Shows, shows and shows

Next week, I have a solo show on at RedBubble, which I'm very excited about. Elizabeth bravo has created this great flyer for it. These shows on RedBubble are not only a great way to showcase your work, they are a chance to discuss the work with lots of people. For an artist working on their own, that can be a godsend to get some feedback.

I'm also showing some paintings at Peter Potter Gallery's winter exhibiton, opening on the 29th of october. I'll add a flyer for that once I know more. But it will be very nice to have this painting framed properly and shown to the public - it's been hanging in my kitchen too long!


I'm also in discussions with Blackmarket art.co.uk about being represented on their website, and in hotels around Edinburgh. Again, Will post more when I know more..

And finally, I have a feature spot in ArtgalleryUk for the next week or so - lots of original work on sale there.

Now I think it's about time I went and produced more paintings..

West Highland paintings

Broke my long spell of not-very -much -painting at all with a couple of paintings inspired by our holiday in the highlands last week. It's always difficult to pick up a brush again after a long time away, so I was quite pleased with how they turned out. Some paintings are better in photos than they are in the flesh, with these it's the other way round, but here they are anyway.



Both are acrylic on Box canvas, 16" x 12". The originals are for sale at £120 each, or £200 for both. As always, cards and prints can be bought at Redbubble via the link on the side.

RECENT WORKS - PAINTING PRESENTS

Now I'm back in Scotland for a while, regular service can resume...

My painting schedule has been pretty scrappy and intermittent of late, but what I have managed to get done is a couple of presents for people.

Painting for presents is a funny thing - whenever I am painting regularly, it seems quite a lot of my output is always marked out as presents. If I have a wedding coming up, or someone I want to thank, or a birthday, I never like to give people something 'off the shelf' - I'd far rather make a bit more effort to make something that is personal to them, that I think would suit their taste.



Sometimes this is easy - La Barthe was a painting for our neighbours in France, to thank them for all their help to my family of late, phoning the hospital daily for us and generally rallying round in times of trouble. Subject matter was fairly easy then - their house, nestled between the maize fields and the hills. I wanted to catch a soft twilight light, and the way the house glowed goldenly when the sun was rising or setting on it. On the computer screen, it looks almost too vivid - garish almost - but seen hanging within their sunny yellow salle, it works.



The Lighthouse was a slightly trickier one - a wedding present for my swedish friend Anna and her new husband Neil. I've never been to Worthing, where they live in the Uk, or Sweden, but I know her well enough to know she'd like a stormy sea scene. I asked a mutual friend for some help, and he suggested using a lighthouse she liked in Sweden - Morups Tånge fyr

Morups Tånge Fyr, April 2008

Creative Commons photo by Sune Frack

So I pulled together a few images of the lighthouse, such as the one above, and set about creating a turneresque moody sea, with gloomy colours but a pale yellow light. Challenging, but fun - and hopefully enjoyed by the recipient.

It's one of the nicest things about being a painter - being able to give people pictures that are personal to them in some way. Just as well I like it though, as we have a lot more weddings coming up that need presents of some kind..

Valle d'Or continued

And the latest in the series.

Have to admit, I am thoroughly enjoying making these paintings. The process is somewhat akin to design, imagining what will unfold in the next panel along - half closing my eyes until I can see the landscape before me. I really feel this is a development in the right direction, and I'll push it until the inspiration is all squeezed out.

take a look at the gallery here to see all 5 together.

STYLE VERSUS EXPERIMENTATION

I have about 5 blog posts stored up in my head, but getting to the computer to write them has been a bit problematic. But it's 7 30 am, the house is quiet but for the birds singing, so here I am..

One of the biggest challenges an artist faces is developing a cohesive style whilst constantly challenging one self. (hmm. that was a tad generic - perhaps I should rather say it's one of the biggest challenges I face).

Style is important. It makes your work recognisable. It reassures galleries, who see a constant dipping in and out of different methods as the sign of an immature artist. But it also can seem highly restrictive - how can one develop if one is repeating the same thing in different variations over and over again? and where is the line drawn between progression of that style, and doing something totally new and different every week?

In my last entry, I mentioned that I was experimenting with different media - acrylic on very thin paper with chalks. I did struggle on with this for a while, and produced around 7 or 8 sketches using this method, but ultimately I didn't feel I was getting anywhere with these.

There comes a point, ultimately when you have to concede to yourself - this method just isn't working. That building up a body of work that hangs together is only important if the body of work is essentially something that you can succeed with.

The solution was to buy bigger, heavier paper, gummed watercolour paper that I can load with paint and it won't buckle, won't protest. We had a little trip into Bordeaux where I did just that, and I gleefully set about punishing the new paper with lots of water, lots of paint, lots of colour.

This is a sketch of my brother done whilst in Bordeaux and coloured up after - potraiture is really not my thing ( it looks nothing like my poor brother), but it felt so good to play with colour again, and get away from the muted effect in the paintings above. But where's the style, my head was screaming - how does this fit in to my body of work? It doesn't.

So I stopped and had a bit of a think. I'm away from home, I don't have all my usual tools around me. It's ok to experiment. It's ok to take this time out of linear progression and try and do altogether new things. It's ok if they don't work, or if they don't fit. With this pep talk in mind, I let myself go completely freestyle, concentrating only on the colours I wanted to achieve, and letting my mind wander a little.

And I started to paint a little french valley out of my minds eye, following it with another as my mind travelled along the horizon ( from right to left, strangely), and another... and now I'm just having fun seeing how much of this place I can 'see' before the vision runs out.

Developing a cohesive style is important. It will demonstrate to myself as much as anyone else that my art is backed by rigour, and thought, rather than just the dabblings of an amateur. But it can wait a little longer.

DEB MILLIGAN

Coalescence

As mentioned the other week, one of the nicest things about RedBubble is finding other artists whose work inspires you. One such is Deb Milligan, whose abstracts seem to glow with light. The more I look at them, the more I want to go back and look at them more - my only regret is that as an Australian artist, it's not very likely I'll get to see the originals of her work any time soon.

Worlds 3

Deb describes her work on her gallery thus :

My work is largely, though not only, abstract – usually painted in oils or acrylics.
My abstract paintings speak of particular moments in time, glimpses of dynamic stillness when the Universe is at play within us. Through my art I try to give expression to the subtle shifts contained within these openings.

A moment's recognition

As time goes by, I find myself more and more drawn to abstract art - I'm also envious of those who can create it, as I don't have a natural facility for it. When abstract art works best for me, it's something that evokes a mood, a thought, or an emotion that can't be put into words. This ability to transcend written language is what I love most about Deb's works.





Night Lyric (water) Solitude's Shadow Connection

She is also a superb colourist - deep rich muted colours blended beautifully as in her Water or Spirit series, or violent fiery strong colours leaping out from a dark background in the Fire series. I'd urge you all to take a look at her galleries, grouped into elemental series - as I can only show the works very small here and they really don't do them justice.

Deb has kindly agreeed to answer a few questions on her work :

Have you been painting long? give us a bit of background…

I remember when I was 9 deciding that when I grew up I was going to be a famous artist. I rapidly dropped the ‘famous’ but that initial thought has guided me ever since. I have been painting for 30 years and focused first on watercolours as they were easy to travel with while I was backpacking in my early 20’s. In my 30’s I moved away from representational art, and nearly a decade ago developed a love of abstraction, which holds me in its thrall still

Slight

Your paintings are very cerebral – they reflect a pace in the mind rather than a physical place. What comes first, the thought or the painting? or do they evolve together?


This is a difficult question to answer and any response is more an exploration than a definitive answer. Often the thought, or the general theme, comes first. Usually this thought is elusive and difficult to pin down. so I will write copiously trying to capture it. Sometimes, when all the elements are out in the open, I will then try to identify the essence of what I want to capture by writing it in haiku form. This strips away all the fluff and leaves me with a very clear direction to follow. However, I don’t always use that tool. At other times I start with the elusive thoughts still wandering freeform.


When I paint I am often guided by the sensations within my body. When I feel it in my heart, in my stomach, in my hands - even in my mouth - then I know that the painting is working for me. It is a deeply visceral, even primitive feeling. It is only later that I step back and analyse it, refine it, work ‘by the rules’. Initially though, I gather the awareness of what I wish to convey within my body, observe my physical, emotional and intellectual reaction, and then endeavour to give it expression through paint.

Regardless of the way in which I start, the painting itself often tells me more about my initial intentions as it evolves. Sometimes it is only when I have finished that I fully understand what my intentions were. I enjoy allowing the painting to guide me.

The Cross

Tell us a bit about your methods : sponge,rags,brushed,fingers, type of paints – how do you do it?

My methods vary depending on the subject. I usually start in acrylic and work up a base painting. Sometimes I continue in acrylic, for example with Solitude’s Shadow where I used brushes, sponges and rags with glazes to create the dappled effect. With Connection and Transition, I continued over the base painting using oils, with palette knife, brushes and my hands. With these two paintings I was trying to capture a range of different expressions of ‘energy’, both through colour and technique, hence they include gentle glazes as well as more dynamic brushwork. At times I may take off more paint than I put on, using paper towel and other materials, especially when I wish to create a layered veil-like effect. Then in other works I create a highly textured surface by building up layers of acrylic paint using a palette knife.

Transition

What inspires you, motivates you to keep painting, and gives you joy doing it?


I just love painting. I love getting lost in the process. I love the difficulties inherent in presenting or exploring complex issues through abstraction. I love the complex simplicity that is necessary in abstraction. I am inspired by the exploration of ideas, trying to understand the world and my place in it better through this exploration.

As an artist, do you have a goal you are working towards? is there a direction you would like to take, or does your art work evolve by itself?

At the moment I suspect my work is in transition and I am not quite sure where it will go. However the overall goal is to continue to improve my work, keep improving my CV and so increase the opportunities to show my work to a wider audience.



Finally..name three artists who inspire you on Rb – pay it forward!

Victor is one of the most talented artists I have seen on redbubble – he has a superb eye and masterly technique. I love the work of Midori McCabe for her purity of technique – she gets straight to the essence. And John Fish is a great inspiration for his transformative visions, both in paint and word,

Amongst the photographers I also pay respect to Jordanpaint for her clear and beautiful abstracted vision which always inspires me, and Skip Hunt for his superbly crafted images of life as a citizen of the world.

Thanks to Deb for great answers. Please take a moment to look at her gallery here - and I hope you enjoyed what will be the first in a series of artist interviews.

IT'S WORTH WHATEVER YOU PAY FOR IT..

Well, that's the maxim for art, or rather, non-collectible art. But whilst walking around Edinburgh on Saturday with a friend of mine, I saw something that made me giggle...

Firstly, we came across the stalls on the high street, selling some surprisingly nice prints and some very reasonably priced original art. Beautifully mounted and wrapped, from £30 - £45 for an original painting ...well, dirt and cheap come to mind, especially when it's not the artist himself who is selling it, so there's other people taking a cut along that chain. ( click on the image to see the price tag..)




So we carry on our daunder, stopping in it at the 'Red Door Gallery', a nice wee boutique gallery that sells a lot of lovely prints. Leaving there, we pass another gallery that shall not be named, selling this :



As my friend put it, that must be one hell of a frame. Gold plated?

I think I'd be rather annoyed if I was a towrist and I'd just spent £230 quid on a piece of original art...then found the same thing 200 metres up the road for £30. I think the moral of the lesson is to be consistent in your pricing. Or maybe it is buyer beware. Or maybe it's that galleries, on occasion, take the utter piss...

Anyway. Finished off commission paintings over the weekend which made me happy, and did this wee triptych. Apologies for no post on Sunday.. but I figure very few people are actually reading this on the weekend anyway, so it's OK to miss the odd Sunday.

THE LAST OF THE DAY

The last of the day
acrylic on canvas 8 " x 8"
Original for sale £115

Sometimes, it's the accidental painting that turns out best. After struggling all day with these bloody plums ( which still aren't right), and doing a kinda nice painting of lemons we saw at the botanics on Sunday, I started a little abstract just to finish off the paints on my palette - waste not want not.

But a wee house appeared within it, and then a window frame, and it became a night painting of an imaginary cottage somewhere very remote, with only one neighbour to share the dark of the night with. I was pleased with this.

Later on this week, I'll be doing a couple of blog entries focusing on one of may favourite 'finds' at RedBubble, Deb Milligan. And discoursing on if and how artists see things differently.

Three Plums
Acrylic on canvas 12" x 12"

Lemons at the Botanics
Acrylic on canvas 12" x 12"
Original for sale £150

A LENGTHY DISCOURSE ON THE ART OF COPYING

I've decided blogging is rather a nice thing to do over morning coffee, to organise my thoughts for the day - so expect a regular entry about this time. Today I'm going to talk about about photography, and how I use it in art - and problems thereof with copyright and integrity.

The last couple of days, I decided to do some paintings for my former co-workers down in Yeovil, as a thank you for all the help they gave me in working towards my professional architecture qualifications. At first, I thought I'd just give them something from stock, but then I decided - naah, let's do something a bit more specific to them. I wanted to do something with soft colours and rolling hills, that would sum up somerset.

Cue problem. I had no photos to work from. I'm not someone who's good at working purely from memory, or directly from the imagination. I like to have a base picture to start from, even if I never look at it through the whole process of painting, and the final picture comes out nothing like. Probably a hang up from my architectural education, where I was taught to record what I saw rather faithfully.

So I turned to flickr, which turned out to have nothing much of use, then to RedBubble - where I found the wonderful work of Steve Spraggan. I would urge anyone reading this to go and have a look at his photography - it's incredibly beautiful. I found these two rather perfect images here :




*From his redbubble site - I wanted to link these pics directly to it but haven't worked out how yet!

Now here comes an ethical dilemma. Firstly, is it legally right to base art on someone else's photographs? There are copyright laws involved here, and so many issues as to fill up a thousand days worth of blogs talking about it. But basically - no. It breaks UK copyright laws.

Copyright applies to any medium. This means that you must not reproduce copyright protected work in another medium without permission. This includes, publishing photographs on the Internet, making a sound recording of a book, a painting of a photograph and so on
Source -UK Intellectual property office


There's a lot of debate about this these days - a whole Creative Commons debate, a realisation that so many artistic works these days come from 'remixing' - graphically or musically. The Obama Hope poster is a very famous example where copyright was broken (although laws are different in the US, and the case appears to be murkier). And it's not very realistic - how many people apply for permission to cross-post pictures on the Internet? the Internet would surely become a text based medium if everyone did that, and be a much poorer environment.

But really, this is just a couple of presents for friends! is it a big deal?

Well, yes. Because I do also plan to put the finished paintings on the Internet, to promote my art, and possibly sell prints or cards of the paintings.



In other words, I plan to profit from my theft. So I did the sensible thing and asked the artist for permission, which he kindly gave. And in return, I'm publicly thanking him, and linking to his work every where these images are displayed. A win-win, hopefully.

With the legal side out the way, that brings me to the artistic side - is it really art if I'm just copying someone else's vision?

As said above, I nearly always work from photos (or en plein air). But I generally make it a rule only to work from my own photos.

The reasons for this are threefold - copyright, as mentioned above. Secondly, when I take photos, I'm taking them with a painting in mind - I'm looking for something quite different to a good photograph. The composition isn't always the same, the lighting will be different, and what makes a great photo can make a very dull painting, and vice versa.

The final reason is a little more difficult to explain - I need to kind of feel myself in the photo. Working from a photo of a place I have never been will often result in a flat dead painting - I can't capture the emotion I felt when there. It sounds a bit hippyish, I know, but that's how it works. I often can't even use my own old photographs - the emotion has leached out over time, and whatever I felt when there is forgotten.

The photo is the beginning of a process, of a seed of an idea, that will wither and die quite quickly if I don't turn it into paint soon. Sometimes I have to work from other people's photos'; for commissions for example, but I don't generally like it.

With that in mind, how did I manage to work from Steve's photos?

When I lived in Somerset, I would take an hour long train journey at 6am every day through the somerset countryside. The beauty of the morning mists rolling over the somerset countryside was something that would take my breath away day after day, and left me with a memory of these train rides being a rather wonderful part of my life, rather than a dull commute.

Steve's photographs brought me back to that time, to the magic of these early mornings on an empty train, very forcefully. If I could have stopped the train, these are the photos I would have taken. (If I had also been as good a photographer as Steve!)

So, in this particular case he captured something that was important to me, that I'd seen again and again, and that I could feel myself in the picture. So it worked, and I felt when I painted that I added my own interpretation, my own emotion, to my version of Steve's vision.

But I do look back on times when I was younger, and I did highly representational paintings from photos in books, with a sense of shame, and a sense that I cheated.. I guess this is an issue that all artists make their own rules on, and as best as I can sum up, these are mine.

INTRODUCTION

This is the first blog post of what I hope will be many here, so it makes sense to start off with a little background.

Last month I became redundant in the same week as I finally qualified as an architect. With the world the way it is, it's unlikely that I'll get work in architecture for at least another 6 months or probably a year.


With that in mind, I turned to my 'alternate' career of being an artist - something that's seen me through student days, when I did 'House portraits' like the one shown here; times when I was too ill to work in architecture, and times when I would just rather be painting.



In the past, I've sold in Edinburgh cafes and little galleries, outdoor markets and galleries in New Zealand; set up selling postcards and prints of my paintings in rural France. I've probably sold somewhere between 500 to 1000 paintings over the years; yet I've never had a proper show, or approached many serious galleries.


This blog will be following me as I attempt to take my art a bit more seriously - to break into new galleries, to begin marketing and selling properly online, and above all, to take my painting somewhere I can be proud of, rather than 'scribbles for tourists'.


Paintings in progress like the one to the left will be shown, from beginning to end, and hopefully by talking through my work here, I'll understand better myself the what, why and how of what I do - and become a better painter.

I'll also be looking at other artists I admire, critiquing paintings I love, and reviewing Scottish galleries that I visit.


The recession has given me a chance to go back and do something I love, and learn to do it well. This is my diary about how I do it. Wish me luck!

And finally - all works shown here can be purchased as cards or prints at Red Bubble, and many are available as originals at Art Gallery . Some Originals are also for sale at Greens and Blues, a Scottish gallery in North Berwick.