A bowl on a tray and a plate with apples; painting in monochrome

*

A bowl on a tray and a plate with apples, oil on card, 11 x 13 cm - available

I had the idea that on one of the trips I should eschew colour entirely and just work with black and white,  or dark sepia, this sustaining a deeper understanding of this fascinating area.

I like the way subtleties of brush movement, or of texture or tone become highlighted and how using black and white tips one into abstraction. Perhaps London, already monochrome in Portland Stone and steel sky would be the ideal place to experiment?

Colour is heady and tends to obliterate appreciation of anything but itself. It's like a drug, and like a drug you need to take more and more for the same effect. That does you no harm, though appreciation of anything grows with its absence.

A puritanical, or perhaps merely ascetic, side to my nature, Scottish or Danish in origin, lends me to suspect any too easily won aesthetic pleasure.

*

Putting on a little show

Many thanks to Adriana and Jorge for help.

*

For reasons which completely escape me, everything here has to be done last minute, as if it's a personal favour. This means that to achieve anything here oiliness or  pseudo-friendliness is a necessary quality.

*

Looking over the work itself, it strikes me that the paintings are actually much more difficult than I had imagined. I mean, they are harder to understand: they are less easy and open in sentiment than I had thought when painting them. I don't, honestly, think many people will like them but I am not sure that matters.

There is also a fair degree of variation: this is good.

It annoys me that the paper on which I set the paintings isn't perfectly flat: it's made of several paices joined together: in the future I'll use a painted board.

I haven't included any information about the pictures other than the titles. I used to do that, but this time I thought, what the hell, let them find out for themselves.

Pochades: an attempt at self-criticism II

*

The intellect demands understanding but while I might draw my conclusions, make recommendations, stipulate policies, all this seems to make no difference to the sheer strange willfulness of art-making itself, which is, so much, too much  like leading a lively dog across a meadow full of rabbits.

*

Pochades: an attempt at self-criticism

*

A selection of pochades

I'm going through the pochades of the last three years, dating and titling the backs, varnishing them, deciding if any should be discarded (always a delightful feeling to paint over the dodgy ones, as if someone has taken an invisible rucksack from my back) seeing if I can draw any general conclusions from seeing them en masse.

My conclusions are:

1. The best pictures are not fuzzy. There is a clear focus. When first I began painting the pochades about three years ago I was somewhat under the influence of early photography. I liked the blurriness of those early Victorian images, and even more that of symbolist photographers as in the Camera Work group. 

On reflection, this influence was baleful: the dreamlike effects are a way, Ithink, of artists escaping responsibility, of saying in effect: "it is not up to us to direct you, all we do is provide a certain stimulus".

2. There is a minimum amount of work that the pochades have to show. That is, there must evidently be a transformative process on display, so that the viewer cannot dismiss the piece as mere.

3. The better pictures use clear, clean colours. Initially, I used often somewhat muted colours. I feel this was a mistake, and the result of cowardice: fear of colour

4. The best pictures are very rooted in direct experience, especially a sense of excitement with places or people. This has to be balanced with knowledge. If a place is totally new then it is often overwhelming, but this is better than if it is too familiar, because then it doesn't inspire at all. It is surprising how many of the best pictures come from being in a place for the very first time and I kick myself for not having pursued the delights of travel painting more vigorously before.

5. There is good attention payed to surfaces and textures.

6. There seems to be a maximum size in which I can give the picture sufficient attention within the hour and a half that one session lasts. So pictures larger than about 10cm sq in surface area are generally too large for the results to be satisfactory.

7. There is little gimmicky work. This is good.

*

Two recent pochades with coins for scale; painting pochades

Two recent pochades with coins for scale: a Brazillian centavo, a British penny, a US quarter and a Euro.

The size below has become roughly my standard- a little smaller than a postcard. The paintings are completed in about an hour, which is a good length of time to paint plein air here in Brazil, giving the speed of changing atmospheric conditions (in the UK it is might be less), and it allows me to produce a "finished" looking picture on this size. I sometimes work a little larger, and as above, sometimes smaller- though I find this somewhat fiddly.

I like working quickly, and in a burst: I find it exciting, in a way that is analagous to being a live performer. Instead  of making a studio recording: it stands or fails as I make it, there's no secondary editing process. I produce a good number of duds, at least 10%.

A certain number of duds are a certainty at any scale: that's a necessary collorary to being at all experimental, but at least I don't spend weeks and much money producing them. It is difficult for me to know immediately whether a picture is a dud or not and sometimes I am decieved, only realising later that a picture is poor. But it is very hard for me to find guiding principles: the jugement is subjective and falls outside words. This is one of the things that animates me to make art: the simple difficulty in knowing for sure which guiding principles- outside mere technical judgements- will produce good pictures.

The paintings can be easily stored and posted, and are accessable to people on lower incomes.

Portrait of Tony Alana II

Portrait of Tony Alano II, oil on card, 14.4 x 10 cm - discarded

The second of the series: perhaps there will be five in total. Tony is a great sitter, with an expressive body language.

It is delightful to be painting portraits again: the experience is very intense for me, like doing an important exam- you've an hour and a half to get everything right. Working with the same model over a period of time is very enjoyable: every session revealing a different aspect.

Making art without that element of risk is an insipid experience in comparasion. Tomorrow I shall be paiting Lucas again.

The sea from the mall

*

 

 

The sea from the mall, oil on card, 12 12 cm - discarded

 

 

I feell that I won this picture having had a somewhat unsatisfactory run over the last few days. 

The secret is sometimes to relax and just not to try so hard or care so much.

 

 

*

A trip to the mountains, part 3; solitude and painting

*

Chalets and a distant mountain, oil on card, 9.5 x 14 cm

Five Araucaria trees, oil on card, 14 x 9.6 cm  - available

Here is a final selection from my little trip to the interior of Santa Catarina, which I spent largely alone and painiting.

The first is very "picture postcard": beautiful places always carry the risk to landscape artists of bringing a certain kitschy obviousness to the work they do there. I cannot find a way round this: for me part of the pleasure of being a landscapist is the delight of being in a beautiful place: it gives me an excuse to go there (I believe fishermen and birdwatchers say the same thing). The only thing I can do is to try to offer a balance by also painting places which are without immediate beauty, such as industrial and suburban sites.

Landscape painting also lends a focus to solitude. And I confess I have the misanthropic tendencies common to painters and it hardly pains me to escape the herd*. Many people do not like being alone, it makes them anxious. But I think for this very reason, that it's important to be alone at times so as not to become enslaved to a social network.

I also feel, when I am alone in nature, that sense of rhapsody so forcefully conveyed in Knut Hamsun's glorious novels, especially Pan and Mysteries. Alongside rhapsody though, comes melancholy, and yearning: emotions relating somehow to an increased awareness of ones connextion with the life and death cycles of nature.

*I've never had the least sympathy with Christianity's generalised love of humanity: how can one when there there are simply too many people.

House, Randolph Crescent, Maida Vale, London, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

Probably painted ten years ago. There is a heaviness to the painting which I am not sure if I really like, as if I was unable to say anything without over-stating it.

At the time I was interested in getting commissions for "house portraits": and I think I felt the product had very much to show evidence of "work".

The idea of doing house portraits was a nice one: I love architecture, and I love painting.

But it took me years to recognise fully that I loved painting because it offered a chance to record spontaneous subjective impressions and therefore that the whole idea of being an artist who accepts commissions could never suit me (why this wasn't blinding obvious to me is a mystery, though there was a masochistic element: I felt that being an artist was airy fairy and justifying things on purely subjective terms somehow invalid).

I did pick up ne or two commissions but was never happy either with the results or comfortable with the process.

House, Itacorubi

This sort of weather- rapidly changing, dramatic- makes for marvellous photos, with a late van Gogh / Vlamink feel to them.

Sometimes photography seems too easy to be considered an art form. Or have I just got a selp-punitive instinct, to believe that something worthwhile must necesarily be difficult?