4.1.1. Research point

Painting 1 The Practice of painting

PART 4 Looking out

Project 1 From inside looking out

Exercise 1 Research point

Do your own research into the evolution of landscape painting from the eighteenth century to the present day. Don’t just look at the large oil paintings by artists such as Constable. Many Landscape artists (including Constable) have used oil sketches made on site as a means of recording the landscape for working up into larger paintings, and as you saw in Part One, water colour has been a popular medium for English landscape painting.

Note particularly, some of the ways in which modern and contemporary artists have chosen to interpret this genre. To what extent does contemporary landscape painting reflect environmental concerns?

Landscape painting reached a peak in the mid seventeenth century in the paintings of  Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, two French Baroque painters who both lived in Rome, the then centre of the art world. In The Netherlands, in the hands of Rembrandt and Vermeer a Zenith was also reached. It would not be for another 150 years that Landscape Painting would reach such heights

At the end of the eighteenth Century Reynolds in England was painting highly elaborate landscapes as backdrops to his portraits and Friedrich in Germany was paining evocative landscapes mostly with figures in the foreground. Both artists painted exclusively But the dawn of the nineteenth century was to see the dawn of a new great era for landscape painting that would last into the twentieth century.

One of the main reasons for this was that landscape painting was able to get out of the studio and into the great outdoors. Turner and Constable used pig bladders to hold their paint and were the pioneers of plein air painting. Watercolour pans, as we know them today, were invented in 1835, glass paint syringes were invented in 1837 and finally in 1844 paint in tubes arrived.

It was not only the fact that artists were getting outside, landscape artists had a whole new subject, atmosphere. Standing in front of one of Constables full size sketches for his six footers, it is impossible to believe it is not as contemporary as yesterday, yet they were painted almost two hundred years ago. I know I have done it on several occasions, they were all together at the recent Constable exhibition “The Making of a Master” and the six foot sketch for “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows” was included in the exhibition “John Constable observing the Weather”. If you are a painter seek these Sketches out and look at them in the flesh, they are truly breathtaking and as contemporary as anything by John Virtue.

Turner was all atmosphere, from “Snow storm Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps” (Can you see the elephant) to “Rain Steam and Speed” not forgetting the sunset in his old dutch “The fighting Temeraire” and on from Turners sunset to Delacroix’s sunset “The sea from the heights of Dieppe”

The next to take the stage were the Impressionists and the true landscape Impressionists were  Pissarro, Sisley and Monet, who became the most famous probably because he lived the longest. The three are brought together in the May triptych in the Musee d’Orsay which is truly a delight to see.

Next is the turn of Cezanne and his lonely mountain, Mont Sainte Victoire Cezanne was called the father of modern art and rightly so, his paintings of the mountain were a cross between direct observation and a construct or thought process.

We move now to the landscapes of the mind, they are based on direct observation but there is always something about them that is expressionist, forever unreal.

Firstly Vincent, who doesn’t believe that a Starry Night looks like this, or that a Cafe Terrace at Night looks like this, or even that a Wheatfield with Crows is a premonition of death.

Salvador Dali was an accomplished painter of landscapes at an early age, he painted this aged just seventeen in 1921. He internalised this ability in his later career to produce dreamscapes such as The Persistence of Memory and The Broken Bridge and the Dream

Anselm Kiefer painted Landscapes on a vast scale including materials such as straw and sand in his artwork, some of his paintings became increasingly sculptural with the build up of material build up on the surface.

The American artist Richard Diebenkorn managed to combine colour field painting and abstract expressionism in unique way to produce a highly varied collection of landscapes.

Back in England Frank Auerbach started with high relief paintings that slowly morphed into landscapes with lots of texture and reworking of London around his studio in Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill.

In the monochrome painting of John Virtue we come almost full circle in that these are reminiscent of the six foot sketches of John Constable.

 

Bibliography

All internet references associated with the hyperlinks in this essa were viewed by the author of this essay during May 2016

Britt D. (1989) Modern Art Impressionism to Post Modernism. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Carlson J.F. (1973) Carlson’s guide to landscape painting. New York: Dover Publications

Constable J. (2014) The making of a master. London: V&A Museum

Delacroix E. (2016) Delacroix and the rise of Modern Art. London: National Gallery

Evans M. (2011) John Constable Oil sketches from the V&A Museum. London: V&A Publishing

Gombrich E. (1989) The story of art.15^th Edition. London: Phaidon Press Ltd.

Hatt M. and Klonk C.(2006) Art History a critical introduction to its methods. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Kitson M. (1969) Rembrandt. London: Phaidon Press Ltd

Novotny F. (1972) Cezanne. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica International Ltd.

Overview

Watercolour Practice Painting 1

Overview

I remember setting off with a brand new set of artist’s watercolour tubes and being confounded by the fact that they didn’t do what it said on the tube. I remember sticking paper down with brown paper parcel tape and buying patent stretching machines in the hope it would somehow help, it didn’t, except to show me that this was not the right way to go about things.

I read lots of books, visited galleries, did endless experiments and around about Part 2 of the course I had settled on a process of working involving a pencil, pan watercolours, 300 lb paper and real sable brushes that were beginning to feel a part of my hand. My stabiliser throughout this period was my drawing ability and I was loathe to let it go, as long as I could draw it, I could fill it in with watercolour tones of about the right value.

Around about part 4 I started to get rid of my pencil crutch, I realised that now I could get my watercolours to behave a little, I had to give them the freedom to misbehave a little, whilst still being able to get them back in line before they went too wild. The paintings got bigger and freer and started to look like proper watercolours in their own right.

As a kind of parallel thing I was simultaneously trying to make sense of Modern Art, it was hard going, I could understand how Art progressed from the caves to the Impressionists but I had never been able to make the link between the Impressionists and Modern Art. At last it clicked and I could trace the thread through the Impressionists to the early nineteen seventies but that is where I lost the plot for now.

All this resulted in a very happy part 5 where I was able to celebrate my conquest of the beastly watercolours and understanding of Expressionism and the thought processes that went into it. The revelation that I suffered from synthesesia was an added bonus.

I was enjoying myself from Part 4 on and I think I painted the best traditional watercolour I have ever painted at Assignment 5.3.

My tutor thought that I could go Post Modern but it was too late, it didn’t fit with the mounting and packing plan and it felt too forced without enough understanding of Post modernism.

After 2 years at the sharp end, I am pleased to have come as far as I have with watercolours and my research. Post Modernism can wait, as Blanche said, “Tomorrow is another day.”

With regard to the assessment, I saw it as a small exhibition of 19 paintings, I am the curator, but it is important, because I am not there, that the people who unpack my work can readily identify which is which. The written work in support of my submission relates directly to the 19 paintings so that the information regarding the 10 and the assessments is immediately to hand without the need of multimedia resourcing.

Hilma af Klint Study visit

Museum and Gallery visits

The Serpentine Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum

30 April 2016

The exhibition I went to see was called “Hilma af Klint, Painting the Unseen” at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. The visit was part of an OCA visit organised by Angela Rodgers and there were 11 or twelve other students there as well, as usual I don’t remember all of the names so I apologise and leave out the names to avoid further embarrassment.

I arrived early and this gave me time to browse the Gallery’s bookshop, it is probably the best art bookshop I have been in for a while, I managed to restrict myself to a single book even though I could have come away with at least a dozen if I could have carried them for the day. It was a lovely spring day and Angela gave a talk outside the Gallery about Hilda, her work and her involvement with the Theosophical Society and how it came about that what seemed a contemporary exhibition were in fact painted more than a hundred years ago.

I had come across both af Klint and the Theosophical society in my researches and as is my usual habit I had bought the catalogue of the exhibition from Amazon and read it prior to visiting the exhibition, this saves reading the walls of the gallery so that you can concentrate on the paintings. So I was as well prepared as I could be for the visit.

Looking at the actual paintings I was impressed by the size of the Big Ten and felt that the purpley pink tones of the background in some of them had echoes of Monet’s Water lily series perhaps if you paint purpley pink on a very large canvas it always comes out like this, one day perhaps I’ll get the chance.

I thought that the Evolution Series was reminiscent of Soviet revolutionary art but I have since been corrected by swift research into Theosophical Art that Soviet Revolutionary art could stem from Theosophy

In particular the painting “Evolution number 5 Group IV of 1908” seems to illustrate ideas contained within “Man Visible and Invisible “ by Charles Leadbeater in that a family pet can aspire to human qualities simply by living in a human dominated environment, the cat or dog can cast off their animalism and adopt human traits, which in Theosophical terms is a step up the planes of existence.

I was prepared to accept that all the paintings by af Klint were the result of painting in a trance like state but this connection leads me to suspect that at least the evolution series was based on illustrating Theosophical ideas.

I was also struck by the similarity between “The Swan number 17 Group IX/SUW 1915”and Robert Delaunay’s “Lea Premier Disque” of 1913. The common denominator was probably Rudolph Steiner who met both Kandinsky and af Klint separately in 1908 and influenced (page 24) Delaunay.

As to who painted the first Abstract painting, it would seem, however, that the accolade goes to the anonymous artists that illustrated the Theosophist books “Man Visible and Invisible” and “Thought Forms”.

The discussion was lively during lunch, both about the exhibition and other art related topics, and especially how we were getting on with our respective courses.

After lunch we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to draw from the collection based on the impressions we had gained from viewing the af Klint exhibition. I came away from the exhibition with a distinct idea of fossilised snails and felt it would be easier to find inspiration for this in the Natural history museum next door but I persevered and found something Klintish and snail like in the light fitting above the entrance to the V&A, the curl of the robe of a statue and the way the light glanced off the belly button of another statue.

Figure 1 (16 04 30 01) Entrance light V&A biro on A4 cartridge paper

Figure 2 (16 04 30 02) Statue V&A sharpie on A4 cartridge paper

Figure 3 (16 04 30 03) Statue V&A biro on A4 cartridge paper

I also got a distinct impression of af Klint’s colouring and pattern work in Evolution numbers 12 and 16 group VI in a fragment of a stained glass window that I took a photograph of with the permission of the guard.

Figure 4 (16 04 30 04) Statue V&A biro on A4 cartridge paper

The V&A is a lovely place to visit just for its own sake in the time I was free in there I managed to spend a good bit of time examining the Raphael Cartoons for the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel that are truly wondrous in their own right.

Another thing to note is that the urinals in the gents are the good old fashioned type with the blue fly to aim at, urinals have such a special place in the history of art, and it is nice to know the attention to detail that the V&A pay to their functional fittings.

I also managed to find time to visit the current exhibition Botticelli Reimagined that was particularly fascinating.

After this we met for tea and as the weather was fine, we took this in the courtyard of the V&A. We discussed what we had seen and compared the sketches we had made during the course of the afternoon.

It was a really fun day, very educational and inspiring, thank you very much for that Angela, oh and one last thing I can thoroughly recommend the V&A house white.