Paul @ Edinburgh College

Art at Usher Hall

It isn't that any important doubt has ever been cast on Miles Davis' talents as musician, but seeing Sketches of Spain performed by a thirty man orchestra left me astonished at the depth of his innovation and the subtlety of his compositional forms.

Even I, a great lover of Jazz, subconsciously notch it below serious music, i.e. Classical. Some claim that since Jazz is now over one hundred years old, a century in which it has been constantly re-examined and renovated, it too, is classical music. I am neither musicologist nor musician, maybe Classical music does have some criterion that sets it apart. But, at Usher Hall last night, I felt there could be nothing wrong with mentioning, say, Bach, Mozart, Shostakovitch and Davis, together.

Sketches of Spain is a sound never heard before it was written. A new foray into what music can be. A haunting melancholic wind that both warms and chills the blood. To see how that sound is made, piecemeal, by musicians, impresses with its virtuosity and ingenuity.

The orchestra was all woodwind and brass except for two stringed instruments, Harp and double Bass, the latter played both pizzicato and bowed. And two on percussion. One who handled the triangle, timpani, castanets and other incidental percussion instruments. The other did the best day's work behind a standard drum kit I have ever seen. Not, a la Rock and Roll, working up a sweat by hitting the skins a million times a second with great vigour, but because of his aching restraint. His control over timbre and volume. He used hands and fingertips to brush the drum-heads; he used brushes on the underside of cymbals with such sensitivity that the sounds merged with the whole, no longer seeming to come from a discrete instrument.

The three flautists, who all played the full range, from Piccolo to Base, eschewing embouchure at one point, held their C Flutes like Saxophones and simply blew into their mouthpieces—creating a silent sound like far-away leaves rustled by a faint breeze. It was a sound essential to the whole, a sound I recognised from the recordings, but not one I ever isolated, or whose provenance I could have guessed if I had.

For another movement, five trumpets stood and exited stage left. From there they played Reveille, which we could hear through a door left judiciously ajar. Upon hearing the effect I became aware that the distance in the sound could not have been achieved acoustically had they remained onstage.

And so, every instrument on the stage was stretched in its abilities. The horns were constantly switching among a variety of four cups. The woodwinds were constantly changing instruments. Only Davis' own trumpet and Cornet surfed the sound waves, clear and penetrating and precise.

Miles Davis was a musical genius and a consummate artist.

Constable & Mc Taggart at the National

Images:

detail, lower left of Salisbury Cathedral

detail, foreground, right of centre

Salisbury Cathedral

Preparatory sketch for the finished painting

The two large landscapes that represented Mc Taggart seemed to me perfectly ordinary paintings. Painted in a standard palette & punctuated by cartoon-like, two-dimensional figures draped in unconvincing textiles.

Constable was another story. Two of his more important pieces, as clean as the day he finished them, shone preternaturally, as if animated by a flickering inner light, alongside a few of his delightful, preparatory oil studies.

(Strangely, the big Salisbury Cathedral, one of Constable’s most famous paintings—surely valued in the tens of millions—is framed in cheap & ugly, faux gilt, & is of an ornamentation too large for the already busy painting.)

A painter must, from time to time, go in close to a Constable. The overall effect of his paintings are hindered by their general heaviness. He prepared his canvasses with a Raw Umber imprimatura, like a Renaissance painter, a generation before Monet & Renoir were experimenting with light violets & China blues. And even while a young Turner was trying yellows & bright Sienas. Add to that an English sky; unlike Mediterranean landscapes, the more interesting when dark with heavy cloud. And trees which, in contrast to Corot’s maxim, no bird could fly through, & you have the sombre, even, turgid, impact of a typical Constable landscape. One might say, the antithesis of a late Turner, Constable’s contemporary.

He also suffers from the biscuit tin effect. Where capturing a landscape with rainbow was daring—a new way for people to see the elusive phenomenon outside of nature (explained by Newton around the time of Constable’s birth, two life-times before photography)—it has become twee, today, because we’ve seen a million photographs of rainbows & seldom in a high art context. Constable’s technique & mastery were unique & original in his day but his treatment of his subjects was devalued, too, by their commercial use & bad imitators.

Go in close, however, to discover why he is a true painter’s painter. The first of the details, above, is as lively & congruent in its sense of tamed chaos as a Jackson Pollock. Constable’s technical skills were innovative, wide in variety, & controlled with exquisite skill. Much, but not all of the first layers are applied with brushes, but in wilful & varied texture intended to take the following layers a certain way. Some of the early work on the canvas, & much of the late, is applied with palette knife instead.

Constable was a master of Frotage, the delicate technique where a lightly loaded palette knife is drawn lightly across a textured surface so that, for instance (as you can see in the examples above) a white catches only on the high points of a bush, imitating light caught by a multitude of leaves that would lose life, would become ‘still life’, if each highlight were a brushstroke. As we can see in 17th century Dutch landscapes where the painstakingly painted leaves, each with three tones & colours, are as static as the wood of the tree whose branches they adorn—they do not flutter or dapple or shine. For Frotage to work one must plan ahead & create the correct texture in the lower layers to capture the dragged paint later.

The textured surface that results as consequence adds another element which a smooth surface lacks: shadow. Under each of those highlights—that form the highest part of the surface—sits a tiny shadow, a genuine translucent shadow that makes the contrasting lights pop.

For the many branches of a bush, or blades of grass, he uses the edge of the palette knife to achieve not only fine, unvaried lines, but also to create a texture which will come to life when a palette knife loaded in a lighter colour is pulled across them in a single stroke that imitates the direction of light.

Add to these effects opaque layers, & leaves formed as if of clay with a flick of the palette knife that gives half of each leaf a transparency that works as shadow, as well as translucent glazes & scumbling, & you have the fascinating complexity of a Constable surface.

I think, too, that the extraordinary surfaces of his paintings were achieved sitting down at the easel; that is to say, so near that he could only see the bit he was painting until he stood up to get some distance. This also impacts badly on the whole. There are places where the detail works from a distance appropriate to the painting’s size (rule of thumb: 3 times the diagonal), like the twigs in the foreground & the beautifully described bushes on the far bank, while other areas of detail coalesce into a dark & shapeless mush.

Etching @ Edinburgh Printmakers

I finally made it back to Edinburgh Printmaker's workshop to print a couple of plates I etched in my studio. The first, above, I had pulled proofs from, which I used to re-work the copper plate. Unfortunately, as you can see, without a chance at more proofs I think I have overdone it. Rather than dark & mysterious, like a Goya, it has just turned murky.

The second, below, was a surprise delight! I did it quickly; without preliminary drawings—I just drew directly into the ground with a screwdriver from a photograph I took of a fellow waiting at a bus stop. I then dirtied it (or, as I've learned from experienced etchers at the workshop, I added “noise”) with glue, ground & drypoint scratches. I am happier with it than the other one, on which I spent some dozens of hours.

Royal Academy, New Contemporaries show

The degree show at the Royal Academy didn't surprise by being mostly nonsense & craft, nor either for showing just a few young painters with promise. A historically common ratio

Prices were decidedly affordable. None of those I mention below could afford the time their pieces took if they counted on their sales to pay their rents.

I didn't take photographs because I had the catalogue under my arm & knew the RSA website had it covered. But, oddly, the only photo of Sam Drake's work available on the Site, in the catalogue, & from the Edinburgh Reporter article, is the same black & white above (of a painting in colour). I liked Drake's work, though I hope he learns to do his own drawing so that his paintings won't be restricted by being painted on hard projected images. Still, I thought his application of paint showed power, & his choice of colour & composition, good taste. (between 950 & £4250)

Just as Goya's black period chills with sinister titillation, so do Daphne Percy-Choffara's interesting pieces. Heads drawn on paper glued to rough plywood panels & then half-hidden under layers of judicious raw & burnt umber glazes, have a wonderful presence. (the big ones at £1700)

Emily Stewart's '18th century' miniature portraits, done on acrylic the size & shape of a smartphone, delight with their dainty sensitivity. The image above does not do justice, not only a washed-out photo with lost detail, but larger than the original. (£500 each)

Mark Wallinger

I went to see the Mark Wallinger exhibit at the Fruitmarket gallery the other day. A combination of wasted art materials & bare-faced audacity undisturbed by aesthetic consideration or visits from muses who might fertilise the womb of his mind.

Wallinger’s work illustrates ideas that would have greater impact & artistic success if he described them in words & let his audience use its imagination.

The gall it took to print a large photograph of a great artist's great painting (Innocent X, by Velasquez), hang it from the ceiling, & call it his own, astounds—especially after it has already been treated with such power by Bacon in his version. Wallinger invites merited derision by inviting comparison to real artists.

A series of self portraits embodied as the letter 'I', repeated in haphazard, indifferent calligraphy ad nauseaum, is too small an idea, too badly executed, to occupy a full gallery wall. It might delight, instead, as a single page in a chapbook. Just as the room-full of chairs each with his name written in paint on its back, are too trivial to fill a room.

The large Rorschach charts painted with fingers in black paint on white, soon-to-be-yellow, gesso, fill one with desire to use the large, expensively stretched canvasses, for something worthwhile, or at least, sincere, by painting over his daubs.

Vis-com rotation

I brainstormed a dozen ideas at the beginning of this project. I chose one, a humorous animation, and worked on it for a week.

Then, on Friday of the same week, Doug gave us a talk which included a bunch of samples that were creative, innovative and well-made. I left class a little stunned. I abandoned the conventional animation I had been working on and tried to come up with an idea of the category Doug had shown us. A challenge.

I pondered; I waited for inspiration; I drew, and finally I came up with this. I call it: The Idea

I thought to tell the narrative with images and, since half the story is about contemplation, I considered doing each of the thirteen panels I had story-boarded in a different medium—to reflect my character's consideration of possibilities. I did some oil sketches, clay studies, acrylics, pen, pencil, watercolours, lino-cuts, as well as a tool new to me that I like very much, the pen brush.

I thought I might create a booklet with pages of different supports depending on the media used, and even a pop-up figure in the middle. I planned to then video record. Moving across and in and out of the series of panels with a soundtrack a musician friend was standing by to compose for it.

But though I had been rather pleased with myself for getting the facial gestures right with few changes after the storyboard, the more I re-drew the same scene, the more I realised how much they could be improved. In clarity, subtlety and even the gesture itself. When I looked up certain expressions with Google images, like: disappointment, or chagrin, or alarm, the choices tended to little variation. I began to realise, however, that entirely different gesticulation might be used to describe the same emotion to better effect, for not being common.

I took photographs of a patient friend in all the positions and lighting I envisaged for the panels and referred to them when drawing.

Time pressed and drawing the thirteen panels in ballpoint with watercolour washes, was in itself daunting. So, I got down to it and worked my way through them, finishing the last drawing Sunday night before Monday deadline.

It is the third iteration if you don't count the many individual sketches exploring expression, composition and point of view. Or the experiments in other media. But it is not accomplished. I would need one more go, although, in experience, 'one more go', one at a time, often mean: several more goes. I have replaced a couple of the panels with improvements but many of the others shout their poor anatomy or tiresome, repetitive composition.

What would I change? Well, as Doug pointed out, I should have reconsidered the stylised hair which worked well enough for the rougher sketches. It neither matches the style of some of the faces nor exploits what could be effective about it when the fingers enter his head. I thought the ballpoint pen and watercolours worked well enough for the first, large, panel, but became dull as one works through the pages. If I did it again I would try the more calligraphic line of a pen-brush. As mentioned, some of the drawings need improvement simply in the anatomy; others want livening-up with different points of view, but mostly, it is to the facial gesture that I have found my focus directed.

The last panel presented an especial challenge. A difficult expression, a kind of resigned disappointment and frustration. As well as its being important as the final panel, the punchline, so to speak. I drew and I re-drew, and googled and re-googled (with all the synonyms I could think of) but though I found appropriate images, they lacked impact, they lacked a dynamic quality. When one of my sketches reminded me of Homer Simpson, I wrote: D'OH! Next to it and had an epiphany as a result. Of course! When Homer says “D'oh!” he wears the very facial gesture I'd been looking for. I searched it out and, sure enough, was able to extrapolate from that simple stylisation—Homer the cartoon character—the same expression for my protagonist.

As I drew I began to realise that I have been drawing and painting people all of my life—they are my favourite subject—but never, EVER, with an expressive gesture. Combined with my recent revisiting of Rembrandt's etchings (which have spurred me to my own forays into copper etching) it dawned on me that this is an area I need to explore to see where it leads. (Just as Rembrandt explored it all of his life, especially in the etchings.)

Experimenting with colour & tone

How far from real—natural—colours can one go, as long as he keeps the tones true? Above, the background blue for instance, seems too light in tone where it was left as shadow on the body.

I was at the Royal Academy the other day & had a walk through the academician’s gallery, though I’ve seldom seen anything interesting there. This time, however, just as I was reaching the exit, I saw a lone lino-cut of a stylised figure having a pee against a wall. I stopped to look at it, delighted. And just when I was wondering who the artist was & wishing there was more, I turned right & found a room-full!

Wee Willie Rodgers born in 1930, Glasgow, & his wee prints. They are wonderful. The limited edition prints in series of about 50 start at a reasonable £90.