Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Artists & Illustrators

Recognition is important. While the process of creating artworks can be immensely satisfying in its own right, a bit of peer approval can do wonders for the confidence. Entering open competitions and sharing work on sites like our own Portfolio Plus scheme are a perfect way for an amateur artist to gain feedback and focus for their fledgling practice. In this issue, we have spoken to three artists who have recently become recipients of Artists & Illustrators awards, including Ian Hargreaves, who was crowned Artist of the Year at our annual exhibition at Mall Galleries last month. Each of the three very talented painters have shared their experiences, giving you an insight into how they developed their careers and created award-winning works so you can follow in their footsteps -…

1 SUNDAY TIMES WATERCOLOUR COMPETITION 2016 Calling all watercolourists: submissions for the weekend broadsheet’s annual painting competition close on the 13 June. The event is the most prestigious of its kind in the UK, with a first prize of £10,000 on offer. Judges will be looking for original work that seeks to redefine and celebrate water-based media. All shortlisted works will be shown at London’s Mall Galleries from 19-24 September. Last year’s award went to Akash Bhatt for Blue Room (pictured), a moving portrait of the artist’s mother. www.sundaytimeswatercolour.org 2 SUBMIT Royal Society of Marine Artists Think your seascapes deserve to see the inside of a gallery? The Royal Society of Marine Artists is accepting submissions until the 24 June. Selected works will appear at the RSMA exhibition at London’s…

The key to art competitions, as any artist will tell you, is to keep your expectations low. This is not about humility, but the need for a thick skin to guard against unsuccessful submissions. When Dorset painter Ian Hargreaves was shortlisted for the Artists & Illustrators Artist of the Year 2015 competition, he never expected to win. On the opening night, he scanned the 50 diverse works on show, and made a mental note of those he thought might walk away with first prize. When his work, High Rise – Naples, was crowned the overall winner, he almost missed the announcement. For his offbeat Italian cityscape, he was awarded £1,000 and representation from prestigious London gallery Panter & Hall. The artist wasted no time taking advantage of the opportunity. He…

“DO YOUR RESEARCH AND A GALLERY REALLY CAN BE YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND” If you followed my last column about approaching galleries, you’ll have a fair idea of the preparation involved in choosing suitable venues. The next step is to make your approach. Never just show up at gallery with a portfolio – it’s not appropriate and will only annoy the gallerist. Instead, take a paper and pen, call the gallery to introduce yourself and ask how to submit work for consideration. Take a name and then follow their instructions to the letter. Don’t overcompensate if the gallery only asks for three or four images – that really is all they require. Include details of your website or Portfolio Plus profile in addition to your images, never as an alternative.…

What do we know about Francis Bacon’s art? Much of the writing on the painter’s life is prurient and voyeuristic, preoccupied with seediness. There is no shortage of stories documenting the Soho years in The Colony Room or his destructive love affair with George Dyer. Too often the art becomes the understudy to the debauchery. With all the distraction, it’s easy to forget that Bacon was one of the greatest painters of the 20th-century. Nobody appears more frustrated by this distraction than Martin Harrison, FSA, a Bacon scholar who has spent the last decade tracking down the artist’s entire oeuvre. He was set the gargantuan task of editing the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné; a five-volume, slip-cased publication costing a cool £1,000. The artist destroyed many of his own paintings, leaving 584…

“I was very aware that all the skills that made me successful in science would help me be successful in art” Sequestered in an archway, Henry Jabbour’s two small portraits were a highlight of the Pastel Society’s recent annual exhibition. The artist’s liberal applications of oil pastel had clearly been pushed and pulled around on the surface, as if he was fighting the impulse to offer a traditional likeness while simultaneously searching for a deeper truth under the skin of his subject. One of those two paintings, Ancient Eyes, was particularly successful; a masterclass in movement, colour and suggestion that duly earned Henry the exhibition’s coveted Artists & Illustrators award. The restless spirit that so enlivened Ancient Eyes is evident in Henry’s general approach to his art. Having worked for…

“CHILDREN ARE NATURAL ARTISTS... YOU CAN SHOW THEM QUITE COMPLEX CONCEPTS EARLY ON” How did the story for your first picture book, Bob the Artist, come about? I have been trying to do a picture book for a while. I was struggling to get a character and I thought, “I’ll just use [Bob] for the moment”. In the end I just developed a story around him. When you write your first story, you quite often use something personal; it’s natural to go to that subject matter. I tried to tune into something about being a kid and what was important to you then. Ultimately, the message of the book is learning to accept yourself, and if you find some extra talent along the way, then fantastic. The book mentions artists…

I never tire of painting peoples faces; I am drawn in by them and become completely absorbed. It is such a pleasure, with all your materials to hand and a well-lit model sitting comfortably before you, to observe and paint, moment by moment. While it is important to view the face as a whole and work across the entire image at once, my new series will focus in turn at the four key elements that make up a basic face: the eyes, the nose, the mouth and the hair. I want to show you different ways of describing these four features in a variety of media, and from different angles. For the demonstration opposite, I chose to use the following colours: Van Dyke Brown, Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue, Sap Green,…

RE: Your Paint Problems Solved, Issue 364 I had just finished another rather safe and unsatisfactory still life when the May edition of Artists & Illustrators dropped through the letterbox. I was so intrigued by Kate Osborne’s article that l promptly washed off my still life painting and started again. While not entirely happy with the result l have learned so much doing that one painting that l shall be doing much more “recycling” in the future. Thank you Kate, what a revelation! Sylvia Farrow, via email It pays to persevere Sylvia! Thank you for sharing the final result. We hope your ‘Letter of the Month’ £50 GreatArt voucher helps to fuel your inspiration.…

YUKO SHIMIZU Yuko Shimizu almost didn’t become an illustrator. Trained in advertising and marketing, she took a PR job in Tokyo before having a “mid-life crisis” at the age of 22. A decade of corporate work followed, before she saved up enough money to take the biggest gamble of her life. In 1999, she moved to New York and enrolled on the Illustration as Visual Essay programme at the School of Visual Arts. The gamble has well and truly paid off. Working from a studio in midtown Manhattan, her client roster includes PepsiCo, Paramount Pictures and The New Yorker, while Newsweek Japan named her among the “100 Japanese People the World Respects”. Water Lilies (pictured) is a rare image for Yuko in that it features pink, a colour that she…

“I have always been encouraged to develop a freer, spontaneous route so I’ve been trying to bring that into my painting” For most artists, painting to a 10-hour deadline would cause an understandable spike in stress levels. This was not the case for Alain Speed, winner of the 2015 edition of the outdoor art competition Pintar Rapido. He registered at 9am, set up his easel down the road from his workplace at an architectural practice in Chelsea, and just started painting. By 1pm, he was finished; instead of racing against the clock, he strolled back to the office, had lunch and even framed the piece before handing it in. No blood, sweat and tears, just a few tubes of oil paint and a well-laid plan. Alain had staked out his…

“MY PAINTING IS A CONTINUOUS BATTLE BETWEEN ABSTRACTION AND FIGURATION” Why the switch from sculpture to painting? Painting has always been with me. When you’re a child, you paint – you don’t make sculpture. One of my heroes in the 1950s was Degas, who did both sculpture and painting. When he was drawing the dancers, the speed of his conception, between seeing it and putting it down, and the accuracy and the flow… It’s astonishing. And I love colour. Everything I made in sculpture, I put colour on. But then, it’s a waste of time when you’re not painting a picture, where you’re actually using colour properly. Have you found it useful to master both art forms? All the artists who could do both, did it: Degas, Matisse, Picasso are…

Choosing the right paint is a tricky business. Do you want the high degree of pigmentation and flexibility of long drying times that comes with oil paint? Or would you prefer the simple mixing qualities of acrylic? Thankfully, you no longer have to choose. Cobra Artist Water Mixable Oil Colours are the best of both worlds. Made with the benefit of more than a century of colourman expertise by Royal Talens, the 70-colour range can be applied like oils and cleaned away like acrylics without the need for any hazardous solvents. Each pigment is ground on a triple roller mill for an artists’ quality finish, while almost half the tubes are single-pigment colours to make blending even easier. To find out more about Cobra Artist Water Mixable Oil Colours and…

I started doing these studies because I wanted to gain a better understanding of colour. Most of my study up to this point had been indoors under similar lighting situations and the subject was the figure, which meant that drawing was my primary focus. I first began by setting up a few objects of the same colour outside together in direct sunlight – a group of red objects, a group of blue ones and so on. That proved to be too ambitious in the time I allotted for myself, so I decided to keep the set-ups very simple. Each study would be painted with a single brush and a single dominant hue. Colour was the goal, not drawing. Later I moved inside to paint, so that I could leave my…

Why is watercolour a useful medium for botanical artists? If the watercolour blends beautifully across the paper it will create a softness and smoothness to a petal that is hard to recreate. It also dries faster and that can be very useful when working from live plants as you can swiftly capture its image. What are the best outlets for selling botanical art? Well as yet I haven’t been taken on by a gallery, I have been so busy I have not had the time to go out and see them. I have tried various shows like Country Living and small galleries across England but I now mainly sell through my website and the Society of Botanical Artists show in Central Hall Westminster. Commissions come from people finding me online…

I arrived at portraits late in my journey as an artist. The catalyst was a catalogue from a 2006 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Glitter and Doom, in which I rediscovered German art from the interwar period, and the work of Otto Dix and the New Objectivity in particular. Maybe it was because my technical training at art school did not include portraiture that I was so sensitive to the raw humanity of these paintings. A lack of academic background has definitely determined my own approach to portraits. Formally, I do not think of a portrait any differently to a landscape, for instance. I judge the success of a portrait foremost as a painting because a technically accomplished portrait does not necessarily make an interesting painting. And…