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I began painting in February 1993, by reading the instructions on a set of
paints that I had been given for Christmas. It described how to paint some
vases and bowls on a shelf. This sounded a bit mundane so instead I painted
a beach from a photograph I had taken a few years previously, one of those
rare and extraordinarily lucky photographs where the evening sunlight is low
and orange and almost incandescent in the way it turns everything it touches
to molten metal. My family and friends were making their way back, parents
festooned with tired children, over the water-striped sands revealed by the
outgoing tide.
Even with that first picture, painted on paper, I was utterly
hooked. Painting was a new thing! My control of the paint was awkward but it could be
coaxed into doing the right thing. For twenty years I had been taking photographs, and now
here was something new to do with a photograph. I could take pictures with a new vision -
what would this look like if it were painted? I quickly began to discover that the art
world, far from being something that "other people did", was something that I
could learn about and find enormously interesting. I began to read books voraciously to
learn technique, painting and drawing continuously to train the hand to move and the eye
to see. I visited art galleries wherever I went, and I was fortunate
enough to see many original works.
Learning to paint is a great project, but it should never be finished.
Artists are
always only on the edge of all that there is to know. First stretch a canvas,
then mix any colour, then learn which colours advance or recede, then select the
right brush, then learn the paint media, then learn about texture and brush
strokes and impasto, then learn the drying times of different paints. At
the top of this hill a new vista opens. Learn about light and dark,
about emphasis, the tones of human flesh, the anatomy of muscle and bone, the
painting of hair, the mist which seeps from the sky and blurs the distant
horizon. Through that mist another panorama awaits. Learn from the
Masters: the layered glazes of Titian; the brushwork of Van Gogh; the skies of
Turner; the hair of Millais; the smouldering sex of Lenkiewicz; the
chiaroscuro of Rembrandt; the patterns of Klimt. All the grand masters through
the ages, before whose pictures we stand in awe.
What else do I do when not painting or philosophising?! I
play the piano terribly badly. I
have a lovely wife named Vivien. I have four children named Hattie, Flora, Leo and Zak,
and two step-children named Cate and Alex. |
