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Wed, 10 Mar 2010  In praise of in-between spaces... The in between space IS the relationship between two or more objects or elements chosen for your composition. It is FAR more useful to you as an artist to start by looking for in-between spaces and building the composition around them. By looking for a shape which relates to two or more things and on which you can ‘hang’ the related elements you are more likely to see the elements of your subject correctly. This is because by looking at the in-between spaces you are making comparisons between the main elements. By making comparisons, you are asking questions about what you are looking at; you begin to understand how one thing appears as compared to another. An in-between space tells you about two or more things simultaneously, whereas seeing one element in isolation makes it much harder to understand what it actually looks like. Look at the working sketch by Carole Katchen. Visualise the shape between the man’s vest and the woman’s elbow. This shape has as much right to exist as the man’s hat or the woman’s hair. We know in reality it describes a gap, but in two dimensions it exists as a flat shape just as the man’s trousers do. Look at the underside of the woman’s skirt, the darker red shapes. What lovely shapes and how well they define where her legs are! It’s all too easy to ignore these shapes and expect the elements of your subject to sit successfully together on your painting; they won’t without an understanding of the spaces between them. I would also say, look at how certain elements relate to the edges of your page...otherwise you’ll find your subject ‘floating’ aimlessly somewhere in the middle of your page. See, on the left hand side of the drawing, how an in-between shape exists between the man’s hand, the woman’s hair, arm and skirt, and the edge of the page...there it is, showing you exactly where and how to compose the drawing within the edges of your page. On a slightly different kind of in-between space...I watched with pleasure today as one of my students ‘found’ a tree by creating it’s whole shape across the left hand side of her page and then proceeded to ‘reveal’ it by painting the shapes between the branches and twigs. The crop-section here is from one of my own paintings, where the tree and the child’s pole swing were ‘revealed’ by painting the in-between spaces. It makes for an exciting life!!!  - Comment - |
Mon, 08 Mar 2010  I've been working on this raven today, and made another nice frame for another painting. I like my frames exactly the way I make them...the colour and contruction...I'm teaching tonight. - Comment - |
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 It was wonderful to see my brother. He is thin and tired but he perked up with a good political converstion and we had a good laugh over memories of a friend of his, Bugs, who is big in the Tattoo world and has now become a painter too, some of his paintings are rather wonderful (I found him on-line)  This one is called 'Guitariste'. My brother has a large abcess in his gut which is difficult to reach but needs to be removed with an operation requiring a general anasthetic. He's in a catch 22 trap; he can't live with the abcess, it's what keeps re-infecting him, but he's not strong enough for an anasthetic to have it removed. When it's removed (its been described as trying to scoop up lump of mashed potato) many of the various bugs contained within it are likely to be released and bring about a massive new attack on his body...so things must get worse before they get better. He'll probably go to Oxford this week although the Royal Free want to hold on to him for a bit to 'build him up'. On a very happy note, his daughter and her husband (the soldier who lost his legs in Sangin) are expecting their first baby!!! Yippeeee...I'll be a great aunt!!! and my little brother will be a grandad!!!hhahahahaaray...there is a God in Heaven!! - Comment - |
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 Here is the William Congdon painting \'Dying Vulture\'...isn\'t it brilliant?? I love it.    IN my shed I'm working on my Raven, I saw a painting about two years ago called 'Dying Vulture' by William Congdon (1957). I've only seen it once (it's at Kettles Yard, Cambridge) but it must have lined right up with one of my inner blueprints because I think of it all the time. There's no doubt it has influenced me because when I saw it I was working on another large Raven painting and seeing it resolved the way I was going to continue with my painting. Now I'm working on my 'Dying Raven'. I'm still thinking about William Congdon's painting but obviously on my own path now. I'm using a lot of colour with a view to knocking it back later on without losing it altogether. I've bought some liquin which I believe allows me to increase the transparency of oil paint and will try some transparent layers over the painting...glaze and scumble. The old masters used 'glaze and scumble' several times on one painting. With a transparent colour (Indian yellow)they would cover the whole surface of a painting then wipe the paint off certain areas such as the face. By picking up the bright face area with light paint (Naples yellow, white etc.) the background became darker and the face became brighter and glowing. It adds an extraordinary cohesion to the whole image too. I do this with my own paintings of faces but also with landscapes and other subjects. I'm hoping I can vary the colour of my transparent layers (normally I use only Indian yellow or Alizarin crimson for their high transparency) with my liquin. Howard Hodgkin uses wondeful colours and textures, many of which are not quite obscured, under subsequent calming semi-transparent layers. I've also been working on a self portrait version of my Jane Seymour. I'm off to London any minute now to see my brother.  - Comment - |
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 3rd:Re-reading what I've said about Lord Ashcroft; I need to say that we give by direct debit to four charities every month and have done for more than 20years. We do more for other charities too including being trustees of a gorilla charity and raising money in various ways for it. www.G4G.co.uk Even so it never feels like enough, and I don't have a concept of -if every very wealthy person gave the same proportion we give, of their income, how far would it go to meeting the needs of the poorest parts of the world? Is the pit so bottomless that its not worth doing? On another note, my brother took a dive yesterday, I wonder if he's reached the bottom of his particilar pit yet...I wish...then it might be upwards from here. I'm going on Saturday to see him, still at the Royal Free in London. 2nd: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8537696.stm A link to Esther. 1st: Just looking at the pictures of Michael Foot (I think his dad was called Isaac Foot, what a wonderful name), I so completely approve of his duffle coat which he wore to lay a wreath at The Cenotaph in 1981; I approve now and I approved then. We’re plagued with the need to dress smartly. In our time of spin and shiny smiles, there’s something refreshing, real and appealing about Michael Foot’s duffle coat, as there was then in 1981. So many people have spoken lyrically about Michael Foot, not least Enoch Powell who said of him ‘He was the outstanding parliamentarian of our time’ and much more. I would so much have preferred Michael Foot to lead government rather than Tony Blair in whom it was hard to have trust -right from the beginning, with his evangelical zeal and his repellent look of ecstasy. My husband stayed up all night during that count. He was sure that if Blair were to win the election we would be heralding in the new age...I suppose we were doing so, of sorts, the age of see-only-what’s-on-the-surface-and-no-further, or the-means-justify-the-end-but-we-don’t-need-to-know...just-have-faith-in-our-glorious-leader. I was more cynical. I went to bed. Now with the Lord Ashcroft situation –how measly of him- we have to understand that smart suits are de rigueur, and the face of things is what we get until secrets are revealed by the media. Lord Ashcroft so coveted a title that he was happy to mislead even his close friend William Hague (how mortifying for Hague and what treachery from Ashcroft)...in other words we didn’t get quite what we were lead to believe we were getting, those supposed 10s of millions of £s in the tax coffers. Proportionally of course my dustbin man is probably paying more tax pro-rata, not wearing a smart suit (a green council overall instead) and I would much much much much much prefer to see him sitting in the house of Lords asking questions and voting on decisions than I would Lord Ashcroft. I wish that some of Lord Ashcroft’s 10s of millions of £s could trickle down to the tragic little girl Esther I saw last night on ‘Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children’. Aged about 8yrs and suffering from HIV aids, she was saying ‘I’m so hungry; my body hurts in every place’. Maybe it would help if we knew more rather than less about Lord Ashcroft now, hopefully that quite a lot of his 10s of millions of £s are reaching small girls like Esther, who is so desperately aware of the sadness of her life. - Comment - |
Tue, 02 Mar 2010  This one is 'Garden Cove' the last one 'Twisting Stream'. As english as cow parsley and village church yards.  We've been looking at landscape painters in class, I took in a scruffy but favourite little book about Ivon Hitchens. After years of looking after my own small children and feeling I never had anywhere near enough time to begin, let alone immerse myself in, painting, I remember finding this book on what must have been the first day of school for my youngest child. And so the re-awakening of my freer mind began; it was pouring with rain and I was looking at the view through the back window of my old shed. I worked on the same format using very similar colours to this painting, it wasn't a big painting, but the one which was the beginning of everything since...Although I never stopped painting when the children were small, and in fact often painted them, I was afraid of looking out at the world in case I suffered the frustration of not being able to respond to it. There's a particularly stunning view near here, above Tollard Royal, for years I wouldn't look out of the car window at it, it was too unbearably frustrating. Ivon Hitchens' paintings make me want to paint, look at paintings, talk about them, show them to people, they make me wish I had done them! - Comment - |
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 I heard my daughter wishing her boyfriend 'good luck' for tomorrow, he has his driving test. It reminded me of the day after I passed my driving test...I drove up on to Exmoor. The family had one car, an old Morris Oxford, and we all used it; consequently it ran on just above empty. I drove up to Brendon Two Gates with my painting things and sat looking across layers of moor with my canvas on the ground. I had to roll much of the way back down off Exmoor to hold on to the little bit of petrol. My teachers at the art school in Taunton loved the painting. It hung in the family home for several years and then I lost contact with it until recently when a friend told me she had a painting of mine in her attic...It now is stacked away in my shed but was an incidental admission in this painting (see crop) as I had been looking at still-lives and including whatever occured in the composition.  It felt at the time like it had taken me years to realise the desire to do what I had just done -old enough and free enough to take myself up on to the top of Exmoor. Between Simonsbath and Brendon Two Gates is my favourite house, not much to look at but in a landscape which so closely aligns with my inner blueprint of a perfect landscape that I harbour desires to live there one day...Simon says he'd slit his wrists if we lived on Exmoor...  ...even though he loves it there. I spoke to my brother today...its called a Gallium scan...all complex again, I'll collate the information in my head and say something about it tomorrow. Yesterday I put up the exhibition of my students' work in The Forum Cafe. Though I say it myself it looks really great. It entirely overcomes the challenge of being a diverse collection of work and looks cohesive and interesting and really great! - Comment - |
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 Finally there's a possible reason for my brother's sickness. The Galleon scan and a CT scan have been looked at together and show fluid on his cecum...(thats a new one on me)...it looks like a little appendix at the join of the small and large intestines. He's still at the Royal Free and very weak. The fluid wil be drained and if it turns out to be amylase it means his new pancreas is in trouble and he will have to be opened up and 'all fixings checked' (to and from the new pancreas I guess). If the fluid is something else it may just be an infection which can be treated, but so far John is still not taking anitbiotics and has a temperature. A temperature is one way of fighting infection so maybe he has some immunity of sorts.  Jane Seymour and happy memories of history lessons with Miss Pike. Jane Seymour in her lovely frame.  - Comment - |
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 I'm gathering work by my students for an exhibition at The Forum Cafe in Blandford. I have the cafe for a month so in order to accommodate everyone who is giving me work I shall be dividing the exhibition into two lots of two weeks. My students are an impressive lot and there is some fine work going in to the show. I will photograph the show when its up, meanwhile...here is a watercolour of some apples. No more on my brother just yet.  I have made an exquisite (yep...I can hardly believe it) frame for the Jane Seymour painting. I hope I'm not deluding myself! - Comment - |
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 So Dad has been to see John today at the Royal Free in London and says he seems a little brighter; I can explain the complications now. Since the transplant, every five weeks John has gone into collapse with an infection. He ends up at the A&E of his nearest hospital, Royal Free where they treat him with antibiotics and move him on to Churchill hospital in Oxford where the transplant was performed. After a few days he’s responding to the antibiotics so the Churchill send him home, where he feels better for a while and even manages to combat his almost constant sickness and eat something. Five weeks later and he’s down again. This time he has refused antibiotics at the Royal Free because he wants to go straight to Oxford where that they can assess him before treatment, but Oxford are short of beds and can’t take him until possibly the weekend. Now John is very ill, very weak, having only fluids by drip and the Royal Free feel they need to do a super-duper scan which requires a radioactive injection and then the scan two days later. Being radioactive, it means he can’t have another injection for a few weeks. If he misses the scan day two days later he misses the chance of this particular kind of scan for some weeks to come. He had the injection yesterday and now hopes Oxford won’t come up with a free bed until after tomorrow when he has had the super-duper scan at the Royal Free, but he’s still struggling to hang on without antibiotics, against the advice of his consultant. Dad asked John did he regret having had the transplant and John said absolutely not...a small mercy, and a relief to any relative of an organ donor who might be reading this. - Comment - |
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 I’m in Oxford, with my younger sister Jane at her baby-clothes warehouse. I’ve just dropped Mary for an interview at Oxford Brookes. Jane and I are about to find Dad, he’s at Jane’s house waiting for news of our brother John. John was at A&E in London yesterday; at some point today he’s arriving by ambulance at the hospital here in Oxford which performed his transplant six months ago. He’s very dehydrated, not compus mentus either I gather. The decision is whether to open him up and look at the pancreas with a view to treating him, or whether to cut losses and take it out. I believe he’ll keep the kidney. It means he’ll be diabetic again and I’m not sure of the implications of that; it seems better than the condition he’s been struggling to live with since the transplant. I remember when we were living in USA, I had such a bad tooth, a molar near the back. I went to the dentist who was all for root canal treatment and what-not...I said absolutely NOT. I can live without it, just PULL it out please. I think it cost me $120 for the pleasure of it! What a relief it was; every time I poke my tongue into the gap I’m glad. I wish we had several pancreases in the same way we have several teeth; a synthesised evolutionary furrow to plough if diabetes becomes the endemic problem forecast? Why else do we have two kidneys, when we can live on 25% function of one of them, if not to mitigate the loss of one? And by the same reasoning several teeth? And two eyes? (although that may be for binocular vision, and in the case of birds, all round vision too.) I suppose stem cell research is dealing with these questions...growing one’s own spares for these eventualities. Update: My brother still in London, in Royal Free, waiting for a bed in Oxford. He's having liquids only and refusing all other treatment at the moment...complicated...too upsetting to explain. - Comment - |
Sun, 21 Feb 2010  This photo was taken on the first day when I was drawing on top of the black bales. The ravens are on the horizon. 19.2.10 3. I found a round fibre-resin tea tray, selected various good steep slopes, made some ice-runs and had a great time whizzing down them and trudging up to the top again. The nice thing about being on my own is that I didn’t have to share my tea tray, I just skidded down and trudged up until I was soaking wet and whacked!  2. I haven’t found the sledge so I’m going to search out something else which will do. The snow looks wonderful, on the hills it reveals every scar, every sinew and every crevice, but the fields are as smooth as an iced wedding cake. If I’d had an iced wedding cake an Exmoor scene on it would have been nice. As it was we had Wonder Woman and SuperMan cakes at our wedding. I’ve been on a favourite walk around Sparcombe Water; I could feel myself smiling all the way as the sun shone on the snow. I sent a picture message of a white Exe Cleave back to all my students who have hired a hall near Blandford and are spending the week painting without me!  1. Quantum physics: A particle can exist in two places at once? The act of looking makes the particle change its behaviour? Slippery!! Anecdotal: MP? I’m still fussing in my mind over this false-passport/sanctioned-state-murder in which we might have colluded. It’s been snowing hard again and I’ve been told there’s a sledge in a nearby field so I’m off to look for that and a hill with a gentle incline at the bottom...I don’t mind if it’s steep at the top. I shall only exist at the top or at the bottom...or anywhere in between but not all at the same time; maybe going so fast that I shall APPEAR to be in every place at the same time.  18.2.10 Robert Fisk in today’s paper is suggesting that although Israel is behind the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh murder it was done with British collusion and in the past similar things have been done with active US support. The people who committed the murder and were in Dubai at the time of the murder, presumably helping, must be such small-fry-pawns in the greater game it probably doesn’t matter what they feel about what they’ve done, and those whose passports they’ve used rank even lower; abused with no comeback and placed in a very vulnerable position. It’s been snowing hard all day again today so we walked to Exford to the pub to read the papers, have lunch etc. Snow well and truly settled, it’s hard to believe that this end of the week belongs to the same beginning! That warm sun and those clear blue skies with the ravens tumbling about...another time another place! Earlier today I was watching a flock of starlings feeding at the edges of the cabin where the snow is thinner. After prodding the ground with their beaks they were finding big fat worms and swallowing them down whole. One of the starlings has a completely deformed leg, he seems to have no trouble flying or feeding on the ground but I can’t see how he can perch. It struck me that he probably doesn’t know he’s disabled!  Once again I’ve been working from drawings I’ve made this week...making clear the advantages of drawing while the sun shines. As ever at the start of a painting you wonder what the hell is going to happen with it, and is it worth sticking to? If you can disengage yourself from your feelings about the painting itself, simply continue with carefully found revelations, edges, areas and tones from your subject or the drawing from which you’re working, it sometimes happens that something interesting results. Looking out of the window...it’s unbelievable that we have more snow than we’ve ever had on Exmoor at this half-term time, and in Vancouver they have the least they’ve had in 100 years. ‘Law’ and ‘Murphy’s’ comes to mind. I don’t envy those in charge of this year’s winter Olympics.  17.2.10: woke up to this outside our window. The cabin is much warmer even though it’s been snowing hard again, sustained fire in the woodburner at least during the day. We went to Exeter to see George...a treat! I got up early, lit the fire and worked on a painting from a drawing I made yesterday above Chetsford Water. I’m shocked, perhaps naive...by the killers on false passports who murdered a Hamas man in Dubai...does every nation do it? How justified is it? Would they have done it/authorised it if they’d known it would be revealed? Are they smug? Worried? Ashamed? Embarrassed? Pleased with themselves? Satisfied? Ready to do more? Well paid? Unaffected? Affected? Just doing their jobs? In full support of what they’ve done? I’d be stomping mad if I were one of the stolen ‘identities’ -and worried for my safety. I spent £23 on three tubes of watercolour paint in Exeter today.  2. Sometimes I paint on location and at other times I’ll paint from drawings made on location. Today I’ve done a bit of both. There’s no doubt that the painting done on location has a much lighter touch, an immediate response to what one is looking at, with the subject available to be gleaned from as the eye jumps from page to view to page again. However the paintings made from drawings are much more likely to deal with composition, structure, shapes and tones...and an overall ‘feel’. They don’t have that same light touch but they have a stronger initial impact and clearer divisions between ‘light’ and ‘dark’. One very important result of filling my drawing books is that I can use them like a bank...I fill them with drawings from which I can extract visual information at any time in the future. I use the drawings and re-use some of them, as often as I like, as a basis for paintings on canvas. They have structures and compositions which have endless possible manifestations. The drawings in my drawing books are not lovely; they are an efficient method of note-taking and when I’m working from them in my shed they evoke very strong memories of what I was looking at when I made them. Here on Exmoor, if I’m not painting on location, I try to make watercolours from my drawings as soon as I get back to the cabin from my walks. These watercolours may be framed and exhibited when I’m back at home but they may prompt paintings on canvas as well.  1. Yesterday I walked with the others, along the coast, over North Hill and down into Minehead which has an extraordinary ‘old town’ with tiny thatched cottages and little streets...its places like that which give us an idea of the scale of the old days, certainly of the days when people walked everywhere unless they were wealthy enough for space and horses. Worlds, I suppose, were measured by walking distances - Lorna Doone is a great book for its descriptions of 17th century life on Exmoor, plenty of walking in deep snow to rescue sheep! There’s quite a lot of ‘new’ Minehead which is not so engaging –a main street filled with £-shops! I missed my stretch of strolling and sketching so I had the others drop me off a way from the cabin and I walked back. Today is the oddest day; we’ve had heavy snow and now streaming sunshine. I’ve been out drawing in the snow and am now going into the glorious sun...everything is glistening. - Comment - |
Sat, 20 Feb 2010  14.2.10: It’s 10pm now and the fire is banked up and popping. The temperature is about 1deg. outside. The day has been lovely. I found a stack of black bales –like a castle- and sank in a dip right on top, between two bales, with my feet up on the bale in front. I had a wide view, the sun was shining and a half dozen ravens hove into view, scrabbling and gobbling...I was amazed! Eventually they flew north but two pairs peeled off and gave wonderful dual aerobatics which then became a display of four...watch and learn Red Arrows...the difference is that ravens can improvise their swings and dives and they seem to delight in doing just that, but the Red Arrows must spend hours choreographing and practising. Right...bedsocks...blankets...zzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ It was a cold night but two duvets, several blankets and bed socks sorted that out. Simon was up early and got the fire going and then set off to Exford to get the papers. He dropped me half way so I could walk back with my camera, take photographs and suck in deep breaths of Exmoor air. You have to be careful with a camera not to miss the things you look at. The camera often means you peep through the viewfinder, snap and then never look again. I need to look and keep looking before snapping, and generally I’m looking for a ‘composition’ which the camera viewfinder then helps me with, and helps me to understand better once I’ve downloaded it to the computer. This time I found I was interested in the way the foreground beech banks veil the hills in the background, and exactly how much of the view behind the beech-veil was visible. When I look at the view my eye- focus jumps between the foreground and the background, compensating and re-focussing accordingly, but my camera will only focus on one layer giving me a chance to see how one layer of view relates to another with just a single focus. I suppose it’s called ‘depth of field’ in camera terms, and I could get the whole lot in focus if I wanted. I spent last night playing with my new paper...it was lovely! Last time I was here I was feeling dark and moody. I scrambled in the undergrowth along covered streams and small rivers looking for dark places with moments of light. Perhaps it was three things; it was autumn and the end of summer always feels like a loss, my nephew-in-law had just lost both his legs and some fingers off both hands, in Afghanistan, a couple of days before we came up here. Four months later he seems to be doing really well. He’s been selected to train for two Paralympics’ teams; shooting and tennis I think, and he and my niece are in the process of buying a bungalow. I’m feeling more open and ready for the blooming year this time; the only cloud and the third thing is my brother’s transplant. He had a kidney/pancreas transplant last August; it’s taking a long time to get better. I thought I’d be able to ‘tweet’ about him and the process, I found I couldn’t...all too painful to put into single sentences. Home!! I blogged on a word doc while away and will update bit by bit: 13.2.10. We’ve head to Exmoor today, very cold day, and met friends at The Red Lion in Dulverton...it’s how our Exmoor weeks begin and its where we step out of our lives which belong to other things and into our lives which belong entirely to ourselves. I have 100 sheets of Fabriano paper which I couldn’t stop thinking about all the way here. I remembered to bring my gum strip and already I have a stretched sheet drying on a board. We’re in the cabin, the woodburner’s lit but it’s still pretty cold. Bridget is cooking so not only do I not have to think about what to cook, I don’t have to cook it either. I can’t stop thinking about my new paper, about loading my brush with colour and off-loading onto my paper...I’m not even sure I mind what the image will be at the moment. I simply want the pleasure of negotiating with watercolour on my new paper. Exmoor, even at this drab time of year, has the most wonderful colours and textures as well as the eye-grabbing shapes of the hills and valleys. If a fashion designer were to spend time on Exmoor I can’t see how it could fail to influence the cut of a pattern or the texture and colour of a fabric. The hills are as sumptuous as body curves clad in rich earthy colours, the lines of beech banks clearly describe the hills’ edges... edges again...beech seems to hold on to its autumn leaves well into spring so they haven’t lost the orange glow. Now I just wish I had Mary’s ‘onesy’ with me, her all-in-one fleecy sleep suit...I’d happily put it on over my jeans! Because my time is my own here, I tend not to hang out with the others. I trudge off on my own with my drawing things and ‘fill the bank’ with sketches, structures, compositions, colours and notes. Its evening so all that has to wait until tomorrow. As soon as the first sheet dries I’ll test it out tonight with some colour and shape...I think I’ll try a bit of resist as well, I have my oil pastels here. %*&^$£)(& Can’t Wait!!!&)(£$^&*%  - Comment - |
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 I'm off to Exmoor tomorrow for a week, to a place with no phone signal or internet connection. I've been watching a film about the Graf Zeppelin airship which travelled around the world in 1928. It's inner workings, engines, steering room etc look like something out of Metropolis (which I believe was released the year before). They flew in luxury, bedrooms and beds, tables, cultery and served meals, a chef and a bedmaker...it was gripping though, the most challenging moments being only just gaining enough height to surmout some Russian mountains, and surviving a storm and disappearing for two days over the pacific. The landscapes were beautiful in the black and white crackly film. I believe large lost chunks of 'Metropolis' (which had been cut after the film flopped on its first release) were found in Argentina. The newly found footage was in poor condition but has been restored using new techniques designed precisely to deal with the depth of damage. I saw metropolis when I was a student at Somerset College of Arts and Technology...made a big impression...two exrtaordinary things to come out of Germany at the same time. I've just read that the new version of Metropolis has had its first release today...what a co-incidence! - Comment - |
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 Kilvicheoun Beach   When I was teaching on Mull there were two girls from Shetland working at the same place. They’d never been off Shetland and were amazed by the massive blue skies and warm sunshine further south (they said it always rains on Shetland). We were coming home one day from a trip to Kilvicheoun beach, one of those vast white sandy beaches on the south coast of Mull, it had been unusually hot and sunny even for Mull. In the far distance on the other side of the road we could see what looked like a pony and trap coming towards us which is exactly what it turned out to be, but sitting at the reigns of the trap was the unmistakable Harry Secombe. I thought it was hilarious but the girls were speechless with excitement, there were wide eyes and sharp intakes of breath! They’d never seen a famous person before. It felt like we were moving through a ‘Songs of Praise’ special on the road from Iona to Carsaig. This photo is of the road down to Inniemore Lodge where I was teaching. - Comment - |
Wed, 10 Feb 2010 I caught sight of this picture as I was searching rapidly through some pictures on google-images. I thought ‘That’s Scotland’ It reminded me of when I was teaching on Mull, at Pennyghael just off the road to Iona. The view south across the water to Jura had a clear light and pine trees too, much like this painting. Actually it wasn’t Scotland after all. It’s a painting called ‘Girl in a Landscape’ by an American artist, Fairfield Porter, who painted on Long Island and in Maine. Although I was wrong this time, I think we all have an inner hard-wiring for landscape recognition. When I was 18 I travelled from New York to Denver on a train. It took three days and, apart from the nights, I spent practically every minute at the window taking in the passing landscape. Of course it changed gradually from the green and wooded east, via Philadelphia and Chicago, a gently hilly Iowa and on across the plains of Nebraska to the Rocky Mountains. Almost twenty years later I followed the same route but by road (which parallels the railway) with my family and I was surprised at how much the passing landscape matched my memories of it so exactly. It got me thinking about how important the ‘interpretation’ of landscape must have been to our survival as a species. If you were in the jungle and a puma is hiding in a tree nearby, you need to be interpreting every rustle and shadow or you’ll be his dinner. Try holding your thumb up about four inches from your eye. How does it compare with whatever is twelve feet away? Would you say your thumb looks as big as a door? And yet you know your thumb is NOT as big as a door. If you were in the desert and saw a distant oasis, luckily your brain will interpret the tiny size you see it as, and you’ll understand that it’s big enough to be somewhere you might get a drink. You’ll also understand that ‘green’ might mean sustenance of some sort and you’ll understand that it will take you a certain amount of time to walk to it. I heard yesterday on the radio that to be in the countryside is important for our wellbeing. It gives very positive benefits to troubled people...and I’m thinking... 'did anyone ever think otherwise???’ I’d like to misquote Anthony Gormley who said about art that ‘We ignore the figure at our peril’ and say ‘We ignore landscape at our peril’.  - Comment - |
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 I'm still working on Jane Seymour. What caught me (and catches me) most about Holbein's portraits are his hard edges and the colour blue he uses in so many portraits. I'm trying to marry the blues, the hard edges, the 'sfumato' painting he uses on faces AND a freer style of painting which I would natually use in my painting ordinarily. I want all these notions to sit together in one painting. It seems I am pushing forward with these techniques and ideas and then 'knocking' the paint-work back a bit. The difficulty is...how far does one go with the looser style of painting? How much do I match the paintwork back in once I've let loose with it?  - Comment - |
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 Here\'s my version of Jane Seymour thus far. I\'m keeping as much control of her face as I can, as near as I can manage to Holbein (its very hard) but I\'m going to go whacky and experimental around the edges and on her dress with colour, texture and freedom.  I told Simon this morning about the youngsters who think the Hamed Karzai painting is Darth Vader; he said 'You bring to a painting the World you know'. - Comment - |
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 A field vole has made his home under the bird feeder behind my shed. When he peeps his little twitching nose out of the undergrowth to have a look around and then darts out to grab the fallen seeds, its impossible not to see him as Beatrix Potter might have done. Sometimes he\'s quite brave and sits for a while, nibbling and washing...until something like a chaffinch comes along which is, by comparison, ENORMOUS! He turns tail and thats the last I see of him for an hour or two. Apparently field voles leave trails along their pathways to repel other voles...but the trails emit UV light which is visible to all the hunting birds...seems a little unfair!  Tony, the manager at the cafe where I hang the political stuff says that, more than once, the youngsters have asked about the bottom picture in the triptych...'Is that Darth Vader?'...Doh! - Comment - |
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 So...Cherie Blair spares a man jail because of his religion...does that mean that if I thump a man and break his jaw I will go to prison if Cherie is the judge at my court case? Paul Woolley, in support of Cherie says in The Independent today that ‘Cherie Booth was taking into account Mr. Miah’s membership of a faith community. Evidence indicates that belonging to a community reduces the likelihood of reoffending’. Perhaps this suggests that a community as large as a country, any country, even the smallest country, where a person from one end of the country couldn’t possibly know, or feel accountable to, someone from the other end of the country, is too large. Surely we should all reduce our allegiances down to the size of a city-state at most and then we might all feel that we ‘belong’ to a community and therefore both accountable and responsible. The logical conclusion is that Cherie, in handing down this lenient non-sentence, has in one fell swoop negated all the years her husband was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain??!!!! Because it left so many of us in a position where we were unable to ‘belong’ to a community small enough for us to feel ourselves ‘members’, ‘accountable’ or even safe at the hands of our judges??? Phew...I feel better after that! - Comment - |
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 I have gone one stage further with this painting. You can look at stage three and see how it conforms to the ideas I've been talking about. There are probably two more layers after this one, and the last layer is the moment when the whole image comes together. Watercolour has a perfect logic behind it. You'll see it beautifully practiced in the work of John Sell Cotman. He was able to deal with those long stages of abstraction of shape and tone before his paintings co-alesced into a cohesive image.  Stage two becomes more tricky. You have to decide where layer two must go and where it must not go...in other words...what shapes and areas do you 'reveal' with the next layer of paint.  This is Claude Lorrain stage one. All I have done with this first layer of paint is \'reveal\' the lightest place. Every other area has \'tone\' and therefore needs to take some of this first layer.  In class we've been looking at watercolour again. The counter-intuitive way of thinking needed is always a challenge even for my veteran students...and for myself too. I have to remind myself of the process of watercolour painting every time I use it. Look at this Claude Lorrain watercolour painting. Ask yourself about the shapes and positions of the lightest places. The point about watercolour is that you cannot 'paint' a light place, you can only 'reveal' it by painting around it. I am also going to post what I consider the first two stages of Claude Lorrain's watercolour might have looked like.  - Comment - |
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 And now look at this equally marvellous head by Frank Auerbach, with equally subtle and complex tonal changes across the surface of the face.  - Comment - |
Tue, 02 Feb 2010  I've been looking at this Holbein painting of Jane Seymour...for two reasons. Firstly I think Holbein was a master of 'edge' and 'edge' is one of my five fundamental elements of painting. Edges come both 'hard' and 'soft' and amazing examples of both exist on this painting. The egde between Jane and her background is a 'hard' edge. Either side of that edge the tones contrast enough for the edge to show clearly. You can see that Holbein even changed the background blue to contrast differently with the figure, on the left Jane's sleeve is lighter than the background but on the right it is the background which is lighter than the sleeve. Much much more subtle edges exist on Jane's face. It might look like it's one rather bland tone but close up you can see the softest change from one subtle tone to another all across her face. Her face is a collection of soft-edged close-toned shapes. My second reason for looking at this painting is in defernce to our history teacher. She told us that Henry had 'really loved' Jane Seymour; he had wanted so much to 'show her off' after the birth of their son that he insisted she get up and dressed to be presented to the court too soon after giving birth. She was more ill than Henry realised. She probably died of a haemorrhage about two weeks later and it was several years before Henry married again. He buried her in the tomb he'd been preparing for himself and so he is now buried there with her. I am (along with many others who have done so in the past) painting my own version, its more a case of 'Looking for Jane Seymour' rather than a straight copy. She was rumoured to have a 'calm and gentle demeanor', but most Holbein paintings give that feeling. Its that same feeling I'm looking for with my own version, plus the same complexities and subtleties with 'edge'. - Comment - |
Sun, 31 Jan 2010 I hardly dare say what I\'ve been given today, I\'m so grateful. I have a raven in my freezer which was found dead out on The Cranborne Chase. I\'m caught in that between-world where I can preserve it but not look at it, or look at it but not preserve it. I shall have to hope that the temp in my shed remains below zero for a couple of hours tomorrow (not unusual!)   I've been to my local cafe thismorning. There's a space set aside for me to hang political stuff which I appreciate very much. The cafe ought to have a preservation order placed on it, its built like cave on the inside and painted orange; in fact it's like sitting in a tonsil, must have been designed in the 70s. I've put up the Hamed Karzai triptych. He presides over a country where half the population are covered up, invisible, and that same half of the population need two of themselves in order to witness a legal document or testify and be heard in a court of law. So I've decided anyone who presides over that kind of a country must only be half a person, and live only a half life.. I tried to stuff him fully under a burqa but then I realised we wouldn't know who he is so in the third piece he's half under the burqa. I've been so excited waiting for 'Sunday' on radio 4, Ed Stourton has moved in to the place of Roger Bolton. I really like Roger Bolton and have loved the presenting he's done but, after Nick Clarke (who prsented 'the world at one'and died of cancer in 2006) and who was the monarch of presenting, Ed Stourton comes a very close second. Ed Stourton is a complete gentleman who gets the absolute best out of his interviewees with quiet respect and not a single bit of ear-bashing. There was a very funny line thismorning when they were discussing the merits (or not) of lying. The interviewee said to Ed 'If you were my wife and you asked me 'Does this dress make me look fat' would I reply 'Absolutely not darling, it's your fat that makes you look fat'...?' - Comment - |
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still.." J.D. Salinger. Perhaps more extreme than necesary but I am constantly telling my students not to have a 'viewer' in mind as they paint. A 'viewer' might be dictating their painting to them rather than their own thoughts, desires and responses. A chunk of my job as their teacher is to swing their aspirations away from wanting to create something 'competent' to wanting to search their own souls to discover what it is they DO want to paint and then to give them some facility with various media to help them do just that. Today is a wonderful day, full of sunlight and birds on the bird table. I\'m in my shed laughing because I can always tell when the woodpecker visits the birdtable...I hear \'bangbangbang\' and there he is attacking the birdfat. The sparrows fling stuff everywhere and the greenfinches eat in a gentle and considered way, by far the best manners. I\'ve put some of Simon\'s bread out too and the rooks love that... Rook on the fence behind my shed.  - Comment - |
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 I think Aunt Peggy and Uncle Hugh's marriage was very much a partnership of equals unusual at that time. There was a long driveway leading to where they lived and one time Kate and I were in the car with Aunt Peggy heading down the drive and Uncle Hugh was driving up the other way. There was more than enough time for them to avoid each other but instead they bumped into each other. Aunt Peggy got out of the car and said 'Hugh, you should have gone into the hedge', to which he replied 'Nonsense Peggy, you should have gone into the ditch'. Photographs are so evocative. I can remember the moment that the photo below was taken. I had asked my twin sister to take the picture and someone else to stand over to the right (of me) so that Novio would look around me at what was going on. Our own memories are the fabric of what we are, and having a photo to jog that memory is, I suppose, why we take them. I imagine someone set up the photo of Aunt Peggy and Uncle Hugh in the same way, and although I wasn't there I'm certainly glad to have the photo...I was very fond of Aunt Peggy (and Uncle Hugh too), she was funny, opinionated and keen to find out what the modern world was about into her nineties (when she died). My sister and I would be put on a plane at Heathrow and sent over during the summer holidays to stay with them from quite a young age (7yrs old I think). There was a lake to swim in and always horses to ride and the Dublin Horse Show to visit. - Comment - |
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 And now an indulgence, my favorite picture of me aged 17 with a horse called Novio...hmmmmm...he was lovely.  Uncle Hugh and Aunt Peggy 1931  Here is one of the paintings from our recent study of Van Gogh and old boots. These were painted by Norah. Norah grew up in Ireland, and as a girl she was given a pony by my great aunt and Uncle which she says changed ger life. The pony was called Merrilegs. It was something she and I had no idea about until one day when I took in an old photo of my aunt and uncle on horses. My aunt had been top racing trainer in Ireland for four years running but had to do it in Uncle Hugh\'s name as women were not allowed to be trainers. Later I\'ll scan the photo of aunt Peggy and uncle Hugh and post it here. Norah\'s father had been the local doctor and the hunt doctor. They all hunted together.  This photo was taken with my phone camera -excuse the quality. - Comment - |
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 Yesterday was not an easy day in my shed...everything went wrong. It was one of those days when the mood is \'why the hell did I think I could do this?\'. Howevever, it seems that yesterday was set up to support today. That doesn\'t mean one can be complacent. There\'s nothing to ensure that great things emerge today, its just that moments of \'possibility\' are recognisable where they definitely were not yesterday. Here is my shed in the snow this winter.  - Comment - |
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 Here are four of them...then my camera battery ran out.  I went over to Chris's today to watch the ravens. Every evening at about 5pm they head to a certain barn, Chris says it can be over 100 sometimes. They sort of saunter across the sky in twos and threes, grumbling and croaking at each other with an occasional display of dual acrobatics. They are the crucifixes of the sky, great black crosses but far too chatty to be really ominous. I've been working on these dream like paintings again.Thery are all based on drawings of real places but have taken on their own enigma. I think I'll call them the 'Nocta Lucca' set, I heard those words last night. Its difficult naming paintings, it doesn't always feel straight forward. One of my teachers was John Hoyland, he said that he used to call all his work 'untitled' with a reference number but he could never remember which was which when referring to them so he began to name in order to make reference. He said the names didn't mean anything, but its a little like naming your children. You wouldn't 'reference-number' your children, you wouldn't give them a name you didn't like, naming something is meaningful whether you intend it or not. - Comment - |
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 The first snowdrops are up behind my shed under the ash tree...always a good sign. I've been working on paintings with a very dream-like quality to them and its probably a reaction to the cold, dark,blanket grey of the skies at the moment. My edges are soft and my colours orange! - Comment - |
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 So today in class we were looking at ways of drawing with pencil. From the moment you walk into your first class in school, and in fact before then, its probable that you've been using line and almost exclusively line unless you've been encouraged to do otherwise. Today 'outline' was discouraged. Line was only encouraged as 'hatched' line. I asked for 'fluid' hatching, making large areas of shadow indicative of the subject they were looking at (old boots!). I asked them also to use an eraser to carve back into the hatched area to begin to sculpt the shapes of the boots. It became a conversation between the pencil and the eraser, gradually the pencil marks and shapes becoming darker and more detailed and the light places revealed with the eraser. Some great pieces were produced. At the moment there's a glitch uploading pictures to this blog, as soon as its sorted out I'll upload some of my students' work. - Comment - |
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 I’ve been teaching watercolour painting to adults and children for 25 years. It is both a lovely moment and a relief when my students begin to ‘see the light’. Watercolour is a challenge. To use it successfully you must switch your way of thinking to something which is so counter-intuitive as to seem outrageous initially but will eventually be the bedrock of your way of seeing in every medium you use. Once you are using it, it will affect every part of your life, a big claim for a seemingly unassuming medium. I have had some students walk out of a class in their frustration and inability to take on board the notion that with watercolour you can't paint a 'light' place, you have to 'reveal' a light place by painting around it. It means that you have to be as conscious of the shapes you do not paint as you are of the shapes you do paint. - Comment - |
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 I wrote to the paper today, sometimes they publish it sometimes they don't...as follows Sir: I hope and think that David Baddiel's film will be very interesting (Baddiel courts controversy with a film about 'Muslim Jew'. 'Race' is a non-description of anyone I contend. When I was last in Jordan I met a mother and daughter. The mother was telling me that her parents were a Jewish Zionist settler and a Muslim Palestinian boxer. They married in 1947 and were disowned by their respective families. In 1948 they were put in prison and then freed on condition they 'went away'. 'Went away' meant going east and for the wife to live as a Muslim. Presumably the mother and daughter I met may return to Israel under the law of return, they are both Jewish being daughters of Jewish mothers.  Last September in an open exhibition I won a prize with money attached and one of the things I bought myself was a net book...The idea is that I have a line of banter via my website about the painting and teaching that I'm doing. Its in its nascent stages, there may be hiccoughs, but if you tune in here you might find enlightenment and there again you might not! |
clare.shep@btinternet.com
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