On Painting
Materials
For normal work / exhibition pieces I paint on the best quality
stretched canvas I can get. The paints I use are Windsor and Newton
Artisan oils - they are top quality pigment in a medium of modified
salflower oil. This makes them water soluble and much more easy to
manipulate - be it impasto or fine detail. Definitely better for the
wellbeing of the brush!
For illustration work I paint on oil painting paper (check out the
Rowney Georgian product) and use Windsor and Newton Alkyds (synthetic
resin based) with Zest, an organic (orange based!) solvent. Alkyds are touch dry and reworkable
in 4 to 5 hours - great when time is of the essence.
Palette
I use a minimal colour palette, and am a bit obsessive as to how they
are laid out. They have to be in the order right to left and laid out
as 1. Titanium White 2. Yellow Ochre 3. Cadium Yellow (Light) 4. Olive Green 5. French
Ultramine 6. Paynes Grey 7. Raw Umber 8. Burnt Umber
9. Indian Red or Alizarian Crimson (depending on subject).
Lighting
When painting at night, I use a combination of a neon strip (white
light variety as used in car paint shops), white halogen 'daylight strip' clamped to the easel,
and a normal yellow light bulb strategically placed to cancel
out any anoying cross shadows.
Method
I would hesitate to commend my own working methods to anyone -
other than passing on the best bit of advice I have ever been given.
The painter Adrian Stokes (whose written work I recommend unreservedly)
suggested that one should always start with a monotone painting, as a
guide, in various tones of raw umber and white. The idea is to study
and decode the subject by identifying and applying the darkest dark
(represented by raw umber) and the lightest light (represented by
white) then rendering the mid tones in various mixtures of just these
two colours.
This anchors your painting and, when dry, assists
you in identifying and applying over it the warmest colours through to
the coolest without losing the correct relationship between each. It
may sound mad but try it - it works, and I always start making pictures
in this way.
On 'Art'
One of my oldest friends is a carpenter and an extremely good one
- he takes natural materials and makes them into objects which people
value because of their inherent craftmanship, beauty and functional
value. This seems an admirable thing to be able to do, and it is something
I try to offer in the pictures I make. From this perspective, the
debate about whether preserved partial animal corpses are 'Art' or not
is one I cannot contribute to - other than to observe that 'Art',
whatever it is, is something that seems
to have commoditised itself. Where the role of a painter or
picture-maker fits into this I leave to others to decide - avoiding the
word 'Artist', and aspiring to be as good at picture making as my
carpenter friend is at what he does is good enough for me.
