Chords of colour.

Painting, when thought of as great art, has the same character as great
music. Harmony, tones, notes, chords, slurs, hard edges, lost edges,
soft edges. Orchestral colour, melody line, texture, transparency,
palimpsest, rhythm, percussion… each of these concepts has to become
our friend, our muse.

If I may illustrate… imagine two snooker balls on a green tabletop,
one red, the other yellow. The prosaic way to paint this (correct, but
deathly boring) would be to draw two circles on a green ground, fill
the one with yellow and the other with red, then shade each of them
from light to dark, not forgetting to add the cast shadow of each in
darker green, and finally, add a highlight on each. Particularly
obsessive renderers would even show how each of the two balls are
reflected in the other.

Now imagine the same simple subject painted by a master like Turner,
Sargent, or Rembrandt. In one brushstroke they would give us the yellow
ball, in another the red ball. This, at the most basic level. In truth,
they would in a single brushstroke define both balls, and the shadows,
as well as the tabletop. One colour chord, one slur of pigment,
perfectly weighted and drawn, easy apparently, but the result of the
most intense visual perception and refinement of feeling.

Painting of this quality can hardly be achieved in one lifetime. So we
have to take it as far as we can and pass on such knowledge as we may
have to a next generation, for them to add their own serious researches
until eventually, art is restored to its place of honour with the work
of Beethoven and Mozart.

Ryno.

Visual music

Much of music is an up and down progression along a scale, something

like a xylophone or a pan flute, both of which leave me irritated and

dissatisfied. The beauty of music lies in its expressive range:

harmonies, tempi, breadth and force. Even the piano, which is no more

than a long ladder of notes, is capable of the greatest beauty and

emotion because it involves all ten fingers, and sometimes more.

The same thing happens in art. There are many paintings which are no

more than a rendering of the scale of light and shade over an area of

canvas, sometimes in monochrome, and sometimes in Kodakcolour.

For painting to move into the realm of art, requires exactly the same

as does music. The artist has to bring more to the painting than just

the barren correctness of tinted tone. We have to give energy, tempo,

drama, beauty, and expression. We have to make the painting slow in

part and fast in part, light and airy here and heavy and moody here,

establish contrast in one picture and harmony in another. And we have

to learn each one of these skills as a musician does. We have to know

the meaning of each term and how to achieve it. Then we have to teach

it to every young artist who comes to us for help.

Painting at its most boring is like newspaper prose; at its most

exciting, like an orchestral masterpiece.

(This post is getting a bit long. I shall continue in my next post with an example of what I am trying to express.)

What is outline drawing?

When we think about line drawing, the first thought that comes is often

“outline drawing”. This is however such a vague concept as to be

virtually meaningless.

Line in terms of some kind of outline around objects, does not exist.

The lines we draw is an indication of where something takes place. So a

contour line is an indication of where an object stops and the

background “begins”. Of course the object, say a face, does not ever

stop, it simply turns away from us. It is this kind of turning away of

form which is termed “contour”. So the edge of a form is not an outline

but a contour, and is indicated by a contour line.

Two simple drawings can illustrate this. In the first drawing the line

is used to indicate contour, the turning away of forms, and in the

second drawing the line describes the silhouette of a face, that is,

the point at which the object obscures the background. The result is

markedly different.

The first drawing explores the structures of the face, eyes,

cheekbones, the fall of the hair. There is no question that contour

drawing is the most difficult skill in art. It was mastered by a

handful of artists throughout history, Michelangelo, Leonardo,

Botticelli, Dürer, Rubens, Ingres, Leighton. Maybe this explains

Ingres’ advice to the young Degas, “Draw lines, young man, draw many

lines.”

The second drawing is a simple silhouette, as if the headshape was cut

out of a sheet of paper. To achieve accuracy in a silhouette is still

very difficult, but it is much less taxing than trying to define the

structures that make the face. For this reason it is a good way to

start drawing. Until and unless we can get the simple silhouette right,

we have no hope of getting the features.

In all line drawing it is the abstract qualities of the line as much as

its visual accuracy which make a drawing expressive: the sweep, the

breadth, the nervousness or force of the line. But in the words of

Leonardo da Vinci, it is the simple accuracy of vision which makes us

value an artist as competent.

“That is the most praiseworthy painting which has most

conformity with the thing represented.” –Leonardo

It is precisely because our greatest achievement, and our highest art,

is so difficult, that the idea of cheating at it is so awful. It was Degas who called drawing the probity of art. Probity, meaning integrity, or honesty.

Cat vision

Cats eyes. Look at them. The pupil a narrow slit, vertical through the

iris. Mysterious, intriquing.

One day, many years ago, I was relaxing in the summer sun in front of

our lovely old house. With me were our two cats, Mao and Myrtle. They

were as lazy as I was, “lolling” being the only word to describe their

movements. But where I favoured the sun, they both preferred the shade.

It was hot, I was nearly asleep, and just barely taking in the scene

before me through half-closed eyes. The cats were invisible in their

shaded patches. One of the cats got up and padded over to a new

position, again, in the shade. After a while it moved again. Also into

the shade. With my eyes half closed, where there would normally be an

undifferentiated garden path, I could see a meaningful pattern of light

and shade.

Slowly it became clear that the cats were seeing the garden in this

way, as a meaningful map of light/shade patterns. And that they

responded to this information by moving from shady spot to shady spot.

For me to see the pattern I had to close my eyes and observe the scene

through my eye-lashes, as it were. No such need for the cats though.

They have these specialised pupils which contracts to a narrow vertical

line, eliminating excess light while allowing good depth of field in a

narrow band from the twigs in front of them to the distant prey.

Unblinking. To enable this level of concentration, even blinking is

enhanced by a third eyelid, transparent, quick, clearing the surface of

the eye without obscuring the vision. What immortal hand or eye could

frame THIS fearful symmetry?

Something kept nagging at me, though. I knew that I was right, but what

was the payoff for the cat? What was the evolutionary benefit of such a

visual system? I could even identify a reason not to have such a system

in hunting animal. with our eyes half closed, we see less. It is most

amusing to tease a cat into hunting your hand… A fraction of a second

before it attacks, the pupil opens to its full extent, and if you pull

your hand away at this moment, the cat will leap, but into empty space.

Most embarrassing for the cat! But it needs to see every detail before

pouncing, as also in the momentum of its attack.

It was only in writing this note, that the benefit became clear to me.

Camouflage, first. As the cat moves from shade to shade, it remains

virtually invisible. And then, environmental. In Africa, the big cats

spend the day in shade, and in cold climates, they would seek out the

sunlight. Their superb visual system frees them to do this on a

virtually subconscious level.

All this has a lesson for the artist. Light and shade is the most

important of all skills that the artist has to master. And if we cannot

see light and shade, we can never render it. So the lesson of the cat

is, to see the clear and vital patterns of light and shade, half-close

your eyes.

Even in the 19th century a contemporary critic wrote,”Impressionism is

painting done through half-closed eyes.”

Before them the classical artists used a device called a Claude mirror,

a concave mirror backed with black instead of silver. You can make this

at home by taking a flat piece of glass and painting one side of it

black. The other side is a Claude mirror. Looking into it we see the

world in enhanced tonalities… lights remain light, but middle tones

are shifted down towards the darks, very much like a Rembrandt

painting. Colours in the shadow also tend towards Rembrandt-like black

coffee.

A simpler way of achieving the same result is by looking at the sky

through an unexposed film negative, the way we look at eclipses,

except, don’t use it to look at the sun so much as to look at cloud

formations. You will be surprised. The skies you see will look

remarkably like Turner skies (Don’t forget that Turner idolised Claude,

who is credited with the invention of the black mirror.)

Ruskin, for all his admiration of Turner, abhorred the black mirror and

what he called “Rembrandtism”. His reason was simply that to sacrifice

the glories of colour to get good light and shade was too high a price

to pay. We must have good light and shade, yes, but we must also have

good colour (Colour is the type of love, Ruskin said.)

The answer is not to use the Claude mirror to distinguish light and

shade but rather to use the natural method of looking through

half-close eyes, emulating that great hunter of nature, the cat. This

way we see, at the same time, true tonalities, and true colour.

The mind’s eye.

Dreams, sleeping dreams I mean, are fugitive and hard to pin down. Many

people believe that our dream experiences are real, and in the sense

that they open a path to our subconscious and the collective

subconscious, they are very important.

When I mentioned “dreamers of dreams”, I meant not sleeping dreams,

but that most vital aspect of the true artist, visualising or

daydreaming.

Images, even from daydreaming, are clothed in mystery, and need

exploration and investigation to transform into art. Still, they are

all there, they come as a totality.

If we imagine a woman standing with her back to us, the imagination

holds her in fullness. But, if we want to know what her face looks

like, we cannot see that until we, in imagination, make her turn

around, or move around her. This is the creative aspect of the true

artist, to hold the images, and to dwell in the dream.

The experience of JK Rowlings the day she found the inspiration for the

world of Harry Potter, demonstrates this point. Her train was delayed

for hours, and she was allowed/forced to stay with the images that came

to her, to explore and to delve into this world, until it demonstrated

to her its own laws. She got fully formed characters, places, moods,

and events. All she had to do was to write it down. Mozart had similar

experiences. His manuscripts were written in one draft, with no

corrections or alterations.

So, as you say, you always have to use time to enhance what you put

down originally. Time, drawing on paper, and time, exploring the dream.

This dialogue between paper and fantasy is central. The one drives the

other, and to some extent the images on paper become as powerful as

those held in the imagination. Greatness lies in keeping the dream

alive. Don’t let it fade, don’t let it die, don’t let it go. Even as

you paint, be the dream.

This is why it is vital to draw and paint exactly what we see. Because

until we can accurately render what we see in the real world, we can

never render what we see in the world of myth, memory, and imagination.

For a great artist to paint from real life requires a similar approach,

to see this world as a dream, held in pure consciousness, and to render

that with as much reverence as if it were a vision handed down from the

gods.

Ryno.

The first skill: Imagination.

Of all the skills an artist may or may not have the most basic, and the

most important, is imagination.

This is the one that makes us an artist in the first place. Without it

nobody is an artist. It might even be thought not to be a skill which

can be developed, but a gift, or a god-given talent. WITH this gift,

nothing will stop you from being an artist. Prose, poetry, novels,

screenplays, musical composition, choreography, sculpture, painting,

comic strips, moviemaking, architecture, sandcastles; the imagination

will express itself.

This is the heart of art, of which the photopainters and the mechanical

renderers know nothing. This is Shakespeare, Beethoven, Turner, Rodin.

And this is the approach that we have chosen, or which has chosen us.

If you have this gift of the imagination, apart from real physical

distress, what can limit you? If you were to lose your sight, you would

tell the stories, and if you were to lose your voice, you would play

the music. Degas was blind, and Beethoven deaf, but the imagination

flowed through. Even if we were unable to communicate, as long as we

were able to fight the demons of loneliness, we would simply enjoy the

passing show.

My next note, hopefully, will be on the nature of imagination, and ways

of tuning in to the mind of God (or the collective subconscious).

With all our problems, let’s not forget to be grateful for being who we

are.

Art and skill.

“Art is skill”, the great Plato said.

This axiom has only been contested once in the history of art: in our time.

First, it was contested by the Modern school who were patently without skill. Cutting up animals and throwing paint at canvas, or painting flat squares with masking tape, piling bricks into a museum, are obviously not skilled activities. This travesty is still continuing because of the aging Modernists who still control all public-funded museums and art schools. More recently they have found a new skill-less art form to espouse: the work of unskilled ethnic groups whose work has to be shown as a kind of “democratisation” of art. They fear skill, because it is recognised by all; and their jobs depend on them alone being the arbiters of artistic merit. These jhighly paid jobs are lifetime appointments, so don’t look for any changes here. They will leave only when the die of senility.

But now there is another, much more dangerous group who deny the role of skill in art.

They are the highly successful artists who project colour photographs onto their canvases to trace in pencil outlines and then to color in oil paints. There is NO skill is involved in this. They, like their mortal enemies, the modernists, say that skill is of no consequence; that it is only the result that matters. At least the modernists were honest about their uselessness; these photopainters are dangerous deceivers, selling fraud as art. They need to be exposed and identified for what they are.

Because at the heart of art lies this truth: “Art is skill”.

The skill of observation, of empathy, of memory and of visualistion.

The skill of capturing movement in rapid sketches, and studying tone and form in careful studies.

The skill of composition and of arranging color and texture into passages of great beauty.

The skill of handling oil paint, pastel, and watercolour, as well as pencil and charcoal.

The skills of comprehending the secrets of chiaroscuro, palimpsest and paint quality.

The skill of conveying expression and mood qualities to shapes and forms.

The skill of integrating the various elements that make up the work into a seamless and harmonised whole.

One of the greatest flowering of pure skill was in the 19th Century, with artists such as Waterhouse, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Klimt, Alma-Tadema, Corot, Bouguereau, Gerome, Degas, Mauve, Mancini and others.

Why are they unknown today? Simply because the Modernists who control the exhibition and teaching of art, have so decreed. Ironically, the people who shout the loudest about these truly great artists, and who pretend to emulate them, are the fraudsters of photopainting.

Look up these artists of skill in your library, or on the internet, and rediscover the joy of loving art.

Then discover the joy of creating works of skill, truth, power, and beauty.

Ryno.

The picture below is by Waterhouse; Saint Cecilia.

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Subject matter, or theme?

One of the toughest things for young artists is deciding what subject matter to concentrate on. Once we are a little older it is often simply a matter of looking back on our work and then trying to recognise what our subject matter really is.

If we look at one picture by any artist we see a subject, such as Athena, or Adam. But when we look at the overall output of an artist we begin to discern something else, underlying all their work. This is their theme, and it is quite possible that some artists themselves never become aware of these underlying forces powering their work.

Praxiteles: The ideal

Michelangelo: The male nude

Rembrandt: Humanity

Beethoven: Passion and peace

Mozart: Love

Turner: Passion and peace

Alma-Tadema: Living history

Degas: Grace and power, animal and human

Toulouse-Lautrec: Surgical insight

Klimt: The Eros of beauty

Rodin: The body of God

Rothko: Mood made concrete

What we need to do, is to find out what it is that drives us to create art. This must not be art itself, but that aspect of creation which stirs us, excites us, and turns us on.

This is necessary for two reasons. First, it allows us to cut to the chase, as it were, and to say the things we want to say. (Not truly what we “want” to say, actually, but the things we are here to say.) And second, because unless we can identify early on where our passion lies, we can so easily lose interest in art.

There is some risk in this. We need to explore our psyche, and often our dark side… On the positive side, once we reveal this passion to ourselves it is then batehed in the light of our consciousness. Because the task of true art is simply to celebrate. Good art is the celebration of a great soul; and great art is the celebration of a great soul.

Practically, finding your theme requires us do do many pictures, from life, from memory, and from imagination. And at the slow pace at which good paintings are created, this process would take decades. The way to explore this world and with it our responses to this world, is to draw. To draw without ceasing. “Draw many lines, young man,” Ingres told Degas, and, “Draw the thousand-and-one things,” Hokusai was instructed.

Get a sketchbook, a large (A4) hard-cover book with quality paper, and use it, not as a sketchbook, but as a book of nature study, as a diary, as a scrapbook, and as a notebook for thoughts on life and art. This book is to become your alter ego, your Portrait of Dorian Gray. And as you fill one, move on to the next one. At least one drawing a day, for the rest of your life.

And when we die, our sketchbooks will be our true legacy. Greater than our so-well crafted paintings and sculptures; intimate, passionate.

Hello.

Hi. My name is Ryno Swart. I have been working as a figurative artist since the 70’s, and so, like many artists of the time, have gone through the worst of the modern period, when any art that subscribed to the ideals of beauty, harmony and truth, and of creating images that reflected the visual world, were dismissed out of hand.

Today’s artists have the road smoothed to some extent, but not fully. While a majority of commercial galleries now show realist work, it is still virtually impossible for a figurative artist to attain critical recognition. Public museums and galleries still subscribe to the modern and now the postmodern ideal of “if it does not offend the public, it must be bad.” This situation will endure for another 30 years, as every curator gets a lifetime appointment and will not be replaced until they retire or die. Critics defend their position in the same way. If it became accepted that the public can intelligently make value judgments on art, they will become obsolete. Worse, they might have to learn a discipline diametrically opposed to art criticism; art appreciation.

Below is one of my pictures from a few years ago. I hope you enjoy it.