Break it up.

Human lives are more important than art, that should be stated right away, and the killing currently going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is the worst thing about ISIS.  Some will try to make out that this tumult is somehow the west's fault and that we should take the blame for these deaths, and we certainly should take responsibility for some of them.  But this fighting is purely ideogical in the way that the Nazi's would have recognised and it was foisted on us.  You'll have quite a job on you're hands to defend the ideogical position of ISIS and even they can only begin to do it through the bizarre filter of their own particular version of Islam.  

Our own mourning of so many human lives can only be from a distance, as rightly only close family and friends can properly grieve over these deaths, but what about the death of art?  Recently reports that ISIS were in the northern parts of Iraq made me mindful of the location of the ancient city of Nineveh which was thought to be a Biblical metaphor as late as the 1820's until it was re-discovered by the brilliant proto-archaeologist Sir Henry Austin Layard towards the end of the 1840's.  Layard's life is one that rewards research and for sheer 'real life adventure thrills' reads like pages from the thousand and one nights.

Winged 'Lamassu' or gate guardian.  From Khorsabad.  Wikipedia commons.

Luckily much that was found at Nineveh is now sitting in various western museums.  ISIS have been judicious in their choices of which monuments to attack and are obviously using this as a means of goading the west, as if only western people really care about these things.  But of course they have managed to terrify their own people into acquiescence.  Their most recent war crime against world heritage sites has been in Palmyra, as it has come to light that a few days ago they blew up the Baalshamin temple (see at top of page) that has stood for two thousand years.  When you take the path of destroying art, you have taken the first step to complete perdition.  The idea of this kind of destruction is the hallmark of the true barbarian, after all where can you go from there?  What kind of society can you hope to build?  A drab dull one dimensional dullard society.  What miserable wretches.

However, we in the west shouldn't forget when we too were art destroying wretches and vandals of the worst persuasion.  Britain's civil war period and its aftermath was a bad time for art, for in a very similar way to those of ISIS, the average British puritan of the seventeenth century saw Idolatry wherever they looked.  And much of what they looked at ended up in pieces.   And then of course, a hundred and fifty years or so before was the reformation.  Scarcely a church or monastery in Britain escaped some kind of damage, and many of the ecclesiastic buildings (like the priory in my home town) were left in ruins.

A lot of the sculptures of saints that line the walls of Wells Cathedral were lost to vandalism, but this set of huddled saints who all look as if they're having a quick cigarette out the back managed to survive.  Wikipedia commons.

 During the period of Charles the Second's reign country people began attacking the stone circle of Avebury, breaking up the stones with sledgehammers and crowbars.  Stone circles might not strictly be termed 'art' but their destruction by the people is a pretty good litmus test for the prevailing mood.  Much of Avebury still survives as it is one of the largest such structures in Europe, but many of it's stones were broken into rubble  through a combination of a need for building material and ignorant religious zealotry.

And then there's the vandalism of the French revolution, where revolutionary hardliners who were convinced that the church represented the ancien régime and all that was outmoded and anti revolutionary (they were probably right there) attacked all church buildings and their fabric, just as we did during the reformation.  They damaged or totally destroyed at least twenty buildings that were probably artistic treasures, the most valuable of which was the Church Abbey of Cluny, the largest church building in all Europe.  They began their attacks in 1790, and eventually almost all of it was demolished in 1810, although one tower still survives.  Watch the video below for a beautiful 3D animation walkthrough recreating this lost monument.

  

Another crime committed by the revolutionaries was the attack on the beautiful medieval sculptural group known as 'The Well of Moses' by Claus Sluter.  The hexagonal plinth section which depicts various biblical patriarchs such as Moses (hence the name) was left fairly intact, but the revolutionaries vented their spleen on the crucifixion on top of the plinth.  They destroyed the cross, most of the Christ, and all of a figure of Mary Magdalane that stood at the foot of the cross.  Today, fragments of the Christ figure exist, the head, shoulders and upper torso, enough to see that it matched the fine quality of the work on the plinth.

The Well of Moses by Claus Sluter.  Wikipedia commons

 We are certainly living in dark times, possibly not since the Second World War have they been so dark, and so we should keep in mind something my Grandfather always said, 'those that can't make will always break.'  So if you see anyone anytime soon taking a sledgehammer to a work of art - then run for the hills or stand and fight.  Whichever you feel is the appropriate response.

Picture of Baalshamin temple Wikipedia commons.

My Website

Zazzle

Lets go Dutch

Van Dyke.  From the triple portrait of Charles the First.

I've long been an admirer of Anthony van Dyke (1599 - 1641) and in the spirit of my previous statements that any aspiring artist should copy pictures, I remember copying a wonderful portrait by van Dyke of Cornelius van der Geest.  I'm not now sure when I copied it and I almost certainly didn't keep the results, but keeping the thing isn't exactly the point.  It's what you learn during the process that counts.

Van der Geest (1577 - 1638) was a spice merchant who used his wealth to finance artists and build up a huge collection of now famous works of art by the likes of Matsys, van Eyck and Rubens.  The portrait of van der Geest is well worth making a copy of, but unless you're truly skilled its unlikely you'll accomplish much for the painting is a tour de force of portraiture.

It hits off van der Geest's peering, almost hesitant demeanour perfectly, the moisture on his lips and his eyes give it life and immediacy.  It's almost as if he's just turned his head to you on hearing his name spoken.  You can't doubt that this portrait really looked like the sitter, it's as close to a seventeenth century photograph as you'll get.

Cornelis van der Geest, by Sir Anthony van Dyke.

It must have been a shock for artists in Britain when in 1620 van Dyke first knocked on the countries door and began painting the rich patrons who had been active in encouraging him to visit London.  The kings court painter at the time, a Dutchman named Daniel Mytens who had gained great favour, seemed stiff and formal in his painterly approach when compared with the newcomer.  Van Dyke of course had the best start, having been taught his art by Peter Paul Rubens who was famous throughout Europe and had also visited London to great acclaim.  The artist stayed nine months and King Charles the First was so pleased with his work that he knighted Rubens, and commissioned work from him on his return to his home city of Antwerp. 

Sir Anthony van Dyke with Sir Endymion Porter.  Porter (1587 - 1689), seen in the light coloured clothing was an agent and political diplomat.

On his arrival in London, King Charles knighted van Dyke almost immediately probably in hopes of encouraging him to stay in Britain.  It was well known that he had received his training from Rubens and that Rubens believed him to be his best pupil.  He was just the kind of painter that Charles wanted at court because he was not only extremely accomplished but new, and like most monarchs, Charles wanted his court to be seem as fashionable and as worldly as possible.

Portrait of James Hamilton 1st Duke of Hamiliton by Daniel Mytens.

Mytens was capable of producing a good portrait, his best is perhaps that of James Hamilton 1st Duke of Hamilton, but he could see the way things were going when most of his cliental left to be painted by van Dyke.  Maybe Mytens was a little too early being on the cusp of the transition between James the First (he did in fact paint this king) and Charles the First and he didn't have time to evaluate the new approach quickly enough.   Along came van Dyke and starts producing images that showed men and women as graceful charming creatures, whose expensive taste in clothing the artist seemed able to represent like no other painter.  Certainly not Mytens, who, poor soul, returned to the Netherlands to continue his career on a slightly less elevated plane.

All these Dutch painters were the foundation of future British art, and it might probably be said that a great native British artist didn't emerge until the eighteenth century.  However we shouldn't forget William Dobson (1611 - 1646), active during the late van Dyke period and into the civil war.   He is a pretty dam good painter with little of the Dutch influence about his work, and once van Dyke was dead became more obvious to the court as a great painter in his own right.
 

The gangs all here. Portraits by William Dobson.  At left: Sir Endymion Porter.  He gets everywhere doesn't he?  At right the subjects are (from the left) Nicholas Lanier (1588 - 1666), Dobson himself, and Sir Charles Cottrell. (1615 - 1701)

Born in London the antiquary John Aubrey said of him that he was 'the most excellent painter that England has yet bred'.  He is supposed to have been discovered by van Dyke but there is no evidence to uphold this.  After van Dyke's death and the start of the civil war Dobson did well, painting numerous cavaliers and supporters of the king, but once the king was gone however his fortunes waned and he fell into debt, dieing at the young age of thirty six.

Dobson should be up there with the best of them, native born and with a feel to his work that is as vital and attractive as anything by Rubens or van Dyke. 

My Website 

Zazzle

The great struggle to finish.

I've painted and drawn all my life, and I've long realised that sometimes no matter how well you plan, however many rough sketches you do - things start to go wrong.  And I also know that sometimes you can produce pretty good work with little preparation, almost as if by magic.  And it's difficult to know what happened in either case.

Sometimes you can exhaust your commitment to a project by working and re-working the design over too many times.  For instance if I design a picture with a number of figures and other elements in the background, I sometimes find myself redrawing each figure over and over so that when I come to paint the finished image I can get it right quickly.  I suppose it's like an actor rehearsing a role over and over so as to be as good as possible on the night.  But I often get to the stage where I've done the drawing so many times it starts to feel stale not sharp, and I get so sick of it that my enthusiasm wanes.

But I keep doing it because experience and common sense tells me that the finished result should be better if I've 'rehearsed' the thing.  If you don't put in that extra work the whole thing is liable to go awry.  But that extra work can also be the thing that bores you to a standstill.  It might, I suppose be something to do with my bad technique which has been largely self taught, and therefore lacking in system.

The Shrimp Girl by William Hogarth. (1697 - 1764)  This fine work was once lauded as an impressionist painting before the fact, but its free handling is really all due to its being unfinished.  Why is it unfinished?  Only Hogarth knew the answer to that.  Wikipedia Commons.

Uncertainty must also play its part in this, because if you know your drawing is sound because your training is good then maybe you don't feel constrained to re-draw it so many times.  However the scores of great drawing studies by famous artists show they always did the groundwork, and made superb studies that are works of art in themselves.

  But there are still a lot of unfinished paintings out there.  Like books and musical compositions often they're not finished because of that old excuse - death, however there are a lot of paintings that were left unfinished for various reasons ranging from the artist falling out with the sitter of a portrait or the patron who had commissioned a work suddenly changing their mind about the cost half way through the work.

Jacques Louis David (1748 - 1825)  Madame Récamier.  I think this seems finished enough for a Neo Classic painting.  They're meant to be spartan.  Jean Auguste Dominic Ingres (1780 - 1867) painted the lamp stand.  Wikipedia Commons.

J. L. David is supposed to have left his portrait of Madame Récamier unfinished because he felt insulted that she had invited another artist, Gerard to paint her, because David was taking so long.  It was reported that she liked Gerard's painting better.  David wrote her a letter stating that just as ladies had their whims, so did artists, and that he would leave the painting unfinished.  But is it really unfinished?  It has the sharp emptiness that the Neo Classic artists valued, its simple and elegant.  Even that scumbling that you see in the background, usually a sign that the artist has only just placed in the undercoat doesn't mean much with David who often used that approach for his backgrounds.

Gustav Klimt (1864 - 1918)  The Bride.  One of a number of uncompleted paintings found in his studio at his death.  Wikipedia Commons.

Death prevented Klimt from completing a number of works.  He had a stroke which put him in hospital partly paralysed and according to the account by Alessandra Comini while he was in hospital burglars broke into his studio and were confronted by these large paintings still on their easels and in various stages of completion.  He had painted the naked figures and had begun to paint patterned clothing over them.  Comini imagined the burglars in the darkness of the studio, bemused by these strange visions as they came to light before their torches.  

This was 1918, the year the First World War ended, but also the year the terrible influenza epidemic began, killing almost as many across the world as the war itself had done.  And Klimt in his weakened state did not escape it.

The one unsettling note is that these artists only left work unfinished with a good reason, whereas I seem to find it harder to finish paintings now I'm older than I did when young.  I tell myself that its because the better I am the more exacting I have become and that it all takes longer.  Nothing to do with laziness then.

Website

Zazzle

Under the influence.

When I was seventeen I saw a copy of Alessandra Comini's Book on Gustav Klimt.  It was the first time he had come to my attention and that magical effect that I was talking about the week before last took hold of me again, where you are swept along by an artists work and just can't get enough.

I think most people aren't all that interested in art, so they experience the same effect through popular music, and the following of a particular band or singer but it is essentially the same thing.  You become a super fan.  A young artist might follow bands as well, but a really interesting artist will grab their attention in a very special way.

Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918)  photographed by Josef Anton Trĉka.  Wikipedia commons.

Klimt was one of the artists I copied, and learned huge amounts from the study of his work.  He's usually known for his 'gold paintings' but I was as aware of his drawings and poster designs as the paintings.  I particularly liked the Comini book because it was an economically produced colour book - that actually had gold effect printing so that the images of the paintings could really be appreciated, which I suppose for 1977, was pretty adventurous for a publisher.  It seems to have been a success because Klimt's present popularity seems to stem from this books publication.

Comini compared Klimt's Pallas Athena (left) favourably with a similar painting by a contemporary Franz Stuck (1863 - 1928).  Klimt's is great and more inventive, but I still Like Stuck's.  Both Images - Wikipedia commons.

For about five years I drew and painted Klimt inspired work until I finally got him out of my system.  It's quite possible that I paint less well now, I won't dispute it and I still think he's great but an influence like that is like having artistic measles.  Its effect is quite obvious.

I mentioned in that last blog how strong the influence of H. R. Giger (1940 - 2014) has been on young artists after 1979, and the introduction of his work to a wider audience through his production designs for the film 'Alien'.  Again I caught the bug, but this time I had a stronger immunity.  Still, it didn't stop me buying the book on the production of the film, a second book 'Giger's Alien' and his book of posters and other designs, 'Necronimicon'.

H. R. Giger.  Biomechanical Landscape (Detail).  One of my favourite works by this artist, and I think one of his most successful.  Here's someone's generic photograph of it.  It's not from a poster site!  Click on it to see Giger's own website.

  But the influence on my own work didn't last anywhere near as long.  I'm not suggesting he's not a worthy artist, but his work is so dark and dank, after a prolonged exposure to it you feel like you're sitting in someones rubbish filled cellar watching water run down the walls.  Having said that, Giger's work can certainly shake you up when you see it for the first time, and make you realise new possibilities.

I suppose that being aware of the strength of influence that some artist may have on your art is essential, but is also challenging because to improve and grow you have to be aware of and be exposed to different approaches and styles.

On the face of it I think they are two strangely different artists to have developed a liking for in the space of a few years, Klimt with his ethereal lovelies and ornate decoration, and Giger with his brutal industrialised images of biomechanical hell.  But then - that's the teenage years for you.  All those hormones make you jittery.  So that's what I was under the influence of all along.

 Website

Zazzle

Bits and pieces.

In keeping with the Roman tombstone blog of a couple of weeks ago I'd like to share some work I did a while back concerning a reconstruction of a Roman auxiliary cavalry helmet.  It wasn't done for anything in particular, except that I find such things interesting and like to study them.

In the UK we have a rich historical past and that means plenty of archaeology that needs intricate study in the labs of museums up and down the country, and plenty more still in the ground just waiting to be discovered.  Recently a couple of Roman cavalry helmets have come to light in Britain and I have concentrated on a helmet found in a place called Hallaton in Leicestershire.

A cavalry sports helmet found at Ribchester in Lancashire in 1796.  It would originally have been silvered.  Wikipedia commons.

It was found in 2000 through the efforts of Ken Wallace, a member of the Hallaton field walking group, and the pieces were dug out of the ground still in blocks of earth and spent the next nine years at the British Museum where they were conserved.  The helmet is now on permanent display at the Harborough museum in Market Harborough.

The Hallaton helmet in Harborough museum.  Wikipedia commons

It's of a type called a 'cavalry sports helmet' quite a number of which have been discovered around the Roman world, and would have been used in ceremonial events and in certain kinds of military sports displays.  Probably manufactured in the early 1st century AD it is made of sheets of iron, and would have originally been given a silvered surface, and  been covered with extensive embossed decoration.  Some of this detail has survived, but a lot was badly damaged so part of the game here is to closely scrutinise photographs taken when the helmet was still covered in dirt and see if something can be made of them.

Hallaton helmet cheek guard showing detail of mounted officer with a winged victory.  Wikipedia commons/the author

One of the cheek guards, the left one, was in a reasonable state of preservation and a figure of a general or possibly an emperor can be seen in the typical formulaic Roman manner, riding a horse over the prone body of a barbarian.  This was fairly easy to visualise as most of it was still there, but the front of the crown of the helmet was a sad ruin.  Something of a female head and shoulders portrait can be made out just above the face of the wearer, but most of the top of the head and face of this portrait is missing.

The female portrait at the front of the helmet.  Probably a Roman goddess or local deity.  Wikipedia commons.

As this is very badly eroded only the general sense of the original can be gleaned from study of photographs. So a certain amount of speculation has to be indulged in, and a certain amount of  - yes invention.  The portrait is probably of a Roman goddess possibly Victory, or a local deity.  We all know more or less what a Roman/Greek goddess looks like where statues are concerned.  I'm sure the ancient Romans/Greeks could tell the difference pretty easily, and professors of Roman/Greek history can properly lecture on the ways and means of telling them apart, but to most of us they are fairly similar in look.

And of course all we have to work with here is a head and shoulders. On very close examination you can just make out that she has some plaits of hair hanging at each side of the head, and is wearing some kind of tunic, the creases of which are still just visible.  On either side of the portrait are two lions with prey, in the above image you can just make out the head of a ram on the left of the picture.  These things are heavily eroded and again much imagination was needed to realise these figures, but my own scrutiny of the photographs lead me to believe that the lion is lying down and not on it's haunches as I've seen in other reconstructions.  However they are the experts and have actual access to the real helmet so I'm happy to concede that I am probably wrong. 

So here is my two penn'uth, and it's about as close as I can get without actually seeing the real helmet.  Why did I bother?  As an exercise in drawing and understanding, all part of an artist/illustrators work. 

My website

My Zazzle page