Part 5 Research part 1 some of this page has been altered post formative assessment.

Applying paint

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) worked in several styles through his painting life: moving from Impressionism to pointalism and back again. 

Pissarro used a wide tonal pallet . https://www.camillepissarro.org/the-cote-des-baoeufs-at-lhermitage.jsp In this example worked paint into the work , over layering the impasto leaving small parts of brush marks . It is also full of interwoven trees in the foreground giving an authentic feel and hiding the figures in the mid ground from initial view. In contrast , https://www.camillepissarro.org/boulevard-montmartre-at-night.jsp , one of few urban scenes that he painted the view opens out wide using the street angle to allow simplified contrasting tone perspective. The brush work in this one is much looser and it is suggested that this was because there was a time pressure to catch the light on the damp pavements. Both of his techniques use textured paint to create perspective.

https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-history/pastel-drawings-famous-artists-time/ shows techniques used by twentieth century and current artists. Ordin Redon applied pastels in a way that mimicked oil work. Use of contrasting hues and close tonal shades appear in heavy overplayed areas resembling paint applied with a spatula. Yet in some areas there is only a thin tint and leaving white areas and pencil markings.

In contrast Mary Casset was well known fir creating fine tonal work. She was able to blend in some areas like clothing but achieved a mottled skin effect by allowing marking lines in blues and pinks to stay distinct on arms and faces. Strands of hair where chiselled into the paper distinctly and a reflection in a mirror shows distinct over hatching to identify it.

Recommended artists to research

Joan Eardsley-https://youtu.be/2t8HAAFLfWw. And https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/10/joan-eardley-the-forgotten-artist-who-captured-scotlands-life-and-soul

Eardley painted coastal seascapes and landscapes at a fishing village called Catterline. She painted large works in situe and often in extreme conditions. Her work was full of bold and loose mark making, impasto , ground additives and scratching. She used quite a muted storm palette most of the time but could introduce translucent pinks and yellows to convey a change for the better in the weather. The energy in her work really inspires me as does the semi abstract quality of her paintings. They convey the power of nature .

Joan Eardley- behind the canvas

While her street children are perhaps equally or even more iconic I intend to concentrate on Eardley at Catterline where her sea scape work and insight from the late 50’s till her death in 1963 . Here her loose and impasto technique appeals greatly to me and I aspire to the same passion for a simplistic representation of the magnificence of the natural costal environment.

Second research notes

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In the 19th and early 20th centuries certain artistic disciplines, like sculpture, were regarded as unfeminine. Similarly, certain types of art were considered to be more appropriate for women: in 1860, French art critic, Léon Lagrange wrote of female artists: ‘Let women occupy themselves with those kinds of art they have always preferred… the paintings of flowers’ for example. However, have things have moved on for female artists today?

In this film contemporary artists Julie Roberts, Graham Fagen, and arts journalist Jan Patience were invited to discuss whether an artist’s gender affects the work they create or the subject matter they choose. ‘

Julie Roberts and Graham Fagen discuss pre 1980’s thinking on appropriate subject matter for female artists. They agree that Eardsley’s street children were a product of what she had access to paint ie not the life room or celebrity portraiture. (Fortunate though for social history that it forms a record though of a disappearing way of life!)

Around 2:30 in the video Eardley is shown working in her studio in Catterline. Her body language portrayed tension and an urgency to spurt out her work. She held large brushes and a pallet knife in both hands and applied the beginnings of a painting with large loose marks, possibly dark ( black and white clip) onto a mid – tone board support .Here work on seascapes became large and hosted longer, looser markings which apparently she painted in groups mainly outside no matter what the weather was, even strapping down boards in storms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXPZk35FhwM&feature=emb_title

Description of ‘The Wave’ 1961

‘This work was painted in Catterline, a village on the East Coast of Scotland where Eardley owned a cottage. It suggests something of the power of the sea, with the wave approaching the shore like a wall of water. The artist has described the circumstances of the painting: ‘It was painted during February 1961 – entirely outside – as is the case with all my sea paintings. It was one of four paintings which I had in progress during a stormy period of weather. I worked on all four together – or rather from one to the other according to the tide’.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/485#related-media-anchor

https://youtu.be/MOof0SdNsMI – Eardley’s technique in 1959 described and paired with Anne Redpath from a similar period. Both are influenced by the strong bold abstracts emerging from America. still uses a and realistic colour pallet for sea scales – odd as she uses Freudian surreal pallets for her street children. It is commented on that her bold and confident style was influential on Redpath , an artist with many more years of experience. She illustrates swirls and impasto techniques and pallet knife spreads of paint along the canvas .

‘There are several late oil paintings whose subject remains enigmatic, where the abstract quality is dominant, where the paint itself seems to the as much the subject as the view. The title, which derives from a Roland Browse & Delbanco label, has assumed we are looking at a waterfall but can we detect the form of a beehive (a favourite Catterline motif) with the light illuminating a path beyond? What is certain is the energy inherent in the paint, a determination not to let her picture become a topographical record that she shared at this moment with Auerbach, Kossof and European Tachist painters like Antoni Tàpies.’P38 TSG catalogue

See shape , form and colour for Trees and Haystacks. Paint etched out possibly with the end of a brush as described elsewhere. P29

‘For Eardley there was enough inspiration for a lifetime of painting and more and this drove the urgency in her work, the sense that nature would not be tamed or oblige with the same conditions ever again; her response was to work tirelessly’

P28 from Joan Eardley – Restless talent TSG catalogue

Sourced at http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sgall-assets/pdf/TSG_Joan_Eardley_Restless_Talent.pdf

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A Carter and His Horse, which the Government Art Collection bought in 1952 and then loaned to the British Embassy in Tokyo for decades. It captures the carter beside his horse, lighting a cigarette while he waits for goods to be unloaded from the harbour glimpsed in the background. Yet the 4ft-wide picture has an impressive scale. Eardley carries the eye across the surface by means of small connecting passages, without forcing the interest at any point. The brushwork is brusque, almost nonchalant, suggesting a confidence that feels no need to impress.’

‘…The North East, – it’s just vast waste and vast seas, vast areas of cliff – you’ve just got to paint it. I very often find I will take my paints to a certain place which has moved me and I’ll begin to paint there and I find by perhaps the end of the summer I haven’t moved from that place. My paints are still there. I’ve worn a kind of mark in the ground – no grass left! – and I just leave my paints there overnight and eventually it seems to have built up this other table and generally a studio seems to have arrived outside and that seems to be how I work. Once I’ve started in a place I don’t find I want to move, because I’m trying to do something and you’re never really satisfied with what you’re doing, so you keep on trying and the more you try the more you think of new ways of doing this particular subject and so you just go on and on.’

Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p57

Three large canvases all worked throughout the day from my front door or thereabouts. It has been a perfect painting day – Not as regards climate! (I wore a fur coat for the first time). But for beauty quite perfect – A big sea – with lovely light – greyness and blowing swirling mists – and latterly a strong wind blowing from the south, blowing up great froths of whiteness off the sea, like soap suds onto the field behind our wee house – And towards evening the sun appeared shrouded in heavy mist – and turned yellow and orange and red, with great swirls of mist obscuring her every now and again – I wanted so much to paint the sun but it meant turning round and leaving my sea – or else running round paints and all to the other side of the bay. And I just hadn’t time or energy to do this – Tomorrow perhaps there will be the possibility of this sun again and I can take up my position, the other side, by the minister’s house. I think it could be good there.’

Joan Eardley, extract from a letter, Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries,

2013, p21 TSG -Joan Eardley in context

http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sgall-assets/pdf/Joan_Eardley_In_Context.pdf



Ohttps://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/art-review-joan-eardley-sense-place-1460207 shows intensity and urgency esp the ground blhs – colours showing winter light.

‘I don’t think there’s anybody else that has painted two completely different subjects, in the same way, with the same passion, and caught both of them,’ says Eardley’s niece, Anne Morrison, who grew up in Glasgow, and knew Eardley when she was a child.

As Anne observes, Townhead and Catterline actually had quite a lot in common.

They were both communities on the edge. Catterline is still there, still much the same, but Townhead has been bulldozed – replaced with high rise flats and a new motorway. Her haunting portraits of its children are all that has survived.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1290R2hMbnhYfz7pJNKZkmz/how-the-unflinching-art-of-joan-eardley-captures-scotland-at-its-rawest

Oliver describes her late landscapes as an urgent need to find expression ‘for a heightened response to the experience of all of her senses – the angry roar and tumult of the sea, the silence of the snow-bound village, the sussuration of the wind across the barley field, the scent of the wild flowers and the hum of the bees; all these are implicit in her paintings’.16

And also describes as “‘non linear’

https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/joan-eardley

When I first saw one of Joan Eardley’s street kids pictures I was struck by the freedom of her mark-making and her bold colour choices. Solid blue rings around a child’s eyes is not conventional- and yet it works. It is spontaneous and says something of the plight of the impoverished children that she knew so well from the streets around her Glasgow studio. The colours of the clothing are bright and used repeatedly as a complimentary colour technique to make her work ‘pop’ and to draw attention to the poverty of the residents – the same items of clothing appear again and again on different siblings . As one of the artists for recommended study in this unit , I returned to her work . New amazement hit me- as I felt the frenzied energy used in a breath- taking manner to portray storms she observed from the small fishing village that she spent a great deal of her latter years living in. She worked outside with huge canvases lashed down to prevent them blowing away in gales and apparently worked quickly and loosely to paint in the same spots again and again, claiming that the more you studied a site the more detail and feeling you got from it. I greatly admire Eardley’s bold mark making, impasto, application of sand in her ground and scratching into her work. This conveys the urgency of her paint application and therefore her passion for the subject. In her work I can detect the joy that she must have felt in her paintings and realising this I felt more able to try to loosen up and experiment in my assignment . I commented in part 4 that I realise I retreat into convention and lose the sense of what I am trying to paint. Therefore Eardley inspired me to be bolder in this submission.

Ellis O’Connor says that “ on stormy days the sea and sky converge” and this is what she tries to bring to her work.https://youtu.be/U6SZjQgeZIc

I have taken Ellis’s words very much to heart and sat for many hours absorbing the moods and tides of the sea. I best love the bubbling white mass of foam as tall rollers crash in from the Atlantic and smash many miles worth of built up kinetic energy into stacks of outlying rocks or collide with rip tides bouncing of the bay. This wild caldron is imprinted on my mind to the point that I must try to describe it using colour,texture, splashes, pallet knife marks and anything that I feel will develop my depiction of this amazing and dangerous sight.

Until very recently I felt a sense of defeat when I picked up a brush or chalk to record this scene. It has taken technical ‘light-bulb’ moments as referenced in ‘Personal Development’ at the start of Part 5 ) and without a doubt the research into the work and emotions of artists like Joan Eardley to encourage me out of my previous artistic paradigm . It may sound over dramatic but I am convinced that discovering the level of passion and self belief and observing the mark-making that Eardley used in her seascapes opened up to me the possibility that I did not have to paint as a photorealist. My journey in art is to represent the energy that I feel in a subject through urgent mark-making and development of my emotional response to the subject and my evolving work.

Kurt Jackson-https://www.kurtjackson.com/exhibitions/. Jackson paints landscapes in thick oils. His mark making is not quite as loose as Eardsley but the splashing and dribbling of bright highlites really makes it pop.Thinking about how he uses perspectivehas been a revelation to me- that while hue fades into the distance, the shadow that forms behind or on the furthest hills, trees etc can be as dark or darker than closest points. See kJ sea picture s-Sea on horizon much darker than closest.

Barbara Rae-https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/exhibitions/barbara-rae-the-northwest-passage/ Rae uses simple semi abstract form and lines and blocks of bright colour. The colour is used effectively to show perspective and convey ideas but fir me it does not have the same feeling of energy as Joan Eardsley’s workBy 1942 Nash has added bright hues to his pallet. The yellows and soft pink/browns change the mood of the landscape adding warmth and cheer to his work. This is ironic as WW11 is still raging on and his Heath has deteriorated greatly before his death the following year. The strange tones and more abstract shapes are reminiscent of the dreamscapes that he is well known for. It is easy to trace the development of Nash’s work throughout his painting life. He sticks to themes that he is passionate about but within this his techniques and emotional awareness of his subjects develop his work.

Research altered 12/01/21 after formative assessment to include passages read but not included and explanations of Nash’s effect on my work.

Paul Nash – amended review of artist’s influence on my work

One of Paul Nash’s great strengths was his sense of place- feeling that there was an emotional connection to convey as well as the physical image. He returned over his life time to The Clumps ,Wittenham, Oxfordshire. (Brains & Dillon, s.d.) record his response to this landscape

I share Nash’s sense of place. In assignment 5 prep and the assessment work itself I have stated how much I have been affected on a deeper level by the seas and coastline that I now call home. I have spent much of my time since observing and getting to know how my local beach areas respond to different weather and tides. I have sketched the same parts of the coast line again and again looking forward development of my technical skills and experimenting with media methods to illustrate the sea in all its moods. It is a compulsion and connects me to my environment. As the shapes , forms and colours become second nature , I find that my style relaxes and I can look out for marks and textures to develop my understanding further.

Nash used trees to describe his work: whether the clumps of Wittenham or the awful blown up stumps of the aftermath of Passiondale. I have taken this to heart and see the sense in using shapes the I love and understand to convey a message.

nashclumps.org produced by Christopher Baines & Anna Dillon.: Paul Nash and the Wittenham Clumps s.d. At https://www.nashclumps.org/display.html (accessed on 11/01/21)

David Boyd Haycock (12/03/2018) – Paul Nash: The landscape of modern war” from HENI Talks on Vimeo At https://vimeo.com/259680856 first accessed on 12/20.

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Aberdeen Gallery – Part 2

My favourite piece in the gallery turned out to be byPeter Howson. He is an artist who takes on tough subjects and portrays them in a raw but sensitive way. He uses groups of dark tones with most of the bright coming from skin and white hi lights. In this image the background is light rather than his usual black, perhaps to leave us in no doubt what his troubling subject is. 

The figures are inter-twined in a mass of unnatural black and green which is in itself disturbing. Only after looking for sometime is the viewer able to pick out details one by one. I feel that this is a device to echo the sickening horror of the scene. When eventually I identified the woman’s eyes ‘ locked in an upward fearful glance do I understand the full impact. The sparse use of flesh colour around her face and arm  emphasise this.

Howson uses big bold strokes and furious scribble strokes – to me this suggests the violence he is trying to put across. For the same reason the background is roughly applied and the strokes change to denote this. Effective linear brush marks in black hi light features such as joints on the hands. This is simple and effective.

I only discovered Howson,s work recently but have come to love it. I would not have realised before seeing it how well what appears at first glance to be rough and perhaps even ‘crude’ is actually extremely poinient in it’s narrative. This is the one picture that fills my mind on leaving the gallery. The woman’s eyes are rough dots but yet they haunt me!

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The blocks of colour suggest a feeling of single strokes and as most are sweeping the painting seems alive. A deep grey is used to denote areas of shadow and human features. These devices give a stark contrast to the colour books making them stand out.

The figures are of a ‘naive’ style and shadows shown in sharp contrast of tones rather than using subtle layering.

Angles are sharp, limbs are bent unnaturally and the perspective is deliberately wrong suggesting an awkwardness. I wish to look at more of his work to see if this is is his style at the time or whether it is specific to this piece in which case it could be a narrative for the uncomfortable exploration of youth, health or even portraying a dream?

I also find it interesting that although the figures size and rich bright colourings dominate the painting my eyes are first drawn to the paler horizon. Here the colours are more closely matched and there are gaps in the outline colour which makes it different and softer.

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I love David Bomberg’s use of a wide palette. His bold strokes (probably achieved by using a thick pigment medium to keep them distinct ) show perspective through indicating   different  angles of rocky outcrops and reflected sunrise or sunset  on the mountain and swirls in the paler background sky.

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described as ‘brutal ‘ possibly because of the black background contrasting strongly with the white over glaze on the face. Brush strokes are left observable indicating movement around the sunken dark eyes and dabbed areas across the scull area looking like mist.

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