Picture Framing - Or, You Win This Round, Random Bearded Stranger.

So I bought a mitre saw.

As I was walking away from the B&Q, some bearded cove passing by took a look at the box I was holding and informed me, unasked, with that malice the English reserve for strangers, 'Those things aren't very good for cutting mitres'. I was glad to rebut this allegation with my personal experience that provided you take care, clamp the moulding securely, and let the blade do the work rather than trying to force it, you can, with a little skill, cut excellent mitres.*

Little did I know.

Besides, of the options out there, a manual mitre saw was the only one I'd countenance. I could have bought an electric rotary mitre saw, but I have a special relationship with power tools. I refrain from using them, and they refrain from scattering my favourite body parts around the room. I'm very attached to my fingers. And I intend to keep it that way.

I did price a Morso mitre cutter, the best option of all, while I was looking, but those things start at £500 second hand, and I can't currently afford one. Or, indeed, have anywhere to put it. So a manual mitre saw it was.

Because I have to frame my paintings.

This whole business of picture framing is something I've only just got to grips with. I priced several framers online, one of them conveniently close and very good, but the fact is they're all too expensive. So I'm forced to develop another skill set. (Website coding, picture framing, fixing my jeans with duct tape - is there no limit to what one man must do?)

The fact is, a well framed piece does look 647%** better than the identical piece unframed. That's just the way it is. An unframed painting is like a man sitting around unshaved in his vest and slippers - in no fit state to receive visitors. A framed painting says someone went to the trouble and expense of putting this bad boy in the painterly equivalent of a very nice suit, so he could impress the ladies. For those potential customers who wouldn't know a good painting if it bit them on the face, a great frame might be the only thing they really see. Worth thinking about before you show your work to anyone.

In the past, I've had to take paintings all the way to Nottingham to get them framed at a franchise outlet, which is basically half a day lost and a wearisome train ride. Now I've bought a stock of picture frame moulding online, and the only inconvenience is remembering not to trip over the stuff in the hall, given that I can't figure out where else to store it, or indeed how to get the 10 foot lengths out of there.

In the past I've used dado rail mouldings glued to planed timber, which worked pretty well and looked classier than you might expect. I once sent a picture to a London gallery in a plain pine frame made this way and got it back after the show painted and gilded, and a very nice job they did too. If I have to cook up some gesso and learn how to apply gold leaf myself, I'm up to the task. Essentially I'm spending time instead of money, time which I could use to paint - but the skills, once you have them, are always there, ready to be called on.

But oh, the irony...

* Having just spent a fretful afternoon and evening wrestling with this particular saw, I'm forced to eat my words. While my previous mitre saw cut perfectly accurate mitres, this one doesn't. It's slipshod, rickety, ill made, tacky, plasticky and pot-metally, and it's ruined most of a length of moulding.

Watching YouTube videos of smiling picture framers getting perfect results with similar kit is particularly galling. 'Use a see-saw motion to get a straight cut.' Yeah. And when I do it, watch the blade skitter and jump like a frog's leg hooked up to a car battery. I could get better results blindfold, using an axe.

Seriously, this is not a good tool and I can't recommend it to anyone. Yes I know, a bad workman blames his tools. The fact remains I could work wonders with my old saw. But not, apparently, with this one.

So... plan B. Save up, buy Morso mitre cutter.

Still, there's always a silver lining. I failed to make a decent picture frame, but I now have some rather fancy firewood.

Yippee.


** Actual made up statistic.

Artists Online

One of the best things about the internet is that you can find just about anything and anyone. I sometimes spend an hour looking for artists, just so I can see what everyone else is doing.

I think the 'painting a day' thing is just about exhausted now, swamped by wannabees, but the original and best is still worth a good long look. Duane Keiser's blog and website feature his beautiful paintings and videos. Go take a look. I'll wait.

I've never seen any other painters with the same throwaway rendering skills. Try painting a scrap of that cellophane wrap you get on cigarettes or small packages. Now make it convincing. Not as easy as you might think.

Another painter i found through YouTube is Paul Fenniak, whose work reminds me a little of the paintings of Alan Dyer, who taught at my old college. I like them not so much for the subject matter as for the way they're painted. How can I put it? The paint quality and the rendering are part and parcel of the subject.

One English painter who has made a huge success of the painting a day discipline is Julian Merrow-Smith, who paints small pictures of Provence and auctions them online. There's a book too. (Smart move.) Which I may well buy.

And the last, and my most recent discovery, is the blog of Stapleton Kearns, an American landscape painter, which is absolutely crammed with useful - and occasionally hilarious - advice.

In the recent past, I would probably never have heard of any of these people. And I would have missed out. The internet is a lovely shiny thing that belongs to everyone. Which is why we need to protect it from the depredations of special interest groups, politicians of every nation, big copyright industries, and their loathsome ilk.

This is the only time I'm going to get even slightly political on here. For one thing, I'm too lazy to be an activist. I'd have to get informed, which is agonizingly dull and takes up huge amounts of time and effort, just so I wouldn't be merely sloganizing instead of coming up with cogent arguments.

What's my point? The internet is the best thing ever. Then along comes legislation like ACTA, in Europe, and SOPA and CISPA in the US, which are going to destroy it. If you're concerned, Google the whole deal and then make your representative's life a misery until these things go away.

And disengage political mode...Now.

Done. Check out my favourite painters online.

While you still can.

May In June

So I just started painting again.

A small (6" x 6") oil on board taken from a landscape photograph I took a while ago. It's some hawthorne in bloom, around June, taken on a hot morning when I went for a walk, gathering a crop of photographs to work from.

It's a bit loose and brushworky, since I dropped the fiddly oil and tempera technique I used. Now I stick to the simplest methods: oil paint in layers, fat on lean.  Word of advice to painters - if it looks about right, leave it alone. Before you foul it up.

I had a long think about scale, and decided to work between 6" x 6" at the smallest, and 16" x 20" at the largest, at least for now. I used to finish about three paintings a year. Now, I'm trying to scale that up, and doing smaller work is an obvious step.

I finally bought a decent, portable, plein air easel too, so I'll be out and about when the weather turns. Photographs work, but there's no substitute for painting on site. 

I sat down at one point and tried to figure out a list of subjects, only to end up admitting that I'd have to stick to landscape - and maybe still life on wet days at home. Second word of advice to painters - paint what you love. I love the look of things around here. Gorgeous spring, lush summer, misty autumn and stark winter, all with their own colour schemes and points of interest. Open countryside precisely one strolling minute away from my front door. I wouldn't live anywhere else.

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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