In September, I made a lot of drawings of the Neolithic stone (menhir) alignments and surrounding landscape at Carnac in Brittany. I had plans of returning home and making a series of paintings relating explicitly to the drawings, but so far their influence on recent oil paintings has been indirect, affecting forms, lines, and textures. But I have done a number of watercolour and gouache paintings closely based on the drawings and this is one example in which the forms provide a framework for a free exploration of colour.
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In 2006 I visited Auvers, a short train ride from Paris. It hasn't changed much since the late 19th century, and you can still find views painted by van Gogh and Cézanne. The photo shows the view Cézanne painted in 'The House of the Hanged Man' of 1873. It was a transitional work that had always had a special mystery for me, probably because of the title. It was strange to see that the house was now a respectable middle-class residence. ("House of the Hanged Man" is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
(reposted from December 2104)
I recently read that Harry Roberts, who murdered three police officers in 1966, had been released from prison. The story on the BBC website included photos of the three victims. I found the faces mesmerizing and downloaded the images with the idea of doing some drawings or even a painting from them. The more I looked at the face of the policeman on the right, the more familiar it seemed. Then I realized it reminded me of a drawing I had in a portfolio of my old work. I managed to find it, and yes, I'd made the drawing from the same photograph, 48 years ago. (originally posted in March 2015) A real pleasure to receive Tony Rushton's reply to my email sent care of Private Eye: "Not only do I have ‘Quiet’ finally hung at home - sadly not on a blank white wall - but I also have the ’66 Whitechapel catalogue. Both of us have no doubt aged but I still find the painting very peaceful and eloquently sophisticated." His wife Annie added a few lines and kindly attached images of 'Quiet' in its new home, including the one below. She later sent me a more frontal version which has replaced the black and white image on my 'Earlier work' page. It was interesting to see this painting in colour again after so many years. In my ongoing web search for old paintings of mine, in early 2015 I Googled 'Tony Rushton', until 2012 art editor at Private Eye and buyer of one of my paintings ('Quiet') in the 1966 Whitechapel Show. This portrait of Rushton standing in front of 'Quiet' turned up on the website of photographer Eric Hands. Taken in 2006, so TR has probably had the painting on his wall for 40 years. Eric has kindly given me permission to use the photo. Two useful sayings for any painter from Lao-Tzu:
"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." "Try to change it and you will ruin it. Try to hold it and you will lose it." From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Six principles of Chinese painting were established by Xie He (also known as Hsieh Ho), a writer, art historian and critic in 6th century China. He is most famous for his "Six points to consider when judging a painting" (繪畫六法, Pinyin:Huìhuà Liùfǎ), taken from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters" (古畫品錄; Pinyin: Gǔhuà Pǐnlù). This was written circa 550 and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices. The six elements that define a painting are:
This is my post from a few years ago on a website called 'Painter's Keys': I just came across the post by Henryk Ptasiewicz while Googling paintings by Graham Sutherland and felt I had to comment on a number of points, even though the thread was started in 2003. Mr. Ptasiewicz writes, “For years we had seen, and were familiar with, the photograph of Churchill by Karsh, which captured his personality totally. So there was a great expectation that a painting would be even better.” Was there expectation that a painting would be even better? How do you know? Is a painting automatically better than a photograph? “However the final portrait just couldn’t compete with the public image we all had. Sutherland had painted a grumpy old man…” Well, probably he was a grumpy old man. But the painting (alas, only in reproduction) shows a grumpy old man with tremendous character and charisma. Are you saying that the painting should have depicted ‘the public image we all had,’ even if Sutherland felt that wasn’t the truth? It’s very likely Churchill didn’t get on with Sutherland, as he made no secret of his antipathy toward ‘Modern Art’ (i.e. anything after the Impressionists). “…and despite lots of pressure otherwise, it was so despised by Lady Churchill, that upon Winston’s death, she destroyed it.” Yes, that was unforgiveable. A selfish, philistine act. “There was a tremendous public relief; the masses hated it.” Was there really? Who showed that relief (apart from Mr. and Mrs. Churchill)? And who exactly are the masses? The taste of the masses, even if they exist, is not the best guide to quality in art. “We were told that this was great art, and it wasn’t.” Told by whom? Very few artists deserve to be called ‘great.’ Sutherland probably isn’t a great artist, but he’s a very, very good one whose reputation is rising once more after a period of neglect. The Churchill portrait was probably his best commissioned portrait (although it was said that he couldn’t get the feet right and decided to paint them out) and, in my humble opinion, it was a criminal act to destroy it. As a postscript, according to a Daily Telegraph story from 2015, Churchill's private secretary destroyed the painting, with Mrs Churchill giving her blessing after the fact. In the mid- to late 1960s I was making paintings based on mathematical sequences (simple ones), and when I found out about the golden ratio it made an enormous impression on me. The thought that a single proportion (1 to 1.618, or in linear terms, a+b is to a as a is to b) and the related Fibonacci sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. (every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones) lay behind structures in art and nature such as ancient Greek architecture, sunflower seed patterns, the growth of shells, and human beings’ preferred rectangular proportion, was mind-boggling. Although the concept of the golden ratio as a universal law (and its use by ancient Greek architects) has been disputed, some scientists maintain that it is present at the atomic scale. |