This entry follows on directly from my last entry at the end of 2017 where I had made a number of works plein air. Working outside can be tricky, you have to cope with the elements, the wind and the rain, your work often gets blow over, you drop things, stuff gets stuck to the painting’s surface (I have heard tell that Van Gogh in particular would have things such as sand and even a grasshopper stuck to his work). One of these problems I recently partly solved, was what to do with the left over paint on the pallet. If you are outside in a field, on a beach then left over paint is a real pain and whatever you are going to do it is going to make a mess or dry up or both. My solution was simply to create another painting from the left over paint. A first attempt at this was carried out on Aberystwyth beach at the end of 2017:

Leftover paint landscape number 1.

The crude painting here was far from amazing but I enjoyed the process, immediately a few things came to light: By this point in the painting process, i.e. after I have already been painting for a while on another work, the paint that is left is often of odd colours and dirty. Whether acrylic or oil the medium (water or oil or turps) is often also dirty and by the same logic you often have unclean brushes. The work needs to be done quickly because I am actually trying to pack away and I am often cold or wet or simply required else where. However, I have found that out of these quite limiting factors has come work that I am increasingly pleased with. One of my problems in painting is that I get too tight and precious over the work, to do a work that by its nature has to be the opposite of this has been really educational.

The works that followed on from this painting mostly related to my landscape generator project and so they are paintings of other alien landscapes found out in solar system. I further developed the method of working to actually utilise a single brush and dirty water, often mixing directly on the paintings surface and just applying more paint when I wanted one colour or another to dominate. This required an impasto painting technique of pushing the paint around the surface and often blocking different colours in a method similar to printing rather than painting (this was in an attempt to avoid colours over mixing and just becoming a muddy mess. To start with the paintings have actually been quite small about 6×4 inches (as that was what I had in wood off cuts), but I do envisage this becoming a future painting method that I could use to complete larger works.

I have really enjoyed the freedom that working this way has allowed and I particularly like the fact that now I no longer end up with one painting but two and sometimes even three paintings at the end of the day, which of course is very productive and helps me on my way to the prolific artistic level that I always have aspired to.

Kimberly Crater Mars

Dunes Mars

A Dune on Mars

Titan Plains

Titan Mountains

The Rocks On Titan

Since the end of the summer I found that I have increasingly been practicing painting and drawing out doors, ‘plein air’. Even though I work a lot as a photographer and for my latest MA conceptual work this has meant working in studios creating model landscapes to photograph, I have found that in some ways it is even more important to take my inspiration from the real world and real landscapes and to such ends I found that looking and painting / drawing landscapes is of immense importance. Below are some of my efforts from the last few months, I will start with a couple of photographs below of my working set up:

Painting at Aberystwyth

Painting at Drefach.

Clouds Above The Teifi

The Hill Above Sooty

The Ridge

Dryslwyn Ruins

The View From Heathers Oak

Longwood Walk

Llanllwni Mountain Top

Brecon Cathedral

The Sea By Aberystwyth

Sometimes new artistic inspiration takes the form of a happy accident, which it did recently after watching an episode of the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme. Fake or Fortune is a programme that I have started watching more frequently since starting my art MA. For those who don’t watch this programme the basic premise is that gallery owner Philip Mould and presenter Fiona Bruce each episode set off on another artistic ‘who done it’ or rather ‘who painted, drew or sculpted this?’ quest. There is often a reasonable amount of doubt over the work in question hence all the detective work; and then at the end of the programme there is a big reveal: did the suspected artist create the work or did someone else or is a fake or do we still do not know?

Now, I should point out here that whilst this programme is interesting, and I like anything to do with art, the programme format does play up a bit to the cameras and the hype: i.e. I think that the programme makers like a bit of controversy – in one episode I watched the authority’s / experts in Paris who were looking at the work decided it was a fake and not only withheld it but destroyed the artwork! Whilst everyone was shocked, and this must have been particularly upsetting for the painting’s owners I suspect that such incidents may help boost the programmes ratings? This and the fact that some of the content is dumbed down for a large viewing audience mean that it is not my favourite art programme.

However, on a recent episode (it may have been a rerun) they show cased a supposed Renoir painting in Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire. I won’t go into the full story here but I’ll rather link in here the castles website where there is an account of what happened: https://www.pictoncastle.co.uk/fake-or-fortune-the-picton-renoir-features-on-tv-sunday-12-july-at-8-00pm

Basically, there is a good chance that this painting is by Renoir, however the art world ‘experts’ cannot agree and so this definition cannot be official; unfortunately for Picton this does dramatically devalue the work.

Now, all of this is slightly ‘by the by’; when watching the programme, I had missed the very start so did not actually realise where ‘Picton’ was and had certainly not thought about going to see the painting.

However, chance would have it that a friend was visiting us at the time and we were considering places to visit / take them. We had not tried visiting anything in this area of Pembrokeshire previously and so when web searching and Picton came up the family simply considered this to be an interesting castle to visit. It was only when looking again what was there that I put 2 and 2 together and realised that I would be visiting the painting that I had just been learning about.

This proved to be a fun thing to do, it is always good to see art in the flesh particularly pieces that you might have seen on online, on TV, or in a book; there is something about a real artwork that cannot be conveyed through other media; and I enjoyed spotting the painting and having my own close look at the work. However, this was not what I gained most from the experience. Rather, I found myself considering what other ‘master pieces’ might be hidden in such great houses as Picton and indeed who was to say what is a master piece and what is not. Fake or Fortune had brought to the attention of the world this small painting and whether or not it was by Renoir it’s status had undoubtedly been elevated; a few years before it had just been another small painting on the wall of a great house gathering dust and probably quite ignored. What is to say that there are not many such cases across the British Isles or indeed the world? And even those pieces of work which we know were not done by anyone of consequence; what is to say that a single piece cannot be a great piece of art in its own right?

In short, my brush with Renoir’s painting has highlighted to me the importance of looking twice at paintings, drawings, photographs and indeed any art as I move through my life. It is easy to walk around museums, national trust properties and the like and to not really take in what you are being shown. Starting that day, I have slowed down when visiting such places and have taken the time to really look at the work on display.

Picton Castle Renoir

Below are some of the other paintings on display in Picton Castle.

Inspired by all of the art work on display, I did my own En plein air sketch of the front of Picton Castle, sitting on the damp leaves at the edge of their main driveway:-

Sketch of the front of Picton castle.

I am retrospectively inserting this blog entry back into a period where I had not written very much on the blog front.

I’ll be honest and say at this point that I feel conflicted about blogs: on one hand the conscientious me feels as though I should write regularly at least every month (and indeed in terms of the internet and web searches this is the best thing to do – as I am sure you all know). However, this is not me, one thing that I feel very uncertain about in computing is the way it seems to turn us all into social media addicts – we seem to feel the need to constantly update our profile and post and share our feelings and be ‘liked’ by one another; I, it seems to do not feel this need (hence only having visited Facebook about three times this year). So, and I can say this looking back (as I am writing this in Oct 2018), my blogging will be sporadic (just so you know); there will be months where I write three times in a month and other periods where I will write nothing for six months. To some degree this is because I will put content else where on my website for the period when there was a gap, or I will have just been too busy to write. Though, and this is the really conflicted part, I am fascinated by digital technology and its impact and love art and photography, so though I will wonder off and do lots of real stuff in the real world like baking cakes, spending time with my family, gardening and painting, I will be drawn back here from time to time to say something about it all.

Sue Lewington

My last entry about going out and painting with water colours reminded me of learning to paint with watercolours when I was a teenager. I had like most kids been painting with cheap water colours and powder-paints since I was small but on a family holiday to the island of St. Martins in the Isles of Scilly when I was about 14 (so that would be 1993 /94), my parents discovered a talented water colour artist on the island who was running her own gallery and decided to pay for me to have a lesson with her. Although, in actuality this then resulted in me spending most of the rest of the holiday painting in watercolours and calling back to the poor lady’s studio on a number of occasions to show her my efforts. I have just found that this artist is still painting, her name is Sue Lewington. She does not have much of a formal web presence, but rather exists online by reputation (there are pages and pages of people commenting on her work and courses). I would like to say thank you to her for teaching me to paint all those years ago (I was much improved on my return from the Scilly’s); although I think I might need to go back for some more lessons now.

How do you make painting more efficient?

With the weather the recently improving, I have started to think about working (more specifically painting – I already do most of my photography) outside; I have always fancied being a plein air painter. When I was a teenager I used to do a lot more drawing and painting outside than I do now, particularly watercolours, and I have started to wonder if I should not take this media up again.

My work on landscapes, both the photography and the models has made me think that I should also spend more time drawing and painting landscapes so as to better understand the structure and the shapes of the land. I have been enjoying using pen and ink in my illustrations of moons and craters for my ‘landscape generator’ project and watercolour is a similar media. I do struggle with the lightness of touch required in watercolour painting but this should improve with practice and so in this sense there should be no excuse for not getting out and making a start.

One of the problems I have though with plein air is the amount of time taken up by the activity, not just the actual time painting but the getting to the location and the preparation of your equipment beforehand. Don’t get me wrong I think that it is a perfect activity: painting, walking, fresh air, beautiful scenery what’s there not to like? However, both my family and college are keen to make my art economically viable and I worry that disappearing off for the whole day to paint is a risky economic activity; but then we are told that we should not think like this about art. I guess it might be alright if you can complete several paintings whist out or if you can somehow speed the process up? It was with this in mind that I had a brain-wave, what if I combined my painting with my exercise, that way I’ll be doing two useful activities at once and if I run to or from my painting location then I will speed the activity up.

A couple of days after having this idea I packed a small rucksack with paints, brushes, pens, pencils, ink and paper and set off up the hill above our house with the intension of finding a spot to paint!

Ultimately the experiment was reasonably successful; I briskly walked up the hill, so as not to get too sweaty and out of breath before I began. I found a good spot beside the road and started work. I got a couple of images completed and then ran back. The only issue was that I was still gone for a good two hours, although I only saw one car on the road the whole time I was out and at the end of the day you can’t put a price on that, or on art it would seem!

Lifelong Learning Wildlife Photography Class:

My current wildlife photography group working at Ynys Hir and Ynyslas in North Ceredigion.

Teaching at home:

Occasionally I also teach photography tuition privately. For the last three weeks I have had two ladies visit me on Thursday afternoons to further their photographic skills. Here are a couple of photographs that we worked during last weeks class; taken after a short walk around the farm.

Ivy growing up the side of a tree. Textures and Details.

Dandilion in Colour? Experimenting with layers in Photoshop.

Borth and Ynys Hir:

Another activity that I did at the end of 2016 was to take a group of Photography Learners (a private group I teach in the village of Gorsgoch not far from where I live) on a day trip to visit Borth Zoo and the RSPB’s Nature Reserve at Ynys Hir in the north of Ceredigion. I set this group up to meet a need in my teaching, namely that often when I have finished formal Higher education and Further education courses, I still have requests from students asking if it would be possible to continue to learn. With the support of the village hall I was able to offer those learners interested such an opportunity at a relatively low cost. The learning itself is very relaxed, sometimes I  do a workshop, sometimes we talk about the work and occasionally we go on a field trip as was the case here.

Even though this was at the end of November we had a perfect day; the zoo was fun and the animals entertaining to photograph, Ynys Hir was really beautiful and we got some great photos. I have to admit though that when I am teaching I don’t often get much opportunity to take photographs, and I am more interested in my students having the greater success, however I am attaching a few images that I shot whilst working.