After a period of essential maintenance carried out on this website, it’s good to be back with some more of my experiences as an artist who is not only an art enthusiast but also someone who is particularly interested in the arts in general and many kinds of music.
Every time I go to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London I am amazed at the extraordinary quality and skill of the originators of the earliest works of art on display there. The lengths these artists went to in order to achieve fine detail is phenomenal; how on earth did they manage to create such impressive paintings with the brushes, pigments and other materials available in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? Even though these pictures lacked depth and perspective they really must be seen to be believed! Here is one such example:-
Scenes from the lives of the Virgin and other Saints – Giavanni da Rimini (probably about 1300 – 1305)
I often think that I don’t have enough patience when I’m painting and maybe that’s why I’m never satisfied. I certainly can’t do photo- realism and there are still many techniques I haven’t successfully mastered. Last week I met an artist, Sarah Hardy, who has only been painting seriously for three years after spending time in Florence on a tuition course there. Her work is amazing and she is incredibly gifted. Her paintings and drawings reflect many of the works of the great masters such as Velasquez, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and many others. Here is the link to her website.http://www.sarahhardy.com.
I know that I will never be able to achieve Sarah’s level of skill and proficiency but as usual, when I see such high quality work, it gives me the necessary incentive to try and do better!
This is a good time of the year for anyone who loves art. Apart from the many exhibitions taking place in London at the moment (Van Gogh, Bonnard and many others) I have also again been following on television the Sky Portrait Artist of the Year competition, a new short series on Rembrandt and a very enlightening programme on Sean Scully. He is a very unconventional, driven and successful Irish born artist who has made an enormous impact on me due his defiant and dismissive attitude to the art establishment. Although I’m not convinced of his talent as much as he is, and do not particularly like what he does, he commands extraordinary prices which, like many other artists with similar work such as Rothko, I find slightly baffling. Here is a sample of what he does entitled ” Landline China 8, 2018″, which is based on his fascination with horizons:-
The Sky Portrait Artist of the Year semi-finals reached a very high standard with three excellent paintings of Courtney Pine the brilliant Jazz Saxophonist which are shown below. The three artists, Tom Mead, Duncan Shoosmith and Sarah Lavelle should be congratulated for producing these works under extreme pressure in just 4 hours.
Courtney Pine by Tim Mead, Duncan Shoosmith and Sarah Lavelle.
My own efforts have been fairly limited in the last few weeks but I have managed to produce an oil sketch of a musician who I have always admired due to my earlier years as a player of various brass instruments:-
Derick Kane, Principal Euphonium player in the International Staff Band of the Salvation Army for 42 years who has just retired from that position.
My technical shortcomings have been niggling away at the back of my mind and I have decided to go back to basics for a while and do some regular drawing in my sketchbook and look at figure drawing, and anatomy, particularly the problem of proportion. My last contribution to this blog is a painted sketch of a semi-naked male figure which I’ll work on for a while. Here’s the initial attempt:-
