Artists & Illustrators - UK (2020-01)

MASTER TECHNIQUES

LEFT Martin Kinnear,

Buttermere, oil on

canvas, 122x91cm

A wide range of optical

fi nishes created rich,

ambiguous effects.

BELOW This detail

shows how fat impasto

marks and thin glazes

gives the effect of

gathering light

I

understand why many

contemporary artists who attend

courses at the Norfolk Painting

School initially shun the idea of

working traditionally. The trouble with

old-fashioned painting is, well, it looks

so old fashioned.

In this second part of my series,

I’d like you to pause for thought,

however, or at least question your

assumptions for a moment. While Old

Master paintings are the stuff of art

history, the ideas and techniques

used in them can be as relevant today

as they always were. With this in

mind, I’d like to focus upon the one

concept that you’ll fi nd in almost any

Old Master painting: optics. When it

comes to painting, optics refers to the

ways in which they interact with light.

It is the reason that we can all

recognise Old Master works for their

inherent depth and subtlety, as

opposed to the fl at and often bold

aesthetic of contemporary painting.

So how do we combine these two

approaches?

In his essay on the work of Pierre

Bonnard, the late great painter Sargy

Mann noted that lesser artists paint

extraordinary things in an ordinary

way, but that the mark of a great

artist is to paint the most ordinary

and commonplace of subjects in an

extraordinary way. Looking at a simple

still life by a 20th-century painter

such as Sir William Nicholson, which

simply glows with cool light, or one of

John Piper’s luminous pictures of very

ordinary buildings, it becomes clear

that these masters are doing far more

than simply laying down tube oils.

Rather than dreaming up ever more

extraordinary things to paint, why not

try to develop the range of your

techniques instead? Even if you want

to paint very creatively, it pays to have

skills. As Mann observed, it’s no good

having artistic vision if you can’t put it

on a canvas; in other words, skills

facilitate creativity.

Artists & Illustrators 47