Creativity

Watching the TV after School

Here’s a page from one of my sketchbooks. Its so difficult to get catch children sitting still. Sometime you have to catch them during one the rare times of day when they are (relatively) still and quiet.

My sketchbooks are full of very quick and usually unfinished sketches like this. I do feel very jealous of people whose sketchbooks are full of mini-masterpeices on each page. I never seem to have the time to complete my sketches and as a result my sketchbooks are full of half-finished drawings and unidentifiable squiggles.

Seth Godin has a great blog entry called I Need to Build a House, What Kind of Hammer Should I Buy?

I guess many artists are guilty of over-emphasising the importance of the equipment they use. It reminds me that you only need three primary colours plus white, some basic brushes and a length of cheap hardboard to paint a masterpiece.

We focus on the technology of creativity (the pigments, binders, supports, brush types and yes, blogging) and on the techniques (scrumbling, anatomy, cross-hatching, glazing, perspective etc) until it becomes an excuse not to create.

I stumbled on Sydney Padua’s blog today. Sydney is a London-based animator who with a geekish knowledge of cat anatomy. He’s recently been leading some courses in cat anatomy for animators and has published some of his exquisitley drawn course notes on the web. They’re fabulous - lively, brisk and full of cat-like energy and inquisitiveness. Animators like Sydney have to observe their subjects even more intensely than we artists - every gesture, every nuance must be right.

Rhys Harding emailed me a few days ago with a few questions. I answered them as best I could!

What are the major influences in your work?

The landscape (and seascapes) plus portraits and the human form have been the most inspirational subjects for me. In more abstract ways: light (shining through leaves, or from behind stormclouds), colour (from sunsets, or moorland grasses in winter), textures (clouds, hills, grass, mud).

Are there any other artists you have looked up to in your career or when you were younger?

Picasso. For pushing the boundaries of art, for his creative energy and for his technical skill (people forget that he was an incredible draughtsman and could make paint do anything he wanted).

Ivon Hitchens. A relatively unknown English painter whose simple, direct paintings of landscapes I try to emulate.

Matisse. Just for his line and colour, but what lines and what colour!

David Hockney. I can learn so much about painting and drawing by study his work…

Constable. His small sketches, painted outside in front of his subject are so fresh and lively.

Degas. I love the way he used photography to inspire new compositions.

Richard Long. For his understanding of the landscape.

Lucien Freud. Painting the nude is an incredible skill, and to have his focus, over so many years has enabled him to create a ‘body’ (sorry about the pun) of work that helps me see the human form in new ways.

Liam Spencer (a local Manchester artist). Because he’s local and because he captures the way the light reflects on rain-wet streets so well.

Which medium do you most like to work with and why?

Oil or acrylic on canvas or hardboard. I try not be be too concerned about the medium.

What is the favourite piece of your own work?

Usually my own favourites are ones that no-one else likes. I’m really pleased with http://www.davidpott.co.uk/images/WinterHillAndBelmont.jpg but no-one ever buys it! My favourites are usually paintings where I feel I’ve created the painting I set out to paint. Very often when I paint, my initial vision isn’t quite matched by the final painting. When the final painting does match the initial vision, then that’s great.

Where is your favourite place to paint and why?

I feel most at home painting the Pennines.

How long on average do you spend on one of your paintings?

I usually spend about a month from starting a painting to finishing it, though I will have two or three painting ‘on the go’ at any one time. If you add up the actual hours painting involved in one of my paintings, perhaps 5 to 10 hours. I seem to spend a lot of time gazing out of the window, listening to music or the radio, or just looking at the painting in progress. To me, daydreaming like this is just part of the creative process. I used to feel bad about it, until I realised that pictures have to form at their own rate.

Do you find your paintings a challenge or does it come naturally?

If I don’t paint for any period of time I become very irritable but having said that, I find it very difficult to shut out the distractions of everyday life and start to paint. Once started, I’m too easily distracted by other things. So I guess I’m not a naturally creative person - I do have to force myself to stand in front of the canvas sometimes, but I always feel very rewarded when I do.

Do you enjoy what you do?

See above!

Did you always want to be an artist?

My father is an artist, so I was always given access to paint, paper and encouragement. At school I wanted to be many things (an astronaut, an astronomer, a physicist). I ended up working in IT, but slowly the artist came to the fore.

Do you learn something form each piece you create?

Yes. That’s what makes it so great. You never, ever stop being surprised by the visual world.

Have your experiences an artist changed you as a person?

Being an artist helps you see the world with fresh eyes every day. I think I’m much more receptive to beauty, and much more capable of finding aesthetically pleasing aspects in otherwise mundane objects.

I’m in the middle of a painting of part of the moorlands near my home in Lancashire. The moorland landscape is deceptively complex. On first glance it is almost minimal in its simplicity: hills, grasses, heather and sky. On closer investigation you can see the marks of human habitation and usage through thousands of years. Bronze age cairns and barrows, ancient paths and trackways, more recent stone quarries, coal mines and isolated farmsteads are all visible when you take the time to look and to learn the history of this landscape.

On a practical, artistic, level painting the moors allows an artist to experiment with landscapes that are so elemental as to be virtually abstract. Textures of grass, contours of hills, wild racing clouds and the scratching of crumbled walls, sheep paths and old excavations allow for bold brush strokes and expertimentation. Colours are muted, but rich reds and ochres add depth and vibrancy. Softness is provided by the ocean-like expanses of grasses.

Think of an artist and you’ll often end up thinking of a specific place. Think of Constable, and you’ll have a mental image of Suffolk countryside, think of Monet and you’ll get a mental picture of Giverny, or think of Cezanne and a you’ll think of Provence. Whether we realize it or not, many artists are unalterably associated with a specific place.

So here’s my list of British artists with their mental associations of artist = place. Its not scientific, and not in any particular order, and some of the associations might not even be factually correct, but they how I perceive the artist:

Augustus John = Tenby, South Wales
Stanley Spencer = Cookham
LS Lowry = Salford
Patrick Heron = St Ives
David Hockney = Los Angeles or Bradford
A Heaton Cooper, W Heaton Cooper = Lake District
Christopher Wood = Cornwall
Leon Kossof = London
John Sell Cotman = East Anglia
Samuel Palmer = Shoreham

If I could own one work of art by an English painter, I think I’d choose one of the three works you can see in this blog today. Its a shame that all three are in the Tate collection, but at least I can always go down to the Tate Gallery and dream!

Ivon Hitchens work succeeds in areas that mosy artists can only dream of:

1. His brushstrokes are so confident, and always so perfectly judged. Nothing is wasted in Hitchen’s brushstroke - they are neither too long, nor too short, creating a perfectly judged effect - they are brushstrokes of the purest essence.
2. His colours are muted, never brash, never discordant. Again their sheer economy is wonderful. No colour that he applied seems extraneous.
3. Although the paintings look simple and effortless, I believe that the effortlessness is an illusion, all great artists are able to make the extraordinary look easy, and Ivon was a great artist who specialised in effortless looking paintings
4. The illusion of atmosphere and distance are almost tangible. The rainy wetness of the paintings on this page are beautifully realised. You can almost hear the rain dripping off the autumn leaves.

Ivon Hitchens’ was a contemporary of Henry Moor and Barbara Hepworth, and seems to have led a traditional artist’s life of poverty and little recognition until he was bombed out of his London studio during the Second World War whereupon he took to living in a caravan in six acres of woodland near Midhurst in Sussex.

The local landscape provided the inspiration for many paintings over the next 40 years. He often painted directly from nature, never cleaned his brushes (prefering the paint from the previous day’s painting to influence the next day’s painting) and sometimes took a taxi to a prefered painting location. The picture of his life sounds slightly eccentric, but wonderfully connected to his roots, to the locale that provided the driving force and inspiration for his paintings - and that’s the lesson I take most from Ivon Hitchen’s life and work - a long time, evolving, absorbing dedication to completely understanding his local landscape.

This English spring has been one of the warmest and sunniest in living memory. As each day in the northern hemisphere lengthens and gets warmer, nature puts on one of her greatest shows. The trees are glorious in their new, bright green leaves, bluebells, sorrel, garlic mustard and even the humble dandelions are putting on a beautiful show.

Near my home, Rivington, near Bolton in Lancashire is an extensive area of countryside originally opening up to the public by Lord Leverhulme in the early years of the last century. The area is full of serene reservoirs, pleasant woodland and open fields, with a backdrop provided by the wild and dramatic expanse of the West Pennine Moors.

As an artist, I can’t walk through all this visual splendour without reflection on how to create a painting inspired by all this natural vibrancy - and that’s why sometimes its hard to be an artist.

Because, while most people can walk through the woods on a day like today and just enjoy the moment, the poor (!) artist is constantly reminded of his or her own inadequacies - we all know, deep down, that any attempt to recreate this vision in two dimensions, using ordinary pigment on canvas, paper or panels is bound to fail, and fail badly.

A million fresh green leaves trembling in the breeze, golden sunlight filtering through the branches, the glint of the setting sun on the flat, glittering expanses of crystal clear water just beg to be painted. But how to start? And then to finish?

OK, back to basics:

The three rules of painting are: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Simplify the colours, simplify the composition, simplify the tones.

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.

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.