13th July 2012
I am having a very busy July, even though
it started with a holiday. My exhibition at Lilford Fine Art in Canterbury
opens tonight, and we only got back from Hungary the day before yesterday. I
made sure the whole thing was sorted out before we left, frames, mail-outs,
facebook invitations and phone calls, though, so I have nothing to do but work
out what to wear.
We go to Hungary a lot, because my
brother-in-law lives in Budapest. Like a lot of Budapesters, he also has a
cottage in the countryside, near Lake Balaton, and that’s where we stayed. It’s
extraordinary countryside, with hills that are volcanic plugs and look like a
child’s drawing of a hill, terraced and wooded, and Balaton is a seventy mile
long freshwater lake, muddy and reeded, and lined with ‘Strands’, beaches that
you pay to enter, with cafes, pedalos and shower blocks. You don’t pay much,
and it’s a lovely, restful time.
I took the opportunity to get back into
watercolour painting, partly because I have been commissioned to write a follow
up to Basic Drawing on watercolour, and partly because I just want to muck around with
watercolour. I have been looking at Patrick Proctor’s watercolours, and the
easy-looking, ‘just-so’ quality that they have. Sometimes. Sometimes they’re
pretty bad. As are mine.
Mina poses on
the breakwater w/c 10 x 8 cms
My niece and nephew, eight year old twins,
pose for me when I offer them money. 20 Hungarian forints is worth about a
penny, but they seem happy with it. I also draw more or less constantly in my
sketchbook - the heat is so strong, and the activity so limited, just beach,
swimming, sunbathing, that there is little else to do, so I enjoy looking and
noting. I try to keep in mind Richard Pikesley’s advice, to find still lifes in
the landscape, and Peter Brown’s, not to look too hard for a composition, and
it seems to work, but the thing I really notice is that I could draw a person
for hours but a landscape, from life, seems so confusing.
Landscape Study,
Balaton, Hungary w/c 8 x 12 cms
While I was there I thought a lot about
the difference between photography and painting, and wonder why people like
paintings of things and places, and why we paint things when we could
photograph them. My answer is that painting and drawing gives you permission to
stare at something for longer than photographing it does; the image you get at
the end is a result of five minutes, an hour, a day, rather than a split second
camera click, and so you notice more in the image and it seems to live in your
memory longer. I have decided to write an article on this, as part of the
series that Artist
And Illustrator has asked
from me. More writing.
My Mother-in-law
in the shade
The other thing I want to write about is
how we learn to draw. I read David Haycock’s ‘A Crisis Of Brilliance’ while I
was in Hungary, an excellent book about early C20th painters from the Slade,
Spencer, Carrington, Gertler, Nash, Nevinson - all artists who showed with the
NEAC, by the way - and one of the main connections they had was that they’d all
been taught to draw by Henry Tonks at the Slade.
Page of
sketches, sketchbook
But what was it they were actually taught?
My own definition of drawing is that it is how we represent form, independent
of media. In other words, the term ‘drawing’ means, for me, not something done
in pencil or charcoal, but how the form in a piece of work is described.
Perhaps Tonks’ chief influence is the
clarity and integrity that you can see in the work of these five painters. Look
at Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round, Spencer’s Centurion’s Servant or Carrington’s Lytton Strachey; one of the things they share, even though they are
images extremely unlike one another, is that you are in no doubt about the
physical forms represented.
Perhaps I’m talking rubbish. I am pretty
good at that, as you will see if you tune in to BBC2 at 3pm on the 18th of this
month, for Show Me
The Monet, a TV programme
about artists that combines Dragon’s
Den with Britain’s Got Talent, in which I make an ass of myself. I kind
of wish I hadn’t now.
16th July
The Private View was lovely,
with ex-students, friends, collectors and artists all turning up. The gallery’s
great, excellent wine served all evening and lots of amusing meetings, a few
sales and general jolliness. To my great pleasure Sir Ronald Macintosh, one of
the NEAC’s great patrons, who happens to live near Faversham, where I live, was
there too.
My next task is to organise
next year’s Drawing School curriculum and it’s no easy one. I have to schedule
small runs of teaching, of perhaps two Saturdays next June, in July, and no one
reallly wants to be committed like that. NEAC members tend to be busy working;
a lot of them will be away in the summer months too, painting abroad, and
impossible to get hold of. The RA Schools, where we hold many of our classes,
are also on holiday, seemingly from June to September.
It is quite fun though,
calling up my friends and bullying them into teaching - we catch up on news,
share ideas and sometimes generate completely new courses. Mick Kirkbride, for
example, has come up with the idea of running Beginner’s classes, away from the
RA Schools, which might intimidate the more nervous student, and we’re starting
that in a school in North London this September. We also run ‘Schools’ Saturdays’,
where sixth-formers from various schools come to the RA Schools Life Room for a
day of ‘old-fashioned observational drawing’. Most A-level students seem to
think drawing is copying from photographs, and it’s sometimes a bit of a shock
for them to be confronted with a live human being.
John
Dobbs Townscape Study Charcoal,
pen and wash 2012
One of the best things about
the Drawing School this year has been the Scholars; John Dobbs and Claire
Robinson have been absolutely fantastic, highly committed and determined to get
everything they can out of their year. It’s been a joy dealing with them, and
they will be showing in the Open in November. I will be scheduling in a day to
meet them and catch up with their work in the next week or two, if I can find
some time between organising my Continuing Education classes at Christ Church
Canterbury University, writing my Artist And Illustrator articles, writing my Basic Watercolour book, setting up the Mini-Art School we run at the Mall during
the Open, putting my work in for the National Open Art Competition etc etc.
When do I do my own painting?
You may well ask...
Swimmer at Balaton
