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.

My visit to Worcester Art Gallery on Monday was a depressing experience. Why is it that art educators these days seem to be lost in their own peculiar world which has little reference to the world of exciting and interesting development which the rest of us experience. More creative ingenuity is displayed in contemporary technology than you will find in the Art Colleges.

The contemporary artists which really interest me are those who are largely self taught and have become painters out of love for the craft after experience in a different kind of work. John Yardley and John Blockley are examples from an older generation, another is Mark Leach who works mostly in pastels and whose work tends towards abstract landscape. Generally when these painters talk or write about painting they express themselves in plain words – a refreshing change from the unintelligible prattle of the academics.

Here is a brief quotation from an article which Mark Leach wrote in ‘The Artist’ in April 2003. It interests me because it challenges traditional practice.

‘Each painting is a recollection. To that end, I rarely do preliminary studies, and hardly ever work on site. This I now realise just confuses my feelings. I literally cannot see the wood for the trees. What I try to do is make use of my memory. I want the finished paintings to be like a memory where the mind over time has sieved out all extraneous detail and left only the relevant.’

Mark is developing a web site at .www.markleach.net

I paid a visit to Worcester today where there is a nice Municipal Art Gallery sad bout the work they show though. The current show in the main gallery had the intriguing title of ‘Ellipsis’ – so I entered in a state of curious anticipation. The first exhibit in the gallery was a poster with the heading ‘Artists’ statement.’ It is always a bad sign when an artist feels the need to explain his work before you get a chance to look at it – it is an indication that it will be obscure and bad.

The gallery was lined with abstract daubs and scrapes applied to small panels of MDF about 30cm square. All showing dribbles of paint on the edges of the sub frames – lazy this even Howard Hodgkin who paints similar but more sensitive abstracts puts his work in a frame and then incorporates the painted frame as part of his picture. None of the works bore titles or prices.

The whole show was rather sad and meaningless. It seemed like the work of a recently graduated fine art student who had been badly let down by his course. I made this point to the lady at the information desk at the end of the gallery and received the surprising news that the artist was a college lecturer in his fifties. God help his students after all he is old enough to know better.

The May issue of 'The Artist' magazine carried an article with the intriguing title'‘A Journey with Pastels.' The author’s idea was to explain the process of developing his Cumbrian landscapes into abstract paintings by emphasizing the observed patterns and textures. Every artist feels the need to move on and develop and I suppose it is useful to use the analogy of embarking on a journey – an artistic, if not an actual one. A local artist friend Joan Baker, who studied with John Blockley used the same analogy and produced an interesting little book with the title 'My Artistic Journey' Her work like that of John Blockley developed towards abstraction though in John’s case his concern was to exploit the properties of paint itself rather than looking for formal patterns and textures. John liked to simply play with paint and there is nothing wrong with that if the result pleases the eye. The concept of embarking on an artistic journey as a way of developing one’s work in new ways is a helpful one. It is more constructive than being self critical about trying to produce ‘better’ work. We never live long enough to become ‘better’ we only change with experience

Applying a coat of wood preserver to my garden shed is a task that is not likely to generate aesthetic excitement. Yet today as I removed green encrusted lichen I became aware of the subtle colour contrasts in the weathered wood. There were subtle contrasts of grey and green which made quiet harmonies that could be used as the basis of colour composition in a painting. It was important to make a note of them to aid memory. When the work was done I used pastel as a quick medium too record the effects I had observed.

I have decided you can’t be an artist and a gardener. I try to paint or draw every day but at this time of year plant growth takes over and unless the garden is tamed there will be little chance of any artistic activity through the summer. I normally try to do at least one drawing each day even if the opportunity to pick up a paint brush doesn’t present itself. The best way to grab a drawing opportunity is to pick up the most readily available tool usually a fountain pen, grab a sketchbook and draw the first object that comes into your line of sight. There may only be ten minutes or so available but the practice keeps your eye in. Here is one such drawing grabbed in a brief interval before having to face some tiresome routine chore.

Campo dei Frari
There are many quiet corners in Venice which are a delight to sketch. This quick pen drawing was done with a Rotring Art Pen and the tonal washes created with an index finger moistened with saliva. A technique I first saw demonstrated by Sir Hugh Casson in a BBC programme. I’ve since refined the technique by using a Pentel brush pen which has a reservoir in the handle that can be filled with water. This drawing supplemented by photographs of the foreground gondolas has been the starting point for paintings in various media.

I had another look at Grahame Sydney’s web site tonight and I never cease to be amazed by the way he creates a painting from the most unpromising material, a limp windsock on an airstrip in a bare landscape dominated by the sky. Or an old shed which may be used for shearing or as the bar of the Dog Trials Club. Central Otago is a strange lonely place and he captures the spirit of the place perfectly. I only have a brief experience of it and I couldn’t make any painterly sense of it. Grahame Sydney Gallery/shop Page 6

I spent a month sketching my way around New Zealand and had more luck on North Island where the character of the landscape is quite different. There is open space but there are the trees and lush vegetation of the bush. You are also acutely aware of volcanic activity on North Island – there are still active volcanoes and the hot sulphur springs are indicators of the fact that molten magma is not far below the surface. North Island’s thermal reserves are fascinating places full of colour from the brightly coloured algae which thrive in the hot springs. One of my favourites is Orakei Korako near Taupo. To reach it you are taken by boat across the Waikato River to a laid out trail in the bush which climbs up silica terraces passing several hot springs and steam vents. I made a pastel painting based on watercolour sketches made on the reserve.



Orakei Korako, Silica Rapids. Pastel

We completed our day in the Cotswolds with a visit to Burford ­ another nice Cotswold village with interesting galleries. I noticed a nice watercolour by Alan Simpson and in another gallery there was a show of contemporary Scottish painters. This was unusual, except for the likes of Joan Eardley, Alan Davie or Elizabeth Blackadder who are featured in municipal galleries Scottish work rarely gets shown in England.

Then an oil painting with a four figure price tag and a red spot on the label caught my eye in the window of the Brian Sinfield Gallery. It was a painting of a Swiss ski resort and it turned out to be by Bob Brown who was being given a one man show. I was miffed because the gallery was closed and I could see very little except for the window display. I would have liked to see his work again. The last occasion I saw his work was at an exhibition by members of the New English Art Club in Cardiff. The NEAC ran two one-day drawing workshops in St. David’s Hall in association with the exhibition.

I enrolled for one and Bob was the tutor. It was an enjoyable day and having exhausted the possibilities of sketching rather restricted street views from the windows of St. David’s Hall Bob suggested I work from the street and he set me the task of drawing ‘The Hayles’ from the main entrance of the Hall. He dropped by to see how I was getting on, then I became totally engrossed in the drawing and when I came back to reality found it was time the course was due to end. Returning to the exhibition I found other students packing their gear and Bob had gone home! He owes me a crit.

Sheila and I had a day in the Cotswolds yesterday. It was a glorious sunny spring day trees bursting into leaf and celandines and primroses in the roadside verges. There was a time when we would have taken to field paths to observe the reawakening natural world more closely. We had other more material concerns on this day out. For me it was a spell of gallery going, for Sheila household shopping.

First stop was Stow on the Wold where I always look in on one or two galleries. Thompsons who took over John Blockley’s gallery a few years ago is my first choice because they usually have an oil painting by Fred Cuming on show. Sure enough there was a lovely atmospheric oil of his trademark subject just sand, sea and sky with perhaps an occasional figure. I’m bowled over by everyone I see. Always the paintings have a aubtle, limited range of colours which harmonise perfectly. Yet the paint surface is not descriptive, a dash of paint reads as a cloud but doesn’t describe or classify any particular type co cloud formation. The pictures are just beautiful paint surface and I love them. They motivate me to get a primed board on the easel and paint which is why I look at a Fred Cuming painting whenever I can.

A book I received last week from a relative has prompted memories of New Zealand. Its title is ‘Timeless Land’ and it contains reproductions of paintings by Grahame Sydney of the landscapes of Central Otago on South Island where he lives. On my first visit in 1999 I was privileged to meet him briefly at a major retrospective of his work in Dunedin. Although he is New Zealand’s most successful contemporary painter his work is not generally known.

The landscape of Central Otago on superficial acquaintance does not seem to offer the painter many subjects. It is a wild landscape of eroded gullies; there are dilapidated farmsteads, empty shearing sheds and disused railway buildings, roads that appear to go nowhere. To capture the spirit of this landscape requires contemplation in Grahame Sydney’s words, "I’m the long stare rather than the quick glimpse." So his beautifully crafted paintings deal with acutely observed incidents, the shadow patterns created by the play of light across weatherboarded buildings or eroded hillsides. That’s about all there is in Central Otago but it is a landscape which is home to him.

You can get to know these paintings by visiting Grahame Sydney's web site.

Waikato River.

This is a pastel painting of some high pumice cliffs on the Waikato River close to where it flows out of Lake Taupo. Its a beautiful peaceful spot. The peace is occasionally disturbed by the shrieks of Bungee Jumpers leaping off one of the high points. They are picked up by boat and returned to the bank feeling elated no doubt.

I have a kind of affection for the painting and will be sorry to see it go when it sells. At least I will have the satisfaction of knowing it is giving pleasure to someone else. Alfred Cox the English 19th century watercolour painter had a similar affection for his paintings. As he was dying he is reported to have said, "Goodbye paintings, I will not see you again." - as though he was parting from old friends. I know what he meant.

Still on the subject of Rembrandt's teaching methods it is interesting to note that there was an air of theatricality which pervaded Rembrandt's studio practice. He would often explore the nature of biblical incidents by enacting them with his studio assistants. A good example is where he depicts himself carousing and with Saskia posed as a tart on his knee – the epitome of ‘The Prodigal Son.’ Rembrandt encouraged his students to enact similar scenes themselves and very often the notes he wrote on students drawings resembled stage directions – ‘move the ass backward’, ‘Mary must hold the child more loosely’, and so on.

There is an amusing story about the studio play acting which is almost too good to be true. Students had their own.enclosed studio space where they could work from the nude model. One student acting the role of Adam rather too literally was overheard to remark, “Here we are naked like Adam and Eve in the Garden.” When they were discovered by Rembrandt he banged on the door and shouted, “But because you are aware you are naked you are banished out of the Garden of Eden.” The master then drove them out into the street as they tried to get dressed. The account, which reads like a scene from a comedy, was recorded by Arnold Houbraken a student of Samuel van Hoogstraten, a painter who once studied in Rembrandt's studio.

The recent discovery of a Rembrandt self portrait which had been overpainted by one of his students was a reminder that Rembrandt, established a flourishing studio enterprise in Amsterdam. Quite why Rembrandt allowed one of his students to paint over the head of the self portrait is unclear. He had several assistants his studio and he would often rework part a student’s drawing and then insist they make a copy of the reworked original – a procedure which often left his students in despair. Allowing a student to rework one of his own paintings seems to be a departure from normal studio practice.

It was once common studio practice to allow students or apprentices to complete parts of a painting. There is a famous example of the striking figure of the angel in Verrochio’s ‘Annuniation’ which was painted by the young Leonado da Vinci when he was an apprentice in Verrochio’s studio. This was unusual because students usually undertook minor features like drapery or ornament. In the Rembrandt portrait the student has reworked the head, the primary focus of the picture. Whether the reworking was done in Rembrandt’s studio or later when the painting came into the possession of another painter is a mystery.

I try to spend an hour each day studying Chess. I rarely play an actual game against an opponent except Fritz on my laptop. Its engine is much too strong to play at full strength and if I feel the need to boost my confidence I reduce its strength to ‘moron’ standard when I can usually manage to win. Chess is a beautiful but complex game and to make any sense of it requires study and analysis. Since I am no ambition to compete at any high level study of strategy and games played by GM’s in major tournaments is for me a form of relaxation.

The thought has occurred to me that a painting is constructed rather like a game of chess. An opening phase where the ground is prepared and the preliminary moves made with the brush. Next you have to devise a plan or strategy to develop the painting. Finally an endgame where the final marks are made and the painting brought to a conclusion. Just as the chess player has a number of variations to learn so the painter may have a bewildering number of options to consider in developing his painting.