EXPERIMENTING - WORKS ON PAPER

LINES I

In between dog walking and gruelling hospital visits ( 5 hour drive) yesterday, I did at least manage to do some sketching, which I am much relieved about. It doesn't do to go to long without painting lest one lose the habit.

These peices are acrylics and chalks on paper, and are a bit experimental for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm not using reference photos for them, but rather painting 'out of my head'. I think I've mentioned previously that's not something that comes easy to me, but with these subjects the basic ideas behind them have been rolling about in my head for years, so it's not been too hard.

LINES II

I've always been fascinated with the linear aspect of the french countryside, whether it be stands of poplar trees, rows of vines, the way the countryside is criscrossed with irrigation ditches, or even just the plough lines in the field. This juxtaposition of the geometric and the organic has been subject matter for me - in my head, if not always on paper - since I arrived here in 2002, when the highly detailed watercolour below was done.

POPLAR TREES

Secondly, the medium is new. I could only bring very thin cartridge paper with me, which has its own challenges - it buckles over the slightest application of water, so paint has to be built up in thin, sponged on layers. It's always fun to try and get around a technical limitation like that, but also one musn't expect brilliant results on the first go - or even the second or third. So I'm calling these experiments, and hoping that I can improve upon them in the next few days using the same methods.

LINES III

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.

FRANCE

In France, after a long day's travel yesterday. I'm here to help out my folks a bit, as my father is ill, so any painting/blogging will have to be fitted in numerous drives to Bordeaux hopsitals and back. But really, I have no excuse for not blogging at the same time every morning, as my parents are not exactly early risers. I'll do my best. today I'll be finishing the interview peice I talked about doing with Deb Milligan - this has taken way longer than I thought, and in future I shall not be advertising things before I am sure they are going to happen soon! Full thing will appear tomorrow though.

I 'll also be revisiting these two peices, and adding a third..

I am (hopefully) off to France tomorrow, for a week or two, so the blog may become a bit sporadic whilst I am out there. Apologies in advance ( not that I expect my..erm..hordes of readers will be jumping up and down with rage, but I like to be consistent).


I've been thinking a little bit about art and ego and how intertwined they are. Sometimes, it seems like such a fantastically arrogant thing to be, or want to be, an artist. It's a sort of childish consistent wish for praise, and attention, and 'look at me! look at me!', and I think you need to be a pretty resilient personality to reconcile this with a way of life.

I was out with a lot of architects from my old job last night, and it got me thinking when I was talking about how different this way of life is. No, I don't have site agents yelling down the phone at me, and constant demands for information, and endless problems which never seem to be resolvable. But I also don't have an 'off' switch any more. Everything seems to relate back to painting - every emotion, every bit of information, every single thing I see. And that has its own form of stresses and tiredness. And the doubt! the endless self questioning, not least of which is if I have any right to do this at all - or if I would be a lot better sitting out the recession with a job down at Tesco, and then waiting for a job in architecture to come back up.

But, I think I'd always kick myself if I didn't paint. I don't really like life when there's no creativity in it - or, I do, but it seems a bit more pointless somehow. It was nice to go out there last night, with all my old colleagues - some of which still have jobs, some who don't, and be able to be a bit proud of what I am doing now, and hear that many of them liked the paintings they'd seen online. It kicked me out of the strop, and the abyss of self doubt I'd been wallowing in since Friday. I think the lesson is it's not a bad thing necessarily to want a bit of praise and encouragement to keep going - the bad thing would be letting myself be cut of from friends and people in general just because I don't work in a big noisy office any more. The hermetic life of the artist in isolation is not for me - or only up to a point. So, anyway,. here's to my friends - thanks for cheering me up last night. Even though I am suffering for it today with a most dreadful hangover..

WORKING TO COMMISSION...

Is not something I generally seek out. Not that I don't like it precisely, but more that it always seems to take me ages to do it.

Mind, that's mostly because the commissions I have done in the last couple of years have been for charity - which I am all in favour of, if I can make £400 for charity just by giving a few hours of my time, well, that's awesome. And I'm glad to do it. The problem has been getting round to it, particularly when I had a very demanding full time job as well as studying for my professional exams in architecture. And when I'm not painting much, so there's the whole bit of getting back in to practice before I even start.

So it was with a large sense of relief when I went to drop off this painting last night - I really had taken too long over this, and though the recipients were lovely people and very understanding, it was good to have the decks cleared.



Just to say sorry over the delay, I gave them a wee sketch of their gorgeous black lab, Carrie. I think they were almost happier with this than the house painting.




Happy customers is a Good Thing. So I think I'll maybe build a little side website for house paintings - it may not be high art, but if it's art that makes people happy, and makes me a bit of a living then it's not a bad thing.

Blue Wednesday - WIP

I hadn't been painting for a couple of days, which made me slightly twitchy. Even a short break like that makes it hard for me to get back at it. When I start, I don't want to stop, when I stop, I don't want to start..

Anyway, A few rather blue paintings inspired by our trip to Cramond on Tuesday night in our brand new shiny car. Playing about with the manual settings on my camera gave me some interestingly confused light results, of white skies at sunset.

Granton gas works has always been a wee bit of an obsession with me - I first painted it as part of a student project back in 1997. This is an as yet unfinished romanticised view of it - but it does look romantic fading into the sky from Cramond.




The causeway out to the island is one I've photographed many times, but never painted. It didn't seem to suit the watercolour style I used to use. But I think it's been a bit more successful with a slightly dynamic perspective.



Finally, there's a slightly more abstract piece with the edge of the cause way and one of the high tide markers. There are things I like about this, and things I don't... I'll leave it for a few days and see If I want to change anything.




Now I'm off to the job centre. Hmm. We'll see what that brings. For the rest of the week, I'm going to be concentrating on pulling a couple of pieces together for the RSA (Royal Scottish Academy) open exhibition. I doubt I'm ready for that, or that my pieces will be accepted, but if you don't try you don't get, I guess.

TURNER IN ITALY

I've been kinda excited about this exhibition for the last couple of weeks - and yes, it was definitely worth the wait.

It's a rare, rare event when I am gobsmacked by a painting. Here I was gobsmacked by whole rooms of them. I think the best was catching a glimpse of what was waiting for you in the next room...and being bowled over by the light which seemed to pour out of his paintings.

The sun is God, said Turner famously. Well, Turner himself is certainly its high priest, if you'll excuse my dreadful metaphor. How something over 150 years old can glow with so much light... I'm rhapsodising. I know I am. But they were That Good.

The exhibition ranged over the whole of Turner's life - from initial etchings and sketches before he had ever been to Italy, to the 'white canvas' abstracts of his old age.





So not only did you get classical Italy to 19th century Venice, you also got a range of every style Turner used and a strand of his life from start to finish.




I've always been interested in Turner's watercolours, as one of the few great artists to work in that medium ( I worked almost exclusively in watercolours throughout my twenties, though I am kind of off them right now). But in this case, it wasn't the watercolours which were the interesting pieces, with one or two exceptions. ( none of which I can find online, so you will just have to imagine them. They were off mountain passes and they were fabulous).The stars of this show were undoubtably, however, the oils. They glowed.


They hit you from far off. They got better the closer you moved. And these images do them no justice. ( I didn't bother buying a catalogue, or a guide, because although I wanted one, the images seemed so flat compare to the real thing. I settled for a mediocre postcard).

Interestingly enough, one of the largest pieces was first shown in Edinburgh in 1845. There was a clip from the Scotsman Review of it at the time. It was kind of cool to be standing in the same building, 164 years on, looking at it.


My sister-in-law and I spent barely an hour in there - because it really was quite overwhelming. Ours eyes hurt after half an hour. I can't imagine what it would be like to live with these on your wall ( not sure if anyone does, these days).

Turner was by all accounts arrogant, commercial, mischievous, and shocking. (painting abstracts in the 1850s! the mind boggles). But just..a wonderful, wonderful painter. Go see it when it comes to your city, or go see it now if you are in Edinburgh. Well worth the price of a cinema ticket.