The paintings I’ve been working on for a while now are starting to look like a series. One leads onto the next. I don’t experiment so much along the way. Whilst working on one new ideas or variations arise that may subsequently become the basis for a future painting.
The current chain of work is following very much that pattern, but I have recently been working on a scaled-up variation of earlier pieces. It takes a little longer to complete, but also adds the possibility for greater complexity and delicacy in the layout. With a little more time on my hands this week I’ve been able to push it the 120cm wide painting to completion.
Essentially the work is three seascapes overlayed on each other. A sea horizon cuts across, perfectly horizontal, a second corrupted/disturbed horizon seems to follow, but doesn’t follow, the apparent folds in the composition and on top of everything is a swirling, churning sky bringing its own unrest.
The templates are cut for the next in the series, which will no doubt in due course follow.
Two weeks ago I visited the Vermeer exhibition in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Just fantastic to see. The famous Dutchman is only too well known for his slow rate of production, but also his fine labour intensive way of working. I don´t want to draw parallels between Vermeer and myself, but it does make me feel a little better about how long it seems to take me to finish a painting. Today one reached completion, reason enough to share it.
The progress may be slow, but the results are good and do seem to be starting to form a quite rich and well-resolved series. There is undoubtedly more to be achieved in this area, so hopefully more will follow.
The biggest exhibition of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings ever opens this week at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Twenty-eight pieces are being brought in from all over the world to present the most complete retrospective of the Dutchman’s work ever. Like many others, I already have my tickets to visit the Rijksmuseum in early March.
For me though, this is more than just a chance to submerge myself in the quiet, stillness of the artist’s views of seventeenth century domesticity. It is a chance to revisit the art that I was making when I first moved to the Netherlands. At the time, Vermeer’s work was hugely important to me, and I was engaged with a visual and conceptual exploration of these icons of art history.
I was exploring the nature of the art object, the painting as it is found in the museum, the role of the reproduction of images in our experience of art and indeed the place that the re-presentation of art has in Vermeer’s work itself.
I made paintings, drawings, collages, constructions and even installation work. It was, for me, a rich vein of work that seems on reflection a strangely perfectly fitting body of work for my own arrival in the country.
So, in the light of all the fanfare around the Rijksmuseum exhibition, my own modest online Vermeer display. A small collection here. A more extensive collection on my other site that can be found here: Vermeer series
Yes, I’ve thought that before. In fact, almost always the most recent work feels like it’s the best. You are most in tune with the newest creative processes and the ideas attached to them. But having said all that, these recent pieces to feel like particularly good ones.
I seem to be finding potential of the ideas and approaches that started to take an initial form back in January. They paintings are slow and labour intensive to make, but the results are good. Bringing together visually interesting compositions, with landscape, seascape, weather, and the disrupted effect we are having on our environment.
The result……elements of beauty and elements of fragmentation.
It has been slow, but finally this relatively small painting is finished. Started earlier in the summer with a month-long trip that involved considerable staring out to the horizon on the north Atlantic seas around Orkney, and finished on our return.
Although the idea for the work was essentially in place before the journey north a number of combinations of ideas and occurrences are playing their part in this painting and the steps on to the subsequent pieces now being developed. The countless watercolours made of the Orcadian landscape and coast, the ever-present geometry of the horizon so present around the sea and a treeless landscape. Then there was the visit to an exhibition of Laura Drever’s work at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness. Whilst her work is considerably less geometric than mine, we share landscape interests and a surprisingly similar way of layering imagery up.
For me the work hints and opens the door further on the series of pieces I’ve been developing since the start of the year. More subtle and sensitive that the brasher and brighter paintings from the spring. More to follow……
Open days at school have been a bit of disrupted business over the last two years. A chance for a school to show potentially new pupils what the school is all about, the atmosphere, building, and of course the staff. For the first time since January 2020, we invited both parents and their primary school aged children into the school yesterday evening.
For the art department it’s a chance to show just what we are about and stage an extensive display of the pupils’ work, from the youngest in the school (aged 12) right through to the oldest (aged 18). During the five hours of the open day, we welcomed around 300 ten- and eleven-year-olds into the main hall to show them round.
But an art department wouldn’t be an art department if there wasn’t something to do and participate in. Not an insignificant challenge when they are coming through in groups of up to twenty-four children every ten minutes or so. The resulting activity is kind of formulaic, and maybe lacks a bit in the area of creativity, but it certainly had a good groups participation factor and a wow effect at the end!
For step by step instructions on how to carry out a similar large scale, pixelated portrait click on the link below to download the .pdf file.
Getting children to understand a bit about how areas of tone and colour can work to create form is a central task for most of those working in art education. The pupils generally get the idea of how line has a part to play rather quicker than these other two might combine to occupy the areas between the drawn line.
Also increasingly central to activities, at least in my art room, is how digital tools can also have a part to play and can be combined with more traditional approaches.
The following short assignment played very much into these areas, focusing on how form can be created using surfaces of colour, colour mixing and becoming familiar with how a few digitally editing tools can be used. Those tools can be found in most editing software, and we were using the excellent (and free!) open source software offered on the photopea.com website.
The contextual background for the project that I did with my class of 12-13 year olds was transcriptions in art. We had looked at a variety of artists’ work, but had paid particular attention to Velazquez Las Meninas and Picasso’s numerous interpretations of it.
Our focus was subsequently on the work of Vermeer for our own remakes. The working process was reasonably simple and worked as follows:
Import the image that you want to remake into Photopea.com
Create a new layer above the image
Look carefully at the image and try to identify areas of colour that whilst not being identical are at least very similar
Use a selection lasso to trace round the area
Sample the ‘average’ colour in the selected area and fill the whole area with just that colour
Then proceed onto the next area
The pupils find this quite fascinating to do and work in an increasingly focused way, gradually building up their own image. The result look a little like vector drawings that might have been created using a inbuilt filter, but it is very much a question of look, analyse and then carry out the digital steps.
For a group of 12-13 year olds the results have been excellent and has resulted in a feeling of considerable pride in the group.
The second phase was to use carbon paper to transfer the ‘vector’ drawing structure onto paper and then to paint or colour (using coloured pencils) the resulting simplified linear drawing. At this point it becomes very much a colour mixing exercise where the subtleties of the digital image are transferred into a handmade version.
This part of the project is still at a relatively early stage, but the signs are good for some well made results. But of course the real proof of the pudding will be in seeing whether pupils are able to take the lessons learning into future work, but hopefully without the digital step always having to be used.
Below is a link to a short PDF booklet that explains how the part of the project done using photopea.com works. It is written about portraits, but the principle and process is the same.
Sometimes things in the studio progress painfully slowly. Any number of things get in the way and finding the spaces in between all the other stuff just doesn’t happen. That has been very much the case in the last few weeks.
Over Christmas I made a couple of collages using elements of lino-prints that I had made. They were good and I could see the potential to take them further into paintings. A few technical experiments followed (unsuccessfully) before I finally landed on how to approach the idea.
The original collages
Now, a few weeks later, finally my first successfully completed painting of 2022 is a fact. It is a good one I think and has good possibilities to be taken further, hopefully quicker this time round. All in all, a nice distraction from other activities, not least the educational one, which is tough at the moment. But that is another story!
Its not actually the last completed piece of the year. It will be cut up later and turned into a collage, but it was the product of the afternoon on 31 December 2021. Maybe the collage will follow in the coming days, we’ll see.
Peter Sansom 