Notes for Art Students, Part Two

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Hot on the heels of my last post is Part Two in my series Notes for Art Students. 

My climb up the documentary video steep learning curve continues. As with climbing a mountain, just when you think you're nearing the top, another steep slope awaits. With my son helping me along, we spent yesterday working on sound quality; partly due to recording technicalities, which he can put right, and partly due to my dyslexic miss pronunciations and hesitancies, which the more we try, the worse they get.

The introduction to each video begins with relevant autobiographical images. My painting demonstrations are in real time, which means I'm eligible for the Guiness Book of Records in terms of speed of execution. Where others take an hour, I take five minutes.

I welcome your feedback on the series.

The ugliness of beautification

 

Municipal Rustic. An illustration from Ian Nairn's book Outrage.

In the realms of the urban environment, “beautification” is not creating beauty, but cleaning up the mess that disfigured that which was beautiful before we made a mess of it.

Ian Nairn highlighted the problem in his book "Outrage". That was seventy years ago, and in the meantime the roots of beautification have multiplied and termites have eaten their way through my cherished copy his book. 

Rural beautification is even worse. On my island the verges of a road that passes through the rain forest have been beautified with crotons.

Focusing the eye towards telling detail.

 

The opening pictures illustrate what the moving image can do best; that is, zooming out from a detail to the picture as a whole. This is what the eye does when viewing a picture. But by way of the camera, I have the advantage of selecting the viewer's starting point. When left to their own devices, viewers invariably begin by convertly focusing on the body parts that are deemed forbidden. 

I only wish that I could free my videos from the excessively wide horizontal format of today's screens - be it the cinema, television or handheld device. Paintings in the wide horizontal are a rarity. The format of my reclining nudes is only moderately horizontal, whereas my standing figures demand the vertical.

My most recent video is seen as source of inspiration to art students and aspiring artists who had almost given up. 

Realising Creative Potential

 

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The first video, in my series of Notes for Art Students, is titled Realising Creative Potential. The content is relevant, as we are all born with 98% the creative potential of genius, but by the time we reach adulthood, conformity has reduced it to less than 2%. 

The video is supplemented by my books on the same theme. 

My collection of videos on art can be found at my Video Channel Home Page.

Sound, vision and the written word

Today's image is the header of a blog that has had just two brief spurts of life over the last ten years. I am now in the process of resurrecting the notes with sound, vision and the written word: that being a series of art tutorials videos together with a book on the same subject.

It will serve as an antidote for those who have suffered an overdose of insipid tutorial art videos. My intention is to put the passion back into art. So be warned, viewing and reading will not be for the faint hearted. I can already hear the scratching of censorous pens.

By getting the message across by different means, I may find, as J B Priestley found of his wartime broadcasts:

I have been hard at it getting through to the public mind, one way or another, for about twenty years, but as a medium of communication broadcasting makes everything seem like the method of a secret society.

If the author found that to be true of a five minute talk on the radio over 80 years ago, I wonder what he'd make of today's social media.