There's Constable. And then there's me.

So I'm carrying on with this larger canvas based on three small painted studies, and I took a look at 'Constable: The Great Landscapes' to see how he would tackle something like this.

 Like many painters, he used squaring up to copy drawings and smaller studies to canvas. Some of his larger works apparently show evidence of tacks spaced regularly around the edges of the canvas, to which threads could be tied in a grid. This is instead of using pencil lines, which can be a pain to get rid of. It's a method I've used before, and saves a lot of time and dented canvas from rubbing out. So I spent a sweary fifteen minutes hunting down the drawing pins and carefully measuring out the edges of the canvas before sticking the pins in at regularly spaced intervals and threading a length of cotton around them all to make a grid.

I'd also previously applied a thin wash of Light Red to cover the scary white of the canvas and provide a contrast to the greens that are going on top of it.

I've seen videos of American landscape painters like Scott Christensen starting a large canvas in the studio freehand, working from studies but with no preparatory drawing or underpainting. Great if you can do it, but that's a little too nerve wracking for me. I like a tight underpainting I can work into, with all the drawing and compositional problems worked out beforehand. Also, I think some effects are only to be had with overpainting and layering, and that calls for a more planned approach.

The sky is going to present problems. I have several choices as to what's going into it, and good records of the light and cloud conditions from the time I made studies on site, but I want to make sure it gets the full Constable treatment - the sky as 'chief organ of sentiment' in a painting. To that end, I'm doing small sky studies to try out different things.

Dishonest? Yes. This is art. It's a bunch of lies that tell a truth.

To get back to the title of this post - why is Constable's work the paradigm of English landscape painting that resonates so deeply with most of us? If you want to paint English landscape, you can't help but acknowledge him, despite the fact that there are other, equally well known English painters whose work is no worse, and who arguably should have just as great a claim on the national consciousness.

In part, it's because his paintings are so well known, from hundreds of reproductions hanging on parlour walls all over the country. It's also because of what they represent; a rural idyll that many long for, but most will never live in.

Mostly, though, it's the simple fact of recognition. When you look at a Constable, you sense the sheer simple pleasure he obviously took in being there, wherever he was painting. 

What not to paint

Just as the British army has an unofficial list of things its junior officers should never do, lessons learned from long study of military history - don't march on Moscow in the winter, never invade China by land, don't attack Afghanistan* - so there's probably a similar list for painters. Here are just a few of those hard won lessons regarding painting that I know.

- Don't try to paint something through something. I could put this better, so I will. If you chance upon a subject that is coyly hiding behind, say, a tree, but you can just about see the subject behind it... paint something else.

Why? Because painting a simple thing well is hard enough on painter and viewer alike, without adding the possibility of confusion. A chain link fence with a shop window full of glassware and reflections behind it could provide a real challenge for a photorealist, but the rest of us are better off sidestepping subjects like this.

- Don't paint any pictures too big to fit in the back of a London taxi.

Why not? Many of your potential gallery partners are located in London. Have you ever tried to take a large painting through central London on an average day?

- Don't paint anything your mother wouldn't like.

Why not? Because she has better taste than you think. Scary or difficult paintings won't get past her mum radar, which means they won't get to frighten off buyers.

- Don't paint fast. It's not a race. Get it right.

If you try to do everything in haste, you'll end up with a painting that looks like it was done in a hurry.

- On the other hand, don't faff about. Get it done.

If you take too long, your impetus and enthusiasm will dry up long before you finish. And your painting will look like you second guessed every brush stroke you made.

- Don't paint Spring landscapes.

Why not? The greens are vile, and blossom is impossible. And even if you get everything right, it'll look too pretty.

- Don't be too honest with the greens you see in the landscape.

Why not? Green is a difficult colour, and a little goes a very long way. What looks admirable out there in the landscape has a way of looking bilious on canvas. Solution? Tone down those greens with red, or mix them using pigments from the grubby underside of the colour solid, like Yellow Ochre and Raw Sienna.

- Don't make your paintings deliberately eccentric to get attention.

Why not? You can get a lot of attention by wearing a clown outfit, but it's not the sort of attention you want. Similarly, any attempt to stand out on a gallery wall that doesn't involve painting really well is best avoided. Some artists have made a career out of their quirks, but forced oddity gets old pretty quickly - probably more so for the painter than for their audience. I can't imagine a worse fate than having to top the last odd idea with something even weirder.

Am I teaching my granny to suck eggs here? Any words of wisdom from the audience? Extra tips would be appreciated, and stolen for the follow up.

* The wily Pathan, then as now, has always been a tricky customer.

Landscape painting: building a composition.

So my most recent small paintings began to sprout and join up, and before I knew it they'd turned into a study for a larger work.

Three 10" x 12"s laid out in a row became the centre of a larger planned painting. I took this photograph of the three together and used it as the basis for further studies with GIMP.

On the one hand, GIMP is a great way to quickly get a notion of what a planned painting could look like. On the other, there are drawbacks: one is that you can choke on choice.

The problem is the ease with which GIMP enables you to try out different compositions: you can be seduced into spending all your time and energy discovering different solutions instead of sticking with one. Too much choice can be disabling.

But that's just me chickening out of the process of coming up with a pictorial solution. Composing a picture needs a toolkit I was fortunate enough to pick up in school art class, thanks to a great teacher. A small painting is pretty easy to compose. Things begin to get out of hand when you're dealing with a larger work which has several parts, which is where you can learn from the lessons of the past. In a previous post, I mentioned drawing a copy of Constable's 'Flatford Mill', and discovering how every component played a role in the composition, guiding the eye around the picture.

So what are some rules of composition?

- Look for big shapes. You should be able to read your painting from across a room.

- Frame studies with two right angled L shapes to help you find the right size and shape rectangle for your support.

- Echo shapes in different places. That bouncy treeline? Turn it upside down and use it in the clouds, or in the foreground.

- Contrast significant elements. Bush with leaves turning orange? Put against blue sky for maximum impact. Foliage mass in full light? Place against darkest shadows.

- Design matters more than reportage. Make each element work as part of the painting, rather than slaving to make it look 'real'.

Sketchbook? Drawing book. Potato, potato...

I just dug out my old drawing books and scanned the best pages, having found enough material for several new paintings. It was a pleasant surprise to discover how well past me could draw, at least when he was on his game and trying hard.

Incidentally, can we settle one thing now? It's a drawing book, not a sketchbook. A sketch is something done in a hurry. The very word sketch implies something unfinished, hurried, unimportant.

Drawing, on the other hand, is done slowly, in a measured way, calling on the full powers and concentration of the draughtsman. It's a task involving hand and eye and mind, memory and perception, the juggling of rules and craft and the inspiration of the moment.

A sketch is something you throw away. A drawing is a treasure. And drawing - whatever the current orthodoxy declares - is the centre of art.

I read a line in Martin Gayford's book about David Hockney, in which the author and painter spoke of a contemporary artist who said he didn't draw, just as people 'no longer rode a horse to work'.

My opinion? If you can't draw, you're not really an artist.

It's like someone illiterate declaring themselves a writer, or a tone deaf mute insisting they can sing. It would be like me claiming to have a full head of lovely hair. It's simply not the case. Some careers have a minimum entry requirement, and to me, calling yourself an artist demands that you have some competence with a pencil and a sheet of paper, to the extent that you can make a recognizable effort at drawing whatever's in front of you.

Drawing is the central competence of art. That's just the way it is. It's not really negotiable.

Drawing teaches you to see, in a way that photography or video never will - these mechanical means are a way of not looking at the world, a delegation of the task of sight, a way to avoid the responsibility of seeing. And seeing is the only important thing an artist does. Artists show the rest of us what the world looks like.

If you want to learn how to draw, join a life class at your local college. Then do a Google image search on drawings by Renaissance artists, download a few to your desktop, print out the best and copy them freehand. Google Harold Speed and John Ruskin to find free PDF downloads of their books.

I don't recommend the arts section of your local library. Most of the books about drawing in mine have the words 'Fast!' or 'Easy!' in the title, and were written by people who not only can't draw, but also don't realize the fact. Sadly, the same applies to many of the hundreds of YouTube videos on drawing and painting.

The good news is that a Google image search will turn up many examples of good drawing for you to ponder over and copy. The whole of art history is there online, at your disposal. 

pochade box

I bought a pochade box recently, thinking it might prove an easy alternative to lugging my portable easel around.

It's certainly lighter. A cleverly designed, two piece folding box with a carry handle and strap, it has enough space to stash all the paint and brushes you need in the base, plus two 10" x 12" boards and a palette in the lid. That's a day's work right there for your average landscape painter.

The one on the right requires a fork lift truck.

Pro tip: if you cut your own boards to size, make sure they fit into the slots in the lid without being forced. Failure to ensure this will result in a tug of war when you try to remove them, which is only funny to onlookers. Run the end of a candle up and down the edges of the boards to make sure they slide in and out easily.

The palette is part of the lid, and folds neatly into it when the box is closed. This effectively seals it from the outside air and seems to slow down the drying time of the paint quite effectively.

Pro tip #2: Seal the palette with a couple of coats of linseed oil rubbed on with a rag and allowed to dry before you use it for the first time.

Is a pochade box a workable alternative to an easel? Well... no. Half an hour into using it for the first time, I rested it on top of a nearby fence and swung my left arm about to get the feeling back into it, and admitted that what this baby really needs is some legs to stand it on. So that's the next part of my plan: get a tripod bush fitting and attach it to the underside of the pochade box so I can put it on my camera tripod. Which I'll have to bring with me, along with the pochade box... which is tantamount to hauling along the full sized portable easel.

I haven't really thought this through, have I?

There's room for a small bottle of medicinal whisky.

So what is it good for? Well, it really is a lightweight alternative for those days when the full kit is just too much trouble. If you can find somewhere to sit, a pochade box is perfect. If you can't, you're stuck with a sore arm or hauling a tripod around. If you can work from your car, the pochade box is exactly what you need.

Working in that 10" x 12" limit is perfect for outdoor painting, when you're not going to be working on any painting for more than ninety minutes because the light changes. Studies for larger works you'll do in the studio can be finished in that time, or at least brought to a stage where you can finish them at home.

I've been using it for three studies for a planned larger painting to be done in studio, and it's worked fine. The subject is a grass bank and a small wood which I noticed a couple of years ago looking particularly fine in the autumn. On a related note, if you attempt an autumn landscape yourself, look sharp about it, as those pretty leaves don't hang around for long. One day everywhere is all golden and lovely, the next day some lummox coughs and every single leaf plummets to the ground. I started drawing a stand of trees in full leaf and overnight they went and turned into bare branches, which is awkward. I've got drawings and photographs of the pre-naked trees, so it's not a lost cause.

painting trees

It's easy when you're five. Big green blob for the leaves, brown stripe below for the trunk, and little red blobs for the apples. Not an apple tree? Doesn't matter, get them in there. 

Now that's how you paint a tree. It gets a lot harder when you're older. Especially when they're all bunched up and you're trying to paint them in changing light. You can't see where one ends and the next begins, or where the branches start and finish. The trunk is in there somewhere, and you could see it yesterday when the light was different. But you can also see the outline of the tree behind through the tree you're trying to paint, and that's not helping at all... 

So you have to get organized when you're drawing or painting something that insists on being undrawable. Painting trees en masse is a little like painting clouds, in that both move about and are made up of deceptive forms which change appearance with the light. 

'But trees just stand there,' you say. Well, yeah, but their forms are hard to read, in that while a mass of foliage looks like a solid some of the time, it's really a collection of twigs and leaves. And because of this, as the sun moves, or clouds cover it, different aspects of various trees appear and disappear like stage flats lit by madmen. Branches pop in and out of sight. Foliage is light, then dark. And it moves with the wind. So you have to simplify, and make what is ambiguous, plain. Painting demands that we pick and choose from what we can see, and make all our selections work together in one convincing whole.

  

I often start with the trunk, then try to lay in the branches and the outline all at the same time. If you get the outline, that's half the job of making your tree look convincing done. The outline can usually identify the species, which at least tells the viewer you actually looked at a real tree. Incidentally, learning a little about the species of tree you're likely to encounter can help you draw and paint them well. 

Judicious placement of sky holes comes last - probably fewer than there are in real life, unless you want your tree to resemble a lace doilie. Remember that verisimilitude matters, but making a good painting matters more. There comes a point when a painting has enough facts in it, and you have to start thinking of it as a performer thinks of a music score. Getting the notes right counts, but not as much as making music. 

the horsey test

Having opened my big mouth a while ago about real artists being able to draw horses, I thought I should probably attempt to prove myself capable. Since there are horses conveniently parked in the field over the road, that was where I began. I took a small drawing book and a biro and set out to draw me some horsey. 

They obliged me by standing around, quietly wondering what the scrawny human was up to. Some went so far as to actually pose nicely, which was handy. Others took the mickey something fierce, and stood in front of the ones posing. Eventually, they all lost interest and moved on, having heard there was some great grass at the far end of the field.

There are pitfalls lying in wait for the horse draughtsman. Their ears come out looking like Doberman ears if you're too emphatic with the curve and point. The legs leave the body at unexpected angles, giving them the appearance of being perpetually poised, ready to spring forward at the gallop, even when standing still. And don't get me started on hooves. What kind of design is that for a foot? That's why God made tufty grass, so painters wouldn't have to deal with hooves.

I took photographs too, but something weird happens when you take pictures of horses. Even though they were standing still, they all came out looking as if they were caught in the middle of a peculiar dance, with legs inexplicably in the air, tails flapping about, and gormless expressions. Anyway, here's the end result. A drawing I'm not totally ashamed of. 

It had to be patched and redrawn a couple of times. Obviously, it's time to take a look at how other, better artists tackled the same subject. Leonardo's drawings for the Sforza equestrian statue spring to mind, along with Degas at the races. Degas is a great choice because you can often see his mind working with different versions and over-drawing in his studies. 

Horses in a Meadow, by Degas. Photo by cliff1066 on Flickr.

The trick, I've found, is to avoid making your horse look like a freakishly stick-legged rodent - more easily done than you might suspect - and to take care over the aforementioned Doberman ears. Remember, horses come in different shapes and sizes, and that experts will look long and hard to make sure you've captured the characteristics of a particular breed, quite possibly with that same obsessive attention to detail that makes painting steam trains a no go.

The good news is that information is just a Google away. I already have George Stubbs' 'Anatomy of the Horse', which will show you more than you wish to know about the insides and outside of that quadruped, along with Muybridge's 'Animals in Motion', which demonstrates how a horse runs. YouTube has this video, 'Equine Anatomy on a Live Painted Horse'. 

Am I going to explore the horse as subject? No. There are equestrian artists online who will capture the likeness of your favourite hunter for a fee. Paint what you love, should be the guiding principle for any painter, and I confess I don't feel much more than wary admiration for horses in general. And now I know what a fetlock is, and where the withers are, I feel I know as much as I needed to. It's just that, as a landscape painter, I think I should have some ability to convincingly render any of the staffage that might appear in my paintings. So, cows next. People I can do already.

The Nottingham Castle Annual Open 2012

I got on the mailing list for this show, forgot about it and missed the entry dates in August, then got an email inviting me to the opening on 29th September.

The rule of thumb for entering any open show is this: just as writers should never send a story to a magazine they don't enjoy, painters should never enter any show which contains stuff they don't like. It's common sense. If you don't like what they do, chances are the converse also applies. And you should never pay money to have people you don't know reject your work.

At first I wasn't going to go. But then the email mentioned free drink...

I took the bus to town on a Saturday evening and strode up to the castle grounds. It's always a pleasure to visit. The gardens are well worth a look, and the castle has exceptional views over the city.

The exhibition occupied three rooms and seemed smaller than the sprawling, overstuffed shows I'd been to in previous years. It may well be that more work was tucked away elsewhere - I didn't ask - but all I saw was in those three rooms.

I had to take particular care not to step on some of the works on display. There were a number of floor mounted pieces that barely reached knee height, including some displayed under what looked like huge sheets of plate glass. The potential for gruesome death and huge lawsuits seems to have bypassed the usual health and safety checks, but don't let that put you off going. Just walk like you're in a mine field and you should be okay.

Among the paintings I stopped to take a closer look at was Tanya Foster's 'Kyrenia', which you can see here:

The others were Giles Woodward's 'Step up to a dream', which nicely captured the look of neon at night, and someone whom I can only hope is called Steven Ingram, because I can barely read my own spider-track handwritten notes, whose three small paintings of shop fronts, each about the size of a paperback book, impressed me no end.

As for the rest - well, the older I get, the less I'm prepared to invest in anything. If a novel doesn't hook me on page one, I won't read it. If a film looks like it's going to follow all the usual Hollywood cliches to a predictable ending, I'm out of there. If any art demands that I puzzle over its meaning or suspend my tolerance for things I find ugly or irritating, my eyes are going to slide right over it.

In the end, I can only relate to painters who deal with the way things look. That's my personal preference. It's like Match.com; if you've got tats and a nose ring you won't make my shortlist. Doesn't mean you're a bad person; just means we won't get on. Similarly, if you do video installations or pile stuff in gallery corners, chances are I won't even notice your work. There were some photographs in there too, but I didn't look at those either.

Having gone the rounds a couple of times I decided to visit the permanent collection. I found they'd been digging through the cupboards since my last visit. Their very nice Stanley Spencer was still on display, but my favourite Marcus Stone was missing, while a number of works I'd never seen before had been dusted off and brought out. I noticed a good Laura Knight, who easily passed the horsey test with a circus scene. I may well be going mad, but I seem to remember a large seascape in their collection which was also absent: a Victorian era coastal scene, looking out to sea in full sunlight. There was a rowing boat out on the water, and in the foreground a large boulder, with children playing around it, and a little girl in period dress leaning against it. Or maybe it was in the Walker in Liverpool, and I'm getting confused. If it rings any bells, I'd be grateful for title and painter, if you happen to know.


(Edit: It's Golden Prospects, St Catherine's Well, Land's End, Cornwall, by John Brett, painted in 1881. Oil on canvas, 3' 6" high x 7' wide. You can order a print here.)
 
Anyway. I claimed my free red wine, sat in the restaurant and drank it, then wisely eschewed a second glass, being half cut, and made my way home.

And now I know better than to apply next year, having seen the kind of work that mostly gets shown. At some point, when I've done enough good paintings to make it worth my while, I'm going to have to sit down and work out a list of galleries and open shows I could usefully approach. Remember, getting into a show or gallery is easy. It's painting that's hard.


* If you're planning to visit the castle to see this show, remember that Nottingham's Goose Fair, which is also worth a visit, begins next week on the 3rd of October. You don't need to bring your own goose. In fact it's probably better if you don't. 

alla prima

I just bought the book 'Alla Prima' by Richard Schmid, which is his account of how he paints. Schmid is held in high regard among his fellow American realist painters, and I wanted to find out why.

I bought the book from his website, richardschmid.com, for a hefty $49.95, the thick end of £45 when you factor in overseas shipping. For that I got a fair sized paperback, about 10 5/8" by 8 1/2", delivered a couple of weeks later, with 193 lavishly illustrated pages, printed on high quality paper. There's also a hardback version for an eye watering $95.

Schmid's style is realist, and direct. He usually paints from life, and ideally in one continuous sitting. Schmid was taught by William H. Mosby, whose own teachers were contemporaries of Sargent and other well known painters of that time.

Schmid's painting is unashamedly concerned with the look of things - and he certainly has an eye. At times, his rendering skills can seem little more than a vulgar magic trick, but mostly you're just left wondering, somewhat enviously, how it's done. Which he is perfectly happy to explain, and indeed make simple.

He emphasizes the importance of getting it right first time, and sometimes will stop work on a painting rather than risk losing or spoiling what he's already done. Speaking as someone who will grind away at a canvas that has already suffered too much, like a man industriously flogging a dead horse, I'm inclined to think he has a point. This light handed treatment of his does sometimes result in pieces which I think look lightweight and sketchy - but they're always beautifully and tightly drawn.

There's a tension between this tight drawing and his bravura brush strokes. At first glance, some of his more complex paintings look like an abstract jumble. Then the thing jumps into focus and becomes a still life, which somehow looks more real, more solid and convincing than it has any right to.

In the book there are chapters on drawing, tone, edges, colour, and composition, among other things, in which he calmly and clearly tells how he works. One colour exercise he describes is a way of making colour charts of the paints you use, which I can recommend, having made similar charts myself. Getting your hands dirty with this will teach you more in a few hours than any number of textbooks on the subject, and help you mix cleaner, more accurate colours easily. No more thrashing around in mud.

The chapter on edges filled a gap in my knowledge I didn't even know I had, and gave me several new tools for my paintbox that I'll be trying out soon.

I can recommend this book for anyone struggling with the problems thrown up by painting in a realist style. His calm, reasoned analysis and simplification of those problems would have been a big help at the start of my painting career. Things I took years to learn first hand are explained in this book in terms anyone can understand and apply.

I tend to paint and repaint to get the result I want, working from drawings and colour studies and photographs done on site. A painting can take weeks, often because I have to wait until it occurs to me how I'm going to finish it, and will sometimes end up with passages that work well jammed up against areas that look worse every time I take the painting out.

Many realist painters have to deal with this problem of working from life and from studies, reinventing what they see from scraps and memory, and trying to make the resulting patchwork look good. When your subject is too big to paint in one session, 'alla prima', that's what you have to do.

But I will still apply the lessons I'm learning from this book to the studies I make on site from now on.

Long story short? If you paint in a realist style and want to learn some things, this book is well worth the money. Consider it an investment; cheaper than a painting holiday or course, and always there for you to refer to. Painting is a lifelong education, and Richard Schmid can teach you a thing or two. And no, I don't get paid for telling you that.

There are other books for sale on the website, from what I presume is the artist's own Stove Prairie Press, including one on his landscapes which I will definitely be getting next.

Health and safety in your studio. Whether you like it or not.

Safety is a good thing. When I cut and sand boards, I use a dust mask. When I use thinners or turpentine or varnish I make sure the room is adequately ventilated and that there are no naked flames. When I paint, I take care not to eat or drink or smoke, and I wash my hands carefully after every session. 

I always use safety gear. People who don't end up with nicknames like 'One eyed Pete', or 'Stumpy Joe'. Or 'Counts to nine then has to take his shoes off Dave'. Safety is good. 

But then I bought some Naples Yellow the other day to replace an old tube that was running out. The old tube is full of lead antimonate - nasty, lead based, toxic paint. Which handles like a dream and does wonderful things in paintings. 

The new tube is some ersatz mix of Titanium white and synthetic iron oxide, which doesn't work wonders. I don't like it. 

Which brings me, by a circuitous route, to my point. My first, instinctive reaction was this: 

"Given that I'm a responsible adult - no, really - why is someone hindering my right to use paint which, in careful normal use, offers no risk to anyone? I'm not going to smear buckets full of genuine Naples Yellow all over the nearest infants' school. I'm fairly sure I'm not going to spoon it into the coffee of unsuspecting diners when I stop by Wilko for tea and cake. I'm going to try my very best not to force feed it to terrified hostages while dressed as the Joker and holding Gotham City to ransom. So why is it getting harder to buy?"

You should probably read the preceding paragraph in an angry, sputtering, shouty voice for full effect. I've used an appropriate font to help you do this. 

But a little internet research - which is my avenue of last resort, and only comes after my customary self righteous, knee-jerk scaremongering - tells me that you can still buy the genuine article online and elsewhere easily enough. Spectrum have taken to selling it in tins to get around the law against selling it in tubes. Obviously, if you buy Naples Yellow in tins you have to tube it all up - thus ironically exposing yourself to more risky lead paint contact. 

Pigment manufacturers have slowly stopped making lead based pigments over the past few years, not because of some gigantic plot against the world's artists, but because safety legislation has led to fewer household paint manufacturers using them. The few remaining customers are those art materials firms who make lead based paints. And that's not a big enough market to justify the cost of continued production. Hence the difficulty of finding Flake White, and its rising price. 

Gentlemen. One of you is an impostor.

I want to use real Naples Yellow, not some second rate imitation. I want to keep the option of using Flake White. I want to make the informed choice and balance the advantages these pigments offer against the tiny risk inherent in their use. 

And while I believed that not being able to was down to the machinations of Eurocrats who've got nothing better to do than fiddle their expenses and think up new ways to annoy me, I could enjoy the full fury of righteous indignation. Finding out that it's all down to blind economic forces caused by safety legislation I can only approve of is somewhat deflating, but at least my blood pressure has stopped spiking now. So, safer on that score too. 

Michael Harding's site has got the lowdown on lead carbonate production here. 

If you want to know even more about it, there's a great blog post here which also gives handy hints on how to make your own lead carbonate using a scrap yard, horse manure, apple vinegar, and an old fridge. I have a policy of leaving paint manufacture to people whose job it is and who know exactly what they're doing, so I won't be going that route myself. 

If you use oil paint and fret about health and safety in your studio, Winsor & Newton have some helpful and informative PDF handouts on their website. 

We've come a long way on the safety front. Within living memory, back in the 1930's, you could buy radium toothpaste. Which was presumably quietly phased out when people's jaws began falling off from the resulting radiation poisoning. Travelling by car used to be about as safe as bomb disposal, but since the 70's better auto design, seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, and drink and drive laws have changed that. Also, people generally don't have to breathe asbestos fibres everywhere they go these days, and that's good too. 

Whether we like it or not, we're all a little bit safer now. 

But I still want my genuine Naples Yellow. 

(PS: You can keep Vermilion. It's got mercury sulfide in it. Now that stuff's dangerous.)

I hate Art. Because underpants.

I'm very fond of painting. Tell me there's an exhibition of landscape painting on down the road, and I'll get my coat.

Tell me there's an exhibition of 'thought-provoking contemporary art that challenges the status quo' *, however, and I'll give you a dirty look, smack your head in passing, and cross you off my Christmas card list.

It all started years ago when my artist friends took me to a gallery opening, where some guy did a performance piece which involved painting himself blue and prancing about in his underpants. I could forgive the less than stellar paintings, the junkyard sculptures, the grisly, dull, video installations, but this was a step too far.

Always with the underpants.

I don't like contemporary art. I think it has become little more than the retarded cousin of the fashion industry. To get me into a gallery showing it these days would take armed men or free drink, and more fuss than would be seemly.

Is there still a place for art, now that the avant garde is running down? Or is all the real talent already hunched over a Wacom tablet, working on the next big game release or movie?

Status Quo pic by Watt_Dabney on Flickr

* If you insist upon 'challenging the status quo', you obviously haven't cottoned on to the fact that you are the status quo. Don't be the status quo. Unless you're Status Quo.

Acrylics - Satan's Paint

I've tried all kinds of paint. I spent a lot of time using acrylics. At art college we were taught to mix our own using Spectrum PVA, base, and pigments. One of the tutors gave me a sample pack of Liquitex to try. It seemed the height of arty luxury, to be able to buy paint in pre-mixed tones. After art college I used Winsor & Newton acrylics for a while.

And today I wouldn't touch any of them with a bargepole.

It's not a quality thing; any proprietary brand of acrylic paint is probably just as permanent and lightfast as comparable oil paint. But I'd rather bite off my own arm than use acrylics ever again.

Why? Three reasons: drying time, handling, and colour change.

Acrylics dry quickly. That's a good thing, right? Not really. You have to work fast with acrylics, or you can find yourself with a handful of ruined brushes. Sometimes working fast is a good thing - but working at a pace you choose is usually better.

If you're working in an alla prima technique, oil paint allows you to put down a brushstroke of the correct tone and colour immediately. With acrylics, the handling means you're trapped between applying the paint like watercolour or using full impasto. There doesn't seem to be a happy place between those two. You're working in layers, like tempera, that start off transparent and build up to opacity, or you're using the paint full thickness. I always ended up fighting acrylic paint or using workarounds to get something like the result I wanted. Compromising with your materials is a bad way to work.

When acrylics dry, there's a tonal change between wet and dry paint. The paint dries around a half tone darker than when you put it on. That just doesn't happen with oils. I don't want to be constantly second guessing myself and trying to judge a tonal change between wet and dry paint when I'm working.

Bottom line? When I use oil paint, I know what to expect. I can use it to make opaque marks, or the thinnest of glazes. It dries the same tone and colour as the pile I mixed on my palette. I can scumble it, scrub it in, blend it, paint fine lines or thick juicy impasto, and it'll never surprise me in a bad way. Whatever advantages acrylics offer - and for the life of me, I can't think what they are - they just don't compare, for me, with ordinary oil paint. Using acrylics is like painting with boxing gloves on. It can be done, but not well. And why would you?

making a tonal scale in GIMP

Having used a bucket full of oil paint to make a tonal ruler with which to regulate the tones of my paintings, I decided it might work out cheaper to do it with electrons.

I opened up GIMP and started messing with the colour control to make some clean neutral greys.

You can accesss the colour controls in the Toolbox icon by clicking on the foreground or background colour squares to open the colour selection dialogue. I use the default HTML notation that defines a colour by giving it a number that corresponds to its Red, Green, and Blue components. For example, 000000 = Black. ffffff = White. ff0000 = Red. 00ff00 = Green. 0000ff = Blue.

The numbers are in hexadecimal, which just means that they're in base 16: 0 to 9, then a,b,c,d,e,f. 0 is the lowest value and f the highest.

I can tell it's getting complicated because my head is starting to hurt. Bottom line? Simple code number gives precise colour swatch. And when the RGB components are equal, you get a clean grey, because no one colour predominates.

Anyway.

What this means is that you can make very precisely stepped greys all the way from white to black. Which is great for making a tonal scale. I ended up using these colours -

ffffff
dfdfdf
cfcfcf
bfbfbf
afafaf
9f9f9f
8f8f8f
7f7f7f
------------777777 = background mid grey
6f6f6f
5f5f5f
4f4f4f
3f3f3f
2f2f2f
1f1f1f
0f0f0f
000000

- Which give a clean 16 step scale that looks somewhat neater than the 10 step scale I made with oil paint on index cards, and will last for as long as computers do. Working in paint I found it hard to judge the darker tones by eye, which is pretty much what you'd expect. The paint surface isn't perfectly matt, and reflects enough light to make the darker greys hard to see.

Why bother at all? Because tone is the most important part of a painting. It's what you see from across a room. If you have a clear, simple tonal plan, your painting will hang together and look good.

But if the tones are left to their own devices, it will look exactly like you did just that. To use a musical analogy, it's like making music without deciding what key you're playing in. No tonal plan = an ill conceived mess.

It doesn't have to be complicated, in fact it'll probably work better if it's as simple as you can make it. But it does have to be there.

A tonal scale, like this one, will help you plan the tones of your painting. To download it, right click on the image to open it full size in another tab. Then right click again and choose 'Save Image As' to download to your computer.

introverted horse

I'm wary of horses. They are, after all, large animals, and capable of inflicting serious injury. Plus, it has been my unfortunate experience that every animal with which I ever became more than casually acquainted, would, at some point, try to kill and eat me.

Nonetheless, I was undeterred when I had an opportunity to draw some horses on my way back from a drawing expedition. I'd noticed three piebald ponies tethered in a field en route to my drawing spot. Only one was there when I returned, and he didn't take kindly to being stared at.

Some horses love it when you take an interest. They wander over and try to eat your drawing book. They hang around looking hopeful, in case you have carrots or Polo mints.

This horse was having none of it. He grazed a little, then moved into another pose before I could get busy with the first one. Then he moved again. And again. Until finally he'd strayed to the full extent of his tether and was hiding in the cover of a tree over the stream. Peering out now and then to see if I'd gone.

I can take a hint.

I passed by the next day on the other side of the field, and found him once again sheltering in the trees. This time he seemed happy to stand and pose for the few minutes I spent on a drawing.

And the moral of this slight tale is: if you chance upon a socially anxious horse who refuses to be drawn, give him some breathing space and come back the next day from a different angle. Also, be aware that his new attitude may well be a trap, and keep checking to make sure his equine accomplices aren't attempting to sneak up behind you with meat cleavers grasped awkwardly in their raised hooves.

they move the scenery

You have to paint like you're in a race. I've written before, here, about how things get changed around, out in the country, and it just happened to me again.

After my last post about transferring an image to a primed board, I went to paint that scene. And everything was different.

I'd started the drawing on drizzly days with heavy grey clouds. Now it was sunny and bright, with rim lit cumulus.

There was lovely, long, luscious grass that was full of textures and colour. Which I'm going to be painting from memory, since the farmer started mowing it the minute I set up my easel and began to paint.

A return to the same spot for a second session went well. I have a new favourite colour: Mars Orange mixed with Burnt Umber to make a warm undercoat for the sky. After two hours on site, I have enough information to finish the painting at home. Which is just as well, since the farmer started mowing again the moment I showed up. If I'd stayed any longer I suspect he'd have started cutting down the trees I was painting. 

When I am Emperor, I shall hire teams of midget thespians to disguise themselves as grey aliens and terrorize the local farming community, so that they cower indoors and refrain from mowing their fields. At least until I'm done painting them.

By Jeremy Burgin on Flickr

Using GIMP to transfer a drawing to a support

Being out of tracing paper, and wishing to transfer a drawing to a support so I could paint on it tomorrow, I used GIMP and a reference photograph to work around it.

I open the photograph in GIMP and use the Rectangle Select Tool to crop the image.

Toolbox - Rectangle Select Tool
Image - Crop to Selection

Because the image is straight from the camera, it's a bit unwieldy for my puny computer at around 3600 x 2500 pixels even after cropping, so I scale the image to reduce the size.

Image - Scale Image

I reduce the image to 1000 pixels across and 718 pixels high. This makes it easier for my underpowered system box to hump the pixels around while I'm doing this.

The idea is to print out the photograph on some A4 paper and chalk the back of this so I can draw around the image to transfer the outline to a piece of primed board. To save toner and have a clear image, I need to reduce the image to mostly just an outline. To do that, I use an Edge-Detect filter.

Filters - Edge Detect - Edge
Algorithm - Sobel  (Like I know what this means.)
Amount - 2.0 

This picks out all the edge detail in the photograph but turns everything dark. So now, to get minimal black on white lines, we go to

Colour - Invert

This leaves us with a fairly clean line image, which is still in colour. To get rid of the colour, use

Colours - Posterize

and select 2 colours. Then go back into

Colours - Desaturate

where you will have the choice between choosing your shade of grey based on Lightness, Luminosity, or their Average. They're all subtly different, and it's worth trying out all three before you choose the one that suits your image best.

So now I have the image I need, but is it the right size for printing? Go to

Image - Print Size

I choose 'inches' because I don't do metric. I change the width to 11.000", and clicking on the height automatically changes that to 7.898" in this case. That will fit on a sheet of A4 and give me the size of drawing I need. Press 'OK'.

To print it out, I go to

File - Page Setup

and choose Landscape. Then I go to

File - Print

This brings up another dialogue in which you can check your settings before you commit to a print. Check the tiny preview on the Image Settings, and if you're happy with that, click Print.

And I end up with the image I want on a sheet of A4, ready to transfer to a 10" x 12" primed board. You can do this by covering the rear of the paper with pastel, taping it to the board and going over the outlines with a ballpoint.

Just to be clear, this isn't going to turn into a slavish copy of a photograph. That would be pointless at best. It's just a quick way to get an image outline onto a support. That outline is still subject to all the painting decisions I'll make in front of the real subject. Trees will be moved. Colours will be pushed, squished, or otherwise abused. Individual blades of grass will be cruelly ignored while I make bold and decisive brush marks in juicy paint. Skies will be invented, applied, and discarded.

art history shenanigans

Here's how art history was taught to me:

Academic art ruled at the start of the nineteenth century, but because it was bad - for reasons which no one ever explained - and brown, it was up to Impressionism to save the day with colour. Post impressionism came next and evolved into Cubism, when Cezanne paved the way for Picasso's demolition job. Then along came Dada and Surrealism, plus Vorticism and some other ugly, spiky stuff. Abstract Expressionism was the next big thing, followed by Pop Art, and a bunch of other movements no one remembers, and Photorealism.

Then everybody got tired of thinking up names and they just called all the new art Post Modernism but still kept writing reams of guff about it.

And that brings us up to date. This version of art history cherry picks its facts, imposes an evolutionary narrative, and leaves out those artists who don't fit. It's dishonest.

Realist figurative painting didn't just stop in all that time. It was just marginalized by art critics, and sneeringly condescended to.

'This denigration of academic art reached its peak through the writings of art critic Clement Greenberg who stated that all academic art is "kitsch". References to academic art were gradually removed from histories of art and textbooks by modernists, who justified doing this in the name of cultural revolution. For most of the 20th century, academic art was completely obscured, only brought up rarely,...for the purpose of ridiculing it and the bourgeois society which supported it, laying a groundwork for the importance of modernism...'

Wikipedia

The only trustworthy version of art history is the one you write for yourself. Exposure to art you might never have had the chance to see can only help you expand your view of what art matters. So here's a different version of art history for you to explore using Google Image Search.

Atelier system 

 Ivan Shishkin

 Isaac Levitan

 Albert Bierstadt

 Thomas Moran

 John Singer Sargent

 Edward Seago 

 Pietro Annigoni 

 It's no more 'true' than the official Modernist version, but it contains many more good paintings and is thereby more satisfying. There is no one true version of art history. When an intellectual mafia try to tell you otherwise, it's because they have a political agenda which they are crafting a story to support.

The only true judge of any art is your eye. To look at art through the lens of art criticism or the frame provided by exhibition organisers, with their selections and omissions, and carefully worded texts with their implicit baggage of disdain and prejudice, is to be misled. You are unwittingly co-opted into a world view you do not share.

You are impoverished by their choices.

Here is the only test you need apply to any art you see:

'Would I like to hang that on my wall?'

The Line of Beauty. And My Aching Backside.

Painting on location - not for wimps. A 'portable' easel weighs around five tons fully laden, and has more hard corners and sharp edges than a skip full of girders. 

Nevertheless, I used it most days until lately. Just a fortnight ago today I trekked out to a painting spot and found out that you can, indeed, paint while it's raining. Just not very well. On the plus side, as a reward for sticking it out and braving the elements, I was treated to some magical evening sunlight, very dramatic clouds, and a double rainbow, and all of a sudden I was inside a George Inness painting. Still working on that in the studio.

 

I tend to carry my easel in one hand, rather than using the shoulder strap. Obviously, over time this will develop the strength in that arm in a disproportionate manner. I shall build one huge arm, so that I resemble a human fiddler crab. I'll wave it about at parties, in a threatening display. 'Behold my gianty arm! Behold!' 

Anyway. 

Still laid up with sciatica, quite possibly as a result of hefting that damned easel. The weather is fine, the fields are calling, and there are paintings I could begin. And I'm stuck at home nursing a sore butt. The moral of this tale? Standing in a draughty lane for an hour to draw a pretty orchard can have consequences. 

On the plus side, it's given me time to read. I ordered 'The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour ' by Sir Alfred East from Amazon about three weeks ago, but it's been taken hostage by brigands en route. The good news is I just got an email from Amazon's excellent customer service informing me that a new copy has been sent first class. 

Update: it arrived this morning, and turned out to be a skinny pamphlet with 29 pages of closely printed text and no illustrations. Which is why I just removed the affiliate link ad.

Update #2: I found a free PDF download online of the whole book, here.

Note to self: Never, ever buy a book until you've Googled the title and added the words 'free PDF download' to it.

  

The Line of Beauty 

I remembered this phrase when I looked at my reference shots of Hardwick park after I'd made a joiner out of them, and noted the S-shaped curves naturally occurring throughout, in the branches of the trees, and echoed in the layout of the land. I don't know who landscaped Hardwick park - perhaps it was Robert Smythson, the architect - but they knew what they were doing.

 

Looking the phrase up on Google took me to Wikipedia, and William Hogarth's 'The Analysis of Beauty': 'Prominent among his ideas of beauty was the theory of the Line of Beauty; an S-shaped curved line (serpentine line) that excited the attention of the viewer and evoked liveliness and movement.' Ready built in to the subject wherever you look - makes painting in the park a little like shooting fish in a barrel. I'm not going into Hogarth's ideas here, but the interested reader can follow the Wikipedia link above to find out more. 

 I downloaded 'The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds' too, which puts me firmly in my place on the second lowest rung as a painter of mere landscapes. On the other hand, this and the Hogarth are fascinating insights into eighteenth century opinion, which frankly seems both more thoughtful and entertaining than current art writing. 

What do I think is beautiful? I know it when I see it, but giving any kind of pat definition is beyond me. I've mentioned how I pick my subjects - I wander around until I see something so visually affecting, in a positive way, that it makes me want to paint it. I'm always saying, 'Wow, that's pretty,' but I'm not sure pretty covers it. 

Recognition is involved, somehow, but it's a slippery concept, and one that you can't reverse engineer. The component parts of beauty are separate from the things we find beautiful, and are within us. 

How's that for a soundbite to hold the masses at bay while we quickly make our exit before some bright spark realizes we were just spouting nonsense? I'm not equipped for deep thought, being a bear of little brain, but I do know what's pretty, and that's good enough for me. I'll leave the theorizing to those who have nothing better to do.