how to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite

                                 Our English Coasts:Holman Hunt

If you want to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite there are one or two technical points which will help you achieve a rich, detailed and lustrous surface. One of the most interesting of the group from a technical point of view was William Holman Hunt and I am going to explain the method he used when painting Our English Coasts 1852 (Strayed Sheep) which is in the collection at Tate Britain.

To obtain the kind of surface that Hunt aimed for you could certainly consider the following:

Use an oil rich painting medium.
Use sable rather than bristle brushes for your detailed work.

The advantages of an oil rich painting medium are that you have a buttery medium which dries to a lustrous, enamel like surface. Hunt said that his formula was:to use equal quantities of walnut or poppy oil,copal varnish and turpentine.

These materials may be obtained from good art material shops.

The advantages of sable brushes are that they give much finer, neater lines than you can get with bristle brushes and with broader sables they can give a softer,more even touch.They are very expensive and need careful looking after.

Hunt worked on a white ground, which also helps if the paintwork is thin and the ground can reflect light through it.He said that he would cover the underdrawing on his canvas with a thin layer of spatula applied white oil from which most of the oil had in fact been removed by allowing the paint to stand on a newspaper. Before applying this thin layer he added a drop of varnish.

So he sometimes was painting wet into wet-and with a very light touch.


You can get further detailed information on Hunt and from: Completing the Picture: materials and techniques of twenty-six paintings in the Tate Gallery.This was published by the Tate Gallery , London in 1982. No overall author is listed but the foreword is by Allan Bowness.The actual section on Hunt is by Christine Leback Sitwell.

why paper grain matters to an artist

Have you ever tried to fold a large sheet of paper preparatory to tearing or cutting it into two pieces? If you produced a neat clean fold then you were folding with the paper grain. If the paper cracked and was difficult to fold then you were working against the grain. It is a fact that most paper is made by machine nowadays and the pulp fibres tend to lie in a consistent direction. You can also find grain in artists' quality papers.

The nature of paper grain has long been known to bookbinders who regularly paste papers with a variety of glues. If the papers being glued do not have their fibres running in the same direction then the tensions within the book will tend to warp it.

These tensions can occur in different degrees when making collages or mounting drawings. If the paper is not treated properly it will not be possible to glue it in place without wrinkling and distortion occurring.If you want to make thin pasteboard-which can be very strong, then you should assemble the layers so that the grain of each sheet lies in the same direction. I will say more on this when I write about the making of glue and the practice of gluing paper .

There are many ways of determining paper grain. Which way does the paper fold easiest? That is the direction of the grain. This method works with large sheets of paper. Imagine a rectangular sheet. If it folds easiest from short side to short side then the grain runs parallel to that side and vice versa. If you have only a small square of paper then moisten it and see which way it tends to curl. The direction of curl is parallel to the grain.

the GIMP

This is one of my latest works made using the GIMP. You can see more of them-along with my paintings, drawings and photography by clicking through to my website or to Flickr.

At the moment I am taking photographs and working with the GIMP program to make digital art. I like the GIMP, it is free after-all and it does a great job for me. It allows me to create projects which give the impression of being sculptural works which appear to exist on a large scale.

I take photos of objects or forms made out of any materials which can be cut, shaped or modelled and then transform them with the GIMP. Some of the objects are intended to be works in their own right but many more are very temporary and impermanent. As time goes by I have built up a collection of images and textures which can be used to enrich the digital work.

heist

I have made a resolution not to read any crime novels which feature the word heist in the publisher's blurb.It seems to me that a heist story now means something like a robbery involving a comic and risible mcguffin. I have had enormous pleasure reading Ian Rankin's Rebus series several times over but rather less from one of his latest offerings, "Doors Open". In this an unlikely trio of successful people decide to commit the perfect crime within Edinburgh's art world. Not much time is wasted on the process by which each one decides to join the plot. The success or failure of the heist partly depends on an accomplice being able to reproduce exactly a group of paintings which belong to the National Gallery of Scotland. There are problems with this conceit:it is impossible to make reproductions such as these. And secondly they have to be made within a short-but unspecified time. Neither is likely to happen but for the purposes of the story we must believe that they did happen and that the results were convincing.
This objection may seem like pedantry and I suppose that any zoo-keeper looking at a crime story which featured the practices and procedures associated with looking after animals would be likely to find weaknesses in a complex plot involving the treatment of the same.The general reader will presumably overlook the details and move on.

Doors Open, Ian Rankin, Orion 2008.

euan uglow

The recently published catalogue of Euan Uglow's oeuvre contains  some surprises. Firstly it confirms that  he is a much more competent painter within his own very narrow focus than his friend and mentor Coldstream was in his. (There was an artist whose reputation came because he was well connected and one of the great and the good rather than for any quality  as a painter.) Uglow's portrait work lacks any attempt at insight into character, but you could say the same about Cezanne's portraits which are also exercise in style.The faces in Uglow are often a little too mask like. Some of the nudes hold strikingly memorable poses and no doubt he will have been accused of sadism towards models. There are a few works which will be long remembered- the diagonal nude is perhaps the most successful and any artist should be satisfied  with that. What I frequently like about the later work is the colour which is something  personal and striking. He had no feeling for landscape whatsoever and the formalism/parallelism is to be seen early on.

Seurat

I have been interested in Seurat since my schooldays. I cannot recall if my art teacher , Mr Hunter, mentioned his quasi scientific attitude, most probably he did. This interest was greatly helped when the Northumberland Library Service bought two books on the artist which I  requested and wanted to consult. They were Herbert's book on the drawings which was a very attractive book design for its time and Homer's book on Seurat's use of colour. I'm not sure how much of the latter I understood. I have been re-reading Homer and can see why it occupies an important but much criticised place in Seurat studies. It is too dogmatic  but it is also a useful collection of material for anyone interested in colour in C19 art. 

Discussing colour is extraordinarily difficult and optical mixture/fusion is as tricky as they come. One problem is that Homer, and most writers on Seurat do not seem to understand the importance of the size of the dot and the fact that this is crucial to the greying effects said to be observed in The Models and other  late works. We have problems in perceiving the colour of dots: they can only appear to be greyish at the distance where  fusion may be expected to occur. In other words the colour of dots seen at a distance cannot be clearly perceived by the human eye, at increasing distances their true colour cannot be observed and they will tend to look grey. Juxtaposed dots of differing colours will  function in a similar way and it seems to me that there will be a fusion of coloured greys. The importance of dot size has been known for almost 40 years though it is not mentioned in any of the standard works which I have to hand.Webster, in his well known article on Impressionism has nothing to say on this matter.

Homer is obsessed with the ideal viewing distance for paintings and may have derived this preoccupation from Webster. On that score I can only say that we experience paintings as we can. A wall-painting may force a distant viewpoint, a large canvas allows one to move about and to experience it in different ways. It would have been useful if he had avoided sentences like this.

"As a result of the growing  uniformity of Seurat's pointillist technique,  optical mixture could take place much more easily, and thus  his paintings tended increasingly to operate as luminous screens that emit colored light". (page 165)

 

"Seurat and the Science of Painting",William Innes Homer, The M.I.T Press, 1964

   

the iraqi picasso

Boucher Diana
Originally uploaded by baroque.rococo

The painting, originating in Iraq, was not painted by Picasso. It is not of museum quality and probably dates from around 1900 . The pose is derived from a painting by Boucher in the Louvre-Diana leaving the Bath. This would be obvious to any first year art-history student.

The majority is often wrong

The English language changes  through ignorance, there is no doubt about it and I am sure this is not an original observation. One corruption or transformation which has been going on for the last two years at least is in the misuse of the the word majority. This is a word which in its usual use refers to number. We now see it by extension being used to describe the greater part of an object as in, "the majority of the South Front...." in material on display during the restoration at Stowe.  This grates on my ear . Journalists are using it in this ignorant way. Here is an example from Oliver James," The great majority of depression is not major but what is known as minor....." So where was the sub-editor?

(September 3, 2009: I have an earlier example of the casual use of the word "majority". W Homer, in his 1964 study of Seurat writes of colours "which occupy the majority of the water area."(page 68).

Palmer forged

This illustration shows a gross forgery of a Shoreham period work by Samuel Palmer. It was made by Keating and appeared with two others in the catalogue of an exhibition presented by a prestigious London gallery in 1970. The forgeries were accompanied by quality works by English watercolourists. The gallery had no intention to deceive but was itself deceived. Once again the forger of the painting had provided a  forged provenance for the works.A provenance is nothing more than a history of where and with whom the work has spent its time since its creation.   This helps to give persuade the buyer that reputable, perhaps very reputable people, have been custodians of the work. Where the provenance is genuine one can learn something about the history of collecting.

This forgery was the work of prolific but incompetent British forger, now dead.His action was despicable. No, I dont have much sympathy for dealers and art historians, and anyone can make a mistake. In this case some doubts were raised early on. 

What concerns me is that  the forger is a traitor to any sense of solidarity which might exist among artists. He-and it is usually a he, knows that his forgery is not in the same league as  the work on which he parasitises. The forger is usually found out eventually but  meanwhile he smears the reputation of a fellow artist. Compare the fake Palmer with the real thing and you can see how crude the forgery is. It may be argued that this Palmer forgery is in the style of the artist, but it is only a crude approximation. It is a garish travesty of an artistic moment when a burgeoning sensibility (Palmer's) made a creative leap such as our forger could never have manifested.

Alan Sorell's Archaeological Illustrations

Not long ago my local Oxfam yielded up a copy of Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-Created which was published in 1980 by the National Museum of Wales. The name of Alan Sorrell is certainly well known to anyone over the age of fifty who has more than a passing interest in British archaeology; for it was he who was the illustrator of choice for all those Ministry of Works guidebooks which my generation brought home from visits to ancient sites. Sorrell's dramatic images showed high quality reconstructions of places as they might have looked during the time when they were inhabited. When I was young I did not appreciate these drawings but I have a different opinion now.

When I studied the book I found a postcard inserted beside Sorrell's drawing of the Roman villa at Llantwit Major.It showed another artist's reconstruction of the same site. What a contrast! Perhaps the previous owner had thought so too. Sorrell's drawing is richness itself compared to the work of the unnamed postcardist. He adopts a very high viewpoint so that you see over the villa and the surrounding countryside; lines of vision shoot off into the far distance-to vanishing points outside the image itself. High viewpoints are common with Sorrell: he deploys his perspective with panache-and of course he came from a period when art students were likely to learn it in a serious manner. His drawing is filled with incident: humans, animals and nature enrich the scene . The miserable art of the postcardist is timidity personified when compared to that of Sorell who uses as all his painterly skills to produce a living work of art. Sometimes I have thought that his work looks a little harsh but just as often I remember that he had to explain what was happening and consider how work would look when reproduced. He was also a muralist and muralists look for clarity. I would say that since Sorrell there has been something of a decline in this type of work. The illustrated leaflet for the mesolithic house at Howick was a case in point. There the drawings were more akin to something from a very rudimentary comic.It is good to see that there is a website commemorating Sorrell here . His wife, Elizabeth Tanner was also an artist of quality. Both were fortunate to study at a time when the ability to draw was valued.

The Chicago Faun

The Art Institute of Chicago - Paul Gauguin - Faun
Originally uploaded by cerdsp NOT IN FACT A GAUGUIN.

The Art Institute has one of the finest collections of 19th Century art in the world. But it does not have a sculpture by Paul Gauguin. For a brief period it thought that it did have one but this turned out to be a forgery. The object was forged and so was the provenance yet scholars felt able to identify it as the earliest surviving ceramic by Gauguin. They also had knowledge of an authentic drawing -apparently rather slight-which suggested the faun to them (and to the forger). This image can be seen on page 14 of Gray's book on the artist's sculpture and ceramics. It shows the first page of  the Album Gauguin now in the Louvre. This sketchbook is concerned with projects for ceramic work and some of these do survive and are undoubtedly by Gauguin. This  provided clear evidence that Gauguin thought about an image of a faun. So it was possible that a similar ceramic would one day be found. This along with the forged provenance suggested that an unknown work by Gauguin had been found.If you look at the illustration in Gray you will see that the faun's pectoral area suggests femininity as much as  masculinity.I suggest-and it is easy with hindsight to do this-that the Faun looks rather like some sort of fantasy art model.

It is extremely easy to be wise after the event but the Art Institute's advisors should have noticed the poor quality of the modelling  of the faun and compared it with the  early family portrait busts by Gauguin .These show a bland and sophisticated modelling. These works exist as marbles  which must have been realised after the original clays by the artist, realised by a praticien a highly skilled craftsman and not by Gauguin himself. It is of course the case that Gauguin was consciously attempting a  primitivism in his work and that is the reason we admire his ceramics so much. But do look at the modelling of the chest and arms. Gauguin would not have been satisfied with something so slapdash . Primitivism is one thing but incompetence entirely another. Some will say that those who authenticated the work were influenced by the very fact that Gauguin ceramics are not easy to obtain.

It is sad/amusing to relate that at one point Gauguin did offer to work as a praticien. This can only have been in a moment of desperation or fantasy. It is even more improbable than the idea of James Joyce as a cinema manager.You can read more about the perpetrator of this forgery here

Museum Studies

The new museum in Athens is opening this weekend. There have been a few articles in the press and photos on the web but it is hard to get a good impression of the building and its displays. My first thoughts about the exterior is that it is gross/crass. Regarding the display of standing figures, well they should not be dwarfed by the architecture around them.

Regarding the moral blackmail which the Greeks are trying to use over the Elgin "marbles" I will say that the sculptures should stay in London . The suggestion that they could be loaned to Athens if British ownership was admitted was a foolish one to get into and one wonders if it is really the BM 's opinion. Repatriation of the "marbles", however much sentiment may urge it, would not be a good move from the point of view of museums in general. It  has been allowed in the case of body parts from indigenous peoples or after looting during major wars.   It would be a major operation to move these sculptures. They should not be moved except for conservation purposes. Maybe it was all a storm in a teacup.Perhaps Italy will ask for Veronese's Marriage at Cana to be sent back from the Louvre.The case seems to be similar.

The genius of Steve Bell

Steve Bell is undoubtedly the finest cartoonist working for the Guardian/Observer group. The Guardian has indulged him as he learned to draw and matured as an artist and for this one is truly grateful. His work seems to fit best with the  tradition of clear, hardhitting imagery. I would hazard a guess that the improvement in Martin Rowson's work owes something to Bell's influence.

Today's cartoon is not one of his best. 

It is a parody of Holman Hunt's  The Scapegoat.

 It shows Speaker Martin as the latest outcast, stumbling in his robes and adjacent to the head of our lamentable Prime Minister. There is the traditional, "apologies to...",  inscribed at the side. 

Cartoonists probably don't do their best work when there is an "apologies to..."situation. They are taking someone else's symbolism and bending it to their own theme and there is an inevitable collision between the original symbolism and the adaptation-which can of course be interesting in itself. The suggestion here is that the Speaker is literally a scapegoat and indeed you could make out a case for this. How many of those turning on him are without sin? His performance yesterday was indeed pathetic. And who would want the support of Sir Stuart Bell?  

When I say that Martin Rowson's work has improved recently I mean to say that it is often clearer and more direct than it used to be. But there is still too much of the more complicated symbolism and lurid, heavy handed clumsiness. He isn't very good with likenesses either.

Brinkburn Priory

It was thirty years ago that we first visited Brinkburn, just after it was opened after being taken into the care of English Heritage. As a building it is worth a visit: it is also enjoyable because of its secluded site. You approach it down a gently sloping track which yesterday abounded in primroses and speedwell. You are lead down into the valley where the Coquet runs around the site. Brinkburn is also worth a visit because of its mature trees, many grow high on the steep banks on the opposite bank of the river. In winter this situation would have reduced the already  small amount of sunlight available.

What do you see when you get there?  You see the 12th century Priory and the much later house partly built from monastic outbuildings and sited over the ranges between the church and the river. The house has a large extension by Dobson. You can enter  and see the dilapidation .

The church itself is empty of most of the usual church furniture and this helps to emphasize the severity of the building.The north door is well worth a look for its late Norman details. Perhaps the most interesting object inside the church is the tombstone of Prior William who died in 1484. I did not photograph inside the church as a small choir were practicing there.

The weather was extraordinary and this would be an excellent  spot for a picnic or a  spot for children to play. I am not surprised that someone thought of holding a music festival here. Artists wishing to redo the Turner view would definitely have a problem due to the growth of trees since his time and difficulty in getting to his viewpoint.

Old Libraries and New

In June of this year there opens the new City Library of Newcastle. This is the third City Library in living memory. Any literate Novocastrian over the age of about 55 can remember the Victorian library which stood on the same site. Then came Basil Spence's version from the late 1960s. When that   building had outlived its usefulness (said who?), a  new one was designed by Ryder and built by Kajima . Thus was lost the opportunity to  commission a noteworthy  building demonstrating civic pride. It would surely have been possible to find an architectural firm which could have made the statement without making it overblown or turning the project into an "ideas store" .  

 The aesthetic nullity of the new library is unbelievable. It contrasts unfavourably with the more humble suburban library at Jesmond which was opened in 1963. This one has a circular book/reading room and was designed by Harry Faulkner Brown and Partners.It fits comfortably into a small corner site and is reasonably well lit. The only disadvantage is that (if I remember rightly) it does not have a public lavatory).

 Libraries are in the news at the moment,there are the planned closures of several of them in the Wirral and now-according to "The Guardian" there is the suggestion that piped music should be supplied. The mind boggles but boggle it must. One recent proposal was that booksellers should choose what goes onto library shelves. Judging from the state of my own local branch that may already be happening. 

Malcolm Fraser in Berwick

Yesterday; wandering back from a visit to Holy Trinity in Berwick with my friend David we came across an interesting new office development. A photographic exhibition was being shown inside so this gave us the chance to make a visit. It turned out that the building was more interesting than the photographs and we were glad to look around. This building-which has quality written all over  it, is the work of the Malcolm Fraser practice which has produced some fine work in Edinburgh; the Scottish Poetry Centre being perhaps the best known. So there are now two worthwhile recent buildings in Northumberland: this office development and the new observatory at Kielder. Both feature wood in their construction or cladding. Newcastle has nothing recent to offer of similar quality. The new City Library appears to be a monument to banality and have even less going for it than the dreadful housing  on the Quayside. I do not think Newcastle has had a building of real quality since MEA House by Ryder and Yates.

Unfortunately the Berwick building, which has offices to rent by the month, was almost totally unoccupied: another sign of the times. You can access the  Berwick Workspace from the alley beside the Berwick Advertiser building and also from Walkergate.   

Calligraphy by Li Yuan-Chia

Wei wu wei; act without acting is a Daoist aphorism here written by the Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia. I never saw him practicing his calligraphy but I do know that he did not use the traditional ink stick and stone. He used instead a large bottle of indian ink as purchased from Thurnam's in Carlisle. Paper for practice was provided by old newspapers which were then used to light his stove.

Whether this frugality would be classed as a Daoist characteristic I do not know. One presumes that would be the case; showing off doesn't fit with the image of  self sufficiency and frugality such as Li exemplified.

And frugal he certainly was: a visitor, calling by arrangement on a winter evening might find the house in darkness. But he answered the door pointing out that one did not need light to think by. Li did not usually go far from home but sometimes went out on his scooter-with a kind of home-made apron fixed around his legs to protect himself from the breeze.  

Visit the LYC Foundation 

The naming of children

  C J Sansom's  Shardlake novels convey a distinct impression of the disturbed and disturbing atmosphere during the reign of Henry the Horrible when conscience was literally a matter of life and death. In"Dissolution" there is a scene where the Tudor problem solver visits a family who have adapted to the new times by giving their children names such as Zealous, Perseverance and Duty.

I was strongly reminded of similar practices in other tyrannical situations. A Chinese parent  at the time of the so-called Cultural Revolution  would be placed in a difficult situation. Give a child a generation name and you were backward. Best just to call the child Hua (China) and be done with it. No criticism was then possible.No doubt there would be similar patriotic names in the Soviet Union. 

Recent reading

On Saturday morning in Blackwell's I was tempted by their 3 for 2 deal. But I couldn't find a third book. I have been wanting to read "Cabinet of Equals" since I first heard of it. My partner's interest in Lincoln has certainly rubbed off on me. My second choice was to have been "The Rest is Noise" which is Alex Ross's account of 20C music. But, what to do? I couldn't find a third choice. In the end I left it.

Imagine my delight on finding a copy of Ross's book in my local library later on the same day. It is an excellent read -I was tempted to say that it is journalism of the highest class but in a way that would be unfair. Yes, I have skipped the sections on music in America but I will read them. If they are half as good as the pages on  Schoenberg they will be very good indeed. There are plenty of amusing and  piquant anecdotes such as the passage in which Ross lists the occasions when Schoenberg and Stravinsky were known to have been present at the same event/meeting in Los Angeles and never met.

The problems of bookbinding

Peter Hunter-Blair has a story about the bible text known as the Codex Amiatinus that prodigy of the Northumbrian golden age which now resides in the Laurentian Library in Florence. He notes that one scholar who was allowed to consult the volume found that it was delivered by two men struggling under its weight because it is so massive. It weighs 56 kilos. This makes one wonder about the physical struggle which must have been part of the binding process-if not for the sewer at least for the  person who constructed the housing for the book. The Codex Amiatinus must have been one of the largest insular manuscripts ever made and it could not have been manipulated with the ease with which the Stoneyhurst Gospels could be handled.

Imagine also Abbot Ceolfrith  setting out from Wearmouth/Jarrow on his way to Italy with this monster on June  4, AD 716. It is now the oldest surviving copy of the Vulgate-the Latin Bible.Of the other two bibles made at the same time only fragments  remain.

 

Peter Hunter-Blair,"Northumbria in the Days of Bede".

Signs of the times

Six months ago our local evening paper would boast that it had 900+ jobs available in its Thursday supplement. Last weeks supplement featured a third of that number and this appears to be the  norm.

On another note, and just possibly saying something about Newcastle, I have been interested to observe the lack of sales of finest Spanish jamon in a local delicatessen. When the product went on display, well before Christmas,  the price was £20.00p for 100gm. The ham is still on sale but the price has dropped gradually to £9.50 for 100gm. I doubt if 300gm has been sold in total during the months this admirable product has been on sale.

De Kooning

I have been re-reading some of  David Sylvester's art criticism and one of the topics is Willem de Kooning. Looking also at Hess's 1959 paperback on the artist. The quality of the illustrations is very poor but then, so it seems to me is the quality of the work. When it was made, Excavation may well have seemed raw indeed. But the work that followed it-including the Woman series now seems distressingly inept. The photographs of the early stages of Woman I are the work of a truly clumsy painter who is trying to suppress the bland and mannered side of his art. That aspect of his work was commonly present when he dealt with figures . Artists make art out of chaos but there is a limit to what can be done and Woman I is  abandoned  rather than completed.