A final fling…

During the 1980’s my studio was located on the shore of an idyllic cove in the British Virgin Islands.  In those days my 16 ton gaff cutter shared the pristine anchorage with no more than a handful of visiting yachts and a couple of inter-island cargo boats. 

All too soon marinas, hotels and condominiums invaded my paradise and I moved on.  However, before leaving I took out one of my largest sheets of watercolour paper and had a final fling.  But alas, even my farewell image was fated not to last.  In moving back and forth between the Caribbean and England the painting was damaged beyond recall. 

For years, those vibrant brush strokes have existed only in my memory.  And mine is a selective memory.  It can remember every painting I have ever painted over the last seventy years but cannot remember my telephone number.  Neither can it remember making a high definition scan of the original painting when selecting illustrations for my book Caribbean Sketches.  

The scan came to light when my high-tech daughter resurrected the hard disc from one of my defunct computers.  So here it is, my last vision of the Virgin Islands reincarnated as a limited edition print. 

For details, visit my on-line gallery at  http://artid.com/rogerburnett 

Out of the corner of my eye...

 

 Whether it is the fleeting movement of the model, or the transient scene that I glimpse out of the corner of my eye, it is the unexpected that makes my day. 

Twenty years ago, while painting on the Caribbean island of St Lucia, I interrupted an overly laboured seascape to scribble down this sketch.  The fishermen landed and sold their catch in a matter of minutes and I had to catch my subject in the same moment of time. 

At the end of the day, I valued my sketch infinitely more than my “finished” painting.  It is something that in a hundred years time I’d like to be remembered by. 

Fortunately, this sketch of fishermen landing their catch is permanently lodged in my brother’s collection.  If you go back in the archives to an entry posted 8^th March 2011 and titled “Dear Theo” you’ll find out more about the similarities of our brotherly relationship and that of Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo.

The following letter brings our correspondence up to date.

Dear Ali,

I desperately need the following Winsor & Newton Artists’ Watercolours:  one 14ml tube of Raw Umber & Burnt Umber and one 5ml tube of Viridian & Prussian Green.  They may have discontinued Prussian Green, but the rest should be readily available.  Post them regular airmail. 

I am sending you one of my recent reclining nudes for your collection.  Keep faith, one day it may be worth a little something.

With a handshake in thought,

Rog

Note:  Those who cannot claim a sibling relationship must alas choose from the paintings exhibited on my on-line gallery at http://artid.com/rogerburnett

The devil is in the detail…

 

If push comes to shove, I can paint every leaf on a tree.  The job would be tedious for me and boring for you.  Far better, that I throw down a thunderous wash of Prussian Green and let your  mind do the rest.  In other words, it is better to suggest, rather than to define detail.

For the bold watercolourist, the best suggestive passages are often the happy accidents that are beyond the artist’s control.  Except, you might qualify that statement by saying: the better the artist, the more often the accidents happen in his or her favour.

By suggesting rather than defining detail, we allow the public to enter into the creative process and interpret a picture as they may.  As with poetry, they are free to read their own meaning between the lines.

I have illustrated this entry with a suggestive detail from one of my sketches of the female nude.  If I have been more specific, my painting might have had to be hidden from view for a hundred years - as was the fate of Gustave Courbet’s realist masterpiece* of the same subject. 

*The Origin of the World

For further details of this painting, visit my gallery website at:  http://artid.com/rogerburnett 

Starting young...

Whereas my daughters Tania and Trina can claim they started their modelling career captive in their mother’s womb, my son Tristan had been in the world eight months before modelling for his first sculpture.  Now that he is ten, getting him to model is a different kettle of fish.  A portrait bust that I started of him a couple of years ago dragged out so long that the clay turned to dust long before completion.

My sculptures have themselves brought children into this world.  Behind the backs of the commissioners, I added a little boy to the maquette of my figures for Leeds City Centre.  When called to account for this addition to their budget, I shrugged it off as the inevitable consequence of the couple’s liaison.   

Although children have featured in many of my sculptures, I confess that they are not my preferred subject.  Mummy’s little darling can soon become a fidgety thorn in my side. 

Today’s picture shows Tristan pointing out to me the errors of my work while it was at the initial clay stage.  

For details of the bronze cast, visit my sculpture gallery at http://artit.com/rogerburnett  

In the mood…

Between the mid 1970’s and the mid 1990’s it seemed that I had sketched every beach, every coconut palm and every grain of sand throughout the length of the Caribbean.  I then declared enough is enough, and turned to the figure with a vengeance.  

Last week, for the first time in almost twenty years, I put aside my ebony flesh colours and dug deep for tubes of viridian and turquoise.   I slung my sketch bag over my shoulder and headed for the wild Atlantic Coastline of Dominica.  This seascape of Rosalie Bay is the result of my morning’s labour. 

For further details of this painting, visit my gallery website at:  http://artid.com/rogerburnett 

Confronting the real thing…

A few weeks ago, I visited an exhibition that featured the work of regional students who had over the years, won top marks in the Caribbean Examination Council Visual Arts Examination.  Many of the works were portraits of meticulous detail.  A representative of the Council confirmed my suspicion that they had copied from photographs.  Furthermore, it seems that students are encouraged to work from photographic references, whether it is a portrait, landscape or market scene. 

As a staunch advocate for working from life, this approach to teaching the next generation of artists, beggars belief.  There have been occasions when I have sourced technical detail from photographs to ensure accuracy.  The Caribbean postage stamps that I designed in the 1980’s are a case in point.  But when it comes to the landscape, portrait or figure, I need to confront the real thing. 

I cannot walk around a photograph of my subject, neither can I touch, feel, sense or talk to it.  It can be troublesome working outdoors; you get burnt by the sun, drenched by the rain, bitten by ants and easels get bowled over in the wind.  In the studio, models cannot be expected to retain the freshness of a pose for longer than a couple of minutes. 

Nevertheless, the rewards of working from life are worth the effort.  Between the torn up false starts, the exploratory lines and the dashed down runs of colour, there, on paper, is a trace of the breath of life!   

The above watercolour, which I painted from life this afternoon, illustrates my point.  A photograph would have defined five fingers: my wash dribbled down to make three or four.  I leave the difference to your imagination. 

To view more of my paintings and sculptures visit: http://artid.com/rogerburnett



Standing Pregnant Nude

I will begin my collection by going back twenty years to when I painted Denise through the pregnancies of our daughters Tania and Trina. Their birth dates are less than a year apart, so what I missed on one pregnancy, I caught on the other. I exhibited the entire collection of twenty-five paintings and drawings in the UK in 1998. 

A visitor to the exhibition - a lady in her eighties - was pleased that I had captured the beauty that she had not dared to realise in the days of her youth.  She told me that in those days the nude figure – let alone the pregnant nude - was considered shameful.  Alas, my dear lady, for many it is still so!

This is one of those rare watercolours that I painted directly on the page without the guide lines of a preliminary drawing.  Remember, in watercolour mistakes cannot be corrected and a successful painting – one that has avoided a thousand pitfalls along the way - is a minor miracle.  But as G. K. Chesterton said, “The miraculous thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen”. 

Incidentally, I had this painting in mind when I wrote my poem The Colour Black.  (Search the archives for entry dated August 11^th 2011)

This painting is available for sale, both as the original, and as a limited edition print. For further details visit my Retrospect 1 and Print Gallery at  http://artid.com/rogerburnett.

Problems associated with growing younger…

When my father - who lived well into his nineties – made his infrequent visits to the village surgery, the doctor would greet him with the words, “Good God, are you still walking around”!

After an absence of well over a year, I’m sure you’ll be saying about me.  Let me explain.  This year I reach my biblical three score years and ten, and my long absence has all to do with the problems associated with growing younger. 

At this time of life, I have so many projects on the go that it is difficult to find time to sit down and write about them.  Which brings us back to Henry David Thoreau and his line:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and utter it.

It is not only projects that I have been grappling with.  Last week for the first time in living memory, we took a day’s holiday.  My family enjoyed it immensely but agreed that we wouldn’t want to repeat the experience too often.  

One of the projects has been tutoring the next generation of creative artists and, as an extension of that initiative, offering my studio life classes to visitors.  For more information you can click on my new site: http://workingfromlife.blogspot.com 

That in turn will link you to an on-line gallery of my work: http://artid.com/rogerburnett

Bythe way, as I grow younger, so does my wife.  Here's a sketch of her as she begins her twenty-second year of modelling.  

Look across to "About the Artist" for a more recent and younger photo of me!   

My list for the week…

The fact that my diary entries have become infrequent does not mean that I’m sat twiddling my thumbs.  Far from it, as a glance at my list for the week shows.  The jobs range from raking the path to the river to reading the reading the Warrell Report on Guidance to Minimising Microbial Food Safety Hazards.  My shopping lists might appear mundane with nothing more exciting than Wellington boots and fuel for the water pump.  However, hidden between the lines are projects that offer new challenges and new horizons.  If only they could be revealed, you would find that my list is every bit as exciting as the Tony Buzan “Mind Map” that I use as one of the props for my Creative Thinking Workshops.

Dreamers of the day…

Thankfully, at the start of all my New Years, I’ve never been able to predict what I’ll be doing this time next year.  That very uncertainty has been the spice of my life.  If nothing else, these diary pages bear witness to the fact that, what I’m doing today I’m unlikely to be doing tomorrow. 

These lines by T. E. Lawrence are an appropriate beginning for 2012…along with my sketch of the Halifax Symphony  Orchestra. (You’ve seen sketches of individual players before but not, as I remember, the full orchestra.)

This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-place, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

A Very Happy New Year