Frank Auerbach-Paint as Earth

Drawing after Auerbach

An Exhibition of paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, London. There is a sense of the young Frank Auerbach wanting to create something totally new. There is the urge to pit himself against the painting masters of the past and to create, what he quotes Sickert as saying, 'looks like it has been torn from a page of life.' He does this in paint. Auerbach uses his drawings of London building sites to create his own world through inches thick oil paint. He has empathy with the workmen digging in the heavy soil, as he too works day in day out to move, excavate, rebuild his own painting.

The paintings from the 1950's are so unlike a painting that you sometimes wonder what it is you are looking at. The paintings are anything but beautiful, yet they have a strange and unique presence about them. Later paintings have more colour, but still the yellow only manages to be muted yellow ochre and the reds seem to have a tinge of brown. These, of course, were the cheapest colours available to the artist.

The Exhibition is well worth a visit and for the £5 entry fee you get to look at the permanent collection which has many fine Cezanne paintings

Open shows-the X-factor of art?

For some artists, having work selected for an open exhibition with a selection commitee is a right of passage. It is the time when your work must face the world and be judged. It has to, using the X-factor- metaphor stand up on stage and sing I will survive at the top of its little voice. The holy grail for some artists would be entry to the RA summer show, that yearly bazaar of everything in art. It is a chance to rub shoulders (canvases) with the academicians. Is your art up for living next to Tracey Emin RA for two months?

For me, as a painter the John Moores competition is the one you look to. Many previous winners have made a good career from painting. Peter Doig is a good example.

Upon entering your work for selection-to any level of show- you accept that there might be rejection. As a painter the work is inevitably a part of you, so does the rejection become a rejection of you the artist? At a time when art can be all things, how is a judgement made as to what is accepted or rejected?

The big question is will Cheryl Cole like my picture of her as The Venus of urbino?

Good luck to all who submit work for selection. The spirit of Tony Hart will be with you.

Painting in a photographic age

After watching a film about the painter David Hockney, which can be viewed on the BBC iplayer site here I was thinking about how different generations of painters approach painting today.

Hockney's approach was to get out in the landscape and paint direct from the subject- an approach which might seem out of fashion. I don't think Hockney is a truly great painter, but he is a fantastic draughtsman. Watching him make direct marks on the canvas with paint was a great experience. As was his sheer enthusiasm for the medium and act of painting in creating memorable images. He made a mock poster for the painting 'Bigger trees near Warter' , which was exhibited at the Royal Academy, insisting it was a sensation of the post-photographic age. A sly mocking of the YBA 'Sensation' exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Painting is wide, and infinetly varied. Everything is open. Perhaps the thing left for painters is to find some meaning...

Hockney seemed to achieve that.

thoughts on sickert

Here are some thoughts about an exhibition of paintings from Venice by Walter Sickert. Included are some quick drawings I made of the paintings in the exhibiiton

When you think of Walter Sickert you are probably thinking of his Camden Town series. Turbid interiors with grey-browns, umbers and blacks enlivened by the fall of light on exposed flesh. The flesh tending to be that of local prostitutes who posed for Sickert in low-lit low rent rooms. There always seems a weight to the atmosphere in Sickert paintings.

In the Venice paintings at the Dulwich Picture gallery there is a clear sense of Sickert working at painting. The stuff of painting: colour, composition, paint handling, texture. This is something I like to see. It always reminds me of Cezanne. Sickert paintings tend to be dark. He favours purple browns, muted greens, grey blacks. These tonal colours work well for night-time scenes where a mood of melancholy or incompleteness is created. There is one big painting of St Marks where the sky is a luminous acidic green which works brilliantly against the purple browns of the facade.

Paintings from later trips to Venice in 1903 focus on interiors-predominately women in interiors. These can be seen to predict the mood of the later Camden Town paintings. I liked the intimate scale of these paintings. They encourage close looking and seem to compress the interior atmosphere even more. The paint was applied swiftly and with energy giving an overall immediacy to the painting.


As a big fan of Frank Auerbach it was interesting to see the lineage of drawing going back to Sickert. The working practices of Auerbach being to make paintings from drawings made in the landscape rather than working directly in front of the subject.

This is modern art

Found an excellent series of youtube clips from a programme presented by Matthew Collings in 1998 called "This is modern art" It looks back at the history of modern art and then goes on to look at the work of contemporary artists.

This is the first episode www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoSjRRv6ZrE

paintings as celebrities

This follows on from the previous post. During New Year I was lucky enough to visit the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. After braving the cold and the queues I was excited to be able to see the fantastic collection of Paul Cezanne paintings. As more people drifted in to the galleries I was struck by how many people were taking their own photos of the paintings. Many others were having their photo taken in front of the painting as if it was a celebrity. This worried me and also raised issues in my mind about looking at an original object (the painting) and looking at a reproduction. Would it matter if the painting was lost as long as there was a super high resolution photograph of it?

new year...new posts

Are there too many images in the world?