I gave up painting in 1994 because it had begun to seem ridiculous. I'd started to get somewhere, in a small way; mentions in magazine articles, a little interest. Everybody liked my work, and nobody bought it. Pressing things demanded my attention, so I stopped painting altogether.
I started again in 2008. Same subject - landscape - but a more direct approach in that I stuck to oil painting rather than fiddling with mixed oil and tempera or any other medium. You can waste a lot of time in the technique hole. Find a way to paint that works, and stick with it.
This time I'm fitting painting around the rest of my life, and I have to say it's not working too well. I have a rule: You can do three things badly, two things well, or one thing better than anybody else in the whole world. It's a good rule. And I wish I could keep it. I'm fitting painting in between writing and the internet, and the small matter of trying to make a living, and the results have been mixed.
Which is where the notion of a failure rate comes in. Sometimes you can't finish a painting as well as you would like. I can think of maybe two paintings I've ever done that turned out just the way they were meant to, where skill and vision coincided perfectly. The rest are compromises of varying degree. Sometimes, the end result is just too compromised to keep. In simple terms, if it rates less than 65% on my internal score card, it's not going to make it.
Maybe part of a painting works. I've cut down paintings to save the best bits, and I'm thinking of doing that with some of my recent work. Overpainting what you've done to get it right has mixed results, generally. If you know exactly what you did wrong, and you know how to fix it - why the hell didn't you do it right first time around? If you're not too sure, any more work is just going to eat up time and paint and the painting will look worse every time you take it out.
The thing that every successful painting has in common is this: planning and rehearsal. Whenever I've done a number of preliminary drawings, tonal and colour studies, the resulting painting has gone like clockwork. And whenever I've tried to wing it, the opposite has happened. Which begs the question, why would I try to wing it, knowing that it probably won't work?
Well, because sometimes the painting gets lost between the initial decision and the final work.Spend too much time preparing, and the spark can die. I've got drawing books full of pictures that never got past the study stage. Use up your slender stock of enthusiasm on the studies, and that's what happens; they're stillborn. Painting is a balancing act, all the way. And at any stage in the process, like the plates the plate spinner is frantically rushing around to keep aloft, a painting can fail.
The awkward truth is, if you want to paint well, it has to be your life. And you have to do it every day for years to get good. And you have to find good tutors so you don't waste time doing things wrong. Painting is like playing the violin: you need to practice, and you need good tuition if you want to be world class. And, as with the violin, aspiring to anything less is an insult to your potential audience. Who wants to listen to a second rate violinist?
When you paint, you should bear in mind that your work could eventually hang on a wall somewhere in the company of recognized masterpieces. And you should try to make sure you won't be embarrassed by the inevitable comparisons.
The even more awkward truth is, if painting is your life, it also has to pay the bills, which is to say it's your day job. Which is great, so long as someone is actually paying you to paint. If you struggle to sell your work, to the extent that you need another day job to support you, you're pretty much screwed.
A quick trawl through art history tells us what happened to the world's most successful and well known artists. Some, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, ended up bankrupt. Others, like a Dutch landscape painter whose name escapes me, disappear from art history because they jumped ship to sell wine, or do anything else that would pay for groceries. Others - Monet springs to mind - labour for years in ignominious anonymity, always hovering on the edge of poverty and want, only succeeding late in life. Some, like Van Gogh, get paid for their life's work with the ultimate insult - posthumous success. Being an artist is not an easy option.
Being an artist - even a successful, well known artist - is no guarantee of living well. Or even of not starving. You're producing hand made luxury goods for a fickle market. Your reputation and earning power depends on the good will of a coterie of critics, or on the patronage of a limited number of collectors, and as such can disappear overnight.
The one good thing my old foundation course college did was make us read The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary. It tells the story of Gulley Jimson, an ageing British artist, and his daily struggle to get by. The artist's life as it all too often is, rather than the way it should be.
And the really awkward truth is I'm not as good a painter as I want to be.
I started again in 2008. Same subject - landscape - but a more direct approach in that I stuck to oil painting rather than fiddling with mixed oil and tempera or any other medium. You can waste a lot of time in the technique hole. Find a way to paint that works, and stick with it.
This time I'm fitting painting around the rest of my life, and I have to say it's not working too well. I have a rule: You can do three things badly, two things well, or one thing better than anybody else in the whole world. It's a good rule. And I wish I could keep it. I'm fitting painting in between writing and the internet, and the small matter of trying to make a living, and the results have been mixed.
Which is where the notion of a failure rate comes in. Sometimes you can't finish a painting as well as you would like. I can think of maybe two paintings I've ever done that turned out just the way they were meant to, where skill and vision coincided perfectly. The rest are compromises of varying degree. Sometimes, the end result is just too compromised to keep. In simple terms, if it rates less than 65% on my internal score card, it's not going to make it.
Maybe part of a painting works. I've cut down paintings to save the best bits, and I'm thinking of doing that with some of my recent work. Overpainting what you've done to get it right has mixed results, generally. If you know exactly what you did wrong, and you know how to fix it - why the hell didn't you do it right first time around? If you're not too sure, any more work is just going to eat up time and paint and the painting will look worse every time you take it out.
The thing that every successful painting has in common is this: planning and rehearsal. Whenever I've done a number of preliminary drawings, tonal and colour studies, the resulting painting has gone like clockwork. And whenever I've tried to wing it, the opposite has happened. Which begs the question, why would I try to wing it, knowing that it probably won't work?
Well, because sometimes the painting gets lost between the initial decision and the final work.Spend too much time preparing, and the spark can die. I've got drawing books full of pictures that never got past the study stage. Use up your slender stock of enthusiasm on the studies, and that's what happens; they're stillborn. Painting is a balancing act, all the way. And at any stage in the process, like the plates the plate spinner is frantically rushing around to keep aloft, a painting can fail.
The awkward truth is, if you want to paint well, it has to be your life. And you have to do it every day for years to get good. And you have to find good tutors so you don't waste time doing things wrong. Painting is like playing the violin: you need to practice, and you need good tuition if you want to be world class. And, as with the violin, aspiring to anything less is an insult to your potential audience. Who wants to listen to a second rate violinist?
When you paint, you should bear in mind that your work could eventually hang on a wall somewhere in the company of recognized masterpieces. And you should try to make sure you won't be embarrassed by the inevitable comparisons.
The even more awkward truth is, if painting is your life, it also has to pay the bills, which is to say it's your day job. Which is great, so long as someone is actually paying you to paint. If you struggle to sell your work, to the extent that you need another day job to support you, you're pretty much screwed.
A quick trawl through art history tells us what happened to the world's most successful and well known artists. Some, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, ended up bankrupt. Others, like a Dutch landscape painter whose name escapes me, disappear from art history because they jumped ship to sell wine, or do anything else that would pay for groceries. Others - Monet springs to mind - labour for years in ignominious anonymity, always hovering on the edge of poverty and want, only succeeding late in life. Some, like Van Gogh, get paid for their life's work with the ultimate insult - posthumous success. Being an artist is not an easy option.
Being an artist - even a successful, well known artist - is no guarantee of living well. Or even of not starving. You're producing hand made luxury goods for a fickle market. Your reputation and earning power depends on the good will of a coterie of critics, or on the patronage of a limited number of collectors, and as such can disappear overnight.
The one good thing my old foundation course college did was make us read The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary. It tells the story of Gulley Jimson, an ageing British artist, and his daily struggle to get by. The artist's life as it all too often is, rather than the way it should be.
And the really awkward truth is I'm not as good a painter as I want to be.
