About This Project
This is not a portfolio site.
I'm a lapsed painter who has recently returned to the easel. It's difficult for me to put into words how it feels to be painting again after so many years. It's like coming home, I guess that's the best way I can put it.
Returning after so long, I can see that there are still vestiges of what I used to be capable of, but I know I've lost a lot of the skills I used to have. My first attempts at drawing again (which haven't made it on to the site) were frightening. In my mind I was still a capable artist, but the first few pages of my sketchpad give the lie to that. Amateurish isn't a word I like to use, it has snobbish connotations, but when I look at those first drawings I'm filled with a deep sense of disquiet which doesn't help my confidence much. I'd say that they're about the standard of the work I was producing for my 'A' level, twenty-odd years ago.
So I'm starting again with a clean slate. I'm stripping everything back to the basics as far as I can, making sure I get that right before I allow myself to go further. I'm attempting to manage my journey back to being a painter in as controlled and rational a manner as I can. I'm doing this because I think it's the best way to regain the skills I used to have and then take them further in as short a time as possible.
(Added 18th February 2006)
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Well, it would be very nice if I could get it all back quickly, but four months in and I've decided that's not such a great idea. You can find out what's changed here.
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Every painting, every drawing I do is not seen as a finished work in any sense. Each one is just another step on the journey back to being a painter. Doing a series of small sketches paradoxically enables me to deal with the 'big picture' - getting the tones and the colours right. These are the most important skills to have in order to produce good painting. Quality of the brushwork, the nature of edges, composition, style, all these things will come later.
The main skill I've lost is the ability to see the world as a painter, as collections shapes, of lights and darks, as patches of colour. This is the key to both painting and drawing, and is the skill I'm primarily working on now, at the beginning of my journey.
So I'm concentrating on the skills it takes to produce good realistic paintings and drawings: the technical, craft side of being a painter. To the best of my knowledge I don't have any great artistic vision that differs particularly from thousands of other painters, that doesn't interest me. Past experience has taught me that trying to force that is a very effective way to disappear up your own back end in short order. If it's going to happen, it'll happen of it's own accord. I just want to produce good paintings.
(Added February 2006.)
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I've just been reading over this again today, and my position on this has changed a bit. What I wrote in that last paragraph above, when I started this site, seems a little naive to me now only four months later. I think I may have been subconsciously trying to arm myself against what I had an inkling might be coming when I started painting again. I'm still primarily concerned with working on my technical skills, that hasn't changed nor will it, but recent self-portraits have made me realise that no matter how I try to stay level headed and rational about it, something of me is going to creep in when I least expect it. Not always stuff I'd like to be dealing with in public, either, but I'd rather it be there than not.
I'm finding this hard to put into words. This post reflects one aspect of it, but its by no means the whole story. I've been spending a lot of time immersing myself in painting and drawing lately, looking at everything I can find on the web, reading more too - Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo at the moment, and a book on Sargent. Also Gombrich's classic, 'The Story of Art'.
The further I go, the more I see, the more I have the feeling that I don't want to produce work which is about technique and nothing else, at least not in the long run, mainly because I increasingly find work like that dry and lifeless. It would appear that I don't have a lot of choice in the matter anyway.
I'll try to get somewhere near with a positive example. I recently came across the powerful work of one William Whitaker. This work, in particular the figure paintings, exemplifies what I'm talking about. You can't argue with the man's technique, but that's not what makes his work live for me. I can't begin to describe what it is, but its something else apart from sheer technical mastery.
Some paintings move me. Van Gogh moves me, and Van Gogh's paintings aren't about technique in the classical sense at all. Vermeer, although he could perhaps be seen as an intellectual painter concerned primarily with appearances, produces such delicate balance of tone that I find myself moved in front of his paintings. By contrast, El Greco produces paintings which move me in a very different way. Velazquez, the 'painter's painter', made wonderfully moving paintings. The last time I went see the Rokeby Venus I spent a long time in front of that painting. It gave me a deep sense of peace, it seems to have something sublime about it, if that doesn't sound too pretentious. Sargent, although a 'society painter', has something in many of his portraits that transcend that, something that goes beyond sheer technical mastery and the documenting of a social class. When I'm at the National Gallery in London, I often spend hours transfixed in front of the Rembrandt paintings. Anyone who argues that those paintings aren't deeply human and deeply touching is without a soul.
That may seem like an odd collection of artists, and there's many more I've missed, but to me there's something deeply human about all their work.
I know I'm on very thin subjective ice here, but its something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I haven't properly thought this through yet either, and I'll probably be back adding to this page again in a few months. I've just been nattering about this with Michelle for the last hour or so, we do a lot of that lately. She plays the piano, and she just gave me a great analogy: Its possible to just follow the notes on a sheet of music and to play it with no feeling at all. Hell, a computer can do that, but it won't sound very good, and it certainly won't move anybody. When it becomes music is when someone puts something of themselves into it, some feeling, that's what brings it to life.
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Why all the small still lifes and sketches?
Still lifes have traditionally been a popular subject with painters because of the amount of control you have over your subject. Portrait subjects move around, and may not agree with the likeness you've got. Light in a landscape changes before you've finished painting it. These are difficult challenges to meet head on. With a still life you have considerably more control over the colours of your subject and the light which defines them. Of course the light will still change if you are painting by natural light (which I much prefer), but generally much less than outside, particularly if you have a north facing window with cool, diffuse light. Painters will often prefer north facing windows in studios because the light changes less throughout the day. Apparently, Dutch artists in Rembrandt's time used to prefer their studios to be on streets that ran east to west for exactly this reason.
Why so small? Simple answer - speed. Bashing out a large number of small paintings enables me to deal with fresh challenges, or the same challenges in a different way, in each painting. The idea of producing quick studies is to accelerate my learning, without getting too tied up in trying to produce finished works before I have the technical capability to do so effectively. Once I feel I've sufficiently developed my ability to see, I'll begin to work on larger, more time consuming pieces.
Lately I've been concentrating much more on drawings. I'm beginning to realise that until I develop my drawing skills I won't have much chance of producing good paintings. Concentrating on drawing is also developing my ability to see. How this will relate to painting and seeing colour I don't know, but I have a feeling it will help. In a way it makes sense to concentrate on the drawing first, even though it may seem like a backwards step in the short term. In the old ateliers, a pupil wouldn't be allowed near paint until they were producing satisfactory drawings.
Method and technique
My methods and the techniques I use change on such a regular basis that I've given up trying to write something meaningful here. All the write ups of the paintings and drawings include notes on how they were done, so all I can really do is point you to those pagesWhy this web site?
I want to keep a record of my progression or lack thereof. I often find myself looking over the thumbnails on the paintings page, it's easy to see the paintings in sequence and to see what's changed as I go along.But there's another reason too. Everything I post to this site is written so that it (hopefully) makes sense to visitors. Primarily who I have in mind here are other painters, amateur or professional, experienced or just starting out. If a visitor finds something in my aimless ramblings that helps them to crack a particular challenge, or just to realise that they're not alone in finding a particular aspect of painting difficult, then I'm happy. Painting is a fairly lonely undertaking, and if I can connect with other painters out there through this site then that can only be a good thing. But there's something more, too. I want to prove to myself that it's possible to teach yourself to paint. If, by doing that, I can inspire other lapsed painters like myself, who like me have been alienated from their craft by the excesses of post modern art, to return to their brushes, then I'll have contributed something beyond my pictures.
If this site is about pictures, why all the writing?
Mainly because it helps me to get my thoughts straight. And also for the above reason. I do hope that visitors, painter or not, find something interesting here. I try as far as possible to be honest about what I'm doing, which is why I put up failures as well as successes.