Success in painting? Ask the bin!

It's been a busy old season and I've been hard at the easel throughout. The problem is, things keep getting in the way, Christmas, work, sleeping, people, conversations, breathing etc. Plus it's been a bit of a tough few weeks too. There's been quite a lot of work thats only graced the walls of the bin for a start. I can feel you rolling your eyes. I understand my naivety, that has always been abundantly clear - you can't just decide to be a painter. Its a craft - a skill - its thousands of hours of work which I haven't yet put in. It's understanding the dynamic effects of light and colour and being able to express yourself and make n emotional impact on a viewer. I know that! Stop the rolling of the eyes! I'm committed, okay?? I'm putting the hours in - in fact I've been doing the hardest things in order to improve my work - I've been sketching faces. In my humble opinion, sketching a face and getting a likeness is the holy grail of your skills as a draughtsman - and a decent draughtsman is step one in becoming a decent painter.

So I drew a number of portraits and then a sketch of my wife. It wasn't too bad - she looked more like a close cousin than my actual wife - but it gave me hope - I can fix the errors in the actual painting - so I plunged on and started laying the foundations down of a portrait in oils. She was away visiting family and I thought I'd surprise her with my brilliance when she returned. The end result was more like a second cousin, who'd married her first cousin and produced a child that played bluegrass on a banjo on the porch and possessed nothing of the the sheer natural beauty of the woman I married.

I was plunged into an artistic depression. Its an uglier version of a standard depression where I must don a frilly shirt and melodramatically collapse myself on a couch like some Victorian poet as I rail against the slings and arrows of outrageous brushstrokes.

Anyroad - it was pathetic and so I picked myself off of the couch - slapped myself about a bit and then cracked on with drawing yet more dodgy portraits. Because thats the thing - it's sketching hours I need. My brain needs to subtly improve the way it judges distance and mark-making. The hardest thing is usually the best thing for us - like carrots and press ups - and so portrait sketching is the way to go - because I'm bloody terrible at it!

So I've had my head down - doing the best I can to improve what real artists call 'The Line'. I'm also concentrating on the other two members of that painting Holy Trinity, 'value' or 'tone' , (the subtle difference between the lights and the darks in painting) and the third is colour and I'm an idiot at colour.

Here's a paragraph where I explain what makes me an idiot at colour. For most of my childhood and adult life I had a palette of 'Blue, Red, Green, Yellow' and other classics such as 'Purple', 'black' and 'white'. If I was feeling clever I might add 'dark' or 'light' to that vast array of descriptions. Since I've started painting there's an entire vocabulary I've had to learn - 'Burnt Sienna', 'Raw Umber', Ultramarine Blue' there are warm colours and cold colours. There are half-tones, opaque colours and translucent colours. It's been a total education. So in terms of the holy trinity of art - line, tone and colour, the Holy Ghost has been seriously lacking.

So I've been putting in the work - listening to podcasts when I'm driving off to work - studying paintings - watching Youtube videos. It's all good. I've even stopped myself on walks with the dog to wonder at the amazing colours in God's palette and said to myself - 'What an astounding light blue!' I know I'm years behind some of the great work I see out there - but thankfully I'm one of those foolish optimists that you just want to slap. So I crack on. I love it and I'm cracking on.

I also switched back to pastels. They are such a lovely medium because essentially you are drawing but you can use all of the skills that you have learned in oil painting such as tone and colour mixing and you can get a lovely realism and exactness. Pastels are my friends. Oils are like some really sophisticated cigarette smoking French kids I want to hang out with but I'm not quite cool enough to be in their gang and I don't really speak the lingo. But pastels are kind to me. So I'm going to hang out with my pastel mates for a while while I learn some French swear words.

Fire Fox - Pastels.

I'm really pleased with my latest couple of pieces (I can call them 'pieces' cos I'm an artist!) a lovely pastel picture of a hare and then my latest piece, a fox that I call 'Fire Fox'. With that one I really wanted to accentuate the difference between the warm reds and the cool blues and greens in the shadows. I think it was rather successful and admitting that doesn't come easy. Ask the bin!

Until next time!