Oil painting

[LONDONER]

To contribute to this thread I have to go back quite some years when I was at art school.

 

At the end of each term we were required to submit a painting to the Sketch Club when it would be appraised and criticised by the Head of the school Mr Millard and a visiting artist.

 

Unfortunately that day was my birthday and I was due to go to the theatre and was unable to stay to hear what was said so I asked a fellow student to take note and write to me.  She did and this was what she wrote:

I have great news about your painting and I’m really glad that you asked me to take notice of the criticism so that what was said is not lost.

Do you remember the picture of the anemones which Mr Millard spoke of before you left which he considered to have been approached in entirely the wrong way and did not like as a painting.  Yours he used as the exact contrast.  Where the first tried to record the fact that they were red anemones by filling in the exact shape with the local colour, yours recorded effect and feeling by using overall colour.  The result was that yours were not only more sensuous, but also more real and solid.  They had been approached freely and were alive while the others were dead..  Yours did not say that this is a picture of an onion, a jug, a table etc., but it gave the feeling and your onion could have been handled.  The other just said that here are red anemones in a pot and added nothing to this fact.  Mr Millard ticked it off for Senior Sketch Club so you are now a senior member. 

Mr Julian Trevelyan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Trevelyan) spoke at the Senior Sketch Club at the end of term.  After looking over the wall of paintings, he spoke of yours saying that it was the only one that dealt successfully with colour, both in colour combination and in the way that it had been conceived as a whole in colour.  He admired your use of a very limited palette and said of all the paintings yours was the only one had had the courage to limit.  He advocated to other people more limited palettes but stressed also the fact that limited colour did not mean dull colour.  Yours was not dull, it was very delicately painted.  He liked also the way you had dealt with local colour.  Yours was the first he picked out for a star, the other he chose were all by very senior members: Tony Brown, Ruth Decand, Peter Kent, so you should be very well pleased. 

   

[CellarDweller]

Oh, you're talented!

[LONDONER]

Oh, you're talented!

Thanks @CellarDweller, but I think that should have been in the past tense.

[CellarDweller]

Thanks @CellarDweller, but I think that should have been in the past tense.

Somehow, I doubt that.

[LONDONER]

Thanks @CellarDweller, but I think that should have been in the past tense.

Somehow, I doubt that.

I admit to a certain talent then but I doubt that I could achieve anything like that now.

[InbetweenDreams]

@LONDONER Do you still do any paintings?

[LONDONER]

@LONDONER Do you still do any paintings?

Various friends have tried to persuade me to take it up again but so far without any success.

I sent that protograph of my painting to a friend i Greece and she in her turn, showed it to a friend of hers who is a well known artist, wthout telling him who had painted it, and his immediae reaction was: "Oh, that s a museum piece , isn't it?"!!!

Maybe after all the COVID-19 crisis is over, I might buy some paints and some canvases, and will try to see if I have any talent left.

[InbetweenDreams]

@LONDONER I think you should. I seem to be good at realism, painting what I see on a photo, halfway decent on matching color, but coming up with something like that, something that evokes something entirely different. That's what I have difficulty with. I can't pull things out of my head and paint them. I have the tendency to overblend and sometimes having the rough brushstrokes really gives the painting its character, like John Singer Sargent's works.

At any rate, do it because you want to do it. Paint what you want to paint, how you want to paint it.

[LONDONER]

@LONDONER I think you should. I seem to be good at realism, painting what I see on a photo, halfway decent on matching color, but coming up with something like that, something that evokes something entirely different. That's what I have difficulty with. I can't pull things out of my head and paint them. I have the tendency to overblend and sometimes having the rough brushstrokes really gives the painting its character, like John Singer Sargent's works.

At any rate, do it because you want to do it. Paint what you want to paint, how you want to paint it.

Maybe, maybe when I am fully recovered from the patch I am going through at the moment.

I think that one of the secrets of painting is knowing when to stop.  I have seen artist's works that would have been so much better if they had stopped two or three stages earlier instead of trying to embellsh more and more.  I'm not a great fan of John Constable in spite of the admiration that critics have of him, but I have seen some of his preliminary sketches that to me, convey so much more than his finished works.  Just a personal opinion.  Also, try not to paint from photos unless you're aiming for ultra realism.  The end results always seem to lack a "spark" and seem a bit dead.  Personally I dislike ultra realism.   It's very clever but there seems no point to it.  A camera can do it so much better.

[InbetweenDreams]

Sure thing, oil paints aren't exactly cheap, neither are good canvases. I mean, yes you can buy cheap stuff but you'll be disappointed. I've bought cheap oil paints from walmart only to be extremely disappointed in what they called ultramarine, never seen anything like it, looked like something mixed with titanium white.

I don't go for ultra-realism, I don't always paint everything in the photo, sometimes I add stuff, leave stuff out, etc. I've got one of a night time arctic scene with an aurora, I used several photos as reference in order to better get what I wanted on canvas. Once I finish the other one I'm working on, I'll get that one finished up. So, I do take some liberties but pulling out something like a landscape purely from imagination is difficult for me. I do like the idea of plein air but just never found the time or the urge to go do it...and it is a lot of work to haul this easel, paints, canvases, etc to wherever it is. Also, have to take extra care not to mess up the finished painting on the drive home (lots of curves around here...and definitely don't want oil paint all over the seats and doors and so on)