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Football’s going Rome…


Detail of Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, who was rubbish at football.

On Sunday a group of plucky lads narrowly escaped becoming national heroes. I know nothing of football but I imagine they were a bit disappointed. To be fair, I was a bit despondent too, until I remembered that the Italian fellows must be besides themselves with glee, which is a rather cheerful thought. After all, I like the Italians: before we showed them how to kick a ball around, they showed us how to paint, I think that is a fair exchange.

Their exuberance and sensuality contrasted with the rather stuffy work being produced in Northern Europe, they kicked off the Renaissance and modern painting is generally agreed to have started with Titian and the Venetians, now part of Italy. So as a painter, I’m not going to ask for our ball back.

Summer

Our term ends on Saturday the 24th July and then for August we will be running Tuesday eveningsWednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. We hope that you will find yourself fully immunised on a beach in a green list country but if you do get left behind in Blighty, we’d love to see you in the studio or on Zoom.

Term resumes on the 6th September and we should have our tutored courses available to book on the website soon.

Theatre? Graham Cowley, who often draws with us, has a play running called Staircase running at the Southwark Playhouse. It’s a comedy that harks back to a time when being tolerant of other peoples sexuality was optional. You can read more and book tickets here

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Oily fish and oil paint


Black Scabbard Fish – if it’s not oily, it should be.

Reviewing the many health benefits of eating oily fish I was encouraged to read that “Among people who abuse alcohol, fish oil may offer protection from dementia” which is lucky, because I may occasionally slip into that micro niche of people who ‘abuse alcohol’ and no one enjoys an anchovy more than I do. So voluptuous consumption of tuna and salmon will form a key part of my strategy for getting older. They’re also jam packed with Vitamin D which helps keep Covid away, so for the while we should all be eating plenty.

Oil paint, on the other hand, really has no dietary value at all; which does not mean we should dismiss it; it contributes to our health in other ways, particularly if we paint with it*. Take dementia, in one study researchers found a 73% reduction in the onset of Alzheimer’s in those engaged in the arts and crafts. We know that learning new things is a brilliant way of maintaining neuroplasticity as we age. We also know that when we paint we are constantly learning, it’s one of the reasons we find it so engaging.

If we take the holistic view that anything that contributes to our well being also contributes to our health, painting is most assuredly potent and certainly preferable to a handful of pills from the quack. I can tell you from daily experience that the buzz and whirr of a room full of honest artists painting a model is a powerful tonic and visibly contributes to their well being. If we paint, we have a purpose, even if locked in our studios the vista before us is infinite and beckons.

Whilst you could say that of many activities, unlike active sports and more physical arts where our skills degenerate over time, painting, along with writing, appears to be something we get better at the longer we do it, regardless of age. We may have to adapt, Matisse ended up doing cutouts and drawing with long sticks from his bed, still he found a way and his eye was never lost. Monet never lost his eye even though he practically lost his eyesight, he painted on, overcoming his difficulties and contributing towards what would become abstraction.

If we’re lucky, we may even exhibit and sell, the business around an exhibition can be quite gripping, hobnobbing with artists and collectors is immense fun and any funds returned from the exercise certainly contribute to our wellbeing, and so to our health.

Good habits put in place early in life support us throughout the journey. Our art habit, often neglected when things like family and career get in the way, will always be there to pick up and continue. Like fresh Nieuwe Haring from Holland there is immediate and vivid pleasure but it is the long term benefits that bring the real reward.

*As a side note, linseed oil, marketed as flax seed oil, is sold in health food shops to those who cannot eat fish because it has the precursors of Omega3 fatty acids in it, the very fats that are so beneficial in oily fish. Linseed oil is, of course, the medium generally used in oil paint.

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Mothing to See Here

Mothing to see here

We had a visitor in the studio this week, an exceedingly elegant lady who it transpires was a lime hawk moth. She was huge and plump with a seductively velvety belly. Most noticeably she was wearing distinctly military looking camouflage fatigues. If you look at the modern camouflage on the F16 below you can see that the two designers were thinking along the same lines.

Time was when art students were taught to sketch from nature, to make visual notes about natural forms and to become curious about the endless invention of the natural world. The enquiry would not only train the hand and eye as you’d expect but enrich the students visual vocabulary and connect them with a limitless resource. Going outdoors and having a good look at the rocks, plants and animals and possibly drawing some of them, can provide as much stimulation as any sane person needs to get going with their art and certainly inform their design. For the rest of us there’s always Google.

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Talking and Pictures

You may know the feeling. Notwithstanding a world class arts education, forty years of diligent practice, many sales and peer reviewed accolades, you discover that you haven’t a clue how to paint. On top of that you’re useless at drawing and everybody hates you.

Oh how easy it would have been if we’d just done what our parents wanted and become accountants or doctors. Even bad doctors can set bones and save lives whilst very good artists are often overlooked. For the physician the parameters are clear, fix the disease and you make the mark. Fix it or not and you still get paid. The mark for most artists is not a self evident truth about which all agree, the problems they try to solve and the solutions they find can be half-seen, fleeting and complex.

Creativity will not submit to order and control; like a cat it may choose to sit on our lap and purr or turn around and put it’s bum in our face. Whereas accountants have the certainty of arithmetic around which to build their careers, the only certainty artists have is that their chief tool, creativity, may come and go as it chooses.

And yet, is creativity, like love, an ever-fixed mark? Could it be that whilst it appears to come and go, this is just an illusion? Whilst the product of creativity is always changing, the feeling of creativity is always the same: open, easy, fluid, playful, fresh. What continues to change are our thoughts and feelings which have dubious value around our art: if we think we’re great, we often produce vapid crap and we know that negative thoughts can be kryptonite to our creativity.

As a youngster I was outraged that my school never taught me how to think. I found that Edward de Bono did and on top of that, he was one of the few people in the world who spoke about creativity. I used his tools to get through A levels and then to generate ideas when I was working in advertising. He would often suggest solving creative problems by introducing a random element. As a copywriter for example I would often select random words with a pin to include in problematic statements. Rather like working with a limited palette, the limitation curiously allows the mind greater freedom. Creativity does not resolve negative thoughts, it merely dances around them in a way that makes them irrelevant.

Edward de Bono died this week and whilst he may have been arrogant and controversial his ideas have been fantastically helpful not only to artists but also to doctors and accountants.

Most artists will have some method for returning them to the state of grace so necessary to their work. If you don’t then you could do worse than look at one of his books. (No, we’re not affiliated!)

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Casual sex and Sunday painters

Casual sex and Sunday painters


Trees near Breccles – Winston Churchill

I know we’re not allowed to go on holiday but is anyone clear about the government regulations around casual sex? I’m asking for a friend. My grasp of the guidelines is fuzzy but so long as we do it out of doors in a group of six, I think it should be ok and I presume that the hugging thing means that we no longer need to do it at a distance of a metre plus, a feat for which most of us were not sufficiently equipped.

‘Casual sex’ is one of those dissonant phrases, like ‘amateur painter’, blithe formulations that are often used to gloss over ideas that are too complicated to go into. In my limited experience, there is nothing remotely casual about most people’s approach to getting their leg over. Rather it consumes much of our early life with a desperate intensity, and when partnered with its sensible friend procreation, it could be said to be the alpha and omega of our existence, nothing casual about that.

As for ‘amateur painter’, the phrase conjures up a feckless hobbyist with a ‘that’ll do’ attitude whose output is admired by loyal friends through slightly gritted teeth. I’m sure such people exist but all the painters that I know bring every fibre of their resolve to the act of making images, no idle pastime but a heroic battle with pigment and perception.

I’ve heard some use the phrase about themselves in a self-deprecating manner, largely I’m sure to deflect any ‘constructive criticism’ they feel may come their way. Winston Churchill publicly thought of himself as an amateur painter and referred to his output as daubs, and yet he painted throughout his life, had works accepted into the Royal Academy and even wrote a book about his hobby!

‘’Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.”

Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime

In defence of the amateur, if we look at the root of the word, it means lover: ideally we’d all be amateurs in the sense that we paint for the love of it, not for financial reward. And if we do paint to pay our bills it’s important to at least occasionally paint just for the sheer joy of it. It keeps things alive.

On a practical note, amateur painting will engage us long after casual sex is a fond, if distant, memory.

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Making the best of it


Vincent van Gogh, Four Swifts with Landscape Sketches, 1887; Paris, France

The swifts are here. It may not be the Summer we wanted, it’s cold, wet and we can’t go anywhere nice but there are green things and flowers and pleasures close to home, we can make the best of things and have fun; we can even go to the pub tonight.

As a youngster I was led to believe that making the best of things was a virtue. Whilst as a child that may have meant colouring in on a rainy afternoon, as an adult the idea is more profound. It’s not the same as putting up with things, it’s a bit more than that. If things were always the way that we wanted them to be we would likely as not repeat the same pleasurable experiences ad infinitum, discovering over time that through familiarity the pleasure dulls and is overtaken by a sense of ennui.

As artists we are alive to possibility and keenly aware that one of our greatest creative friends is chance, accident, surprise and occasionally adversity or even perversity. We may intentionally spill paint on our work, stab at it with a loaded brush or molest it with a palette knife just to bring the edginess and excitement back to it. We create a possibility for the inner child to get out the crayons and start colouring in, to see disappointment and make the best of it, knowing that when we do we often discover something new.

It takes courage to work with the unfamiliar but we are artists and we will work with what we find before us, trusting that our art revels in the unexpected, that it will create order from the commotion.

This frightful year might have shown us that in the absence of outings to restaurants we can prepare our own food, instead of travelling to crowded retail spaces we can shop smaller and closer to home, instead of a weekend in Paris we can explore our local parks. Not putting up with it but actually discovering how blessed we are to just have what we have, looking up with an open heart as we hear the treening sound of passing swifts.

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Why Turner may be turning in his grave


Ancient Sounds – Paul Klee 1925 – It’s visual and it’s art so nothing to do with the Turner Prize.

Whilst the Turner Prize is ostensibly for British excellence in the visual arts you wonder at times at the definition of ‘visual’, let alone ‘art’.

Thinking about the visual, I know through my own personal response to things that I see that there are certain configurations of shapes, colours and qualities that strongly engage me, captivate me and very occasionally  bring about a life changing neurological event.

I know that some of these visual experiences are pure and simple, the statement of a single colour for example or the exquisite painting by Klee above, which moves me in a deep and curious way. Other visual experiences are more complex and may include description, illusion, narrative or even language. We may find that the tendons of the visual piece extend out into politics and beyond.

That said, surely with the visual arts the key sense with which we play is vision. When the emphasis is put upon something other than the visual experience, for example a political narrative of social engagement, are we missing the point?

I can remember being taught to listen to poetry not by hanging on the meaning of the words and trying to analyse them but by listening to the texture and timbre of the sounds of the words first. Meaning comes but not always as easily communicable ‘ideas’.

Similarly, the language of sight needs no translation or explanation if we are just quietly open to the experience of seeing. We know when our art receptors start to tingle.

The fact that images can communicate in a way that words cannot is a problem for anyone whose primary means of communication is words. What is a journalist to say when confronted with transcendent rightness or simple visual beauty? Being left speechless is a bad look, far easier to talk about artworks that engage primarily with ideas and narratives.

We know that the act of looking and then trying to arrange shapes and colours on a surface in a way that explores and celebrates visual experience has value for us personally as artists, otherwise why would so many of us be doing it? There are far easier ways of spending an afternoon. We also know that sometimes the product of that exercise has such value for others they are keen to buy it and keep it in their homes to enrich their lives in a mysterious way that is hard to talk about.

When the visual arts are rooted in the joy and act of looking they seem to have an integrity which is so often overlooked by the cerebral types who are the spokespeople for contemporary art. They miss that most profound and intense relationship we can have with our world when we truly *see* it.

Turner was extravagantly interested in how things looked, there may well have been other things going on in his paintings but mostly they were preoccupied with the visual.

However, big respect to the Black Obsidian Sound System, who seem to share my love of unfeasibly large loudspeakers!

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Going the extra mile – old wisdom in the modern era

Recent visitors to our studios will have noticed the addition of some new bookshelf speakers. I say bookshelf because they are sort of on a bookshelf but actually they are each the size of a fridge and have monstrously large, single drive units. They were tricky to source and we had to build them ourselves, our first lockdown project. They make a small but intensely important uplift in the quality of the sound.

We arrived at this solution after quite a lot of research and discovered that in order to get high quality sound into a large room, you either have to spend an inordinate amount of money on complex technology or you go large and old fashioned; we chose option two. The amplifier is over forty years old and like the modern yet traditionally built speakers, was made to do the job in the best way possible, not to ‘fit in’ or meet a budget. Coincidentally it was conceived at about the same time as Alison’s old Mercedes, the last one to be designed to a standard not to a budget.

If the difference in sound quality is small you might think, well, why bother, why not do what others do and be happy? Because happy is not enough. We want ecstasy.

Which kind of brings me to the point, and it relates to painting, or indeed any of the arts. Anyone can learn to draw well enough, to apply colours in a pleasing way to a surface, to form appealing shapes out of wood or clay, to do what the others do and be happy. If we were making fridges this may suffice but as artists we have to go further. To find that final, small and transformative improvement which will elevate our work and transfix the viewer. The irony is that those small changes can take far longer than the main body of the piece and are disproportionately expensive in terms of thought and reflection.

On top of this, the wisdom of going large and old fashioned is to be celebrated. So much improvement in the modern world is nothing of the sort, just tinkering to sell more product or diminishments to fit in with the privations of modern life. The materials that we use as artists tend to be old fashioned. Charcoal, such a wonderful sensitive medium, was used by Neanderthals (and still is looking at the state of our studio floor at times) and oil paint, a thoroughly modern medium, dates back to the early renaissance. Whilst you could argue that modern equivalents such as acrylic are more convenient, in every other way oil, whilst old fashioned, is superior.

Most of what is important to us has been known for ever: whilst it is unfashionable to say, I have never learnt anything from a modern self-help book that could not be gleaned from the Bible, the Buddha or the Vedas, which work with concepts that predate the written word. About as old fashioned as you can get.

Which is not to dismiss the modern, we would be fools to reject the genuine improvements of modern life, just to be sensible to the deceptive marketing of products and ideas; things that purport to give us value whilst in practice merely profiting someone else.

Our music system is simple because it works and it is big because it’s better. Old wisdom.

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Post Covid Artists


Our studio, ready and waiting

Are you a Post Covid artist? And what would that mean for you?

Whilst not presuming to know any individuals personal reality, it seems that we have stared pestilence in the face, contemplated our mortality and carried on painting. Now, as the restrictions are slowly loosening there is a process of assessment, looking at what has changed through necessity and thinking about what might remain changed through choice.

We know that there are artists who would have wrinkled their nose at the idea of painting from a screen who now produce solid works that way. Others have put in place a robust studio routine which will stay with them for years to come. New mediums have been tried, new motifs entertained. Works have sold directly through Instagram, schemes like the Artists support pledge have sustained some and allowed others to snap up some good value originals. Galleries have been mounting online exhibitions and in some cases selling handsomely.

The TV companies have latched on to life drawing and helped to excite interest in drawing and painting and a lot of starters have had a first taste either from TV or on Zoom, where a plethora of models and organisations have been offering online sessions. It looks as if quite a few artists have decided to run workshops and teach too, responding to the enhanced interest in learning to draw and paint.

The arts community on Instagram has grown by more than 20% in the last year and it’s now routine to post your work there and accrue comments and likes, which can feel nice. Some artists may treat their feed like their website and post finished works, others will treat it like a window into their studio, where the artist is as interesting as the work.

The government view that creatives like dancers, should consider going into coding has been firmly inserted back into the orifice from which it emerged. We work with lots of dancers and none of them have become computer programmers! Indeed all the creatives we know have dug in and used the time profitably, affirming old practises and learning new.

If there is one thing that we may all share as post Covid artists, it is that we have had time to consider what is important to us. Knowing that is pungently meaningful.

Joining us in the studio

It has been so good to have people back in the studio. Our studio is Covid secure with PVC screens and good ventilation. The new arrangements mean that we can only have thirteen artists at a time so we are now never crowded. We used to like a good throng but now that thronging has become illegal, on the bright side, you’re sure of a clear view of the model and some personal space. We still serve excellent coffee in old fashioned cups with proper biscuits and cakes and our artists are a self-selecting bunch of excellent people, winningly friendly and fabulously talented.

So do think of coming to see us, Wednesday mornings and Tuesday afternoons have plenty of spaces available and all of the evening life drawing sessions have spaces too.

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Sunshine

Sunshine


Henry Hensche – Portrait of Loretta Bohaty

We know one thing about the virus and that is that we are better defended against it when we have adequate amounts of Vitamin D in our systems. The best source of that is to stretch out naked on a sunny beach and make our own from the warming rays of the sun. For most of us that just isn’t an option right now so we find another way. Dry pills and oily fish seem to be the thing, smoked salmon is no hardship when taken medicinally but I’d swap it in a flash for a glimpse of the sun.

Like the quickening of a creative urge the sun can rarely be relied upon, sometimes it’s there and sometimes obscured. As artists we know that in the absence of our mojo we turn to process, discipline and routine in the knowledge that turning this soil is the way to provide for future growth when the sunshine breaks through again.

The painting above is by the colourist Henry Hensche. Hensche would paint and teach in full sunshine so that the colours would sing and form the structure of the painting. Those of you who will be attending Erin Raedeke’s Master Class in a couple of weeks may be interested to know that Erin can trace a line through her tutelage back to Hawthorne, Hensche and the Cape Cod School, where colour came first. You can see the similarity in the way the colours are handled in the sliver of Erins work below:

You can still sign up for Erin’s Free Masterclass on the 15th February and the last time I checked there were two places left on the course which runs from February 22nd – March 29th, read more or sign up on this page.

 

Tuesday Evening Freya’s Fast Poses 7.00pm-8.30pm on Zoom


Adrian @modbodadrian

Freya will be dipping into the murky ponds of emotion and distortion this evening referencing Oskar Kokoshka. Kokoshka was deemed a degenerate artist by the Nazis, what’s not to like?

You can join us on Zoom from 6.45pm and get to know us and any other drawers before work commences at 7.00pm.

The cost is £8 but if you can convince us you’re a student we’ll give you a code to get the session for £5: drop us an email.

Click here to book

Wednesday Portraiture 2.00pm-5.00pm on Zoom


The second week with Amy as our portrait model. You can see a couple of works at the top the first one from Carolyne Megan the second one by Stuart Fairlamb

We’ll have a further three hours this Wednesday to finish her off. So to speak.

Zoom fee is £15 Please book here

The session fee will be reduced to £12 if you use the discount code PESTE2 at final checkout. This is optional.

Saturday Long Pose Life Drawing 10.00am-1.00pm on Zoom


Rebecca by Denis Purshouse

Rebecca by Simon

Rebecca is seated with one knee drawn up and a big mop of red hair – I’ve put a couple of works in progress above to give you an idea. The first is by Denis Purshouse who is going for the portrait view and the second is my own which is from a different angle in the studio (I find it tricky painting through the cameras!) but gives you an idea of the pose, from the camera her knees are pretty much pointing at you.

Zoom fee is £15

Please book here

The Zoom session fee will be reduced to £12 if you use the discount code PESTE2 at final checkout. This is optional.