Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i Artists & Illustrators

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Your new exhibition, Main Street, will be presented as a series of pop-up shops. How did that idea come about? The shop idea sprang from an old Two Ronnies sketch, where a guy walks into a hardware store and asks for four candles. The shop is full of drawers of all sorts and looks completely unique. I wanted to make similar interiors of shops that were quirky but that probably didn’t make much money. I like the idea of a shop not driven by profit, which is hard to find these days. Is the collection a dig at modern consumerism then? It is, but I’m not stamping my feet about the issue because I like the age I live in. I love the 21st century, I like being in 2015,…

How long have you had this studio? I’ve been here four years. I actually really enjoy working from home and it’s a very comfortable space to work in, but then on the flip side of that, work is always upstairs waiting for you to go back to it, so it’s quite difficult to switch off. Your first two adult colouring books have sold a staggering 3.7 million copies. When did you get the first inkling they would be so successful? The first book, Animal Kingdom, was published last August and I just didn’t know what to expect. It was well received, sales gradually started picking up and then in spring of this year, the phenomenon for adult colouring books just went through the roof. Why do you think your colouring…

To create the mid-tones of the flesh, use a mixture of Titanium White with yellows or reds. A mix of Cadmium Red and Alizarin Crimson provides the warm reds and pinks needed for painting lips, noses and ears. A mixture of Alizarin Crimson and French Ultramarine offers a range of purples. Add a little Sap Green or French Ultramarine to cool down the lighter tones, usually found around the eyes. A mixture of my three darkest tones – Raw Umber, French Ultramarine and Alizarin Crimson – can create a deep black. ARRANGING COLOURS Here you can see how I laid out my paints in order. Running clockwise from top left, the colours are Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Orange, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow, Titanium White, Burnt Sienna, Sap Green, French…

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CONTESTING TIMES I was delighted to be a contestant on the Landscape Artist Of The Year series, which is being broadcast on Sky Arts this month. Filming of the heats took place earlier in the year at three glorious National Trust locations. “Artists, you may begin!” declared presenters Joan Bakewell and Frank Skinner, signalling the start of five hours for the eight shortlisted artists in heat two to exquisitely immortalise the blossoming Waddesdon Manor parterre revealed to us that morning. Pencils and brushes scribbled; cameras and boom mikes loomed, scrutinising every detail of the creative process. Expert judges and members of the public eyed our progress. The sun disappeared and cold pinched our fingers. With an hour left, my linocut tools were cutting faster and faster only just beginning the…

I am often asked about my approach to sketching. While I hanker after beautifully complete sketchbooks and envy those with the discipline to create them, my sketches are more of a rough shorthand on whatever paper I can find. Their contents remain a mystery to almost everyone but me. This often surprises and, if I’m honest, disappoints people, but it’s the system that works for me. I believe that making a sketch is essentially a fact-finding mission and, for me, the skill lies in the gathering of information, not in the quality of the drawings themselves. I honestly believe that the roughest sketch will always be a more helpful way of capturing and recording an idea than a photograph. Firstly, however brief the work, you will have to study your…

Over the past 20 years, I have spent a lot of time sketching and painting the amazing old trees and roots along the Niagara Escarpment cliffs here on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario where I live. Some of these old trees have been carbon-dated back more than 800 years. Their spirit clings to the limestone rock faces with roots weaving in and out and around the cracks. It is quite amazing they survive in such difficult landscape. Each old root has its own spirit and character that catches my imagination: what have they been witness to over many years, joy and sorrow, nature and all its wild creatures? The root in this particular painting, Buddha Tree II, clings to the escarpment face near a waterfall that has sculpted the landscape…

Since moving into a one-bedroom flat (I overdid the down-sizing!) with nowhere to use as a studio, I found having to set up and pack up each time I wanted to paint was very trying and even discouraged me from painting unless I had quite a long time to spend on it. However, I have found a solution. I bought an old-fashioned tea trolley on wheels and keep most of my art equipment on it so that when I finish a session I just push the trolley out of the way or into another room. It also has another advantage: the light in the morning is best in the living room and in the afternoon it is better in the kitchen so I can make the most of the whole…

RWS CONTEMPORARY WATERCOLOUR COMPETITION 2016 Brief: The Royal Watercolour Society encourages more experimental approaches to water-based media for this annual showcase. Deadline: 12 noon, 18 January 2016 Exhibition: 4-16 March 2016 at Bankside Gallery, London SE1 Enter online: www.royalwatercolour society.co.uk ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PAINTERS IN WATER COLOURS 2016 Brief: The UK’s other major watercolour society is inviting submissions of up to six works for sale. Deadline: 12 noon, 8 January 2016 Receiving day: 13 February 2016 Exhibition: 6-16 April 2016 at Mall Galleries, London SW1 Enter online: www.registration mallgalleries.org.uk ROYAL SOCIETY OF PORTRAIT PAINTERS ANNUAL SHOW 2016 Brief: Submit new and traditional portraiture for the chance to win the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize. Deadline: 12 noon, 29 January 2016 Receiving day: 27 February 2016 Exhibition: 5-20 May 2016 at Mall Galleries,…

1 FABIÁN LA ROSA, JUANA, 2010 OIL ON CANVAS, 90X110CM Juana closely resembles Nipper, a Jack Russell who intently studied the sound of a wind-up gramophone. Nipper is better known as the famous mascot of HMV’s logo and was derived from the illustration, His Master’s Voice, painted by the dog’s owner, Francis Barraud. In Fabián La Rosa’s painting, Juana appears to be listening intently to the voice of his owner, who is situated stage left. I see this as an expression of the interior monologue of a Jack Russell, which I’ve always imagined to go something like this: “What? Where? Who? When? Why?” 2 JOHN ST. HELIER LANDER, PORTRAIT OF HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES, 1925 OIL ON CANVAS, 86X112CM “The Prince of Wales is wearing it” was a popular…

an absence of facial features typically has negative connotations. Think first of language, specifically English. There is ‘losing face’ (not a good thing); there is ‘faceless’ (synonymous with anonymous); and there is ‘defaced’ (as in spoilt). In the visual register, this author remembers at least three cinematic encounters from early adolescence – Twilight Zone: The Movie, the film version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Eyes Without a Face – in which the sudden appearance of, or even allusion to, a blank-slate physiognomy did what it was designed to do and scared the bejesus out of him. It is understandable why this, the denial of human connection, is a trope of horror films. If we read personality through faces (‘on the face of it’, we say), then the emptied face…

I like to think of my still life paintings as group portraits. All the individual personalities must be fully expressed, yet each one must take its place within the whole. Each grape is a unique character, yet no one grape is more important than the bunch of grapes, and the bunch must be in harmony with the rest of the painting. At every stage, I endeavour to keep the painting alive. In the end, the work must be harmonious, with light and space that live and breathe, and forms that have character and express vitality. 1 Preparing the canvas with a middle tone before I begin allows me to quickly enter into the excitement of the painting. Using a shadow value tone, I explore the rhythms within the group of…

IDENTIFYING THE LIGHT SPOT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE TWO PHOTOS OF A STILL LIFE SET-UP One of the trickiest things about painting from life is creating a convincing sense of atmosphere. The key to this often lies in capturing the softness or hardness of the light, yet this is often easily overlooked in the struggle to achieve accuracy in proportion, tone and colour. So what exactly is the difference between a soft and a hard light source? And how does one go about painting it? IDENTIFYING LIGHT First of all we need to look at what defines the different types of light. A ‘hard’ light is characterised by strong shadows with crisp edges. It comes from a source of light that is relatively small in relation to viewpoint of the…

MY PRINTMAKING HERO Pablo Picasso was so exuberant with the medium and broke so much new ground. He was a great, great etcher. MY RECOMMENDED READ By far the best book on etching was written in the 1920s: ES Lumsden’s The Art of Etching (1). It’s the ‘Jane Grigson’ of etching books. MY STUDIO MOTIVATION The postcards and prints pinned to my studio walls are all by people I have known, including Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Alan Davie and Henry Moore. MY FAVOURITE ART SHOP There are a few. There’s a wonderful little art shop in Thirsk called The Artist’s Palette (2), L Cornelissen & Son, Atlantis and Intaglio Printmaker in London, and TN Lawrence in Brighton. MY LITERARY INSPIRATION I continually read anthologies of poetry and I…