Essays on Painting

painting is primarily a craft. To describe painting as a craft makes it sound
too much like a hobby but even hobbies rely on discipline and in the case
of painting that discipline consists of training of both hand and eye.
Shapes, tones and colours and how they are arranged all comprise the
province of the artist. Composition and visual balance are important, areas
between shapes are as visually important as those formed on and by shapes
of actual objects. Everything on a surface must have a meaningful relationship
to the edges of a picture.
It takes much longer to see a view in terms purely as shapes rather than
just a collection of objects. Many painters never manage this at all. This is
most evident in the proliferation of plant studies and portraits against a
blank sheet of paper that have no setting.
In the Still Life with Yellow Rose I have
attempted to link other objects with the
flowers to create an arrangement of connected
shapes. The surrounding shapes
give a setting to the still life and help the
composition.
Pictures, if they are not to be merely illustration,
should show objects as part of
the real world in a believable environment.
To illustrate this I always think of an episode
from the Goon show.
The main characters are investigating a
strange house.
“What are you doing here Eccles?”
“Everybody gotta be somewhere.”
Still Life with Yellow Rose
The same is true for objects which are always placed somewhere.
The artist looks objectively. Artist's models only realise after a while that
to their dismay that students regard them purely as objects, no more remarkable
than a still life. As an art teacher in the past I had to be very careful
to intervene and give a model a rest because parts of them were turning
blue. Intent on their work, the students will not notice. They are unlikely
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