Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.