It is a common idea that as painters age they gain in wisdom and depth which makes their late works more resonant and moving. This idea was key to Simon Schama’s latest program on the late Rembrandt. I enjoyed the program but it was an extremely orthodox view which I am tempted to question. If you look at the great man’s paintings they actually in my opinion fall off a great deal in quality. I suspect some problems with his vision as Titian and Turner show much the same retreat into inchoate yellow orange tones. With Rembrandt of course falling off in quality is a relative term, he was in my opinion one of the all time greats. What I dislike is the hijacking of this change in quality, probably brought about by diminuition of sight, as a harbinger of modernism. This was the final line of Shama’s spiel. I have heard this argument and commented on it in relation to Turner in earlier posts. In my opinion to take this view is deeply silly. None of these artists as far as I can see could have had any understanding or sympathy with what we call modernism. What we see in their works is physical decline not a new visionary conceptual direction.
This is well illustrated by this quote from a letter from Monet to Marc Elder, in 1922 He wrote, “in the end I was forced to recognize that I was spoiling them [the paintings], that I was no longer capable of doing anything good. So I destroyed several of my panels. Now I’m almost blind and I’m having to abandon work altogether. It’s hard but that’s the way it is: a sad end despite my good health!” . Yet these same canvasses are now held up as the artist making a bold step forwards towards abstraction. For Monet however they were a desparate struggle against increasing blindness. Why abstraction should so often be regarded as a step forward in this road to Damascus manner rather irritates me as abstraction has always been with us in one form or another and cannot really seen as step toward nirvana. There it is though, we are constantly assured that moving from representation to abstraction is like gaining adulthood and leaving the whimsy and the toys of childhood behind.
I have been rather distracted by building a studio in my new garden and the general hassle of relocating a hundred miles from London. It has been very frustrating seeing the countryside of Dorset looking very paintable while I was doomed to be wheeling barrows of concrete for foundations. Still I have managed a few bits and bobs. Also I have a fair few pictures in this exhibition at Bankside with the United society of Artists.
A tiny oil I snatched the time to paint, it is going to take a little while to adapt fully to doing pure landscape. The relative lack of people will be one of the greatest changes.
I did this in about 15 min on a damp foggy morning. Walking through the village to get my morning pint of milk was so magical that I had do rush out and try to catch it.
Briefly back in London to paint with the Brass monkeys. I am experimenting with different primes on my boards, this is wuite a rough one with marble dust in the acrylic gesso. Unusually I took this to a finish on site. oils 10in by 14in.
After making a mess of two looking down Whitehall I settled to paint Admiralty Arch, only about 45min for this little sketch but I was pleased with the feel. 8in by 10in oils.
I managed another quick excursion before heading back to the country. This is looking down Surrey St from Mary Le Strand. 10in by 14in oils.
I got up to London for a single day but just took my drawing stuff. It was a fantastic day around Parsons Green in Fulham, the low winter light is fantastic and you can draw or paint all day really. This is the New Kings Rd .
A very quick sketch on the way back to the station. This is the North end of Parsons Green. Pen and ink.
As my train wasn’t until 8pm I sat on the Thames South Bank and drew the Carousel. After doing a very rough pencil outline I got the figures in first, some are just sketched from passers by, and others cribbed from snaps on my iPhone. Much of the sky hatching I did on the train home! That’s it Posts will be a bit few and far between for a while but I shall still be snatching the odd chance to paint and draw.
Fantastic paintings and drawings Rob. All the best.
Vic
Comment by Vic — November 11, 2014 @ 7:32 pm
I look forward to seeing your West Country works Rob.
Comment by Doug Elliot — November 11, 2014 @ 7:33 pm
With this premise about failing eyesight I wonder what you think of the modern phenomenon of Blind or very nearly blind painters – who nevertheless command prices in five figures. The results of one I saw recently on Facebook and it led me to describe them with the S word – in the ensuing argument with two Neanderthal non painters who thought the daubs were REAL ART I had to block them which at least solved the problem I had that one of them had sometimes ‘liked’ my drawings but I guessed for all the wrong reasons since they were usually of young women with large breasts and he was in general postings a knee jerk Little England Fascist..
My point was not that the poor marginally sighted guy shouldn’t continue to paint if he feels like it but that work like that is a corporate operation – HIM, THE WIFE, HIS DAUGHTER AND THEIR FRIENDS – to get the daub into presentable condition to satisfy the Gallery. Then some rich idiot buys it and feels good when he shows it to friends…
Comment by ERNEST BARTON — November 12, 2014 @ 3:40 am
Hi Earnest, yes I saw that about the blind guy. I admired his courage but the paintings were not great… however they were better than many current artists who can see which says something!
Comment by Rob Adams — November 12, 2014 @ 9:54 am
Yes I am sure you are right and since I am somewhat troubled by blob floaters myself I may be oversensitive about the whole issue especially as very few people who see my work like it anyway… It would be interesting to know if he had not had the original operation 25 years ago if his sight might have actually lasted longer. These days their techniques are better. I think in Rembrandt’s time Cateract operations were actually performed but for a man in his 60’s then it might have seemed the risk was not worth it. I also watched the Hockney programme on the Camera Obscura again and found a lot of it plausible but some of it very dubious. He never explained that concave mirrors and simple convex lenses give marked distortion at angles way off the axis which would have limited the size they were capable of projecting at a reasonable sharpness . Also he waffled on about Effective Aperture without using the term or showing much evidence he understood it . Effective apurtures had to be small in the early days to keep the aberrations from showing too much. In the early days of photography this was still a problem – indeed there was one camera which used a concave mirror instead of a lens THE WOLCOTT but it only made Dageurrotypes one inch square – which were mounted in Lockets.
The other thing is all these techniques using lenses required a level of skill in tracing beyond the grasp of most artists now. I know from my own recent efforts that even simple tracing is actually quite difficult and then it has to be transferred to a canvas or board and corrected and fixed with tempera or shellac acrylic etc – at each stage requiring adjustments and corrections – which he of course never did ON SCREEN. Fox Talbot himself tried tracing with a Camera Obscura and made such a crude balls up of it he decided that a Chemical process might be better – and invented negative positive photography. So I find it all a bit GLIB and wanted to know more about Ghiberti and that transition to linear perspective – in the 14th century they started using ISOMETRIC projections for city pictures but this may have been simple seeing from the hills – everything becomes flat and you can copy what you see in a frame viewfinder. I suspect the romans probably did this but we have so few good Roman landscapes it is hard to know.
Comment by ERNEST BARTON — November 12, 2014 @ 1:46 pm
Odd though it may sound I think your recent Silhouette figures are much livelier than the full sunlit ones – perhaps a case of less is more – in fact the one of the girl in wedge heels striding across Surrey Street is practically a character study on its own.
Comment by ERNEST BARTON — November 12, 2014 @ 1:54 pm