I’m not convinced that I ever really grasped the importance of it – not really – well not until writing this blog maybe! spending all my pocket money on a biography of the artist Graham Sutherland, and feeling a proud sense of self-importance – yes indeed,  that I also could appreciate an artist’s work largely characterised in modernity. The fact is, it was the mix of Sutherland’s thorny brand of modernity and his amazing portraiture – pushed to the slightly comfortable side of modern art, that I found so compelling! This was just how I yearned to be! and here it was – the proof – me on a train – the book,  clutched hard to the chest – hardback, Faber and Faber!

Here is my impression from the dust cover – Graham Sutherland (Oil on Cotton, 30×20), 1982. The book is by Roger Berthoud.

When walking the dog this morning I noticed that that time of year when the first beginnings of the winter thaw had arrived. It was drizzling with rain and deadly still, and like a watched pan of water just on the hob, the expectation of change was ever so slightly simmering (a feeling often evoked through Turner’s famous watery contrasts!) My portrait shown here portrait (mixed media – Oil on Linen on mixed ground, 46×91), has the sitter in a mood of similar slightly disturbed serenity; a bit like Rothko – slightly nearer the powerful than the pretty!

Have you heard the one about “Rembrandt the show off”? it’s tongue-in-cheek I know! but the ease with which Rembrandt seemed able to turn out iconic masterpieces, proves that in the whole history of art,  the truly miraculous can really be achieved using just paint and brushes! Given that it is impossible to know the exact circumstances surrounding the relationship between Rembrandt and his patrons, I prefer to imagine him pushing to the boundaries of his customers expectations, first and foremost as a portraitist, but above of all, striving for excellence in the craft of his chosen medium as an artist! This is a particularly potent argument in the case of Rembrandt given the complex constraints that I know to exist in portraiture.

A rather pompous remark made during an overheard conversation at a local gallery recently chimed so brilliantly with this blog: “Art should not be constrained by its medium.” the man said. Rembrandt demonstrably proves the opposite case; that the very best art has the enduring quality of reflecting the medium with which it is created, it is constrained by it, and so defines a very human statement. Imagine music without the constraints of melody or literature bound by rules for the written word! Of course the visual aesthetic speaks to us all in different ways, a moon, an expression, a colour, but see a Rembrandt self-portrait and you will find it impossible to escape the fact that this is “hand made” using oil paints!

Here is my own homage to the most gifted painter who has ever lived - Rembrandt Study – 1987 (Oil on Linen, 24×18)

When scratching around for new inspiration this year it occurred to me that maybe I should really exercise some discipline and actually finish works begun last year instead! Here is a “work in progress” portrait of my dad (Oil on Linen, 54×38). I’m in an uncomfortable place with this work where I am struck on the image in its crude form so much so that I dare not risk taking it to the next level – maybe there just isn’t one. When living at my parents home as a young boy at school trying hard to be like Picasso, I took to preparing small canvasses each portraying an individual body part rendered in fairly intricate detail. My big idea was to assemble these by displacing them on a blank ground in a form such that the less interesting connecting parts could just be imagined. The entire enterprise was based on the physiology of human vision where I had read that images taken in by the eye are actually quite limited,  concentrated on relatively small areas of focus, and that the brain fills in the bits in-between with something constructed using a form of cognitive perception…The Human Eye. I often find that unfinished works are intriguing for similar reasons; here you get to see what the artist instinctively considers to be initially significant – those little gems of gravitational pull to which most of us are drawn.

Footnote: my tiny bedroom was covered in experimental art and was invariably shrouded in the pungent smell of oil colours. I remember extending the “body parts” concept to include an impression of seafood having been inspired momentarily by photographs of food cut from magazines, but eventually the experiment ended badly due to my mother objecting to me nailing canvasses to my bedroom walls – even wood-chip wallpaper looks bad with holes in it!

An excellent documentary shown recently on television explored Giorgio Vasari’s book “The Lives of the Artists”. The show re-acquainted me with the work of Jacopo Pontormo whom I had admired since my early interest in Italian Renaissance painting. Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1556) was a Florentine Painter who attracted much praise from leading contemporaries during his lifetime – the illustrious Michelangelo and Rafael included! Quotes like “he will exalt his art to the heavens” and “astonishing” and “cannot be bettered” illuminate the text of Vasaris treatment of Pontormo in his famous chronicle of Italian renaissance art. Unfortunately, comparatively few of Pontormos works described in “The Lives” survive today; but even from what little remains, it is clear that this body of work exudes the same natural confluence of aesthetic and draftsman-like qualities that in so many ways characterises the achievements of only a few of his contemporaries; distinguishing them in modern terms as great masters of art. My study detail (Oil on Card, 2009) shown here is painted from the much admired Deposition from the Cross which can be found in the Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicita. It’s curious to me that in the apparant insatiable quest of art scholars to “rationalise the intuitive”, this painting is categorised in the style of so-called Mannerism! I think it entirely fitting not to squeeze Pontormo into that particular box and leave the final word on that to Vasari who said, “his genius always went about investigating new conceits and extravagant ways of working, never resting content with any of them” Just look at paintings like Supper at Emmans and one of his portraits e.g., Portrait of Maria Salviati hanging on the same wall in the Uffizi, and you will not fail to recognise such vivid and compelling contrasts.

Hello everyone - this is my first post using my new blog. Please feel free to leave any comment on art, or my work, or anything else even vaguely related to the content of the website. The picture above is one of my earliest studio format oil paintings (Oil on Linen – 30×40) completed 80′s ish when first drawn to the art of the Pre-Raphaelites – rather longer ago than I care to remember! This example is after John Waterhouse.

In the red corner we have that old cockney geezer (JMW Turner) with his huge skies, huge weather, and huge ideas, and in the blue, the country gentleman (John Constable) who in contrast expressed a deeply felt view of the countryside albeit on such a scale – judging by the size of his canvases, to transcend the essentially claustrophobic intimacy of his subjects. I have always been intrigued by the well documented rivalry between these two lions as they grew obviously more expressionistic together as ageing RA’s! Was Turner really, as most people think, just a natural or is Constable’s part in this particular contest tainted with the legacy handed down to him by legions of chocolatiers? Sorry for verging on the predictable by repeating here one of the most often used cliches in British Art history, but now that’s done, I wonder whether that comfortable view might be challenged somewhat by Constable’s painting of Waterloo Bridge exhibited at the RA in 1835? This work is courageously expressive for its time especially when you consider that the painting was begun as early as 1817, but arguably it reveals a very linear progression on Constable’s own landscape tradition. It is intriguing that Turner’s contribution to the same exhibition is much weaker in its expressive ambition, maybe this was the turning point!

This work is probably the nearest I have ever come to Constable’esk if you take the popular view that is!  View from Meldon Hall, Northumberland (Oil on Linen, 36×48) As far as that old geezer is concerned, well his influence is woven like a thread through everything that I do!