April 2007

I’m in the middle of painting a portrait commission for a client. Portrait commissions are (usually) a joy and this one is no exception. Like most commissions, I’m being asked to create a likeness from a selection of photographs. I suppose that a hundred years ago I’d have to work directly from the model, over a large number of sittings. These days photographs are almost the norm. People ask me if its possible to get a real likeness from photos, or if photograph somehow taints the finished painting.

Well, I guess that you’d expect me to say that, no, the use of a photo has no effect on the finished painting. And you’d be right, that’s exactly my point of view. On the contrary, I think the filter of an intervening photograph can be a liberating experience for the artist.

Why can this be true? Too often as an artist I become a slave to the accurate representation of nature. When painting a landscape outside the studio, I often find the need to finish the painting off in the studio because the original is too beautiful, or complex, to interpret. By returning to the studio I allow my subconscious mind to work on the painting away from the tyranny of the subject.

A photograph has the same effect as a return to the studio, it remove the artist from the subject just enough to allow true artistic interpretation. Of course, this is a tightrope, and a move too far away from a likeness would be disastrous for a portrait commission, but walking a tightrope between success and disaster is a very constructive path for an artist.

You can find out more details about the portrait commission process and prices here.

I came across this site yesterday and can highly recommend it to any beginner artists out there. Drawspace is a web site set up by a lady called Brenda Hoddinott. The well-crafted lessons are clear and well paced and the information is pitched at just the right level. You’lll need to create an account but the basic subscription is free.

You might have seen this site already, but I’ve just found a site that allows you to create your own Jackson Pollock masterpiece (see the link below). Its firmly tongue-in-cheek of course…

My views on Jackson Pollock? Yes, he was an important artist. Yes, he did push back the boundaries of painting, and in doing so he opened the door to new generations of artists to create new work in different and exciting ways.

But perhaps he was too much a ‘one trick pony’. I find too much repetition in his work - to the extent where many of his paintings are indistinguishable from each other. Can you remember a specific painting of his? or, like me, do you remember just an amalgam of all his paintings?

Here’s the link to DIY Jackson Pollock painting.

I’ve been doing a bit of research and I’ve worked out a way of creating an e-commerce website to sell your painting online for less than £6 per year. You can see the results at http://www.oil-painter.me.uk. Here’s how I did it:

Register a domain name at http://www.freevirtualservers.com/. If you register a domain name they will let you have a webhosting package free of charge. UK domains cost £8.99 plus VAT - a shade over a tenner.

Choose yourself a good domain name carefully.

The free hosting package allows you to install a WordPress blog. Install it to your root directory. Now when you log in, you’ll get your blog homepage.

Wordpress has a great little plugin that allows you to set up a simple e-commerce shop within your blog. Its called WP e-commerce lite and you can find it here: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce

That it, that’s all there is too it. All the software is free, you don’t need to know any html, you just need to be able to install a script and a plugin. On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s about a 5.

I’ll try and post more details here over the next few days, depending on if anyone’s interested!

I can recommend Seth Godin’s blog (I read it regularly) - and this is an interesting post. Seth posts a mechanism to encourage the business world to explore the art world AND engage with the local community.

Seth recommends that medium to large businesses employ an artist in residence. The artist presumably has the brief of exploring visually the company, its environs, employees and customers. The work produced forms an exhibition that involves the local community. When the exhibition is over the artwork goes into the offices and factories.

Some forward-thinking companies in the UK already do this on a small scale but given the vast profits of the Tescos and Barclays of this world, why doesn’t it happen more often, and on a larger and (dare I say) more commercial scale?

The blog entry is here.

Here’s a link to a new article on my oil paintings from the BBC

I’ve been using scrapblogger to create a little explanatory diagram of the thought processes that went into one of my recent paintings.

A walk in the fantastic countryside near my hometown of Bolton has yielded some new paintings. The end of a sunny early spring day produced a wonderful hazy sunset with the sun slightly flattened by the thick atmosphere. The atmospheric haze also produced a banded look to the sky which you might be able to discern in the photo below.

The atmosphere also has the effect of flattening the landscape, producing the appearance of the theatre wings, each hill looks flattened, with more distant hills becoming flatter and flatter.

I’m hoping to be able to create one ot two paintings from this subject, a watercolour and an acrylic or oil. The acrylic also already in progress. In it I find that I’m emphasising the colour contrast and simplifying some of the details to silhouettes. I’ll post the finished paintings to the main site, and maybe to this blog, later.