Pigment’s better than pixels or print.

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art, artist, arts, brush strokes, canvas, Christian artist, east sussex, excited, linen, Michelle, oil painting, oil paintings, paint, painter, painting, pink bag, portrait, shiny

Recently I was reading a post by the very talented Elena Caravela (http://elenacaravela.wordpress.com/) and she mentioned what a pain it had been to photograph an oil painting she had been working on, if at this point you are hoping for a step-by-step guide on “how to photograph oil paintings”, well I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint, sorry. That’s an area of expertise that I haven’t mastered either. Anyway it got me thinking about why this is.

You see oil paintings seem to possess a magical ability to only truly come alive when they’re actually seen in the flesh (paint). I can’t explain why, it’s not that the 3D qualities of the paint can only be seen with the naked eye – although the secret to the mystery probably is found in the eye – it’s something else, something wonderful that happens when you’re in it’s presence.

I expect what it is, is that the human eye is such a miraculous piece of design engineering, that in conjunction with the brain, it is able to scan every angle, absorb every subtle difference in hue, chroma and saturation, zoom in and out rapidly and at will from multiple angles, it can blur areas while focusing on others and almost literally visually feel the painting. Cameras by contrast are a very, very poor substitute*.

And yet with science aside, there is something else about actually standing in front of a picture that is incredibly rewarding to the viewer. As an artist I find this both wonderful and a complete pain! It’s wonderful for the viewer, a complete pain for the artist trying to promote his or her work via the internet or in print.

Personally, I often photograph my work on my phone as I’m working on it, but this is a very dangerous thing to do. Dangerous because if I don’t keep reminding myself that the work is better in the flesh, seeing the work as a photo’ can make me feel that it is complete rubbish and trigger thoughts along the lines of, “really, I don’t know why I bother”!

But – yes I know I’ve just started a paragraph with both an “and” and a “but”, but I don’t care, my thinking like my grammar is poorly punctuated – when you stand in front of a painting it takes on a life of it’s own. It’s as if it notices it’s being looked at and suddenly does its best to put on a show for the viewer. A painting is an experience, not an image to be collected on a computer etc. You can’t tell anything about the scale of a painting on a screen, or the texture, or smell, or presence as it absorbs and reflects light, that’s why owning a picture is so much better than just seeing it in a book.

That said, I can’t own some of my favourites, not unless I put on a stripy jersey and a mask and manage to work out how to foil the security of the world’s finest galleries. So I – like most of us – have to be content to admire them in a book.

So, after a few hundred words extolling the virtues of seeing pictures in the flesh and explaining how much better they are in the flesh, here’s Michelle (Mrs. Me). She’d just bought a shiny new bag and was very excited in a very girlie way about the shiny pinkness of the bag in question. I’ll try my best to look at it on the canvas and not on the screen…

Oil on linen.

*Interestingly, did you know that visible light represents approximately only about 1 inch on an electromagnetic scale that would stretch over 2,000 miles! When you look at it that way, it makes you wonder about just how much we can’t see! Imagine if your eyes could see all the other electromagnetic waves and how they interact with our surroundings. Wow!

Forget-me-nots

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forget me nots, iphone, iPhoneography, myosotis

Photographed yesterday on an iPhone3Gs, filtered with Snapseed and Pic Grunger

Zoe and Rags.

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art, artist, brush strokes, canvas, Christian artist, dog, linen, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, picture, portrait, portraiture, special girl, special moment, surprise birthday, veil of secrecy

It’s always a little limiting when you get a commission to paint a captured moment from a supplied photograph, but this was a special moment and a special girl. So I thought I’d share this one now that it’s veil of secrecy has been lifted.

‘Zoe and Rags’ was for a surprise birthday present and all had to be kept under wraps until it was handed over. I couldn’t even ring or text the client! However, somehow it all went smoothly and I now have permission to show the painting.

So here she is, Zoe and her dog Rags:

This is the only snap I have and it was taken on a phone, so apologies for the quality. The dog is suffering from reflected light a little, he’s darker in real life.

How did we get here?

Tags

2D, abstract, Academy, art, artist, avant-garde, Banksy, david byrne, gallery, Hirst, John Hoyland, Massow, neo-conceptionalist, online exhibition, refuses, Saatchi, salon, spots, talking heads, Turner, YBA

***

Ever feel like you didn’t fit it?

To paraphrase David Byrne from Talking heads, “How did we get here?” and by here, I mean as an artist excluded from art. You see I’m still licking my wounds from being unceremoniously rejected by my local public gallery for the annual open exhibition. My work ‘Elegy’ wasn’t chosen… bum!

Elegy

So you could take this post as a bad case of sour grapes, but I hope not. I understand that I’ve not really developed yet as an artist and I’ve very much to learn in terms of concept and execution, but if last years exhibits are to go by, I know when I turn up to look around, there will almost certainly be some work that I’ll look at in bewilderment and say, “really, that got in!” The first piece to greet me last year as I entered the gallery were three pieces of graph paper torn from an exercise book with small drawings of a chair and door in biro on them… I still don’t get it. But a rejection of your work, isn’t a rejection of you and selected or not selected is often just dependent on who the selectors are at the time.

It reminds me of an interview I saw with one of the entrants to the Royal Academy open exhibition. This artist’s work was accidentally divided into two parts, a square wooden block for the plinth and a beautifully sculpted mask. The mask was rejected and the plinth it was to stand on, was accepted!

Anyway, I gave a short talk over the weekend, a kind of whirlwind timeline of art, and it occurred to me that as an artist, I feel in a similar situation to the Impressionists in 1863, when the academy excluded them from the “in crowd”.

Here’s a bit of background “borrowed” from Wikipedia:

“In that year (1863), artists protested the Salon jury’s (the art establishment of its day) rejection of more than 3,000 works, far more than usual. “Wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints,” said an official notice, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the rejected artists could exhibit their works in an annex to the regular Salon. Many critics and the public ridiculed the “refusés” (a nickname adopted by those who were rejected by the Salon), which included such now-famous paintings as Édouard Manet‘s Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe)^[1] and James McNeill Whistler‘s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. But the critical attention also legitimized the emerging avant-garde in painting. The Impressionists successfully exhibited their works outside the Salon beginning in 1874. Subsequent Salons des Refusés were mounted in Paris in 1874, 1875, and 1886, by which time the popularity of the Paris Salon had declined for those who were more interested in Impressionism.”

So essentially the art establishment of the day got to say what was art, and if they didn’t like your work, you were rejected, refused (refusé) entry into the gang. So what’s new?

Well I believe that circumstances in the art world are similar now to how they were in 19th century Paris, except now traditional 2D art is looked down on and refused and the hyper-avant-garde (no, this probably isn’t even a word, but it includes the neo-conceptionalists) are the establishment. The current high priests of art tell the public what is art and public funds pay for it to be installed at our municipal galleries. The problem with this I find, is that often the public “just don’t get it” and even as an artist, I sometimes struggle to get it too!

The thing is, if it’s public art and the public don’t get it, is the gallery and the artists it chooses, failing the public with it’s choice of art? If 19th century Paris could trust the public, couldn’t we too? At least a bit!

Now it may just be that I am a stuffy, out of touch, talentless, conservative, but I hope not. Recently my favourite piece at my local public gallery was by John Hoyland. A piece not dissimilar to this:

**

But today, even this is considered passé by those who run our galleries.

Now I would probably be shot at dawn (with paint guns of course) by most gallery curators for suggesting this, but I believe the sort of neo-conceptial art that is fashionable in many galleries, is itself passé and redundant and I hope, is now rapidly becoming unfashionable.

“In 2002, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts branded conceptual art “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat” and in “danger of disappearing up its own **** … At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****.”

But.. “In October 2004 the Saatchi Gallery told the media that “painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate.” Following this Charles Saatchi began to sell prominent works from his YBA (Young British Artists) collection.” – Good for you Charlie boy!

(I’m not sure if this is fan art or a genuine Banksy comment on YBA Damian Hirst’s spot pictures, but I like what it’s saying all the same.)

I believe, with the advent of the internet age, art is going through a paradigm shift and it may now be the time of The Refusés again. Traditional 2D art does still have something to say and the public like what it’s saying!

VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION!

If you’ve had a piece rejected from a show, drop me a line and if I get enough exhibits, I’ll post them on the blog and we’ll have a show of our own Refusés.

*All quotes, sourced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/

**http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/424830559/306460.jpg

***http://exponential63.tumblr.com/post/27560806614

Landscapes? Yeah, I’m not so sure.

Tags

art, artist, canvas, Christian artist, church, Constable, east sussex, field, Hellingly, landscape, Norman, oil on canvas, oil painting, Sussex, Turner

This is the second landscape I’ve attempted. The first was a field of flax in France, this time it was near to home, a Sussex field in winter with the old Norman church in the distance and even after a second attempt at trying to paint landscapes… I just can’t love them… yet. Perhaps if I loosen up in my approach we might one day fall in love, but for now I think we’ll agree to take a break.

Every new subject is like a sort of puzzle to be solved and once solved you can bend the rules, but try as a may, I just can’t bend the rules. Asserting my own style upon landscapes is proving illusive. Maybe that means I just don’t “get” them yet, maybe I’m just going about it the wrong way. Maybe I’m just looking at the subject all wrong. Whatever the problem is I’m probably going to steer clear of them for a while and in truth I’ve never really been a big fan of traditional English landscapes. Constable never really rang my bell, Turner on the other hand is awesome, but try as I may I just ended up Constable-ising this one, just not as well.

Anyway, here it is nearly complete (there’s a little more sky on the canvas), if not a little badly lit for the photograph.

Dead poppy lanterns.

Tags

art, east sussex, gardener, iPhoneography, nature, opium poppy, papaver, papaver somniferum, plants, Poppy, somniferum, sun, winter, winter sun

Shot these dead poppy heads this morning on my phone. If had been a more conscientious gardener I would have removed them weeks ago, but I’m glad I didn’t get round to it. They looked great with the winter sun pouring through them, as if they were lit!

Papaver somniferum (Opium poppy) lit by the morning winter sun.

Art or Artificial?

Tags

Academy, art, artist, canvas, Cezanne, create, Duchess of Cambridge, Henry Ward Beecher, Hockney, Hyper-Realism, Impressionists, Jackson Pollock, Kate, Michelangelo, National Portrait Gallery, Nelson Mandela, Neo-Classicism, NPG, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, Paul Emsley, RA, Romanticism, Royal Academy

Life and work have been, well… hectic lately. Lots of things are up in the air, as if life has been hit by a fast moving whirlwind. You know, the kind the Tasmanian Devil from the Warner Bros cartoons would produce, knocking everything up into the air as if hit by a bomb!

Part of the chaos has been preparation for the regional art show and other British open exhibitions that all seem to come up at this time of year. It’s like it’s Open Season for exhibitions.

It was reading the rules for entering the National Portrait Gallery BP Portrait Award that made me frown (mostly because a work I wanted to submit was created utilising a photo) and contemplate just how far we’ve come in portraiture since the Impressionists first reacted against the strangle hold of the academy system. Neo-Classicism and later, Romanticism had become somewhat “formulaic”. One painted in a particular way, the academy way. One didn’t just follow academy techniques, but academy values too and I wonder, has much really changed?

You see every now and again a generation of artists tears away from the accepted methods of how a picture must be constructed. The now much loved Impressionists tore away from the methods of the previous generation, Cezanne started to pull away from them and Picasso went even further, until by the time we got to the likes of Duchamp and his urinal, the idea alone was king. But still the likes of the NPG take a very traditional line and insist a picture must be constructed a particular way.

With the NPG (National Portrait Gallery) in order to enter the illustrious yearly competition your work must be a “life study”. Now, I’m not against life studies, they’re great and invaluable to the development of any artist that studies the figure. The problem with life studies is that having someone “sit” for you almost never captures much of interest about the sitter/subject. Partly because they have to hold a set pose for hours, which is far from spontaneous!

In fact a great deal of life studies have the feel of a Neo-Classical piece, as if they were painted in 1813 not 2013 and some are just plain dull! Impressive, but dull. Take the new portrait by Paul Emsley of the Duchess of Cambridge. Technically it’s beautiful. Paul is obviously, technically a very talented artist, but to me it has the look of a picture that might hang in a spooky mansion in an episode of Scooby Doo. So why do we insist on the subject sitting for a portrait?

In this case the traditional method didn’t help poor, young, vibrant Kate. All life and spontaneity has been squeezed out of her in the new portrait. Why couldn’t Paul Emsley have taken some sketches, done some studies and taken a handful of expressive photo’s to work from? Because that would be cheating of course. Rubbish!

Mind you judging from his approach the Mandela commission, he does tend to err on the serious and far from spontaneous side of life.

*

It’s worth noting at this point that although the NPG insists on entrants painting “from life” to enter the NPG portrait prize competition, NPG prize winner Paul, himself has worked from photographs, most notably when he painted Nelson Mandela. Emsley himself said of the commission, “I had to ask him to stop smiling (what a shame) as my intention was to do a fairly ‘serious’ portrait.” Emsley worked from fourteen photographs that he’d taken during meeting Nelson Mandela.

**

So why the insistence on “life” studies NPG? After all most of make use of the technology to hand, as did Degas and other “greats”. I expect if Michelangelo could have taken reference shots for his Sistine Chapel work, he would have done. He would probably have used a digital projector too, to get his sketches onto the Sistine ceiling. What! Outrageous! Maybe, but almost certainly true. Funny to think of Michelangelo or Degas being barred from the NPG for doing so though.

And yet… there is a real tension between the use of technology to assist the process of producing art and that technology itself replacing the art in art. In my view, if the technology helps in the process but doesn’t get in the way of the artist’s expression of him or herself in the work, then why not make the most it? Look if Hockney can produce work on an iPad that gets shown in the Royal Academy (RA), painters can use photo’s for reference, National Portrait Gallery!

But what about “photo-realism”? Now, this might be a little controversial and I certainly don’t want to offend anyone, but if a picture drawn, or painted from a photo looks exactly like the photo it’s taken from then, in my opinion, that isn’t art.

Any work where the artist acts like the human equivalent of an ink/paint/pencil jet printer, producing a picture that in indiscernible from the original, although sometimes amazing, isn’t art. You may as well have the original photo enlarged and printed on canvas and give appropriate credit to the photographer, clever it may be, sometimes amazing, but not art. I myself gasp when looking at a stunning photographic quality picture that’s been created with a handful of ball point pens, but again I can’t help but conclude it isn’t art. If it is, then my Epson printer is an artist.

Actually, if you think about it there must be a lot of great photography where the poor photographer isn’t getting the credit he deserves. We may gasp in awe at the drawing of water pouring off someone that looks so realistic that it “looks like a photo’”, but although an impressive feat of skill, surely the photographer deserves equal, if not more, credit than the artist.

Art has to have been, in some way, an expression of the artist. You should be able to recognise the artist – good or bad – in the pictures that they produce, even if they’re boring! In the words of Henry Ward Beecher:

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Also Jackson Pollock:

Every good painter paints what he is.

So we use the tools to hand, but for a painting to be art, we should see something of the artist in it too.

Sadly I can’t publish a picture of my current commission as it is for a surprise birthday present. However I can show the back without giving away any secrets, so here it is:

What do you think? Over reliant on technology? Expressing something of the artist within it? I like it.

Quotes courtesy of:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/paints.html#Y1iZMkzv3ZoY4HOy.99

*(Photo – courtesy of the NPG via the BBC)

**http://www.iart.co.za/news/2010/04/06/paul-emsley-a-portrait-of-nelson-mandela/

iPhoneography – en Hiver

Tags

carbon antlers, east sussex, Fungi, fungus, iPhoneography, photography, Salix, Wildlife, Willow, winter, Xylaria hypoxylon

Just finished a commission, but as I can’t publish it due to being sworn to secrecy (it’s a surprise birthday present), thought I’d publish a couple of shots taken today.

Willow – the saturation is enhanced… a little.

Fungi – Apparently (after a quick image search on Google) this is the Carbon Antlers (Xylaria hypoxylon) fungus. Anyway, I thought it worthy of a photo’. They look like little Tim Burton style antlers.

Autumn and Winter

Tags

autumn, Dalek, east sussex, frost, frozen, ice, iPhoneography, leaves, photinia, pond, snow dalek, winter

Thought I’d post a few of the last shots taken this year, before a new start with a new year.

Happy New Year!

Leaves frozen in a pond

Hoar Frost

Bullrushes in a frozen pond. The lines in the ice are bubbles of trapped air.

These two are of a leaf that had fallen in a tub of water and frozen in situ.

This last couple were taken in 2010, but I don’t think I’ve published them before and they fit the theme. Besides, I really liked the snow dalek. He was fun!

Photinia (Red Robin) trap in thawing snow that had refrozen.

A quantum Christmas carol.

Tags

animator, art, artist, Christian artist, Christmas, christmas theme, dinosaur, east sussex, morse, night before Christmas, picture, poem, T-Rex, Tyrannosaur, wormhole

Okay, continuing on a Christmas theme, here’s a collaboration between myself and the talented animator Lauren Morse. Lauren provided the awesome T-Rex illustration while I exchanged brush for pen this time and provide the verse.

Hope you like it:

http://www.iangoldsmith-artist.com

http://www.laurenmorse.co.uk