The perils of painting over the top of finished work

I have a big exhibition coming up this month here in France.  That is, it feels big to me, because I seem to have been preparing for it for weeks.  It will be the first time I have had a proper exhibition of my work here and for that reason I suppose it is somewhat more nerve wracking than usual !  Mind you up until a month ago I had been quite laid back about it. Of course, I thought, I had loads of work ready….but needless to say when it came to looking at it again, it wasn’t that simple !

Part of the challenge this time is exhibiting with two other ‘Brits’ who are really very good, begging the question : is my work going to stand up beside theirs ? And so when I got down to getting the work out to see what I was going to exhibit, my heart sank and I was into some knock out rounds once again with my obnoxious internal critic who was naturally having a field day making unhelpful comments like : « huh, call yourself an artist !  Who’s going to look twice at this lot ! etc » 

That’s when things could have got a bit tricky, as I decided that I didn’t have nearly enough work I was remotely happy with and didn’t have time to produce anything new - so it boiled down to that old chestnut : « What can I alter ?» Well, that can be fatal, but many’s the artist who has fallen prey to that particular vice. And no, it doesn’t always work, in fact quite often it is the exact opposite, particularly, if you keep a photographic record of your work and looking back realise that what you had before was actually inifinitely better.

To give you an idea of some of the dramatic changes that have been taking place, the image at the top of this page used to look like this:

 and here's another one that moved from hot to cold:

But perhaps even more extreme, this image from a blog I wrote in March has transformed into something quite different and still niggles me! 

New pastures to refresh the imagination

We just returned from a wonderful road trip down into the very deep south of Spain as far as Cordoba.  Starting out from our home in France, we travelled along the south side of the Pyrenees, almost to Cantabria, along stunning mountain roads. We saw huge Eagles soaring above us and then, as we headed down onto the plains, found storks sitting in their huge, ungainly nests that are perched precariously on top of church towers and electric pylons.

We were travelling in the footsteps of the Moors and the early Sephardic Jewish community, staying in wonderful medieval castles and wandering the streets of old towns like Siguenza, Cuenca and Toledo.  But what left its mark on me more than anything else was the incredibly diverse and majestic countryside we passed through.  From the brilliant colours of La Mancha where the earth is a deep terracotta red contrasting with the vivid green of the spring wheat fields that takes your breath away, to hundreds of acres of regimented olive trees covering every spare inch of land in the countryside of Andalucia just to the South of Cordoba.

 

When we came back I started to draw some very simple little ink impressions that this wonderful trip had imprinted on my memory and from those drawings I have produced a few small canvasses, which condense some of those memories.  Semi abstract and completely different from the large-scale mountain paintings I have been doing since Christmas, these pieces have given me enormous pleasure.  

For me experimenting like this is absolutely vital for refreshing my creative energy. 

Arriving back where I started

‘We shall not cease from exploration/ and the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.'

T.S. Eliott Four Quartets

'Seeing the Light' - oil on canvas 90 x 90 (cms) combination of the two styles

So, as you know if you read the last blog, I spent January and February shut away in the studio determined to change the way I paint.  Persuaded by my bossy internal critic that a ‘looser style’ of painting would somehow make my work more ‘valid’, I set out to produce a series of paintings looking at how light affects the mountains. At the same time I challenged myself to work purely from memory of what I see around me here in the mountains.

The work took a long time and went through numerous changes in pursuit of these goals.  I really was not enjoying myself: “so much the better,” said the critic, “art should be a struggle!”.

After 8 weeks, I had completed two paintings.  I stood back and looked at them.  I felt absolutely nothing.  No sense of completion, satisfaction, mission accomplished, simply the reverse.  I did not like this work.  It simply wasn’t ‘me’.

I was very bad tempered for several days!  What a failure, what a hopeless, mediocre painter I was! Then, trawling the internet, I came across the work of Polly Townsend, mountain explorer and artist.  Here was somebody’s work that spoke to me straight away.  Wonderful paintings, full of energy, form, strength, individuality – this was work that I related to, that really inspired me.  Polly’s work has elements of what really fascinates me – the patterns and contours in a landscape.

And so here I am back where I started. I have left one of my ‘misty mountain’ paintings to remind me not to travel too far away from my own style again, but to stay true to the journey I am on, to keep on working at it and see what materializes as time goes by.  The change was too extreme, it was stressful and far too un-familiar. Whilst the creative journey is often scary and difficult, I am convinced that it should at least give you a sense of excitement, and hopefully, from time to time a sense of achievement.  

The Challenge of Change

© Early one morning 90 x 90 Oil on canvas

Psychotherapists and gurus of all persuasions regularly focus on our reluctance to change, even though we claim that we want our lives to be different: happier, better, more fulfilling.  Something isn’t working, change it and you’ll feel better. Sounds easy doesn’t it?

For most of us working as full time artists, I think the challenge of change is fundamental to our development. It seems to me that the constant search for new ways to express ourselves is what makes the journey so exciting, but at the same time, just as changing the pattern of an unsatisfactory life is scary, so too is taking a leap into the unknown in the realms of creativity.

When I started painting full time 6 years ago, I seemed to find a style and voice very quickly, using vibrant colour and focussing on pattern whether in landscape or still life. The work went well, I felt some satisfaction in what I was producing and quite quickly found that I was selling my paintings whenever I exhibited.  Then gradually, the initial interpretation changed, I became more focussed on the quality of the application of the paint and less on creating pretty pictures. 

Recently – as you have seen from my previous blog I put all the work of the last 6 years together in a book.  It seemed to me when I had done it, that somehow I was making a statement: ‘this is the end of an era.  It is where I am now but not where I want to be in the future’

At the same time I warned my followers on facebook that I was going to delete the page.  I wanted to give myself sufficient time to experiment without pressure to show off my work.  I decided I would not exhibit this year I just wanted to paint.  But while change is happening, the world doesn’t stand still and in the ‘sods law’ way of things, no sooner had I set out on this course than I had several invitations to exhibit this year and the facebook page … well, maybe I’ll re-consider!

But in the meantime, I have been working in a very different way, even though that has resulted in chasing paint around the canvas for the past two months. Journeying but never quite arriving!  I have been working from images in my head rather than from drawings or photographs.  I am relying on memories of how the light looks as the dawn comes up on the mountains; trying to keep the brush work loose and focussed without tightening up; restricting the colours on my palette.  At times this is proving a painful experience as the effect I am trying to achieve continues to elude me, but through pursuing this very different approach to my work I hope I will discover something with substance to move me on.

Re-published my Book

Following my last post, I have just found that I could re-publish my book with over double the number of pages for the same price. The preview below shows the first 23 pages:

Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

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Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

A New Year in the Studio and Marking a Period of work

Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

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Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

I have put a book together to mark a four year period of work that started in 2006.  In a way I rather hope it will act as a milestone - the end of one phase and the beginning of another.  I have been feeling a need to change, to say more in my work and with the start of the new year, it is on my 'bucket list'!  (Ref: a great film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman).

In other words, until now I have found it hard to focus on what it is that I want my paintings to 'say' about landscape. Yesterday I was walking with a painter friend high up on a ridge in the mountains near my home surrounded by staggering views in every direction.  We kept stopping just to breathe in the air, to marvel at the vast landscape of rock under the brilliant blue Mediterranean sky and  to listen to the silence that is so special in this part of the world.  We had been talking about what my friend was searching for in her work and it was at that moment that I knew what I had to focus on in mine.

I suppose that subconsciously an artist's voice is already expressing something about their feelings when they paint, however what I am looking for is a way to communicate to others a profound love of the natural world that I have had since childhood.  It feels particularly important today in light of so many environmental challenges that we are all facing, that I make some small contribution by sharing that sense of wonder, peace, stillness or simply sheer joy of being alive that comes from being somewhere wild and beautiful.

I know I haven't captured those elements to my own satisfaction in my work so far, so this year I'm going for it - I'll share the journey with you as I go along.

Bonfire of the vanities: destroying sub standard work

Home Thoughts from Abroad 

oil on canvas 100 x 100

I know an artist who resolutely burns much of her old work.  When I first started out I was very shocked when she told me this, particularly as the pieces she was destroying seemed beautiful to me at that time. Now I understand her actions only too well. 

Recently I visited an old friend who was among the first to buy my work and there was the painting she had bought hanging on the dining room wall.  I cringed - had I really thought that piece was sufficiently good to exhibit and with a relatively high price tag ?  The fact that my friend loves her painting is irrelevant, my pride is at stake !  I can see everything that was wrong with it now and know that my work has improved considerably since those early days.

Most of us who paint are our own harshest critics, never truly satisfied with what we have produced and spurred on by the idea that one day we will paint something ‘really good’!  The trouble is, that producing a piece of work can take days and sometimes weeks for really very little financial reward in view of the hours put in to its creation, so the temptation is to sell those pieces that don’t work at a knock down price in order to have more pennies to put into the materials fund.  But at the end of the day when you come face to face with a piece of sub standard work that you created do you really want your name on that for others to see when you know you can produce something so much better?

I suspect this feeling would apply to several of the great painters in art history.  Leafing through those coffee table books of images I have certainly come across work by the 'greats' of the art world that I know is simply in print because they produced it, but let’s face it, they too were human even if they are considered the gods of the art world – surely they must have had their bad days just like the rest of us?

Unfortunately, the more I paint, the more critical I become, so these days I do have quite a reject pile, but come what may I have decided to start 2011 off with a new tradition.  I am going to destroy my less than good work on the first day of January and take it to the tip for recycling!

Happy Holidays to you all and my thanks for reading these blogs and for your patience as they only emerge when I have something I really feel strongly about.