Failure Rate

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.

Bad Art


The older I get, the less I'm sure of. But one thing I do know is this: the things you love and admire in the first part of your life will change as you get older. And that applies especially to art.

As a teenager, I loved the Impressionists, progressive rock music, and anything in 'Movements in Art since 1945', by Edward Lucie Smith. I thought 20th century art was the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. Especially Surrealism. Those wacky funsters with their melting clocks.

I thought 'Lord Of The Rings' was a book I would reread every year. I thought H.P.Lovecraft was a great writer. I thought Emerson, Lake and Palmer made great albums. I thought, in short, a lot of things that turned out to be other than correct.

Now every time I see contemporary art, I judge it by one simple question: assuming I had the money, would I buy this to hang on my wall?

I judge the artists by an even simpler question: could this person draw a horse? (I call it the horsey test. If the artist can draw a convincing horse from life, I'm interested. If they can't, maybe they should take up window dressing or something.)

It's okay to judge art by what you see. Most impressionist paintings are horrid little daubs. Some are world class keepers. Having the courage to openly say which, in your opinion, is which, is something that comes with age.

Most contemporary art is achingly horrible. Being brave enough to even consider that, let alone say it, when you're a young student, whose tutor may well be producing the very work they secretly despise, whose college degree may be graded by someone whose work they think is bad, is a rarity.

Which means this dreadful round goes on and on. In the UK, I believe there are something like 40 art colleges.

Assume they each take in 25 fine art students every year on a degree course. That means there are 1000 fine art students graduating every year, students who may have gained no useful skills during their 3 or 4 year course; whose work may be so unappealing to any potential collector that they stand no chance of making a living from selling it; who have been trained to hold skills like life drawing and figurative painting in contempt; who stand no
chance of employment, in other words, outside the very system that created them - the art colleges. Where through artist in residence schemes and part time tutor vacancies, some of them may scrape a living until they luck into a full time tutor post.

But only if they subscribe to this unspoken dogma of art for art's sake, which puts all contemporary art beyond any kind of criticism. Because if you say one word against it, you are immediately labelled as a philistine, or compared to the Nazis who organized the exhibitions of degenerate art. There is, in short, no discourse allowed around this question.

And where no discourse is allowed, of course, is the very spot where it should be taking place.

So here are some questions you might care to think over.

1 Who actually benefits from contemporary art?

Reputations are built and destroyed on whim, and the value of an artist's work can soar or plummet accordingly. Read $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art to get some illuminating views on the art market of today. It doesn't really have much to do with art.


2 Should I send my child to art college? They love painting.

If they love painting and want to learn how to do it well, let them take a look here. They may never get a museum show, but at least they'll be able to make a good living. Plus they'll learn Italian. Which will get them laid.

3 When the subversion that contemporary art is based upon has become institutionalized and mainstream, is it time to take it out the back and shoot it?

Slightly loaded question, but it's pertinent. Picasso finished the demolition job that the Post Impressionists started on Western Art. Which crisis was probably caused by the development of photography. What was the point of taking hours to produce a still image when a box could do the same thing in seconds, the only skill required being the ability to press a button?

So art turned inward, where the camera could not follow. So far inward that it lost its way, becoming conceptual rather than perceptual. And now it ploughs this tedious furrow every year, with young artists settling into their recognizable ruts: there's the girl who makes fey, elfin frameworks with butterflies; here's a young man who makes enormous sculptures with unusual materials; here's another who splashes paint about on huge canvases. On and on. With no end in sight, and a dwindling interest all around.

Even the ability to shock has been blunted by over use. Want to be shocked? Just log on to some of the darker corners of the internet. No need to check out the latest Crabstock twins installation.

And all along, unseen, for the most part, and never spoken of, artists have been quietly turning out paintings that don't shrink from exhibiting skill and passion. Art that you would hang on your wall. By artists who could pass the horsey test. 

You will never see their work in any book on contemporary art. Not until the tide turns, anyway.

Good news? It's about that time.