Thursday 15 March 2012

Day off ramble watercolour of café at Westgate some photos and stuff about art.


I suppose that one of the trickiest things I do at the moment is painting in public, anyway here is today’s offering, granted not very good. The white chairs completely defeated me, with watercolour you can’t paint over the top with white paint so all the white bits are bare paper. You can use some special fluid or a wax crayon to make areas that repel the paint, but it tends to make the picture look funny.
 I could have gone home and painted the thing from a photograph, but my sketchbook is for me, so there wouldn’t be any point, I guess I could have traced the photo to get everything just right.

I could have drawn the scene first with a pencil, painted it and then rubbed the pencil out, this would have made it a lot easier. I hope you see where I am coming from here.
I was looking at art books about Renoir and Picasso last night and have bought a very cheap A3 sketchbook, the paper is too thin to take watercolour so the coloured bits are chalk.


Inevitably there were a few pictures on the camera card after having the day off, they are going on the web here


and here

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop312/id9.htm


What I am getting at here I think is something like, what would you prefer hanging on you wall, given that you can’t have an original Picasso, Renoir or whatever.

A photograph?

A painting of a photograph?

A print of a painting?

A painting from real life that wasn’t that good but you could afford?

A painting that was an exact copy of a great painting, done by a good copyist
This picture inserted to respond to comment.

Oh and one of today’s photos which I have rotated and flipped, it should get bigger if you click on it. Makes one wonder what shape the line between reflection and reality is.  
  
I may ramble on here.   

9 comments:

  1. I believe white paint can be used to overpaint in waterclour. I understand the White watercolour can be mixed with a traditional resin, perhaps copal or something similar to give it body. The late Samual Palmers are painted in watercolours given resin structure. They can even be varnished, to give a richer oil-like finish. Thankyou for showing your paintings on the blog, Im sure your persevererence with the medium will develop your skills. Please continue your works and the blog.

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    1. Or I could just use acrylics and paint white over any colour, I guess you see the problem. Turner used titanium white which I use sometimes, picture of Richborough power station from the top of the Granville inserted in post to show you what I mean. You have to wait until the other paint is very dry though, best the day after you painted it, I cheated in this one and sprayed the other paint with fixative before putting the white on.

      But carrying around a can of fixative seems a bit much for plastic chairs.

      I have to admit I like to work fast and fairly wet, letting the paint dictate part of how the picture is, glad you are enjoying the blog and the paintings, I guess my interest at the moment is far more in painting than local issues, so the blog is going a bit that way. Luckily I don’t have to sell pictures for a living, so it doesn’t matter much how they turn out.

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  2. Personally I'd rather put a "Naked in Thanet" original on my wall! ; )

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    1. Peter, I suppose what you are saying is you would rather have your own work on your wall, which I guess raises another question. Would you rather have your own work on your wall, than the work of a conventionally great artist?

      The walls in here are mostly covered with books, records and guitars in the rather utilitarian fashion of there being nowhere else to put them. Not sure I would want to be confronted by my own work and hence shortcomings all the time.

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    2. Yes, I would rather have my own work, definitely. My flat is deliberately minimalist anyway, as I'm not one for lots of clutter; I have bare white walls with a few of my prints here & there in plain black frames.

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    3. Peter the picture in the post from my A3 sketchbook is loosely framed around Picasso’s “The Artist and His Model” series, it should enlarge if you click on it. I guess it gives you some idea of my inability to impose conformity on life.

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    4. "loosely framed around Picasso’s “The Artist and His Model”" - yeah very very loosely !!

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    5. And of course Renoir’s “The Large Bathers” but then they mush have done something a bit looser when he nipped behind a tree for a call of a less artistic nature.

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  3. To be fair, I think I'd rather have some of Peter's work on the walls in my place - purely for their artistic value of course !

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.