Category: Art

All my life I have admired people who can make marks on paper that capture your imagination in some way. That has widened to include other forms of design, like furniture, pottery, sculpture, fabric design, even knitting. I’ve never stopped trying to do that.

All these activities mean acquiring skills but also learning what are essentially tricks. I’ve often told people about my dad saying ‘let the saw do the work’ and it taking me another 20 years to realise what he meant (don’t over work it, establish a smooth rhythm). If you know the trick, then the skill often becomes easier to achieve. About 45 years after my dad first said that, someone watching me make stage sets remarked on the sheer speed of my sawing and I gave a little inward smile.

Last week I mentioned to Shelley Art Group the old watercolour sky trick. Skies often have deeper colour at the top of your view than at the bottom. If you are using watercolour the liquid tends to run downwards, taking the pigment with it. If you are painting on the flat, then it tends to run to edges of the area you are painting. If you are painting a sky, then turning the paper upside down makes the pigment run to the top of the sky. which is usually what you want. If it is a blue sky with white clouds you can dab the clouds out using an edge of cloth or tissue.

Knowing the trick doesn’t guarantee a result but it usually means that you are not working against the materials. This in turn allows you to concentrate on developing the skills to make the best use of that trick. As with my sawing, you suddenly develop more freedom and control in what you are doing. In watercolour that often means that you can use wetter applications of paint that flow.

In one group of people I painted with, one of them had been an art teacher and went to the Slade Art School. I watched him working on a scene with figures. This is a hard thing to do. He did the background and then sketched the figures on separate pieces of paper and cut them out. He moved them about the painting till he was satisfied, changing figure size if necessary, then marked them in place and set to painting. I’ve never forgotten that trick and I now use it in digital sketches for painted works. The painting at the top of this piece is one I was asked to do, of a kestrel sculpture I made that is down in Bristol. I had a couple of photos and I played with layouts, using a mixture of bits cut from photos, that I moved about and changed the angles of in Art Rage, and digital paint for the sky. When I was happy with it, I painted the sky first, using a mixture of palette knife and brush, then added the house roofs (palette knife). Finally I cut out the kestrel, moved it about, changed size and shape slightly then marked it in place and painted it on. I moved the rod, that holds it up and allows it to be seen from different angles as well as possible, so that it was there but worked best with this painting angle.

One of the simplest tricks people often forget about is to keep standing back to look at what you are doing from further away. Find some way of standing it up and look from the other side of the room. Do it often. If you are making a sculptural object, put it somewhere that you can walk round it and peer at it from different angles. You don’t have to develop a skill for this one, just remember the trick. If you are working digitally keep zooming out to get the same effect.

So there you are your trick starters.

When people are taught to paint landscapes, they will often be told to make things further away tend towards lighter and bluer. Unfortunately sometimes people tend see this as a rule, rather than a painting trick to emulate the effects of distance and atmosphere on colour saturation. There are lots of similar guidelines that can become a hindrance if taken too literally.

If you read about the painter John Constable, you will almost certainly come across the tale of him and Joshua Reynolds, where constable puts a violin on the grass to demonstrate that they are not the same colour, after Reynolds objected to the colours in Constable’s paintings.

When photography came along it changed the way we see things and motion photography even allowed us to see how things actually move for the first time. At the same time photography took away visual art’s dominant role in capturing a likeness for posterity. This in turn allowed artists to investigate other roles for their art. Increasing awareness of science, particularly relating to colour and vision, also gave artists new ideas about how to do their job. There have been many debates in art history about how to do things and some of these relate to vision and how we see and remember the world around us.

If you ever stand in front of a wide open landscape and enjoy looking at it, a temptation is to take a photograph. I’d be pretty surprised if you weren’t often disappointed with the result. All the magnificent detail and sweep of light you see will have been largely lost. Even a sophisticated camera has limitations of focus, whereas we can focus near and far repeatedly and rapidly without really noticing that we are doing it. Most of the time it doesn’t even make us dizzy. The vision we have in our head is then a combination of what we have seen and felt, with special emphasis on all the things we have been most interested in.

The next element of perception that is important to highlight separately is memory. While our memories are unreliable, they are still ours. We are capable of holding a lot of detail about a scene, as well as host of related generalisations and also feelings. I know of painters who repeat the same scene repeatedly from memory. Each version is different but also alike. Whether intensionally or not, each painting will often be recognisably by the same person.

That last bit about repeating a scene painting also relates to our ability to produce and recognise schematics of things. Every child does it very quickly in their development and even animals are able to do it. Those Captcha tests that have popped up over the last few years, designed to demonstrate your humanity, would be within the capability of a pigeon or crow, as long as they had been taught to associate the schematic with food.

In the pencil sketch below the are no colour hints about what we are seeing and little difference in tone between near and far. In fact the mast at Emley Moor has more definition than it might have in a photograph, representing what we would see by changing our focus temporarily. Within the picture there are plenty of hints about scale and perspective from the lines and objects. The effect is strong enough for us to recognise that the field in the distance is just a different shape, rather than badly drawn.

So if you do want to paint a scene, reasonably realistically, for someone, based on a photograph, don’t be afraid to paint it as they might see or remember it. Equally don’t be afraid to represent what you want to represent without being a slave to the myth of realism.

In one way or another, I’ve been studying and doing art and craft for more than sixty years. I’ve also been involved with performance of various kinds, crossing art boundaries. For more than a decade I’ve taken people round the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, on the historic West Bretton Estate and talked to every sort of person, from different parts of the world, about art and history. One of the things I stress to people about YSP is that the park itself is a giant sculpture.

Talking to people has made some things particularly clear to me and below are some key points I have learned.

Art is both subconscious and conscious. Most animals, including us, seem to have a sense of shape and form and also sound. Some of us animals use those senses for display and communication purposes. This means that art can have multiple levels of appeal.

Because art has been around as long as we have it is plain that it is important to us in some way.

Art has never had one particular way of doing things, though there have been plenty of attempts to enforce a particular way.

The separation of art from craft is not really helpful.

Even the best artists never fully achieve what they want, let alone satisfy all the people all the time.

Human competitiveness means that arts are often used to show off and to demonstrate superiority and thus other people’s inferiority. You should never let that last tendency put you off trying out your artistic skills, if you, and even someone else, might get enjoyment from the attempt.

Some people can just control themselves better and practice doesn’t make perfect in such complicated skills. Equally, even with control and practice people can still produce neat, colourful but not very interesting art.

We all borrow ideas from others. It can’t be helped. Children’s art is already full of borrowed ideas and styles but can still have a personal impact without complicated skills. We all have to make a compromise to achieve whatever we want to achieve.

Art can look like something but it doesn’t have to copy that thing completely.

Art can be abstract but that doesn’t mean it can’t also represent something or some idea or emotion.

When you produce any form of art you are representing a subject, an idea. On top of that, what you produce is influenced by all the things and people you have encountered. Those two things should influence the tools you use to produce the art and those tools should influence the art itself.

Art doesn’t have to be pretty. All forms of art can be used to highlight unpleasant things. There are all sorts of messages in art and the art reflects that.

If your art has a particularly strong emphasis on message then it is of little use if only a small number of the already converted pick that message up.

The, never displayed, work above was called ‘Modern Gods and Heroes’. It is a visual rant about cars, overcrowding, shallow celebrity and eco-failure from around forty years ago. The fact that I’m explaining it speaks of its relative failure. That doesn’t mean that art shouldn’t have a title or explanation.

You are right to question the value of art and the need for public funding but think of all the other things that command higher prices than they perhaps deserve.

Keep looking, thinking, enjoying and trying.