How to make Stand Oil.

Go on ebay, and search for 'organic flax oil'. Make sure it has no additives. Compare prices, make your choice, and order.

Get a couple of empty jars with screw top lids while you're waiting on delivery. Wash them in very hot water, and drain.

When your oil arrives, pour it into your jars until they are about half full. Add a generous amount of salt to each jar, then top up with water until they're full, and screw on the lids.

Shake the jars vigorously, then put them on a sunlit window sill. Shake them once a day for about a month, then whenever you remember when you pass by them. Leave in the sunny spot for a year.

When summer comes around, buy a turkey baster syringe. Use it to remove the oil from the jars and put it into a plastic tray, such as is used to hold seedling pots. Put this tray back on your sunny window sill, and partially cover with a sheet of glass or perspex, leaving a gap for air. Once in a while, whisk the oil in the tray with an old fork kept for this purpose.

You will notice the oil getting thicker over time. When it has reached a treacly consistency, pour the oil into small glass jars and seal them. Congratulations: you have stand oil.

This will make a fine painting medium when mixed with turpentine or mineral spirits.

For further information I can recommend this site:

https://tadspurgeon.com/

'Painting the Visual Impression' review.

'Painting the Visual Impression', by Richard Whitney.
ISBN: 978-1-938394-12-6

I ordered the book from Richard Whitney's website

a couple of years ago after reading an article about him on the Sight-Size blog. After searching in vain for a Paypal button, I ended up emailing the author for a price that included postage to the UK, and after a courteous and helpful exchange we arrived at a slightly eye watering $50. (While the book is modestly priced, the postage charges from the US seem exorbitant, though when you consider the distances involved, reasonable.)

Anyway. The book arrived, neatly and safely packaged soon after I sent cash through the post. Note well: you don't have to do this. You can get the Kindle version for your newfangled electronic reader for considerably less and no postal charges, but I'm just a Luddite who prefers real books made of dead trees.

The book is a well made paperback, 9" high by 6" wide, with 95 pages, many of which carry full colour illustrations, as does the cover. Whitney's landscapes and portraits are represented, and the latter stand comparison with Renaissance examples.

And while the book is slim, the content is dense and information heavy, with a great deal of practical advice about the process of painting. This is divided into named chapters, in which the relevant information is presented as a series of aphorisms, short sentences that appear deceptively simple, but unpack into lessons as you consider them and apply them to your painting.

The overall effect is one of listening to a great painter and teacher as they look at your painting. I've learned most from previous tutors while listening to them talk about painting, and reading this book is the next best thing. As painters, we turn to instruction when we run out of ways to progress using what we already know, and this book offers new insights into a process that might have become too familiar.

Can I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly and without reservation. I've said elsewhere that books which fail to teach me get quietly relisted for sale. 'Painting the Visual Impression', on the other hand,  is going to stay in my collection and be a well thumbed addition to my library for as long as I paint.

Shift it, Artboy.

I went out early on a drawing expedition one day last week. Took a drawing I'd begun on a quarter-imperial sheet of paper clipped to an MDF board, a propelling pencil, and a brush pen filled with watered down Payne's grey.

It was sunny and just a little after sunrise when I began the drawing a couple of weeks ago, but it was overcast and drizzling that day. I spent a little while longer on the drawing and took some more reference photos, but it wasn't going anywhere, and I probably won't start a painting anytime soon. There's a colour study I might finish in the studio, but I'll hold off on the painting until I feel ready. Sometimes an idea needs to incubate until you come up with an approach.

And while I'm here, why did no one tell me about these brush pens? I bought a couple off the Ken Bromley website. They are brilliant. The concept is simple: a brush head screwed onto a reservoir into which you can put any watered down paint you like. A fountain pen with a brush nib, in other words.

I risked a second expedition after lunch, now that the plague is dying down, and worked on a sketchbook drawing with the same tools. Had to move once when an ageing couple refused to walk past me because they would get too close and might catch the Chinese EbolAIDSitis. Of course they stood there for a couple of minutes first, waiting for me to read their minds rather than saying, 'Shift it, artboy, plague avoiders coming through!' No one does quiet, seething, passive-aggressive rage like we do over here. Makes me proud to be British.

One other thing I can recommend is getting up really early - around 4am - for the good light. Every direction your head turns, there's another real life Claude to look at, and the bonus cherry on top is that there's nobody else around at that hour to spoil your fun.

Back in the Saddle

I left my day job last Tuesday. Reached retirement age on Wednesday, and got up at 4 on Thursday, to go out painting.

Wrestled with a 10x12 of a spot I'd noticed walking to work, and considering I hadn't done any plein air painting in, what, three years? It went pretty well.

I had a hard time opening some of the paint tubes. The caps had locked shut, stuck fast with paint and oil. I found out that if you use the lid of your easel like a nutcracker, you can fix that easily.

Came home, ate another breakfast, took a nap, then worked on a studio painting I hadn't touched in a while. Went well. 

Oil paint order.

I ordered some oil paint from Ken Bromley online. It's Winsor & Newton artists' oil colour, they have a sale at least once a year with up to 35% off the usual retail price, and throw in a free 200ml tube of Titanium white if you buy a minimum of six tubes.

Ordered on Thursday and they arrived at my door on Friday.

So: Over a third off the full price, and next day delivery.

Service so good you feel miffed because you can't find anything to complain about.

Why did I buy Winsor & Newton?

Good enough for Turner, probably more than good enough for me.

Why artists' quality?

Colour stability and permanence. Student quality paint sometimes uses odd pigments with peculiar and unexpected colours. There's a world of difference between Cobalt blue and Cobalt blue hue, for example. Also the pigment load in artists' quality paint is higher, which means you don't end up with weirdly washed out mixes on your palette. I've used cheap paint and ended up with an over oily, low colour mess on my palette. Cheap paint is usually a false economy.

Why these colours in particular?

Cadmium Lemon: purest, cleanest yellow closest to spectrum yellow. Excellent covering and tinting power. Better for mixing clean greens than Cadmium Yellow, which tends to be a bit orangey.

Yellow Ochre: gets a lot of work done painting landscape. Good base for dirty greens, with the addition of black or blue. Also a cheap pigment, which doesn't hurt.

French Ultramarine: pure, clean blue slightly on the violet side of spectrum blue. Good in glazes and mixtures, with good tinting strength. I've been using this as a general purpose blue for a while now. Again, a cheap pigment.

Burnt Sienna: good dirty red, useful in landscape. Makes a coloured black when mixed with blue. If you use a layered technique, it's a nice warm, orangey underpainting for landscape.

Flesh Tint: should probably never be anywhere near your palette if you're painting actual flesh, but it's great for lightening landscape greens and taking the bilious edge off the green hue.

Naples Yellow: this used to be made from lead antimonate, and was a marvel at creating distance when scumbled thinly over a painting's background. Now I think it's just a mix of white and yellow ochre, but it's a convenient colour to have on your palette. Again, great for lightening landscape greens.

That's all for now. Look out for a review of Rosemary & Co. brushes next.

Horse etiquette

Having decided to do a second version of a large painting (you can see the GIMP study I did in the previous post) I found it needed more reference material.

The foreground tree was a problem insofar as it had to have an interesting trunk. I strolled around looking for a candidate, and found a couple.

The second problem was the horse, which needed a new and different pose, so I stalked the local horses with my camera. And breached horse etiquette by being a bit too sneaky, when I walked into the field where they were grazing* and startled them. Ever been glared at by a horse?

Anyway...went back next day, found the big white guy on his own, and managed to snap him. I don't think he was impressed. Once his curiosity was satisfied he turned on his heels and favoured me with his rear end until I left. 

'Put that in your picture.'

* Kindly note I would no more trespass on a farmer's land than I would stride uninvited into his kitchen and make free with his toaster. There's a public footpath through the field.  

GIMPing

I've been working on an old painting in GIMP, given that I wasn't too happy with the way it turned out in real life.

I changed the format from a square to a 3:2 rectangle, and introduced some changes, cutting and pasting trees from other finished paintings. Like the repoussoir on the left?* I've been looking all over for a tree that would do the job, auditioning the local hopefuls for the part. I might end up just inventing one, the way Constable used to.

Shoving pixels around with a mouse is easier than painting, that's for sure. But at some point I'm going to have to turn this back into a real painting. Wish me luck.

*Repoussoir is my word of the day. Next week, fandango.

Plein air II

Plein air

Colour Wheel

I found these in my painting folder. 

They're from some colour studies I did back in 2013, the colour wheel starting life as an attempt in oils at a YURMBY wheel, which places red, green, and blue, between cyan, magenta, and yellow.

It went through GIMP at some point, lost the pencil lines and got tidied up a little after gaining an inner circle which places colours against their most contrasting colour.

Some painters are natural colourists, others do better with form. Which camp are you in?

Current drawings

I'm taking a break from landscape, given that the local countryside looks like a midden right now, to concentrate on figure drawing.

I started by drawing myself, after catching sight of me one morning in the mirror in the process of getting up. I thought, 'You know, you look good.' Good being a relative term, and strictly dependent on who I'm standing next to.

I began to draw myself, which set me several difficult tasks. Such as, have you ever tried to draw your own hands from life? It requires astonishing feats of juggling.

I finished that drawing and began another. I took reference photographs, and painted a small colour study. I'm currently working on a drawing of my head from the photographs, which you can see here. 

Yes, I got the nose wrong and I have to do it over.

A Modest Proposal

During my morning constitutional I found this scene at a favourite painting spot.

Now, I'm an old softy at heart. I believe in rehabilitation rather than punishment. I think mercy is the better part of justice. I do not favour the death penalty.

But people who fly-tip should be beaten to death with wire coat hangers.

Some of the gentler souls among you might find that opinion a little challenging, but hear me out.

The local authority provides a state of the art recycling centre that anyone can use for free, and they'll actually send someone in a truck to your house to pick up bulky items for a small fee. Someone who thinks it's a good idea to go to the trouble of hauling their household junk into the middle of a local beauty spot, in order to spread it around like a hippo marking its territory with faeces, therefore, is probably taking the micky, and should be taken out with extreme prejudice. No judicial process, just two behind the ear and a last journey to the nearest pig farm.

Ever have one of those veins throbbing in your forehead? I think mine's calmed down now, but my hands are still shaking.

On a similar note, I've seen pictures of graffiti tags on rocks in American national parks, miles from anywhere. Which means the perpetrators went to the trouble of carrying their spray cans through miles of beautiful wilderness in order to deface it. And of course, the savages in the east have taken to blowing up priceless art treasures and historical monuments. 

Hmmm...perhaps there's some ideological component to these people's decisions to deface the natural world.

So there you have it: proof that fly-tippers are in league with Islamist extremists. Well, maybe not proof, but good enough, by the standards of today, to start waging war on them.

If that doesn't get the drone strikes lighting them up, I don't know what will.

RIP Flip Mino

I bought a little Flip Mino video camera in 2009, and used it to make the painting videos I put up on my YouTube channel. I carried it everywhere, to take reference footage for paintings while I was out and about.

The camera was light and small enough to slip into a coat pocket. The video quality was surprisingly good given its size, and the stills I took from it had a pleasantly painterly character, with extraneous detail smoothed out into blobs of tone and colour, like this:

Alas, it is no more.

Did it wear out? No, it was still going strong, and I used it daily.

Did I drop it? Several times, but that never seemed to trouble it at all. Six years of banging about in my coat pocket with a clasp knife and a pencil had barely scratched the finish.

Did I leave it in a coat pocket, then forget to check the pockets before I put the coat through the washing machine?

Yes. Yes I did. While most delicate electronics stand at least a chance of full recovery after a brief dunking, an hour and a quarter in a 40 degree suds bath followed by a 1200 rpm spin dry proved to be one ordeal too many. I glumly dried it out for a few days in an old yogurt tub filled with uncooked rice, then hooked it up to the computer. It recharged nicely, but apart from that, it's stone dead. Software and memory wiped. It was a useful tool, but now it's a paperweight at best, and a disagreeable reminder of my capacity for stupidity.

What moral can we draw from my tale of woe and the consequences of absent mindedness?

- Always check your pockets on wash day.
- Download your images frequently, lest ye put your camera in a washing machine.
- And better still, buy a waterproof camera. That's too big to fit into your pocket.

The good news - well, the least bad news - is that a comparable replacement camera costs a lot less nowadays. 

 

2009-2015 R.I.P.

Why are you painting that?

Back in February of last year I stood on a path at the edge of a field and painted a small wood.

Some kid walking his dog stopped to take a look and asked me what I found to paint 'in this place'. The way he said it set me thinking. He sounded local, looked like he might have had a rural job. And he was evidently baffled as to why I chose to paint what, to him, looked drab and ordinary.

Except it plainly wasn't. The winter sun glared like a flashbulb going off. That hard light lit up the edge of the wood, but left the depths a rich, dark, velvet brown. Ragged clouds, cream and smoke grey, writhed across a sky of intense blue. The next field's bare turned earth glowed an unlikely salmon pink. It all looked beautiful. The only problem I had with it was how to paint it and do it justice.*

If I divide the world into painters and 'civilians', it's because of encounters like this. I had friends from school who were inept at drawing and painting, mostly because they didn't look at things.

They've all done well for themselves - in some instances, considerably better than me -  so looking plainly isn't a requirement for success. But it leaves me feeling sorry for people who don't, won't, or can't, see the world the way a painter does.

I've never had a dull journey. Give me a three hour train ride with a window seat, and I'll happily stare out for the whole way.

Shadows on a landscape, like that Inness painting? There's a real life example, take notes. Sheep on a hillside like ticks on a blanket, as in several Turners? What do you know, they look exactly like that. Dark out? Even better. Artificial lighting, perspective, and window reflections.

I don't get bored. Waiting rooms? Window light on walls and radiators, the stately change in shadow tonal depth. Every view presents a challenge. How would I paint that? What colours would I mix to do it?  

In the end, that's what painters do. They look at things so the rest of you can see them better. They show you the world as it really is: intensely beautiful.

* Which I signally failed to do, which is why you see a different picture here.

Tuition

In a recent post I said I wanted to step up my painting game, and needed tuition to help me do that.

But where to find it?

There are options out there: painters who run their own workshops or schools of art, painters who make DVDs of their instructional videos, painters who write illustrated how-to-paint books, and even painters who do all three.

I'm too skint and lazy to pay for, or attend, a workshop. That leaves me with two choices, videos and books.

When you want to paint better than you already do, learn from a painter who can paint better than you do now. Let that be your guiding principle and you can't go far wrong when searching through all that's on offer. 

With that in mind, I have an Amazon wish list with over a hundred books on it. Every so often I check to see which prices have dropped, and snap up bargains from the list. Sometimes they're books by contemporary landscape painters, other times books about painters from the past whose work I admire. The former will tell you how they paint, the latter will contain works that need to be reverse engineered before you can get what you're after.

And what, precisely, are you after? Insight, mostly. A new way of looking at the same things you deal with when painting, that will add an extra tool to your internal toolbox. No matter how much you know, there's a wealth of undiscovered knowledge out there waiting to be applied.

I have to admit, it can be a lottery. Sometimes a book will overdeliver, in which case it becomes a well thumbed staple of my bookshelf. Sometimes a book will disappoint, in which case I quietly relist it for sale on my Amazon seller account. 

Sargent on Cezanne.

'When in 1912 Mr. D. S. MacColl wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century, "A Year of Post-Impressionism," he received from Sargent the following letter:

My dear MacColl,
I have enjoyed reading your article on Post-Impressionism very much—I should think it would bring a good many people to their senses—I admire the certainty with which you have refrained from hinting at the possibility of bad faith on the part of people like Matisse or at the theory that I am inclined to believe that the sharp picture dealers invented and boomed this new article of commerce.
     I think you have exactly weighed the merits of Cezanne and rather over-estimated the "realism" of Van Gogh whose things look to me like imitations made in coral or glass of objects in a vacuum. As to Gauguin, of course you had to deal with him for the sake of your argument, as if there were something in him besides rich and rare colour. Some day if we ever meet I should like to discuss with you the meaning of the word "values" and the word Impressionism.

Yours sincerely,

John S. Sargent.
 
In order to appreciate the value of Sargent's concurrence with Mr. MacColl's estimate of Cezanne, the following extract from the article may be quoted:

Cezanne was not a great classic; he was an artist often clumsy, always in difficulties, very limited in his range, absurdly so in most numerous productions, but "with quite a little mood" and the haunting idea of an art built upon the early Monet, at which he could only hint. He oscillated between Monet's earlier and finer manner, that of dark contours and broadly divided colour, and a painting based on the early Monet, all colour in a high key. In this manner he produced certain landscapes tender and beautiful in colour, but the figure was too difficult for him, and from difficulties he escaped into the still lifes I have spoken of, flattened jugs, apples, and napkins like blue tin that would clank if they fell. What is fatal to the claim set up for him as a deliberate designer,  creating eternal images out of the momentary lights of the Impressionists, is the fact that his technique, remains that of the Impressionists, a sketcher's technique, adapted for snatching hurriedly at effects that will not wait.

It is clear that Sargent was from the first definitely hostile to the more advanced Post-Impressionists; he receded very little, if at all, from that position. He regarded the Cubists, their followers and offshoots with uncompromising disapproval. He did not consider that either they or even the great majority of Post-Impressionists, by slighting representation, were contributing in any way whatsoever, as was claimed for them by a leading critic, "to establishing more and more firmly the fundamental laws of expressive form in its barest and most abstract elements." He held that it could be more effectually and much more emotionally attained by representing also the visual and spiritual values of the thing seen.'

From page 193 of John Sargent, by the Hon. Evan Charteris, K.C., with reproductions from his paintings and drawings. Charles Scribner's sons, New York, 1927. '

Website (Vanity II)

Either...

A website is an absolutely necessary piece of online real estate for every artist, where you can display, promote, and sell your work.

Or...

A website is an expensive way to waste time you could have spent painting. You have to learn to code, or pay someone to do it for you, and either way it costs you time or money. 

Your expensive premium WordPress theme looks great, but it slows down your site so much that Google hates you. So you waste half a day checking out fast loading free themes, every one of which is exactly wrong for your site.

Also, one third of your surprisingly low traffic is bored east european kids trying to hack your database for the fun of it, as you will discover when you're obsessively perusing your visitor logs in your host company's back end and wondering why nobody drops by. And your email sign ups will dump you the moment they get that free gift you gave them in exchange for their email address, never to be heard from again.

Which of these points of view is true? Well, they both are. Kind of. If you've reached a place in your art career where people are looking you up online, getting a website is a logical step to take, or at least it can be if you have a realistic expectations of online sales or some other kind of profitable contact from it - perhaps commissions, or exhibition invitations.

If you decide to go with the 'Heck, yes I want a website!' option, remember it's not all upside. Creating a customer base and selling your work without paying gallery commission? Well, that makes sense. Having to deal with the heavy lifting a good gallery would do for you in return for their commission? That's when it starts to look a little less inviting.

I've been looking at art marketing advice online, given that I'm ready to start selling my paintings, and one thing every art consultant agreed on was the absolute necessity of having your own artist's website. Given that all of them just happened to be selling artist's websites, I decided to take that advice with a grain of salt.

If you haven't reached the place where your name is getting Googled on a regular basis, maybe you should concentrate on your painting until it does. And, for once, I'll be taking my own advice and not getting my own website yet.

Vanity.

I've been drawing self portraits since I was an art student, partly because it's good drawing practice, but mainly because it's easier than persuading someone to sit for me.

Drawing the human face or figure means that any mistakes leap out at you, so you're less inclined to let your drawing become lax. Drawing yourself means you've always got a model, but it also means you get to examine your face somewhat more closely than you usually would, and see the harm that time is doing. (As well as the flaws that came built in - little lapses in symmetry, features that are too big or too small, a nose that points off to the side.)

If you have any vanity, drawing your face pretty much takes it away. Having said that, when I look back at photographs of me taken years ago, I wonder how that fresh faced innocent ever survived to become the evil old monkey into which I am slowly transforming. Altogether, I think I prefer the look of now me. 

Choosing paintings to show.

I wrote recently about looking back at what I'd been doing, and it seems like a good time to pause and take stock.

Having consigned half my recent paintings to the kindling pile, I then took a long look at what remained and picked around twenty pieces that could be worth showing.

There's a consistent theme of landscape, with sub themes: the tree 'portrait', the light effect, the path in perspective, water and reflections, the horse, the house. All four seasons are represented, though mostly summer. There are several attempts at convincing skies.

In all of them there's a tension between finish and its absence, mostly caused by trying to keep the balance between making the mark and trying not to overwork the paint.

Attempts at making more ambitious works have foundered on the twin rocks of lack of preparation and this problem of finish. A big, complex realist painting takes a long time and a lot of work. If you're thinking of painting that way, here's a tip: do lots of studies.

Success? I've found my themes, and I now know how to tackle a new subject and assimilate it into what I can do.

Failure? I'm not half the painter I hoped I was. My ambition has outpaced my abilities.

Conclusions? I need tuition. 

A Good Painting Spot

This was a good painting spot, because there happened to be a thicket of blackberry bushes within arm's reach to my right. Free fruit.

Of course, it also happened to be on a footpath which got more traffic than I expected, which led to some akward dances around the easel, but it could have been worse; read this Telegraph article to see what can befall an RA in the middle of London.

Even as a landscape painter I sometimes get an audience. The good thing is that onlookers soon realize that painting isn't interesting, and they drift away. Sometimes a troll will try to spoil your concentration by talking to you, but I've perfected the deadpan monosyllabic reply and cheerful countenance that makes them realize they're onto a non starter, and they soon leave in search of fresh prey.

People who do that were the bane of Cezanne's life, or so my reading about him would suggest. A sensitive man who was quick to anger, he was probably easy entertainment for bored peasants on a slow farming day. I've been leafing through the local library's copy of Cezanne: His life and works in 500 images, by Susie Hodge (available at a surprisingly high price on Amazon).

Anyway...where was I, and what's my point? Pick painting spots with free fruit, avoid those with bored peasants and/ or jobsworths.