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

 

Click on the image to view.

 

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.

Injecting life into a still life

Still life by the 17th century Flemish painter Artus Claessens.

Still life by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

The video that I am now working on is about injecting life into still life. But whether it be a still life, landscape or figure, encouraging the majority of artists that post on facebook forums to inject life into their paintings is like trying to resurrect the dead. It is slavishly copying from photographs that puts the nail in the coffin.

Working from life is a messy business and the result is not likely to win accolades to the tune of "how sweet". In my real life life-classes, erasing is forbidden. In my book Notes on the Nude I have this to say:

I only enforce one rule for those attending my life class: no erasers! In sketching, as in life, every moment counts, mistakes and all. There’s no turning the clock back. One of my mature students put it nicely when she told the class she had earned every line on her face. Hidden in a confusion of wrong lines is the right line. When I find it, I firm it up and the wrong lines remain to emphasise that I have figured it out. Sometimes I leave the viewer to determine which line is the right line. By these means I invite the viewer to have a say in the creative process. A multitude of lines gives testimony to the struggle one faces when working from the live model.  The model is alive, and the artist must somehow put the very breath of life down on paper.  Right lines and wrong lines all count: there’s no rubbing out.

A passion that never dies.

Click on the image to view.

My latest video traces work in progress on sculptures in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. It is the story of a love affair began over fifty years ago when I was seduced by Enzo Plazzotta's sculpture Jamaican Girl and it continues to this day.

 

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty...

 In his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran has this to say about clothes:

And the weaver said, Speak to us of Clothes.

     And he answered:

     Your clothes conceal much of your beauty,

yet they hide not the unbeautiful.

     And though you seek in garments the

freedom of privacy you may find in them

a harness and a chain.

     Would that you could meet the sun

and the wind with more of your skin and less

of your raiment,

     For the breath of life is in the sunlight

and the hand of life is in the wind.

 

     Some of you say, “It is the north wind

who has woven the clothes we wear.”

     And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,

     But shame was his loom, and the soften-

ing of the sinews was his thread.

     And when his work was done he laughed

in the forest.

     Forget not that modesty is for a shield

against the eye of the unclean.

     And when the unclean shall be no more,

what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling

of the mind?

     And forget not that the earth delights to

feel your bare feet and the winds long to

play with your hair.

The quandary of depicting the nude.

Three years ago I opened my post tilted As a matter of Fact with the following health warning:

The images that follow have been recently banned by Social Media's Keeper's of Public Decency. 

The censor's message reads: This post was flagged because it contains adult content which violates our Community Guidelines. THIS DECISION CANNOT BE APPEALED. It appears that social media in general wants us to be more comfortable with war, violence and foul language than with innocent paintings of the nude.

I trust that Edouard Danton's paintings will not shock or offend followers of this blog. 

The video I am now working on delves into the issue of depicting the nude with reference to the live model. In all of the instructional videos that I've seen on working from the nude model, the camera acts as a fig leaf and discreetly masks what you should not see. And that's far removed from life. I feel compelled to do otherwise and risk censorship.

I take courage in the fact that my recent released video Working from Life has won praise from the cognoscenti.

My Father's Studio Edouard Danton (1848-1897)

 

The painter Edouard Danton (1848-1897) came from a family of sculptors and the paintings he made in his father's studio to my mind perfectly capture the matter of fact business of working from the nude model. I stress "to my mind" because one critic from the world of art academia - having I'm sure, never worked from the nude - considers his paintings mere titillation. 

In my book Notes on the Nude I delve deeper into the working relationship between artist and model. In particular the titillation of the provocatively dressed model as against the natural beauty of the undressed:

The human body is less sexually alluring nude than when it is dressed. If one of my regular models had posed in the fetching flimsy white dress she wore on arrival, I would have been lost beyond recall. But as soon as she took it off we were back to our matter of fact working relationship.

As with the model depicted in the painting, my models are likewise fascinated by the work in progress and at the end of a session I can sense my model's reluctance to exchange the freedom of the nude for the restrictions of being clothed.

Below are two more of Edouard Danton's masterly paintings. As a sculptor I can recognise every detail, from the tools on his workbench, to the temporary rail alongside the modelling stand, and the calm composure of the model.

Casting from Life

Coin d atelier

 

Artist and Model

This demonstration video supplements my book Notes on the Nude. I hope it encourage a new generation of artists to pursue the challenge of working from the nude model and inspire a new generation of models. In recent times artists have resorted to working from photographs, rather than from life. 

To quote from my book:

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 truth! 

You can view the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFBxxmBNsDU

An accolade that hopefully I will never receive

 

Trudy

My five minute charcoal sketch of Trudy, will never receive the accolade: It looks so real that it could almost be a photo! But many post of paintings on facebook art sites do. This I have realised after a week of scanning facebook posts. Most certainly, if it was a painting of the nude that looks so real that it could almost be a photo, social media censors would banish it forthwith. 

Curiously, my brother, an accomplished photographer, occasionally does it the other way about, by photoshopping his photos to make them look like a painting. 

On the cutting room floor

Detail from the painting featured in a forthcoming demonstration video titled 

Working from Life. 

In the pre-digital days of film making discarded footage ended up on the cutting room floor. Now superfluous clips are deleted at the click of a mouse. But what might be discarded as worthless today might be considered gems tomorrow. Today's picture is a case in point. It is a still from a demonstration video I'm making that illustrates my way of painting in watercolour. Yesterday it was edited out, today it's back in. 

It is the same with my paintings. I restrain myself from destroying those that on the spur of the moment I consider worthless. On reassessment, I sometimes find positive features that had eluded me.

The video shows the creation of a painting in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun, from start to finish. The timespan is 14 minutes. Speed is of the essence.

Only angles and babies need apply

 

My wife Denise in the eighth month of her pregnancy with our daughter Trina. 

Following the theory: if you can't beat them, join them, I have been trolling through scores of art group sites on Facebook in view of introducing my book Notes on the Nude to their members. In the process I have been reminded of Facebook's horror of the nude, hence on many sites my paintings and sculptures are persona non grata. 

Granted, one group makes the exception of angles and babies. But alas, the painting of my wife Denise in the eighth month of her pregnancy with our daughter Trina, still falls foul of their censors; albeit that it embodies both exceptions in one painting. 

Years ago, when one of my sculptures was being cast by the Morris Singer Foundry, I caught sight two angels. They had been commissioned to stand each side of a church alter. Gossamer drapery served to accentuate their God given beauty. I learnt from the sculptor that the model for one was a young lady of impeccable breeding and for the other, a prostitute.

My book dwells at length on censorship of the nude in art.

Townscapes

The opening picture is a page from my book Townscapes. The sketch is one of thousands I've made from the pavements of towns and cities during the course of my life. It was a life that began in the darkest days of WW2. The townscapes that escaped the bombs in the 1940's were demolished by developers in the 1960's, thus my passion for recording buildings individually and collectively. 

The book can be accessed at: https://www.studiopublications.org/

Let there be life

 

 

My message to my fellow artists for the New Year is, Let there be life! 

Let there be no slavishly copying from photographs. 

Let there be no social media censoring of the nude.

Let there be no carefully contrived compositions.

Let there be no constraints. 

Let there be no erasing. 

The painting above was made at 3.00am in a Leeds night club, and the painting below was made from life on a beach in the Virgin Islands. It is one of hundreds of illustrations in my book Notes on the Nude. No photograph, no censoring, no constraints.

A Christmas Story from the Caribbean

 

Thirty-five years ago, the only way I could get a Christmas message to my three children was to pay for the following to be published in the island’s newspaper.

I have just spent a day searching for Christmas presents for my three children. The burden of the task has been on my mind for weeks. As I feared, it was a fruitless day and I came home empty-handed. Money was not the restraint, nor the selection of toys. The problem was one of circumstances.

My children are aged three, five and six, against their wish, are separated from me through a marriage that ended in divorce. Father Christmas, no matter how laden with toys, cannot substitute my children’s right to a real father. Even the toys lovingly created for them by my own hand - as they always used to be - cannot fill the void needlessly created in their lives.

But against overwhelming odds, some measure of justice prevailed. A few months ago, the court awarded them what was to have been their real Christmas present - a better deal. But the order was never allowed to take effect. The present was taken from them before they had a chance to experience it.

A child's fairy-tale world demands miracles, especially at Christmas. They expect immediate results, with angels and bright, shining lights. Their reasoning takes no account of court orders, the mischief of lawyers and the conniving of government ministers. All they know is that, for some unaccountable reason, love for them manifests itself in restrictions, resentment and revenge.

“I wish you a Merry Christmas..." in the circumstances, even the message on the cards is a fallacy. They cannot honestly be sent. My children can do better. On the card my son made at school for Father's Day, he drew a picture of an exploding volcano!

Perhaps for Christmas, they will show similar insight. The story of Jesus, if honestly told, would do quite well. Beneath the façade of romanticized stables, cute nativity plays and comforting carol services, nothing has changed.

I'm so sorry my sweethearts...Love Daddy

The story of my fight for access is told in my book: For the Sake of the Children.  

The book is my personal account of parental alienation. There are millions of similar cases worldwide, but mine has the distinction of being one of the worst. My story begins on an island in the Caribbean forty years ago and continues up to the present. My fight for the right of my children to have access to their father was fought under the most difficult circumstances. Other than to attend court hearings, I was for the most part forbidden to set foot on the island that was their home, and which had previously been my home. By fighting for a basic human right, I was deemed an undesirable person and a menace to the public good. For a period of five years, I had to wage my campaign from the cabin of a small boat while sailing from island to island. The term parental alienation had only just been coined when my problems began. There were no books on the subject and no guidance for those expected to advise and judge.  

Following in the footsteps of Laurie Lee

 

Road Town, British Virgin Islands

What began over fifty years ago out of dire necessity became one of things that I've enjoyed doing most in life. That being, sketching and selling on the pavements of the places my travels have taken me to. 

To pluck up courage and declare myself an artist on the pavements of France wasn't easy. Laurie Lee in his book, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning expresses what he felt in similar circumstances.

Presently I got up and dressed, stuck my violin under my jacket and went out into the streets to try my luck. It was now or never. I must face it now, or pack up and go home. I wandered about for an hour looking for a likely spot, feeling as though I was about to commit a crime. Then I stopped at last under a bridge by the station and decided to have a go. 

I felt tense and shaky. It was the first time, after all. I drew the violin from my coat like a gun. It was here, in Southampton, with trains rattling overhead, that I declared myself. One moment I was part of the hurrying crowds, the next moment I stood nakedly apart, my back to the wall, my hat on the pavement before me, the violin stuck under my chin. 

When I'd finished the first tune there was over a shilling in my hat: it seemed too easy, like a confidence trick. But I was elated now; I felt that wherever I went from here, this was a trick I could always live by.

To this day I am never happier than when on the pavements practicing that trick. It has taught me far more than what I would have learnt had I gone to art school. 

This video of a walk through the back streets of Havana has me longing to pick up my sketching bag and practice it again.

The books that contain sketches I've made from pavements in the Caribbean can be found at Studio Publications.

The Art of Making Love

The painting and following note is taken from my book Notes on the Nude.

If artists make love with the same restraint that many of them paint pictures, it must be a boring business. Making art, like making love, is 99% passion. Tie it down to a set formula and you screw up. 

Notes on the Nude is available as an eBook and can be viewed and purchased at: https://www.studiopublications.org/

My life has been the poem I would have writ...

 

The Launching of Born Free of Higham.

My life has been the poem I would have writ. 

But I could not both live and utter it.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Those words aptly sum up my own life. In the books listed in my last post I have attempted to utter some of it. They are a mixed bag, but as such they express the triumphs and tribulations of my life. 

The boat shown in the opening picture played a significant role in the tribulations. I designed her for working and living aboard in the tropics and built her in a farmyard in the heart of Constable's Suffolk countryside. During the two years I spent building the boat we lived in a cottage that is included in one of Constable's paintings of the village of Higham.

John Constable's painting of the village of Higham.

Studio Publications

I have spent the last four months converting my ten books into eBook format, and moreover, creating my own publishing house to market them. So goodbye Amazon: there will no more censoring my Notes on the Nude, and no more of my hard-earned dollars going into your coffers.

I began my journey into self-publishing sixty years ago when I sold my prints door to door in England. The price tag was ten shillings and within a week I had sold a thousand copies. In the 1980's, I hawked my book Virgin Island Sketches from boat to boat in the Caribbean. By these means - person to person, face to face - the book sold over 14,000 copies. 

Although selling eBooks online lacks the personal touch, it enables my work to reach a worldwide market from my small island in the Caribbean - just as my blog posts are followed by thousands of artists and art students in over eighty countries. 

Studio Publications is virtually a one-man band. I am publisher, author, artist and general factotum rolled into one. Computer mastery, an essential requirement for E-publishing, is beyond my octarian dyslexic capabilities. But my computer savvy son helps me with that. 

In the days of hard copies, I had to contend with the gremlins that infiltrate printers ink. But they are tame in comparison to the gremlins that frustrate the conversion of Word Documents to eBooks. We fight them off on one page on one day and by the following day they have creeped back on the next. 

But the final appearance of an ebook depends on user preferences and the receiving device. The recipient can alter fonts, text colour and line spacing, and hence enter into the creative process - just as my models share the creative process of my paintings and sculptures. The books that contain illustrations are in PDF format to ensure precise layout and quality reproduction. 

Below are images of the front covers of my books. Further information about contents and ordering can be found at: https://www.studiopublications.org/

  

At the click of a mouse

Porto

My book Townscapes includes a series of sketches I made of Porto twenty-five years ago. But the one that illustrates this post somehow got lost by the way. I found it today when searching through a past portfolio. As I am in the process of republishing Townscapes as an eBook, it can be included this time around. One of the advantages of an eBook publication, especially when self published from my studio, is that I can revise contents and add new books as my fancy dictates. I'm not beholden to Amazon or anyone else.

Another advantage, is the speed by which a new eBook can take shape and then, at the click of a mouse, reach the far corners of the world from my small island in the Caribbean.

He's made a mess of that!

 

Today's picture is a still from a video I am making, the purpose of which is to show work in progress. What the still fails to show - but the moving picture does - is one colour running into the next. What I'm trying to get across to the viewer is the importance of allowing watercolours freedom. They rightfully resist being constrained.

Looking at the picture you might well say, as has been said of my work on occasions, "He's made a mess of that!" But when a watercolour appears to be going wrong, it is invariably going right.

Making the video has not been easy. I am struggling as both artist and cameraman and working in the absence of a model. Whist help would be appreciated, the following offer, via the contact form on this blog, is not what I'm after.

Hello,

I hope this message finds you well.

My name is Araz, and I am writing to express my strong interest in joining your team as a Content Writer.

I believe that my skills and experience would be a great fit for your team. As such, I would like to inquire about any potential opportunities available.

I would be happy to discuss my qualifications further and answer any questions you may have.

Araz

On the other hand, my models have stood in behind the camera, and on occasion, stepped down naked to help me bend steel for the armature of the initial clay sketch of their figure.

 

A Rare Find

Rain Over Calderdale

 

I am preparing for publication a book titled, "The Calderdale Portfolio". It features paintings and sketches I made over thirty years ago of the towns, villages and countryside of my youth. The portfolio has survived storms at sea and hurricanes on land. In recent years it has languished unopened on a shelf in my studio. Most of the contents can I remember as if they were painted yesterday. But the one above took me by surprise. 

How evocative is a painting that is fleetingly jotted down from life! Even in the warmth of the tropics, I can feel the searching wind and the expectant cold shower of rain. 

A tantalising glimpse

Jeune Fille en Bust (Portrait of a Young Girl) by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (c.1794)

The above portrait led me to discover a remarkable series of YouTube videos. These videos by The Anonymous Art Historian, are a welcomed addition to the visual arts. They are in themselves a work of art: excellent visuals, intelligent commentary and valuable transcripts.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin 's portrait caught my eye due to the similarity of pose to Ruben's image of Mary Magdalene in his painting Christ and the Penitent Sinners.

In earlier times, painters were adept at allowing a tantalising glimpse of the nude in the most innocent of subjects. In both of the above paintings the hand demurely covers the breast. But tantalisingly, the fore and middle fingers are parted to reveal the delicate beauty of the nipple.

A Creative Health Warning

  

A detail from a painting in my pregnancy series.

An overdose of instructional videos on "How to Paint in Watercolour" can seriously damage your creative health. This health warning has been brought about by looking at too many carefully contrived, tame insipidies that have been drearily painted to rule. They lack very essence of the medium: that being spontaneity and freedom.

I remember one such regimented practitioner shaking his head in despair at my work. His advice was that I should use a smaller brush, less water and paint more carefully.