiff and the texture and dryness of the paint fascinates me. Finding out from information in the Museum that she created her own chalky ground to paint on, which absorbed the oils from the paint, was really interesting.

Sketches and the Beginning of the Portrait Project.

2011-03-01T03:48:00.000-08:00

Following on from researching the work of Eugene Carriere, Augustus and Gwen John and Paula Modersohn Becker, and after numerous sketches with different people in different poses I decided to make a start on the Portrait Project.

This is the sketch I decided to work from for the painting. I like the diagonal elements in the composition, especially where there is a v shape created by the angle of the face and the shoulder. The strong contrast that will result from the pale white sheet and the darker tones in the clothing and bedsheets is also what drew me to this image above the others that I had sketched.

When I came to sketching it onto the sized but un-primed canvas, 50 by 75 cm, I became aware that the area in the bottom right was just too empty. I had thought it would be an "interesting" emptiness, creating a contrast to the rest of the painting, but it just looked odd. So I added an arm (drawn from memory, not observation at the time) coming out at a right angle. This balanced out the composition well and I was happy to add the first layer of paint.

Having also been studying the work of Lucian Freud for my critical review (and group portrait for the last project) I decided to include a lot of charcoal into the layers of paint, that's why it's been applied so thickly on the canvas sketch. I also realised, just as I was about to start painting, that subconsciously I've probably absorbed his subject matter into my choice of subject matter, namely the reclined figure, half asleep. I was worried that this choice of child asleep would be seen as sentimental, but I'm hoping that by following in his vein, and keeping the colours muted, and the tonal contrast strong it will come across as more interesting than sentimental.

Eugene Carriere

2011-02-28T13:44:00.001-08:00

Eugene Carriere 1849-1906, Maternity. Oil on Canvas. 44 by 54cm. Location Musee des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France. From the Bridgeman Education Site.

I've seen one of Carriere's paintings in the National Museum and Gallery of Wales around three years ago, and the image was so striking for the deep shadowy areas and the piercing section of light.

I saw this image on the Bridgeman site and had to put it here. My portrait project at the moment is taking elements from Carrier's work, most notably the tonal contrast, limited palette, hazy light and the subject of children. Mine is of my son asleep so the lighting conditions are perfect for creating this kind of hazy effect, especially as I've been using my daughters night light torch to highlight areas of his face. The painting is more than life size and is interesting for the challenges it poses.

This painting of Carriere's is captivating for the swirling movement in the forms of the figures, creating a perfect curve up and around and back again. Swimming in a sea of sepia toned background the highlights of the features stand out like ghostly forms.

I've seen several versions of this composition, some are called studies and some look like a "finished" painting, so this image obviously captivated him. What I also love about his paintings, which I'm bringing out in my version too (after having painted most of my project with really thick paint recently), is the thin use of paint and how the canvas shows through in areas. It creates such a strong contrast between the areas of the figures and faces that have been painted so beautifully life like and then breaking through that illusion of life is the flicker texture from the canvas.

Augustus John (1878-1961)

2011-02-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

Edwin John by Augustus John 1911. Oil on Canvas. Owned by the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, from the Davies Sisters Collection. Painted when Edwin was about six years old.

Edwin John 1940 by Augustus John. Oil on canvas. 52 by 48cm. Owned by the Fitzwilliam museum, Cambridge University. Copied from the Bridgeman Education site.

PORTRAIT PROJECT

I've recently been to the National Museum and Galleries of Wales in Cardiff to get a flavour of the different portrait styles there that could be incorporated into this portrait project. Thanks to a new wing having been recently opened in the Museum there is now a huge section of paintings from the 1900 onwards that are available to view.

Augustus and Gwen John stood out as the highlights for me of this new section. It was wonderful to see the paintings by Gwen on display having previously only seen them in the vaults of the museum when I visited there in May 2010. It's charceristic to see the backgound only partly blocked in, indeed it's unusual to see one of his paintings that has all of the canvas covered in paint. The 29 years that seperate these two paintings here don't show much stylistic differences, the later is slightly more loose, but there is still the emphasis on observation coupled with expressive application of paint. It's these elements that I will aim to bring out in my own painting for this project.

A separate room was also filled with drawings and etchings by Augustus John and I copied a couple for my logbook. The sketches and etchings also show elements of closely observed draughtsmanship coupled with free and loose use of line.

The top painting of Johns son Edwin is on display in the museum in Cardiff, along side several others of Johns family, friends and admirers. What struck me about this image was the vivid colours and the confident pose of the young boy. Information on the wall said that his mother, Ida John, thought of the boy as ugly with small blue eyes. In another room at the museum there is a sculpture of Romilly John, Edwin's brother, carved by Eric Gill. Romilly also shows the characteristics that his mother thought of as "ugly" but it strikes me as strange that what she viewed as ugly, his father and Gill thought of as art, enough that they created paintings and carvings of them. When I was in the museum I sketched the images of these two boys, one by John and one by Gill, for my logbook.

The second painting of Edwin above shows him at the age of 35, a handsome and striking man. A further historical fact about Edwin is that it was his aunt, Gwen John, who encouraged him to become a watercolour artist after a brief career as a middleweight boxer. After her death "he inherited the estate of his aunt Gwen and did much to secure her posthumous reputation." (From the Museum of Wales website, link below.) http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/art/online/?action=show_item&item=902

The Museum in Cardiff owns 126 paintings by Augustus, including a further 2000 works on paper by both Augustus and his sister Gwen. Born in Tenby West Wales it is fitting that the Museum of Wales is justifiably proud of these Welsh artists.

Elfyn Lewis

2011-01-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/northwestwales/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8726000/8726798.stm

Just had an "Ah ha!" moment. Following links about Brenden Burns from Google led me to reading an interview with him, which I added to my post about him previously, where he mentions Elfyn Lewis winning the Welsh Artist of the Year award, the first painter to win it since 2005. Googling Elfyn Lewis then led to me to sites featuring his paintings and I immediately recognised them as the work of an artist I saw in the Eisteddfod last summer, 2010. They were only small paintings but caught my eye because of the unbelievably thick layers of acrylic paint used. The canvas was on a thick stretcher, about two inches, and the paint had been allowed to dribble down the sides, he must have painted on them horizontally. The site I've linked to above quotes him as saying he uses Squeegees, trowels and even cassette tapes to scrape the paint from top to bottom or left to right. The paintings that I saw in the exhibition had what looked like at least ten layers of paint layered one on top of the each other, and each one looked to have been left to dry before adding another layer. They were so tactile because they still looked wet and fluid. I felt too self conscious to have a go at copying the colour etc used in the painting into my sketchbook because there were so many people there (a pathetic excuse I know) but the memory of seeing the paintings is still very fresh in my mind.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10322630

This link is to a BBC page which shows and talks about the winning painting for the Welsh Artist of the Year, and also mentions winning the Gold medal for Fine Art in the 2009 Eisteddfod in the Bala. This is obviously an artists to keep an eye on and I'm glad his paintings caught my attention.

http://www.elfynlewis.com/index.php?lang=cym&status=3

Here's his website, with a huge collection of his paintings. One of the paintings that I remembered seeing in the Eisteddfod was similar to Cae Melyn (Which means "Yellow Field" in Welsh). I just remember that intense yellow colour. I also remember something similar to Carno which had a small section in the top layer that only partly covered the thicker layers underneath, allowing then to show through.

Lucian Freud Tenby Harbour 1944

2011-01-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

Lucian Freud Tenby Harbour 1944 From Oriel y parc website, St Davids, West Wales.

Watercolour, crayon and charcoal on Ingres paper. It will be on display in the gallery until the end of March, 2011.

What surprised me is how little has changed from my version that I did of Tenby Harbour after going on holidays there last summer.

It looks like he was much higher up on the cliffs doing his version as the harbour wall and houses are seen from above, whereas as mine is ground level. Mine also shows the new addition of some kind of ramp that much be used for the life rafts.

The Finished Landscape Painting

2010-11-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

This is the final painting for the Landscape project, which I think shows a wide variety of marks, tones and colours to make it an interesting painting of an interesting feature. The photo of the profile of the painting shows the amount of texture added both from old paint glued onto the canvas from an old palette plus fresh paint that was applied using card. It's funny how techniques from the Collage project have fed through into this project, because if I hadn't have experimented with techniques suggested by Mike Bernard then I would never have thought to paint using card for the rock face.

This bottom photo shows a work in progress where I wasn't happy with the colour of rocks as they were too yellow. Brightening the rock face using more white and Cerulean Blue has made such a difference to suggesting the form of the cliff.

Development of the Landscape Project

2010-11-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is the painting at the moment shown alongside one of the photo's I took of the cliff-face. I'm not working from the photo's now I'm back home but am continuing to work from the sketches and studies that I did. I'm not aiming for photographic realism either, but just want to show how it's the essence of the rocks and their solidity that really drew me to this as a subject matter. The fact it's such a high horizon line and that the rock occupies most of the composition makes it an even more impressive feature.

Landscape Painting.

2010-10-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

During a recent holiday at the beginning of October to Tenby in West Wales I was struck by a cliff at the back of our caravan which seemed so out of place next to the rows of neat white caravans. So I took it upon myself to make some studies of it and to see if it could be developed into a painting. This A3 oil pastel sketch from my sketchbook shows the composition I wanted to use along with a more expressive rendering of the colours and plant forms. I was thinking about Peter Prendergasts' work at the time and the strong use of black contrasting with the light tonal areas shows his influence.

I filled a few pages of my sketch book with compositional studies and once I'd decided on the right angle I painted this A2 study. It contains a more accurate rendering of the colours in the rocks face and shows detail for the cracks and fissures and plant life, but I was hoping I could bring out more texture in the finished painting. The oil pastel sketch above contains much more dynamic marks that I was hoping to bring out too, rather than the flat smooth brush marks.

After having experimented with using lumps of old acrylic paint scraped off old palettes in my John Piper style painting I decided to try the technique again for this painting. This photo shows the painting viewed from the side showing where I've placed the textured areas in the middle, corresponding with the rock face. The vivid colours that I've used for the under painting will hopefully feed through into the top layers which will be slightly more "realistic." I'm still hoping to work somewhat in the style of Peter Prendergast.

Another layer of paint has been added here with areas scraped through into the bottom layer such as the plants on the bottom left corner and the rock face. The sky has had another layer added to it using a palette knife and thin layers of white, blue and red. Even though the photo doesn't show the colour of the sky very effectively I'm happy with the effect here and probably won't change it much in future alterations.

The colours for the rocks and plants are still not very life like as my main priority at the moment is still to achieve unusual texture in the undercoat. I'll work more at adapting the colour once I'm happy with the texture.

Brendan Stuart Burns

2010-10-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.brendanstuartburns.co.uk/paint_perspex.htm

This link is to the paintings on the website of Brendan Stuart Burns, a contemporary Welsh artist who's won the gold medal in Fine Art twice in the National Eisteddfod of Wales, and who I knew as a tutor on the Fine Art section of the Foundation Course in the Glamorgan Centre of Art and Design Technology when I studied there in 1997. At the time I wasn't very aware of the paintings he created, there were two on display in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff at the time, but I didn't really understand them. They were so large and didn't seem to be depicting anything specifically that it was difficult for me to see what was going on in them, especially as I'd never studied anything in this style before.

I've since read about his work in more detail in the book "Welsh Artists Talking" by Tony Curtis which was published in the year 2000, which contains interviews with various artists about their work. I now see his paintings differently, the key reason being the piece of information relayed in the book that the paintings are depictions of the beach on the Pembrokeshire coast in West Wales seen from looking down at the ground. Many of the paintings are of rock pools, seen close up, and the use of perspex and wax along with oil paints recreates this gloopy, liquid world. The colours and forms are of the rocks, sand and plant life and once I read this I saw the paintings in a different way. It reminds me of the work of Peter Lanyon, who I've written about in my paper logbook, and the fact that he painted many of his images from the scenes he viewed when flying across the coast of Devon and Cornwall in his glider. Both artists are creating landscape paintings though seen from a very different angle.

I've recently seen more of his work at the National Eisteddfod of Wales this year in Ebbw Vale, where he had three large paintings on display, but not so typically depicting rock pools and the coast line. They were in a square format, quite dark, and used a lot of purple and unusually contained a fair amount of glitter which was visible when viewing the work from the side. Maybe this was meant to depict the sparkle of the water. They were very tactile and invited you in to view them both close up and from a distance. There was the hint at some kind of representation but it was as though seen through a veil.

http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/art/online/?action=show_works&item=99&type=artist

The link here is for the paintings by Burns owned by the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, though they aren't on display at the moment. However I have seen two of his paintings, quite small ones, that were on display the last time I visited the museum a couple of months ago, but they were on loan from the artist. I remember them being slightly different to the rock pool paintings, and the use of paint seemed quite sparse, with more of an inclusion of blobs, maybe they were meant to be the rocks. I will make some studies of them next time I go to the museum, which will be quite soon.

(added info on 11/1/11) The paintings are not there anymore, they've moved a lot of things about, but more information on the web shows them to be part of " The Taste of Sight" collection of paintings. The small ones, 15cm by 15cm are in my price bracket and are very tempting. "These paintings strive to 'touch' you" he says in a statement on the 56groupwales website, where he is one of the artist members. "The constant struggle and dialogue with the abstract and the figurative, empathise with the process of nature found within both microcosm and macrocosm." I can remember his doing a session on synaesthesia in his art classes back in 1997 and he mentions synaesthesia in the website statement too. The tactile quality of paint must be such an integral part of the painting process for him.

http://culture-candy.co.uk/2010/07/artist-interview-brendan-burns-2/

This interview is related to an exhibition of his in Oriel Myrddin, featuring work that he completed on a residency in Oriel Y Parc in West Wales. When asked what he loves about painting he says "The smell, and the fact you can't master it and what it can do." Which is quite a humble and realistic standpoint really.

Here's list of artists who he mentions on the website for Oriel Y Parc in West Wales where he had a residency in 2009. He was able to select paintings by these artists from the collection of the National Museum of Wales to be exhibited next to his work when on display in the Oriel Y Parc; Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkins, Ceri Richards, Sean Scully, Ben Nicholson, Eugin Boudin and Thomas Jones.

Peter Prendergast

2010-10-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

Peter Prendergast, "Autumn Evening Towards Penrhyn Castle" 1994. Acrylic on Canvas. 106.7 by 61 (website didn't say inches or centimeters but I'm assuming it's cm) Copyright the Bridgeman Education Site.

New project time; "Landscape."

This little beauty of a painting is by Welsh artist Peter Prendergast. He grew up in South Wales and then spent the majority of his career up in North Wales. The two landscapes of North and South being very different is interesting to note, South being more rolling valleys and North being more rugged mountains. This painting, even though painted "Up North" has all the rolling hills of the South (where I live) so I wonder if he was never quite able to shake off his roots.

I had a little chuckle to myself when I felt saw this image on the Bridgeman site yesterday because they'd displayed it the wrong way up. It was lying on it's side and needed to be rotated anti-clockwise. I contacted them and told them and within 24 they'd sorted the problem, very efficient. It just makes me wonder that with the expressive style on this painting that maybe at first glance it looked like it should have been displayed that way! (Try looking at it with you head bent to the left, it still looks like a good painting. Even Kandinsky didn't recognize one of his own paintings when he saw it displayed upside down.) However I knew it should be landscape format because of the hint of horizon, and the contrast of bluish colour for the sky and greenish colours for the ground.

I did an A3 version of one of his paintings very similar to this in my paper logbook. It was very satisfying to paint. Thick, gloppy acrylic paint and intense unreal colours with such strongly contrasting tonal areas. It only took my five minutes to paint it because I wanted to keep the expressive style. He always painted outside too, so the weather affected his paintings very strongly as can be seen from the stormy skies in the painting above. There are seven paintings of his owned by the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff so I'll be making an appointment to see them in the vaults, unfortunately they aren't on display in the galleries. Seeing his paintings in the flesh will be very interesting.

It's worth pointing out that he was taught by Frank Auerbach in the Slade in London, and has been accused of copying his tutors style with his use of thick black outlines, but seeing paintings that Prendergast created when he was a teenager (which I saw reproduced in the book on Prendergast's work "The Painters Quarry") shows very clearly that he had this thick and heavily outlined style before he'd even stepped foot in the city.

Paper Mosaic Collage

2010-10-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling very honoured to have had comments on a few of my posts here from Ellen Golla herself after having found and joined her own blog site which she then followed the link back to my blog site. In honour of that I thought I'd include photo's of the paper mosaic collage I created inspired by her images.

I created this collage mosaic based on a sketch I did of the light patterns from a lamppost that had grown up into a tree. The image by Ellen Golla that fed into my version was "I'd Drown Looking for You" which I found on her website and did my own sketched version above. It was the flow of mosaic pieces that really caught my eye, along side the contrast of the vibrant and shinning colours in the centre surrounded by the darker shadowy areas. My own version tries to tie in these elements of flow and vibrant colour. The allusion to fire is something that I'm happy with because Ellen herself also uses a lot of fire images in her own work, which makes me wonder if it has symbolic meaning for her.

My comments in the previous post about her work mentioned how labour intensive I found doing this image. I took about four hours to do this small A3 size image, working for an hour each time for four different sessions, most of the time taken up with cutting the pieces. Towards the end of the piece, for the areas down the bottom, I tried to short cut the amount of time spent cutting by folding the paper a few times over and cutting through five or six layers at the same time. The saved on time but ended up with irregular shaped pieces and sometimes picked up on colours in the magazine scraps that weren't quite right. The pieces in the middle of the image were cut individually so it features little detailed pieces that I wanted to include such as the tiny little slice from a cello showing the f shaped sound hole. There's also sections in the darker areas with pieces from birds and animals, because the magazine that I used primarily was the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds magazine, but I quite like their inclusion, as it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.

When I featured Ellen Golla's piece "Tea Time With Gordy" a few posts back she was kind enough to comment that she had taken a few months to finish the piece, working on the piece for a little while each day, which is quite amazing. It was also really nice to find out from her that the foreground images, such as the tea set and the swans were indeed taken from photo's she'd taken and placed on top of the mosaic pieces, which is what I'd thought from studying it. Having her feedback has been invaluable and I'm very grateful.

More about the Seeds

2010-10-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've just watched half of an accompanying video that is featured on a link on the Tate site. Interesting that they show footage of the miners, considering the comments I made on the previous post. Dust is seen rising from the seeds at the very beginning of the footage when Weiwei is seen sweeping them smooth. Was he warned about that because of Health and safety?

Footage of the place where the seeds were made mentions the fact that it used to make porcelain for the king, but now most people have gone bankrupt. Seeing Weiwei walking around each one of the workers as they are painting away is like watching a king among his subjects. They view him with the same kind of adoration and respect, because he is the one bringing money into the area.

The sheer monumentally of the work just makes my head spin. The numbers of seeds involved, and the numbers of workers that go into making each seed, mining the rock, making the porcelain, making the moulds, painting each seed. And when they're all seen together they sink into their own vastness. Each one is the same, none of the workers would be able to pick one up and say"I painted this one". It's like a metaphor for our lives in a way. We are just like the seeds, that when seen from a distance we just blend into the vastness of the whole.

Just watched a little more of the footage and the sunflower seeds are indeed meant as a symbol for people. Chairman Mao was always depicted surrounded by Sunflowers, because he was seen as the sun and the followers were the sunflowers. The numbers and the fact that everyone is doing the same thing reminds me very strongly of footage from countries such as China and Korea where you have vast numbers of people that stick together as a unit and perform perfectly and in unison. The same sort of behaviour is not expected over here though. I remember the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics where London did a performance to signal them taking over in 2012 and it just looked like utter chaos with everyone running around doing random things, and all this next to the precision of the performances from China. Neither are perfect though, and we each have our own problems in our own way.

Ai Weiwei in the Tate Modern

2010-10-20T05:07:00.000-07:00

I briefly saw a story on the telly about this installation and the angle of the article was ridicule towards it and the fact that it had been branded a health and safety hazard. Well there no such thing as bad publicity and the work by this artist has made it's way into more people's awareness because of the "hazard" than if it had been branded completely safe. So I decided to look it up and read into it in more detail.

What I, and probably every person who sees it, thought were real sunflower seeds turn out to be individually made out of porcelain by workers in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. This immediately brought to my mind the impossibility and the monumentality of the task. How on earth did they have the patience to create these millions of seeds? The work is meant to make us think about the issue of almost everything being "Made in China." As a child of the late seventies I can remember toys that were "Made in England" and then the cheep influx of imported goods. It's very rare to see anything with a "Made in England" stamp anymore.

Then the issue about health and safety is mentioned in more detail in the write up on the Tate site which refers to the dangers of inhaling dust from the porcelain which would have been ground up by the viewers to the exhibition, who seemingly would have been allowed to walk all over the seeds. But then it brings to my mind the fact that these workers who made the seeds would themselves have been exposed to the dust.

The recent activities in Chile with the rescued miners makes me realise the fact that until recently my home town was itself a mining colliery, now closed down, and maybe it is the wave of Health and Safety that helped to shut these dangerous places down. But the fact that we now refuse these jobs mean that other countries with different standards end up taking over jobs that still pose dangers. And now we're a country with very little industry and huge debts.

So what started off as a complex exhibition in the first place is now a place for even more thought.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unileverseries2010/default.shtm

Joseph Cornell

2010-10-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Soapbubble Variant c.1956 Mixed Media. From the Bridgeman Education Site.

Untitled c. 1960 Joseph Cornell. Collage on Masonite Board. From the Bridgeman Education site.

Although for some people the image of a naked woman lying on the grass would catch their attention, for me it's the image of Caerphilly Castle in the background! I'd know that castle anywhere, it's just down the road from me and I've stood underneath that precariously balanced section of wall - a Welsh Leaning Tower of Pizza. Not only is it surreal that a naked woman is outside having a picnic, but to me it's also surreal that an American artist would use an image of a building from Wales.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/cornjose/
This link is to the papers written and compiled by Joseph Cornell throughout his entire career and it's really interesting. There's twenty five pages of stamps that he collected, as many of his Shadow Boxes included stamps in them. They must have had an important relevance for him. The website says there's twenty five linear feet of papers that the artist collected, either as business correspondence or artistic references. There's also 66 linear feet of artifacts that were directly related to the shadow boxes and collages that he created. Incredible. You could spend hours just on this one site alone, sifting through the reams of information.

He was obviously a man with a finely tuned visual sense, with nature and humans seeming to occupy the majority of his symbology. The image above for Saopbubble Variant refers to the interest he held in celestial affairs. One of the stamps used in the top left hand section, of the little girl, has also been used in another of his shadow boxes, Untitled 1950, which I saw in The Art Book by Phaiden, which just shows how much relevance he attaches to all these different images, and how deeply they've entered his visual language.

This link has a huge list of photos to look at. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/

Collage Artist

2010-09-20T05:19:00.000-07:00

"The Letter" 1994 Mixed Media. Nissan Engel. From the Bridgeman Education Site.

I've just done a search for "collage" on the Bridgeman site and it's come back with 1042 results, including many from the Dadaists which I will be looking into more detail to come. However the images that caught my eye were all by the Israeli artist Nissan Engel and there were many by him. So for now I just wanted to include this image by him. I love the rich colour and the textures created by the ripped paper. I also love the inclusion of manuscript paper which personally I find exciting because I play piano so I'm always wondering what the pieces sound like, but also the patterns of the black dots and lines adds another level of interest to the textures. I'm planning on experimenting with manuscript paper myself, but I find it hard to contemplate ripping up real manuscript paper so will probably photocopy some sheets and then age them by painting over them or staining them with teabags.

Robert Tilling

2010-09-20T03:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.davidsimongallery.com/Artists/Tilling.htm I've just been doing some looking around the Internet for information on Robert Tilling, whose one of the artists with work featured in the course book for the "Collage" project. This was one of the interesting sites I could find on him. It wasn't what I was looking for though, and I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't one mention of him using collage in his paintings. All of the images featured, whilst similar in subject matter to the "Distant Headland" which I first saw in the course book and I've included above from the Bridgeman Education site, are actually completely different in their colour scheme, because "Distant Headland" features very subtle gradations of tone in a monochromatic colour scheme whereas the paintings featured in the websites are very vibrantly coloured.

The website http://www.thisisjersey.co.uk/art/roberttilling/index.html says that he works "primarily in watercolour, acrylic, gouache and charcoal" and another website http://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/index.php?pid=113&subid=220 features an artists statement by him which says that "my work is based on observation and memory, where chance and accident play an important role. I often work very quickly paring down my ideas to abstraction." This site features some very interesting images that are more vertical in their orientation, as opposed to horizontal like the landscapes, and the vivid purples oranges and blues work really well here but area again very different to the painting featured in the course book.

I have to say I much prefer his monochrome "Distant Headland" and will be interested to have a go at mocking up this image in my own logbook just to see what I can learn from his technique. I really like the way he's used heavily textured watercolour paper, which he's painted on top of, then ripped the edges, creating a ragged white line against the mottled greys layered up underneath. These subtle horizontals and diagonals are all that are needed to suggest the bands of the horizon on the coastline.

Picasso and Las Meninas and "Art From Art"

2010-09-19T03:50:00.000-07:00

I've managed to find a website featuring the work of Picasso in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/collection/cont_collec.htm#p13 It contains a lot of information that I haven't been able to come across before and is very interesting, especially the reference to the "laboratory" he set up in order to better study three great paintings by Velazquez, Manet and Delacroix.

The Wikipedia page on the original painting by Velazquez also goes into some detail into the tributes paid to it by Picasso. It says that he created 58 paintings based on the painting Las Meninas between August and December of 1957. The Picasso Museum site says that he sought to create "a group of canvases with a common theme" which surely he was already doing to a certain degree, though the fact that he created 58 paintings in total takes it into a different league. He took the original composition and added his own unique style to it, which is what the website says at the end of the article, in that "the big difference between Velazquez' painting and the Picasso's is in its aesthetics."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/24/picasso-national-gallery This article in the Guardian is really interesting because it reviews an exhibition that went on in the National Gallery in February 2009 which featured many of Picasso's paintings that had been based on Old Master work. There's also a feature on the side of the web page called "More on this Story" which goes to another page featuring a gallery of Picasso images, including several that were base on Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass," one of which I used for my Logbook. The only criticism that I came across regarding the exhibition was the fact that the Old Master paintings weren't included in the same rooms as the Picasso's, whereas in Paris where the same exhibition was shown it included the original paintings right next to the Picasso's. This would have been fascinating to see which elements of the painting he decided to keep and which he decided to evolve in his own style.

It makes me look at the project we've been doing in a different way. We were asked to paint in the style of another artist, of which I chose John Piper because of the theme of a ruined building. However what the artists I've looking into for the logbook/contextual studies are artists who have taken an original painting by another artist and vastly changed its style, or aesthetics. The example that really sticks in my mind is the version created by Leon Kossof, which I copied into my logbook, where he took a painting by Rembrandt and painted it as only he could using tremendously thick paint and vivid outlines, in dramatic contrast to the refined, smooth depiction of flesh by Rembrandt.

"ART FROM ART"

However whilst looking around for other examples by artists of working in this way I also came across painting that had been copied almost exactly as they appeared in their original form. There were a couple featured in the book "Paint; A Manual of Pictorial Thought and Practical Advice" byJeffery Camp, the most striking being the painting "after Cezanne, The Black Clock" by Leonard McComb from 1988 on page 43 which has been painted wonderfully, with a vibrant splash of thick colour depicting the curve of the enormous conch shell which is featured next to the black clock from the title. But when seen next to the original by Cezanne, from 1870, it's almost an exact copy, there's slightly more colour and texture in the McComb version but there's still very little difference. The Cezanne painting itself is notable for it's early placing in Cezanne's career, coming before his mature phase of the 1890's, and looks quite flat and with a very heavy inclusion of black paint. McComb also copied part of Bonnard's "Paysage du Cannet" which was also featured in the book "Paint" on page 69, and this too differs very little from the original.

The quote from the course book "art comes from art, not from nature" has stuck with me throughout doing the "art from art" project and I've found that my opinion has changed slightly, aiming now towards agreeing with the quote to a certain degree. The other quote which comes back to me in relation to this is by John Piper, who was in turn inspired by William Blake who wanted art to occupy it's own sphere, just like poetry and music. It makes me think that music, in the way that people create it, is itself removed from nature, it obeys certain rules of harmony and vibration which are dictated by nature and physics, but is free to distort and branch off in many directions. This also is now true of art and painting, and it has indeed started to occupy it's own sphere.

This brings me back to the differences between what was asked of us in the project, to copy another style, and the different forms of copying that I've seen in other artists, and the most successful ones being those who can rake another image and make it their own. After all what I've been doing in my own logbook is to copy directly the work of other artists, and whilst this is interesting to find out more information about composition and colour mixing I would in no way consider this to be art.

Ellen Golla

2010-09-17T02:29:00.000-07:00

http://zebracrossing.org/ I thought I'd do a link here to Ellen Golla's website. I've written about her in my sketchbook for two different projects, "Animals" and "Collage" and I just love her images and little constructions. The tiny books in little medicine capsules are amazing, how on earth would you make them? The quote by her on the first page is very inspiring, "I love the scent of paper, the textures of paper, and the endless possibilities of paper. My paper mosaic collages are intricately composed of hundreds of little bits of cut paper," and in an image like "Tea Time with Gordy" which I've included above from the Bridgeman Education site, it perfectly shows off each one of these tiny slices of paper, stuck together to suggest the movement of water, rushing the collection of tea set pieces, including a swan in a tea cup, over the edge of the table, like a waterfall, where they will surely crash. There's usually a slightly Surrealist element to her images, such as the swan in a tea cup, or maybe it's just there to show her sense of humour.

I've experimented with her way of working for the project "Collage" and found it to be very labour intensive, and I didn't even cut the pieces as small as she does. In the end I found that combining paper and paint, such as Mike Bernard's method was much more to my liking, but I'm glad that I experimented with a few different ways to find out. From studying this image above I imagine that she used the collage mosaic method for the background but used whole images for the tea set, as they look too perfect and smooth to have been constructed from many small pieces of paper. Her website says that she often uses her own images so I guess that's what she did here and took photo's especially for this composition.

Detail of the Final Image

2010-09-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to take close up photo's of the final painting to show in better detail the textures in the use of paint and paper. I found that they also created interesting images and compositions in their own right, so I've included a few examples here.

The Final Image

2010-09-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

I have to say I'm really happy with the success of this image and am pleased with how far it's taken me out of my comfort zone as I'm more accustomed with painting in detail.

This final stage saw me adding splashes of colour to the darker areas in the top right and bottom left hand corner, similar to the splashes of green in the watercolour sketch. This has helped to lift the darker areas whilst also emphasising their tonal differences. When compared to the previous photo the contrast is quite large.

The use of collage as a technique is one that I will definitely use again, as the possibilities are vast especially when used in combination with paint. In my sketchbook I've experimented with more abstract images plus landscape compositions and in a way this final image here is like a cross between the two, there are elements of abstract and natural representation within it.

The one area of weakness that I can see in the final piece is that maybe the composition is slightly too straight forward. The flowers are laid out in two horizontal rows, and maybe there could have been more movement here. I think this fault has come about by not planning enough at the beginning stages, and laying the coloured paper areas out without considering their relation to each other in the composition. Once it got to the stage that I could see there was a slight problem I didn't feel confident enough to be moving the areas around without affecting how it already looked. There is a fine line between chaos and order and maybe the beginning stage was a bit too random, so I will know to plan more in the future. However the dynamism of the paint and collage effects more than makes up for the slightly tame composition, in my opinion.

More Colour

2010-09-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

Here I added more colour for the flowers, using both acrylic paint applied with card and small strips of coloured paper. I like the way it's given more definition to the flowers without making them look too cut out and neat. I've also darkened the background, using mostly paint, to add more tonal contrast, something that is very striking in Bernards images. Even though the original watercolour image didn't have this much dark paint it still benefited from the lighter area surround the painting, which this painting doesn't have, so I think that the darker blues and purples in the corners is helping to bring the flowers into greater focus.

I'm also worried that the dark paint is slightly too dark so am contemplating adding lighter areas on top, maybe in the form of dragged paint using the card, as I've done in other areas, but am thinking of splatting paint on top, using white and yellow. The original watercolour featured splattered green paint which crossed over into the pale paper and I think added more interest to the image, so I will see how it looks here.

Detail from collage

2010-09-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

This close up image shows the dribbles of paint blending into each other and the contrast between the printed areas of paper and the plain paper used for the collaged sections which I think adds a lot of interest. Taking photo's of the individual areas of flower shows that they are just as dynamic as the full sized image in my opinion.

For the background colours I used gouache paint watered down well because I didn't have acrylic ink as Mike Bernard uses, so I wanted something that would have the luminosity of ink but with more body to it to show up as a slightly more solid colour. I'll be using acrylic paint on top of this layer, plus integrating more coloured paper, and will be applying the paint using pieces of card, as opposed to paint brushes, which is a technique that Bernard uses in his paintings.

Colour and Collage

2010-09-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

For this stage I layered tissue paper onto the base layer of paper, this was because I wanted more texture for the top layers of paint, so I purposefully crumpled the tissue before blotting it down into the glue. I also planned on applying the paint using Bernard's technique of scraping it on with a strip of card, this would mean that the paint stuck to the top ruffles of tissue but that the bottom layers would stay the original colour. He also uses a lino roller for his paintings which creates the really interesting stipple effect as the paint is dragged across, it would be worth investing in this piece of equipment for future use.

Another technique Bernard uses at this stage is to spray the whole painting with a water sprayer, then dribble acrylic inks into the water so they create random patterns in the paper, sometimes angling the board at a different angle to how it will be seen in it's finished state. I don't have a water sprayer so instead I painted a layer of water over the whole image, then added areas of coloured ink, and finally dabbed large splodges of water at the top of the board so that it would take some of the ink with it as it ran down the paper.

At this stage I also added sections of green paper and card, these are the areas with the sections of print visible, and this visible text is a common feature of Bernards work and helps bring a lot of sparkle into the image. The tissue paper has also been used to integrate into the daffodil flower section, then I painted yellow ink into these areas and I like the way that the green ink has run into it and bled.

Project "Combine Painting and Collage"

2010-09-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

My main source of information on technique and ideas for creating collage images is the book by Mike Barnard called "Collage, Colour and Texture in Painting." I'd seen it listed in Cardiff Library when I did a search for "Collage" so I put a reserve on it and was pleased when my tutor also recommended to me.

One of the most interesting things about the book is Barnard's advocation for starting a painting by laying down a random pattern of paper and textures, this is to fuel his creative thinking and to break down any feelings of preciousness about the image, so that he can be as free as possible. He then layers washes of acrylic ink, letting then blend, bleed and dribble down the image. Once this is dried on top of this is laid more washes of acrylic paint, some thicker and mostly applied with sections of card or a lino roller, then more coloured paper is added for greater definition.

Using his working method as my starting point I decided to follow this example to create my own collaged mixed media image. I used a watercolour sketch of some daffodils from my sketchbook form the last course I did as the image to base my painting on. I liked the sketch because it was colourful and textural and also there was a simplified use of foreground and background, all useful features for creating the collage. I applied random strips and chunks of paper, tissue and card to the thick backing paper, using torn pieces of yellow paper, in two different tones, to suggest the forms of the flowers. I left the background a neutral colour because I wanted to add the blues and greens with the acrylic paints, plus maybe the addition of further coloured paper. I purposefully left it quite open at this stage and didn't do any further sketches in my sketchbook because I wanted it to evolve in a very natural way.

Quote by Cezanne

2010-09-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

When writing about Peter Prendergast there was a quote by Cezanne which I'd read previously that kept hovering at the edge of my mind, but as I couldn't remember the full quote I didn't want to put it down. I've now found it again, and of course it was in the most obvious place, in my course book which I also copied into my logbook. It struck a chord when writing about Prendergast's reaction to painting outdoors and how if he could "pull the earth back you could find where the world came from" which reminded me of these words by Cezanne; "Nature does not lie on the surface, but hides in the depth, through colours whose depth are revealed on the surface, they rise up from the roots of the world." They were both great landscape artists in their own way, and it's interesting to see their different expressive reactions to the earth and it's forms, even though their thought processes came from the same place.

Peter Prendergast

2010-08-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Another book that has enriched my analysis and appreciation of art, especially landscape art, is the book "The Painter's Quarry, The Art of Peter Prendergast" published in 2006 by Gwasg Gomer, which features seven essays written about the artist. Prendergast came to my awareness thanks to a recomendation by one of the tutors on the college forum (one who had been lucky enough to work with him in the past). If I had to describe his paintings in simple terms it would be messy, but messy in a wonderful sense, like rubbing soil into the canvas, with the main difference between soil and his paintings being the colours, as his are like a rainbow of intensity, colours bleeding and blending into each other in such an exciting way. If painting outside is what creates a painting like Prendergast's then I'm all up for it. The essay by John Russell Taylor on page 12 mentions "the emotion he experiences in front of a landscape dictates the movement of the brush quite as much as the physical shape of the scene before him. Thus the paint is applied in great swathes of colour, constantly threatening to burst out of control and run riot all over the picture, moving it insensibly from expressionism to abstract expressionism."

Another passage I want to make note of is on page 11; "A landscape in nature may be beautifully composed, an artwork waiting to happen, but a landscape is the work of a mind and hand as well as an eye" which reminds me of the quote from the book "Art and Illusion" that a painting is a "corner of nature seen through a temperament," which again makes me think of John Piper. There is a thread running through these artists because on page 14 Taylor makes mentions the John Piper paintings of Windsor castle and the response of the kings to the "terrible weather" in Pipers paintings, a feature prominent in Prendergasts paintings too. "Chaos lies in wait ready to engulf art and artist, (p14)" this in response to the wonderful messy style of Predergast, like Auerbach his teacher at the Slade, whose representations of the landscape sometimes lie on a knife-edge.

It is important to think of the human being in the landscape, even if one isn't visible in the composition,and Prendergast makes his human presense well known in the landscape as he creates the majority of his paintings on site, even having to tie down the canvases in strong winds. These intense elements of wind, rain and sun are what feeds into his powerful paintings, full of movement and passion, and whilst looking at them it is so apparent that this is a human being responding to being in a landscape, not just an automaton capturing a moment for posterity; "very direct contact with the scene that inspire him remains an absolute necessity. Prendergast is a reactor, and his art is all about his reactions rather than about the phenomena that trigger them." (p.15)

Peter Wakelin writes on page 35 about the turning point in Prendergast's work when he saw an exhibition in the Tate London of the work by Oskar Kokoshka in 1962. The expressive dynamic properties of this artist spoke deeply to the young Prendergast, and coupled with the influence of his tutor Frank Auerbach confirmed to him that focusing on the structure underneath appearance was of the utmost importance to him. Page 74 in an essay by Robert Macdonald quotes the artist saying; "I have to make drawings to understand the landscape. When I know it thoroughly I work on my paintings. A cloud may come by, the light may change, and with a few strokes I may be able to finish the painting. I wouldn't be able to do that unless I had spent time reassessing, reconstructing, reconsidering. Some might equate the work with children's scribbling. They don't realise all the work underneath. The paintings haven't just arrived from nowhere."

Finally on page 121 the author Tony Curtis quotes the artists saying a profound statement of his art; "For me the nature of landscape is important. I believe that if you could pull the earth back you could find out where the world came from. the picture is made from some sort of glorification, celebration of nature. I don't know what they do for other people. I know that painting helps make sense of my life, as a way of trying to understand myself, to see the world and justify myself in it."

The whole range of his paintings, from the linear panoramic views of the valleys in North Wales such as "Landscape near Bethesda from Parc" from 1973, through to the later more fluid seascapes such as "Rock Pool Below" from 2004-5 all speak of an intimate knowledge of the land and the sea and are deeply moving and interesting because of that knowledge.

Art and Illusion by EH Gombrich

2010-08-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

Though I didn't find this as easy to read as the book "The Story of Art" by the same author is was still very interesting and there are a few passages I want to make note of here. The first is from page 4 which surprised me with its honesty and forward thinking for essays written in 1960; "the first prejudice teachers of art appreciation usually try to combat is the belief that artistic excellence is identical with photographic accuracy." This is something that I've been guilty of in the past so it was with relief that I read this and could put into motion the ability to change this.

Gombrich is also aware of the high illusionist abilities of the Old Master painters, such as Caravaggio and Da Vinci, with their perfect, clean, crisp paintings lead us to assume that the same standard of excecution is to be sought after now; "When we deal with masters of the past who were both great artists and great 'illusionists', the study of art and the study of illusion cannot always be kept apart." But it is important to realise now that the role of painting has changed from what it was to something richer and more multi layered than just illusion. However the description made by Plato in the "Sophist" and quoted by Gombrich on page 7 is a beautiful homage to the ability of art to defy reality, that it is a "man-made dream for those who are awake."

There is a significant section at the beginning of the book devoted to the developments made by Constable in his search for greater realism in his paintings which consisted in relinquishing the styles of the past and the assumed standards for painting, the classic example being his use of green paint for grass when it had previously been painted as brown. This radical shift in the creation of paintings is written about in interesting terms in the book on page 30; "much of the knowledge gained by these experiments in the past has become common property today...Indeed there are artists who think the field to which Constable devoted his scientific endeavours has been fully investigated by now and that they must turn to different areas for experiment. Instead of exploring the visible world, they probe the mysterious of the unconscious mind or test our response to abstract shapes." It is humbling to think of how far the developments in art have come, and interesting to think of how much an effect the invention of photography must also have contributed to the new areas in painting.

On page 55 Gombrich quotes Emile Zola who said that a painting was "a corner of nature seen through a temperament," which to my mind brings back what I'd been reading about Piper and the way that he viewed the world around him, surely inspired to a great degree by his own passions and personality. There is a quote in the "Finding Your Way" course book which says "A work of Art created without emotion is not Art" and this again ties in with the quote above. It could also be looked upon that any painting, landscape or not, is created through a temperament.

I have been interested in the work of Lucian Freud recently, for a number of my projects both written and painted, so it was humorous to read on page 80 about this "young" artist (bearing in mind it was written in the 60's). But what was really interesting (age aside) was his input into the illusionist, Pygmalion powers of painting; "A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life." I find this deeply touching, especially as it is primarily his family, friends and lovers that he paints (as he has said in the past who else could he paint with such honesty? -very much like Frank Auerbach). But is there also an element of preservation in his paintings? Especially in the deeply touching ones of his mother. His paintings contain that glimmer of life, that Pygmalion power that they could move, yet you are also aware of their encasing in paint, as he is aware too.

Another point of the book which made me laugh was page 98 and the story about Matisse and the lady who came to visit his studio who said " 'But surely, the arm of this woman is much too long,' the artist replied politely, 'Madame, you are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture.' " This shows a different outlook on the act of painting to the one by Freud, as he realises from the outset that his is nothing more and nothing less than a painting.

John Piper by Frances Spalding

2010-08-19T11:34:00.001-07:00

http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Piper-Myfanwy-Lives-Art/dp/0199567611/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1316608052&sr=8-2

I've just finished reading the book "John Piper, Myfanwy Piper, Lives in Art" by Frances Spalding, copyright 2009. I really enjoyed reading it because it flowed like a novel and it was easy to get caught up in the lives of these fascinating people and their family and home whilst also being absorbed with the creative contents of their lives. I want to include some of the passages that interested me in particular.
Page 18 of the book includes a wonderful quote by William Blake, whose work Piper admired tremendously because of its"exuberant creativity." Upon reading the work of this artist he came across this question posed by Blake and the impact of it was obviously felt throughout the whole of Piper's creative life; "Shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated to its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception?" This is a very powerful suggestion that I can see settled into Pipers brain at an early age, he would have been about seventeen at the time, and helped to form the way that he used his art, as he very thankfully did not go down the route of facsimile representation in his art. The whole of his career was fascinating to read about, flowing from pure abstraction to a Romanticised vision of the country and its buildings (fueled by the destruction of buildings, villages, towns and cities by the Second World War) which he created in oils, watercolours, aquatints, lithographs and prints, through to stained glass windows, murals and tapestries.

Descriptions of his time spent in Wales were particularly interesting to me, visiting areas such as Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and the Teifi lakes where he enjoyed the "weird solitude". His trips to North Wales during 1945 also produced rich and dramatic paintings, reminiscent of the layers grazes used by Turner, though enhanced with textures and added depth through his interesting use of thick gesso which he used to "complicate and enrich the surface of the painting."(p.288) Other parts of the book also used more details of his working method, involving the thick layers of gesso and thin glazes of oil paints as underpainting and scraping back, ideas which helped to inform the way I painted my own version of a ruined building. He was always aware of the painting serving the need for being a representation of something seen whilst also existing as a painting in its own right, and the process of experimenting and marking the surface of the painting in a way which shows it as an object, and not just an illusion of something, is something that was very important to him. He always drew on the spot with mixed media, including pencils, black and coloured inks, pastel and oily chalks, watercolour and gouache and would only use his oils when back in the studio, as the amount of equipment needed was just too much to take on site. Page 216 describes the scratches into the paint, using the wrong end of the brush, as carrying "a memory of the building's imagined past."
Cotman was another of the artists who Piper admired for his choice of ruined buildings and who always found "rich beauties in every building he visited" no matter how decayed they were. Piper was one of the artists who helped to revive this Romanticised view of nature and the countryside as favoured by Turner and other artists of the past. Piper also published his own book on the subject in 1942 called "British Romantic Artists" which opens with the striking line that Romantic art "is the result of a vision that can see into these things something significant
beyond ordinary significance:something that for a moment seems to contain the
whole world; and, when the moment is past, carries over some comment on life or
experience besides the comment on appearances."
Which to my mind harks back to the quote above by William Blake that had struck Piper as a teenager, and goes to show how much of a resonance it must have held for him. Christopher Hussey in his book "The Picturesque," quoted by Frances Spalding, says of the Romantic movement in art that is was a process of "feeling through the eyes" and it was this that fed his imagination to see into and beyond the destruction that he beheld in the ruined Coventry Cathedral, his turning point when it came to dealing with the destruction of the war and the painting that inspired me to take the ideas from it to feed into my painting of a ruined building.

A passage in page 202 made me laugh when Piper was commissioned to paint Windsor Castle and upon seeing the finished images with their dark and brooding storm clouds King George VI made the comment "you seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper." However if it hadn't been for this expressive use of landscape then Piper would have just ended up as another typical typographer, not as a Romantic visionary of the British landscape.

Final Image for Painting in the Style of Another Artist

2010-08-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last entry because I wanted to make sure the base layer of paint was dry before started painting on top of it. I didn't want any wet on wet dragging effect, but wet on dry so that I could get a scumbling affect and that the base layer of paint, either darker or lighter that the top layer, would show through underneath as it often does in Pipers own paintings. This can be seen in the close up of the front of the building.

The close up of the stone wall shows how the chunks of dried paint which I added to the canvas in the early stages of the painting have now been integrated into the whole image, with both adding on more layers of sticky paint, plus scrapping back. This has helped it to look more organic, and not so artificial; it's a technique I'll remember for the future.

The colours themselves have changed since the last photo shown here, some bits are lighter, like the building which gives it a spotlit effect as used by Piper, then the sky is darker, with patchwork areas of colour to break up the expanse of blue. The painting of Piper's which I used for this arrangement of colour in the sky is Seaton Delaval, used on the cover of the book "Lives in Art" by Francis Spalding which I've been reading and will write about here soon.

The skyline has also changed because I decided to get rid of the hills in the distance. I didn't really know what to do with them, give them colour or make them dark or light, so in the end I decided they weren't really adding anything to the composition and could go, so I covered them over with the new colours used for the sky and I much prefer this new dramatic skyline as it makes it look like smoke rising above the building.

The other area where the colours have changed is the trees, which I'd also wondered what to do with. But I found that the bright colours were too out of sync with the building, so I decided to give them a more autumnal tone, more in keeping with the muted warm colours in the rest of the painting, and I've also scrapped them back in areas to show the brighter green underneath as this gives it more variety in both colour and mark-making.

I'm really fond of the colours used for the smoke damaged part of the building, because even though they may look a little artificial, and they were again inspired by the vivid colours used in Seaton Delaval, there are actually hints of pink and orange in the paint work of the building in real life that were affected by the heat of the blaze. I feel that the final image works really well as an integration of the style of John Piper, plus representing expressively and accurately a real building in its ruined state.

(Added April 12th 2011) I've since found this on a website featuring information on the town of Tonyrefail, where I live. It gives some interesting images and information on the building before and after the ruined state. http://tonyrefail.org/inferno.html

Grave stones and dry stone wall.

2010-07-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've started adding detail to the gravestones and the drystone wall here, which is helping to create an extra feeling of three dimensionality. I am a bit worried that it's still looking very dark, so I might start adding brighter colours here.

The version on the right shows a lighter background for the hills behind the church which I am now unhappy with and will put it back to the version on the left which is more of a silhouette, rather than the strangely lit version on the right. I've also gone back to the brighter version for the building as the previous stage was looking too muddy. Looking at Piper's paintings the colours were always quite clear, so I will go back to my original idea of scumbling darker paint over the dry underpaint, which means just waiting for the paint to dry.

Adding detail

2010-07-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

I was happy with the sky in the previous image, but then realised that in the John Piper skies there's more swirling movement and so I decided that I needed to add more movement to my painting, as my previous stage had more of a cross hatching type texture to it. The sky still needs a bit of work doing to it but I'm happy with how the lighter area in the middle of the sky creates the light source for the building. There's much use of this kind of dramatic skyline in the backgrounds that Piper painted for theatrical productions.

I've started to mix darker colours into the building whilst the paint is still wet as I decided not to leave it all until the paint had dried just in case it looked too rough.

To help my assessment of the composition I've added the main elements such as the gravestones and the dry stone wall and also the windows so that I could judge if I'd got the proportions right. It's frustrating trying to add darker detail to the window when the lighter paint just mixes in and prevents the dark from sticking, so there are some issues that will have to be resolved when the oils have dried.

I've noticed how fond Piper is of black within his paintings and I'm hoping that it's not pure black from a tube as I've been warned against that so many times! So to incorporate darker colours into my painting (which I've already started to in the trees in the side) I've been mixing viridian green with prussian blue and a tiny bit of payne's grey and sometimes some burnt sienna to warm it up a bit. I'm hoping that this will provide the added layer of depth that's in Piper's paintings without killing the colour and sucking all light out of it.

Adding the oil paints

2010-07-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

This shows the first layer of oil paint added to the base coat of acrylic shown previously. The thick layering of dried acrylic chunks is still visible and provides an interesting relief to the flat layer of the canvas. The light sourse for this photo is from above and shows the texture off very effectively.

My colour scheme here is based on several paintings by John Piper, which I've included in my sketchbook studies, as he was quite distinctive in his use of striking blue for the sky, with the dark swirling clouds, coupled with yellow ochre used for the building. At such an early stage the building itself is still looking very neat and clean, though this will be adapted as the oil paints dry and I'm then able to scumble and mix in darker colours into the base coat.

The background here is still very dark, though detail will be added, notably in the foreground for the gravestones. I'm unsure wheather to bring the trees on the sides into their full colour range or keep them as shadows to frame the building. At the moment I'm quite happy with how dark they look. There's also a dry stone wall that's right in the forground and I'm looking forward to utilising the dried acrylic relief here to recreate the effect of rough stone.

Project 7; Paint In The Style Of Another Artist

2010-07-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

John Piper has interested me since the Autumn project for the course "Relating to Other Artists" and I've continued to do research into his work. Seeing one of his paintings on display in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff recently was interesting in order to see how he used texture and layering to achieve his dramatic effects. I've also been reading the book "Lives in Art" by Frances Spalding which chronicles the lives of husband and wife team John and Myfanwy Piper. The book goes into quite a bit of detail behind the techniques that John used, especially the use of thick gesso paint in the background and also the way he would scrape into the paint. The website johnpiper.org.uk gives information that John wouldn't actually have painted the oil paintings outside, as he felt the equipment needed to create these paintings was just too cumbersome, but he did many watercolour paintings on site and would accompany this with pages and pages of written information on tonal properties and colours.

Using this information and the images featured in the book and the website I decided to create my own John Piperesque painting for the project "In the style of...", using as my subject matter a chapel which burned down a few years ago. I'd painted the chapel in its whole state for the Watercolour course five years ago so I found the idea of treating it in a different style to be interesting and challenging.

I spent many pages researching and recreating images by John Piper incorporating his dramatic colour schemes, then went on to experiment with my compositions for the chapel using different viewpoints, and then proceeded to start the final painting. I wanted to use oils, as John would have done, but felt that painting with acrylics as an undercoat would allow me greater flexibility with time seeing as thick layers of oil paint would be used and I couldn't wait too long before posting it off to my tutor.

Whilst laying down the initial layer of acrylic paint, using an old palette with dried on paint, I came up with the idea that rather than scraping off the old acrylic from the palette and throwing it in the bin, I would use it to thicken up the background for the painting, which would then create the opportunity for interesting paint textures for the oils on top. The two photo's above show the end result of the base layer of acrylic, incorporating the thick dried chunks of acrylic. At this moment in time I'm still unsure if it's going to work though, I'll either live to regret it or decide that it was well worth it. For now I see it as an interesting effect and I'm willing to give it a go.

Old and new version of the "Moving Figures" project

2010-07-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Following advice from my tutor and my own opinion that the original painting for "Figures in an Interior," which is shown in the top photo, was just too vague and not detailed enough, I decided to rework the image. I went back to my original sketches and the original idea to base it on similar techniques and style to the sketches by Henry Moore in his "Shelter Sketchbook", and the result is the drastically different painting in the photo on the bottom.

I'm so glad that I've changed the first painting, and it's made even more apparent the weaknesses in that painting by seeing it here next to the new one. The main problems in the old version are the lack of depth to the pictorial plane and the deadening of the colour by the use of too much black. The application of paint, which was meant to be expressive and gestural, just ends up looking messy and vague.

My tutor pointed out to me the level of detailing that can be achieved whilst still keeping a feeling of movement and freshness, by showing me the work of the OCA tutor Colin Allbrock. This really helped me decided on the amount of detailing that I wanted to add to the new painting.

Another major difference between the paintings, which I'm really glad about, is the use of light and shade within the composition as a whole, not just the light and shade in the figures, but the fact that the top half of the new painting is much lighter than the bottom half, strengthening the illusion of the light casting source of the coloured lights, bringing them into more prominence as opposed to the original painting where they weren't really contributing anything. It also adds a feeling of depth and movement that the blackness in the original painting just couldn't create.

On a personal level I'm glad I stuck to my original idea of including the unusual "harp guitar" instrument which was played by the guitarists, because in the first painting I thought it might look too strange, but now that it's been added it's the normal guitar which looks strange because of the ineffective colours used.

I'll do a full write up in my logbook for "what I have achieved", but what I wanted to show here was a direct comparison between the two paintings.

Henry Moore at the Tate

2010-06-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

I know this is such a touristy thing to do, but it had to be done! This is me next to one of the Henry Moore sculptures that I saw when I went to the Tate at the end of May for the contextual studies workshop with Richard Lilley where we discussed and sketched lot of the paintings from the modern British art collection, I've written all about it in my logbook. I also went to the Henry Moore exhibition which was downstairs, and I've written about it in my logbook too because his sketches in particular were a source of inspiration to me, especially in the "Figures in an Interior" project.

I love his sculptures too though, and this figure stopped me in my tracks when I walked in to the building. She was so tender and monumental at the same time, a bit like a whale, if you know what I mean. I've read the book "Celebrating Moore" which has so many photo's of his work in it that it makes you giddy. I'd love to see some more, especially the ones that are outside like on big hillsides. I've been to the Barbara Hepworth Museum down in St Ives, and her work looks so wonderful when it's outside, which a lot of it is as it's arranged in her garden as she wanted it to, and the sculptures look like they're growing out of the soil, which I can imagine Moore's work being like when viewed outside.

Movement Experiment

2010-06-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

This is the final image for another exercise for movement which I wrote about in my first sketchbook on page 69, but I wanted to include here to show it along side the previous movement painting of the swimming pool because of its similar flickering effect, thought here it was achieved through different means, which were suggested in the course book. It said to try cutting up a photograph or a drawing into thin strips and glue them down with thin areas of white showing in between. I took the idea a step further and took three separate paintings, all of kites which were painted from photo's that I took on holiday, then I cut these into strips and glued them down with the three separate images layed down in an alternate pattern. I'm really pleased with the effect this has given, again like the last painting, as though it's seen through a prism. It does make it look like the kite is moving and that the tail is flickering around. A very interesting effect and a worth while experiment. I also love how simple the image is, especially the colouring, which was inspired by the David Hockney painting "A Bigger Splash" with its pristine blue water and sky, and how such a flat slab of colour could still help to convey movement, maybe because it acts as such a strong counterpoint to the movement of the splash in the water, and here the kite in the sky.

Finishing off the Figure

2010-06-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Having completed the background in the previous stage, all that was left was to add the detail for the figure. I started off by redefining the highlights where the sun was hitting the limbs and torso, then added shade to the opposite side. Closer study of the photo showed me areas from the body that were being refracted by the water, and it's interesting to see how much of a difference it's made to the implied movement of the figure that there are areas around the arm on the right and the head and legs that have been split up like a prism, and the water has overlapped into the areas of the body.

I added more splashes, with a purer white, instead of the bluey white used previously, to the area at the bottom which has again contributed to the feeling of movement through the water because the splash is further away than the foot, suggesting the figure has already moved away from where she was.

I'm really happy with the image, and feel that it conveys movement very well, both of the water and of the figure. I'm also really happy with the level of realistic detail in it, but also how expressive it is as a painting with lots of gestural brushstrokes.

Ripples and Splashes

2010-06-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

The effect of the water rippling is really starting to come together now, and the illusion of depth is quite convicing. Closer study of the original photo, which had previously been studied at arms length, as it was attached to the board, showed how much more detail there was to be found in the image, especially subtle, tiny ripples and reflections. This has added a lot more interest.

I used a softer sable mix brush for this stage, after having used a hogs hair brush up til this point, and started off with the larger brush to add the larger areas of reflections in the top of the painting, then a much smaller sable brush to add the tiny ripples of light on top of these larger areas. The section on the bottom right of the painting has particularly benefited from the extra ripples added there, because the detail in the top area of the painting was too dominant. The large splash at the bottom is also helping to equalize the interest in the different sections of the painting.

I've also added more definition to the figure, with more light and shade to suggest the contour of the limbs, though this is by no means finished, as it needs to be defined more clearly before it is then broken up by the refractions of the water.

Adding Detail

2010-06-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

It's quite hard with this painting to see very much development, because all of the elements are already there. What I'm aiming to do is to tighten up the amount of detail that is there. I also want to add more depth, which will be achieved by adding a greater contrast between the light and dark areas. Looking at the original photo shows a lot more sparkle in the water, and the area at the bottom of the image is where the splash is taking place from the foot kicking up, so I will be using splatters and splashes to achieve the effect. This will be an interesting contrast between the area in the top left hand corner which shows the bigger ripples.

I've also added detail to the figure here, just to better place it in its context, and the addition of the goggles is quite and interesting feature, as it makes it look quite eery.

New Movement Painting

2010-06-28T03:16:00.000-07:00

Following a recent holiday in Devon, where I unfortunately forgot to take my sketching equipment, I took lots of interesting photos which I was hoping would provide me with lots of images to incorporate into the "Movement" project. A wonderful set of photo's I took was of my children swimming in the outdoor pool, on a gloriously sunny day, which gave loads of ripples and reflections. My daughter was the most willing model for me, as being older than her brother she can swim under the water. So I was getting her to swim around so I could photograph her. What made this such a novelty for me is that where I live we are forbidden to take photo's of our own children in the local swimming pools.

There was one photo in particular which I took of her, that really caught my interest, where she fully submerged but looking up at the sky. This photo here is the beginning of my painting of it. I started off with a layer of ultramarine blue, but when I saw that the colour didn't match up with the turquoise of the water, and not even adding white made any difference, I decided to invest in a new shade of blue. A visit to the art shop helped me decide on Cerulean Blue Hue, which when mixed with pale green, ultramarine and white, like I've done here, has perfectly captured the rippling sun dappled effect of the water.

I roughly filled in the area of the figure, just so I could see it in its position, but I'm not being too precious about painting over it in areas, because there are areas on the legs, arms and head which are fragmented by the water, so this will help to give that effect. When I first started blocking in the areas of paint for the figure and the water I did my brush strokes going horizontally, but I realised that this deadened the image, and made it look flat and motionless. Changing the brushstrokes to diagonals, as shown above, has created greater movement, and made the effect of the sun and water rippling much more effective.

I'm again using acrylics here so I can layer the paint quicker than oils. I did think about using oil paints, but I was worried about how much smudging would occur between the paint. However I am planning on copying another one of the swimming photo's, this time of my son, for my own use (as it does not convey movement as effectively as this image) and I will try and use oils for this version, then I can compare the effects of both images.

Finished Painting

2010-06-28T02:43:00.000-07:00

The finished painting converys a lot of the movement that I was hoping it would, both in the rippling of the fields in the rise and fall and the suggested movement of the wind from the growth pattern of the trees. The texture of the paint had a lot to do with the flow of the grass and the leaves, which is what conveys this movement so well. Working from the studies from home, after doing the preliminary work on site, was interesting because of the challenge it offered, and also the scope for developing the image beyond what was presented in front of you when sat looking at the hill.

If I had to do it again I would develop more detail in the main tree, because it does look slightly blob-like, also looking at the photo of it now I can see how the two areas of sunlit grass, on the left and the right, don't match up colour wise, the area on the right looks slightly more blue compared to the greeny yellow area on the left, but as the painting is quite large I didn't notice this at the time.

I'm glad I used acrylics, because the faster drying time enabled me to apply many more layers than I would have been able to achieve with oils. Having said that, I've never actually painted on site with oils, so that would be an experiance worth having. I know that project 12 offers another landscape painting, so maybe that will be my opportunity to experiment with it. I think I will invest in the seperators you can get, that enable you to layer the board you paint on to another board which prevents the oils from getting smudged in transport.

Adding the Tree

2010-06-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

Adding the tree now as the main focal area has made such a difference to the composition, making it seem like a complete image. The way that the tree grows up to the left after having been pushed by the wind for so many years, is an interesting feature, as it mimics the flow of the land. The focus of the painting now is no longer just the rippling effect of the hill, but is also the implied movement of the wind. There's still a lot more detail to be added at this stage, both to the existing trees and to the trees which will be added to the left and right hand side, at the edges of the composition.

The photo here is not so good at picking out the subtle textural detail, but there are areas in the sky and grass which have benefited from the thick treatment of paint with the painting knife, even though I'd carried on using the hogs hair brush, because it's created ridges in the paint, which enabled me to create light and shade, and layers of depth, that to my eye suggested subtle clouds and the movement of grass. This is very interesting as it's not something that I'd planned, but is something that evolved as the painting progressed. It's an effect that I will remember for future use.

Changing the composition

2010-06-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

The previous image was starting to make me feel uncomfortable with how much space the hill was occupying compared to the sky, and still the shadows looked too dark. So I decided to go back to the studies I'd done in the sketchbook, which had been produced as the sun was rising, so there were three different images with three different shadow patterns, and I decided to work with the latter of the images, which had the greater area of sunlit grass, but still showed the shadows created by the contours in the mountain.

Lowering the line of the hill caused problems because I'd used such thick paint for the hill side, it was now showing as unwanted textured areas in the sky, which you can just about make out in the photo here. I spent a while adding more paint to the rough area of the sky to try and blend it in with the smooth ares, and even though it took quite a few applications of paint it worked out quite well and is now almost imperceptable.

The lighter areas of the grass are now much more successful and not so oppressive, and I really like the way that using the brush (my new hogs hair brush!) to paint on top of the darker areas has created a really interesting effect, one that I wanted to keep and utilise, as to me it suggested the blowing of the wind and the rippling of the grass.

Developing the "Movement" painting

2010-06-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

This image shows the work that was done in the house to try and soften the edges of the shadows. I worked this time with a paint brush, as opposed to the painting knife, as I wanted to give it a blurred effect, and to work the wet paint into each other. I also made the effort to lighten the shadows because the contrast between the light and dark areas looked too harsh. The illusion of dips and rises is now starting to look more effective.

I've painted this mountain before for the "Relating to Other Artists" course where we were asked to paint a "Composition of Greens" towards the end of the course. I also worked on site for that painting, and developed studies to work from in my sketchbook. But the composition then was quite different because we were asked to paint different shades of green, so I decided to include another hill into the composition, which is seen to the right of this hill, and is covered in deciduous trees. The contrast between the bright green of this hill, which was seen in direct sunlight at the time, and the darker bluey green of the other hill was quite effective. I also worked with a painting knife predominantly for that painting, using a brush for a small amount of detail, and my inspiration for the image was the work fo Kyffin Williams who was a great Welsh Landscape artist who also painted using a painting knife.

Project 4; Movement

2010-06-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

I'd struggled for a while to come up with an image I was happy with for the "movement" project, and my sketchbook has many of my efforts at trying to find a satisfactory image. But the image that kept getting stuck in my head was "Cataract 3" by Bridget Riley that I saw on the cover of "Art and Illusion" by EH Gombrich. The rolling effect of the image was fascinating, and every morning I could see the same rolling effect on the hills visible from my kitchen window, caused by the rising sun casting long shadows in the dips and rises in the side of the hill.

I decided to make the effort to capture this effect, so early one morning I got up and out of the house, with my car packed with painting supplies (and my flask of tea!) and I settled myself down to paint the effects of the rising of the sun. I also made three studies of the light and shade effects and the colours for my sketchbook so I could refer to them later, when finishing the painting off in the house.

The photo here is of the layer of paint that was layed down on site. I applied it very thickly with a painting knife, and used acrylics for their faster drying time. The shadows here are very dark, and also there is a very abrupt edge between the light and shade, but I aimed to soften this effect with further work on the painting.

Gwen John Paintings

2010-05-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Gwen John paintings today in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and was very impressed, nourished and inspired by what I saw there. I made sketches of the paintings, plus bought postcards that will be going in my logbook with a full write up on what I saw and thought of the paintings, but for now I'll just say there were stunning, ethereal, elegant and deeply dignified. You could smell the Parisian air in the paintings of her room in Paris.

I was really pleased when I said to the curator, who took me into the vaults where the oil paintings were stored, that a painting by John of a still life on the table, though seen from a distance, reminded me of the still lives by Morandi, because of the quiet dignity in them, and the hazy way of painting, and she said she'd often thought that about the similarity between the two artists, especially as they were both quite obsessive about their specific subject matters, painting them over and over again. It pleased me that I'd made an observation about her work that a professional curator agreed with - and I've never read in any book about this similarity in style!

I also bought a long handled hogs hair brush from the art shop in Cardiff, ready to do some textural, expressive oil paintings ala Lucian Freud - though maybe not of nude people yet! I've got another book on Lucian Freud to read called "The artist at work" plus one of Gwen John. So for now I will go and do some reading.

Viewing Gwen John Paintings

2010-05-13T03:10:00.000-07:00

I've just had a phone call from the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, returning my call, to say I can go next Thursday, a week today, to see the oil paintings by Gwen John that are in storage at the museum. There are none out on display at the moment, but the fact that I can go to view her work privately more than makes up for that fact. I want to go to see them because I've read about the unusual way she used oil paints, as apparently they were quite dry, that she drained the oil away from them before applying them, so I'd like to see this for myself. I also want to study her brushstrokes as the paintings always seem almost blurred, as though seen through tissue, so I'd like to figure out how this was done. I'll be able to take drawing materials to the visit, no paints, so I'll make sure to fill plenty of pages for my logbook studies.
When I was in the process of doing the recent figure painting of the girls I noticed how much of a difference it made to hold the brush loosely, and to paint in small side to side motions, especially with the longer handled brush, so I'm wondering if this is something that Gwen John did too. It helped to give it a kind of fluffy edge to the images in the painting, giving them a much more realistic and tactile appearance, so that it wasn't crisp and clean and plastic looking. I will experiment more with this technique, and will invest in a hogs hair brush, long handled, ready to try with oil paints, for any future figure work, like Lucian Freud uses, and I'll also try it to see how it works with non figure based images. The next project is the "movement" project which sounds interesting as it could be interpreted in so many different ways. But before that I still have theoretical studies work to finish for the figures projects.

"Patrick Heron" by Michael McNay. Tate Publishing 2002

2010-05-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

Having previously never understood Patrick Heron's colourful pictures, I've now fallen in love with them after having seen a large painting by him down in the Tate St Ives. It filled my vision with colour, texture and movement. Since then I've tried to find out more about him and how he worked, so I enjoyed this book about him by Michael McNay and I'll include some passages here that caught my interest.

This first passage is in Heron's own words, about his work, which he wrote about in the essay "Art is Autonomous" written in 1955 and is quoted in the book on page 51. "The meaning which a work of art has for society is not the same as the meaning that the artist was conscious of putting into it. This is because art is not just a telephone exchange which facilitates straightforward communication. The work of art is in some profound sense an independent, live entity. It has its own life. It draws nourishment from its creator that he was totally unaware of having put into it: and it redistributes nourishment to the spectator (including the artist himself, for he is merely a spectator once the work is completed)"
Later, on page 52 he goes on to describe the process of building up a painting using shapes and brushstrokes, almost abstract in a way, that goes into an object, that the viewer knows is an illusion, echoing the work of EH Gombrich in his book "Art and Illusion", but like the greatest magic tricks, we love to be deceived by. He gave this lecture at the University of Texas in 1979. "Even in the most highly figurative of masterpieces the painter knows that it is not Rembrandt's mothers nose he is looking at, but a miraculously ordered mosaic of interleaved, overlapped, opaque, transparent, soft-edged, sharp-edged, rounded or squared, separate brush-touches....A painting's greatness, or otherwise, doesn't depend on that information about the nostril (or about any other of the myriad subjects available): it depends upon the organisational significance, harmony, architectonic coherence - or whatever else you like to call it that those paint marks across that flat surface evoke."
During this trip to Texas he became very ill with pneumonia, and his wife died shortly afterwards. For a while he didn't paint at all, then he started to draw, using a very minimalist, representational style that he'd previously experimented with in 1954. This minimalist style of drawing later found its way into his paintings of the 1990s. The book describes this on page 64 in a very interesting way; "And the whites in Heron's drawings, that pregnant emptiness full of suggested light and colour, seem to look forward to the white expanses of primed canvas he would leave on his final paintings, between the carefree filigree of the scribbled lines of paint."
In an essay on Constable by Heron, entitled "Constable: Spatial Colour in the Drawings" written in 1994, Heron goes into more detail about the illusionistic impression of depth that is created in drawings which is mentioned on page 64; "at every stage in our contemplation of a drawing we are measuring the various depths to which our eyes sink into the illusionistic space the drawing evokes: thirty yards to that tree - seventy yards to that bank, two hundred yards to that hedge - eight-five yards to that gable-end - five miles to that cloud - stop; stop; stop; the eye plunges straight ahead through the illusionistic space of the drawing, down a hundred lines of vision to a 'stop'."
It is not surprising that Heron's primary consideration in his paintings was colour. On page 65 the book mentions that "Patrick equated the spiritual with the continent of colour, better than sex, he said, better than anything as a matter of fact. 'All colour is shape and all shape is colour' he wrote. 'There is no shape that is not conveyed to you by colour, and there is no colour that can present itself to you without involving shape." This suggests that he had a language of shapes and colours that was very personal to him, like a code.
On page 67 it mentions that to the younger generation of artists "Heron was a link with the masters, particularly Braque and Matisse in France; and like Heron, like Matisse's British contemporary Matthew Smith, had not painted out of a sense of inferiority but had set out to learn from the old masters of modernism and match them."
Along side this love of colour was a belief which he had written about many times, "that he believed that figuration would return to painting in a different form," but that "finding parallels in nature was not what Heron meant when he had remarked that figuration would return." He died in 1999, the day after he'd created a series of drawings, based on the map of Australia, that were to be turned into etchings. He was 79 years old, and had pursued the puzzle, the joy and struggle of art until his death.

The Final Painting of Figures in an Interior

2010-05-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

This is now the final painting with all the major compositional aspects added. I might alter one or two things, such as the strip of white light behind the two figures which needs to be brighter. Plus there needs to be a bit more detail which I'd like to add to the folded piece of paper on the table, which was made out of lined paper, so I wanted to add very faint lines to show this. Plus the left hands figures left arm still needs altering.

The extra details of shading on the right hand figure adds to a greater feel of three dimensionality to the painting. I'm very happy with the level of detail and realism I've been able to achieve in this painting, the most realistic one I've done so far. I wanted this painting to show that I really could paint and draw, with good observational skills, and I feel I've achieved that. I have to thank the book "Art and Illusion" by EH Gombrich for helping me to interpret what I see and how to translate that to the canvas or paper, by understanding visual language. I've only just started the book and it's taught me so much, so I look forward to more information it can give me with my painting work, both realistic and expressive.

I'll do a full write up on "What I have achieved" for my logbook, but for now I'm happy that it's finished.

Finishing the Clothes for Fgures in an Interior

2010-05-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

I'm happy with the faces now, especially since I added the glasses to the figure on the left, so now I've been adding detail to the clothes. It's surprising how it adds solidity to the figures, especially the figure on the right who's head looked a bit disconnected from her body. Adding the detail to the foreground and her legs will contribute more to this illusion of depth and solidity.
I'm looking forward to the composition all coming together now, and to see how the colours work together.

Features for Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've spent a while working on the features of the girls, painting and repainting and rubbing out and starting again. I'm trying not to get frustrated but when I shut my eyes I can see paint!

I decided to take a leaf out of Lucian Freud's book and paint with a longer handled brush, which has given more texture on the left face which is more interesting and "painterly." It's also enabled me to add more texture to the hair, which I'm pleased with. The shading is coming on better too, plus the features are more accurate, especially on the face on the right. The eye closer to the foreground on this face has given me a lot of trouble, mostly because of the tricky angle, which I thought was on a flatter angle than what it is in the original photo. This has resulted in me having to paint over and start again around five times, but I'm glad I made myself do it, rather than put up with an area I knew was wrong, and have to see it as wrong every time I looked at it.

I think I'll concentrate more on the clothing now, and work my way down the painting, so I can see it as a whole, then I can decided if the features need any further work. Plus I think I'll have to add more shadows to the left figures arm, the one closer to the edge of the canvas, as it still looks a little flat, plus the colours don't match up with the colours of the face.

More detail to Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

I've started adding detail to the hair and the features, now that I'm satisfied with the background. The issuse with the section behind the figure on the right has been resolved, thanks to adding more layers of a thin wash of lighter paint.
The features still needs a lot of refining, but it's starting to take shape, which I'm pleased with. The forms still look a little flat, especially around the arms of the figure on the left, but the face some good modelling to it, but again it needs finishing details, and the face on the right needs a lot of work to it, especially due to the tricky angle.
At the moment neither of the girls in the painting look exactly like their version in the original photo. I was hoping to get more of a likeness, but if it doesn't work out then I won't be too disappointed.

From starting to read the book Art and Illusion by E H Gombrich I've started to see the paintings and drawings I do to be more connected to the realm of illusion which is what they really are. This has helped me to see the shapes and forms that are created in the paint as more like abstract marks, which has helped me to analyse the images much more effectively. So rather than thinking "that's a nose, so lets paint a nose" it's more like thinking about what kind of shape that nose is, which can be very different to what you think the nose should look like. This has been very important to me in the development of the features, as has the information in the "painting portraits" book, indeed they seem to compliment each other.

Adding detail to Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

The pink areas for the clothing have now been added which brings more interest and warmth to the image, and adds even more of a contrast to the cool colours in the background. Plus I've adjusted the drapes behind the figure on the left so that it has more contours. The area behind the figure on the right is still a bit a problem because it looks too flat. Once I've sorted out these background areas I'll start work on the features which are the hardest bit of the painting.

I've been reading lots from the book Painting Portraits by Rosalind Cuthbert for any tips to help me with this task, and there's some very useful and important information in there, such as the way that the features distort as the face turns away. The figure on the right will be particuluarly problematic because not only is the face in a three quarter view, but is also turned slightly on an angle. I can see now that the eyes aren't at enough of an angle to match the figure in the original photo which has a much steeper angle to it. The figure on the left presents a problem because she is looking so low down. This means that the lips are hardly visible plus the ears will be much higher up in the composition that usual.

Development of Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

This photo, taken in the daytime, which more accurately depicts the colours used, shows the warm areas for the figures plus the cooler areas for the background that have been added. The photo which I was painting from had cooler shades of grey in the background which, even if they weren't there I would have added, as they'll help to push the figure further forward in the composition.

Next stages of Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

This next images shows the underpainting of burnt sienna, yellow ochre and white. I wanted warm undercolours because it's going to have a lot of areas of skin plus the colours of the clothing are pinks and purples. Maybe I should have used green as the underpainting colour because I've since read in a book called "painting portraits" by Rosalind Cuthbert that green was primarily used because it was a

contrast colour to the warm tones on top, plus it was able to effectivly portray areas of veins, especially on the hands.

Figures in an Interior

2010-05-09T08:23:00.000-07:00

These are a series of photos showing the work in progress for the Figures in an Interior project.

This first photo is the sketch at the very beginning, with some paint added at the bottom. The colours are very warm looking just because I took it at night, so it's giving a false impression of what it looks like.

Robert Perry, Contemporary Landscape Artist

2010-04-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.robertperry-artist.co.uk/

Here is another artist to keep in mind for the "Landscape" project. He was mentioned in the OCA forum discussion on our "top five favourite artists". His name is Robert Perry and his website is "robertperry-artist.com. The site shows lots of images of his work but also photos of him working which are just as interesting. In the "methods and techniques" page it lists his techniques as using airbrushes and spray-guns as well as the traditional brushstrokes.

The photo I loved, and which really captured my interest, was of him sat on top of his van with his canvas proped up in front of him on some kind of rigging which he looks like he's made himself. Interesting stuff.

Iwan Gwyn Parry, Contemporary Welsh Artist

2010-04-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.artwales.com/GWYN%20PARRY%20Iwan/IWAN%20GWYN%20PARRY%20PAGE.htm

Just wanted to make a quick note, considering there's a "Landscape" project latter in the course, about an artist mentioned in the OCA forum, called Iwan Gwyn Parry. He's a contemporary Welsh artist who specialises in landscape. The images I saw were on the Artnet website which says his painting are watercolours, but you'd swear they were oils, because they are so thickly layered and dense. There are also oils and acrylic paintings too, and the use of paint with every one of these medias is so thick and textural. The range of tonal contrast is also very dramatic, and he sites Turner as one of his most important influences. He mentions Turner for including industrial images within the landscape, and Parry also follows that lead, which is interesting as it prevents the idolisation of the landscape, and turning it into something precious.

The watercolour painting on the first page from the link above is "The Menai Straits from High Above Rachub Hill" is interesting for it's shining use of blue in the top half of the painting. There is a contrasting shot of piercing orange light right in the centre slicing through the horizon, but everything else is kept to a dark tonal mass of brown and black, thereby intensifying the areas of light and colour.

My assessment feedback had positive comments for my landscape work, and suggests I "continue developing these first hand" so anything that can feed into this area has to be a good thing. I really loved painting outdoors for the final project for "Relating to Other Artists". I remember packing up my equipment feeling so excited, it was so liberating to be painting on such a big scale, in the fresh air and to make as much mess as I wanted.

Finished Jackdaw Painting

2010-03-18T07:03:00.001-07:00

This is the final image for the Jackdaw painting. It's half an A1 sheet - chopped in half length wise. I've very pleased with the light, spcae, scale and the sense of movement. I'm going to add more branches to the trees next to the sun but right now because the paint there is so thick it still hasn't dried. The sun, when I did the sketch, was so bright that the branches near it were all hazy, so I want to get that across. I ended up working from my sketches for the landscape itself but for the birds I worked from photo's - it was impossible for me to sketch enough different poses for the birds to make it interesting - I love the birds that are dive bombing and the two in the front which are on the verge of changing direction by swooping underneath.

Beginning the Painting

2010-03-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

I started one of the paintings today for the animal project. I'm very happy with the colours and feeling of space and freedom it gives. I did the very first layer of colour in the car last night in the car park that I initially sketched in but I only had a twenty minute window of time to do it in before my daughter came out of her swimming lesson. The weather conditions were very similar to the first occasion so that's why I wanted to go back there.
I had another problem at the time because the mount board that I'd stuck the canvas to was so big that I could barely work with it - I couldn't prop it on my lap as I thought initially so I ended up sitting to one side of it and trying to lean across it. I'll be continuing the work in the studio and will probably change to oils to add thickness on top of the acrylics.

Paintings from Bridgeman

2010-03-09T02:24:00.001-08:00

I've spent some time looking through the Bridgeman Art Library for images of crows and there were plenty.

The one that first caught my eye was 'Tree of Crows' by Caspar David Friedrich. http://www.caspardavidfriedrich.org/The-Tree-of-Crows-c.-1822.html Here's a link to his website showing the image of the tree, It contains a lot of the elements that I want in my painting such as the bare trees, the swirling crows and the pale lemon yellow sky. I'm still planning on my painting being a bit more 'messy' even though I like the tight, detailed look of Friedrich's painting.
I also found an image by Ellen Golla that I liked, the outline of the branches and the crows were uneven and very textural, then I read she created them with paper mosaic. Her website http://www.zebracrossing.org/ goes into detail about her working methods and the image I found of 'Stormy Day, Greenwich Park' is in the link for 'paper mosaic collages' then click on 'imaginary places.'
Phillip Sutton, on the Bridgeman Website, created a series of paintings of crows though I've been able to find no website showing the images yet. He painted with very vivid colours, the Royal Academy website mentions that he was inspired by Matisse, and the crows in his paintings were quite often feature a white border around them, as if to highlight them.
Finally I selected the painting by Van Gogh of 'Wheatfield with crows' (his final painting) which also uses very similar vivid colours to Philip Sutton though with much sharper angles to his brush strokes. The format of this painting really took my interest because of the wide, panoramic view which I hope to use in my painting.

starlings roosting on youtube

2010-03-06T03:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJz3UCIj474

This link shows footage of Starlings flocking on Brighton Pier and they do the real wave shapes that i was writing about previously - the shapes here are what i was thinking of doing for the cube idea I had where each different side of the cube shows a different shape of the morphing ball, but I could do both versions of the painting; a flat one with the Jackdaws flocking and a cube one with the Starlings; mind you I've only got a vague idea about how to make the cube - it involves hard board and lots of glue!

Looking at the project description in detail last night i realised that it asks for two paintings, if we have the time, and that one is of a still animal and the other is a moving animal. The Jackdaws fulfil the moving aspect but I'll have to think more on the still animal - I have started sketching my pet cats so I might follow that lead.

you tube footage

2010-03-06T02:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms5wrUfR_MM

This link to Youtube footage shows a flock of jackdaws flying in their swarming patterns. It shows the light conditions that they prefer - which is quite when it's almost completely dark. The photo's taken yesterday have a lighter skyline than this footage, so I'll see which ones work best - possibly variations on the sketches I did yesterday with different colours in the background.

I was a bit bothered that the quality of the recording (as it is with all youtube footage) was quite grainy - even when i freeze framed i couldn't see a clear outline of the birds - but then I'm not planning on the painting being crystal clear either, the birds will sort of merge with the paint, I'll probably use oils so it'll be quite thick. There are also got more photo's I took yesterday, so if clearer images are needed for references than I can use them.

2010-03-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Sent my student profile off today, mentioned the cube idea to her so I'll see what she says.

I went sketching and photographing the birds and the settings today down in Talbot Green (the place where all the Jackdaws congregate). Got some great images - like the one above which shows really good shapes for their wings, I tried sketching them flying too but I ended up getting stuck with the same wing shape, so it will be useful to have this reference to vary the shapes. One sketch I did of the setting is this long panoramic one (helped by the fact that one of my new sketch books is a big A3 one, bound at the thin side when held horizontally, so when it's opened out it's a double A3 in length). I used this to sketch a wide view of the trees and lampposts silhouetted against the setting sun. It could look quite dramatic worked up in oils on a big format.

The setting used to be old marsh land but is now covered by shops like Matalan, Asda and - as can be seen from the sketch above - McDonalds. I thought about editing this from the sketchbook and keeping the image as a pure sort of 'wildlife' setting, but I thought I actually liked it's inclusion, it serves as a counterpoint to the surroundings. The birds have probably been using that spot for a lot longer than what McDonalds have and I like the way that the 'golden arches' sign is diminished by it's surroundings.

I'm going to try and merge the images of the photo's of the birds flying with the sketch of the setting and the trees. I'll probably try it in acrylics on a largish piece of paper, I'd also like to try it with a painting knife and get thick texture on it as I have been reading a lot on Kyffin Williams recently and I love his use of the painting knife.

first day

2010-03-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

So I've done my shopping- stocked up on sketchbooks; small, medium and large, I'm just flicking through the course book trying to make sense of it and then I'm going to send my profile to my tutor.

I've got lots of ideas for the animal project but don't know if it will fit into the brief, the main part of it being painting onto a cube with a different view of the painting on each side of the cube. It's not necessarily going to be a huge cube - maybe just a mock up size of a full size version, but we'll see how it works out.

My idea for it came when I started thinking about swarm patterns in fishes and birds - notably starlings and jackdaws, and this time of year (early spring) the jackdaws have been getting really social and swarming around loads in their groups. There's an area called Talbot Green a few miles from where I live and the jackdaws swarm there for their big communal gatherings where each of the family groups join together and then end up roosting in the trees and big pylons. I love watching them, as do my children, and they make so much noise as they're swooping around that it's really exhilarating especially as they sometimes swoop down really low in the semi darkness (it's around the dawn and dusk times that they do it) - we sometimes drive down just to watch them if the conditions are really good - calm and dry. there have been evenings when the sun is setting just behind them with rich shades of indigo and orange, and the black, dramatic silhouettes of the birds is really striking.

It got me thinking about the freedom they have, the ability to travel in three dimensions - not just left or right like us in a crowd - but up or down, diagonal and side to side. My husbands science magazine 'focus' was saying that computers have been able to replicate the patterns that large schools of fishes and flocks of birds can create by giving the computer a few simple rules such as keeping a certain distance from the creatures around you and always following the one in front of you. I've wanted to do paintings of the swarm patterns they can create but the experience of flying in three dimensions is what made me think of the cube. I can imagine it being suspended by it's corner and allowed to spin in space as each one of the paintings comes into view giving the effect of the swarm changing and morphing.

I'll post some pictures and images, I imagine YouTube would have lots of footage of the birds flying, which would be really interesting to watch.