Four Painters for Inspiration

* 

 

 

 Four Painters for Inspiration

 

 

 

 

  Sholem Schwartz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sir Duncan Smith, Landscape near Antibes, 1930 -4

 

 

 

 

 

Luc Tuymans, 23 October, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Idris Murphy

 

 

Sometimes, when I am a bit confused I go on Pinterest and see where my curiousity leads. Going online is no substitute for visiting museums, of course. The dramatic loss of scale, as well as the distortions in colour and disappearance  of texture make online a very secondary way to experience art. But it's what I can do at the moment.

Here are four artists whose work I feel a strong kinship with. Alas, I don't have the dimensions of any nor full title information on Murphy or Schwartz, though the former is a contemporary Australian, and the latter from St Petersburg and was probably mostly active in the seventies. Tuymans and Smith are both well known, the former a Belgian, and still going strong.

 All are quite bold. The brushmarks are evident, the effect somewhat ragged with textures: a rustic, unpretentious. I love the bright, dense colours. And I like the sense, most obvious in Schwartz's portrait, of caricature and wry humour. In all, the artist is very present, and joyfully even  in Tuyman's more withdrawn work.

Also, I'd speculate, without knowing the working processes of these artists, that these painters have produced works which are "lucky". I mean, they teeter: they could be very unsuccessful amateurish paintings but they seem to succeed, to pull them off. I like that sense of risk.

*

Entrance to an apartment block; the Speyside Way

*

Entrance to an apartment block, oil on card, 12.3 x 8.7cm - Discarded

When I paint thick, boring paintings like this I always think of Luc Tuymans, a great Belgian artist.

*

I'll be walking the Speyside Way in mid July, painting along the way.

The Speyside Way is a walk running from Spey Bay, on the North-East coast of Scotland and Aviemore at the Grampian mountains, roughly following the Spey Valley.  It breaks into sections of between 10 and 15 miles a day for six days, which means about 2 hours walking in the mornings, two in the afternoons with about three intervals for food and painting and rest. This will make a fine contrast to the week I'll have spent in London just before.