Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

I was reading an interesting article about the ghettoisation that is beginning occur on the web. The gist was that the search engines try to find out what you like and what you believe in and then attempts to build a profile and feed you stuff that you would approve of. A little research showed it to be a strange truth. The internet is dividing us up not drawing us together. So eco folk tend to get only stories about how the planet is being ruined and fracking was invented by the devil, presumably deniers get stories about how the global warming theories are wrong and its all a plot by pinko liberal commies. You can try it yourself search for something balmy like chemtrails and it will bring up lots of views for and against. If you just click and browse the sites of the chemtrail believers then next time you search the loonies will come higher up. So people tend to exist in a tailor-made bubble of information they broadly tend to agree with rather than the full spread of wildly conflicting information.

How does this relate to art? Well as a representational painter with certain preferences I will tend to be served images and information I approve of. Also my posted images in turn will be served to those who have previously shown similar tastes. I do not mean this will be a 100% correlation, just that things that fit my profile will predominate. This process is just getting started and will I assume become more effective and widespread as time goes by. So people interested in conceptual art will get the sort of fodder that they approve of and plein air artists the same. There is nothing specifically wrong about this but it does tend to split human interests into separate bubbles that have very little cross talk. Just look at any discussion forum that propounds any view political, religious or otherwise, they consist almost entirely of people who are true believers plus a few trolls, who only serve to emphasise what horrid people those who disagree with the local majority view are.

The other thing that effects me as a painter is how much time the internet eats. You see a picture you like by a painter you hadn’t heard of and off you go searching for more and then maybe finding other related artists that painted in the same place or time. Next thing you know an afternoon has gone. It seems to speak directly to our hunter gatherer instincts. I now have folders and folders full of paintings that may, but probably won’t in some unforeseen future, inspire me to paint a better picture myself. I suppose to look at them all has been educational, but possibly not as much as painting something myself. It is much the same with kit, I recently wasted almost a whole day looking at etching presses. Reading about which types  were good and which were less so. Looking at sites that sell them (and other tempting goodies of course) or scanning ebay for a bargain second hand one.

Of course the evil web has some bonuses. As I put my paintings on line they are seen by more people than they ever would have in a previous era. It is however possibly easier to go unnoticed due to the sheer quantity of others doing the same thing. This blog is apparently the 13th most popular painting blog, the 6th if we are just counting artists. This is the result of the 10,000 or so hits I get a month. Is this all due to my nifty painting skills? Well my ego would like to think so, but a little bit of me knows that much better painters than I languish in the lower regions of popularity. So my web skills have to take some credit, I know how to make life easy for the search engines and how to attract their attention in the areas I wish them to notice.

I have written before about the feeling I get that I am only painting and drawing to supply images to be seen on screen. I don’t think that is necessarily bad though. After all musicians are mostly heard second hand in a recording, their actual live performances are in many cases never heard at all as they don’t play any gigs. Painters often forget that they are a part of the entertainment industry, not as many would like to think part of the spiritual and philosophical world. We do sensory gratification not ideas.

So hopefully here are some images that gratify more than just me in the painting of them!

Another portrait of Dave, who featured in my last post. Here I was trying out the Zorn palette of Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Cadmium Red and White. I actually liked it a lot. Reducing you choices actually smooths the process, it certainly makes remixing colours a lot easier. I intended to only do an hour on this but went about 20 min over. Annoyingly this is a better likeness than the ones where I tried harder to get his character to show through. 10in by 12in oils.

A self portrait here, I was interested in doing a different angle again with a restricted palette. This one is Naples Yellow, Cad red, Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber and Tit White. I intended to just do an hour, but as the light outside was flat and unchanging I only stopped when the sun came out and realised I had been painting away for two hours! Interesting what adding a blue does. 12in by 10in oils.

This is the view down the river Frome at Wareham. It was very flat and hazy which rather suited this view. Only 30 odd min as it didn’t really grab me as subject. 10in by 6in oils.

Wareham again, this time seen from across the marshes I actually worked on another painting (below) at the same time with the boards one above the other on the easel. The second scene was straight ahead of me and this one at right angles. 10in by 5in oils.

Here’s the view 90 degrees to the left. Amazing how the change to looking more into the light transforms the mood. You would hardly think the were painted simultaneously if they were hung side by side. Such lovely tones and subtle hues at this time of year. Soon I will have to wrestle with the spring greens. 10i by 5in oils.

A studio painting this time. I did this from a watercolour (below) which is something I should do more often. This is the a path that runs to the dramatically named Satan’s Square and is near Sutton Waldron. I drew it out from a photo then painted it from the watercolour, hard to resist checking the photo as you work initially, but as you get into it the temptation fades! 16in by 12in oils.

Here is the watercolour for comparison. This is mostly plein air I just did a few bits of darkening and delineating later. I love this view and will be back to paint it in some different lights. 10in by 7in Watercolour.

This is Fontmell Down and painted just before the previous one. I wish I had taken a much wider view, which is a lesson to me to put a few differently proportioned bits of paper in the car. Went a bit grubby as I got the tone in the foreground wrong twice and had to overlay more washes than I like to normally. I was working under some strain though as the wind was attempting to blow everything up to Glasgow! Watercolour 10in by 7in.

That’s it, some London stuff next. I have sadly resigned from the Wapping Group as I now live too far away to get to their painting days on a regular basis. I owe them a great deal of gratitude for prompting me to go out and paint the river and the city which has really transformed the way I paint. Hopefully I will still join them occasionally on an ad hoc basis so it will not mean the end of cityscapes!