On Painting

I keep trying to add some new essays, on new topics, to this site, since most of the others have been around for a while, so I thought it was time I wrote something on another of my passions, which is painting; or, more broadly, visual art. As I already have a number of pages about film, and one about my clothing design work, this one is dedicated to static art: painting, drawing, photography and collage work.

I've always been a very visual person. My mother and grandfather, both of whom had some formal art training, encouraged me to develop my drawing and painting skills as a child. I won several competitions for painting dinosaurs and I had a collage picture based on Stig of the Dump exhibited in the Bishop's Art Gallery in London, though I never got the chance to see it there.

I wouldn't say that I am by any means a brilliant artist; I'm not always very good at drawing people, though I can do hands, which I understand a lot of artists have a problem with. I can draw from life, but it's nothing spectacular. While I was in my early teens I did quite a lot of impressionist watercolour work, because I have an unusual perspective on colour and seemed to be able to get results that impressed people, but ultimately impressionism is not something I find very interesting, so I didn't keep that up. It was only when I was older that I got much chance to work with oils, which are still my greatest love, because they enable me to make things which are so much richer in texture and in hue. I have always had a passion for intense colours. I did a lot of surrealist work in bright inks in my late teens which I later developed using oils, though of course oils are expensive so I can only do such work occasionally. I painted a mural of Yggdrassil in my last flat which has since been painted over by the landlord there (in pale yellow emulsion, next to a decaying brown carpet and dull green velvet curtains - yuck!); I'm now hoping to work on a piece that I have in my head detailing the struggle between the Brithonic gods Gwyn and Gwyrthr over the maiden Creurdilad, and I also have some ideas for a piece about the mythical Briar Rose, but these ones will be painted on board so I can keep them with me when I eventually move.

Ever since I was about six years old I have been collecting material for my collages, which cover one huge wall of my bedroom here in the House of Kadath, and which will end up pretty much everywhere. William Morris said "Have nothing in your home that is not useful or beautiful." I heartily agree with that; and what is more, I believe that the house itstself should fulfil both those functions. I see no reason why lack of money should ever be an excuse for lack of beauty. It is possible to create a beautiful environment with virtually no money at all, and thus to live in a sort of paradise which the very emperors, by way of lack of imagination, have often been denied.

My collages began with pictures of musicians, childish things I suppose, except that I always chose them for their visual impact, for their use of colour and light, more than anything else. I like pictures that make statements and the juxtaposition of items in my collages is generally full of humour, but I guess not always obviously so. Over the years I have expanded my collection with pictures from films and books, and pieces of more traditional artwork, but to me it is how they are positioned around one another which holds the key to whether or not they work.

Donald likes to make art with shiny things, so we have a lot of that in our house as well. On one or two occasions we have lain in bed ill due to the amount of chocolates we consumed to get shiny paper for his different type of collage work. In the first room that we ever shared it was often impossible to distinguish the walls from the ceiling; and to confuse matters further, there were mobiles everywhere, made from a myriad household objects; and there were (and are) glow in the dark things, and sheets of translucent coloured plastic hanging around the light so as to cause the rest of the room to undergo constant colour shifts.

The invention of scanners has been a miracle to me. I had always dreamed of such things. Now I am finally able to copy, restore and preserve my oldest pictures and my damaged ones. I also find that they're a great tool for making my own artwork. I like to start off drawings by hand, with ink on paper; then scan them and edit them in a paint program; then print them out and do another stage by hand, and so on. This makes it much easier for me to effectively create what I see in my head.

I am intending to put pictures of some of my artwork on this page as soon as I can get them scanned; I'll also try to provide thumbnails of the pictures I list below; for the meantime, a little about my favourite art...

Some Favourite Paintings

Death of Chatterton - This was, of course, an extremely populist piece in its time, romanticising as it does the results of poverty. I do have something of a personal reason for liking it, in that the young model reminds me very much of a one time lover of mine who may well, by now, have come upon a similar fate; yet what I love most about this picture is its brilliant use of light, its whiteness, its presentation of death as something vivid rather than something traditionally, safely dark. I like its stark simplicity, which seems to lend it a sort of honesty; the subject has committed what was traditionally a terrible sin, yet he is illuminated like a martyr.

Spirit of the Rose - This picture does not appeal to me so much in an aesthetic way; its beauty is a more complex thing, not the beauty of the model or the flower, but the beauty of the spirit behind them. Standing as she is so as to give the impression of containment within high walls, the young woman drinks in the scent of the rose which seems to be only a hint of what lies beyond, of the verdant landscapes just visible on the outside. This seems to have a lot to say about the position of women in the world at that time, and about the restraint which we all experience in life, in any society in any age, and about how freedom can be found despite that; about the small freedoms which can be seized on and loved for all they are worth, not just in themselves, but of symbols of everything that is possible if we can break out of those walls. The passion of the woman for the rose is the same passion any of us can experience for the world; it is what makes the difference between existing and living.

The Garden of Delights - I have always been rather intrigued by Bosch, enigmatic as he is; he seemed, in his time, to say many dangerously precocious things about religion, but for the most part I suspect he got away with it by being obscure. Often the very visual impact of his work, its striking use of colour and form, its beautifully detailed figures, with so much work invested in each individual even when they're present in great numbers, seems to occlude the deeper meanings hidden in his work. Little is really known about this particular painting of his, but my interpretation is that it represents three stages in the fall of man, and demonstrates some anger at the Christian god in so doing, implying that He must have known it was inevitable. In the first part of the triptych, a beautiful garden is filled with fabulous beasts no longer known thereafter, perhaps destroyed in the Deluge; an old man who might be a personified God introduces woman to man, as if introducing the challenges of mortal love, and sex, which have often been in conflict with religious belief since. In the central part, the multitudinous people appear to be set on celebrating those passions, exploring them in every way they can, celebrating their humanity. In the third part, they have either been condemned to hell for it, or they have themselves somehow entered another place, a darker place, another stage in their evolution.

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Last updated 13th May, 2005