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The source of inspiration

Statuesque, shapely, slim.

But that was not what made Ruby a fantasy come to life. Nor even her long brown hair that tumbled in heavy volumes, down, down her back to brush her bottom (a french plait, one of the reasons I have been put on this earth to experience). It was the fact that she was the personification of a painting done long before.

We worked together for many years and she inspired some of my favourite paintings around the eighties...

The funny thing is that I had been been painting Ruby for ten years before I met her. When I started painting full-time, the bulk of my work was fantasy. One theme dominated, a group of women who haunted the fringes of my dreams in a dark, mysterious landscape. Among them was one, a tall young woman with a long French plait, often on horseback.

The day Ruby first modeled for Sam and me was very hot. Holding a standing pose, I noticed a slight sway in her body, and started forward, catching her as she fainted. With a strange mixture of embarrassment, wonder, and gratitude that she wasn't hurt, I waited for her to recover, and we went back to work, but it is one of those moments that stay with us, as if the world is saying, "Just what is it going to take for you to understand?" Thoughts are things. Things and people enter our lives, like Dracula, never uninvited, but in answer to our visualisations, and unknown wishes.

At that moment, kneeling on the dusty wooden floor with a naked girl in my arms, I made no connection between my earlier work and Ruby, but over recent years, as I have come to see the links between thought and reality, it became clear that our world is created by our dreams, and a painting is nothing but an intensely held dream, held in consciousness often for months, even years.

This is beautifully described in Richard Bach's book "Illusions". As painters, though, as artists, we are daily creating, not only pictures, we are forming reality itself.

The feeling instrument

Harold Speed wrote an important little book around 1870, called "The Practice and Science Of Drawing". I am most impressed by his practical approach, as well as his fine feeling for artistic qualities, which is what the following quotation deals with.

"Thought and feeling are very intimately connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling...

"Pure intellect seeks to construct from the facts brought to our consciousness by the senses, an accurately measured world of phenomena, uncoloured by the human equation in each of us... It therefore invents mechanical instruments to do the measuring of our sense perceptions, as their records are more accurate than human observation unaided.

"But while in science observation is made much more effective by the use of mechanical instruments in registering facts, the facts with which art deals, being those of feeling, can only be recorded by the feeling instrument - man, and are entirely missed by any mechanically devised substitutes.

Portrait workshop

At the end of the month I shall be teaching a portrait workshop in Simon's Town. With more enrollments than I can accommodate, you will need to confirm that you will be attending.

The flash of beauty

Landscape painting reached a special level of popularity, both with artists and with the public, during the time of the Impressionists.

The joy of being out there in nature, often in rain or snow, always in wind and mostly with friends, is matchless.

But a lot of mediocre, even nasty work has been unleashed on the world, because suddenly, everybody is an artist, and the most highly prized skill is speed and "looseness". Art deserves more than a thick skin. It demands contemplation, consideration, composition, and all the skill we can muster. Monet did more than go and sit in nature. His Waterlilies are among the most calculated, composed, and multi-layered, and massive masterworks in history. Sargent, Turner, Constable, Mauve, Corot, Millais and Courbet, all wrought their landscape masterpieces in their studio. Their outdoor works were intended as studies.

The greatest skill in landscape work is to identify and to capture the flash of beauty.

Nature is perfect at every moment, but the artist can paint only one.

If we really feel the need to be out there in nature for a few hours, we have two options: we can do a series of 10 minute studies; or we can grasp hold of one moment of beauty, and hold on to it, essentially ignoring all the variations of light that take place before and around us, and working as if we were elsewhere, in a studio.

The best however, is to use the time for studies, to take them home, and then to develop and craft a truly considered painting.

The birth of Venus

The birth of Venus represents the dawning of beauty. In Uprising I propose a cycle of work taking beauty as its theme.

Website

http://artistvision.org/

Workshops

For details on workshops and classes in Cape Town and Europe, click here

The tea ceremony

I have often regretted the fact that unlike the Japanese we have no ceremonies, no zen activities.
But we do. Every garden is a Zen garden, and every cup of tea we make for another person is an act of love and grace.

The art of Ryno Swart