Having studied Tonal Realist oil painting with Ms Shirley Bourne OAM and Alan Martin for some 10 years I have now been teaching these techniques for over 30 years.
My book ON PAINTING was published in 2007.
My major influences include Joseph Turner, Diego Velasquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Corot and Max Meldrum and of course Shirley Bourne and Alan Martin
I enjoy all types of painting from landscape to still life, portraits and flowers.
I work out of studios in Eaglemont and Montsalvat at Eltham where I have been a resident painter and teacher since 1992.
I am a Fellow of the Victorian Artists’ Society.
If asked for an artist’s statement mine is “I PAINT.”
One of my earliest memories is of hearing my brother laugh at the Goons, a comedy show which used to be broadcast regularly on radio. I quickly learned to laugh at the knockabout antics of Neddy Seagoon, Eccles, Little Jim et al. I still enjoy listening to or watching these idiots nearly 70 years later, even though I have heard all of their sketches many times over. It is a bit like always being thrilled every time I see images ofJohn Singer Sargent’s magnificent painting of The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Having seen this wonderful painting in the flesh at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1979 one could think that computer images would not touch ones heart, but no, I can gaze on that image and feel the thrill time and time again.
Another memory which remains strong is hearing the American comic Jimmy Durante singing his song about being the guy who found the lost chord. It is not often that comedy comes to mind when I am working but recently I was painting some Japonica in a clear glass Jicky Guerlain perfume bottle, a subject that I have enjoyed over the years and whilst completing the work, Alan Martin’s voice clearly said to me as he had in the 1980’s, “Remember, it’s not what you put into a picture but what you leave out that’s important!” Of course I have known this fact for years and have continued to celebrate lost edge in my work. I emphasise this idea with my student’s. and often tell them that when they find a lost edge that they should break out the caviar and champagne.
Hearing Alan put me in mind of great painters such as Sargent, Meldrum, Velasquez etc. and the paintings of theirs that I have looked at and enjoyed over and over again without noticing their lost edges.
Max Meldrum, in his book The Science of Appearances devotes chapter to ‘Objectivity vs Subjectivity’ which touches on this subject but all the aspiring realist painter needs to know was summed up very well by Alan Martin telling them what he had told me. Sounds simple but it is very difficult to overcome the need to paint what one knows to be there instead of what one can see easily. Much practice and discipline is required to do this but when a painter becomes the ‘guy’ or ‘gal’ who finds the lost edge it is truly time for a celebration.
Next time you look at a work of a painter that you admire, see if you can find their lost edges and also try to find them the next time you approach the canvas and see if you thrill to the sensation as I still do after 50 years of painting.
Don James
6th September 2021
MISSING THINGS
At the back of the stables.
I have almost forgotten when I last had face to face contact with students but gee I miss them. Both of my painting teachers seemed to enjoy teaching, Alan Martin more than Shirley Bourne I think but she showed real interest in what we were doing and always encouraged us to strive for better results. For many of us teaching is a means to an end, that of financial stability, but I don’t subscribe to Shaw’s notion that “Those who can do and those who can’t teach.” If in the past those who could refused to teach, then the quality of painting would not have continued at such a high level to this day.
Those who know me will be aware that I don’t put much store in the idea of the born genius when it comes to painting. Max Meldrum has commented on the lack of prodigy painters and I tend to agree. In earlier times painting was considered a craft and artists took youngsters into their studios at an early age as apprentices and so by their early twenties they had undergone at least 10 years of intensive training, some to the point of establishing their own studios. We marvel at these painters today and rightly so. They may have had some intellectual qualities that many don’t but I believe that that their achievements came about due to good training, hard work and interest in their craft.
Going on a bit I’m afraid, but we don’t train painters like that any more. Painting is no longer considered a craft and has been lumped into that great amorphous conglomeration called art. These days anybody who wields a brush, or anything else with a flourish is labelled an artist. This is not a term that I enjoy being applied to me.
I am a painter. I teach people to paint and I am missing doing it! BRING ON THE END OF COVID.
Don James August 2021
DOCTOR POZZI AT HOME
Since 1979 when I first set eyes on the work of John Singer Sargent I have been a big fan. He was the epitome of the ‘artist’, painting in both oils and watercolour and drawing like a dream, apparently having little else to do throughout his rather privileged life during the Edwardian era. I was in London with my family in September-October of 1979 and my teacher had advised me to visit several galleries, one of which was the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square. I had no idea who Sargent was and had been looking at the paintings of Velasquez and Rembrandt in the National Gallery, extending my art education and dutifully went next door to see the Portrait Gallery.
If my memory is correct, we entered and almost immediately faced a staircase at the top of which was hung the large portrait of the Daughters Of Edward Darley Boit. Measuring some 84 inches square with the four girls spaced well apart on a Persian carpet with a couple of large oriental vases, it certainly stopped me in my tracks. At this stage I had not heard of Sargent but soon realised that, having entered a travelling retrospective of his work, that my life had changed forever. The portraits in this exhibition stood out for me, their colour, composition and what I can only call life made me observe other portraits with new eyes. Paintings such as Lady Agnew of Lochnaw and Carolus Duran, Sargents teacher as well as the Boit children remain as some of my favourite paintings to this day.
In my more recent experience of Sargent’s work I had come across a very striking portrait of a Dr Pozzi, another spectacular example of his work. In the painting Dr Pozzi At Home, the doctor is portrayed full length against a red background on a red carpet wearing what looks to me like a red dressing gown. The only areas that are not red are his head and hands, his white frilled collar, shirt front and cuffs and his slippered toe peeping from beneath his robe. I love red, it is my favourite colour but this painting is not just red, it is ****ing RED as Billy Connolly would say. however, it works! Have a look at it, it is brilliant. It can be found online at- https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/644345
I have just read a book with this painting on the cover. Its title is The Man In The Red Coat written by Julian barnes. Although it is said that you cant judge a book by its cover, I couldn’t resist buying it and have enjoyed the read immensely. The cast of characters include the likes of Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Marcel Proust and of course John Singer Sargent. It is essentially a potted history of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century as it concerned European society.
The Man in the Red Coat Julian Barnes. Pub. Jonathon Cape 2019
One passage in the book got me thinking about the fact that when we look at a painted portrait, whether historical or current, we cannot help but make assumptions about the sitter. Of course, this communication with the sitter is second hand via the eyes and the mind of the painter.
Our knowledge of the person painted may be great or none, personal or studied but our reaction to the painting will contain our prejudices and desires as well as those of the artist, whether scientific or emotional.
On page 205 of his book Mr Barnes makes what is to me a profound observation on this point and I quote:
“An artist paints a likeness, or a version or an interpretation, which celebrates the sitter during life, commemorates him or her after death, and perhaps sparks curiosity in the spectator centuries and more later. This sounds straightforward and sometimes it is. I was drawn to Dr Pozzi by the Sargent portrait, became curious about his life and work, wrote this work and still find the picture a true and dashing likeness. But it doesn’t take much for this collusion between dead painter, dead subject and spectator to go wrong. “(1.)
Mr Barnes then goes on to describe his relationship with a particular portrait, making incorrect assumptions about the sitter’s personality and having these assumptions changed by studying the man’s history. He comes to the conclusion that;
“When we look at a portrait – of an Elizabethan child, a Georgian worthy, a Victorian matron – what we are doing in part is trying to bring them back to life, to have have an ocular conversation with them, as we look at them looking back at us. And in this exchange we may mistakenly assume that their feelings are versions of our feelings – or what our feelings might be if we were in their place; also, that they are, somehow as interested in us as we are in them.“(2.)
When I look at Dr. Pozzi I see a handsome dashing man of middle years, quite well off and possibly slightly dissolute. Maybe I am projecting my desires onto him , being an elderly rather arthritic man who is not well off ,but on reading this book I find that I am close to being correct about him, although Pozzi is so much more. He is well a read celebrated gynaecologist who pioneered that discipline in France and the UK at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. He was also a brilliant surgeon bringing Dr Lister’s ideas regarding antiseptic practices into his own and other hospitals. He travelled widely and was acquainted with poets, authors, actors and artists of the day. So much more to the man than my first assumptions.
Whether one is a painter or a student of history you should find this book a fascinating look at Europe at the fin de siecle, in Paris in particular. A time and placed which has interested me since first coming across the work of Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec as a teenager.
1 and 2.. Julian Barnes. The Man In The Red Coat. Published Jonathon Cape 2019
Don James 26th September 2020
A COLLAGE OF OCULAR FACTS
A comparative look at two painters – Edwin Dickinson and Max Meldrum
This blog was inspired by a Facebook post by a fellow painter regarding an exhibition entitled “From Edwin Dickinson to the Perceptual Painters, Observation and Invention: The Space of Desire”
Several years ago, I coined the phrase ‘a collage of ocular facts’ to describe what I aim to have collected on a canvas when I have completed a painting. The phrase could be deemed accurate in its use of the words collage and ocular, but I guess that some may quibble at the word facts. Ones perception of the accuracy of this word as it relates to any finished realist painting depends on one’s knowledge of the subject represented, and virtually nobody gets to see that subject from the same physical viewpoint as the painter, let alone through the painter’s eyes, so to speak.
Having just watched a video entitled, “From Edwin Dickinson to the Perceptual Painters, Observation and Invention: The Space of Desire.” I was reminded of the general tone of Max Meldrum’s book, “The Science of Appearances” which stresses time and time again the necessity for the tonal realist painter to forego all thoughts of modification of the natural world in our work and to paint only what we see.Here we have a problem. As painters, is what we see modified in the process of visual interpretation due to our different experiences of the world?
I suppose that Mr Meldrum may say ‘so what?’ We can only put down what we see if that is our aim, and any differences in perception will be governed by our ability to be objective about what we see. This is why I believe that it is easier to paint a portrait of a stranger than a close relative. We face fewer pre-conceived notions or imprinted memories.
In our need to label things Max Meldrum’s work has been called Tonal Realism and I will happily wear that epithet for my own work. I note that Edwin Dickinson’s paintings have been variously labelled Expressionist and Neo Romanticist, probably because some are hard to categorise. According to his daughter Helen, he became enthralled by all he could see and learn of early modern art from abroad, when he went to New York in 1910 to attend art school. This interest would set Dickinson apart from Meldrum who showed no interest at all in Cubism and Impressionism and what would come to be known as Modernism.
The major similarity between Dickinson and Meldrum to my mind is their insistence that the painter work from life only, without the assistance of two-dimensional data, particularly photographs. They appear to have understood the difference between painting an instant in time from a photograph and working from life to produce a picture which includes some of the changes that occur during the time spent in front of the subject.
LANDSCAPE MAX MELDRUM
Apart from possible changes in light, still life does not change, but all other subjects from flowers to portraits and especially landscapes change constantly, and my belief is that these changes are what gives work done in this way a greater reality, hence the ‘Collage of Ocular Facts.’
On scanning Dickinson’s catalogue raisonne and comparing it with my knowledge of Meldrum’s work I would say that Meldrum is by far the most conservative painter of the two.
From what I have seen of Dickinson’s work it shows more variety and experimentation than that of Meldrum. The work of his which appears to have been commissioned shows his apparent need to represent reality in much the same way as Meldrum did in the bulk of his work but when painting for himself, Dickinson moved away from reality, sometimes to the point of abstraction.
Both Dickinson and Meldrum were classically trained utilising the skills passed to them by their teachers and continuing in that line of painting ancestors which stretch back as far as Caravaggio and beyond.
Meldrum had developed a method of painting which involved, as far as possible a scientific approach to the mixing and application of tones and colours as a set of patches on the canvas without any preliminary drawing as he believed ‘there are no lines in nature.
For someone who wants to be an artist, this method can be seen as restrictive but for one who practices the craft of painting from life and who is interesting in representing reality on canvas and producing work which will last in a physical sense, I believe it is the way to go. Once the painter has achieved sufficient skill using this method, moving to the realm of the artist is not just possible but readily achievable as the painter will know how oil paint works, a skill that is sadly ignored by some artists today.
Don James 11th September 2020
SIGHT SIZE IS THE RIGHT SIZE
I was recently reading from a web essay about Charles H Cecil, an American painter and teacher based in in Florence. He was discussing the idea of painting “sight size” a method adopted by painters such as Diego Velasquez and John Singer Sargent. Like me, Mr Cecil teaches this method in his studio, carrying on a tradition of realist painting going back several centuries but as up to date and necessary for any aspiring student of realist oil painter as having paint in a flexible tube.
After explaining the meaning of the terms TONE, FORM, and COLOUR, one of the next questions I ask a student is ‘Do you know what I mean by the term SIGHT SIZE.
Most students wanting to learn to paint in a realist manner will not have heard of this term. Many will have learned to paint by copying 2 dimensional images from photographs etc. and may not know the basic tenets of measuring. Some may have painted from life but in a class where a number of students stand in a semicircle and paint the same subject standing some metres back with their easel and either guessing the proportions of the subject or trying to measure proportionally i.e. how high compared to how long etc.
This was the way I was taught originally, and I did not learn the meaning of SIGHT SIZE until I commenced painting still life with Alan Martin in his wonderful studio in Eltham Victoria.
Here, we each had our own station using a shelf with an easel attached to it.
In this instance measurements can be transferred directly from the subject to the canvas.
Still life and canvas set up for direct measuring.
MATCH THE CANVAS TO THE SUBJECT OR THE SUBJECT TO THE CANVAS?
To me art is to do with the selection or setting up of the subject but once this is done the craft of painting begins. If we are measuring directly as above, the next job is to select a suitable sized canvas on which to paint your masterpiece. To illustrate this, I will move out of the studio into the landscape.
Alan Martin carried several canvasses of different sizes when working in the outdoors. He would set up his easel in a position where he could observe his desired scene and put up a canvas which he thought would contain that scene. Standing on his viewing spot he would use his brush handle to measure the width of the canvas and transfer this measurement to the selected area of landscape. If he found that the canvas could contain the desired scene, he would then measure the height of the canvas and transfer this to the scene and if this suited his purpose, he would commence painting.
If, however he found that the canvas could not contain the desired scene, he would either select a larger piece of canvas or move his easel back from the subject until it fitted on to the existing canvas.
Remember: The size of the image is influenced by the distance between the subject and the easel so the further back the easel is from the subject the smaller the image will be.
I have attached a drawing of a typical studio set up from my book ‘On Painting’ which shows the formula for finding a suitable viewing spot from which to directly measure a subject onto the canvas. ( L = the longest dimension of the canvas)
A perfect set up would be to have the same light on the subject, the canvas and the palette.
With this set up one must ONLY LOOK AT THE SUBJECT WHEN AT YOUR VIEWING SPOT.
The temptation to look at the subject when at the easel is great but one must resist as the subject is different at this position.
I generally place my mark on the canvas and rather than step backwards to my viewing spot I turn around and walk to that spot and turn around and try to view my result as if it was someone else’s painting. In other words, try to remain objective.
Don James
13th July 2020
LEARNING TO TEACH OR TEACHING TO LEARN
As we move into a situation of forced isolation due to the coronavirus I have been considering my position as a teacher of painting more closely, having been such for 38 years. I will now probably not see any of my students for 6 months or so. I will miss them terribly.
Feelings of embarrassment flood back when I think of my early efforts at teaching and I can only hope that I didn’t cause too much damage to my students back then. The doctor’s mantra of ‘first do no harm’ applies I think to teachers.
Being fortunate to have studied under two of the best teachers of tonal realism, almost all of my methods were then and still are based on their teaching methods, and as I look back I think that the most important thing that I learned from both of them can be described as follows.
Shirley Bourne said constantly in class that ‘you are not here to paint a picture. You are here to learn how to paint! ‘
Alan Martin said that ‘we are not in the business of producing wall furniture!’
My dear friend John Wakefield, also a student of Alan Martin says on his web site ‘In contrast to modern business practice, I believe that the process is just as important as the product.’
To me each of these three statements can point to the importance for the student of concentrating on learning the techniques which are being conveyed by the teacher rather than trying to produce a finished painting in class.
Virgins are very thin on the ground these days and to get one, as a student can be wonderful. Many prospective students profess to be virginal but when I question them a little more closely, they have had a few lessons or read some books about technique and as such have lost their virginity.
Naturally any person who wants to learn to paint will have looked at paintings, something that I recommend all of my students do on a regular basis.
This has a great effect on our artistic development, as it stimulates our artistic taste buds.
Many new students have to be gently encouraged, if necessary, to change their way of thinking about painting and be trained to see as painters see.
This technique of course involves the suppression of memory of how things look, to see that all visual data is merely a set of shapes which need to be analyzed, their tonal values mixed in the right colour and placed on a suitably prepared flat surface in the correct place.
When this is done any person will recognize the produced image as the person, landscape or other items selected by the painter to represent.
Watching my students strive to work in this way and guiding them along the path to what Max Meldrum called ‘Visual Truth’ is also a learning experience for me as a teacher and also helps me in my quest to become more objective in my understanding of that term .
Don James
23rd March 2020
Self Isolation Self Portrait
GET AN APP!
I thought this morning that I had nothing to write about in my area of painting and then I read the newspaper supplement. The basic gist of the article was about how people viewed art and how their viewing experience can be improved with the use of things like mobile phone apps.
Apparently the advent of such devices has already changed our viewing habits especially through ‘selfies’. I am aging quickly and this made me feel even older. Time was when cameras were not permitted in art galleries. Originally this ban was probably to do with perceived copyright problems. My memory indicates that flashlights were thought to damage watercolour paintings. All of this seems to have gone out of fashion and cameras are now a necessary part of the viewing experience.
I go to a gallery to look at paintings! Whether I enjoy or am ‘moved’ by a picture is a deeply personal thing, not because of some sombre detail of the poor artist’s life but because of how I relate to he image and the artist’s skill in capturing it.
Whether I spend 17 seconds or 17 minutes in front of a work of art is mostly a function of how the work has been produced. Apart from where it might be or who it is a portrait of and such I am generally not interested. An Artist’s statement is in the work, not on a closely typed A4 page attached below the picture. I can usually find more information in the comfort of my own studio on the web or from a book if I have been stimulated to by the work.
I will continue to switch my mobile phone off when I enter a gallery and try to avoid the idiots who must have a picture of their head in front of a Rembrandt or a Constable. Now I will have to look out for those using a new app. to guide them around the gallery. The combination of these with the ‘selfies’ and those with those infernal aural guides will serve to prevent me from going to see the larger shows that come to town or at least time my visit to avoid the crowds.
Don James
27th December 2019
THE BUGS THAT BITE
I find that several bugs have bitten me during my lifetime.
Many were just fads and fancies that either through lack of money, abilities or interest have disappeared. A couple though have infected me such that they became chronic and remain to this day. One is music. My older brother John was a musician who collected records. Vinyl recordings were the rage and he had quite catholic tastes ranging from Rachmaninoff to Sinatra. He had studied the piano and played records constantly at home. The problem for me was that although I liked most of what he played his taste did not extend beyond the early 1950’s so Rock and Roll was definitely
out! Of course my teenage years spanned the 1950’s so the likes of Elvis Presley and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were my Gods. During these years I was making life difficult for a couple of piano teachers, as I was a lazy student having been forced to take lessons. I was more interested in Jailhouse Rock than Mozart.
However the early influences from John’s records stuck and I now have a taste in music that goes beyond that of my big brother and for that I thank him. I continue to tinkle on the keyboard and try to play guitar but ultimately I just love listening.
Speaking of the senses I could say that I came to oil painting through my sense of smell. Lt. Col. Kilgore said “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” in the movie Apocalypse Now. I quite understand his statement. My nose seeks out Gum Turpentine and Linseed Oil, a heady combination which I first experienced as a student. These days turps is looked down on in most teaching studios but my first experience of that wonderful perfume still makes me keep a bottle of gum turps in my studio cupboard and occasionally use it as a thinning agent.
Keeping with the senses, vision of the ocular type is the one which has driven my life for over fifty years. I cant say when I first consciously looked at something and recognised that it had a visual quality that appealed but my love of the automobile may have started me off.
Back in the 1940’s cars were rather boring in appearance, mostly black or very dark blue. Australia imported vehicles mainly from Britain and the U.S.A. at that time and as the 1950’s drew on a great change occurred. Firstly colours became brighter but in the later part of this decade American cars grew wings. Wow! This was something special and I drew my concept cars constantly.
What was it about these vehicles that fascinated me? The ideas used by the designers were certainly new and I decided at the age of 12, that was the job for me, a car designer.
It was not to be and I opted for architecture but the dry subjects like physics and chemistry left me cold so I didn’t last the distance. It was the graphic subjects that I enjoyed and ultimately I became a draftsman and industrial designer. The visuals still fascinated me and I commenced studying painting. I had found my niche.
So why be a painter? Apart from the aforementioned perfume the rest is of course to do with the way things look.
Another thing that propelled me towards my profession was a disability which prevented me from most physical exertion such as sports for close to two years. During this time I spent a good deal of my time in the local municipal library and drawing. I was very fortunate to have good schoolteachers who encouraged my interest in language and art. In particular geometric art so I guess that a seed was sown there. Reading Moulin Rouge sitting on the floor of the library also helped.
After having been trained in the discipline of painting I have learned not to see the things when I paint, only shapes, tones and colours that form the things. This is the most difficult thing to teach the prospective realist painter. Trying to explain this to adult students can be extremely difficult.
I return to my early studies in art to point out the difference in seeing between the trained painter and the normal human being and reference Georges Braque the French artist who collaborated with Pablo Picasso in the development of Cubism. An artist who taught Graphic Arts to aspiring architects at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne in the early 1960’s introduced this ‘ism’ to me. I was fascinated mainly by the portraits painted by the cubists and their method of breaking the painting into a series of planes. I painted a number of these semi abstract images as a student myself.
At the same time I was regularly visiting the National Gallery of Victoria, which was then located opposite the R.M.I.T. and looking at the work of the Heidelberg School painters who were considered to be Impressionists. I really liked their work particularly that of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton.
On leaving college, without a qualification I dabbled at home in my spare time and in 1972 commenced painting lessons at the Victorian Artists’ Society as well as studying ‘The Science Of Appearances’ by Max Meldrum. With my knowledge of the cubist technique I soon came to realise the similarities between it and the tonal realist technique that I was learning. Both methods required the painter to break the image to a set of planes rather than painting a nose a tree or a cloud in the sky.
Alan Martin, who had learned from Max Meldrum, had a particular mantra “It is just a set of shapes” which rang true and has become one of my regular statements in my teaching. Max Meldrum instructs us to see the subject as a painting and make the painting look like that subject.
Food for thought.
Don James
10th November 2019
TWO DIMENSIONS OR THREE?
SACHA
We had a great day recently during the Montsalvat Arts Festival when a group including Angela Abbott, Adam Frith, Leanne Savory, Peter Cranswick and myself painted still life in the Painting School studio.
Lots of interested and interesting people visited and several good paintings completed.
My work was once deemed not suitable for a particular exhibition because it wasn’t ‘contemporary’. ! After pinching myself to find if I existed I was left wondering how I could achieve that condition. The difference between what is termed Modern and Traditional in painting has been a vexed question for over 100 years now just as the question of what constitutes good or bad painting will always draw and argument.
There is spate of shows involving portraiture at the moment and as usual the various exhibitions require certain conditions to be met for entry from ‘painted from life” to “no use of digital media” as well as size restrictions etc. but there is scant mention of copyright.
I am often asked by prospective student about painting from photographs and my stock answer is that if one has a photograph which is considered good enough to copy as a painting, the photo itself should be enlarged and framed.
The use of sketches, preliminary paintings and even photographs as references for a final work has been widely acceptable for many years, if the photographs have been taken by the artist, but the use of other peoples photos is, if not always illegal then certainly immoral. As a student of realist painting one thing that was drilled into me was that we painted from life or to put it another way we converted three dimensional information into two dimensions, placed that information on a two dimensional panel in such a way that it looked three dimensional. I do not paint from two dimensional data apart from an occasional posthumous portrait which I tend to avoid.
Whilst I have always seen myself as a painter and played down the image of artist I am proud to admit to composing or designing my own work. I have done my share of copying the works of those painters I admire, but that is for my own pleasure and not for display or sale! One of my teachers had us copy one of his works as an exercise, upside down of course and it was very informative as regards technique.
In this digital age quality images of all sorts are at our fingertips and the temptation to use them or worse copy them must be great for the amateur painter, but to see what are obvious copies of other peoples photographs being produced and displayed by professional artists, I find offensive in the extreme.
If that means I am old fashioned then I will proudly wear that epithet and I try to remain contemporary for a few more years as well.
Don James
25th August 2019.
PAINTINGS GOOD OR BAD?
One of the things I tell my students is that the judging of paintings is a bit like judging restaurant food. It is mostly to do with taste. Because of our accumulated experience we cannot be totally objective. No matter how hard we try our prejudices will have an effect on our judgement. So how do we separate a good painting from the not so good or even from the bad.
When judging for prizes I generally do a quick walk around the show and note the pictures that immediately impress me. Then the hard work begins with another, much slower walk around looking harder at each picture, doing a reject list. This can sometimes include some of the ones that first impressed me. So what criteria do I use to reject work? Obviously any works which don’t fit the requirements for the particular prize, are easy to cull. The hard part is to ask why one painting is better than another.
1. An old friend of mine used to say ‘It’s not the size that attracts the flies……’, so all pictures great and small deserve equal consideration.
2. Leonardo Da Vinci is supposed to have said ‘It is better to paint a fish in the market place well than an archangel badly’, so ordinary complexity does not out pace beautiful simplicity. Look at the best of Clarice Beckett’s work.
Another painter worthy of a look is Andrea Smith, an Australian painter working and teaching in Italy. Her work sums up this simplicity idea perfectly and at the same time it is thrillingly beautiful. Her work can be seen on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/atelier.canova
3. ‘Bad framing can make a good painting bad but a good frame cannot make a bad painting good.’ I don’t know where I first heard that but framing is an important consideration when judging a work. The frame is an integral part of the work and should fit in more ways than one. A wide complex frame often can reduce the affect of a picture, whereas a frame that is too light can cheapen the look of a work.
4. As a painter I like to inspect whether the work has been constructed well as I have an eye to conservation. If a picture is on sale the general public the buyer needs to be sure of its quality.
5 We now get to the subjective rather than the objective part of the job. I believe that ideally signatures on pictures should be obscured as this would help the judge to be more objective. This is difficult to do so one must resort to whether the picture appeals or not. This involves using one’s accumulated knowledge and experience to come to what is always a difficult conclusion.
Mostly I look for paintings which are pleasing to the eye, that are honest, don’t resort to trickery, all terms that are indefinable but that is the best I can do I’m afraid as we are into the realm of subjectivity again.
Don James
25th May 2019.
FACEBOOK
In recent months I have been reposting lots of images of paintings by some of my favourite painters such as John Singer Sargent, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and Henri Fantin-Latour. The amount of high quality work that these and other painters produced in their lifetimes never ceases to amaze me.
Apart from the quantity it is the quality that stands out for me.
Many people denigrate Facebook and in some areas I have to agree that it has its drawbacks but as a painter and teacher I find it a very useful tool to show students what they can aspire to. It is also a very useful tool which can be used to learn about the lives of these artists and to look at a vast number of their works.
Looking at these works reminds me of the fact that all of these painters were classically trained from a quite early age, something that is not done today. So how can we expect to achieve what they did.
In the hundred or so years since they were working there have been tremendous advances in technology, none of which helps wth the learning of the techniques of oil painting to the level of these masters of the craft. Many inventions are used in painting but few of them improve the work of those that use them, in fact the reverse generally occurs. People look for easy fixes but there aren’t any, just good observation, hard work and discipline.
Don James
10th March 2019.
p.s. Anyone who is interested in reading a great story about artists of the era of Fantin Latour should seek out a copy of the following book. It gives an alternative view of Whistler and talks of his relationship with Fantin Latour and Alphonse Legros, The Societe des Trois.
Whistler the Friend Pennell, Elizabeth Robins
Published by J. B. Lippincott Company. 1930. Philadelphia., 1930
In 2007 I published a handbook titled ‘ON PAINTING’. This book is designed for the student of painting from life who may be interested in the information imparted to me by my teachers.
I see my teachers and their teachers as my painting family tree and as such I trace my painting origins back through history to the likes of Diego Velasquez and Rembrandt.
Readers will gain knowledge about tonality, colour mixing, measuring and even brush cleaning.
I consider myself very fortunate to have been taught painting by my teachers both of whom stressed the discipline required to become competent with this method of representing reality on canvas in oils.
Please email me at james143@ozemail.com.au if you would like to obtain a copy.
Don James Art 