Santo Amaro de Imperatriz from above

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Santo Amaro de  Imperatriz from above, oil on card, 11.2 / 13.5 cm - available

Another Saturday visit  to this beautifully located little town, which I love to paint.

I wish I could easily go and see some of Kokoschka's or Bomberg's paintings. Seeing things online is only really good as a reference and both were fellow itinerants, painting places from above.

Nocturne: buildings opposite; paintings of cities in Britain

Nocturne: buildings opposite, oil on card, 9 x 11cm  SOLD

I started painting this in a pointellist style, then decided this was much too fiddley for the effects I wanted, and repainted it entirely in a broad strokes. Sometimes the best methods are obvious, but my instinct to fiddle- to seek to justify myself leads me astray.

On the other hand, however, it can be argued  that the initial phase was a necessary exploatory corollary to the latter, broader and rapid painting process.

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Cities viewed depicted from above are a visual summary of a place: a speciality of T|urner and later ofKokoshka, both artists who travelled widely. It's nice to have this massive scale as a constrast to closer views. Of course it helps enormously if the city being portrayed has hills nearby, or, if the artist has access to high buildings.

I am thinking of trying to paint London from either Crystal Palace (where I have never been before), or from Parlianment Hill. Then, Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat, Carlton Hill, from the Castle, or the Braid Hills, Glasgow from the Necropolis (well worth a visit in itself) and Aberdeen from either Kincorth Hill or, if I can get access, one of the high university buildings.

Three from Sicily; tourism, photography and plein air painting

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I took the ferry from Malta to Sicily, staying for a couple of days in spledidly sited former Greek Empire city of Syracuse, where Archimedes lived and which features ruins of some importance.

Much of the city has recently been restored, though the place still has some rough edges.

Three from Sicily (Syracuse and Taormina)

 

 

 

 

Corso Umberto I, oil on card, 13 x 9.6 cm - discarded

Greek Amphitheatre, Syracuse, oil on card, 9.5 x 12.6

I met a charming French-Spanish couple while painting here, at this greek Apmhitheatre, which is quite enormous. Thanks to them for buying me lunch. I hope they find this site.

 

View of Taormino, oil on card 12.6 x 9.5 cm    available

 

 

 

 

Taormino is one of those places that is so touristified that it is quite unpleasant, the entire length of the main street taken up with shops selling souvenirs. The tourist industry has this amazing capacity to destroy the places and cultures that it supposedly celebrates: everything becomes commodified, including aspects of interpersonal relations.

The views  from the town, however, are quite breathtaking.

My picture owes something to Kokoschka, the itinerant Austrian, whose painting journeys might become a model for me, along with Edward Lear and the Scotsman David Roberts.

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Digital cameras have made photography easy, cheap and fast and I see tourists, including myself, wandering about snapping away, scarely seeing the world save through a lens. Given that images of most places tourists visit, quite probably of superior quality, can be found on the web, their reason for snapping must really more to do with the desire to say "I was here", than to record or understand a place.

In the face of this barrage of fast photo images there is obviously place for slower, more considered meditation on places. Plein air painting provides this.

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These paintings are for sale- for 100 Brazillian Reals or equivalent in another stable currency (at the time of writing this is roughly 58 US$ or 42 Euros or 36 GB pounds). Post, packing and handling are not included.

More details can be found under the label "buying art", below: please contact me with any enquiries.

 

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Kim's Game - work in progress 2

Pen drawing of an aesthete.



Below: Kim's Game Oil on canvas, 59 x 65 cm - stages 4 (above) and 3 (bottom)







For previous versions see:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/09/kims-game-work-in-progress.html

and

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

What has happened? I've cleaned the background, making it more uniform. The broadly triangular shape to the bottom left above he maroon oval has been refined. It reminds me of both a salt cellar and a phallus. The pink oval on the top row has been given a brown edge, which makes it seem 3-dimensional.

I am not sure if making everything sharper was really the right way to go: the gentleness of the previous shapes was part of what was appealing about them. But it is incredibly difficult- impossible, I'd say- to "go back". Paintings become more and more focused, shapes become more and more defined; insistant as you work on them- it is unavoidable.

A picture which was meant to become suggestive becomes less is as it is elaborated. And, so it seems to me, that I am best at artwork which denies equivocation.

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I am good at ink drawing because this technique has a knife-edge quality about it: there is no half-way point between failure and success. If it is good it is excellent; if not, the drawing goes directly into the bin. It isn't really possible to correct an ink drawing because you cannot erase the ink.

Oil painting of the sort above is difficult for a personality such as mine, because oil paint allows endless tampering: it can be scraped off, overpainted or wiped away, and I am unable to resist the temptation to make endless the little corrections which seem necessary but actually serve merely to reduce the force of the image.

My happiest style is akin to the quip, to an aphorism, or a rebuke. It denies regret. My paintings are like over-elaborated jokes, they are laboured: they miss the point of a quip which lies in its rapidity and surprise in a given context and not necessarily in the profundity of what is said.

Lost is concision, that much underrated quality in art. And critical here is the notion of "the gesture". There are oil painters for whom "the gesture" is an intrinsic to their vocabulary- Kokoschka springs to mind- but even so this element is less apparent in his painting than in his drawings and is more prevalant still among the draughtsmen such as Kubin, Belloc, Lear and Beerbohm who are my true companions: ironists and satirists mainly.

This sort of work is sarcastic and slight: it has wit, but sometimes lacks substance and one can become trapped in irony and that is why I shall continue to try to make oil painting work for me.