Elfyn Lewis

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.