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Shoe-box
Digital cameras have made keeping records of paintings easy, but in the old days it was both difficult and expensive to photograph them. If you wanted any quality, slides were best, but very impractical. Recently I came across a shoe-box full of slides of some of my favourite paintings from decades ago. It cost a lot, but last week I had them all professionally scanned onto CDs, and now I can put them onto my website under a link appropriately named Shoe-Box. I'll be adding, slowly, week by week, the ones I like best. It is the weirdest thing, to see a painting that you had done and forgotten. The first thing is that you like it, not because it is so good, but because it is you. We all know how a smell can awaken memories... here we have colour and content and texture, not only seen by yourself, but crafted by your own hand. The sounds of VeniceOn a previous trip to Venice, I made a simple video recording of a very special moment. It goes a long way to expressing why people love this place so much. I have put it into my new website and you can share in it here. HighlightThe only thing we can see, is light. In the dark we are blind. This is why in painting I like to treat the shadows as a province of mystery: moody, veiled, orchestral; dark but luminous. Light is another thing altogether. The province of light is the garden of our visual delight. Colour, tone, texture, rhythm, atmosphere and mood, contrast, harmony; flare and flash and streak and slash; smudge and blur, smear and scratch. Hard and soft; crisp and lost. Every aspect of our world resonates with the music of vision. Rainbow and sunset, mist and stone delight our senses. Surfaces too... gold and bronze, siver and pearl. Then of course, there is skin. The ivory of the temple, the rose of the cheek, the blush of the lip; the hues of light are deeper and more resonant than we expect, like churchbells or the deep beautiful chords of the cello. Greatest of all, the highlight on the cheekbone, on the knee. The highlight is never white, always tinted, glowing with light. To make that one highlight sing, all other colours have to be orchestrated, rounded, muted, subjugated to its greater glory. It is no coincidence that the word highlight, apart from meaning the lightest point in a picture, also describes our greatest joy. July courseWith only two weeks left in the semester, now is the time to register for the next semester, starting on 20th July. |
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