Criticism: who needs it?
The March 2006 copy of ‘the Artist’ carried a depressing letter from a man who endured devastating criticism of his painting at a local Art Society meeting. The experience completely destroyed his confidence.

I cannot understand why amateur Art Societies persist in holding criticism evenings; in my experience they achieve very little. What usually happens on these occasions is that several members chip in with often contrary opinions and anyone looking for consistent constructive advice rarely gets it. The situation that exists in a well run class or workshop where the tutor offers advice and comment on a one to one basis is far more helpful.

Interestingly the correspondent described the friendliness and willingness to share ideas that existed in the Dunedin Art Society in New Zealand in the 1960’s. I can verify that the same spirit prevails in the new millennium. I’ve made three visits to New Zealand and met members of Art Societies in Dunedin, Taupo and Thames. Sometimes I ‘gatecrashed’ unannounced but I always had a warm welcome. They were interested to see how a Pom with an English watercolour style handled the strange young evolving landforms of their country.

Once attuned to the excitement aroused by what your eye likes painting comes naturally. A more experienced and sympathetic painter occasionally looking over your shoulder to nudge you in an appropriate direction is all you need. Criticism given in a room full of people which makes you colour with embarrassment – you don’t need it.

I'm pleased for loretta

A surprise email from an old friend dropped into my Inbox the other day. It was from Loretta Proctor – a name you could hear more of in time.

I met Loretta when we both used to exhibit at the Malvern Gallery but now she spends her creative time writing. Loretta has just published her first novel set in Greece in WWI.

‘With its authentic background, snapshots of Greek life and tradition, splendid mix of characters and fascinating story line, The Long Shadow is both powerful and engrossing.’ Writes one reviewer.

Here’s a link to her entry on the Amazon Website.

Loretta Proctor: ‘The Long Shadow’

summer festival before winter ends

Each year in June and July my life gets interrupted by the Ludlow Festival. This is because for a number of years my wife has managed wardrobe backstage. Traditionally the main event of the Festival has been an outdoor production of a Shakespeare play in the castle. The Festival runs for two weeks but wardrobe management begins at least one week before the play opens – quite a commitment.

This year having offered to manage the content of the Festival web site it entered my life in January. The web site was developed by the Shropshire Star newspaper and it is huge. Fortunately my remit is only concerned with managing events listing and giving details of accommodation and eating places for visitors. The challenge lies in achieving clear presentation and layout of the text and combining it effectively with images.

Big websites often degenerate into a chaotic jumble of flashing advertising banners which are a distraction. Fortunately visitors to the Ludlow Festival website do not have to cope with them.

Take a look at http://www.ludlowfestival.co.uk/

a brush with corot
I’ve decided that an artist I must study more closely is Corot. I made this decision after watching Tim Marlow’s recent Channel 5 broadcast from the Bowes Museum. A small landscape by Corot, ‘Landscape with Cattle’ grabbed my attention when Tim Marlow introduced it. Though probably painted as a study ‘en plein air’ the direct manner he adopts was daring for its time.

I admired the way he brushed a heavy application of almost white paint into the negative spaces created by the tree trunks. With a few brush marks he adjusted the tone of the sky and brought the trees forward. It is easy to see why he was admired by the Impressionists. Corot’s classical training manifested itself by the way he rendered the light foliage in the middle distance. Delicate flicks of light green paint moving across the picture – leaves caught by a light breeze perhaps? By comparison the brushwork of the majority of the Impressionists looks quite clumsy.

Corot: 'Landscape with Cattle'

tim marlow on the bowes museum
I always try to watch Tim Marlow’s broadcasts on Channel 5 because he has the gift of talking about art in plain words – due I like to think by being taught English at Denstone by my brother-in-law. His presentation is natural and unpretentious unlike another Courtauld graduate of an older generation Brian Sewell. Sewell is very clever and extremely knowledgeable but his accent and mannerisms grate with me and I’m never sure if they are natural or cultivated to enhance his public persona. Anyway Tim Marlow is like a breath of fresh air in the art world where pretentious language prevails all too frequently.

I watched Tim Marlow’s broadcast about the Bowes Museum yesterday. The first picture that caught my attention was a lovely portrait by Goya – his small portraits are masterpieces. I first got to love them when I visited a major exhibition of Goya’s work in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lille. The exhibition had a small gallery of these works sensitively hung with the heads at eye level. All the heads were drawn sight size so the faces gazed out and really engaged with the viewer.

Goya also gives his heads room inside the frame – something which many portrait painters neglect. I was with a group of friends once looking at a portrait of a young woman in one of our local arts society exhibitions. The head was close cropped inside the frame so that the figure was cut off just above the sternum. I commented that the head should have been given more space because she looked as if she was gazing out of a prison cell window. Nobody else could see anything wrong with this so I didn’t labour the point except to say go and look at how Goya paints.

Goya: Juan Antonio Melendez Valdes

One of the participants at my watercolour workshops turned up with a copy of one of Alwyn Crawshaw’s books. He showed me a page with a landscape illustration and said he would love to be able to paint trees like that. Well for a beginner that is not an unworthy ambition and at least he had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve.

Popular though Alwyn is my only reservation about emulating him is that through his entertaining TV series and ‘how to do it books’ the beginner is left with the idea that watercolours are dashed off in half an hour. This direct approach is fine for the plein air painter if that is the way you like to work.
Dashing off a response to the first compulsive eye catch is exciting but there is a deeper magic to be discovered in the studio

So there are sound reasons for taking a more considered approach in the comfort of the studio Elements of the composition can be rearranged and new colour harmonies explored. I’ve been surprised by the strength and depth of colour that can be built up by superimposing several clean pure washes by using more leisurely studio methods.

The oil painter can work up his plein air sketches in the studio – Monet invariably did. The watercolourist though has to begin again with a totally fresh vision.

I ran a series of Watercolour Workshops through autumn 2005 for a group of complete beginners which has sent me back to the basics of watercolour painting – a careful line drawing as a first stage and then laying down a series of controlled transparent washes.

This is a traditional studio method which requires a quite different approach to the direct methods employed in plein air painting. It’s a way of working which I have tended to neglect for some time but returning to it was a marvellous relaxing experience. It needs time it is fatal to apply the next wash until the one beneath is thoroughly dry - the hairdryer gets plenty of use. Better still is to leave the work overnight and greet it like meeting an old friend the next morning!

Another long neglected aspect of using transparent watercolour I discovered was the use of unmixed colours in my washes. A dilute Alizarin Crimson wash applied over the whole picture took the harshness out of a Cerulean Blue sky and brought a subtle harmony to jarring colours in other parts of the composition. I would never have thought of applying this unifying wash had I not left the painting overnight and come to it with a fresh eye the following day.

There is no better way for the beginner to get into watercolour painting than by practising this method.. Another spin off is that on your leisurely way it is easier to accept the challenge of drawing directly with the brush to add variety and enhance the initial outline drawing. It is the most relaxing and rewarding way to paint with watercolour

dianna ponting: canadian pastellist
An email arrived on the Ludlow Art Society’s inbox that aroused my interest. I designed and now manage the Society’s web site and it’s good to find that visitor numbers are increasing.

This particular email came from Dianna Ponting a Canadian artist who lives in British Columbia. Dianna is Vice President of the Confederation of Canadian Artists and is a successful professional painter. She is primarily a pastellist and will be giving a series of pastel workshops in Great Britain and Ireland in 2006.

I was impressed by the variety of work on Dianna’s website and, having bookmarked it, I’ll be back to study it again.

Dianna's web site is worth a visit at http://ponting.com

The digital challenge
I used to be a bit sniffy about digital imaging but the preparation of movies and animations in the lead up to Christmas 2005 has made me change my mind, at least in part. I’d always felt that painterly and drawing processes had as their end result hand crafted artefacts which had value because of their individual character. Any technology which came between the moving hand making marks and the support on which the marks were made was a recipe for disaster.

This was perhaps an extreme attitude but it was formed by the growing use of digital technology to produce Gicleé Prints, a pretentious name for a scanned reproduction of a painting - typically a watercolour. The practice of signing and numbering these is a piece of nonsense aimed at adding value to a reproduction which is really worth very little. There was a good practical reason why etchers and engravers produced signed and numbered editions – over time the plate degraded but with a digitally stored image there is no reason why the print run is theoretically infinite. Furthermore when you buy an etching or engraving you are purchasing a hand crafted artefact which because of the way it was made is likely to be subtly different from others in the edition – it therefore has real value

However digital imaging is here to stay and we artists have to learn how to make creative use of the new technology. I find the current software great fun to use and the results are easy to share over the internet. At the moment I’m exploring ways of using Corel Painter Essentials 2 with a Wacom tablet. It’s great fun simulating pencil and chalk marks, and brush strokes on screen I’m not sure though whether digital drawings can be put in permanent printed form or whether they should remain as strings of bytes on some form of storage medium until sent to a computer screen.

Each year as christmas approaches I dabble with computer animations. The object being to send cheery Christmas and New Year email greetings to friends and acquaintances. I don't think this has made me very popular and perhaps the problem was that I was cluttering up people's inboxes with files they couldn't open. You can get these greetings from Yahoo of course but they are mostly naff.

Designing a simple animation for an email greeting is the easy part - sending it in a form that can easily be opened by the recipient is another matter. I haven't found a way of placing either GIF or SWF animations in an email and there is no guarantee if they are sent as attachments the recipient can handle them

So distribution has to be via a link on my blog:
New Year Greetings
or for Christmas 2005 this one:
Happy Christmas

A recent visit to Tate St. Ives revealed yet another video installation – this time by Tacita Dean. There is a lovely view across the beach from the semi circular atrium all changing light and weather - then they steer you into a darkened room to look at flickering black and white film shot in Berlin accompanied by harsh distorted sound - hardly a thrill. So moved on quickly to look again at the St. Ives modernists. Except for dear old Alfred Wallis whose reputation owes all to the misconceptions of Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson they grow with renewed acquaintance. For me the best of the non figurative bunch is Bryan Wynter. The paintings are simple linear compositions embellished with gestural and dragged brush marks – very subtle and he’s sensitive to what paint can do. The best of his work of the 1950’s was probably produced while in the trance-like state induced by using mescalin. The drug was used to suppress the conscious and let the subconscious mind take over.

After this disappointment it was good to see a big exhibition in Truro at the Cornwall Museum of work by Kurt Jackson. These days he supplements his watercolours with large works on canvas in water media. He works the paint by splashing and dribbling or pouring onto the canvas laid flat on the ground – and done on site. These are large works with their longest dimension at around 2 metres. Stretched up and displayed in a large gallery they look great there’s a subtle spaciousness to them suggesting glimpses into open sunlit woodland – lovely sensations.

I’ve seen two exhibitions where Kurt shows video of himself at work on these large paintings. Once on a Cornish cliff top with the canvas weighted down with rocks he was dancing around barefoot over the canvas making use of the occasional footprint or toe scratchmark. In the Cornish show he was more sensibly wearing wellington boots. There was no commentary just the natural sounds of the breeze but it was entertaining to see him at work and, unlike the St. Ives installations, the video had a point.

Making copies of other artists’ work is one of the best ways of gaining new insights into working methods. Whenever I come across a painting or drawing which grabs my attention I frequently try to make a copy of it. There is a reproduction of a Rossetti ink drawing in Bernard Dunstan’s annotated edition of Ruskin’s‘The Art of Drawing.’ that I once tried. There was some fine hatching that Rossetti had subtly drawn with diluted ink. Now how many of us would have thought of doing that – and yet it is an obvious way of introducing greater tonal subtlety into a line drawing.

Rembrandt made some lovely line and wash drawings of the farms, mills, and canals around Amsterdam which integrate lively line work with delicate washes. He used a quill pen and sepia ink and they prompted me to learn how to cut my own quills. I’ve also experimented with making my own ‘improvements’ – replacing the sepia washes with coloured ones, it adds to the fun!

This detail of Thomas Richardson's watercolour was set as a copy exercise to my workshop participants. I decided to make a copy myself. The buff paper ground of the original was simulated with a raw sienna wash laid on a 300gsm Bockingford sheet from a sketchbook. Next the underdrawing was made and the picture was built up with controlled washes and finally the touches of white bodycolour were added with White acrylic ink. I've floated a cropped image below to show the linework more clearly - some adjustment was needed to the roof of the left-hand building. No prizes for working out how it was done!


Richardson created this painting by the simplest and most direct means which left me full of admiration. The purplish blue wash laid on the distant hillside was carried down onto the buildings to bring them forward. Essentially the same wash strengthened was used for the shadows. All that was required then were the touches of white and a few added details. None of this would have been discovered by just looking at the painting.

Making copies leads to surprising insights. The aim is not to recreate a mark by mark imitation of the original. There is far more detail in Richardson's linework than in my copy. A careful study of his underdrawing would be worthwhile as a separate exercise. The hand guiding the brush writes its own calligraphy so why not improvise your own style on your copy once the general principles have been grasped.

I've recently completed a series of watercolour workshops for a group of complete beginners - it was something of a challenge. Routine exercises like laying washes, experimenting with wet in wet are not particularly exciting after you've made a few attempts. Sketching outside was a rather daunting prospect for most as it showed up inadequate drawing skills. Students managed a simple still life more convincingly but some had formed clear ideas of what they wanted to achieve. "I want to paint landscapes like Alwym Crawshaw." said one. Others were stimulated by the
'Watercolur Challenge' TV broadcasts.

Then it occurred that copying might be the best way forward - but from what sources? certainly not from photographs. Studying good reproductions of works of art is much better. Making copies has a long tradition as part of a painter's apprenticeship. Dr Monroe invited Joseph Turner and Tom Girtin as two promising RA students into his home to copy the engravings in his collection which he bought for 2s.6d and a bowl of oysters. Girtin often doing the linework and Turner adding watercolour washes - look where this training led!

So good examples were needed - what better artist to begin with than Rembrandt. His pen and wash drawings of the mills and farms in the countryside around Amsterdam display a mastery of line and tone which is an inspiration. Unless a reed or quill pen is used it is hopeless to try and achieve the variey of line which these tools can achieve in the hand of a master like Rembrandt - but for the beginner it is worth transposing the linework by using a modern waterproof ball or fibretip pen. Then the applied washes need not be monochrome - the sketches can be teated imaginatively by applying colour.

I chose two watercolours from the Royal Watercolour Society's Diploma Collection as models. These can be found in Stephen Spender's book 'The Glory of Watercolour.' The first choice was John Varley's delightful small watercolour 'Cader Idris.' It's merit lies in the beautifully controlled washes he has laid down to portray the receding planes of the mountains and lake. He uses a simple colour scheme mainly of blues and greens. The painting is an example of traditional transparent watercolour of the highest quality.

The second example shows a different approach to watercolour. It is 'Saÿn on the Pretsoh Bach, Rhine' by Thomas Miles Richardson. It was painted on a buff ground, the line drawing plays an integral part in the finished picture showing through the overlaid washes to record the details of the buildings. Final touches were added with white bodycolour to render the half timber buildings and a smoke rising from a chimney.

So two different ways of using watercolour which are instructive and worthy of careful study. I asked the students to make their own studies of the examples - I'm keen to see what they made of them.

An exhibition associated with Royal Worcester Infimary Installation showed photographs of the building showing the old wards in varying states of dereliction peeling paint and plasterwork nicely composed to show interesting textures and subtle colour effects created by damp and neglect. Then some striking photographs of what I took to be a former patient taken in what was probably the former physiotherapy gym. The model was nude and her legs and arms deformed – she was probably a thalidomide victim. The photographs were not repulsive, there are far more shocking images shown in newsreel but they were startling. The model clearly co-operated willingly and there was a simple dignity about her as she posed; ‘Look at me I’m not ashamed of my body.’ Were then they beautiful? Well no but then I confess to some prejudice against the photographed nude because of the limited artistic range it has. Artistically nude photography hardly rates compared with sculpture which does the incomplete body much better. As examples, The Venus de Milo, Michelangelso’s slaves or the torso’s of Aristide Mailliol and Eric Gill.

The video installations which are the current preoccupation of museum curators are a bore. I encountered one in Worcester recently commissioned, using I suppose Arts Council money, to mark the closure of the old Royal Worcester Infirmary. The RWI was a fine old building which nevertheless fails to meet the standards of present day health practice. The video was filmed in one of the corridors which had doors leading to a staircase at one end. A sequence of apparently unrelated incidents occurred. An old man in a raincoat entered through the doors and stood motionless at the side of the corridor. A young woman entered from a side door and performed rather graceful ballet movements, though the old man did not appear to be aware of her. Finally a young boy suddenly appeared sitting on the floor in the foreground playng a board game. The only bit I enjoyed was when the boy had to reach over to retrieve his dice after a mistimed throw and gave a self-conscious smile to the camera. Good he was living and not a ghost! What was the point of the triple sequence? I hope someone might be able to tell me – in plain words rather than arty jargon.

Gallery Talk

Gallery Talk

It is always interesting to listen to comments people make about paintings. At the Ludlow Art Society Summer Exhibition this year I found myself stewarding with a man who was the husband of one of our members and not himself a painter.  His low opinion of one of our member’s abstract paintings led to a dialogue which went something like this:
     
Steward: “What on earth does that represent?”
Me:  “Well it has a title – what does it say?”
Steward: “‘Gone in 3 seconds.’ How was I supposed to know that just from those splashes of paint.” Then reading the title of the next one:  “‘Caves – Dan yr Ogof’  That doesn’t look like a picture of caves to me.”
Me: “Do you listen to music on Classic FM?”
Steward: “Yes – I enjoy classical music.”
Me: “Well when they play the theme from ‘The Armed Man’ you just sit back and enjoy the sounds you don’t think of a soldier kitted up with military hardware. So why not just enjoy the paintings’ subtle colours, marks, and textures because all those qualities are there when you look at a good figurative painting.”
Steward: “Well I expect pictures to look like something recognisable.”

So I left him unappreciative and unconvinced.

This little dialogue confirms the notion that for most people the pleasure they get from looking at pictures derives from recognition. If they do not immediately recognise the familiar world of experience with the marks on the canvas they are puzzled. This is a problem for artists because we are trained to be selective and to exploit artistic qualities of line, colour, and texture to communicate with the viewer. You have a better chance of engaging the viewer if you start from something observed in the world of everyday experience. Working from the more esoteric domain of pure imagination is likely to leave most people confused.

Organising Exhibitio

Organising Exhibitions: Tedious Repetition or Challenging Opportunity

The Chairman’s appeal for someone to organise the Summer Exhibition at the Ludlow Art Society’s Society’s AGM was greeted by an ominous silence. Members’ reluctance to grasp such an opportunity is odd because the Exhibitions are the sole reason which motivates most of our members to join. Slowly it dawned that it would have to be me or there might be no exhibition.

The preparation of the entry forms with my name featuring as the recipient aroused a feeling of déja vu – been there done that some fifteen years ago. In those relatively far off days things were much more leisurely. We invited external selectors to judge the entries and advise on hanging. There was no shortage of volunteers and we were all fortified with a glass of wine which made hanging a convivial occasion.  This all helped establish the Society’s reputation for mounting exhibitions of high quality that were well presented and tastefully hung. Nowadays constrained by a high rental we are forced to do things in a hurry.

So would a job I once tackled with relatively youthful enthusiasm be a tedious repetition of all the old chores or a creative challenge? Surprisingly it had elements of both. For many years we benefited from the computing expertise of a retired Anglican priest and I owe great deal to him through our association in the production of the Society’s Newsletter. He taught me about correct typographic conventions used in printed documents – when to use an en-dash and when to use a hyphen. The first creative task was to set up the software procedures to produce exhibition stationery to the standard which Ernest had established. This took about four weeks and was tested with the data we had stored from the Spring Exhibition.

  I was also helped by the exhibition organisers who succeeded me – I was delighted to find amongst a bag of papers passed to me a file of very detailed records which had been compiled by one of my succcessors. There are the routine chores of course, telephone calls have to be made, preview mailings, press releases, and posters distributed. All too often these tasks fall to the hard-pressed few and yet they could be undertaken by anyone willing to attend two or three exhibition planning meetings where a check-list of jobs is drawn up and allocated.

The August 2005 issue of ‘The Artist’ carried a very sad editorial called ‘Please Don’t Say No!’  It was written by Jan Milsom about her Art Society that finally had to disband after 23 years. The Society had been kept going by a dwindling band of ageing volunteers but inevitably it collapsed when the Chairman had to undergo major surgery  and a successor could not be found. It’s the same the whole world over. I correspond with a friend who is a member of the Thames Art Society in New Zealand. They had to call an extraordinary general meeting to appoint volunteers to enable the Society to carry on. The Ludlow Society has been close to that situation.

What then of the future? I have to be hopefully optimistic for two reasons. First, the Society has rightly earned a widely respected reputation for almost 60 years – yes that is an anniversary  we must plan to celebrate in style next year. Like many others I drifted into a Summer Exhibition when I was planning to move to Ludlow and was given an encouraging and friendly welcome by the Secretary who handed me a membership form. I’ve never forgotten that welcome or being told that there was no waiting list or that I didn’t have to present a portfolio of work and be voted in by members. The subsequent years of active involvement confirmed that I had been fortunate to join a very friendly society. If that experience is common to other newer members there must be sufficient motivation to continue the Society’s good work if it could be harnessed.

Jan Milsum’s plea in her editorial ‘…if you are asked to help out in some small capacity at your art society, please, please, please, think very carefully before you say no!’  was very apt. Better still, don’t wait to be asked just volunteer!

The loose handling of watercolour has a surprisingly long history. The most notable exponent was Turner whose Venetian sketchbooks are full of drawings which have colour notes added in watercolour. Some of his sketches are made directly in watercolour and there are some interesting examples using body colour on blue paper. They were done as working studies to note down effects of light and to develop his visual memory of a place.

Another exponent of the genre was Sargent who frequently made watercolours on his extensive travels in Europe. Most of his watercolours date from c1900-1917 when he became disillusioned with portrait painting. He embarked on journeys through Europe with friends and students recording places in direct bold watercolours many of which he casually gave away. He probably painted them for simple enjoyment but his fame as a fashionable portrait painter ensured interest by dealers and collectors in everything he produced. In 1909 80 watercolours exhibited at Knoedler’s in New York were bought by the Brooklyn Museum and gradually his watercolours were bought by other American museums.

The loose fluid manner of execution which Sargent developed was very similar to that used by Edward Wesson. In particular there is a striking resemblance between a small watercolour of Venice by Sargent,‘All’ Ave Maria’ painted c1907 and one by Wesson titled ‘Venetian Waters’. The location and composition are very similar. Both paintings could have been made as a quick impression in front of the motif with the aim of further development in the studio. That seems to be the way Wesson evolved his characteristic style – he was able to refine a method that was quick and immediately recognised by his distinctive direct brushwork. It brought him steady sales and a host of imitators.

I am a keen admirer of Edward Wesson’s watercolours but he is a bad exemplar for amateur painters. Wesson developed a very personal loose way of working which is very popular and his style has spawned look-alikes of varying degrees of competence. Demonstrations by professional artists who paint in a loose Wesson manner are sure to captivate audiences at meetings of amateur painters.

The April meeting of Ludlow Art Society members enjoyed two watercolour demonstrations typical of the loosely handled genre. The first demonstration followed a predictable course. First a quick sky painted with fluid washes laid on with a Japanese hake – Wesson’s favourite tool for this job was a French Polisher’s mop. The hake was used again with stronger blues to create foreground shapes. At this point the demonstrator announced it would be a snow scene. The use of a hairdryer to dry off part of the sky area enabled the demonstrator to drybrush the outline of an oak tree with the side of a sign writer’s liner. The point of the liner was used with a dark pthalo blue/umber mix to flick in suggestions of branches. Finally purple blue/grey washes were used to suggest distant hills and create the outline of a farmhouse roof. After further use of the hairdryer a suggestion of the detail was added and the job was done – a finished watercolour in 35 minutes. Members were treated to a second slick performance after an interval. Two large water colours ready for framing in 90 minutes.

Over the years I have observed several demonstrations of this kind and they teach you very little. For the beginner they encourage the idea that loose direct handling is the key to success in water colour and little else. After each of these demonstrations I always return to Barry Miles book on Edward Wesson* to compare his work with that of his look-alikes. This kind of study is important if you want to appreciate him. A superficial awareness of Wesson’s work overlooks the fact that the loose brushwork of his small plein air landscapes are based on keen observation developed through drawing.

Wesson like his contemporaries Jack Merriot, Leonard Squirrel, and Claude Muncaster was a fine draughtsman. For me Wesson is seen at his best in his pen and wash watercolours. There is a fine example, St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol on the dustjacket of Barry Miles book. The clean loosely handled transparent washes are there to be enjoyed but they are supported by accurate, though understated, ink line drawing.

Wesson has so many disciples - John Yardley and Ron Ranson being the most widely known - that it is worth reflecting that Watercolour has a long tradition. It is important to visit public collections to discover how other artists have used the medium. Dear old Edward's watercolours are very seductive but it is best to avoid becoming enslaved by them.

* Edward Wesson 1910-1983: Barry Miles, Hallsgrove (1999)

The other day I was talking to a friend about drawing in pen and ink. The medium is essentially a linear one and tonal contrast is generally achieved by cross hatching. Ruskin in ‘The Elements of Drawing’ sets a very tedious exercise asking the student to cover a small square with lines to achieve gradations of tone. I’ve tried this several times and however hard you try – varying the line spacing, varying the density of cross hatching – smooth gradation of tone is very difficult and time consuming requiring waiting for each stage to dry.

Studying the Whistler etching in Walsall's Garman-Ryan collection the thought occurred that some of the qualities of the print could be reproduced in a pen drawing. An etched plate is often dipped in the acid bath several times. The length of time in the bath determined the depth of ‘bite.’ A deeply bitten line holds more ink than a shallow one and results in a darker line. A similar effect can be achieved by using dilute ink for the most delicate lines in the drawing. Turner used dilute ink in his small watercolour in the Garman-Ryan collection for distant detail. It’s a simple idea which is rarely used and when applied sensitively broadens the scope of pen drawing.

Artists, I am certain, love their own paintings – it is something that is inherent in the creative process. I daresay there are artists, driven by the necessity to sell, who turn out three or four paintings a day with little real affection for what they are producing. This has a hint of production line mentality and there can be little real satisfaction in that way of working.

David Cox, enfeebled and on his death bed, is reported to have said, “Goodbye paintings, I will never see you again.” It was as if he was saying farewell to some dear friends. I experience a similar sensation whenever I sell a painting – part of me is sorry to see it go. I sent'The Flower Girl' which is shown on a Blog posted in February to the LAS Spring Exhibition. I’d enjoyed having her around for a few weeks before the handing-in day and David Cox’ attributed remark came to mind when I learned the painting had been sold. “Goodbye Flower Girl, I may never see you again.” I only hope you give your new owner lasting pleasure. But then the purchaser may be a dealer who will add a 50% mark up and flog you off to someone else. I do hope not.

I paid a visit to the Walsall Art Gallery which houses the Garman-Ryan Collection. Sally Garman was Jacob Epstein’s lifelong mistress who he married late in life. Garman was born in nearby Wednesbury – a fact which influenced her decision to choose Walsall as a home for the collection of Epstein’s bronzes and the art works that she and her friend Sally Ryan had collected.

The Epstein bronzes in the collection are powerful works modelled directly and retaining a satisfying feeling for the plastic nature of clay. Epstein made friends with the Parisian avant-garde in the 1930’s particularly Modigliani. His interest in modernism made him a controversial figure yet he was denied the acclaim which he deserved. In the post war years he became sidelined largely due to the promotion of Henry Moore by the then Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clarke.

The rest of the collection consists chiefly of drawings and works on paper – minor works perhaps but many are worth close study. A nicely handled drawing by Sickert of St. Marks Square freely drawn in pencil overlaid with watercolour washes. Then a small watercolour of Westminster Bridge with detail subtly added with diluted ink.

Another favourite is a small etching of riverside buildings at Chelsea. Whistler is mostly known by his loosely handled Nocturnes – sand also the controversial ‘Cremorne Gardens, the Falling Rocket.’ This little etching shows him to be a sound draughtsman. An artist who has learned his craft so well is entitled to display a little cockney impudence and fling a pot of paint in the public’s face occasionally. Ruskin, who was invariably right in his comments on art, was wrong in his assessment of Whistler.

I’ve currently been working on a pastel sketch that I made some years ago on a painting course run by Claire Spencer PS at Westhope College in Shropshire. I think it was Claire’s suggestion to use a portrait format for an in situ pastel sketch of a view along Wenlock Edge. That did not present any particular problem but I never really resolved the composition satisfactorily and my enthusiasm for the painting went off the boil. I discovered the unfinished picture in a folder of work and decided that I ought to take another look at it.

The decision to work on it again was encouraged by my current preoccupation with ‘Land and Light’ as a progressing theme and the happy memories of the late summer weather when it was begun. Thinking about a strategy my first idea was to catch the sunlight on the rising slopes of Wenlock Edge. The second was to simplify the foreground in some way. In the original sketch there was a broken hedge in the foreground. I had been lured by its rampant summer growth much of which had gone to seed. The seed heads created interesting forms but they were really a distraction - but what to do?

The solution was found by simply playing! The joy of pastel is the pleasure taken in just making marks - it offers almost unlimited possibilities to rub, blend, scrape, and add new marks at will. So the first task was to rub out the hedge by making random marks with dark pastels and blending them – great fun. Then the thought occurred that a grassy path emerging from shade would create a simple foreground that would emphasise the feeling of sunlight on the rising ground beyond. All that remained then was to create a little more interest in the sky and enjoy a little more creative mark making in the fields with complementary colours.

After an hour or so of total absorption I felt the painting was finished – and as Alwyn Crawshaw used to say at the end of his TV demonstrations, ‘”I’m happy with that!”

Whenever possible I try to avoid using fixative because it can create problems. Too heavy application renders the paper surface hard and smooth which makes further drawing and blending difficult. The problem can be solved when using robust grounds like board by roughing the surface with fine sandpaper. This happened when I applied fixative to the face and hair – fortunately Canson is a heavy robust paper which can take a certain amount of rough treatment so no real harm was done.

For this portrait an intermediate fix was needed to seal the underdrawing and prevent it lifting and soiling the final marks. Faces generally have to be highly worked in order to render the subtle tones created around the eyes, nose and mouth. Even the lightest pastel sticks make strong marks which have to be softened when drawing delicate forms. This detail from the completed portrait shows the degree finish that can be achieved.

My strategy was to treat crown of the hat and nightdress more loosely to focus attention on face. The best laid plans though collapse if you get too engrossed in mark making. I began suggesting the straw weave of the hat and the marks took over – I could have brushed them off of course but I was beguiled by the effect they created so it was too late.


Framing is another aspect of the craft of painting that I agonise over. Victor Ambrus lovely pastel drawings on light tinted Ingres paper look fine in a wide ivory mount inside a narrow frame. A full painterly treatment needs a different form of presentation. I had to hand a wide frame which had a gold finish, a slip made from a length of glass bead was used to separate glass and painting. There was a problem – the painting would need to be cropped.

I believe portrait heads need space within the frame if they are not to look imprisoned. The role model who led me to this conclusion is Goya, his head and shoulder portraits are all drawn sight size and the chest is often fully facing the viewer. The width of the shoulders then creates the required space for the head. I had drawn a sideways pose and I think the wide brimmed oversize hat created just sufficient space to allow the painting to be satisfactorily cropped to fit the smaller frame.

The attractive qualities of pastel are its directness and the textural marks which are possible with the medium. With a portrait currently on my easel I began to consider strategies which might be implemented to bring the painting to a conclusion. It helps when deciding on a particular approach to look at examples. One valuable source of reference is ‘Pastel Painting and Drawing 1898-2000’ published by The Pastel Society to celebrate the Society’s Centenary Exhibition.

The book illustrates some fine examples of portraits done by PS members which display the broad range of techniques which can be used with pastel. Ken Paine is an artist who tackles his portrait heads in a vigorous direct manner. The faces seem to emerge from a flurry of textural marks. His subjects are usually old, hirsute, and with ‘character.’ In contrast Victor Ambrus portraits are essentially light firm drawings with hints of colour in the face and parts of the clothing. The linear approach he adopts is ideal for recording detail.

Between these two extremes are portraits which have highly worked parts – usually the face – and more more loosely treated areas which exploit the dry textural nature of the chalk. I decided that this would be the best strategy for a portrait of a child where the skin is smooth with subtle tonal contrast best achieved by blending the coloured marks made by the pastels. Background and clothing could be given looser treatment.

I’ve temporarily abandoned studies of birds to return to a portrait that is in danger of going off the boil. I began it last summer prompted by the sight of my granddaughter dressed in my wife’s nightdress and her straw sunhat. Most children love dressing up and this one is no exception but recording them in their fancy dress is not easy except with a camera. Reliance on photographic references becomes essential since the first tentative drawing was made over six months ago.

The portrait has progressed to the point where major corrections to the pose have been made, one of these – to the outline of the hat – still shows. She is turned away from the light and the face for the most part is lit by reflected light. This creates subtle contrasts of tone around the eyes and nose which I hope to record rather - dare I say – in the way that Rembrandt did!

I’ve gone for a full painterly treatment in pastel on the reverse side of a grey Canson paper – preferring this to the ‘correct’ side which has an insistent regular grain that breaks into textural marks. The work has progressed to the point where I’m beginning to consider an intermediate fix. I’m always reluctant to use fixative preferring to scrape down to the ground when I can. I don’t think I will be able to do this on Canson because the rubbed blends and corrections have filled the grain of the paper. Little can be done that is not likely to damage the paper surface.

This digital image was made from a photograph of a 2005 calendar published by Hawksworth Graphic and Print Ltd. The calendar was one of the most appreciated gifts I received at Christmas - it is now hanging on my studio wall and is a delight and inspiration. The illustrations are by Leonard Squirrel RWS, RE. who has long been one of my favourite watercolourists. He taught etching and engraving at the Ipswich School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy for around 50 years. He was born in 1893 yet he was not elected a full member of the RWS until 1941 – a surprising fact which shows how persistent and determined you have to be to progress in the art world.

He belonged to a generation which produced fine landscape painters like Jack Merriott, Stanley Buckle, and Stanley Badmin. They never get a mention in the scholarly art history books and rarely feature in exhibitions in public galleries - yet they were all very prolific artists making a living from commissions and sales of their work.One of the best ways to become familiar with their work is to look at Greg Norman’s book ‘Landscape Under the Luggage Rack.’

The illustration shows a watercolour ‘The Street, Kersey, Suffolk’ painted in 1960. It is a fine example of a class of English watercolour which use controlled washes over a fine drawing. The detail reveals the method but it is hard to decide if the tiles are drawn with a pen or a fine brush superimposed on the wash or beneath it. The choice of instrument and order of application is a matter of the artist’s preference. Jack Merriott advocated the use of a brush drawing in Indian ink with superimposed washes of colour.

Interest in the work of these artists declined as amateur artists engaged with the looser style of Seago and Wesson. Although both artists developed a loose understated method of working this was underpinned by close observation. Wesson in particular could draw well and it is fatal to try and imitate their style if you can’t. So many of the Wesson ‘look alikes’ in amateur exhibitions suffer from a badly drawn beginning.

I meet artists who are excited by the concept of developing new ways of using watercolour - extending its boundaries. Then I often recall a comment by Milan Kundera which I once read. He questioned whether 'the never before expressed is always ahead of us – may it not be found from something which has gone before and has been overlooked?' Artists like Leonard Squirrel tend to be overlooked but there is much in their work which can be rediscovered.

A poster announcing an exhibition called ‘Cuoto on Netsuke’ caught my eye at the Museum and Art Gallery in Hereford so I made a brief visit. Netsuke are small Japanese beads used to secure objects to a belt. They are highly decorative objects and very beautiful Cuoto turned out to be an artist who was showing large engravings influenced by traditional Japanese themes. Of more interest were the woodcuts of birds and flowers. Although they were described by the exhibition catalogue as realistic, to modern eyes accustomed to photographic images that seemed inappropriate. There charm springs from the limitations imposed on the artist by the medium he is using. Details of colour and texture have to be suggested rather than accurately recorded. For artistic rather than scientific purposes this is not a handicap and they can be enjoyed for their directness and honesty of purpose. These are qualities that distinguish the best hand made artifacts and which give them value.

I’ve just enrolled for a Wildlife Drawing and Painting Course at Ludlow Museum. The museum has a good collection of bird specimens that are interesting to draw. Our tutor Angela Gladwell MArt (RCA) is pushing us in the direction of careful observation and accurate recording. Good basic principles once instilled into art students in the life class. Drawing museum specimens is a good discipline. It’s more like drawing from the antique casts that were once used to prepare students for the life class than drawing a living breathing model.

That said it is a worth while form of study and a lot easier than drawing birds in the wild. I’ve tried drawing garden birds and visitors to our bird table and also puffins at their nesting burrows on Skomer. This is essential study if you want to capture a sense of how birds move, perch, or feed but there is no substitute for having a mounted specimen to study anatomy and plumage. I’ve only ever managed to record such details in a very superficial way in the brief time you get to observe from life.

Having tried sketching birds from life I never cease to be amazed by Charles Tunnicliffe’s sketchbooks. The published sketchbooks are a good source of reference and I’ve learned a lot about drawing techniques from making copies from them. Another artist I greatly admire is Victor Ambrus who makes drawings to reconstruct the buildings excavated by Channel 4’s Time Team.

Victor is also a prolific book illustrator and he has published ‘Drawing Animals’ a book which describes his method of sketchng animals from life. All of his drawings were done at various locations using carbon pencils. I’ve found it instructive to make copies from these by following his methods.

These quick studies copy the style of each of these two fine artists – a brush drawing based on an illustration from Tunnicliffe’s ‘Peregrine Sketchbook’ and a Macaw from ‘Drawing Animals’ by Victor Ambrus.

Angela Gladwell’s web site is also worth a visit at

www.angelagladwell.co.uk

Compared to the practical humanitarian work that needs to be done to help the broken communities recover from the Tsunami disaster painting suddenly seemed to be a useless and irrelevant activity. The enthusiasm for painting left me completely as the daily news bulletins carried more and more horrific images. Then I saw aid workers helping children to face up to their horrific experiences by drawing. So there is a place for art even in the midst of complete chaos to help people overcome the trauma of disaster. Where words cannot be found to record the emotional nightmare perhaps images can.

New Year’s Day seems to be a good time to post a Blog. The last day of 2004 saw the arrival of the Pastel Society’s Newsletter – always an interesting though rather brief read. Roger Dellar, the Editor made reference to ‘Degas, Art in the Making’ - an exhibition currently on show at the National Gallery. Degas late pastels are a source of inspiration for anyone using the medium. He frequently used tracing paper as a support. He made use of it to create mirror images of the poses of his drawings of dancers. In this way he could create varied figure compositions from just a few simple poses. He seems to have resorted to this practice as his eyesight began to fail and he was no longer able to go to the ballet.

Degas also used canvas as a support for pastels – a practice which is hardly ever used today. Sickert, who studied with Degas, criticises this practice in his book ‘Open House.’ because of the risk of damage through vibration. He has a point if a traditional stretched canvas is used but the risk is greatly reduced if the canvas is glued to board.

There are valid creative reasons for exploring the properties of different grounds for pastels. Roger Dellar states the case nicely in his Editorial. ‘I find myself being more and more concerned with the paint surfaces, textures, mark making, and also the composition.’ Painting begins with the preparation of a ground suited to the subject being portrayed. The use of prepared pumice grounds and materials such as canvas offer choices which extend the range of the medium. Degas seems to have been aware of this and in his late pastels he produced some of his most exciting paintings.

While passing the Municipal Gallery in Worcester yesterday my eye caught sight of a poster advertising an exhibition of paintings called ‘Porth’ by Kurt Jackson. Shows in the Worcester gallery are usually a disappointment they are usually touring shows of installations or the ill considered daubing that seem to be in fashion with museum curators. . I first became familiar with Jackson’s work on seeing an exhibition of his innovative watercolours in a gallery in St. Just. So this time I went in eagerly anticipating a welcome change from the usual stuff.

Well for this touring exhibition Kurt has put together large collaged paintings in mixed media. The collaged bits were mostly items retrieved from the beach at Priest’s Cove where Kurt mostly works. ‘All that was left’ had two crumpled oilskin jackets and cork floats with bits of rope evocative but somehow inappropriate.

The majority of the paintings were made up of two or three door-sized stretched canvasses fixed together – gallery art again. Very few locations could display these paintings, a college refectory if you shifted the portraits of pensioned academics perhaps. There were perhaps three of four mixed media watercolours framed but unmounted as though they were a hurried addition. These were typical Kurt showing evidence of his playful exploratory way with water based media – capturing effects of light on the sea and evoking in the viewer a sense of noise of waves breaking on shingle. I wish there had been more.

The gallery was showing a video of Kurt at work outdoors on a cliff top at Priests Cove. He gave a bravura performance working on a huge canvas spread on the turf and held down by stones. I guess he was working on an acrylic underpainting laid in earlier. The video showed him working barefoot, trowelling on paint with a knife, splattering it on with a loaded brush Jackson Pollock style and blending it with fingers and toes. Great fun and with an eye for the chance effect or happy accident but never completely controlled.

For quiet reflection I wandered into a neighbouring gallery and saw ‘Herald of the Night’ by Arnesby Brown - an oil painting of about 1870 he was also a Newlyn painter. The painting shows a full moon rising over a simple landscape with two rather badly painted cows, a painting easily dismissed because of its romantic Victorian subject matter. But then I looked at how he had painted the evening sky, there were blues mauves greens juxtaposed and harmonious. It was controlled and considered the product not of impulsive brush gestures but of carefully placed marks. Characteristics all too rarely found in contemporary painting.

Robert Hughes is still one of the few critics that are worth reading. For an art critic he has the rare quality of expressing his opinion in plain words. His international status as a critic is long established and he has no time for dumb hyped-up nonsense posing as fine art.

He wrote in The Guardian recently a review of Lucien Freud’s exhibition of recent paintings and etchings at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, London – it runs until 18th April. He used his review to contrast Freud’s achievement with the show at the Saatchi Gallery called ‘Fresh Blood.’ A show of ‘awful dumb-arsed posturing’ to paraphrase Hughes’ assessment promoted by Ad-men without any kind of connoisseurship. Nobody can really take the whe work of Hirst, Emin, Lucas and their chums seriously can they?

By contrast there is Freud at 82 producing strong engaging work – the product of a lifetime engaged in subjecting people and objects to obsessive scrutiny. This scrutiny leaves the viewer if not the sitter feeling uncomfortable. There is a residual element of the expressionist distortion which characterised German art of his Grandfather’s time – those reclining figures with exposed genitals distorted by exaggerated perspective.

For Hughes, Freud is England’s greatest living artist - other critics share his enthusiasm - ‘our Titan among minnows’ is Laura Cumming’s assessment of him in The Observer. It is good to find critics who are defending work done by a figurative oil painter. Freud has a sensitivity to the way the oil medium can reconstruct a perceived form and give an interpretation of reality which is far superior to the photographic image. In part this superiority is due to the fact that much effort and obsessive observation have gone into the creation of the paint surface – a result of long and exploratory reworking of the surface. Freud’s paintings show the ‘naked evidence of labour’ to quote Cummings. It is this display of effort which for me gives the work a value which demands respect. After all the uncompromising nakedness though it is refreshing to escape into the fresh air where the breeze ruffles the leaves on the trees and and sunlight creates vibrant colour. I need to gaze at a little David Cox watercolour I think.

Read the reviews at:
Sarah Cumming: 'A brush with Genius'
Robert Hughes: 'The Master at Work.'

It is good to meet an artist who is at home with digital technology and makes competent use of it. Last week I went to meet Mark Ansell one of our new Ludlow Art Society members. Mark is a graphic designer and we met to discuss the Society’s publicity – specifically designs for the posters for our exhibitions. Mark had been busy on his Apple Mac and showed my some of his preliminary designs for the Society’s logo and a redesigned format for the Newsletter.

Some years ago I designed the Society logo using a graphic created with Corel Draw. Greyscale versions of it are used on our membership cards and on the masthead of the Newsletter. Colour versions also are used on the Society’s web site. The design carries the words ‘Ludlow Art Society’ superimposed on the church of St. Laurence the town’s most visible landmark. This in turn has the skyline of the Titterstone Clee as a background.

Mark essentially adopted the same device but gave it more impact by placing the lettering below the graphic and simplifying it into a stark black and white design employing counterchange. It was at once more contemporary and striking. I congratulated him and we chatted about this and other changes over a cup of coffee. What was refreshing about our talk was the way in which he was quite ready to engage in critical discussion without rancour. A rare quality I find in the art world where artists can be temperamental and easily upset if someone expresses a dislike of their work. But then as a professional designer he is constantly discussing designs and listening to his clients instructions. Such is the difference between the real world of the commercial art and the more esoteric one of the fine artist.

Richard Wardle RE in a recent demonstration he gave to Ludlow Art Society members expressed concern about the marketing of Giclée prints. It is a concern I share because of the way they are marketed as a form of fine art. An advertisement once caught my eye in, I think, The Observer. It was offering a ‘Fine Art Giclée’ of ‘St. Michaels. Mount’ in a limited edition signed by the artist – an elected RA. The image was printed of course on archival paper with lightfast inks by state of the art digital technology - a quality bargain at around £200!

Well the gullible may be impressed with that and there is nothing new in the marketing of mass editions of signed artists prints. Russell Flint and L S Lowry are two artists who come to mind whose work was marketed in this way. Lowry though was honest enough to admit that he was being paid a fee essentially for signing his autograph. There is a nice story told in his biography that a dealer brought a quantity of prints for him to sign. The dealer became concerned when he noticed that Lowry was signing the prints ‘L.S.Low.’ When asked to explain Lowry replied, “You have only paid me half my fee so you are only getting half a signature.” He was also quietly amused by the fact that gullible art shoppers were prepared to pay a prestigious gallery £45 for a signed numbered print from an edition of 850 when the same print could be bought unsigned for around £5 from less pretentious outlets. Do artists, who can now produce their own passable prints rather than use a commercial printer, really wish to compromise their integrity with this kind of marketing?.

Richard and other RE members make prints which are individual in the sense that each carries the stamp of the artist’s hand–tooled mark. Their work has far greater integrity than the digital print where the technology creates a barrier between the original hand crafted artefact and the mechanically produced print. I once took issue with the writer of an article in ‘The Artist’ magazine which explained at length the skill and care that she took in producing her giclée prints - using the finest materials and making test prints to get the right contrast and colour. All of this of course is sheer pretension, the real skill resides with the programmer who wrote the robust code that kept her system stable while she tinkered and played with the image on her screen. The final digital print owes more to the programmer’s skill than hers.

There is of course a place for digital imaging in helping artists to promote their work. The technology is quite appropriate for cards and notelets that are not being passed off as fine art. But as painters or printmaker we have chosen to work using hand-craft methods which have a long tradition. We should work in sympathy with the tradition and practice of our chosen craft if our work is to have integrity. In any hand crafted printing process image quality degrades after a number of prints are made. This is why the printmaker produces a signed limited edition – at the end of the print run he destroys his plate. There is no such constraint with ink jet prints so it is a pretence to sign and number them.

By using graphics software like Adobe Photoshop to merely make copies of their paintings artists are missing the creative potential of digital technology. There are artists with the necessary skill and training who use graphics software to create original digital images. Their work has greater integrity and honesty of purpose than scanned images of paintings. The simple reason is that their work does not attempt to simulate a hand made artefact. Indeed original digital images are created by a process in which the hand made mark has no place. The appropriate place for digital graphics is in the developing media like video, the internet, or advertising. Digital images are quite out of place in a gallery or exhibition whose primary function is to display hand-made artefacts. I personally would like to see an addition to the Rules of Entry for the Society’s exhibitions that would exclude Giclée prints from being accepted. I hope most members will be persuaded by the logic of my reasoning

Yesterday a poster placed in the window of Hereford Art Gallery caught my eye. It announced an event called ‘Making a Splash’ which turned out to be an exhibition by St. Ives artists. The doors of the gallery were closed and enquiry at reception revealed that the exhibition did not open until today. I was saved from disappointment by a nearby gallery assistant who having overheard my enquiry asked if I had traveled far. “Oh about 30 miles,” I said, “from Ludlow.” At this she invited me to have a look round while they continued to hang the pictures and I was privileged to spend 20 minutes or so with three very friendly assistant curators who pointed out the paintings by artists I was interested in. It was a kind gesture that I really appreciated and I promised too return again to see the exhibition when it is up and running.

The exhibition has a painting by Stanhope Forbes of a group of figures enjoying a summer day in the shade of a tree lined pool. There was something familiar about the location and the way he handled the ripples on the water. Then I remembered his large canvas ‘The Drinking Place’ which is in Oldham Art Gallery. Did he work at the same spot for both pictures? It’s worth another visit to check. Critics have been rather sniffy about Forbes but in my view he handled paint very well. There was also a nice watercolour by Dame Laura Knight that I must return to study and a rather disappointing small work by Peter Lanyon painted in 1945 I didn’t get the title but it shows him working in the manner of Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. These flat abstracts created from linear designs have lost their novelty and interest now. Ten years later the linear basis is still there in his work but the colour is more subtle and textural treatment of the paint surface makes his work more appealing. Another visit to the exhibition is a must.

Tim Marlow is currently presenting an interesting series about great artists on Channel 5, the series is enjoying a rerun and last night his subject was Delacroix. I was delighted when he opened the little Phaidon edition of the Journal and read from it. The same edition that graces my bookshelf and which I also turn to from time to time. It takes real determination to write a journal and there are periods when Delacroix never wrote a word. So his journal has several gaps whether this was due to pressure of work or because he had little to say is uncertain. Well in this respect I’m in good company - this is the first entry in my blog since September 2003. 2004 begins with a resolve to pick up the thread again.

Viewing the Delacroix programme again I was struck by the strange preoccupations of 19th Century Romantic painting. The massacres, noble suicides, violent revolution, and voyeuristic glimpses into harems. Uncomfortable subjects hardly enjoyable to contemplate. Better perhaps to simply look at how the paint is handled, It is now easy now to understand why the Impressionists admired Delacroix vigorous free handling of paint – a revolutionary change from the tight handling of the French classical tradition. Those raindrops he painted with juxtaposed touches of rainbow hues are also prophetic. The idea of exploiting the optical blending of primaries did not occur again until it was developed by Seurat and the Divisionists.

Recent correspondence with my New Zealand friend (see 25 Aug. 2003) has renewed my interest in Frances Hodgkins. Frances who? you may be forgiven for asking unless you were at Art School in the 1950’s, then she was better known and her work was featured in ‘The Studio’ and other art magazines of the time. She was born in Dunedin but spent most of her artistic life and did most of her painting in Europe. From the age of thirty when she came to England and for the rest of her life she was totally dependent on what she could earn from painting, so life was a struggle. She never had a permanent home of her own and stayed with friends or rented rooms and for a time led a gypsy lifestyle roaming around France, Morocco, Italy, Holland and Belgium.

She taught in order to keep painting and her letters home to New Zealand which are now preserved in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington tell of her struggle. ‘Painting reduces me to tears and misery, peaks of ecstasy, disillusion I feel as if I am possessed by a painting devil which is devouring me body and soul, and claims my brains and energy and leaves me with no wish nor inclination for anything else. Is it worth the sacrifice?’ She found it difficult to get recognition from the conservative British art establishment but finally she was awarded a pension negotiated on her behalf by Sir Kenneth Clarke during his time as Director of the National Gallery. She died in 1947aged seventy-eight in poverty and suffering from depression.

She is honoured today in New Zealand as one of the country’s finest artists. Her work is represented in Tate Britain but there is more to discover on the web site of the Dunedin Art Gallery and that of the City of Dunedin.

Tate Online
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
City of Dunedin

This photograph shows the old school building where the Thames Society of Arts hold their exhibitions and workshops. (see yesterday's Blog)

I have a friend who is a member of the Thames Society of Arts – I should explain that this Society is based in a little town on the Coromandel Peninsular, North Island, New Zealand. They have converted an old school building which they use as a gallery and for running courses – but that is another story. Dennis went out to New Zealand in the 1950’s and the native born Kiwi’s jokingly refer to him and an ‘improved Englishman.’ In a recent letter I asked him what the winter colours were like in the North Island landscapes commenting that Rowland Hilder was the first English watercolour painter to really make extensive use of winter landscapes. The New Zealand seasons do not have the dramatic changes of those in England, plants seem to grow all year and winter simply is the season when there is more snow on the mountains. Rowland Hilder turned out to be a painter that Dennis admired and reference to him had the effect of arousing nostalgia for the Kent landscapes that he knew as a boy.

This exchange renewed my own interest in Hilder and so I turned to a copy of ‘Sketching Country’
That I bought in a second hand bookshop some years ago. Hilder’s description of his working methods makes fascinating reading. He was an artist who loved making sketches out of doors, sometimes these were simply scribbled notes and ideas for paintings following in the footsteps of Turner who left a thousand or more such drawings in sketchbooks. Ruskin – who went through Turner’s effects and arbitrarily destroyed many that he considered might undermine Turner’s artistic reputation – wrote comments on the back of some of his Petworth sketches. Ruskin clearly did not think much of them – he wrote ‘rubbish,’ ‘inferior,’ ‘worse,’ on many of them.

It is curious how taste changes, now these little Petworth colour notes are highly regarded. In Hilder’s day Turner’s sketches and Constable’s oil sketches aroused great interest and the sketch became elevated to being a work of art in it’s own right. So there developed a taste for the direct sketchy style of painting practised by Seago, Wesson, Hilder himself and currently John Yardley. It is a style of painting which has attracted many amateur watercolourists. But beware it is difficult to carry off.

However on balance I think Hilder is right when he observes that; ‘…I am a believer in banishing from a watercolour the kind of detail which I have heard visitors to mixed exhibitions applaud as being ‘true to life’. Truth, in all art, is not the same as literal description.’

I believe a painting benefits from having a part which is understated yet this is rarely appreciated. This year the Ludlow Art Society Summer Exhibition had a lovely watercolour in pen and wash by Maggie Humphry. She is one of the Society’s new professional members and this was the first time she had submitted work. She must have been thrilled to bits to have her watercolour awarded the Selector’s Choice.

I was admiring it when a friend who was with me said it had been frequently criticised because of an understated indefinable area which could be visually read as an area of grass or perhaps part of a farmyard or driveway. The point of the understatement was that it provided a quiet area which focussed attention on some beautifully drawn foreground plants yet afterwards led the eye past some buildings into the distance. The current preoccupation with finicky detail, a result I suspect of unimaginative use of photographs, means that artistic subtlety of this kind often goes unnoticed. A great pity because Maggie in this painting was teaching a lesson which we all ought to take to heart.

You can see more of Maggie's work on her web site at: Maggie Humphry at Pink House

‘The Art of Chess’ exhibition currently showing at Somerset House has attracted media attention even though chess does not have a great deal of popular interest. The exhibition displayed 19 chess sets dating from the 19th Century to the present day including some newly commissioned work by some members of the Britart school. With the exception of a set designed by Marcel Duchamp, who was himself a very good player, it would be very difficult to actually play a game with some of the sets. In one case this was the deliberate intention. Yoko Ono designed a set entirely made up of white pieces so that the combatants would become so confused that an effective battle could not be fought. So chess has been used to promote the cause of ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ A laudable objective perhaps but missing the key idea that chess is a cerebral battle not a physical one.

The Britart gang clearly had little interest in or knowledge of the game. There was a time when if an artist was given a design brief he undertook some background research to ensure that his design was appropriate for its use. Good design becomes a fusion of imagination with knowledge of materials and understanding of the artefacts function. The Britart school blindly ignores this tradition and is in danger of becoming totally irrelevant to real concerns. Not surprisingly a chess journalist commented that ‘one of the exhibits looked like the contents of a kitchen cupboard which had fallen onto the floor.’

Away from the exhibits the real Art of Chess was being demonstrated by two chess prodigies David Howell aged 12 and Sergei Karyakin aged 13 who played a demonstration game on a giant-sized chess board in the courtyard. The genuine beauty of the mind game being enacted through the moves each player made is something which none of the artists, except perhaps Duchamp, seem to have understood.

It is sad to discover an interesting artist by reading his obituary. This was how I learned of Cliff Wilkinson, a painter who shared my love for the Lake District. He developed a style of painting quickly in order to capture the quickly changing effects of light which can be so lovely in mountain landscapes. Judging by the illustration that accompanied his obituary he developed a spontaneous free style approaching abstract expressionism. In this picture ‘Lakeland Walk’ the colours are right and the marks are textural and evocative.

Wilkinson taught at the Borough Polytechnic from 1950-59 that was about the time that David Bomberg established the Borough Bottega and became influential in developing the style taken further by the likes of Frank Auerbach. Wilkinson seems to owe something to Bomberg too. After studying printmaking at the RCA he ran the School of Printmaking in the Fine Art Department at the Manchester College of Art.

Brian Morley, writing the obituary, explains Wilkinson’s attitude to printmaking - dismissed often a mere ‘craft., Wilkinson had no time for ‘..snobbish distinctions: “It’s all shapes and colours in the end,” he said.” I like that. Apparently he rarely showed his work but I hope someone will organise a major retrospective in his memory – I would love to see it.

The annual Ludlow Festival in June-July is built around Shakespeare plays performed outdoors in the castle. The event throws this family into a month of midsummer madness because my wife manages the wardrobe backstage. Actors work peculiar hours after the evening performance they end on a high and like to socialize in the nearest pub until they are turned out in the early hours. Then its off to bed until around mid-day. After a few weeks of this normal mortals find it impossible to come to terms with the real world – hence the long gap in my blog entries.

What makes our involvement worth while though are the friends we have made through meeting the cast every year. Most actors when not performing generally have mild and sensitive personalities which is contrary to what their public expects. I was struck this year by how much thought professional actors give to how they are going to perform the role they are playing. For most it involves a deep study of the text of the play and I have learned far more about Shakespeare by listening to them than I ever did at school.

This kind of commitment has a general application to all creative activities. One of the traps which painters fall into is that in the desire to loosen up and paint freely their work becomes badly constructed and superficial. Ruskin knew this ‘the hand of a great master at real work is never free:’ he wrote, ‘its swiftest dash is under perfect government.’ Good painters give as much thought to where they place their marks as the best actors do to how they recite their words.

The photographs were taken backstage at this year’s festival.

I visited a favorite restaurant for a meal last week and found the décor changed. New softer colours and the walls displayed about 30 watercolour paintings by Roland Spencer Ford. Roland was a prolific watercolourist with a traditional but quite distinctive style. I knew him towards the end of his life – he died in 1990 – when I joined the Ludlow Art Society. Roland was a founder member and former Chairman who worked hard to establish the Society in its earlier years. He supported the Society by always showing his work in Members’ Exhibitions to the end of his life.

He moved to Ludlow and opened his own studio/gallery on College Street - now just a private house – and made a living from his paintings and prints. He left his unsold work to The Shropshire Hospice when he died and I was surprised to see so much of his work still being offered for sale an indication perhaps that even successful artists sell only a part of what they actually produce. An Exhibition of Roland’s watercolours is being held in Ludlow College, Castle Square, from 28th July to 2nd August. Proceeds from the sale of his work will go to the Shropshire Hospice.
I visited a favorite restaurant for a meal last week and found the décor changed. New softer colours and the walls displayed about 30 watercolour paintings by Roland Spencer Ford. Roland was a prolific watercolourist with a traditional but quite distinctive style. I knew him towards the end of his life – he died in 1990 – when I joined the Ludlow Art Society. Roland was a founder member and former Chairman who worked hard to establish the Society in its earlier years. He supported the Society by always showing his work in Members’ Exhibitions to the end of his life.

He moved to Ludlow and opened his own studio/gallery on College Street - now just a private house – and made a living from his paintings and prints. He left his unsold work to The Shropshire Hospice when he died and I was surprised to see so much of his work still being offered for sale an indication perhaps that even successful artists sell only a part of what they actually produce. An Exhibition of Roland’s watercolours is being held in Ludlow College, Castle Square, from 28th July to 2nd August. Proceeds from the sale of his work will go to the Shropshire Hospice.

Art should never aspire to be cerebral it is a creative activity where expression of feeling and emotion are its major concerns. So watching a recent broadcast treating Channel 4 viewers to an explanation of Tate Modern’s themed display on Still Life made me immediately suspicious. Great art needs no explanation it just ravishes you.

We are far enough removed from Picasso and Braque’s Cubism not to be shocked by it. Their reconstruction of observed objects for artistic effect was driven by painterly concerns which now need no explanation. Their insistence that painters had total freedom to organise and present the world in any way they choose was characteristic of the revolutionary times in which they lived and explains the diverse and fragmentary nature of Modernism.

One of Modernism’s unfortunate consequences is that it seems to have led artists to become more arrogant and extreme. Duchamp’s urinal presented as a fountain and signed ‘R. Mutt’ was perhaps a joke but it led to the doctrine that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Magritte’s little painting ‘The Treason of Images’ with the inscription ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ is a light hearted reminder that you are not observing the real thing but he keeps a visual reference the real world. In contrast Michael Craig Martin offering a tumbler of water displayed in a glass shelf as ‘An Oak Tree’ does not. As an idea it’s pathetically weak and lacks a logical general reference as a well devised concept should.

It is questionable whether art should be driven by logical constructs anyway. Artists unlike say mathematicians are not trained for this kind of creativity. When they try they generally display the kind of arrogance which only comes when you are ignorant of the real world. A concept is not true just because the artist says it is. ‘Believe me my unmade bed really is as good as any Vermeer.’ Tracy Emin was just kidding wasn’t she?

The bird drawings I did at the natural history drawing workshop renewed an interest in wild life art. A few years ago I became interested in the paintings which Charles Tunicliffe did at ‘Shorelands,’ his home on Anglesey. He devoted his artistic life to recording birds and country life and the wood engravings done for book illustrations and his large watercolours which earned him election to the Royal Academy are true works of art and deservedly popular.

Tunnicliffes’ sketch books are fascinating documents, examples used to be displayed in the museum at Llangefni on Anglesey which has a large collection of his work. Drawings of birds hold more artistic interest than than paintings – the paintings of the likes of Basil Ede for example do not quite capture the excitement that catching the sight of a bird in the wild. I think it is partly due to the carefully contrived backgrounds which most paintings in the genre have. I suspect this kind of art is mostly admired for the technical skill displayed by the artist in rendering detail.

In pursuit of inspiration I turned to Victor Ambrus, another artist I admire and well known now for his illustrations of the archeological sites investigated on Channel 4’s ‘Time Team’ programme. He once published a book of animal drawings, now long out of print, that I use for study. The drawings reproduced in the book are all done with graphite pencils. I make studies of them using Woolf Carbon Pencils which are similar. The following sketchbook studies are based on some of Victor Ambrus, drawings but there is one which is entirely mine. Can you spot which it is?

I enrolled for a day course on Natural History Drawing and Painting run by the University of Birmingham Extra Mural Department. The venue was our local museum which has a good natural history collection. The tutor presented us with cases of butterflies, shells, stuffed birds and a hare. Recalling Durer’s famous drawing of a hare I was put off attempting it. All that fur and the fine tips of the ears was too exacting. I settled on a wigeon which provided more than enough interest for the day. I stayed with simple drawing tools 2b pencil and a Pentel colour brush. I find the Pentel brush produces a variety of marks that add interest to the drawing and the marks can be diluted into washes with water. Here are two pages of sketchbook studies:

Sunday mornings provide a nice quiet opportunity to study chess. I find it an absorbing and relaxing pastime and have no aspirations to play in tournaments or gain a club norm. A schoolboy interest in the game waned until a couple of years ago when I was alerted by the fact that there was a theory going around that keen chess players rarely developed Altzheimers Disease. They may suffer mental exhaustion and need psychiatric nursing but rarely suffer the brain degeneration that goes with Altzheimers. Having reached the age when I can go upstairs and be unable to remember why I did so I decided that the memory training that chess requires would be beneficial!

Playing chess also has a lot to do with pattern recognition when deciding what moves to play. This is not so far removed from painterly activity where the emerging pattern of marks and shapes influences where the brush is to be placed next. I read a lovely concise definition of art by Alfred North Whitehead which was; “Art is the imposition of pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of this pattern.”

I discovered recently that Marcel Duchamp was a keen chess player and somebody has published a book of his games. He is quoted as saying; “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” I like that and even today, when we all use Fritz on our laptops and GM’s are challenged to play tournaments against computers, intuition can often influence the moves top players make.

The National Geographic web site carries a discussion of digital imaging on its Message Boards. www.nationalgeograpic.com
Apparently some readers were upset by some of the surreal photo images which appeared in the magazine. Images were distorted and superimposed – one showed a goat suspended by spider silk growing out of its back. The point being that a silky fibre has been extracted from the milk of a genetically modified goat, the ethic of this procedure merits a debate of its own but it seems odd that people might be taken in by an obviously contrived photograph.

Now that photographs can be digitally manipulated so cleverly it could be difficult to detect whether the image is an accurate representation or not. The National Geographic has built up a reputation for objective photo journalism and it was the fact that some images shown in the magazine may not be what they seem that upset some readers.

On the other hand digital photography offers a creative tool for artists that needs to be explored. It rarely gets used in an imaginative way outside the world of advertising. By using Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop to merely make copies of their paintings artists are missing the creative potential of these programs. There are artists with the necessary skill and training who use graphics software to create original digital images. Their new art form has been described as ‘Digitalism’. Examples of Digitalism can be found on the internet at http://www.digitalism.org.

giclee prints can't equal a hand crafted artefact

The proliferation of prints made with an inkjet printer, usually from digital scans or photographs of watercolours, is a depressing phenomenon. Craft and garden centres are the main offending outlets. Those prints that are signed and numbered to simulate the limited editions of hand-crafted prints are a crass attempt to give the print an artistic value which it can never have. There are good technical reasons why a wood engraving or etching is produced in a limited edition the plate or block has a limited life before the quality of the print degrades. There is no reason why an inkjet print from a digital source should not be produced by the thousand and of course the cheap prints sold in department stores are. L.S.Lowry – an artist with some business acumen allowed his work to be marketed in this way. A print of one of his paintings would sell for around £35 unsigned but for over twice that if signed. It amused him to think that people would pay £35-£40 for his autograph. A story goes that a sharp dealer once brought a batch of prints to his house to be signed. He started to sign them L.S.Low. when the dealer asked him what he thought he was doing, he replied, “Well you’ve only paid me half a fee so you’re only getting half a signature.”

The visit to Yns Hir reminded me that some years ago I became interested in painting birds – this is a watercolour I did at that time. It is based on sketches and notes made on a trip to Skomer off the Pembrokeshire Coast. I used to go to the local museum where there was quite a varied collection of stuffed birds that the curator kindly let me draw in the storeroom where they were kept. It was a useful discipline but cannot compare with the experience of observing and drawing in the wild.

C.F Tunnicliffe was a wildlife artist that I greatly admired and I visited Anglesey where at Llangefni there is a permanent collection of his work to study. Tunnicliffe was lucky to live at ‘Shorelands’ a bungalow on the estuary at Maltraeth and the waders, swans and ducks which were his main subjects were birds of a reasonable size. The garden birds that were my subjects were all too small to record with anything other than a miniaturist’s technique. So the interest waned and I’m left with my puffins, which my wife won’t let me sell, and sketchbooks.

William Condry wrote a ‘Country Diary’ for The Guardian for a number of years. His piece always appeared on Saturdays and it was generally the first thing I turned up when the paper dropped through the letterbox. He was Warden of the RSPB reserve at Yns Hir on the Dovey Estuary in Wales. I was fortunate to visit the reserve many times and benefit from his knowledge of birds on his tours of the reserve with parties of visitors.

In addition to his column he wrote several books ‘The Snowdonia National Park’ published in Collins New Naturalist Library is one of my favorites. When he died five years ago his moving obituary in The Guardian, pointed me to his autobiography ‘Wildlife, My Life’ which I still find moving every time I take it from my bookshelf. On the way home from a visit to Yns Hir I made a new discovery, a second hand bookshop with a shelf full of Bill Condry’s books. I picked up a title I didn’t have ‘Pathway to the Wild’. For Condry enthusiasts a visit to Coch-y-Bontddu Books in Machynlleth will be worthwhile.

As often as I can I grab a sketchbook and draw the first thing that catches my eye. It is a good way of ‘keeping your eye in’ to borrow a phrase from cricket. So this is a page of sketchbook studies of plants. It might be of interest to know that they were done with a cut turkey quill. Having seen some Rembrandt drawings I was moved by a fit of nostalgic idealism to get back to traditional artists tools and carried around a little bottle of Acrylic Artists Ink to use with the quill. (I baulked at Rembrandt’s method of making drawing ink by using soot mixed with water!)

I also had a spell of making copies from Leonardo’s landscape drawings and plant studies. The BBC website currently carries some fascinating material about Leonardo da Vinci to supplement Alan Yentob’s television programmes. Leonado was first and foremost trained as a painter but his restless enquiring mind took his interests beyond purely painterly concerns. For Leonardo painting was a science, a branch of optics by which it was possible to describe the world through careful observation and applying the principles of perspective.

What interests me most about Leonardo is his astounding ability to communicate his ideas and explore the world through drawing. Draughtsmanship was the primary tool he used to explain his ideas. His notebooks are full of beautiful drawings the written notes seem to be dashed down and frequently written backwards due perhaps to his left-handedness and have to be deciphered in a mirror.

In addition to the BBC web site it is also worth visiting these:-
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vinci/
http://www.mos.org/leonardo/bio.html
http://banzai.msi.umn.edu/leonardo/

In a rare act of kindness my geography teacher on learning of my love of hill walking loaned me a copy of ‘Snowdonia Through the Lens’ a book of mountain photographs by W. A. Poucher. I was captivated and grabbed every opportunity to avail myself of any of Poucher’s books in the local library. His books of mountain photographs were published by Chapman and Hall during the latter years of WW2 and continued through the 1950’s when he became a regular contributor to ‘Country Life’ magazine.The photographs in the early books were all in monochrome taken on Kodak Panatomic X film with a Leica III camera. Later on Constable produced a series of books of his colour photographs but these were terrible – ruined by bad colour reproduction.

The early books quickly went out of print and became keenly sought by collectors, I managed to pick up two of the Chapman and Hall books some years ago and have been browsing second hand bookshops over the years to find others in acceptable condition. Copies worth buying eluded me until last week when I found a copy of ‘Snowdon Holiday’ in a bookshop in Malvern. It was published in 1943 and had been well cared for, the only damage being slight iron staining on the endpapers and dust jacket.

The reproduction in these early books is superb even though this one was produced under war-time restrictions. The paper has a warm neutral tone and the ink a warm black tone with a hint of sepia about it. This represents for me the best in artistic photography for anyone who has walked the welsh hills the photographs gently evoke memories of the experience – colour reproductions are too intrusive and rarely interpret colour accurately anyway. I can use the Poucher monochrome photographs aided by my own memory as the starting point for paintings but anything which has colour is best avoided.