That original spark

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art, artist, arts, brush strokes, canvas, cave painting, Celtic, Christian artist, eye, illustration, J B Phillips, Mischa, native american, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, Paul, portrait, princess, quotes, urban, war paint

What a morning! The unusually hot weather we’re having at the moment made sleep last night, well… challenging. The result was that painting today felt at times like wading through treacle, mentally and physically! However I think I’ve come pretty nearly to a point of completion for my latest project.

I wanted to portray the elegance and perhaps naivety of a teenage girl. She has perhaps, a desire to want to be treated like a princess, but life has almost certainly shown her by now that she’ll have to fight for that! Mischa in this painting has a slightly Celtic feel to her colouring, so I swapped her jumper for a simple dress and embellished it a little with a Celtic knot motif, but I also wanted to give the background an urban feel as it hopefully reflects the reality of her environment. Hopefully I’ve achieved a balance of the two.

The hand is symbolic in Native American culture of success in hand-to-hand combat, or of preparation for war (I also liked the amusing connection to the slang term “war paint”, for a woman’s makeup). This princess, even at the tender age of fourteen, has almost certainly had her share of conflict by now and if she wants to be treated with respect, not only will there be a responsibility upon her to act in a way that deserves respect and to respect herself, but she’ll also need to issue a decree of intent of war upon anyone who wants to treat her disrespectfully!

In the New Testament, Paul writes to the church in Rome, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould.” (Romans 12:2. J B Phillips translation) and I couldn’t think of a better bit of advice to give to any teenager, girl or boy. Each one of us has a unique character, purpose and destiny, but the pressure upon us to conform to someone else’s idea of what that is can be tremendous!

It’s obviously a subject that’s occupied many greater minds than mine, as the following selection of quotes illustrate:

“He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.” ~ Raymond Hull

“God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” ~ William Shakespeare

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.” ~ J M Barrie

“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” ~ Judy Garland

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” ~ François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ~ E.E. Cummings

“Never be bullied into silence.  Never allow yourself to be made a victim.  Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” ~ Harvey Fierstein

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~ Dr. Seuss

“What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.” ~ Carl Rogers

And my own personal favourite….

You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. ~ John Mason*

Mischa was a great sport in whiting her face with face paint and then allowing me to paint around her little sister’s (Phoebe) hand in order get a photo of her with a red hand on her face.

Here she is finished… probably:

*http://www.quotegarden.com/be-self.html

Love is not love which alters when alteration finds…

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affairs of the heart, art, art battle, artist, brush strokes, canvas, Christ, Christian, Christian artist, eye, flowers, forget me nots, light, love, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, picture, portrait, wife

Life’s been a little tousled of late, like a ball of string that’s been stuffed in a draw, until when you pick it out to use it you realise it needs a lot of unpicking!

So deep thoughts are at a premium, but I did have one thought perhaps worth sharing.

It’s a commonly conceived belief that love and friendship are all based on the affairs of the heart, they are in essence emotionally driven. But I want to challenge that, by suggesting that love is a decision too!

When we choose to like someone, it’s mainly a head decision. We literally ‘decide’, based on some sketchy positive information about that person that we are going to like them, or less positively, dislike them! In fact you may be reading this now and thinking ‘hmm, I like what this guy has to say. So until dissuaded otherwise, I’m going to like him’. Or… you may be thinking ‘what a load of rubbish. This guy must be a complete twonk”. If it’s the latter I won’t expect positive feedback, a ‘follow’ or perhaps even a Christmas card!

My point is that when we meet someone new we can either give them the benefit of the doubt and choose to like them while we make up our minds about them, or we can go into the situation pre-decided to dislike them until they prove us otherwise. The first option leads to making a lot more friends!

So for that matter what is love, if not initially a firm ‘like’ that gets reinforced to a full body agreement that ‘like’ should be upgraded to ‘love’! After that it takes an awful lot of decisions to keep loving even through the tough patches.

With that in mind, my wonderful wife has allowed me to share the finished picture that I recently gave her of herself. I say ‘allowed’ because it is a little personal and sharing it globally took some thinking about, but we hoped it might be encouraging to someone.

Anyway here it is. The final blurry snapshots of my latest piece, finished.. more or less. After these shots are some shots too of a new piece I started today.

The following shots are of my current project. It looks a little like what my son described as “the sort of blurry flower picture that old ladies paint” at the moment, but it’s only the undercoat and some splashes of paint. It should toughen up after another day’s work… I hope.

In honour of Bill Shakespeare

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

“… In the eye of the beholder”

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art, artist, arts, brush strokes, canvas, Christian artist, create, east sussex, eye, gallery north, God, Hailsham, inspiration, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, portrait, Tony Blair

It’s been an odd weekend in places and today, it would seem, is no different.

Saturday was the opening of the local Open Exhibition at Gallery North in Hailsham (a little town of the south coast of England, for anyone reading this overseas), and I’d had two paintings selected to be included in the show.

Our boys had gone in first and had hurried from room to room looking for the pictures, while Michelle and I had tried to look more casually around the show. Secretly I guess I was doing exactly what the boys were doing, but trying to be more polite about it. I was itching to find out where they’d hung my pictures! Eventually there came the sound of young boys finding what they’d been looking for, so we politely elbowed past the crowd of folks with the glasses of white wine and tiny crackers and jogged upstairs to where the sound of small boys in a state of excitement (and amusement) was coming from.

There, in a room at the end of the hall facing us as we came up the stairs, was the painting of Tony Hawk, but strangely in a pose like he was worshiping, not pulling a trick upside down on the edge of a half-pipe like he should be. He was upside down. Next to him the other painting called ‘We’re full of stars’ was on it’s side and the little hand in the painting was reaching down to the larger one – it looked like God needed a hand up from a small child, not Him reaching down and out to us across space and time like He should be… that was kind of funny too.

Anyway it took seconds to fix the problem. I only hope that some well meaning person doesn’t think I’ve committed an act of vandalism and puts them back up the wrong way again!

Today was weird in another way. It’s been raining on and off all day today, so between hanging out washing and rapidly getting it back in again, I’ve been painting. That wasn’t that odd, just inconvenient. What was odd was that Tony Blair is apparently trending* on Twitter at the moment. Apparently he’s been giving leadership advice (positively Twilight Zone weird) at a conference and people have been Tweeting his advice and pithy quotes around the globe.

Now if you’re British, and have lived under the Tony Blair government, the idea of Tony giving leadership advice sounds bizarre at best, but to have him quoted globally for his sage-like wisdom is astonishing… here I sit in fact, astonished.

What’s even more bizarre, if that’s possible, is that his advice is really good. Honestly, I’ve read some of it! Which leads me to conclude, that we’re all imperfect and that most of us strive towards being a better person, but being imperfect doesn’t mean we haven’t got a voice.

I believe if we have wisdom, a good idea, something positive to add to society then we should. What we shouldn’t do is hold back because we feel inadequate or that somehow we are unworthy to be heard, or seen! Tony Blair is far from perfect, but that isn’t stopping him from blessing thousands of people (it would seem) with his advice on leadership. It’s good advice, it’s being passed on. People who don’t know him that well will be all the more blessed, those who don’t know him at all might be totally blessed and those of us who do know him might think “well there’s a turn up for the books, Tony Blair is actually a fount of useful advice after all”! Who knew?

So if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Your advice or inspiration may live on in someone else’s life long after you’ve gone, or moved house etc.

Here’s the latest update on the current project. It’s amazing the difference hair makes to a portrait. A couple of brushstrokes and transformation begins!

There’s at least another half to two thirds on the canvas left untouched to left of this image. It’s a kind of portrait in landscape, but the inspiration for the other half eludes me at present.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Updated images. I’ve added some detail:

Here’s the whole canvas, but I’ve painted out the previous blue background ready for over-painting (sorry about the dodgy camera-phone quality).

Window of the soul?

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art, artist, arts, brush strokes, canvas, Christ, Christian, Christian artist, eye, eyes, gallery north, inspiration, mr. potato head, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, picture, windows of the soul

They say that the eye is the window of the soul and, perhaps oddly, an eye is the subject of my new project. There’s also a saying that goes “if art is relaxing, then you’re not doing it right” (if there isn’t, then there should be and if there wasn’t then I just made it up).

The initial stages of oil painting are perhaps the most frustrating of any medium. It’s literally a case of watching paint dry. Not that anyone with any common sense would actually watch it dry, unless that’s part of their “art”. Then again if you shot a video of yourself watching paint dry and submitted to many contemporary galleries here in the UK, you’d probably get exhibited!

No, waiting for the paint to dry so that you can wrestle the picture in a direction that you actually want it to take, can be extremely frustrating and requires a lot of vision and patience; both qualities that the good Lord gave me very small quantities of when he made me…

Anyway, back to the eye. Eyes are fascinating organs of the body and can be very beautiful and striking. In fact it was my wife Michelle’s beautiful eyes that were instrumental in us falling in love. I found them in their hazel brownness as attractive as she found my blue eyes attractive apparently… obviously opposites truly do attract! But it was seeing some close-up photos of the eye and observing one my boys sat in front of a window, with the sun setting behind him catching his eye recently, that inspired me to want to try to capture them on canvas.

Here’s a link to some very ‘other-worldly’ eye photos: http://www.photographyserved.com/Gallery/Your-beautiful-eyes/428809

Or here:

Eyes can be striking, like in the photo above, calming, angry, enticing, penetrating, warm, cold and whole host of other emotions that can be expressed by our eyes. Well I didn’t want to portray any particular emotion in my painting, only try to capture how light hits the eye and gives it a lamp-like effect.

However today’s progress definitely had me wearing my angry eyes at times! But, experience has taught me faith in the future results. I’ve been here before and thought ‘what a disaster’ and wrangled it back into shape in the end… hoping the same for this picture.

Finally, here’s another thought on the windows of our soul.

What we look at can deeply affect how we feel and how we are as a person. If we “feast our eyes” on a diet of healthy images, then the soul that they’re a window to will be the much healthier for it. If we don’t feed the soul a healthy diet of good things, then you can be pretty sure you’ll soon find it rummaging around in the trash (that’s ‘rubbish’ here in the UK) for something less wholesome to feed on! Junk food is always more appetising, but rarely good for you.

St.Augustine (or someone like him) said something along the lines of “it’s easier to resist the devil at the doorstep, than it is to get him to leave once you’ve invited him in”… if it wasn’t St.Augustine, then I’m more than happy to take the blame/credit. Martin Luther however did say “that you can’t stop the birds from flying into your hair, but you can stop them nesting”. Both quotes kind of give the same message though.

Here’s how the work’s going so far:

Initial sketch:

Detail in close up:

Here’s the whole canvas

Still needs hair and a lot more detail, not to mention the entire left side of the canvas is largely untouched and unworked.

And finally, a plug…

http://www.artgallerynorth.co.uk/2012/05/summer-open-exhibition-opens-next.html