Some more Inspiration from the Past

The original inspiration for this painting was Claude Monet's, "Women in a Garden". There are three women in his painting, but I was a bit short of women, so this is:

"A Woman, a Dog and a Bird in a Garden", July-Dec, 2016

Oils on canvas, 69.5cm x 49.5cm.

Inspiration from the past

I have been busy with a renovation project at home and have been neglecting both my painting and blogging. But it is time I got back to both!

I decided to take inspiration from some of the artists of the past, not by copying either their techniques or compositions, but creating a contemporary equivalent of their subject matter.

This one is inspired by Édouard Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass)". There is still a lot of work to be done to it, but I am happy with the composition. The original "Déjeuner" is usually taken as showing two young, fashionable, parisian males with their mistresses. I wanted mine to show an intimate family group. The images are not of anyone in particular, I drew on a variety of sources for help with the detail.

Fauvist leanings

This is an early painting of mine, from 1974 when I was in my first year of my B.A. course at Art College. At the time I was having considerable difficulties with the head tutor of the first year students, who did not like my work and seemed incapable of understanding three-point perspective (where the picture plane is tilted either downwards or upwards). My interest in this painting was primarily in investigating how the diverging vertical lines created the sensation of looking downwards into the painting. I deliberately shaped the edges of the canvas to match the perspective (although in later work I found that slanting the edges in the opposite way actually enhanced the perspective effects more).

However, a secondary interest was in the use of colour, the colours becoming naturally exaggerated as I concentrated on noticing the minor variations of shades. What I did not realise at the time, pre-occupied as I was with the perspective and my tutor difficulties, was that there is a strong connection with what I was doing and some Fauvist work. For example, several of André Derain's paintings, notably “London Bridge, winter 1906”, incorporate a wide angle of view, including some perspective effects created by the spectator looking downwards. However, the colouring of the French Fauvist work is generally so extreme that I think that was what prevented me from making the connection at the time. More recently, I encountered the work of some of the Belgian Fauvists, such as that by Willem Paerels and Rik Wouters, where the control of colour is much closer to that which would interest me.

I do not believe that it would be correct to say that my concept of Experiential Realism was influenced by Fauvism. It is more that I recognise some common concerns, for example, recording perspective as experienced, rather than as required by formal rules. Also that my colour, whilst not as intense as that of the Fauvists, nevertheless becomes intensified through the process of concentrated observation.

An Art Teacher’s Memento Mori

"An Art Teacher's Memento Mori", February-May 2008.
Oils on canvas, 70 cm x 50 cm.

The original “Memento Mori” paintings were also known as “Vanitas” (from the Biblical quote, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” They were intended to be a reminder that all the glories and riches of this world are transitory, and so you should prepare yourself for death and the after-life to come.

One day I was discussing still-life paintings with a class and made a reference to “Vanitas” paintings. To make it more relevant to them, I made a point that the same idea could be applied to any point of transition, such as from school life, as a pupil, to independent life, as an adult. A still-life life along these lines could comprise items such as school books, uniform, awards for achievement at school, etc. The intention of the painting would be to point out that,eventually, all the things to to with school would be behind them and there is a life as an adult to look forward to.

Having now left my teaching career behind me, I decided to apply the same idea to my own life. This “Memento Mori” is thus about the “death” of my own teaching career and a reminder that the things that I thought of as important then are now behind me and that I should look forward to my new career as an independent artist. It is not all negative though, as it is also a celebration of many things that I achieved as a teacher and of the excellent work produced by many of my pupils.

For a larger view of the painting, click here. For a fuller description, click here.

A General Manifesto for Experiential Realism

The Experiential Realist:

• Uses their skill to recreate the actuality of what the eyes can see.
• Renders everyday places, characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, all in verisimilitude, as being of interest and importance.

• Finds and depicts beauty (and ugliness) through their own experience.
• Allows their awareness of the situation and circumstances of the subject to influence their perceptions and the way that they express them.

• Experiential Realism is not a label to be put on just any painting based on observation. Specifically, it is used to declare that the painting is important and relevant as a documentation of a place and situation. It lays claim to a particular form of “truth” as having been recorded and declares it as having value.
  

Of these, it is the first two that make a direct connection with traditional Realism. However, I think that it is the stress of the next two which marks the difference between Realism and Experiential Realism. In some ways it, nudges Realism (just a little) towards Expressionism.

The earlier forms of Realism, Social Realism, etc, made a form of political (with small “p”) statement. For example, one major point behind the original Realist Art Movement was to say that great art was not necessarily about “major” people or events. It claimed that a great painting did not have to depict a king or noble lord or even people of wealth and influence (for example, Courbet’s, “Burial at Ornans”. In other words, Realism was a reaction against the prevailing art of the time. From this, I reason that, if Experiential Realism is to have any real importance, it must also be seen in the context of being a reaction to the prevailing art of our time.

There is presently a dichotomy in the important means of visual communication. The most pervasive form of visual communication is through photography in all its forms. But, because the images are almost infinitely reproducible (especially now that most photography is digital), whilst the image may be highly esteemed, the means of reproduction has almost none. Films can win Academy Awards and can make the owners of the reproduction rights rich, but the individual video or DVD copy of the film has negligible value. It is only the experience of watching the film that is considered to be important. The DVD or video artefact is merely a convenient form of enabling this experience. On the other side of the split is the fine art object, a painting or sculpture. The experience of viewing the object may be highly valued, but the experience can normally only be gained by visiting the one example of the work and, because of this, the object itself may become worth a great deal of money. Hence a Vincent Van Gogh painting of sunflowers becomes worth millions of pounds in the present day art market.

In 1812 Jacques-Louis David painted the Emperor Napoleon, one of the top celebrities of his day, in his study. If it ever came on the market, the painting would now be worth a great deal of money. Present day celebrities, are recorded in film, usually shown on TV, and in photographs, usually published in magazines. A photograph cut from a magazine is worth very little. If a celebrity hired an artist to paint their portrait, the portrait would be worth rather more but would probably only be seen by a very few people. The fine art object which becomes worth a great deal of money does not normally now rely on portraying a celebrity, rather it relies on providing a unique primary experience which can be gained only by visiting the object (and/or a vicarious second-hand experience which can be got from the popular media, usually discussing how ridiculous it is that the object is valued/cost such a great deal of money, e.g., the crack in the floor of the Tate Modern or Damian Hurst's diamond-coated skull).

I would see Experiential Realism as closing this gap. It does not mean that other forms of art are “wrong” or worthless, but it is art about normal, average places and people. And it is for normal, average people. To appreciate it, a specialized art education is not required, just some visual sensitivity and awareness. It cannot be produced cheaply, because it is time and skill intensive, but neither is it unaffordable. Hopefully, it will also be of such a quality that the viewer will return to it again and again and still discover new aspects of the work – for that is what differentiates it from a mass produced image where only the straight-forward perception of the image is important.

Experiential Realism is also a “Modern” art – and will continue to be so. The Modernism comes from the fact that the artist will always be an artist of their own time, painting the things of their own time. In its own way, each painting is an historical document, because, working within the strengths and weaknesses of the medium, it records the truth of a place and situation.

Towards a General Manifesto of Experiential Realism

I was reasonably happy with what I wrote last week as a Manifesto for Experiential Realism. Later, however, I realised that, although it reflected my own views, it would not do as a General Manifesto - which would include other artists who think the title of “Experiential Realism” sums up something important about the way that they work. This was prompted by my making a search for the term on the Internet. I already knew that the term was being used in philosophy, as that was where I adopted it from as the name, potentially, for an art movement! However, I also discovered that a couple of American artists had spontaneously used the term with reference to their own work. An American artist, Aaron Schuerr, used it as a title for one of his blogs and another American, Dough Rugh, used it as a descriptive term within another blog. I cannot be certain that either would agree with the way I think about it, but it seems to me to be worth considering in greater detail my own understanding of what “Experiential Realism” means.

In order to do this, I am going to start with what I have already written, expand and clarify it, as best I can. It is, perhaps, easiest to start with the negatives. I wrote:

I reject:

• 
  Art as decoration, as wallpaper.
  I remember watching an interior decoration programme, I think that it was called “60 Minute Makeover”. The team needed something to add a splash of colour to a wall, something which would match the furniture and the rest of the colour scheme. Someone took a blank canvas, splashed some paint on it to form an abstract pattern and, voilà, instant piece of Abstract Expressionism - which matched the wall perfectly! This may be rather an extreme example, but a lot of people do buy art because it will match in with their décor. It may be rather arrogant of me, but I want more for my art than that!
• 
  The possession of art as a means of establishing intellectual status.
  I am not opposed to the various other movements of modern art, such as Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Post-Modernism, etc., as such. However, I am left with the uncomfortable feeling (hopefully untrue) that many of the purchasers of such work do so to establish, at least in their own minds, their status as intellectual beings, capable of the superior aesthetic understanding required to appreciate such work. I believe that the only genuine reason for purchasing art should be the depth of the feeling that the piece evokes in the prospective purchaser. Provided that such depth of response is present, the type of the artwork is immaterial.
• 
  The Media as the Message and The display of skill as the purpose of art.
  In the end, I decided to lump these two together. I suppose that I was very much thinking of the Photo-Realist and Super-Realist art movements. There is a good example by Richard Estes online.
  “Diner”, (1971) Oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 50 in. (101.7 x 126.8 cm.) It is of course, beautifully painted! But I find myself asking, what would be the difference between this and a photograph produced to the same scale (if one such a photograph existed)? It does not seem there could not be that much difference, since the apparent object was to paint in a photographic manner. Therefore the value of the painting – as art – had to be in the fact that the medium was changed from photography to painting. In other words, this was the painting skill itself being presented as art. It could also be said that, in this case, the media, paint, was the message. Looking at the painting, I do not find myself interested in the place represented, so much as the means by which it represented! I am distracted by the quality of the painting!
• 
  The idea as art.
  Essentially, this is Conceptual Art, but also the work of artists like Damien Hirst. I would consider his diamond covered skull, titled “For the Love of God” to be in the same vein as the Dadist Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain”. Duchamp's piece was a ready-made urinal which he elevated to art by signing it “R. Mutt”. Damien Hirst's skull was a ready made skull, which he elevated to art by having it covered in diamonds! Duchamp mocked the establishment by the cheapness, in both price and effort, of his “readymade”, Damien Hirst mocks it by intrinsic value of the diamonds with which he decorates his own “ready made”. Duchamp was outside the Art Establishment looking in, Damien Hirst is inside the Art Establishment looking out. In some ways, complete opposites, but on the same line! However, the most important part of both items is the idea behind them.
• 
  Other people's conventions of beauty and ugliness.
  I think that a large part of the value of any creative person is their individual viewpoint. So what I mean by this is that every artist has to find out for themselves what they consider to be beautiful or ugly. Truly original work makes new conventions, rather than simply repeats old ones.

I have one major problem with all the points that I have listed above (even though I believe them to be valid) – and that is their very negativity! In the end, I think that it is more important to know what an Art Movement is for, rather than what it is against. So I hope to explore this next week.

Wavy Lines and Op Art

This is an exercise I found useful with first year (secondary school) pupils, both to hammer home lessons about colour mixing and to link it up with a little art history. The exercise starts by drawing a very wavy line down the middle of an A4 sheet of paper.

Further lines are added, trying to keep them evenly spaced from the first one. If a loop is particularly big, a section of the new line will have to be "broken off" and left inside the loop.

This process was continued until this side of the page was completely filled with lines, as evenly spaced as possible. The process was then repeated for the other side!

The next stage was to fill in one of the spaces between the lines down the middle with either a primary or secondary colour. The next space was left blank and the one after that filled in with the next secondary or primary colour in sequence, ie., red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple (and back to red and through the sequence again if necessary). It doesn't matter where the sequence is started or in which direction they are gone through, as long as the colours are kept in sequence.

The process is then repeated to the other side. (Note that, although I have completed the sequence on the left side, it could just have easily have been completed by going through the same colours again in the same order - so instead of purple, I would have filled in orange again, etc.)

The final stage is to fill in the remaining spaces by mixing the two colours on either side of each space.

Some pupils would put in the colours a little differently than others and sometimes interesting results were created when pupils misunderstood the instructions somewhat. If the results were visually interesting, I never told pupils off just because they did not follow my instructions exactly.

The exercise could be done with paints or colouring pencils and I would set a version of this for homework, which could be completed using different shades of lead pencils and no colours at all!

It should be obvious that there are strong connections to Op Art and the work of artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. I encouraged my pupils to investigate this for themselves and to experiment along similar lines. I gave all pupils a small handout on Op Art and encouraged those who could do so to search the Web for more material.

These are some useful links that I have found.

Op Art:

Artcyclopedia

About.com: Art History

Wikipedia

Bridget Riley:

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Tate Gallery

Queensland Art Gallery
Victor Vasarely:

http://www.vasarely.com/

Wikipedia

Fondation Vasarely (in French, but excellent pictures)

Thumbnail Sketches

If any one is seriously interested in Art History then, to my mind, a really important skill to master is that of creating "thumbnail" sketches. This doesn't mean that it is not important to get good quality images wherever possible. There are many sources available online. (One excellent one is Olga's Gallery. For a full colour version of William Turner's, "Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway", see http://www.abcgallery.com/T/turner/turner26.html.) However, a thumbnail sketch is not merely a reminder of the painting, it also helps you to analyse it and understand its composition. For it to be successful, you have to think about what you are doing, about what it is really important to show, yet it is also fast to do!

In order to improve your understanding of a piece of art work, it can also be useful to make a large, detailed study of it (as in my study of the horse cave painting). But sometimes this is unnecessary, even a waste of time, when (in some cases) a much simpler thumbnail sketch would give you all the insight you need and would get across whatever point that you wish to make!

Colour Theory

As I described in my last blog, I found it useful to start Junior pupils with a look at pre-historic cave painting. This lead naturally on to a discussion of how paints are made and then on to a discussion of colour theory. In primary school, some (but not all) of my pupils had completed colour circles. However, I never found the colour circle a particularly good way of explaining how colours mix, so I came up with my own system inspired from Venn diagrams. I gave my pupils an A4 photocopy of the above blank template. The Venn diagram at the top had to be filled in using just three colouring pencils, a yellow, red and a blue.

As with oil pastels, if the colours are to mix well it is important to start lightly. I told my pupils to fill in the lightest colours first, starting by filling in the yellow circle lightly, then the red and finally the blue. Then this was repeated several times until the pores of the paper became completely clogged with colour. Done in this way, the mixture which created the secondary colours worked well. (NB: If a pupil filled in the first colour heavily then, where another colour was supposed to overlap, the pencil tended to skid over the first colour and very little of the second actually stuck to the paper!)

For the middle section, pupils were also allowed to use a black and a brown pencil. In the final section pupils were allowed to use orange, green and purple pencils, simply because of the "cleaner" quality of manufactured secondary, colours compared to their own mixtures.

Note for teachers (in particular): If you wish to use copies of the above sheets, go ahead! They are copyright free for private and educational use. However, it would be nice if you would let me know if you find them useful.

The full Colour Theory lesson (and better quality images) is now available at my website (http://www.artmagic.uk.com/) at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/artmagic/page169a.html and the one on Cave Painting at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/artmagic/page170.html

Art History – Cave Painting

My copy, in oil pastels, of a cave painting of a horse. The original is in the Lascaux Caves in France and dates from around 15,000-10,000 BC. I picked oil pastels because I thought that the broad pastel effect would be the closest to the results produced by the original, pre-historic, artists. When working with oil pastels, I like to start by using the colours in a very light, sketchy way. I keep going over the drawing lightly with different colours until the grain of the paper is largely filled in and the pastels begin to “skid” over the surface. I then use a conical “stub” of paper, rolled to form a hard point, to blend the various shades together. (If you work too soon and too heavily with one particular colour and the paper grain becomes clogged, it becomes difficult to modify it by blending in other shades.)

When I first started my website (http://www.artmagic.uk.com/), I intended to include a series of art lessons, for the possible benefit of both students and teachers, simply because my retirement seemed to otherwise waste a great deal of my experience. (Whether or not the lessons are actually any good is, of course, another matter entirely.) The problem was that, as I became increasingly busy with my own painting, this project has gradually been falling by the wayside. So a change of strategy is called for! What I intend to do is to write up my thoughts on these lessons, as they occur to me, as part of this blog. Afterwards I will tidy them up and incorporate them into my website as time allows.

With regard to Art History, what I hope to do is to take personal “snapshots” of the various periods and movements of Art History. In particular, I hope to provide links between the sections, to show how one influenced or grew out of another - or, sometimes, simply how similarities exist without there being any other connection at all! There is no intention to cover movements in detail - others have already done this and much better than I can! My intention is to create a series of “pegs” that a more detailed study can be hung upon at a later date. For this reason, I am including links to web sites that I found particularly interesting and useful (if you can suggest others that would be particularly appropriate, I would be grateful if you would e-mail me with your recommendations).

This is my first attempt – a look at Pre-Historic Cave Painting. I found this to be a useful introduction to art history for my 1st year pupils (Secondary School). The French Ministry of Culture provides a great virtual tour of the caves at http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en/, which, with the aid of a data projector, I found very useful – and the pupils loved it. The site also has a lot of good follow up material.

Paintings like the original of the horse (at the top) have only survived because they were created in nearly inaccessible places which have been protected from the ravages of the weather. But these places would have been even more difficult to get to thousands of years ago, with no more than primitive lamps and torches to show the way. The paints were created from the materials available at the time, such as coloured earths, charcoal and chalk. The effort involved in collecting these, carrying them down narrow passages deep into the earth and then creating the paintings at the other end should not be under-estimated. To justify such effort, the paintings must have been of considerable importance to the people at the time.

It is likely that there was a 'magical' purpose behind this act of creation, although not perhaps not in the way we might think. I cannot believe that people who were intelligent enough to create such works of art were simply indulging in wishful thinking, i.e., that they thought that by showing the animal pierced with arrows and spears, this would guarantee a successful hunt. I think that the process would have had to have been one of identification with the hunt and the animal being hunted.

When a person totally immerses themselves in a subject, the creative process swings into action. Solutions to problems come to mind without the need for conscious thought, both mind and body tune up for action. I am completely certain that the process of creating these paintings resulted in the participants becoming better hunters - because we still make use of essentially the same process today! This is exactly what a sportsman does when he 'psyches' himself up for a competition. He devotes himself to thinking exclusively about what he has to do, he may run through the act repeatedly within his imagination and, usually, he is surrounded by the paraphenalia and trophies associated with his sport. (Evidence of past success helps to create a mental environment favourable to future success.)

When we do something like this as a group, we often go to a special place dedicated to that purpose. This may be a clubhouse or even a place of business, but whatever its ostensible purpose, its ritualistic aspects are likely to be revealed by its furnishings. These are quite often portraits of earlier sporting or business 'heroes' or perhaps framed certificates, the equivalent of battle honours in military establishments. At one time or another, often without realising it, most of us have been in such environments and participated in group activities designed to promote a group identity and to enthuse us to greater efforts. I doubt if we have really changed that much from the days of prehistoric man.