Background
About 10 to 12 years ago I used to work as a freelance painter, mostly commercial murals in theme pubs and the like, some portraits. To me the money was good. Back then I was living in Nottingham and my rent was £200 a month. But in about 1998 I gave it up, and haven't painted or drawn since, until just recently.
I've thought a lot about why I stopped painting. For one thing I wasn't enjoying the work I was doing. Time was always tight on the murals, and I walked away from pretty much every one (the commercial ones anyway) pretty disgusted with what I'd turned out. Ashamed even. I've a feeling it wasn't just that though. I'd been chucked out of art college (and that's hard, believe me) for not doing any work basically, some time prior to that, around 1989. Art college, at degree level anyway, was a waste of time, quite frankly. I didn't find anything there of any use and tutors mostly just sat around. The tutors I had on my pre-degree foundation year were considerably more committed and I believe were sincere people.
So there I was, in a cul-de-sac with no job and no course to go to, no direction. I'd been making money when I needed it by doing street art for a few years by then, so I could get by ok. An interior designer saw me working in Birmingham outside Marks and Sparks one day and gave me a break. Pretty much all the Murals I did through him, he was a good guy. I had absolutely no idea about business then, (actually I still don't), but he didn't rip me off.
My talent, if I've got one, has always been drawing, since I was a kid. My Mum always says that I could draw a train and it would look like it was moving. And that's my Mum talking so you know she's right. But as I went through the art education system (A level, foundation, degree) increasingly I realised that what I thought I was good at (drawing) didn't count for that much. People were filming their mates urinating and putting up life-size naked photos of themselves and this was taken seriously. Very seriously. As long as you could find some half-baked pseudo-intellectual justification for what you were doing, even if you were doing nothing, you could get away with it. There was no training in painting. No training on materials, techniques, approaches, in fact representational art seemed somehow second best, the stuff you do on your foundation and don't look at again when you reach degree level.
Modern art has left art colleges with no road map for training artists, in my opinion. In the grand old days of the 19th century ateliers and of painter's apprenticeships in the studios of masters, there was a definite set of skills and a definite career progression for an artist. Apprenticeships could last up to 7 years or so. But modern art, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, has changed that.
I'm not on some crusade against modern art, some of it I like very much. If that's your bag then look elsewhere (ARC might be a good start if you like the baby and bath water approach), but it does put art colleges in a difficult position. Left with no definitive set of skills to teach, they follow the art world and fetishise originality and vision. Ironic really since so much of the work produced at art colleges, like so much modern art, is second hand ideas from a slightly different angle. If you have a talent for self-publicity, your work is unimportant.
I find the thought of all those art students with their comfortable lives desperately trying to find their 'personal vision' for three years (then forgetting all about it when they leave college) quite amusing. Lets face it, most art students aren't going to have any kind of personal vision. Most of them have just left home. What I couldn't stand about my art degree course was the pretentiousness of it all.
I don't want to give the impression that I think there's only one approach to this painting malarkey, or that one is necessarily better than another. "Whatever gets you through your life, it's alright," as John Lennon used to say. But I can only speak from my own experience, in relation to my current goals - which of course may change at some point, that's how we grow. But there are fundamentals, which, if learned thoroughly, can be applied to any style.
I know I shouldn't get too carried away with berating the art education establishment. If I'm honest with myself, the troubles I had orienting myself at art college were at least as much to do with me as they were with the college. It was a difficult time in my life on a personal level, and that surely contributed. One nice thing about getting older is becoming more sure of yourself and your direction, and less concerned with what other people think of you and what you produce.
Whatever the reasons, I found the whole art education thing highly confusing, its no wonder I never made it through. I think that experience probably had something to do with me giving up painting. After art college I only did commercial work. Eventually I gave that up too.
(Added 18th February 2006)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whilst the above may have contributed to me giving up painting, I've changed my thinking about all that somewhat since. The responsibility lies squarely at my own door. And taking responsibility for your own actions can be liberating. You can find out how my attitude has changed here. Admitting my own culpability was a big step on the journey. However, I'm keeping this on the site to remind myself of how I thought when I started.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So anyway, back to the present and I've recently decided that I've been wasting my time in boring 9-5 jobs for the last few years when I was always supposed to be a painter, so I've been getting back to it again. At least I want to see if I'm up to it.
Like a muscle you don't use, my drawing skill has atrophied, and to be honest I never did much oil panting in the first place. Mostly I worked large scale with acrylics. But I've decided that my goal is to be able to produce good quality oil paintings - the kind you'd have a fighting chance of making a living from. I plan to become a professional painter.
As far as I'm comcerned, I have no great talent for self publicity, so my work has to be good, both from a perspective of the painting itself, and of the crafstmanship with which it is built. I'm putting my faith in the notion that, at least to some extent, quality speaks for itself.
So I'm sending myself back to my own little art school and I'm teaching myself all the stuff I never learned at college.
The first thing I need to be able to do is paint what I see. Simple right? Well apparently no, it isn't. My head must be full of all kinds of useless art-related rubbish I've gathered over the years, because as I write this I've just completed my fifth painting and its the first one that's anywhere near an honest translation of what I set up to paint, a small still life with a couple of carrots and a squash.
My first few attempts have shown me that I need to go right back to square one and learn to paint what I see in front of me, not what I think I see. So that's what I'm doing now. I'm evolving a method which I'm going to practice for a while on some small still lifes, hopefully this should teach me how to see properly again (if I ever knew how in the first place). I have no idea how long this is going to take, but I'm allowing myself 1 - 2 years to get my work up to speed, then I'll see about making the change to earning a living from painting.
I think the key to good representational painting is getting the colours right. The colours define the light, which defines how physical and real the painting's subject appears, whether it leaps off the canvas or just sits there blandly. With this in mind, I'm currently working towards seeing colour as it really is, not as my mind tells me it is. The goal of every painting I do for the foreseeable future is to see the colour and mark it down on the canvas as close as I can possibly get it.
Everything is new, fresh, and I'm trying to see it as if I was seeing it for the first time. What colour is that piece of fruit really?
(Added January 2007)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That was then and this is now, and my ideas on matching the colours I see in reality have undergone a great change. Much of this came about from my realisation that I couldn't possibly match the tonal range I see in nature. So nature needs to be translated onto the picture plane. But more than that, it needs to be translated with some feeling. A good painting should, I think, communicate something. Not something concrete like a specific idea necessarily, perhaps just a feeling. But copying nature for it's own sake is, well, just copying. A picture is not nature, it's a picture, with it's own logic and meaning.
Much of the way I thought when I started this site over a year ago has changed, but the basic goal is the same. To paint, to paint well, and to earn a living. And perhaps if I work hard enough, at some distant time in the future, to touch someone through a picture - to make a connection.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------