The words “texture” and “facture” are significant terms to painters (maybe in ways that they had not considered or even perhaps that they are not aware of).
Texture is a catch all term for the surface of a painting. To be more specific, texture is the perception of surface. How the reality manifests itself to our sight. Facture is the actual surface. How it feels to the touch. Think of the word “manufacture”. It comes from the Latin “manus” meaning hand and “factus” which is the past participle of the word “facere”, which means to make: made by hand (though that’s less a definition in today’s world of manufacture; robofacture maybe. Robotum being a derivation of the Greek automaton, which refers to mechanical devices)
Read MorePainting is a stop start activity. It has to be. It’s in the durations of the stop phase that determine the look as much as those in the start/ active phase.
Read More…When dealing with the neutrality of unpopulated spaces, the simple rooms, table tops, window views and enclosing walls Matisse is able to afford his visionary imagination greater office and provide his colour pyrotechnics with a greater heft of decision-making.
Read MoreLines are potentially excitingly expressive elements in a painting. Yet a line is more often than not regarded in terms of its ability to describe a contour. A contour line is often an agent of language. We “name” a form and subsequently draw it - or rather delineate it according to our pre-known understanding of its characteristics.
Read MoreIn Tintoretto's Miracle of the Slave, there is a large central green robed and turbaned figure holding the evidence of a 'failed hammer assault', which forms the lower half of a compositional S shape - the top half being St.Mark who appears flying in and hovering above the slave as a symbol of the miracle unseen by the crowd. This green robed figure with a turban on is one half of a very clever "pictorial trick";
Read MoreCézanne’s breakthrough came from his gradual understanding of his own focal points. Every artist usually starts to focus from about 1 ft away from their faces outwards. Cézanne seemed to notice that inside this field vision becomes much more unstable due to the phenomena known as saccading, the tiny movements of the eyes as they switch between focal points.
Read MoreIn figurative art, a landscape creates a spatial distance through its very remit with the surface often used to bring it back into a closer engagement. A portrait or figure immediately creates a more human even intimate sense of space, however it can also distract as it can be “too recognisable”.
Read MoreI have a strong memory of seeing Botticelli’s annunciation in the Uffizi Gallery last summer. Firstly the pleasure gained in having a long look uninterrupted by crowds, who preferred to congregate around the greatest hits of Venus and Primavera.
Read MoreOnly the “concrete” can be controlled, never the “abstract”…
Read MoreIt is important when I work digitally to not fall into a trap of trying to recreate this in paint.
Read MoreThink of a work of art in 3 layers, strata or zones even. Running from top to bottom:
The top layer is the seen one, the final outcome, the actual work of art and its content and your experience of it.
Read MoreAs a student Morris Louis’s work was my main inspiration or perhaps motivation: to make paintings which somehow got to his work whilst being of myself, my feelings and emotions. it was hard to do as they are so particular - being driven also by their process.
Read MoreAll art is a synthesis of our experiences of life. This synthesis can be wilfully made from observed elements as in the case of abstraction, or it can be informed in more symbiotic non-predetermined ways as in working in the abstract.
Read MoreListening to an episode of PG Woodhouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster” on the radio the other day, I was struck by a particular turn of phrase spoke by one of the characters: “Throw your mind back to that occasion” It suddenly made me think how differently that sentiment would be said today: “do you remember?”
Read MoreThe first painting that meets your eyes, when you enter the major Cézanne exhibition at Tate Modern, is “The Basket of Apples” from 1893, a notable still-life filled with the usual props: the wine bottle, the tipped-up basket laden with oranges and apples which spill out over an undulating tablecloth draped over a wooden table and a dish with a carefully stacked tower of what seem to be bread rolls or perhaps savoiardi, set to one side for balance. The immediate feature that caught my eye in this painting, was a pink line, the line of a stripe on the tablecloth; we have a tea towel at home that it reminded me of - a familiar fragment of domesticity. This line, it’s nothing special really, a soft daub of paint, a simple brushstroke…a simple coloured line.
Read MoreRaphael is such a technically advanced and skilled artist and I particularly respond to the nuances he gets in his surfaces, for example: adding marble dust to pigments to differentiate between fabric and flesh, or the way he under-paints layers using complementary or triadic colour relationships. He is a well to go to, to learn about painting.
Read More“Titian is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias; one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand that to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion” These words were written by Eugène Delacroix in 1857…
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