Winsor & Newton AWC 24 half pan box

I bought a watercolour box lately, because my old one had begun to fall apart. I picked a Winsor & Newton artist's watercolour 24 1/2 pan box and got a good price at Ken Bromley's art supplies online.

Watercolour? That pale, insipid enemy of amateur art classes the world over? The chosen, impossible medium of people who cannot paint?

Ease up there, tiger. Watercolour doesn't have to be pale and pretty. Remember Turner? Thomas Girtin? There is no medium more suited to certain effects of weather and light, and once upon a time it was pushed so as to rival oils in terms of painterly effects. If you know what you're doing, watercolour is a powerful medium.

My old art teacher didn't like it because of the transparency, the very thing that makes it so special. He had a point; judging tone and colour values when you're using transparent washes can be a hit and miss business, and body colour only adds to the potential confusion. It's not an easy medium, which is why I would always advise any would be painter to start in oils. Also, watercolour lends itself to seductive chance effects that will undermine your work in the end. There's a constant temptation to be a bit flash, which, if entertained, will end badly.

But when it works... I've done precisely one watercolour landscape that worked exactly the way it was supposed to, and maybe one more that isn't half bad. They're both pretty small, and I only have one picture to hand, the half good one, here.

The trick - if you can call it that - is to know your limitations and stay within them. While not being too dull about it. Rehearsal helps you find out what you can do, and helps you learn how to push the envelope. I used to do small cloud studies every day on little squares of good paper, using a pocket set of watercolours and a collapsible brush. It helped immensely when it came time to paint skies, whether in oils or watercolour. It teaches you economy of means, which is an important principle in watercolour, perhaps more so than any other form of painting. You make the mark and move on. In oils you get as many goes as you need. In drawing, you make lines and rub them out if they're wrong. In watercolour, you'd better just get it right.

It's like drawing a line with a pen, except you're more likely drawing a whole area with a brush, defining all the edges at once and leaving exactly the right amount of wet paint in there that will, when dry, a) depict the precise value and colour you were after,  and b) stay put and not run or bleed.

You can work into watercolour, but only to a certain extent. More than any other medium, if you fiddle with it, you will mess it up beyond repair. If you use good thick paper, you can soak it and pull paint off with a wet brush, and move it about a little. If you know what you're doing - and in this case I don't - you can manipulate the paint with gum arabic and other mediums. I stick to paint and water.

Watercolour painting is good in that it forces you to make simplifying decisions about what you can see in front of you. You have to know where the dark masses are, where the light masses are, their approximate hue and value, and then you have to work out how you're going to paint them in such a way as to avoid leaking edges. And you're going to have to figure out how much detail you want, and how you're going to leave white space for it. You have to think like a painter. It makes you edit what you see in a very painterly way.

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.

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Flower Paintings - The Eternal Appeal Of Flowers As A Subject.

What Is The Appeal Of Flower Paintings? 

Many artists of the past have turned to flowers as a subject for their paintings. What's the appeal? It's an automatic choice; colourful, beautiful, transient, flowers call out to be celebrated and immortalized on canvas. Their colours and shapes offer a seductive challenge to any artist, and the end result is often beautiful. In addition, they provide a respite from more challenging subjects. As Renoir said, 'I just let my mind rest when I paint flowers,' and it's not hard to see his point. The beauty is already built into the subject, and blatantly obvious; all the artist has to do is copy what they see onto canvas.

Dutch Still Life Painters - The Golden Age. 
For calm and studied images of flowers, go back to the Dutch still life painters of the 17th century. Technically accomplished and precise, these paintings reflect the apprenticeship education of the artists, in which they'd be taught everything about painting as a craft, from grinding their own pigments to applying gold leaf to picture frames. The still life, and its sub-genre, the flower painting, was an opportunity for these artists to display their skill in rendering different surfaces and textures, and the play of light across them. Ambrosius Bosschaert, who lived from 1573 to 1621, was one of the first flower painters. His three sons continued the tradition, at a time when the Dutch national obsession with exotic flowers was at its height, and contributed to their success. The detailed realism and symbolism in their paintings appealed to their bourgeois patrons, who had replaced Church and State as the principal collectors of art in the Netherlands. 

Still Life of Flowers in a Drinking Glass by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.

 Vanitas paintings were popular at this time, in which sumptuous arrangements of objects associated with life's pleasures shared the picture with symbolic reminders of its impermanence. An hourglass, a burning candle, the turned pages of a book, or even a skull, would serve as a sharp reminder of the transience of life. The fruits and flowers the artists painted might be shown on the cusp of decay to make the point. 

The techniques of Dutch flower painting were compiled and published by Gerard de Lairesse in 1707, in a treatise called Groot Schilderboek. This contained advice on colour and brushwork, harmony, composition, perspective, the preparation of specimens, and everything else concerned with the painting of flowers. 

The French Impressionists. 

The French Impressionists of the nineteenth century often turned to flowers in their paintings, perhaps because they offered a subject that was sympathetic to their use of colour and methods of painting. Monet famously spent his last years painting his flower garden in Giverny, but long before that turned his attention on occasion to vases of iris and sunflowers.
Water Lilies by Monet

 
Renoir had a particular love for painting full blooming, luxurious flowers. His flower paintings have a similar, lush feeling to his beautiful female nudes. 

Henri Fantin-Latour was a close associate of the Impressionists, and a friend of Whistler and Manet, though his own style remained relatively restrained and academic in comparison. Whistler helped him achieve success in England, where his still life and flower pieces sold well, through his London agents, Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards. From 1880, he and his wife, flower painter Victoria Dubourg, spent the spring and summer in Normandy, where they grew flowers. After breakfast, Fantin-Latour would walk through his garden, picking flowers to create the arrangements he would paint. 

Van Gogh created two series of paintings of sunflowers, which became some of the most widely known images in Western art. He painted the first in Paris in 1887, and the second in Arles in 1888. The Paris series features sunflowers laid on the floor, while those in the Arles series are presented in a vase. To Van Gogh's chagrin, Gaugin claimed one of the paintings in exchange for studies he had left behind, a decision with which Van Gogh was not at all happy. On a sad note, while Van Gogh painted his sunflowers in vibrant yellows, made possible by the recent invention of new pigments such as Chrome Yellow, today his sunflowers are turning brown. This is due to the addition of white pigments he used to brighten the yellows, and to sunlight. This oxidizes the oil in the paint, which releases electrons that are taken up by the pigment, lead chromate, which then turns green. The green paint and the oxidized oil look brown. This is according to conservationists who've been studying the problem and resorted to testing some old samples of the lead chromate Van Gogh used. If you're really that interested, check out the paper, here. 

Modern And Contemporary Flower Painters. 

Georgia O'Keeffe is perhaps the most well known painter of flowers of recent times. She transformed the genre by focusing intently on single blooms, allowing them to fill large canvases with their rich colour. Their close-cropped edges push her flowers right to the surface of the canvas, where their blazing colours form an almost abstract composition.
Abstraction White Rose by Georgia O'Keeffe.

 
Alongside the fine art tradition of flowers as a subject runs the tradition of botanical illustration, which grew with the development of the scientific study of nature. A modern example of this is the illustrator Anna Knights, whose contemporary botanical illustrations are exhibited every year at the Chelsea Flower Show. Her highly detailed, realistic paintings, executed in watercolour, show her simple subjects - flowers, fruit - in their best light. 

Flower Paintings - Conclusion. 

Whether you're a painter yourself, or someone who just loves to see images of flowers, there are places of interest online. I'm rather taken with the work of Susan Entwistle, for example, whose deceptively naive paintings have a calm and restful feel to them. 

Qualia, And Other Painterly Concerns.

So I'm standing at the bus stop outside the hospital on my way home tonight, looking at things. After eavesdropping, it's my favourite occupation. 

I end up looking across the busy road at an unremarkable stretch of greenery - except, given that it was a November evening, foggy and dark, it could properly be called blackery - lit in part by a streetlamp. Utterly beautiful. A feathery mass of foliage in orange-greys where the streetlight caught, and the unlit foliage masses dark blue grey against a steel grey sky lit faint orange by distant sodium lighting.

'How would you paint that?' I wondered. Which is what I do after I've spent a while looking at things. I try to work out a way to paint them. Mostly I start by working out how I'd mix the colours I see, then go on to work out how I'd apply them - working out my painterly algorithm, as it were. 

The rule of the game - there is only one - is simple. Whatever means I devise must convey to the viewer of the painting, as closely as possible, the exact physical sensations of vision I experienced while looking at the scene. Which is a pretty tall order, and fraught with compromise and work-arounds. But it's the rule. 

Take a picture? Yeah, maybe, but not to copy. As I have said, cameras lie, but they do have their uses. Work from memory? Memory lies too. Memory is the fiction our brain concocts, from scraps of reality and as much truth as we can bear to know. I don't want to paint a memory, I want to paint the thing as it is. 

So if I were to paint such a subject, it would be from direct observation. Imagine then, that I have my easel and palette conveniently to hand, along with some means of illuminating both without compromising the scene. I would then mix my colours to match the exact hues and tones of what I see... 

Except that the tonal range and colour gamut of paint on canvas is never going to match the full tonal range and gamut of what's in front of me. Working between black and white, I have to compress all the tones from full dark to the brightest glare. Working with pigment - coloured mud - I have to reproduce fragmented light.  

I have done various kinds of painting. At school, I was an Impressionist who had the good fortune to be taught how to do measured academic drawing. At art college, I was an Abstract Expressionist, twenty years after it was fashionable, who screwed up his degree by trying to become a realist painter in the final year. After art college I stumbled through surrealism and photorealism and finally settled on the Great British Tradition Of Landscape Painting. I've covered a lot of canvas. Fortunately, most of it hasn't survived. I made damned sure of that. 

What has always concerned me is this desire to paint things as they are, and the sheer difficulty involved in that. The terrible truth is that painting has its limitations, and the better you know them, the better a painter you will be. 

Painting is perfect for capturing still life, for example. A non moving subject, arranged as you wish, the lighting controlled, and the game, as it were, rigged - all things made convenient for the purpose of capturing the appearance, the qualia, of the subject. Tabletop space, with nothing accidental, or too difficult to describe in drawing.  

Painting begins to stumble when you paint a living thing. A portrait - as close to painting a still life as you can get when there's a human subject - is still possible, with the rule applied. A moving subject? Forget it. The world is a verb, but a painting is a noun. Any attempt to get around that by formal means is doomed to the remainder bin of history, an oddity outside the mainstream of painting. 

As well as lacking the dimension of time, painting is also embarrassed by its lack of arguably the most important dimension of space - depth. We may paint the beautiful street, but we can never cross it. We may, with the magics of perspective and colour recession conjure a simulacrum of depth - and in fact we'd better, if we don't want to bore the viewer rigid - but we're better off sticking to what we do well. 

Anyway. Enough of that. I can say that this is a splendid time of year to be looking at things, since fog does marvellous tricks. It arranges things by depth, like stage flats in graded tones of grey. It turns trees into grey masses sparked through with autumn leaf colours, blurs the edges of the coloured masses so it looks as if someone already painted them. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Landscape Photographs, October 2011

On my daily walk I always take two drawing books and a camera. And I hardly ever draw, but I always take a picture. These are recent shots, the birch trees from 30th September and the hedge from a couple of days ago.

I find I keep coming back to the same motifs. I've been walking around here for, what, 30 years now, and there's a handful of places where I generally stop to take a look and plan a painting.

This past two years I've started to organize them into a framework, picking out themes and subjects that I'll get around to. Not so much wishful thinking as long term planning.

I can recommend the daily walk to anyone. Quite apart from the health benefits, it tunes your eyes up. When you look at something for long enough, you start to see it. The turn of the leaves this past week, for example, from a surprising, straight-out-of-the-tube yellow ochre to this morning's burnt orange that doesn't fit into any colour space you've ever heard of.

And while we're on that subject, have you ever looked at shadows on snow? Jesus, that's some colour out of space stuff going on right there. I look forward to this winter's snowfall with something like junkie anticipation. Which realization means I sometimes think my enjoyment of what I see might be a little unwholesome, or at least unbalanced. The truth is, with nothing in my system stronger than porridge and tea, when I walk out of the house in the morning I'm tripping on what I see. Everything's so damned beautiful.