Time:

Total time: 6 Hours

Preparing card: 1 hour

Prepare 10 postcard size pieces of card, 5 black and 5 white.

I discovered postcard size is A6 so found some thin white card and cut it with a Stanley knife, using a folded piece of A4 card to mark up rather than measuring. You have to hold the metal ruler down really hard to stop it slipping.

Next, I chose poster paint to paint the grounds as it’s nicer to use but discovered it doesn’t have the same opacity as acrylic so had to do three coats.

The first coat in black with a round brush gave some very interesting results as the brush-marks were preserved in the paint.

One coat:

If this was on a big enough canvas I could almost hang it on my wall.

It reminded me of grasses and some Saatchi Art online paintings, or paintings you get in John Lewis that go well with your interior decoration. I could imagine if you used colours with a house brush you could get some really interesting results. I guess for oils or acrylic you’d have to add some kind add additive?

I don’t know if any serious abstract artist (rather than interior decoration art) has used this process? But, with my ‘do stuff to earn a living’ head on, better than a day job and pays for my art, this might be something to come back to?

Two coats:

The tonal differences are less, but still interesting.

However, it’s not a black ground so I gave it a third coat (and on the principal that the white looked okay but probably had the same problems, gave that another two coats).

As I wanted to get on, I used a big flat brush for the third coat and loaded it with paint.

3rd coat:

Here the brushstrokes have gone, but it’s still a bit blotchy. Which is a lesson, as I think one coat of acrylic would probably have given me an even coat.

Again, it exemplifies the different properties of the different mediums.

However, for this exercise I’m going to accept that as black.

Paintings:

Generally in the exercise book the instructions are unclear to very unclear (I think the whole book could be re-written and then tested by some students) so as ever it’s a case of making my best guess.

I’m going to take 5 found images and then paint one black card and one white card with each given medium.

Just found these…

Which are much thicker and stronger than the thin card I used for the poster paint so am going to paint them with acrylic. This might be sacrilidge, and maybe the poster paint would have adhered better to watercolour paper than shiny card? But I can’t follow every option and have got to keep this in bounds.

As expected the acrylic covered with one coat… surprisingly, given the thickness of the card, it curled, but should flatten when it dries.

I don’t know which I’ll use? The shiny acrylic on thick paper (more stable)… or the thinner matt poster paint. I might pick and choose?

Painting ten ‘cards’: 5 hour so far…

1 and 2: (black ink)… I’m going to use the poster paint ground as I think the ink might not ‘take’ on the shiny acrylic and I want to be able to use all the tones. If I find the ink pulls the poster paint off the card I’ll switch to acrylic.

I don’t know if I love this or hate it? It’s certainly unexpected.

I painted this with just undiluted ink getting the tonal changes by leaving areas blank and overlaying others with two or three coats to get a deeper black.

The black Africa confuses the reading but I think it has movement and looks a little like an etching.

Now on white poster paint…

Bits of this work quite well but some of the shape is wrong like on the outstretched arm. And the white poster paint bled into the watery ink (not into the concentrated ink) which gave me a grey. I decided to use the ‘accident’ and use it as a technique.

The result is that some bits are worked too much, but others work very well.

Ironically, and it’s the same lesson again, the shirt with creases works well and this wasn’t worked but done very quickly and intuitively.

I found the small size hard and the pieces of card moved around, so if I was working on this professionally rather than an exercise I’d have to find a way of securing my ground.

3 and 4: (black acrylic paint)… I’m going to use the poster paint here too but this time because the slight tonal, textural and reflective differences between the matt poster paint and shiny acrylic I should have more to work with.

I don’t feel this has worked… though the photograph looks nothing like the painting.

To hold and feel it looks/feels like an old negative. And it constantly changes depending on where the light source is.  Maybe some paintings are better as ‘sculptures’ or ‘transitory’ art and need to be handled. The only problem is they wouldn’t last long and how do you earn a living from that?

I tried a different approach to painting this and started with the small figure first trying to imagine I was looking at these two small children playing and capture the spirit of movement and depth in a small space, neither of which come across in the photograph which is beautifully taken but ‘frozen’.

I think I’ve been partially successful as the bigger size and hard black line on the nearer child’s raincoat puts them nearer to me and gives a sense of depth; the eye also starts to move between the two children.

And even though the drawing on the distant child is not as accurate as I did when I was more careful this has captured something of the joy and fun, and self-absorption, of the children that the earlier painting didn’t.

5 and 6: (white gouache)… I’ll try the acrylic – if it doesn’t stick on the shiny surface  I’ll go onto the poster paint. But gouache has glue in it so it should be okay?

White on white, even though these whites are very different, is very difficult to read and I found myself trying to build up the gouache into impasto.

You might be able to make a ghostly image which would be ideal for something, but I don’t feel gouache is a natural candidate for impasto.

This was very interesting as it’s a negative to the Mondrian but doesn’t seem to read as a negative, it reads in the same way.

I’m quite please with this as although the drawing is not accurate on the arms, they’re too short. I like the way the right arm rests on the leg and tilts the body… if I were working on this some more I would lesson the shading under the right elbow as it’s too wide/doesn’t work.

However, this is beginning to take on a character of its own and I’m very pleased with that.

I’ll mention it now, as I’ve just thought of it, and at the end in my notes. But I haven’t noticed the absence of colour at all, which give my love of colour, I find really weird. Maybe I’m picking up on the tonal differences in the colour as much as the hue?

7 and 8: (white acrylic paint)… I’ll try it on the acrylic, so I have a comparison with the acrylic on poster paint.

This is not as awful as I thought… I think the brushstrokes are more effective than the impasto.

I’m quite pleased with this especially the neck and shirt. They have an almost physical quality which I like, they’re obviously painted but have got a presence.

The face isn’t quite the right shape, it’s slightly too long and top part of the face is angled back, but parts of it are beginning to work… (I enjoyed doing this)… it’s like lights flickering on and off. It almost comes to life and then it dies.

But it definitely potential, and I like the combination. Something about the physical and textural quality of the black and white working together is very satisfying. Though from a ‘curator’ aspect I guess you’d have to varnish it to protect the poster paint and stop the sunlight bleaching the pigment which I guess is poor quality.

It’s weird but doing all these small paintings is helping me to get back into drawing and giving me more confidence.

9 and 10: (grey acrylic)… Just for the heck of it I’m going to use one each of the backing, the white poster paint and black acrylic ground.

The tonal range is reduced by using grey/white rather than black white… but the poster paint dissolved in some of the thinner back acrylic and gave me more tonal options.

I’m quite pleased how the boat stands out, the clouds/smoke and the layering of the grey to make darker marks in the water. This is an example of media working together and how your technique changes: for example if the white had been acrylic I couldn’t have ‘dissolved’ it into the grey acrylic.

Lots of things wrong with this but as a quick sketch it’s okay… I think the best bit is that it captures a distance between the boat and the buildings.

I tried to dilute the acrylic and layer it to give me a range of tones to work with. This has partially worked but parts of it are a bit blocky, and I’ve all but lost the boat. It’s not as effective as the acrylic poster paint combination.

The very thin grey acrylic pooled or spotted the surface and didn’t take any shape, such as smoke, but the thicker grey merged into one tone.

It’s got something but the techniques I tried using are not as effective as the last painting because of the combination of mediums.

Brief notes:

I made extensive notes as I went along, I find this helps me reflect and focus my learning, so these notes are going to be brief.

1. Black and white..

I think my biggest surprise was how much I enjoyed working in black and white and how little I missed colour.

There is a clarity, sculptural quality and strength to black and white (and tones in between) that is very appealing. And I almost see the colours, I certainly see the 3D ness, which is a bit weird. It’s made me think maybe part of my love of colours comes from the tonal and saturation differences rather than the hue.

2) Acrylic…

Another surprise was how, after using acrylics for a year and seeing them as something I’d always and only use, I can now see their faults. They are one medium with strengths and weaknesses rather than THE medium: they don’t smell, are bright, dilute in water and dry quickly… but they dry on the palette as you paint so flow is a problem, they dry darker which is a problem for matching colours and re-mixing the same colour and they mix in a funny gluey way, once painted they are fixed forever after a few minutes and they have a very unique way of going onto the canvas.

3) Ground…

The ground medium combination affects your painting and technique. It has made me realise that different grounds/mediums are tools for doing a job and some will do a job better than others, so you need to pick the appropriate ones.

 

Time spent:

Total: 16 hours

Brief: 1 hour

Preparing surfaces: 2 hours

Picking found images: (Not recorded – they just came together over about a week)

Painting images: 13 hours

Brief: Use found images, the only criteria is that I like an image and want to paint it.

This is very interesting as I’ve already discovered something about myself and my relationship to images just by trying to find my found images.

I’m an actor so I searched through all my film magazines as well as postcards I’d saved over the years, museum handouts and random photographs. What I discovered was that I didn’t like any of the magazine photographs (well, one so far, and that was on a postcard) or glossy photographs, but love all the museum handouts, postcards of art and museum ephemera.

However, I think I have some reasons.

I’ve been filmed a lot over the years – both stills and film – and done a little semi professional photography and commercial photographs all look totally manufactured. They are photoshopped to death and lit from multiple unnatural angles. When a film crew have taken four hours to light a square meter of space for a beer commercial, like a 3D light sculpture, and you stand in as an actor with your clothes bulldog clipped to look just right and shiny gold paper to make your beer look attractive… you can’t take the  photograph seriously… when you have worked with an actor who looks 60 if he’s a day and they photoshop him to look 40 it makes me laugh. They are lies on glossy paper.

My personal snaps are social records to aid memory and not something I want to paint.

The postcards of art are really attractive to me, but these are already interpreted and full of artistic vision I connect with. So, I’m not sure if that counts as a found image, though there is a huge variation in the photoshopping of the original painting and the quality of the print/postcard. So I think it is a found image.

On Practice of Painting I had a revelation… I started off thinking, and feeling, copying photographs was the way to go. But by the end of the course I found the only useful photographs were ones I’d taken myself. Where I’d experienced the view and had physical and emotional memories. Other photographs were just coloured marks on shiny paper.

I discovered I needed to paint meaning.

My photographs were acting as a memory jogger, not something to copy. In short, I started Practice of Painting thinking copying a visual reality was what painting was all about but ended thinking that was about the only think it wasn’t about.

So, I shall cast my net wider and buy a stack of newspapers. These might also yield some black and white images.

I’m not going to count fine art photographs, which are achingly beautiful and full of meaning, as these are even nearer to their original form than photographs of paintings, and is a work of art a ‘found image’?

However, I had a long chat with my partner who suggested labels, which I immediately found attractive, though I can’t quite explain why. And as ephemera I think these would count.

…….

I’ve just spent six hours researching all the artists and their approaches mentioned in ‘Preparation for working with found images’.

Directly, in finding images ‘I like and would want to paint’ (which is the brief) it hasn’t helped as none of these artists painted random images they liked. They either had a theme, such as Dictators in Childhood – and then sourced the images – or used them as a tool, as Degas did by taking his own photographs of spontaneous poses.

How they used the images is more useful and has given me several ideas from Richter’s overpainted photographs to Andy Warhol’s prints via Annie Kevan’s loose and thin.

However, as if by magic, or some inexplicable osmosis it doesn’t seem a problem any more.

So I’m ready to select.

….

Preparing the surfaces:

This was fun, took much longer than I expected, and gave me some very interesting results. I’ll photograph them all – but from what I remember my biggest surprises were: how bright the poster paint was; that all the paper curled even though I used 200gm HP watercolour paper and how the very thin acrylic held the brushstrokes like Mimei Thompson.

My found images:

It was unclear how many to find so I thought I’d start with 20 for my 20 pieces of paper.

(I found putting these in a mosaic very interesting as I started finding connections and can see how you could have lots of fun, and tell different stories by changing the order.)

 

 

Painting images:

I decided to add a random element and mix up my backgrounds then go through the list of colours in the exercise book, which I’d alternated 3,2,3,2… (to give me 20) and allocated the mediums. This way I wasn’t second guessing and which was best for which picture and would get more experimentation. My found images were also randomly mixed.

For instance I started with three black paintings, one with watercolour, one acrylic and one poster paint. Then picked the first prepared background and first found images off their piles.

As I’ll forget I’m going to make very brief notes as I go. I’ve allowed 30 minutes per painting to include photographing and writing up.

(1) Black watercolour on thinned acrylic. Monet…

I was worried as this was multicoloured and much of the effect (I thought) was to do with colour)… but I discovered even though the cathedral and the water are black if you change your brushstrokes it differentiates them. Then if you add short brushstrokes you can differentiate water.

Watercolour is a revelation, I’ve never used it freely before.

You can thin it… or apply it thick… you can build up layers over dry paint, or wet in wet, and this changes the ‘mass’ or density of what you’re painting. And by using your brush in different ways I managed to approximate the sky.

I know it’s a bit of fun but I’m amazed how versatile watercolour is and how effective this is. I didn’t have any expectations when I started.

(2) Black acrylic on thinned watercolour. Photograph of Freddie Mercury from the film.

I don’t want to be flippant but this medium thing is great. And even then I overworked this… But, the acrylic had totally different properties from the watercolour.

It took much longer to dry, you couldn’t pull it off once you’d painted it, it thinned differently, it went on the paper differently, it set into the paper immediately it touched it, as soon as it was dry you could paint over it without smudging or lifting… if it was a person you’d be talking to a different friend… it has a different personality from watercolour.

I’m amazed how effective this is given how unrealistic and loose the image is, and how quickly I painted it. That’s a big thing for me to learn.

I mainly used a single big brush, for the size of paper, because I was working so quickly, but I think the size and type of brush would give you lots of options, as well as how you used them.

Suddenly, it’s like I’m starting to learn to paint all over again.

I like it.

3) Poster paint on thin black ink. Black and white photograph of Roma from glossy booklet promoting the film. Two children catching rain in cups.

I didn’t think I’d capture anything with black on black but the thin black ink is grey, so gives me a tonal range when compared to the black. Working with a limited tonal range is interesting, this was a technique used by Whistler on some of his prints, and it shows just how much information tonal changes convey and how subtle we are at reading them.

I worked quickly and corrected as I went which is all captured, but if I could do this first time it would be a valid technique.

The ink is fixed so I didn’t have any problem with any of the background moving.

It’s funny, there are bits of this that are working quite well, and have captured the feel of children playing. What I’m learning is how forgiving the eye/brain is and how little information it needs to make a picture. And it’s not necessarily the bits I reworked but a bold fluid stroke that just worked first time.

4) White acrylic on white poster paint. Black and white photograph of Roma from glossy booklet promoting the film. Lead woman crossing an Italian street.

Although this doesn’t read as a woman walking across a busy street it was great to work on and I learned some important things.

As you haven’t got colour or any tone to speak of you have to rely on the surface texture to transmit your message, how shiny it is and it’s ‘3D’ ness. This pushed me to paint impasto and also to think about detail.

Acrylic is very unforgiving and messy as it holds its shape once you put it on so it’s very difficult to overpaint mistakes and your marks become confusing.

The other thing that struck me was the role of detail and ‘tightness’ in a painting, as this forced me to abandon both… what began to happen was that I was ‘feeling’ the woman. Not exactly sculpting but trying to draw shapes of mass and fluid lines of movement.

A very different way of relating to the painting but one which I could imagine some artists relishing.

On looking again, this is not awful, awful… it does have some merits: as the ghostly shapes emerge and you have to work hard to recreate the scene which gives you a different kind of engagement with the canvas till you begin to ‘see’ it. But not in an exterior, looking at a photograph kind of way, in an actually walking across a street kind of way!

5) White gouache on black gouache. Black and white photograph of Roma from glossy booklet promoting the film. The director Alfonso Cuarón at work.

In theory this should give me the complete tonal range as I have black to white.

This was very complicated to work on as the gouache started to dry, so I had to constantly alter its consistency, and the black gouache started to dissolve and bleed into the white.

Annoyingly the bits I worked quickest on are the most effective, like the bricks. this seems to be a consistent message that’s coming through. Working quickly and confidently and the power of confident brushstrokes.

I like the tonal spread across his jacket, the white/black on the right and the greys on the left are very effective.

His face isn’t quite right, I accidentally overpainted it and had to redo it which didn’t help. But there are elements that work. And it’s just struck me that you can give different blocks of the painting different tonal identities, like his head… which is a bit abstract but is maybe something I could play with in future. The highlight/lines on the head are too much.

I sort of knew this, but seeing in light and dark is almost as important as seeing in colour.

6) Watered down watercolour and grey poster paint. Julian Trevelyn self-portrait, colour.

The yellow watercolour didn’t lift like the gouache, it only lifted when I removed some of the grey and rubbed it with a wet brush.

This whole exercise is lots of fun…

The grey and yellow make a really spooky combination. I would never, ever have thought of this… and it’s different from black, the grey does something. I used a big brush for this, and a couple of smaller brushes, just to see what would happen… the different brushes give you different options with the big brush making some really interesting background marks.

The jacket works really well.

I know this is copied from a Julian Trevelyn catalogue, so he’s done 99.99% of the work, but it’s actually remarkably effective. In terms of this course if I’d decided to paint a minor coming out of the pit, dehumanized, grimy… the human cost of our energy… an industry that should be a fossil… I might have chosen this combination.

I didn’t, it was a pure accident, but I can see how choosing the right medium can enhance your message.

It also make me think how strong images can be re-interpreted and given a new meaning.

The actual painting, much to my surprise, has captured something of the original and looks remarkably like it in a weird way.

7) Varnish and grey gouache. Mondrian: Portrait of a Bearded Man

Very interesting… I had to rub the paint in to get a wash, otherwise it went into tiny droplets. And I could wipe the gouache off the varnish and repaint… this was a mixed blessing as it meant I was tempted to overcorrect.

Funny how the thin paint keeps its brushstrokes.

I’m not sure how good a combination this is? If I could use the qualities of the paint on a shiny surface then it would enhance my painting, but I was working against the natural inclination of the medium and surface.

8) Watered down watercolour and grey acrylic. Mondrian; Portrait of a Young Woman, Seated

Again, the watered down watercolour was amazingly fixed. The acrylic did it’s thing and once down couldn’t be lifted, but also it dries quickly so you can overlay thin layers of paint (which is what I did with the hair) to get some subtle tones.

The hand is much too dark.

Mondrian, though I love the shapes is very difficult to copy… when you start you realise just how well he understood the underlying shapes. His exaggeration/stylization is a visual language evolved out of a deep understanding of form – we intrinsically understand the face but I don’t understand his visual language… the answer would be to get a stack of paper and boldly have a go… after a couple of hundred I might just be getting the idea.

I think it’s a combination of Egyptian and Chinese.

9) Poster paint and poster paint. Pierre Bonnard – Still Life

I loved doing this. The complexity and subtlety of colours he used yet the perfect logic and simplification. He was pure genius. He has perfectly captured the purple/blue tones to show the bowl.

I really like this, it has captured something… now if I could just do this without copying…

The poster paints were lovely to work with as they didn’t dry up and the colour didn’t darken as it dried. This made it easy to mix colours quickly. On the downside it was a bit gloopy and I had to be inventive to get the different brushstrokes I wanted.

As it was so nice to work (and cheap) with it would be good to know how colourfast the pigments are, I suspect not very… which would make curating works difficult… maybe coating with varnish that protects against UV light would prolong a painting’s life? Could I use poster paint on canvas?

I also like the way the coloured background has shown through the white and looks like a tablecloth.

As it’s produced a similar result, I wonder if oil is anything like poster paint to work with? (Apart from the hassle cleaning brushes and the smell)

10) Varnish and acrylic paint. Linocut print for Norfolk wildlife trust

This was the opposite of the previous painting, the acrylics started to dry almost as soon as I mixed them… and the colours dried darker… which made it hard to paint.

The acrylic went on the varnish easily and seemed no different to working on a gessoed canvas, apart from the paper lets you slide the paint about.

Also, I felt like I was copying whereas with the Bonnard I felt I was painting the actual fruit. This uses a different visual language, which is interesting but not one I know. It’s very linear and full of detail, which is ironic as I’ve always thought of linocuts as ‘blocky,, but then I’ve never done one so don’t know why I would assume that… because the colours are flat?

I always try to find something I like… and am quite pleased with the shape of the swans.

11) Thinned black ink and very watered down red watercolour. Black and white newspaper photograph of The Specials 1980.

Much to my amazement this works. Another combination I would never have put together.

You can read it’s a band on stage… you can even see the mic.

And maybe because it’s so indistinct you can paint it with colour and sound yourself.

It would need finessing but with the idea of faded memories or trying to catch a feeling of the essence of the band this is strangely effective.

12) Acrylic and very watered down blue watercolour. Julian Trevelyn Renoir gone wrong

My first thoughts were that this was a pointless exercise (acrylic is waterproof, this is bright and the watercolour is so this it won’t mark it) and I should cheat and swap the ground… but you never know so I did it anyway.

While I was painting it I thought nothing was happening, I could see very faint lines… but I was painting ‘blind’ as I couldn’t see where I had applied the paint (and it’s quite a complicated painting).

However, when I photographed it something a little bit magical had happened. The watercolour had changed the acrylic ground. Very subtly the lines, marks and ghostly stains affected the painting. It would be going too far to say it’s beautiful, but it has the potential to be beautiful when the ground on its own was just bright and boring.

Ironically, this is one of the biggest discoveries I’ve made so far in this exercise.

13) White HP watercolour paper and very watered down yellow watercolour. Guardian photograph bees.

I got a little mark on the paper from the table, so need to put a fresh piece of paper down, but decided not to repaint it and incorporate the accident. I don’t think it adds to the painting in any way, but equally don’t think it stops me learning any lessons that might be there.

I’m not very happy with this, maybe there was a better way of approaching it?

I went down the mass of repeated pattern, archetypal bee route.

It may be that the photograph, when I got to it, didn’t inspire me? I’ve never kept bees and though they’re very useful don’t have any connection with them. It’s another lesson in just how sensitive the canvas is to your connection to it… in the same way that tone of voice tells us lots of things the speaker doesn’t intend, so I think the canvas reveals lots of things about the artists connection to his painting.

In my, find one thing good, I may have captured a tiny bit of buzz and movement.

14) White HP watercolour paper with watered down black ink. C.S.Lowry

It’s amazing how iconographic this is… as a thumbnail on my lap top it’s instantly recognisable as a Lowry even though I’ve only done part of the painting.

I stopped after 30 minutes as I could easily have spent another hour adding more people.

What struck me about this is what a lovely medium ink is. I’ve not used it before and was able to start getting all sorts of effects like layering and bleeding. And the tonal range is amazing, it’s almost as if I had colour.

In a funny way, it makes colour seem a bit of a gaudy distraction, I love colour, but this gives you some wonderful tonal structures.

Lowry’s people are very evocative of movement even though strictly speaking he takes lots of liberties, which teaches me, again, to go for the quick fluid brushstrokes. It’s amazing how forgiving the eye is.

I can see that if you used this medium regularly you could do amazing things with it.

15) White HP watercolour paper with thinned black ink. Black and white newspaper photograph of Don McCullin

Lovely to work with and you could do a fantastic portrait with diluted ink if you had the skill.

I tried to loosen up and used a big brush as well as smaller brushes, but the ink is quite unforgiving and once it’s on you can’t really lighten it so if you accidentally paint over a highlight you can’t get it back.

This shows my lack of experience with this medium and lack of skill with faces but I think it also shows potential as this is recognizably Don McCullin and some bits are working well. I think the looser style is more effective.

16) Coloured gouache splodges with thinned acrylic. Photograph of frosty dawn.

Very interesting… having thought acrylic was the ONLY medium to paint with, it now feels like painting with glue. And all its bad habits are hoving into view; quick drying on your palette, funny to mix and drying darker.

It’s like only having had one friend (your next door neighbour in your tiny village) and not seeing any of their faults and suddenly moving to the city and being introduced to a classroom full of people. Your relationship changes and you become aware of other people and their strengths and weaknesses.

As to the actual painting of this it was in two halves… 55 minutes on the background, and 5 minutes on the tracks. I’d aimed for 30 minutes a painting and set a maximum of an hour.  Yet the tracks are more effective and appealing than the rest of the painting.

Plus in painting this I noticed all sorts of things about it, such as the moon and subtle colour shifts, which in an hour I couldn’t match. Maybe layering would be a better option than mixing? The background didn’t help in the sky… but worked on the foreground, so maybe you could pre-paint a painting with different backgrounds in different parts of the painting?

17) White acrylic with thinned gouache. Photograph of Rachel (my son’s partner) in a Chinese restaurant in Manchester on Chinese new year.

You realise when you’re trying to paint thin how much detail is in a photograph like this… not least the background. It’s all about what you don’t put in; both at all… and it terms of detail in things you do include.

I tried to work quicker than the last acrylic painting and change my style to be loose from the start, and not worry too much if things went in the wrong place.

Although I can see a lot wrong with this I’m quite pleased. In a strange way the thrust of the body is right and very bizarrely, to me at least, looks 3D. I’m also quite please with the drinks and bits on the table, especially the prawn crackers and yellowy lager.

Next time I need to change my water, use more than one brush… I thought if I used a fairly thick brush it might force me to work quick and loose. And pay more attention to my colour hygiene.

As before, I stopped at an hour. Maybe still too long but a step forward in not spending forever on a ‘quick’ painting.

(PS: I changed the composition – I missed out all the background tables – as I was fast approaching my hour. This has changed the meaning from a painting of a camera-shy woman avoiding the lens to a sad woman alone in a restaurant. And from a shared meal the viewer just arriving at the table. It’s very interesting how little and loose can convey so much.)

18) Black acrylic and thinned gouache. photograph of Rachel, this time looking the camera and sharing a joke with her partner taking the photograph.

Oooooops!!! This took 1 hour and 50 minutes.

But a lot of strong points, a mixture of very thin and not quite so thin, but was having such a good time I didn’t want to stop the leaning.

Parts of this are really working well… the hands, the bread, the food. Faces are still difficult, and I’m mixing so quickly and working intuitively that when I stop to draw breath my palette is all mixed up and it’s difficult to find any colours to go back in. But, that said, I think my faces are slowly getting better.

And, again, the bits that have worked best are those I did quickly and loosely.

This exercise has really scuppered my boat for white canvas, but there are so many options from black through multicoloured to white that I’m now a bit lost. I think the trick is to choose the backing as carefully as the medium. White might bounce back and make colours glow, but another colour may enhance an effect or unify a colour composition.

19) Grey watercolour and varnish. Photograph of iced puddle.

The varnish picks up the watercolour from the paper and leaves semi white bits of paper when applied heavily with a big brush, with a smaller brush the varnish leaves a dark mark. There’s also a ‘shiny’ effect depending on the light source.

This is semi interesting, though I didn’t want the paint lifting, the differences in tone allow for mark making. There is a pattern and, if you have the source photograph, you can read the puddle, stones and iced blades of grass.

As a by-product, and it’s not captured here, but the swirls in the iced puddle are really fluid and would make the basis for a great meditative abstract.

20) Grey Gouache and varnish. Found piece of drawing paper with interesting marks.

The varnish didn’t lift the gouache at all but it did darken it considerably. This gives me a two-tone painting plus reflections… therefore I tried to use different brushes to change the brushstrokes to give it interest.

I’m not sure it’s worked as it was more interesting when I was painting it than when it dried because I could see the brushstrokes much better. However, given persistence and sufficient skill I think it would be able to create something worthwhile… so it’s worth filing away for the right painting.

………….

I have already recorded all the grounds and mediums in my log as I went along.

Which materials did you like and dislike and why?

I disliked the acrylic because it was like painting wiuth glue when compared to gouache or poster paints and because it dried so quickly that I was constantly having to adjust the flow. It also dries darker and once it’s on you can’t lift it as in seconds it’s permanent.

Mediums:

I loved poster paints as they flowed so nicely, dried the same colour and were lovely and bright.

I liked the gouache for the same reason as the poster paint, but disliked the mudiness of even the bright colours. And being opaque can be useful but it means you can’t build up washes or glazes.

I loved the diluted in as it was a joy working with so many tones… it was almost like working with colour and the effects were wonderful.

Grounds:

The different grounds were a revelation and it will be difficult to work with a white ground again unless I want to. The ground completely altered the painting and how I painted it… at the moment it’s just like having discovered a new colour. I think the choice of ground is important but I need to digest the exercise and start thinking about it for the future.

I think it’s a case of experimenting as I go along, I don’t know enough to make precise choices yet, it’s going to be more educated guesses and seeing what happens. White if I want the reflection of light back through transluscent paint to make it glow… or maybe just to make subtle colours pop a little bit… mid tones will unify a painting and give me a base tone to work against… patches may give movement under a flat wash… the possibilities are endless.

If I did this again what would I change and how would I develop it further?

I think not prejudging this exercise was the best way to go (if I’d tried to match medium to ground to image I would have missed lots of random effects which taught me that just about anything can work for the right subject) and I’ve discovered that the mediums and grounds all have very different qualities.

So, if I were doing this for the first time I’d keep the exercise the same.

I’d develop it by in three ways…

1. By choosing a single image and painting it in a random combination of grounds and mediums. This way I’d start to discover what the different combinations brought to the image.
2. I’d try and find the best ground and medium for my 20 images.
3.  Finally I’d get 20 medium/ground combinations and try and find an image that was perfect for that combination.

I’d keep the scale the same.

The outcomes should improve, by being both more aesthetically pleasing and more accurately hold my meaning. And I’d start to build up a library of combinatiuons of ground and medium I could use for painting.

I think, having done this exercise, and everytging I’ve read abouyt oils that this has brought me much closer to wanting to give oild a go… I suspect they may be wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time spent: 6 hours

As working with found images is totally new to me I think it would be useful if I spent some time researching the suggested artist before I start my first exercise.

Luc Tuymans: b. 1958

(Below is a paraphrasing from the Tate Biography)

Mainly painting – also film/printmaking.

Mass media images and changes them, often photographs or film stills… then degrades them by re-photographing… parallels loss surface in his painting by using cheap materials and distressed finishes.

About: loss of meaning and failure of representation.

Paintings: portray anxiety/impending doom – atmosphere – using everyday objects/unidentified sitters… but appear tranquil. Hidden meaning by using titles such as ‘Child Abuse’.

…..

He’s also paints famous people from life, such as Queen Beatrix, which is hardly a found image, and I struggled to find a typical image as his output varies so much.

However, I found this one below.

Issei Sagawa

2014

This man murdered and cannibalized a fellow student in 1981 while studying in Paris. This is taken from a photograph Tuymans took on his phone from a documentary about Sagawa. The photograph is of Sagawa as a young man before the crime.

I can understand the theory about degrading an image, and about hidden meaning and loss of meaning… there’s a fear in the eyes of the portrait above and you can see the monster that would commit the crime. None of this was in the opriginal p[hotograph so he is dealing with hidden meanings.

It is an image he took for a project he was developing, so I am not sure if that is a found image.  But it is an image that has been given a new new (truer) meaning and says something about our use of images and how we hide our true selves… most people put the best ‘picture’ of themselves on their social media.

So, it’s a visual comment on an ongoing debate based in a specific incident, but you need to know the context for it to make sense. If you don’t the painting has no meaning. So on one level, it’s just a random photograph repainted with loose brushstrokes, where there is skill there but no interest or meaning.

As a template for working with found images, this doesn’t appeal.

Gerhard Richter: b. 1932

Richter’s childhood sounds difficult with lots of traumatic changes caused by the second world war and the nature of his world-changing at key times in his life. One might speculate this effected his view of permanence and of the reality of meaning in images.

I know his drag paintings, that he used photographs in his landscape work and have seen his early re-imaginings of photographs (they look just like the original but are painted) such as his painting of the Dresden bombers.

But for this exercise I discovered his technique of overpainting photographs which he started in the 1980’s and is still doing today.

The book: Gerhard Richter (2015). Overpainted Photographs. London: Heni Publishing, 2015. 1120.

A review says: (https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Overpainted_Photographs.html?id=-1BGrgEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y)

I paraphrase to make it more readabl;e:

This book features informal overpainted photographs from an extended period. Richter has obscured these often innocuous snapshots under layers of paint and transformed their visual meaning to create a fascinating and dreamlike body of work.

I like these but don’t understand them… and wouldn’t want one unless it was free. The paint isn’t random, but I don’t know the visual language, so it’s a bit like listening to Chinese… they may be reciting the most wonderful story or poem but all I hear is a musical voice, a lilting cohesion without meaning.

All the paintings seem to have a different personality: sometimes the paint is a screen through which you view the photograph; sometimes (as here) it’s integrated into the photograph to create a new meaning; sometimes it is like a cancerous growth inside the photograph; sometimes it forms part of the painting and sometimes… I guess it does lots of other things.

They are fun, and part of the original found image is still there, but he creates an entirely new image.

However, as a technique, it’s a way I could approach found images.

Annie Kevans: b. 1972

Her Wikipedia entry says she paints series of ‘portraits’ that explore sometimes controversial concepts and alternative histories, but that they are, “portraits only in a loose sense… her works being a composite of existing images, research and imagination”. Jones, Alice (27 November 2011). “Observations: Annie Kevans – There’s more to these faces than meets the eye”. The Independent.

Looking on her website: https://www.anniekevans.com/lostboys I found she paints series of paintings around a theme. For example her degree show in 2004 featured paintings of political dictators as children, Saatchi bought the whole collection. This is a great idea and gives the paintings an identity as a collection which is easy to market.

It also nicely packages up a meaning (and connects her paintings to the fame of the person she’s painting, for instance lots of people wanted to buy Hitler as a child, which instantly raises the profile opf all the paintings in the series) that can go along with any of the paintings: what were the dictators like as children? How did they become those adults? Also if at least one is bought by a known collector you feel like you’re in an exclusive club and the value of the whole series rises, a bit like limited edition prints only with original paintings.

I chose a painting from her series Lost Boys, about child stars… many of whom never made the transition into adult stars and had drug problems and were humiliated and vilified in the press.

River Phoenix

As she didn’t know River Phoenix as a child this must be from a publicly available image, probably a publicity photograph judging by the pose.

This is a great painting as it’s recognizably Phoenix with just a few loose brushstrokes. And is a perfect example of less is more.

However, it’s not really a found image in the sense of a random appealing image, it’s a carefully sourced image to fulfil a creative brief… photographs of child stars. And is also painted in her own unique style, the found image hasn’t changed her painting style…  the meaning is in the idea and the image is a vehicle to service that idea.

I could have a go at painting a portrait quickly and loosely in thin paint.

Eleanor Moreton: b. 1956

There was nothing about her work I could connect with when I looked at it for my Research point oin contemporary and historical painters. She worked with found images to a formula, selecting anonymous images from the past where people had posed for photographs and then erasing the image to reflect the loss of meaning as those peolple dies and were forgotten.

So there’s nothing about her process of painting with found images that I’d want to pursue.

However, I had another look and found a more recent image.

The Ragged Girl’s Journey (goose girl), 50 x 60 cms  oil on canvas   2018

Unfortunately, I can’t see how this connects to a found image? And I can’t find anything about this painting on the internet. Certainly, there’s no obvious connection to a found image… though it does remind me very strongly of a Gaugin poster I had in my 30’s of a blue girl walking down a path with a big black dog present, even some of the shapes and colours are similar.

Alli Sharma: b.1967 

The OCA introduction says Sharma often uses found images and black and white oil paints or diluted ink for tonal variations.

She draws material (presumably photographs?) from her own past, the cultural past such as women from the 1950’s realist cinema and our relationship to animals. She has examined the morality of pampered bejewelled dogs, the demonisation/fear of harmless bats and animals as entertainment such as her postcards from London zoo; now poignant with cruelty (such as the chimps tea party) but at the time a happy keepsake from a childhood day out.

So again, Sharma is looking at past cultural practices and highlighting changing cultural norms.

London Zoo, Postcard series 2011

Her paintings of forgotten film stars are iconic, just the hair styles and composition identifies them as movie or publicity still and the black and white adds nostalgia.

I chose a chimps tea party.

Not so much found images as a concept driven series of themed paintings clustered around an idea, with the postcards as source material for her meaning. She reintroduces the ‘lost’ postcards as paintings to highlight a cultural change.

Her strength, and all her paintings appear to be fixed in a certain style, is how she captures the essence of a photograph in a few bold brushstrokes of thin paint.

Cathy Lomax: b. 1963

A very interesting Wikipedia entry saying she runs the Transition Gallery, supporting contemporary art by established and emerging artists, publishes an art fanzine called Arty, and is currently studying for Phd in Film Studies.

Lomax says Arty was an antidote to the increasing elitism of established art magazines and a supporter of heartfelt work in tiny galleries. There’s also a quote from Stekla Vine saying how supportive Lomax was.

This begs the question of how much time or interest she has for her own paintings and how they relate to found images.

Fetish Girl by Cathy Lomax 2003 (based on Thora Birch as Enid in the 2001 United Artists film Ghost World

I’m assuming she uses a photograph as the original source, and retitled it. I don’t think there would have been a character (there wasn’t – I checked) called Fetich Girl in the original film.

Again, not really a ‘found’ photograph, more a searched for photograph that she can use to change the meaning.

This was one of the better of her paintings I could find.

Most looked like they had some skill but were not very good fan paintings taken from publicity shots. More weak oil sketches and lacking the flair of Annie Kevans or the skill of Eleanor Moreton.

I could find photographs of famous people and ride on their coattails by repainting them loose and thin.

Walter Sickert: b. 1860 d. 1942

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/walter-richard-sickert-r1105345 The Tate biography is long, detailed and very interesting… however I don’t want to cover all that here.

Suffice it to say he had a long career and constantly reinvented himself, his early training being as a studio assistant for Whistler.

In 1927 he dropped has first name, re-invented himself and became known a Richard Sickert. He still painted domestic interiors, portraits, townscapes and theatrical subjects but now used photographs instead of on the spot drawings.

Again, I don’t think this qualifies as found images… that he suddenly came upon an image he liked and wanted to paint. Much more likely is that he hunted down, or took them himself, images for specific paintings.

I’d need to research more but this sounds like he’d just swapped out his sketchbook for a camera?

The Front at Hove (Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amor), 1930

Faced with a page of Sickert paintings this leapt out as being from a photograph… I wonder what iot was? I think it’s the composition.

What is very interesting is how loose this is, how he’s copied the photographic composition but not the detail, and kept his blurry painting style. It’s sharp and loose at the same time, I really like this… and I love the blue on  the buildings.

I could certainly have a go at painting a photograph in this style.

Any Warhol: b.1928 d. 1927

I have been to two large Warhol exhibitions in the last 20 years and read about his work, so am not coming at this as totally blind as I have to some of the other artists.

His works are very powerful, commercially successful and publicly popular. So he manages to be both art in the old sense of beautiful and popular, but also in the new sense of being ‘academically approved’ modern art.

I think the maxim sex sells is wrong, I think beauty sells. Pornography is very cleverly constructed, whether or not you see its content as dangerous fantasies or harmless fun, the packaging is not ugly, it’s the beauty that makes them effective… and dangerous. People even talk about food pornography when a beautiful image makes you want to gorge yourself. A beautiful image invites the viewer into a shared space and rewards him with a pleasure hit… like nectar for a bee. The viewer is then very receptive to the message, one could almost say they are seduced by ecstasy.

But Warhol’s art is also very political, the content is radical. Maybe not as radical as a message that there’s a magical kingdom you will all go to forever if you follow the beautiful madonna and follow thr strictures of the church, but radical enough. And because he used a common language, the graphic and pop art colours and shapes accessible to everybody, he enfranchised his viewer.

I wonder whether, given the level of control over meaning now, his art would have flourished today as it did in the Wild West of images and ideas of the 60’s?

Maybe he would have sidestepped the meaning mediators and appealed direct to the public? And Doig like, but with a sociopolitical message rather than escapism, achieved fame and success. And as his message doesn’t really challenge the status quo, maybe he would have gained the blessing of the art critics too.

Coming from a background as a commercial ‘artist’ he knew the visual language well, what he did, par excellence, was take these found images and give them a new meaning exploring the relationship between art, celebrity and advertising.

As touched on by this course he used a mixture of media, whatever best expressed his purpose: painting, silkscreen, photography, film, and sculpture.

I’ve chosen his Campbell’s Soup Cans from 1962 as they are his least painterly work from his famous painting:

32 canvases 51 x 41 cm, hand silk screen printed 

Lots of people, including a couple of the artists in this section have used his idea of a collection tied together by a common meaning such as Alli Sharma’s London Zoo Postcards or Annie Kevan’s Dictator’s as Children.

I think this is very clever, it works as a collection and the cans work individually. They are flat and graphic but the slight differences in the red dye point up that these are hand-made and not factory produced. It’s obviously a work of art, it’s nice to look at and makes you think about home-made soup, the lies of the factory advertising, and how we yearn after hand-made products but accept the lie of m,ass produced products sold as, ‘Good as Your Granny Makes’. There’s even a Tesco range of food at the moment featuring ‘nice’ people with ranges of… ‘Mary’s Chicken’ etc… as if they are your mum cooking it for you themselves.

So his message is still relevant today.

I love labels so this is definitely an area I could look at for my found images.

Edgar Degas: b. 1834 d. 1917

Again, I know a little about Degas as I like his work, have seen it in several exhibitions and read about him.

My impression is that he used photography as a technique, or took techniques from photography, such as cropping, rather than chanced upon found images he liked and wanted to paint.

He had a long career, including a stint defending Paris in the 1870’s in the Franco-Prussian war. And went from an early desire to be a History painter in to an Impressionist, if not in his painterly style then at least in his composition as his eyes flicked over scenes and picked up compositions and details other painters may have missed.

Famous for depicting movement; towels move as the women dry themselves; horses whinny and prance and dancers gracefully curtsy. I don’t know his portraits as well but read they are known for their psychological insight and often show human isolation… I wonder if Hopper studied Degas?

It wasn’t until his late 40’s (in the 1880’s) that Degas developed a passion for photography. He threw himself into this new medium photographing friends, artistically in lamplight… which given the technology at the time must have given him some very interesting results… some of these were kept as photographs such as his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmé, while others were used as references for his drawings and paintings.

I didn’t find any reference to him using found images, only to photographs he’d taken himself.

It seems to have been both the muted palette of the photographs (although the first colour photograph was in 1861 it must still have been in its infancy in the 1880’s) and the natural composition (photography allowed spontaneous images for the first time, and it was easy to try new angles) that he copied.

1876 The Ballet Instructor

I hadn’t thought about it before as I wasn’t looking specifically at the colour, more the composition and narrative, but I can see the lack of saturation in these colours. This could have been painted from sketches, but the naturalistic poses (especially of the woman left and fantastically expressive judgemental listening of the nearest ballerina) look more like a spontaneous moment captured by the camera.

It’s the rigour of the old training with the spontaneity of the new medium that make this so exciting.

So, he’s not really using found images, more reinvigorating his practice with a new medium.

Keith Tyson: b. 1969

I am going to paste his Wikipedia entry below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Tyson

“… is an English artist. In 2002, he was the winner of the Turner Prize. His work is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and an embrace of the complexity and interconnectedness of existence.^[1] Tyson works in a wide range of media, including painting, drawing and installation.”

The wide range of media I get, but the other is pure art speak, and actually (when you break it down) means almost nothing. Does it mean he’s interested in how things start (ideas, people, social institutions) and how they are connected?

I couldn’t find the Yellow pages mentioned in the exercise book however I did manage to find this:

KEITH TYSON: SUPERCOLLIDER

16 JAN – 17 MAR 2002
PAST EXHIBITION

This looks like the long-established practice of using ephemera, pages from books, paper bags etc as a painting surface. He’s doodled on some Yellow pages.

Looking through his other work it seemed to split between process painting, pouring paints on discs and letting chance take it’s course; degrading surfaces (again leaving the result to chance) and ‘graffiti’ on found surfaces as above.

It’s ugly, undecipherable and perfectly safe: musing on the connectedness of life is good for us and in any case, the meaning can only be reached through the critics. For ordinary people it absolutely does not do what it says on the tin.

Kurt Schwitters: b. 1887 – d. 1948

Schwitters was a child of his time and circumstance, deeply affected by the collapse of Germany following World War 1 and the Dada movement’s attack on the nature of beauty and it’s connection to the bourgeoise elite who they held responsible for mass murder. Schwitters response was to turn to the rubbish in the streets as a medium instead of paint. Ironically, given that he used rubbish, his arrangements are said to be harmonious and sentimental, but not beautiful. Which begs the question of how relevant his materials were to his art, if he continued to make harmonious art?

As well as collage (using found media) he produced journals, illustrated, painted advertisements, and started Merz, his own journal. In addition, he was a poet and sometimes made poems into sculptures by stringing together musical words.

His sculpture developed onto his Merzbau where he accreted real spaces, adding bits on, till they became walk through sculptures.

It would be interesting to know how popular his collages were at the time? What sort of prices they were fetching? And what the reaction was to having ‘paintings’ made of rubbish? And how the public and the critics reacted?

Opened by Customs 1937–8

I can see that he used rubbish… and paint… and he has obviously had some sort of plan as this is not randomly put together… but am not sure what this says or does. It’s not beautiful and has no aesthetic appeal, neither is it ugly (I think harmonious is a good description). I can’t see how it’s sentimental but that may be historically determined.

Much as I try, unless you had an ideological investment I can’t see why anybody would want this on their wall.

It’s using found media rather than found images, as the ‘images’ are torn up and used a medium to build the painting (in the same way as you might use different oil paints he uses different scraps of paper). As it’s not about the impact of the found image I don’t this wou;d work as a way of usingh found images… unless, of course, I ‘painted’ my found images using rubbish?

 

Time spent:

I’m trying to keep a track on the time I spend on the course so that I can bring it in inside 400 hours.

The first course, Drawing 1, took two years and I guess nearer 800 to 1000 hours, last year, Practice of Painting 1, took a year and was nearer 600 hours. This year I would like to keep it inside the 400 hours, both so I can finish Level 1 within 4 years but also so I can raise my head and spend a lot more time on art outside the course… visiting exhibitions, sketching, log book, general reading and maybe even some of my own projects.

My answer, like being on a diet, is to log all my hours. It’ll keep me on track and make me work faster.

Written response: 20 hours

Visual response: 4 hours

Total for this research point: 24 hours

……………..

Slick, flat paint

Gary Hume, Sarah Morris, Ian Davenport, Inka Essenhigh, Jane Callister and Brian Alfred

I’ll research Gary Hume as it’ll serve as an introduction for me to this painting style and I can carry that over when I come to my likes and dislikes of the other artists, and I’ll have considered what slick, flat paint means.

Gary Hume, b 1962, associated Young British Artists, works in London and Accord, New York.

Medium: Household gloss paints. He chooses this medium because it flows and sets. His works don’t appear to have any brushstrokes so he is doing away with one of the painterly tools, surface and texture, and making them more like photographs?

He also has a psychological reason for choosing household paint, that it is common and everybody has some in their house. Does this mean he is painting for the people? What is his market? How does the medium affect the viewer?

Research Tate studio visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gary-hume-2403/gary-hume-studio-visit (for Tate exhibition May 2013)

He talks about abstract formalism which I take to be found shapes in the real world, as he mentions finding shapes in the environment. Then he makes up a palette (which has nothing to do with representing the original colours). The example he gives is of painting Angela Merkel… he took shapes from her face, meaning from his interest in the rise of German politics and ‘random’ colours to make a meaningful abstract painting. He adds that he lets the painting lead him rather than trying to create a predetermined image. So it’s not about his , the painter’s, intent… his intent is that the painting stands in its own right and through him creates itself.

Aesthetica magazine http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/review-of-gary-hume-at-tate-britain/ said: ‘The man who made a name for himself by painting hospital doors has come a long way with a very simple formula: gloss paint in bold, treading a line between abstraction and figuration.’

I would disagree with this as the paintings I’ve seen have not been bold and are mostly figuratively abstract. You can recognise shapes and faces but the colours are doing something entirely different. And the colours, even if bold, lack emotional energy.

Do I like them?

Gary Hume,  Anxiety and the Horse. Angela Merkel 2011

No.

Why?

They make me feel slightly sick, frustrated and like I have stomach ache.

Firstly I’d have no idea this was about Angela Merkel unless I attended the exhibition and read the title and blurb.

I think the selection of shapes from one object or person matched with the colours based on a psychological interest in something else makes this a process painting. This process gives each painting a strange slippery coherence but the particular shapes and colours don’t matter and are not important to understanding the finished painting, they just give him different visual outcomes.

For me his paintings lack emotional power; it’s almost as if they are emotionally abstracted in the same way that they are pictorially abstracted, one step away from an emotional reality in the same way that he has moved them a step away from a visual reality. More like a Rothko in the sense that I think he is asking for spiritual contemplation rather than emotional engagement. Though I think Rothko’s paintings have a direct emotional connection that Gary Hume’s don’t.

I like something that grabs me by the guts and demands a response, that stimulates and engages me. If it was a person, and for me paintings have personalities as well as meanings, I might find this painting annoyingly disengaged and wishy-washy, and living in its head.

His career is also very interesting as he worked as a film editor up to the 1980’s… did he do paintings as a hobby? Did he lack confidence? Did he not paint at all? He suddenly had an idea that got him attention, his series of infamous door paintings. This shot him to the top of the art tree. Having established himself he changed direction. Why?

Initially he dabbled with sculpture and refers to it in the talk, but is mainly known as a painter. His fame in the Art world was further enhanced in 1999 by representing Britain in the Venice Biennale and being nominated for the Turner Prize.

Title:

I don’t think it has anything to do with the finished painting; it merely refers to the process he used to make the painting, using shapes from Angela Merkel and his interest in German politics. I have no idea what ‘Anxiety and the Horse’ means.

Composition:

They remind me of simplified, non linear Bauhaus house paintings (see below). There’s something about the lack of saturation and the colours that look like they’ve been chosen by theory rather than emotion. And the lack of any complementary colours and visual energy, which is further exacerbated by the lack of brushstrokes.

Walter Gropius – founder of the Bauhaus School

The palette for the Angela Merkel painting is restricted: yellow, green and white. Although they’re harmonious, it’s a sort of ghostly harmony.

Time of production, 2011.

Eight years ago…

In 2011 I can’t remember there being anything other than the normal run of stuff that happens in the world. No major wars, depressions or periods of big technological, social or economic change. There may well have been something personal to Gary Hulmes but there’s no way I could know that.

Sarah Morris, b 1967 in UK, now lives in New York city

Mimei Thompson,

Contemporary British, Tokyo born… she works in thin layers of translucent oil and terms herself  a figurative and process painter.

Like:

I like her fun and non realist approach because it allows me to read emotional narratives into her marks. This reminds me of weeds in a gutter (not a common subject; they remind me of gossiping Saturday shoppers on Oxford Street.

I like the freedom of her quick loose brushstrokes and how they delineate form. It’s a bit like seeing shapes in clouds, but there’s enough there for me to be sure it’s weeds in a gutter.

The simplicity of the background is also very appealing as it blends and enhances the weeds but also gives the painting a little depth.

It feels like the artist is present.

Dislike:

The lack of movement around the painting which I think is due to the composition. Compositionally it reminds me of an all over painting, but the all over is in strips.

I also miss the energy of texture on the surface which thicker paint and brushstrokes bring.

Annie Kevans, b, 1972, lives in France

 

Like:

It’s haunting.

Something about the eyes pulls you in.

I like it because it commands my attention and I connect with it. In some way it’s almost as if Branco is present. The more I look, the more the paint dissolves and I’m looking at the boy, seeing through her eyes.

It’s almost as if  I’m looking inside the boy. In the same way that when you look at somebody you stop seeing their face and just see ‘inside them’ through their eyes.

Dislike:

I don’t like that the face is so  sketchily painted. It’s a place holder for the eyes, and there’s nothing to spoil the illusion of ‘face’, but it’s not quite enough to hold me and sets up a dynamic of staying and looking away, which after a while becomes a distraction.

Kathyn Lomax, b, 1963, London

She was going to leave, 2018, oil on paper, 21x18cm

Like:

I like the composition; how the painting is broken up into strips and the repetition of the colour, which bounces the eye across the painting and creates movement. And the use of the window which breaks up the background around her into geometric shapes.

It reminds me of classical paintings that used curtains or Greek pillars to frame their subject. And the window lights her, so all the focus is put on her.

Dislike:

That she positions it as a narrative with her conversational title, but I can’t read the story in the painting. There’s no mood, no tension and no narrative, it’s just a woman standing at a window with a finger on her mouth.

Also, for me, this looks like an oil sketch for a traditional painting rather than using the loose thin paint as a medium/technique in its own right.

My comparison might be Hopper, who is very filmic, and who I could imagine painting a similar subject, only with the woman smaller. But his would be much more powerful and his medium would match his message. Here the paint is doing one thing, diffusing the image and stepping away from reality, and its title is doing the opposite, trying to portray a very real human dilemma and pull the viewer into the moment, so the painting loses all focus and falls flat on the canvas.

Eleanor Moreton, b, 1956, London

She examines pauses in people’s lives when they presented themselves to the world, such as in historic posed photographs.

Like:

I’m struggling to find anything I like as I can find no way in to connect with the painting, and there’s nothing from a painterly or emotional point of view that I like.

Perhaps the reflections. I like the way the shiny surface (water?) catches the reflections. They read as reflections yet if you look at them closely the reflections are barely there which is very effective in creating a smooth, shiny, but distorted surface.

Dislike:

I dislike that there’s nothing to connect with emotionally and the painting is very cerebral.

The colours have been thinned and sucked dry. The composition matches the original photograph, I assume, and is flat and boring. There’s no movement and no texture.

I dislike that the faces have not, or only partially, been painted.

This is a dead painting. Not a living thing that has died and is fading… not holding of lost memories like a sun-blanched flower… but a mental accretion on top of an old photograph, a process with no connection to its source. I see a process, not a painting.

Photo-realism

Chuck Close, b, 1940, American

Close has changed his style and his current portraits are semi abstract, but as this section is about photo-realism I’m going to look at one of his old paintings.

Like:

I like the skill. It looks like a photograph. And I would imagine given the huge size it would have a big impact on the viewer, like a billboard.

Also, I admire the subtlety of tones that he’s achieved with acrylics.

Dislike:

That I can’t see any purpose or any meaning in the painting.

It doesn’t offer me the artist’s vision of the face, his interpretation of the world, or his unique way of seeing. It doesn’t let me share another person’s soul looking out. And it doesn’t give me any exterior meaning or viewpoint of the world.

I can’t tell the difference from the original photograph. This could be a mechanical reproduction by a camera without any human intervention. For me, the fact it is done in paint doesn’t make it art.

Mark Fairnington, b, 1957, British

Fairnington seems to do a range of paintings, many of which aren’t photo-realistic, so I found one that was. I don’t know when this was painted, but I might surmise that as photo-realism is out of fashion this is an early painting. Did he alter his style to suit the market?

That said, his photo-realism isn’t really photo-realism, it’s more like the realism of botanical illustration. It doesn’t look like a photograph or real; you can tell it’s a painting.

Like:

I like that he’s captured the quality of a taxidermist bird; that frozen dead look where stuffed birds are put in big glass bell jars. It doesn’t matter that it’s not quite photo-real, and indeed the bird (or the taxidermist?) has a whiff of personality which is very appealing.

Dislike:

I dislike the lack of meaning and emotional engagement. There’s no way for me to connect with this painting. I don’t get any painterly vision, or interpretation… no debate is opened up, no meaning is passed across.

Robert Priseman, b. 1965, British

Amy Winehouse, 2012-13

His paintings, even when they fill the canvas, like his Wannasee paintings, are not photo-realistic, and always carry a meaning. The meaning is often ‘in your face’ and more important than the painting.

Looking at his bigger paintings on canvas and the harsh unsubtle colours, I’d say he paints in acrylic?

Like:

I like that he has combined a found image with painting to create a new meaning. Tragic pop stars are now our modern-day saints. It makes me think.

The found image reminds me of time; of changing art styles; of how people stay the same while technology and society change around them… and our need for tragic figures to be ‘idolatised’.

Dislike:

The painting of the face has the feel of a very good amateur or Saturday painter. It looks more like a fan painting than an image created by an artist. The painting of Amy’s face doesn’t connect emotionally because it’s poorly painted, nor is it ‘photo-accurate’, nor does it give me any feeling for her personality or the artist’s vision.

The above may be the whole point of the artwork (I think it’s an artwork/fine art more than a painting because it’s a construction and because the meaning is more important than the painting)… her image is like something a fan might paint and tie to a lamppost with flowers, and its lack of psychological insight stresses how we don’t know her at all. But I can’t get past its lack of skill.

I dislike that it becomes a heavy-handed philosophical comment on the nature of humanity, rather than a painting I can ‘enter’, and that it can be ‘read’ like a book. It does not depend for its effect, or meaning, on the painting, but on the juxtaposition of ideas. The meaning is word based, rather than being visually captured on the canvas.

By contrast, a painting like Guernica affects me deeply and pulls me in, as well as raising issues about war. I have the same reaction to this as I would to a clever cartoon, or a paragraph in a book.

It could be classified as picture book philosophy rather than painting.

Tim Gardner, b. 1973, USA born now lives in Canada

Tourists at Lake Louise, oil on canvas, 2009

He paints in both oil and watercolour, his oils paintings are more ‘real’, but I like his watercolours much better.

Like:

I like how he has captured the heat of the day, and it feels like the man on the left could really walk across the frame. Although it’s not visually ‘real’ like Chuck Close it is experientially real. He has put me in the painting and I can feel the heat. I like my other senses to be engaged when looking at a painting.

In short he’s captured the reality of being there rather than just the visual reality.

In the composition, I like the way all the lines point to where the white mountain meets the green valley at bottom centre, including the people, and then he has one man breaking the focus. It sets up a really interesting dynamic.

The foreground with the people is stunning; it’s like I’m really there. I wouldn’t want to paint it, but I really like it.

Dislike:

The colours aren’t very saturated and look a bit washed out; and the trees on the mountainside look generic, like they’re not trees at all but a green pattern painted without much thought.

Black and white

Raymond Pettibon, b. 1957, American

This looks like black ink on paper. Some of his more recent images have colour. This is an ideal medium for prints (for a mass audience) and I would also expect him to make money from publishing in magazines and papers.

Like:

I like that his art, even though not beautiful, appeals directly to the viewer. The critics have no power over it and the meaning is clear. It enfranchises the viewer and establishes a direct connection between them, the artist and the art.

He makes an argument about enjoying life while you’re young, to be aware of the moment and that youth and fame passes.

It’s witty and powerful.

I like the way he has used direct language as part of his art as it, intentionally or otherwise, is a wry stab at the reams of art-speak that justify many opaque modern works of art where the meaning is only reached through the ministries of an art critic.

I like the power and simplicity of the black and white and how the composition is balanced between light and dark.

Dislike:

On its own it could be the drawing of an 18-year-old who’d never been to art school but enjoyed doodling on his work. In terms of traditional skill it’s naive… and therefore reliant on his words to make it work.

In that way it’s no different to any modern art that needs an explanation to give it meaning. However, as the artist wrote the words and they are part of his ‘painting’, and his painting needs no further explanation, it’s unlike modern art.

I am struggling whether this is really a cartoon? Or art? For me it is certainly on the boundary.

However, I think there’s something about his messages that raises it above the banal and tips it into art. But if I think of Hogarth… he might have had a similar message without words… which is more effective and does it matter?

Finally, this is about the human condition, so is timeless as long as Elvis is part of our cultural lexicon. It would be interesting to see if Pettibon painted political works and what effect they had, and how the establishment reacted.

Jose Toirac, b. 1966, Cuban

Toirac has a range of styles, it’s difficult to see how his coloured paintings of a banana or crisp packet are any more skillful or meaningful than any from a second or third year painting student. But as this section is about black and white painting I’ve picked a black and white image.

This reminds me of Gerhard Richter’s early work on black and white photographs.

The pieces I read about Toirac on the internet say that he deconstructs state-constructed meanings by taking old images and re-examining them, in the same way meaning would be reconstructed if the political situation changed in Cuba… say it became a capitalist country.

Like:

I like that this could be a moment from a life and can be read like a personal narrative. Fidel Castro is giving the boy his hand, a human thing to do, while being focussed on his own agenda. The boy is addressing us, the photographer, by looking directly into camera. He is inquisitive and innocent.

To me, it argues that Fidel was a real man as well as a mythologized leader. As such, it could be about anybody in the public eye or even, in today’s world, any one of us with a carefully chosen Facebook image.

Dislike:

That it looks like, and is still tied to, the original faded photograph, which may be skillful… but I can’t see the point as the faded photograph would be equally as effective.

I dislike that it is all mid tone because this gives it a flat, washed out feeling (this isn’t about faded fame) and I can’t see why he’s made that choice.

Alli Sharma, don’t know when she was born, contemporary, graduated BA Fine Arts in 1967 (but doesn’t mean she was young?)

Her painting is very mixed and it’s difficult to find out verifiable information on the internet.

Like:

That this is almost breaking away from the photograph and beginning to work as a painting. The use of light is interesting and it’s beginning to have its own internal coherence.

It’s almost capturing the woman and putting a presence down on paper.

Dislike:

Because the painting is not quite working as a whole I am noticing separate elements like the poor skill on the hand, which looks like a claw and doesn’t look like it’s resting on her elbow.

It feels like it doesn’t quite know if it’s representational, realist or something entirely different, and the different parts of the drawing have no consistency of style.

Gia Edzgveradze, b. 1953, Georgian, lives and works in Germany

He seems to ‘draw’ mainly unintelligible squiggles… or line drawings with words. However, as most of his words are not in English I can’t read them so have chosen the only black and white image without words I could find, it’s called The Big Bra.

Like:

It’s quite pleasing on the page. The simplicity and confidence are engaging.

Dislike:

As far as there is still any definition between drawing and painting, this is a drawing not a painting.

I cannot see any difference between this and any quick sketchbook drawing of any competent artist. The value and validation must have been given by critics, museums, collectors, universities and other arbiters of what is good.

I don’t dislike it per-se, but I dislike that it has no special artistic value or meaning apart from that given it by ‘experts’.

I wouldn’t pick it out of a student sketchbook, frame it, pay money for it or put it on my wall.

Colour and pattern

Peter Doig, b. 1959, Scottish but now lives in Trinidad

White Canoe, 1991

This reminds me of Gaugin.

I love it… so this might be an area that I could work in.

The blurb on one of the sites about Doig said his style was ‘magical realism’, which is a term I’ve never heard, but is very descriptive and is something I can see, in embryonic form, in my own work.

Like:

I like that it has a coherence, a focus in the canoe, and that it works. By works, I mean I enter the painting and am lost inside it. It’s like a gateway, I’m an equal, and I’m invited into a new, magical world.

It plays on the very edge of reality and unreality and it’s how I see the world a lot of the time.

Also it is heavily colour based and I love colour. The nuances and subtle relationships of tone and colour, saturation, edges, pattern… it’s a shimmering and beautiful piece of work.

I love that it doesn’t need anybody to justify or validate it. That it stands free in the world and is accessible to all, though the original is only accessible to the super rich. If I could paint lesser versions of this type of painting at a price everybody could afford I would be very happy.

It works on a subconscious level as well as having a stunning visual beauty. You can connect and lose yourself in it.

It is pure beauty and also pure art, it doesn’t have a verbal meaning, but it is very meaningful. If I were asked to define the difference between decoration, beauty without meaning, and beautiful art (not counting beautiful art with an argument, like Caravaggio’s ‘Doubting Thomas’) I would cite this painting.

And, as it isn’t carrying a political, religious or social punch it should retain its magic through time. It’s not a beautiful spell to pour meaning into a supplicant viewer, it is itself the magic.

Dislike:

I don’t like the dribbles from the ‘snowflakes’ as they remind me it’s a painting.

Edouard Vuillard, b. 1868 d. 1940, French

Paint maker and print maker associated with the Nabis, a movement I really like.

Breakfast at Villerville, 1910

This reminds me of Pierre Bonnard.

Vuillard painted many more realistic paintings, especially early in his career, but I really like this one.

Like:

The way the colours pick up on each other, echo and bounce round the canvas. It’s like colour jazz.

Within the ‘pattern’ you can read the narrative, but because the painting is all about the feeling, and experience, you catch what it was like for the artist to be there, rather than any definitive visual representation. Most of the time, especially in social situations, we don’t see the scene as a photograph, we view a photograph afterwards and talk about our memories, but we experience the moment.

I really like that this painting captures the moment.

Dislike:

There’s a small area on the bottom left hand corner of the painting, on the yellow tablecloth, which looks like a pattern (it doesn’t fit with the rest of the painting), as if he painted it quickly and without as much care.

Tal R, b. 1967, Israeli born but moved to Denmark when he was 1

Sex Shops, 2017?

Tal R has quite a range of paintings on the internet and it was difficult to select something typical, so I chose a painting from a recent exhibition.

Like:

I’m assuming the grey people are customers?

I wouldn’t have known this without the title… but it adds meaning to an otherwise meaningless canvas.

Dislike:

His use of colour seems random and I can’t find any coherence in the painting. Although he puts complementary colours together they jar rather than adding energy.

That the geometric pattern makes it flat but he has depicted a 3D space.

This is lacking life, and seems more like a failed pattern than a work of art.

Daniel Richter, b. 1962, German