Description:
Warburtonium is part of the shameless and cunning scheme that Geoffrey Warburton has concocted in order to make a living from his online activities.
Contents:
Varying shades of black and brown
Bought some shiny new software this week, which you can find here. Best website building software for the price I've ever seen, and I'm not even getting paid for telling you so. (Wonder if they have an affiliate scheme...never mind.)
Painting has slowed while I attend to other matters, and it's brought up a notion that occurs to me about this time every year. The problem a landscape painter in England faces is this: that while for six months of the year the landscape looks beautiful, for the remaining six - October through March - it looks like a turd with some twigs sticking out of it.
You get this brief spell in October while the leaves change colour, and then everything's varying shades of black and brown until first bud, with a sky that's generally the colour of a dead fish's belly. Once in a while you get a decent snowfall, which looks great, but for the most part you're stuck with working on summer's paintings and drawings, from photographs and memory. And I work on the principle that if I can't see it, or I don't have decent reference sources to work from, I can't paint it.
Work in progress is this 18" x 24" canvas, the underpainting of which you can see above. I should be down on the spot, making more studies from life, but last week the temperature fell, and so did half the leaves on the trees. So I'm staying put and making a colour study on a 9" x 12|" canvas (below).
Eeeuu. Looks better in real life. I'm having some problems taking record shots with my camera. It finds every fault and makes them look worse by a factor of 2. I shall prevail. Eventually. Psyching up for the Mansfield museum gig, and searching my hard drive for scanned images that will make good small prints for the £10 price point. Be there or be regarded as square.
Colour and Light in Oils
Sunflowers
Art Print
Verrall, Nicholas
Buy at AllPosters.com
Colour and Light in Oils by Nicholas Verrall and Robin Capon.
I picked this up in the library. A slim (128 pages) large format paperback, lavishly illustrated, with fairly dense instructive text, it's not short on substance.
Nicholas Verrall is represented by the Catto gallery in London, and has exhibited all over the world. He has a distinctive style, perhaps influenced by his earlier work in pastels, and certainly influenced by late Impressionists like Bonnard.
As a painter his main concern is colour. The paintings - mostly Mediterranean views with an easy, postcard appeal - all tend towards a seductive prettiness. (I say that as if it's a bad thing. It's not.) You wouldn't find them hard to live with. The prettiness can be a little wearing taken en masse, but he occassionally puts away the simple solution - coloured shadows, pretty flowers, pointillist passages - and tackles something harder, like the interior on page 120, 'La Porte Verte'.
One of the things that impressed me was the variety of his solutions. Some painters fall into the trap of doing what works time and again, essentially painting one picture for the rest of their lives, but Verrall makes the point in the text that he seeks out 'the challenge of the unfamiliar, of constantly varied ideas, subjects and working methods'. It seems to have paid off. He walks a fine line between the crowd-pleasing pretty work and the occasionally more complex scenes that are purely painterly, but that's the tension that keeps it interesting.
Should you buy this book? Yep. The words 'lavishly illustrated' and 'dense instructive text' at the start of the review are the giveaway. I learned a lot from one reading, and I thoroughly enjoyed the paintings.
Pining for the fjords
Trawling the internet once more, I came across two painters I'd never heard of, and they've got me pining for the fjords.
Sell what people want to buy.
Never let it be said that I always know what I'm doing. But equally, never let it be said that I need telling twice.
What am I on about? The other topic of this blog, to whit, making money online. I've been trying to get started with affiliate sales for a while now, without much success. But I think I just took a step forward. The number one rule of course is to sell what people want to buy. A rule I didn't so much break as shatter when I went to the trouble and expense of setting up a website devoted to my art and spent months writing an ebook about landscape painting. I did take the sensible promotion route by writing a bunch of art related articles for ezinearticles.com and linking them back to my website, rather than risking any money on PPC.
In 6 months I had a respectable 540 article views of 10 art related articles, resulting in 56 URL clicks and no sales.
A fortnight ago I uploaded 7 articles about weight loss and muscle building. They went live about 3 days ago. In those 3 days I've had 931 article views and 35 URL clicks to a free blog where I'm promoting a Clickbank product. No sales yet, but guess where I'm going to be concentrating my efforts from now on?
Revised plan. I love painting, and I'll keep doing it. Writing about it, blogging about it, and generally trying to promote my ebook online is going to have to fall by the wayside a little bit. Only so many hours in the day. And I think I'll be using them to promote what sells. Because, weirdly enough, that's going to be better for my painting in the long run.
PAINTING WITH DAVID SHEPHERD
This arrived the other day. My first thought was that it seemed a little thin at 144 pages, but given that there are colour illustrations on just about every page, that seems a little churlish now.
Shepherd claims to have no natural talent, and looking at a reproduction of his first painting, you can sort of see his point. He was accepted as a student by the painter Robin Goodwin, to whom he says he owes everything. He's certainly improved since then. I get the impression from the book of an instinctive painter who has honed his gift with tremendous hard work and application, and in the process backed into a kind of greatness.
For some reason, commercial artists like Shepherd are held in a kind of benevolent contempt, but it's a point of view that's getting harder to maintain. The mainstream of figurative art has been marginalised for the last hundred years, but it's never gone away, and even when I was a student, as far back as the 70s, there was a burgeoning, restless suspicion that it was on the way back. And what's wrong with that? The only criteria by which we judge art, in the end, is this: would you hang it on your wall? Looking closely at Shepherd's work over the last couple of days, I'd have to say a resounding yes.
He really is a very skilled painter. His main gift is that of the shock of recognition; sometimes you look at a passage and you're forced to admit he's somehow captured the look of something that's not even central to the subject of the painting, with a throwaway skill that makes me, as a painter, envious. Take, for example, the painting of 'The Artist's own Locomotive' on page 101; light streaming into a dingy engine shed, perfectly captured with some scumbled lines of paint, light flaring on dust in the air, shadowy scaffolding receding into an uncertain space that is instantly familiar. Or consider the background of 'Auster-9 in Malaya' on page 112, where a small plane is coming in to land on a jungle airstrip; foliage and distance and atmosphere indicated with the most economical means.
Sometimes he treats the background in an almost perfunctory way, which gives rise to a curious tension in the work, with passages that are almost abstract suddenly becoming what they were meant to be as you look at them; smeared lines of green paint turn into water weeds in a stream; patches of dark paint become shadowed foliage.
Admittedly, there are subjects he tackles that make me cringe. The Landseer lookalikes of the book's 'Painting the Past' section, for example, all sentiment, rosy cheeked children, and puppies. Saccharine isn't quite the word. But he is a working painter, who lives by selling his work and reproductions of it. Judge the market, if you must. (I've painted dog portraits. Don't knock it.)
Conclusions? Huge respect for David Shepherd as a painter and a conservationist. Does the book tell you all his trade secrets? Well there are step by step demonstrations and some in depth discussion of his painting techniques, but as every painter discovers, in the end it's all about getting your hands dirty. Should you buy this book? Yes, if you're a fan, or you'd just like a little insight into the way a very succesful painter works.
BOOKS ON PAINTING, AND A TASTE OF THE LASH
This is a book I've just ordered from Amazon to add to my growing library of books on painting. Love David Shepherd's work, mainly because a) he can paint, and b) it really annoys arty types when you say so. It remains to be seen whether or not I can recommend it, because it hasn't arrived yet, but I wait expectantly.
Painting here at Warburtonium towers has slowed a little. I've not so much finished the last one as abandoned it. It's drying out in the spare bedroom, waiting on varnishing and framing. I'm thinking of going the DIY route on making frames, mainly because of the expense. It'll need an investment in a new mitre saw (Warburton's Law #3: never lend your tools to anyone, especially not family members) and maybe a mount cutter and a point gun, but the start-up for a minor framing operation is surprisingly cheap.
I'm still humming and hawing about the upcoming Christmas gig at the local museum, but I think it's worth a shot. Maybe one day to test the waters, see if I can give away the artfreebie lesson on CD, spread a few fliers. Taking stuff there and back could be a nightmare, but I might just frame up a couple of prints and take along an illustrated order book. 'That one, modom? Certainly. I'll have one wrapped and delivered post haste by my Lascar houseboy. You shall have it this night or he'll feel the taste of my lash. Good day.'
Just put up a new Squidoo lens this morning, which you can see if you would be so good as to point your browser here. It's a bit more keywordy than my previous efforts, which I'm hoping might improve my traffic chances somewhat. Writing for humans and writing for Google are sometimes very different things, but you have to find a strategy that works for both. Signing out for now, but I'll be back soon with the beginnings of the next painting. Bye.
SHINY NEW REALISTIC PAINTING STYLE
Behold the spot where I am about to exercise my shiny new realistic painting style and painterly skill. It's in Pleasley Vale, which is a pleasant spot about five minute's walk down the road from me. Woodland, fields, wildlife and a surprising amount of traffic accessing the industrial park at the far end of it.
I was drawing down there not an hour ago, and saw two cyclists and some children pass in about an hour. That would be the weekend rush. Peaceful isn't quite the word, but bleakly uninhabited doesn't quite do the place justice.
Why do painters choose the subjects they do? All too often, because they're there. And that's not a bad thing. If your subject is five minute's walk away, you can hardly find an excuse for not working.
My painting expertise
I think I'm improving, as far as mastering the mystery of painting goes. Look above to see the most recent painting. Try and see past the cackhanded photographic effort to the halfway handy painting beneath. Some competent rendering going on there. Pleased with the rocks below the water, and not particularly ashamed of any passages, which is a first.
Self-congratulation over. Back to plotting my assault on the local museum's Christmas market. I might hire a trestle for a day and see if I can flog some prints. Maybe give away some cheap CDs with the free painting lesson from the ebook on them, plus links to the website and blogs. It occurs to me I'd better move sharpish. Get some frames for those prints I've already done; run off some more prints and
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