Judith I Bridgland

Affordable Art Fair, Battersea

2012-03-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

The first UK-based Affordable Art Fair of the year kicks off at Battersea Park in London on Thursday.

It has a casual tents-in-a-park setting and a price tag of everything under £4000, and the whole experience is designed to take the stuffiness out of buying art. You can even take your dog for a walk in the park and then take it to the art fair (it might not appreciate the colours though).

There are now 18 Affordable Art Fairs worldwide, from Rome, Amsterdam and Stockholm to New York, Melbourne, Mexico City, Singapore and soon even Delhi. They were founded in 1999 by Will Ramsay of Will's Art Warehouse, with the ethos that art is for all, and should be within the reach of everyone's pockets.

The fair at Battersea runs until Sunday, and you can find out more at the Affordable Art Fair website.

I have work on Stand D1 with Duncan R Miller.

Last week of 'Between Tides'

2012-03-12T04:37:00.000-07:00

It's the final week of my exhibition in London.

It's always a big thrill to have a show in the capital, and it's rather sad that it's nearly over, with no more solo shows until 2013. That seems such a long time away!

Against all the current economic odds, the show has pretty much been a complete sell-out, which is fantastic news. Especially popular have been paintings of the west coast of Scotland with the white sands around Morar, the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland, and autumn trees at Green Park in London.

All the work is still on display in the gallery, and there are still a few are available for sale, including this one.

Curve of White Sand, Morar (Oil on linen 24 x 26)

'Curve of White Sand, Morar' was painted at the beach at Camusdarach on the 'Road to the Isles'. From the amazing pink and white sands, you can see right out to the islands of Rhum, Eigg and Skye. Because of the pale sands underneath reflecting the light, the sea is the most amazing colours of green and turquoise as it rolls in over the beach. It's an amazing place to be, and one which has a great sense of freshness and openness. There's usually hardly anyone else around on the beach.

It's great to have had such a wonderful response to the show. Perhaps the Hockney exhibition up the road from the gallery has had a positive influence on people's appreciation of brightly-coloured landscapes!

A Bigger Picture - David Hockney Exhibition Part 2

2012-03-09T05:18:00.000-08:00

Just as we are coming into spring itself here, so you progress through the seasons in the massive Hockney exhibition.

I left you earlier in the week half way through the show - now, in Room 7, is the explosion of Hawthorn Blossom with the depiction of what Hockney calls 'Action Week'.

David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 6 2009 (oil on canvas, 60 x 72)

I wasn't so keen on these pictures, although Hockney obviously found the experience of the hedgerows and lanes bursting forth with frothy, creamy fullness and the whole expulsion of bounty a very... exciting experience. Instead of delicate forms, the resulting foam-laden branches take on the guise of sea-creatures, writhing about in an agitated manner like some over-inflated Roger Dean stage set.

Room 8 is Trees and Totems, and the mood changes to one of the cycle of life, and to death and decay. Hockney takes something almost insignificant, a dead tree stump in the woods near Woldgate, and turns it into an iconically massive motif.


David Hockney Winter Timber 2009, oil on 15 canvases (36 x 48" each) 108 x 240"

There it is on the right side of Winter Timber, right on the golden section, dividing up the painting into parts with two completely different eyelines. Here are quick, fluid brushtrokes in purple, cadmium yellow, coerillium and viridian. In further paintings, the truncated form of the 'totem' becomes a motif of the inevitability of death, like Rembrandt's flayed ox. Given that Hockney himself is not in the first flush of youth, it is quite a potent image.

There are also some lovely, lyrical charcoal drawings in this room, drawn from observation and uncluttered by colour. Like most of Hockney's work, they have little sky, but a lovely rhythmic balance of light and dark.

David Hockney 'Cut Trees' 2008

The Arrival of Spring fills room 9 (4 more to go, but I didn't know this at the time as, in the scrum to get in, I hadn't been given my included-in-the-price guidebook).

In this room are 51 prints from an i-Pad and one large painting. Hockney uses his i-Pad as an image-making tool, and in planning the final prints as large-scale, so makes adjustments to colour and form that are needed for the change in scale and mdeium from hand-held i-Pad to Royal Academy wall. It's no wonder this room has a sense of theatricality - Hockney used to design stage sets, and indeed, built a stage-set model of the Royal Academy with miniature print-outs of all the paintings for the planning of the layout of the show.

Here is Hockney, with his painting The Arrival of Spring, as big as a theatrical backdrop.

But centre stage is the drama of nature, like a technicolour Judy Garland musical. The pictures are dated, so you follow through the coming of spring from the almost undetectable to the blazing fanfare, in sometimes almost shimmeringly 3D paintings.

The focus is down on the vegetation, rather than the sky, and all this bursting, undulating, writhing force of nature is strangely contained within their little rectangular boxes. There are no people in the paintings, although there are cars and road-signs and some ruined buildings. There are reminders of people, like some post-apocalyptic world where nature has taken over. This contrasts strangely with the heaving hurly burly of humanity that fills the Royal Academy trying to look at these paintings. None of them featured in the Hockney's miniature stage-set of the show.

Feeling that the show has reached a certain climax, you do wonder what could possibly be next. Room 10 is The Sermon on the Mount, which is not my favourite work. This is a painting by 17th Century French artist Claude Lorraine, which Hockney has digitally 'spring cleaned' and then reinterpreted on a huge scale. What you are faced with is Christ giving a directive from a massive throbbing red edifice, like Tatlin's Tower, or a giant carrot.

Once you think 'giant carrot', you just can't take it seriously, especially when you are so tired, so hot, and have been jostled to bits by fellow visitors for a couple of hours by now.

Then it's on to films. Or it would be, if you could get anywhere near them. The rooms are packed, so you can't just leisurely stroll in, sit down in the middle, and enjoy the multi-screen experience as it is meant to be viewed.

Hockney strapped small video cameras on to apparatus and drove down country lanes to take films of the countryside and hedgerows from multiple viewpoints, which are then projected onto multiple screens.

Each is a different experience of the same thing, a different bit of time. There are other films, including one in an office, and some flexible young men and furniture, but I could only see them from a very oblique angle near the doorway.

With the end in sight, and the smell of the gift shop in my nostrils, it was a quick dash through Yosemite at the end, and out into the piles of catalogues. "This place just gives me a headache," sighed the gift shop lady behind the counter, "All the people. All the heat. All day."

It's a truly amazing exhibition. It has to be seen to be believed, and it catapults landscape into the 21st century as a vast multi-media, multi-experience, great cutting-edge visceral roaring thing that is at the very heart of life itself.

Hockney makes landscape into the most important thing you could ever, ever have a painting about. Not all of it is great. Not all of it is stuff you'd want to have in your front room. But at 74 years old, it's hats off to the sheer human energy and dynamism of this plain-speaking visionary man.

If you're like to watch a 3-minute gallop through the show, then you can watch The Telegraph's art critic Alistair Sooke in this video, which is part of his on-line review of the show.

Telegraph review of David Hockney with video

A Trip to Morecambe

2012-03-08T03:49:00.000-08:00

Last year I was back in Morecambe on several occasions to take photos.

It has a wonderful seafront, which has been done up in recent years, with lots of playful statues of seabirds (including some by Glasgow sculptor Shona Kinloch) and really nice details of seashells in the paving.

It's always great to be by the sea. When the tide is in, you get all the drama of the white-topped waves crashing against the shore, and when the tide is out, you get all the wonderful subtle colours of the wide expanse of sand, with all the purples, lilacs and burnt siennas. There are lots of beautifully-shaped boats that lie on the mud and provide points of colour.

The sky is very big, and there are the hills of the Lake District in the far distance. There's also the newly-repoened Midland Hotel, which is an art deco treat, like a classic ocean-going liner. It has work by Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious, and the most amazing rug in the foyer by Marion Dorn.

Several of my paintings from Morecambe are currently in my London show. This is Boats at Low Tide, Morecambe, which has a lot of textural impasto paint at the bottom right hand side to give the sense of the rocks.

Boats at Low Tide, Morecambe (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

Because the bay has such a lovely wide sweep, I used my largest size of canvas for this.

Sweep of the Bay, Morecambe (Oil on linen, 32 x 48)

And finally a much smaller painting.

Lone Boat, Morecambe (Oil on linen, 12 x 12)

Sculpture completed...

2012-03-07T04:56:00.000-08:00

Thought you might like to have a look at the sculpture that I finished at Art School last night.

You might remember that this involved casting myself in plaster using a large sheet of hessian and a lot of clingfilm (not pleasant), and that it originally liked like the Grim Reaper, which wasn't my intention at all. This is how it began...

However, with the addition of a proper armature, inner plaster core section, and following a lot of work refining the surface and some finishing touches, here it is.

Not the most scenic of surroundings - it is a casting workshop - but you get the idea.

The piece has flowers and butterflies bursting out from inside the inner folds of the garment.

The butterflies are on wires, so that they move.

I then had a battle on my hands to wrap the thing up and get it back to the studio - at 6 foot tall, and heavier than a small planet, it wasn't the easiest item I've ever had to transport. However, with the help of my tutor, the rest of the class, and some sheer brute force, I managed to wrestle it into submission!

Canvasses

2012-03-06T02:25:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd say a word about my canvasses.

With conservation in mind, it is good practice to use the best possible support for an oil painting, especially when you hope that it will last for perhaps a few hundred years!

Because of the textural quality of my work, I use Belgian linen canvas rather than cotton duck, as it is a better support for thicker paint and longer lasting. I have my canvasses made for me by Bird and Davis in London.

This is the back of the canvas, where you can see the natural colour and texture or 'tooth' of the linen.

The lengths of canvas are put on to wooden stretchers. The stretchers keep the canvas taught, giving an even, springy surface tension on which to apply the paint. Triangular-shaped wooden keys at the corners can be tapped in with a hammer to open up the joints of the stretchers, in order to further tension the canvas.

On a big canvas, there will also be one or even two cross-bars at the back to further strengthen and stabliise the canvas. These, too, have keys to widen the joints and tension the canvas.

The stretchers are not the same on both sides. One side is flat, one side has a slight camber to it. This is so that the flat surface of the stretchers doesn't sit directly against the canvas, and a slight gap is created.

See the shadow of the slight gap there?

If you're buying your own stretchers to make up your own canvasses, watch out for this. Take a look at the profile of the stretchers and check that they are all round the right way, and that they are being placed with the correct profile to the back of the canvas. The correct order when you're going to attach a canvas to your stretchers is to have canvas with unprimed side facing you, and then place stretchers on top with the flat side facing you.

Watchout for cheap stretchers which have knots in them - these compromise the strength of the stretchers, can also weep an unpleasant piney residue, and cause problems when pinning.

Check the you have right angles on the stretchers - you can either do it the hard way, by measuring you have equal diagonal measurements, or the simple way, by holding a one of those plastic right angles out of your old geometry set in to the corners. Then stretch and pin.

The canvasses are pre-primed. Priming the canvas, first with a glue-like size (traditionally made from rabbit skin) and then with a white ground, stops the paint from reaching the fibres of the canvas and rotting them (although artist such as Francis Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas).

This is the joint at the corner with the keys. It's a work of art in itself!

You can see why I get someone else to do it for me. It's time consuming to get it just right, and it needs to be just right, so I leave it to the experts!

A Bigger Picture - David Hockney Exhibition

2012-03-05T02:39:00.000-08:00

Now, it does seem as if I'm banging on a bit about David Hockney, but it's a major exhibition of landscape, and I haven't mentioned the actual exhibition yet.

If you've had a look at the BBC film The Art of Seeing, then you'll have seen the exhibition being hung in the Royal Academy, with lots of lovely space where you can stand back from the paintings and contemplate.

However, if you visit the Royal Academy, you will be battling with crowds from the moment you enter the courtyard. Crowds queueing on the off-chance of a day ticket, crowds going up the stairs, in the entrance hall, through the gift shop, and even with a timed ticket, crowds packing every one of the 13 huge rooms. It's a physically huge show, with huge, searingly bright paintings, and the heat of huge numbers of people bumbling about trying to look at them and read the labels. It's exhausting (but worth it), and with 150 paintings on show, it's impossible to talk in depth about any of them here.

The first room has 4 versions of the same group of trees done in the four seasons. It is painted from memory, and sets the theme of the show - that landscape is all about experiencing a motif through time, that it is something to be moved through and lived through, something basic at the centre of our lives and not something peripheral. Naturally, as a landscape artist, that's something I'd endorse - landscape isn't just about trees!

The next room, with its earlier works, has the simply stunning A Closer Grand Canyon from 1998. Now, I've been to the Grand Canyon, and this really is the closest thing you'll get to the experience of being there.

It's a vast, volvanically bright painting on 60 canvasses, and like the real thing, has no focal point and a high horizon which plunges your eyes dizzyingly downwards. It's just amazing.

Then there are photomontages of the Grand Canyon and the Pearblossom Highway. Reminding me rather of Rauschenberg's Glut series, these are picaresque patchworks of photographs recording a journey, and the movement through a landscape.

Pearblossom Highway (1986)

Room 3 has Yorkshire landscapes (Hockney's native landscape), but there's no dull greys here. The Road to York Through Sledmore has red houses, lilac shadows, lime trees and a high horizon, like an urban Grand Canyon.

Roads and fields curve and writhe and undulate like snakes, and the paint is dabbed and combed into shape, as in Garrowby Hill (1998).

Battling past the students armed with sketchpads, Room 4 has watercolours and landscapes from observation. Here, paintings are hung together in large groups. Whilst individually, if you popped some of these in a local art show without a Hockney signature, you might be inclined to think "How did that get in?", the cumulative effect here is of a joyous abundance of nature. There is a lovely sense of the actuality of real places, that you can identify real wheatfields, hedges or clumps of thistles, something which is important in my own work. It elevates the mundane, that which is normally only glimpsed on the way to something more important.

Room 5 is 'Tunnels', again returning to a single motif through the seasons with some lovely work.

Winter Tunnel with Snow (2006)

Room 6 is Woldgate Woods, where Hockney placed an easel at a particular point amongst the trees and returned to it throughout 2006. There are some lovely charcoal drawings here, and the denseness of the tree branches in the paintings with little sky, along with the way the paint is applied, gives a lively surface texture like that of Monet's Waterlilies.

Woldgate Woods, November (2006)

At this point in the exhibition, you are beginning to wonder how many rooms are left, and how to pace yourself, but in fact you are only about half way through - so that's where I'm leaving it for today!

The Thames at Night

2012-03-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Even when you've still got a show on, you're always thinking ahead to the next one.

Whilst in London, I took photos in Trafalgar Square and also along the Thames at night.

Hopefully you'll be seeing paintings from some of these in September!

Green Park, Autumn

2012-03-01T03:55:00.000-08:00

This is one of my paintings currently on exhibition in London.

Green Park, Autumn (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

I was in London in November last year, and had just been to see the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy with a friend. Green Park Underground Station was closed, so we had to walk across Green Park to another station in order to continue our journey.

What was initially an irksome inconvenience turned out in fact to be a very fortuitous change of plan. It was a beautiful late autumn day with a clear blue sky, just right for a stroll in the park, and the ground was carpeted with the wonderful reds, oranges and yellows of the fallen autumn leaves.

It was a lovely peaceful oasis in the city, and the most amazing burst of colour. I had my camera in my bag, as always, and started to take photographs.

Small Dog, Green Park (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

I loved the colours in the park, and the shapes of the trees and the patterns of the shadows, but the paintings that I did later back at the studio from those photos were about more than just that - they were also about a lovely, special day in London, and the joy of an unexpected gift of an autumn walk in the park.

My Cameras - Canon PowerShot G12

2012-02-29T01:53:00.001-08:00

As well as using my Nikon as my main 'serious' camera, I also find it useful to have something a bit more handbag-sized and portable but which still has all the features I need and takes a great picture.

To this purpose, I have a Canon PowerShot G12 more information here.

It wasn't the camera that I went out to buy - after reading all the reviews, I had an Olympus I mind. But when I got to the shop and tried out all the cameras, this was the one which was most comfortable to use in my hand, even though it is quite heavy and a little bulky.

It's built like a tank, so it's great when clambering over rocks and rough ground, or using it on the beach. It has a really good 5x zoom, and has a high-sensitivity sensor which means it is really good at shooting in low light conditions - ideal for the Thames at night! It also has an image stabilizer, which is an anti-shoogle feature that means you can take a picture really quickly and spontaneously out of a car window if you see a scene (as a passenger, I hasten to add, not driving), and you don't have a complete blur.

The best feature, though, is the big screen. You can flip it out, turn it round and tilt it up and really move it around - you can use it screen-side out, or store it screen-side in (clever) and just use the viewfinder. It also allows you to see exactly the shot you are taking at any angle, so you can hold the camera down low (and get lots of nice foreground vegetation in the shot without lying on the ground or randomly pointing the camera at foliage) or right up high so you can get overhead shots. This allows for great versatility and control of composition, so it functions equally well as a work camera or for getting a really nice sharp shot of Steve Hackett at a concert without the rest of the audience in the way!

It's pretty expensive on the company website, but if you shop around, you really can find some great bargains.

David Hockney: The Art of Seeing

2012-02-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

As a landscape painter, it's a big thrill to see a huge landscape exhibition taking pride of place at the Royal Academy, and one which is such a talking point.

David Hockney's A Bigger Picture really is that - a vast exhibition of big, big paintings, in a big big space (all 13 rooms of the RA), which is ironically filled with huge amounts of sharp-elbowed folk in a marked contrast to the empty people-free calm of the pictures.

Sometimes as a painter of landscape, you feel that you might be considered to be at the edge of things, painting in some sort of old-fashioned sub-genre whilst the real artists get on with cutting sharks in half and embedding skulls with diamonds.

"Landscape finished?" snorts the eloquently plain-speaking Yorkshireman Hockney in his BBC Culture Show Special film, "Only our way of looking at landscape is finished - so find a new way".

And here is that new way, with i-Pad print-outs and multiple viewpoint films and great pulsating canvases of colour, all expanding on the sense that landscape is something to be experienced and lived and moved through like life itself.

If you've got any interest in the exhibition, or in landscape, painting, or just the way that paintings make us look at the world afresh and feel alive, then take a look at David Hockney: The Art of Seeing on BBC i-Player. It's a treat.

David Hockney painting on location in Yorkshire

Thank you!

2012-02-27T14:37:00.001-08:00

Now that I'm back from London, I'd like to take the opportunity to say a very big thank you to everyone who kindly came along to the preview of my show on Thursday night and who were so enthusiastic and supportive of my work.

Thank you!

It really was lovely to meet everyone, and I appreciate that a lot of people had made a real effort to get to the gallery for the private view.

Hope you all enjoyed the show - and since two thirds of it has sold already, I guess it must have struck a chord! But if you missed the preview, don't worry. You can drop by at the gallery over the next 3 weeks - the show finishes on March 16th.

The gallery is very handy for the Royal Academy, so I took the opportunity whilst in London to drop in for the big Hockney exhibition (more later!). I'd booked in advance, but it was still sardine city - not for the faint-hearted! I also went to the theatre for One Man, Two Guv'nors ('hottest ticket in town') with James Corden, which was a lot of fun too, even from high up in the cheap seats.

I've also been taking a lot of new photos along the Thames, so hopefully there's more London paintings in the pipeline!

Off to London for 'Between Tides'

2012-02-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

It's off to London now for the preview of my solo show! Very exciting....

Heather by the Sand, Morar (Oil on linen, 32 x 48)

If you're planning to come along to the preview on Thursday between 6 and 8.30pm, then I look forward very much to seeing you there - everyone is welcome. It's going to be a lot of fun! Previews in London are always a big buzz.

For more details on the gallery and the show, go to the Duncan R Miller Fine Arts website.

And if you've a particular painting in mind, then don't be late - there have been quite a few sales already!

The Sculpture Show, part 2

2012-02-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

You can't have a show about 20th century sculpture without having work by Barbara Hepworth - which is fortunate, because she's one of my favourite artists. I've been to see her work at the new Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and several times to her inspiring studio in St Ives.

Her work is very feminine, very nurturing - not surprising, because she had four children, including triplets with fellow artist Ben Nicholson - and very rooted in the landscape, referring not only to her native Yorkshire but also to her adopted Cornwall.

Don't mistake feminine for namby pamby - this is work of sensuous strength and vitality, and forms a complete contrast to the rooms later in the exhibition of hard-edged male militaristic or machine aesthetic art.

This is Curved Form (Oracle) 1960.

Made of carved guarea wood, the tactile fluid form is smooth and natural on the outside and more textured and painted on the inside. It is sensuous and mysterious, suggesting perhaps a seed-pod, nurture, reproduction and ripeness.

This is Wave of 1943.

Again carved in wood and painted, is contains strings, and so suggests a musical instrument or aeolian harp. This gives a sound dimension to it, almost as if you listen very closely, you can hear it, like putting your ear to a seashell. The sculpture is meant to be a view of the sea, encapsulating many viewpoints of a landscape in one (rather like a Peter Lanyon painting). 'The horizon of the sea is enfolded by the arms of the land to the left and right' (wrote Hepworth), with a great sweeping gesture held by the tension of the strings.

(Not all of her sculptures are of wood, nor are they small - there are many epicly-sized public sculptures and Wakefiled has the most amazing plasters.)

The next room contained Epstein and Gill, not their best examples. It included a great clunky ugly alabaster by Epstein.

However, the 'Geometry of Fear - 1950s Britain' was a very interesting room. Elizabeth Frink's small bronze birds from 1959 aren't pretty, delicate things.

These are disjointed, fractured forms, menacing and militaristic, like something out of Star Wars. They are the bronze version of Ted Hughes' poem Hawk Roosting (published around the same time these sculptures were made). Both creative forms, poem and sculpture, are born out of a post-war Britain that has itself been taken apart and brutalised, and is trying to find itself again.

Similarly, Kenneth Armitage's 1957 figure on its side, with its stick-like legs, has literally been knocked sideways and can't stand on its own two feet.

In the room also are Eduardo Paolozzi's assemblages - large forms created out of make-do-and-mend recycled scraps and objects.

Eduardo Paolozzi St Sebastian 1957 bronze

It's as if they are self-made figures, trying to piece themselves back together and find themselves again, and to create a new world order out of the chaos in which they find themselves. They are rather touching in their rag-bag appearance, and almost heroic, as these are figures that are, indeed, putting themselves back on their feet.

Overall the exhibition is a very deft piece of curating, the Geometry of Fear room especially (although it would be wrong to think that all post-WW2 sculpture consisted of the fractured forms suggested displayed in that room - just look at what Hepworth was doing in the same era).

However, it is a difficult thing to make sense of such a big subject, but by making good use of the layout of the gallery, it manages to tell a cohesively thought-provoking, if not exhaustive, story.

The Sculpture Show, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

2012-02-21T04:38:00.000-08:00

During half term, I managed to get through to Edinburgh and take in a few shows, including a trip to the Gallery of Modern Art. I was especially keen to take in the sculpture show, and to see how it compared with the very disappointing British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago - having a theme of 'sculpture' for a show is, after all, ludicrously wide ranging. How to curate and make sense of such a large subject?

The answer here was to narrow the range between 1900 and 2012, and to arrange the rooms each with a theme. The first room that I entered was all about the human form, and contained Ron Mueck's super-sized A Girl (2006).

Born in 1958 in Melbourne (Paula Rego is his mother-in-law, which I didn't know), Mueck's hyper-real sculptures are meant to give a disconcerting sense as you are able to look at something normally quite small in super-close-up, including individually applied hairs on the baby's head. However, I found that the skin was just too shiny and unreal to carry off the illusion and trigger that disconcerting feeling. Or maybe I've watched too many episodes of One Born Every Minute to feel any sense of shock. Or maybe it's having had a baby - of course they feel that big!

In the next room were less literal represenations of figures, with works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Lucas (with her stuffed tights) and Henry Moore.

Henry Moore, The Helmet 1939

Moore's piece is at once something militaristic, and also a mysterious abstract object relating to the human form, being one thing inside another. It can also be read as a mother and child, with the 'helmet' as the protective mother.

Further rooms contained works by Nick Evans - 'Oceania' is a giant checker board with huge coral-like figures, and a dull Damien Hirst retake on Degas' 14 year old ballet dancer. Then I discovered Room 1 where I perhaps should have started...

Now we're talking! This contains a piece by Medardo Rosso - 'Ecce Puer' (Behold the Boy) of 1906.

This plaster sculpture was inspired by seeing a small boy push his face against a net curtain, revealing the form in a ghostly, partially hidden, mysterious shape. The result is a textural, organic form.

Then there are Degas' bronzes, where you can feel the fingers of the artist in the work. Hurrah, there is Rodin, and his study of Balzac, with the figure and the dressing gown all merging into one expressive gesture, like a wave, with an organic synthesis of foam and hair forming the head at the top.

Rodin leaves the marks of the manufacture clear to see. You get a sense of precisely what it was like over a century ago to take a piece of wax and work it into a shape with your fingers. Nothing says that more clearly than the back of his Flying Figure 1900, which originally had a second figure as part of the sculpture. Rodin then decided to remove it by slicing it off with a large knife. You can see the sawing action through the wax as he carved it off, like a Sunday joint. Instead of smoothing off the site of the butchery, he decided that this was all part of the genesis of the piece, and so it is preserved as the final bronze.

This Impressionist sculpture, where you can see the process behind the finished object, of course reflects what was happening in painting in the last part of the 19th century. Painting was changing from highly-finished, studio-created Salon paintings, where brush marks couldn't be detected, to en plein air Impressionism, where expressive gestural brushwork was the order of the day.

Then it was on to a room of Cubist sculpture, of which there's nothing much good to say except I was heartened by again meeting Henri Gaudier Brzeska's Bird Swallowing a Fish.

It's a beautiful thing, a beautiful shape and a lovely patina. It was made in 1914 a few months before the start of WW1 (in which Gaudier Brzeska was killed in 1915 at the age of 23). This was created by someone who was just 21! How many students coming out of art school could make something like this? It's a fusion between machine aesthetic and the organic, with a torpedo like fish being rammed into the beak of a tank-like bird.

It's a resonant precursor of Isaac Rosenberg's WW1 poetry, where he also combines striking imagery of the fusion between the destroying machine and the lyrically organic; as in the poem Dead Man's Dump where 'the swift iron burning bee/ Drained the wild honey of their youth', or in August 1914, 'Iron are our lives / Molten right through our youth. / A burnt space through ripe fields / A fair mouth's broken tooth.'

More tomorrow!

At the Scottish Contemporary Art Auction preview

2012-02-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

I took the opportunity today to drop into McTears in Glasgow to have a look at my Life Study which is coming up for sale in the auction tomorrow. I couldn't remember what sort of a frame it was in, and I thought it would be good to see it again.

Despite being 21 years old, it still looks fresh as a daisy! Here it is...

As you can see, it's in a plain wood (obeche) frame with a gold slip and a plain double mount. The moulding of the frame is about 4" wide, and the outer measurement of the frame is about 32" wide by 42" high.

It's a good big picture, so it will be very interesting to see how much it sells for tomorrow night. It's not often you see my work in an auction, so there's usually quite a bit of interest - but I'm sure someone's going to get themselves a bargain!

All is Calm, North Berwick

2012-02-17T02:04:00.000-08:00

This is currently on show at the Royal College of Art until Sunday.

It's All is Calm, North Berwick, and it's a biggie - 32" x 48", oil on linen.

It was painted in May, and was a lovely warm, bright and sunny, if changeable day. The seaside town of North Berwick, just south of Edinburgh, is behind and to the left. The scene looks out over the Firth of Forth towards Fife (the land just on the horizon). The long low island is Fidra. If you swung round to the right you would see the famous Bass Rock.

I've painted the Bass Rock many times, but for this painting I chose the more unusual scene of these rocks on the beach and their reflection in the calm water. I liked the contrast of the dramatic shapes of the dark rocks in the middle ground with the gentle shape of Fidra in the background, echoing the calm of the sea. I also wanted to bring out the blue of the sea and sky by notching up the orange tone of the sand.

I also liked the dark tide-line of the seaweed, which carries your eye round out of the painting on a continued sweep of the bay. I turned the paintbrush round and drew into the paint to get the texture of the fronds.

Look out for the painting if you're at the 20/21 International Art Fair today or this weekend!

20/21st International Art Fair, RCA London

2012-02-16T02:31:00.000-08:00

The big 20/21st International Art Fair opens today at the Royal College of Art in London. I've got new work on show there with Duncan Miller as a little taster for my solo show which starts next week.

Small Dog, Green Park (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

Running from 16 - 19 February 2012, the fair features modern and contemporary art from the UK but has a significant number of dealers who specialise in work from China, India, Japan, Russia, Poland, Serbia and the Ukraine.

However, art from a whole host of other countries will also be on show including many European countries, and, this year a special exhibit from Australia. International names include Braque, Chagall, Matisse, Miro and Picasso, plus British favourites such as Peter Blake, Damien Hirst, David Hockney and Henry Moore. And me!!

If you're thinking of going, then you can get a free pair of complimentary tickets by going here to the Wren Gallery website. Click on the link and print them out.

Enjoy!

William Gillies - Landscapes and Still Lifes

2012-02-15T06:04:00.000-08:00

As it's the half term break, I took a trip through to Edinburgh to catch up on a few shows. Top of the list was the William Gillies exhibition at the Scottish Gallery.

Gillies was born in Haddington in 1898, was one of the Scottish Gallery's major artists, but remains rather under-rated. His work is quiet and subtle, with reflective interiors, views from windows, or locally Scottish landscape scenes done from the side of the road where he could park his car. He was a well-loved teacher, and taught Elizabeth Blackadder.

This is a sepia ink drawing of Trees near Temple (Temple being Gillies's home from 1939 until his death in 1973).

It's dense, because you are glimpsing houses through tree trunks and branches, but there is a lovely calmness to it. There's also a mischevious sense there, as you're given a playful little glimpse of the buildings. The trunks of the trees are left blank, giving a lovely vertical airiness to the piece, balancing the complexly busy horizontal band.

On the Meldons Road, painted in 1953, is a lovely subtle pastel-coloured watercolour.

It's not a painting that shouts; it doesn't depict a dramatic mountain or an extraorinary moment. The hillside rolls up towards the sky with great familiarity, like a comfortable bedspread, and the wall at the bottom tells you that everything is very safe and enclosed and ordered. It's a very truthful and contented piece of painting, both a recognisably real Scottish place and also about pattern-making on a 2-dimensional surface.

I also loved this little watercolour of Rockcliffe.

It's just such a happy painting, with the shape of the boats mimicing both the clouds and the waves, as if everything is just right together. The warm yellows and earthy oranges of the hillside complement the strong blues of the sea and sky, but the blue tones are also carried through the hillside, so that everything is harmonised. The line of the land meeting the sea is squint, making it feel natural and organic, otherwise there would be a harsh line chopping the composition in half.

Also on show was this lithograph, Cottage Window, of 1946, produced for the Arts Council.

I was very interested in this, because I have one! I got mine many years ago at the Barras. The example in the Scottish Gallery has faded somewhat, with rather sludgy colours. The one I have has much brighter pinks and oranges. I asked what the edition size was of the lithograph, but unfortunately they were unable to tell me.

I love Gillies's paintings and drawings, especially the landscapes. They're just very, very Scottish. I think he's really under-rated, and I'd love to own one - apparently the Scottish Gallery used to have a bargain bin of his watercolours which you could pick up for 20 guineas - sadly, no longer!

The show continues at the Scottish Gallery until 3rd March. For more information, and to see all the work in the exhibition, go to the Scottish Gallery website.

Scottish Contemporary Art Auction - one of my drawings up for sale

2012-02-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

One of my life studies is coming up for sale in a Glasgow auction shortly.

It's Lot 301 in the McTears Scottish Contemporary Art Auction on Tuesday 21 February.

It's of a model called Lynn and was done at Glasgow School of Art quite a long time ago now, so it's really strange to see it again after all these years! It's funny that it still looks like something very familiar.

It's a big piece, and is described in the catalogue as 'ink on paper' - in fact, it's painted in Payne's Grey gouache and Indian Red watercolour on a cream coloured paper. (Indian Red's a really useful colour for life drawing, I'm very fond of it.)

It was originally sold through Art Exposure Gallery in Glasgow in 1991, and has now come up on the secondary market.

It was the first life study I ever sold - in fact, I've sold very few, so it's a rare piece.

You can take a look at it in the catalogue here on the McTears website .

It's quite exciting because you can listen live to the auction as it happens on your computer, and even join in the bidding. (Fortunately, I'll be out at Art School, so I won't be able to follow it live myself and get tempted to bid...!!)

Headland, Causeway Coast

2012-02-13T01:18:00.000-08:00

Here's another little painting from my London show with an interesting story behind it. This is 'Headland, Causeway Coast', painted at the Giant's Causeway.

I went very early in the morning, when there was still a lot of early mist, and spent a long time walking along the paths by the shore, and then back along the cliff path, which forms part of the Ulster Way, to get a different angle.

I sat for a long time in a very secluded spot looking down over the bay and watching the light change, taking a series of photographs. It was very quiet and completely undisturbed, and away from the normal tourist trail. There were lots of harbells and wild frlowers, and it was very peaceful.

Or so I thought - because who should come around the corner but two Dutch geocachers (hullo Wim and Marianne!). Geocachers are an online community who follow clues given on the web to real physical places where small caches of treasure are hidden in the ground. And it turned out I was sitting right on one of them. What were the chances of that?

Anyway, Wim and Marianne were lovely, although it probably gave them a bit of a shock. I don't think 'red-head with camera' was in any of their clues....

Over the years that I've been visiting the Giant's Causeway, it's become much busier and more difficult to park. Now they have a park and ride at Bushmills, which you have to use unless you go really early and can get into the car parks beside the old visitors centre. They're building a huge new visitor's centre, which, according to the artist's impression, looks obtrusively massive, and houses all sorts of 'interpretation centres'. How much interpreting do rocks need?

I plan to go back this August as usual, so we'll see what changes there have been....

Harebells by the Sea, Cushendun

2012-02-10T02:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a cute little painting from my new show...

It's a little oil 10" x 10", called 'Harebells by the Sea, Cushedun'. As usual, I was over in Northern Ireland last August, and travelled along the Causeway Coast which this year was covered in delicate little harebells.

I stopped on a steep hill, where the fields run down to the seacliffs, and you can see Rathlin Island in the distance. It was very sunny and breezy, and there were high verges at the side of the road, so I could get right down low to take the photo and make the flowers a real foreground feature. Here's the photo...

It was a really uplifting scene.

Someone else obviously likes it as well, as the painting has sold from the catalogue with still nearly 2 weeks to go until the show opens!

Favourite paintings - Caravaggio

2012-02-09T03:09:00.000-08:00

If I was to be give one painting in the world to own, then I think it would probably be this one.

It's The Deposition from the Cross by Caravaggio, painted in around 1600-1604, and it's in the Pinacoteca in the Vatican in Rome. It's just beautiful. You look at the real thing close up and you think 'how did he do that??'

It shows Christ being taken down from the cross to be laid in his tomb. It's a huge painting, and when you're standing in front of it and looking up at it, the figures seem to tumble down onto you in an almost inevitable movement towards the grave, in which you seem to be standing.

It's a fine example of the dramatic lighting that Caravaggio was famous for 'chiaroscuro' or 'light dark'. It's almost like looking at a still from a film where the characters are bathed in a spotlight.

Caravaggio was pretty clever in his use of light - often the paintings were commissioned for specific places within chapels (such as in S Maria del Popolo in Rome), so he used real light sources in the chapels which hit the figures in the paintings in the same direction as the painted light source. In The Calling of St Matthew, this is divine light, following the gesture of the hand of Christ as he calls Matthew.

But it is also real light from a window to the right in the chapel where the painting is hung. Caravaggio is playing a complicated game on lots of different levels. His paintings communicate with and refer to their surroundings as well as with us. He's extending the 'world' of the painting into our personal space, which is a pretty conceptual, sculptural idea.

He filled his work with plain ordinary people in contemporary clothes in the scenes of biblical events. Sometimes he even included a portrait of himself in the scene, to say 'I'm right here - you are too.' The figures in the deposition have dirty fingernails and bare feet and struggle awkwardly with their task, something which outraged patrons and shocked polite society when they saw Caravaggio's paintings. I doubt he cared much. His message was that religion isn't about saints and heaven, as so much of Baroque art was, it's about ordinary people right here and right now (and that included women - he was an amazing painter of women as real women). It was totally inclusive. He didn't compromise.

To get the drama of the light and dark in the paintings, Caravaggio painted quickly out of a dark ground, moving towards the light colours. There weren't any preparatory sketches, he just got right on with it.

He painted from life, posing a group of models, and then scratching the main thrust of the composition and main lines into the ground with the end of a brush. If you stand to the side of a lot of the paintings, you can see this when the light catches the marks. (You can see it especially clearly on The Sacrifice of Isaac.)

He painted fast. He had to, as there's only so long models can hold poses like that, plus he was usually on the run. He had quite a temper, and was always getting into trouble. This was a man who matched his work. He was dressed in black, dark eyes, dark hair, dark beard, slept in this clothes because he was always ready for a quick getaway. He picked a fight with a waiter about a plate of artichokes (the old butter/olive oil debate). He killed someone during a game of tennis. His paintings were all light and dark and simple and complex, and so was his life, all contradictions. What a guy.

I could go on for ages. Luckily, the world's hottest fine art historian has recently published the definitive biography of Caravaggio, so if you're interested, read Andrew Graham Dixon's 'Caravaggio; A Life Sacred and Profane'.

Agree? Disagree? (Not with Andrew Graham Dixon being hot - no-one disagrees with that on my blog). Got a favourite painting of your own you'd care to share? Then let me know, either below or at judith@jibridgland.com

Mark making with a palette knife

2012-02-08T03:19:00.000-08:00

Here's some pictures of palette knife action! Hopefully it will give you a few ideas about mark making.

This is the scene in the studio. I've got my new canvas ready with a coloured ground, the image that I want to paint ready. The idea of how I want to do the painting is in my head (the general tone and feeling of what it was like being there - stormy, sunny etc), with the photograph blown up and taped to my easel, and my palette all laid out. Time to go!

I usually work from the top down, so it's sky first. I know what sort of mark I want to make - something big and expressive - lots of big blustery clouds and airy volume. So, picking up the mixed paint from the palette with the narrow edge of the knife...

That's the amount of paint that I want to put on the canvas in one big mark, and it's all ready to go on the edge of the knife there, so the mark is going to be the width of the end of the blade.

Here goes...

On goes the paint in a nice big expressive smooth mark. You keep moving the knife in a controlled directional sweep as long as you have paint on the knife, so I suppose it's a gesture that lasts about two seconds to complete. Varying the pressure gives a different mark.

The orange mid-tone of the background is the complimentary colour to the blue of the sky - as you can see, the paint applied by the palette knife doesn't go on in a completely smooth lump. It has texture to it, especially round the edges on the tooth or roughness of the canvas, so that the background shows through a little bit. That means you have the blue and the orange working together, making each colour extra zingy - the blue looks bluer because of the orange. (Old trick I picked up from Delacroix.)

I don't know exactly how the mark is going to look until I've finished making it. It might not be the right one, but you look at it and think 'is that saying what I want it to say?'. If it isn't, I change it, by modifying it, or by making a different mark.

But unless you're making marks, and making mistakes, and making corrections, you're not actually painting.

This part is the sea, which I roughly sketched in with a small watercolour brush and thinned prussian blue, just to get a sense of the shoreline and where I wanted the main movement of water and waves and tide to be.

You can see that the palette knife has created some nice large rounded texture and lumps in the sweeps on the right. I have now put a little paint on the knife and dipped it into my dish of turps so that it carries a film of turps on the blade. I'm then drawing the edge over the canvas with a scraping action, so that the paint is both thinned and scraped off, giving a very flat, thinly painted area. This is the part where the water is coming into the beach, so there's not so much in the way of waves. I therefore wanted a calmer, flatter area of paint to form a contrast.

There has to be contrasts, otherwise the paint surface would look too busy and unreadable, like an action movie that's nothing but explosions.

As I said before, there's no right way or wrong way of doing things, it's just a case of trying things out and seeing what works for you. I use my palette knife in a variety of different ways, and use it to apply a lot of different marks. You can even use the tip to incise very very fine marks right into the paint, so it can be a very delicate tool, not merely for trowelling the paint on.

Give it a try. See if it works for you.

My palette

2012-02-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

Just before I go out and do battle with the Grim Reaper (that's the statue, hopefully not the real thing), I thought I'd answer a question I've been asked by posting something about my palette and the colours that I use.

I use Daler Rowney Georgian oil paints. I buy them in 225ml tubes, and buy white in 5 litre tubs.

Here's my palette, which is the top of an old school desk.

It's not set out in the order that a text book will probably tell you, but it works for me.

I try to use 2 types of each colour, so 2 yellows, 2 blues etc, one being cold and one being hot, but over the years that's expanded slightly. What you can see here in the massive lumps is (starting at bottom left and moving clockwise)

two browns - raw umber, burnt sienna

two greens - viridian, sap green

three blues - prussian blue, coeruleum (the turquoise at the back), cobalt blue (in front of it)

reds - rose madder (the pink to the right of it), crimson alizarin (to the right of the pink), cobalt violet (at the back), vermilion (the scarlet colour)

You can also see here a small ceramic pot which I put over the liquin to keep it from drying out overnight, and a dish of turps.

Then down the left hand side there is

yellows - cadmium yellow deep, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, naples yellow

whites - mixing white (from the 5 litre tub), titanium white from a 225ml tube (which has a nicer more creamy consistency)

You can also see in amongst that yellow/white section there's a pool of liquin.I mix the colours in the centre, and there's also various scapers for cleaning the board in there, and bradals for signing with.

There's no black - to get the darkest dark, I mix the prussian and raw umber together, and you can add the violet and/or sap green to it, depending on what kind of a dark you want.

Lots of heavy metals going on there, cadmium, titanium, lead - colour comes from the centre of the periodic table with all those metallic elements - so you definately don't want to eat the stuff! However, it does get everywhere....

Sculpture!

2012-02-06T04:06:00.000-08:00

I thought you might like to have a quick look at some of the work I'm doing in my sculpture class. This is the stuff I do for fun!

I do evenings at Glasgow School of Art, and this is the piece that I'm working on at the moment.

It's constructed from hessian material covered in the world's supply of plaster, and placed over a metal and wooden armature to support it.

It's an old trick I picked up from Rodin, who used a real dressing gown dipped in plaster as a study for his finished bronze sculpture of Balzac...

However, with all our struggles so far in the studio with giant sheets of monumentally heavy plaster-coated hessian slopping all over the place, I think I'm on a pretty steep learning curve....

Brushes and palette knives

2012-02-03T03:42:00.000-08:00

I've been asked a question about what sort of brushes I use to paint with, so I thought I'd do a quick blog about the type of tools I use.

I like to get a variety of marks down on the canvas, so pretty much anything can be used as a mark-making object. I use a variety of brushes and palette knives as you can see, but also basically anything to hand that can be used to make a mark - the edge of a piece of card, a roller, a stick. It depends what mark you have in mind, then you look round to see something which you can use to apply the paint with.

Here's a selection of the types of brushes that I use.

As you can see, there's everything from (R-L)

a cheap wide flat bristle brushe, good for making large gestural strokes;

an eye-wateringly expensive large soft cats tongue, again for large soft marks;

chinese calligraphy brush for long thin-wash marks;

a lovely goats hair chinese brush ('capra') which I picked up in a market in Milan and which caused a problem at airport security, again good for loose marks with thin paint;

narrower cheap flat bristle brush, for finer background passages;

a 1" flat;

smaller calligraphy brush;

long natural hair watercolour brush for picking up paint and doing expressive flicky loose marks such as grasses;

short round natural fibre watercolour brush for doing detail;

brush handle sharpened at the end for drawing into the paint.

I also use palette knives of different sorts.

The plastic ones are very flexible, almost like the sort that you use to get cake mixture out of mixing bowls. If they're too rigid, then they break at the handle. Again, the metal knives are very flexible. The large one in the middle is my favourite, very versatile, good for skies and sea. You can get lovely waves and clouds with it. The plastic ones on the left I use all the time for getting the paint on so I can start working the finer detail.

It's just about finding the right tool to make the marks that express what you want to say. All you're doing is mark-making.

I tried out lots of knives in the shop to see what sat best in my hand and what I could do with it, how I could move it about, how I could bend it and flex it to move the paint where I wanted. The sides of the knives are just as useful as the flat surface, so it can be used to incise or cut the paint, as well as make very large flat marks ands sweep the paint, and off course they're a great quick way of mixing colours.

If you dip the large knife into a small dab of oil, then into your dish of turps, then you can do very thin large washes of paint, or scrape paint off. Never be afraid to scrape oils off again. Show it who's boss!

Solo show now online!

2012-02-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

You can now see the images online of all the 36 paintings in my solo show.

View the show here

If there's anything you'd like to ask about any of the paintings, then just get in touch and I'll be happy to answer - drop me a line at judith@jibridgland.com

Seems like it's not long to go now until the show opens! All very exciting, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Rosebay Willowherb, Morar (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

This is another of the paintings in the exhibition. It shows a beautiful array of rosebay willowherb at the side of the old 'Road to the Isles' by the white sands of Morar.

It was a lovely clear early summer day, which meant that you could easily see the mountains of Skye and the distinctive shapes of the islands of Rhum and Eigg in the distance. There was a little yacht with a white sail making good speed in the distance.

It was a scene which seemed to capture everything you imagine about the beautiful west coast of Scotland, with its free open spaces, wonderful scenery and amazing light.

If you've got any thoughts you'd like to share on this painting, or of any others on the blog, do leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Catalogues arriving soon!

2012-02-01T04:42:00.000-08:00

The catalogues for my solo show will be arriving any day now - very exciting!

Montbretia in August, Rinagree (Oil on linen, 32 x 48)

If you'd like one, or an invitation to the preview on Thursday 23rd February, let me know. Send your postal address to judith@jibridgland.com

This is one of the paintings that will be in it - it's a big juicy oil of the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland, looking out over the cliffs and the stormy sea towards the western isles of Scotland.

For more details on the show, please go to Duncan R Miller Fine Arts

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement

2012-01-31T06:44:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd mention a really excellent show which I saw recently at the Royal College of Art in London - I don't know if anyone else managed to see it. (It's unfortunately finished now, but I hadn't started the blog last year, so that's why it's only just getting a mention!)

I'm sure you're all familiar with the work of Degas and his Impressionist paintings of young, ballet dancers, women bathing and frisky horses. Certainly, the image used on the poster would lead you to believe that this was going to be a very sickly sweet show all about pastel-coloured young girls in tutus, ending with a nice line in fridge magnets in the gift shop.

However, what this exhibition managed to clearly document (and all kudos to the curators for putting together such a well thought-out and thought-provoking show) was the development of Degas' lifelong obsession with the figure in movement.

Degas was working at a time in the 19th century when there were great technical advances in photography and early film, which were embraced by the artist in the same way that David Hockney is embracing the i-Pad as a tool to make art in his new show at the Royal Academy.

Degas' compositions were pieced together from various studies made from various sources, so that a group of ballet dancers could come from a variety of different studies of individuals or small groups, made in a number of media. The information from all the sources was then jigsawed together to make the final picture, giviing an informed sense of a place and an event, rather than an actual documentation of one specific event - almost like one of his early history paintings.

The pose of the figures would often have a casual, fleeting sense to them, as figures can when caught off-guard by the camera, giving a feeling of capturing a moment in time and a fleeting glimpse of something temporal.

The really exciting thing in the exhibition was the inclusion of his little-seen photographs and their relationship to other work. Here's one of his photos...

Degas, Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap (Modern gelatin silver print, 1895)

And a pastel and gouache based on the pose - note all the changes made whilst working out the composition, almost as if the figure is blurred in movement, or as if several viewpoints of the same figure were amalgamated into one - which of course, is what Picasso was doing later in 1907 at the birth of cubism.

Another photograph (the intense colour is due to a chemical reaction during development of the plates)...

Degas, Dancer, Arm Outstretched (Collodion on glass, 1895)

And a related pastel with the figure from the photo at the left hand side

So far from being a chocolate-box artist, Degas was instead a modern, radical artist who thought profoundly about visual problems and was fully attuned to the technological developments of his time.

Born in 1834, largely self-taught, this free-thinking and experimental approach paved the way for others in the modern age - look at his incorporation of real objects into his bronze sculpture of the little dancer aged 14, with its ribbon in the hair and tutu made of actual material. That's something everyone from Picasso to Rauschenberg has done.

Again, giving her age of 14 in the title emphasises the temporal movement, and the quick passing of youth.

Increasing blindness forced Degas to give up working in 1912, and for the last 5 years, he was a sad figure shuffling around Montmartre.

One of the most touching things in the exhibition was a short piece of film taken of Degas walking on a street in Paris with his niece. It is strikingly ordinary, with chattering shop-girls on a break at lunchtime walking sassily down the street and playing to the camera. But Degas doesn't notice he's being filmed. It's both ordinary and extraordinary, in that those few seconds capture a fleeting glimpse of one of the true great of art history, just for a moment, not doing anything special, but preserved on a short loop of time. It's strangely appropriate, rather profound, and very touching. It's a work of art in itself.

Poppies and Farm near North Berwick

2012-01-30T03:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a feel-good painting for a Monday morning....

Poppies and Farm near North Berwick, June (Oil on linen, 12 x 12)

For those of you unfamiliar with the east coast of Scotland, North Berwick is a seaside town just south of Edinburgh. The rolling farmland goes down to the clifftops at the sea, and in early summer, the roadsides are bursting with red poppies.

These beautiful flowers were at the edge of a field of barley on the road to Tantallon Castle, fluttering in the breeze.

The painting is currently with Duncan R Miller Fine Arts, London, and will be on exhibition at the 20/21st International Art Fair at the Royal College of Art, London from 16-19th February.

For more information, go to the Duncan R Miller website.

Ballintoy Harbour on Facebook

2012-01-28T03:38:00.000-08:00

Ballintoy Harbour (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

For those of you on Facebook, you might like to check out the Glasgow Art Show wall, which features one of my Northern Ireland paintings, Ballintoy Harbour, as its 'Image of the Day'.

http://www.facebook.com/GlasgowArtShow?sk=wall

The Glasgow Art Show runs from 23rd - 25th March.

Tatlin's Tower

2012-01-27T03:31:00.000-08:00

If you're passing by the Royal Academy in London over the next couple of days, take a quick look in the courtyard at the amazing recreation of Tatlin's Tower. I took this photo of it when I was there in November to see the Degas exhibition.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) designed his Monument to the Third International in 1920, but it was never built. When I studied it as part of my Fine Art degree, it was an enigmatic unfulfilled idea, so it was a big thrill to finally see it in real life, even if it is just a 1:42 scale version!

Left: Computer visualisation of Tatlin's Tower by Dixon Jones Architects

Right: Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), Monument to the Third International: side elevation, 1920, N. Punin Archive © Anna Kaminskaya

Planned as a 400m tall symbol of moderntiy in St Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Built from steel and glass in double helix spiral, it consisted of a main framework which people could travel up, inclined at the same angle as the earth's axis, and 4 large geometric structures which each rotated at different speeds.

At the base was a lecture theatre which completed one rotation a year. Above that was a pyramid housing offices which rotated monthly. Above that was a daily-rotating cylinder housing a radio station and information centre with loudspeakers for disseminating news and manifestos, and a projector for beaming images onto clouds.

How brilliantly mad is all that? But I can imagine that if it had been built, it would never have actually have worked - a bit like the Science Tower in Glasgow! Plus, there's just far too much rotating going on...

There's an interesting article here if you'd like to read more...

Blueprint Magazine - Rebuilding Tatlin's Tower

Graduated filters for digital SLR camera

2012-01-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

I have had some queries about the filters that I use for my digital SLR Nikon camera.

I use a Cokin P121M graduated grey filter. It is a rectangular filter which is dark grey at one end and clear at the bottom. It fits into a circular-shaped holder which goes onto the lens, and the filter slides into this. You can then look through the lens of the camera, and adjust where the line of grey goes by sliding the filter up and down in the holder, swivel it around, and generally adjust the contrast of the picture you are taking.

You can also add more than one lens, and have coloured lenses to give, for example, a sunset effect, or a blurred edge. However, I'm happy with just the one.

This is the difference with a graduated grey filter...

Without

With the filter

(Images are from the Cokin website)

Here's the website (and no, I don't get commission!)

http://www.cokin.co.uk/pages/grad1.htm

Carousel at Night, London Embankment

2012-01-25T02:53:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd introduce you to a few of the paintings which will be in my show next month.

This is a painting which I did from a series of photographs taken along the London Embankment over several nights in February last year.

Carousel at Night, London Embankment (Oil on linen, 32 x 32)

My working method is to take a large number of photographs of a subject with a digital camera - that allows you to take hundreds of photographs, so you are constantly note-taking as you walk through your subject. I use a Nikon DX with a skylight (essential kit in sandy conditions!) and a graduated filter (to heighten the cloud contrast).

A digital camera means you can take photos not only of the compositions that catch your eye, but note-take close-ups of textures - bark, stone, water - and also just turn round and face the other way to contextualise the image. Sometimes it might be a flock of birds in a nearby tree, or a small dog that was barking at the time, or a bit more of the interesting building just to the left, or cloud formations. Sometimes quick and fleeting photos turn out to be the most evocative and interesting ones - you can get too caught up in something that, at the time, you think is 'the' important image.

It's important just to make the most of your time on-the-spot, and a digital camera is a huge advantage over the old film cameras, where you had to think very carefully about not wasting any of your 36 frames. Obviously I compose each shot with the same care as I would with a film camera. but it means you have much more freedom to create material.

I will go back to the computer with several hundred images and review a days work from a location. Sometimes I will have to go back and retake work. As I run through the images, several will jump out, hopefully both as strong images abd also as capturing what it felt like to be there that day (or night). The aim is to capture the sense of the uniqueness of that place on that particular day at that time.

For Carousel at Night, I spent many hours on the Embankment taking photos of the beautiful lights on the water, and the people promenading along the riverside. I was standing on the steps of the bridge across from Charing Cross Station looking towards County Hall. The trees are bare because it is winter (and it was very cold!) You can see the London Eye in the top left of the painting. I liked the contrast of the Houses of Parliament in the distance, symbol of power and authority, contrasting with the simple pleasures of the brightly coloured merry-go-round in the foreground and the big circle of the London Eye.

The painting will be at Duncan R Miller Fine Arts, 6 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AB from 24 February - 16 March 2012.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery

2012-01-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

During the Christmas break, I was through in Edinburgh and visited the newly refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Apparently it has had £17.6 million lavished on it..

It's a beautiful Arts and Crafts building, and the world’s first purpose-built portrait space. The restoration project has opened up previously inaccessible parts of the building and increased the public space by more than 60 per cent.

If you go expecting to see lots of paintings of people in a parade of famous and historical faces, you'll be disappointed. It's more about a portrait of a country and its achievements, and isn't merely paintings, but that's the modern museum way of organising and presenting material.

There's a new gallery dedicated to photography, showing romantically nostalgic highland landscapes and some gritty urban urchins, as well as Annan's amazing photographs of closes.

Thomas Annan, Close No 101 High Street, Glasgow (Albumen print,1868)

There's 'Pioneers of Science', containing a large and sobering Ken Currie portrait Three Oncologists, with some very interesting contextualising material about the doctors portrayed.

Ken Currie, Three Oncologists (Oil on canvas 2002)

There's also an amazing cast of the head of Dolly the Sheep - a clone of a clone - which I thought was just astonishing.

It's not a piece of art as such, and isn't credited with a maker, but as far as I'm concerned it's a far more powerful piece than anything Damien Hurst has ever come up with. You can see the scrim poking out, and the unevenness of the plaster where the cast has run up against Dolly's thick wool, so it has a roughness and lovely textural excitement about it. It has a beautiful shape a rhythm to it, bourne out of the necessity of being unable to cast any further than the non-woolly parts of her head. It was cast on the day she was put to sleep, so it's a death mask, and as such is a very poignant image.

It's not often sheep are named and imortalised, but here Dolly is. She looks almost like one of the Elgin marbles.

Also on display, unfortunately, was John Bellany's portrait of Billy Connolly - a painting so bad that even when you knew who it was, you still couldn't recognise him....

John Bellany, Billy Connolly (Oil on canvas 2004)

No wonder he had to write who it was underneath - or is it just me?

Anyway, if you do get the chance to go to Edinburgh, do visit the Portrait Gallery. Or if you've been, let me know what you thought....

At the London Art Fair

2012-01-23T05:51:00.000-08:00

Even in the cold of January, the London Art Fair at the Business and Design Centre in Islington has lost none of its vibrancy, and remains a fresh, up-beat annual event and a great start to the year.

It’s a slightly awkward space, with a split-level main hall, and further stands housed upstairs, but once you understand the space, it’s a nice venue to explore and get lost in the art.

As soon as I went in, I was met by an excitingly large Henri Gaudier Brzeska relief of two wrestlers.

Henri Gaudier Brzeska Wrestlers 1914

However, this version was cast in the 1960s (Gaudier Brzeska having died in the first world war at 23) so it's arguable how much it is an 'original' - however it's yours for £85,000! It was just one of many high-price tag (or even POA ) works for sale at the fair - obviously there's the market out there for them.

Also on the same stand was a gorgeous Peter Lanyon, with more of his work, including a blue glass sculpture, at Offer Waterman and Co. Lanyon was a Cornish artist, whose edgily visceral landscape work was always very much about experiencing a place, and has a very tangible excitement about it. He was a glider pilot although he suffered from vertigo (ultimately he was killed in a flying accident), and he liked to incorporate this seen-from-the-air viewpoint combined with an element of off-balance tension into his work.

Peter Lanyon Blue Glass Airscape 1960( glass, ceramic, plaster & paint on cork)

Another Cornish-based artist (though originally from Scotland) was Margaret Mellis, whose drfitwood construction was on the Cyril Gerber stand. Her studio must have been a complete fire-hazard, as it was piled high with stacks of found wood which she collected from the Cornwall beaches.

There were plenty of other big names of 20th century art to get your teeth into - Elizabeth Frink (especially the large Fighting Cocks bronze), Joe Tilson's Wooden Relief 1960 at Austin/Desmond Fine Art, the Boyle Family's Fire Series with Melted Records with Richard Saltoun (they used to do the groovy visual effects at early Pink Floyd concerts), even Charles Rennie Mackintosh's delicate watercolour Alder Catkins, Walberswick of 1914 (Mackintosh was arrested as a suspected German spy while he was at Walberswick because of his thick Scottish accent and constant sending of letters to foreign places). Yours for £28,500! Ewan Mundy also had a lovely William Gillies ink drawing of Anstruther for £4250 - yum.

I must mention Jo Taylor's work with Lena Boyle Fine Art. Although I'm no expert on horses, I do love her large-scale equine collages, with their gorgeously expressive lines.

Jo Taylor Desert Horse II (mixed media on paper, 31 x 27 in)

I must also draw attention to a (distant) member of the family firm, Adam Bridgland, with his very distinctive graphic work with TAG Fine Art. His Darling Our Holiday Will Solve All Our Problems looked eerily of-the-moment.

Adam Bridgland Darling This Holiday Will Solve All OUr Problems 2006 (Enamel Plaque 100cm x 100cm)

It's always strange when you see your own work at a gallery or an art fair. In this case, my work was with Duncan Miller on a stand at the back of the main hall, which meant that you could see it from quite far away down one of the main corridors. It's like seeing your work afresh, in its Sunday best. It was great to view it in such a location getting a lot of positive attention at the fair, and also in such estemmed company as Joan Eardley and the Scottish Colourists.

I hope that those of you who attended the fair, and especially those of you who were able to make use of the complimentary tickets, will have had an equally interesting and fruitful time.

If you were there, it would be great to have your feedback!

White Sand, Yellow Flowers, Morar

2012-01-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

This is the painting that will be going on the front cover of my catalogue for my 'Between Tides' solo show which opens next month.

White Sand, Yellow Flowers, Morar (Oil on linen, 32 x 32)

It is from a visit to Morar and Mallaig on the west coast of Scotland in May last year (preparing for a show is a long process!).

The weather was variable, as is usually the case in Scotland at any time of the year, or indeed, at any time of the day! However, there were spells of wonderful strong sunshine with blue skies and the white sand shining through the water. In the shallows, the colours were the most amazing turquoise and emerald, and it looked more like Barbados than Scotland! In the distance you can see the islands of Rhum and Eigg.

I visited the sands at various times of the day, sometimes finding it busy with families, other times pretty much deserted.

Returning in the evening, I found campers sitting round their fire. It cast a welcoming orange glow in the dusk, and reminded me of summer holidays from many years ago.

Campfire on the Beach, Morar (Oil on linen, 32 x 32 )

It's one of my favourite paintings in the show. It will be interesting to hear if visitors to the gallery think the same!

David Hockney : A Bigger Picture

2012-01-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

The new David Hockney landscape show has just opened at the Royal Academy in London. I've got my ticket to go and visit when I'm down for my solo show in February.

I caught an interview with him on BBC1 at the weekend, where he talked about his new work of Yorkshire landscapes created with an iPad. The end result is large, brightly coloured landscape with marks made by a stylus or fingers.

David Hockney, 'Winter Timber', 2009. Oil on 15 canvases. 274 x 609.6 cm.

Hockney said that using an iPad was all part of using the latest technology, in the way that at some point a paintbrush must have been the latest technological innovation.

Critics have given it a mixed reception. The Telegraph today was puzzled. The Telegraph The Sunday Times loved the show. Brian Sewell in today's Evening Standard hated it, calling it 'careless, crude and coarse'. Evening Standard

Oh well - I'll wait and see for myself!

London Art Fair begins...

2012-01-18T03:55:00.000-08:00

The first big fair of the year, the London Art Fair, starts today at the Business and Design Centre in Islington.

It's an exciting fair not only because you can get there by travelling to one of the legendary stations on the Monopoly board (Angel Islington), but because there are over 100 stands of major art galleries, showing many of the most important names in 20th century art. Plus there is also funky new contemporary work in the upstairs Arts Project space.

It's a fair that really sets the tone and pace of the arts year ahead.

My new paintings are in the Main Hall on Stand 50 with Duncan R Miller Fine Arts. Duncan Miller's of St James's is recognised as a leading gallery in the works of the Scottish Colourists - Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter and Peploe.

Winter Afternoon, Trafalgar Square (24 x 26, Oil on linen)

The paintings on show will be a small taster for my forthcoming solo show in February, with seascapes of the Scottish west coast, the Northern Irish coastline, and scenes of Morecambe and London.

I'll be going down to visit the fair, and I'll report back! I'm sure it will be a very exciting trip.

The London Art Fair runs until Sunday 22nd January. There's more information about it here

www.londonartfair.co.uk/

Getting prepared...

2012-01-17T02:37:00.000-08:00

Today is all about getting ready for the next shows and art fairs, so I am doing a stock-check, preparing my canvasses and sorting out my frame orders.

My canvasses are all bespoke, made by a firm in London from Belgian linen. It's a bit more expensive than cotton, but is better in terms of conservation. Having done a course in conservation, I always aim to use the best quality materials that I can. The canvasses are primed, and put onto wooden stretchers. The stretchers have wooden keys at the corners, which can be knocked in with a hammer to tension the linen.

I give the canvasses a coloured ground, usually cadmium orange or magenta, but sometimes a warm grey or lilac. It's good to have a medium tone to work from, and helps to unite the composition. It's also less daunting than working from a huge stark white canvas.

However, having rows of empty canvasses looking at you is also pretty daunting!

It's quite a challenge thinking through what images you want to choose for a show, what size of format is best for each image, and how you want the overall show to look.

A large amount of my time is taken up with the preparation for painting - going out on location to take photos, doing preparatory work, ordering materials, dealing with paperwork and consignments of paintings, and all the logistics of organising a show and getting work at the right time from a to b. However, getting all of that right is the key to producing good work!

Annual Show Submissions

2012-01-16T03:17:00.000-08:00

Todays' the day for submitting work in Edinburgh for the three big annual shows - the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW), The Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) and Visual Arts Scotland (VAS) at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). It's quite a bit of alphabet soup to handle all at once, especially doing the paperwork for all three simultaneously!

Hopefully I've got the right labels on the right pieces, and have taken care to think about the specific feel and individual nature of each of the 3 exhibitions, which all take place in February in the RSA at the same time.

Beached Boat, Aldeburgh ( Acrylic,10 x 10)

Size restrictions mean that I can only submit small work to the SSA, but I've been able to indulge myself with 2 large oils for the VAS. These oils are very textural, with collage incorporated into the paint surface.

St Pauls with Cranes (Oil and mixed media on canvas, 36 x 36)

It's up to the judging panels now, so we'll see what (if anything!) gets in.

Elizabeth Blackadder Exhibition

2012-01-13T04:18:00.000-08:00

I was over in Edinburgh during the Christmas break, and caught the end of the Elizabeth Blackadder exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. The show marks Blackadder's 80th birthday, and a very nice lady outside the exhibition handed me some free tickets, which was lovely.

I not a massive fan of Blackadder's work, which I find quite unengaging, but the space of the Academy is a spectacular one for a solo artist to fill, as was shown to great effect with the recent Joan Eardley retrospective. Plus I am all for appreciating the work of women in Scottish art!

The first room showed early work, with which I was unfamiliar, and I was very taken indeed with the energetic mark-making and wonderfully evocative 1950s and 60s colourways of the prints and drawings. They reminded me very much of William Gillies - not surprising, since he was Blackadder's teacher. Two travelling scholarships to Italy yielded some beautiful pen and ink drawings of Italian hill-top towns, again full of a lovely variety of marks and great energy.

Wall Town 1962 by Elizabeth Blackadder (ink & watercolour)

However I wasn't so taken with the later work, with cats, watercolours of orchids, and saturated flat pattern-making colour still lifes of kimonos and collected objects.

Chinese Still Life with Arum Lillies by Elizabeth Blackadder 1982, Oil on canvas

The oils are certainly quite punchy at a distance, especially in the setting of the RSA, but didn't really convey anything emotionally to me. Closer observation of these or of the botanical watercolours, which initially look so intricate, don't reveal exciting lines or astonishing passages of painting. The cats, which could look very saccharine, are obviously well observed, but just aren't something I could really feel connected with. Nor did the later paintings really speak of the times in which they were created, unlike the early work, which definately had a 50s and 60s vibe.

Blackadder's work is very quiet, very still. That's not a criticism in itself. The work of Gillies is also very quiet and still, and yet his paintings somehow have a real soul to them, a real inner life buzzing away inside them. I'm afraid I just didn't connect with the Blackadders, but perhaps that's just me. Obviously she is hugely popular and much loved, and the paintings, judging by the short film that was showing, are very much a reflection of her as a person, in which she comes across as lovely and unassuming. I just wonder where all that exciting early mark-making went.

In the shop, the catalogues were reduced, and you got two for the price of one. My free ticket entitled me to a further discount, but even at £5 each, I decided against buying. The merchandise was on special offer, and there were lots of cats and orchids on fridge magnets. Everyone there seemed to have a free ticket. Leonardo it wasn't.

Images copyright Elizabeth Blackadder

After the storm

2012-01-12T05:02:00.000-08:00

The big clear-up continues after the recent storms, and I took this photo of trees near the studio.

The broken branches and split tree-trunks look as if they are straight out of a Salvator Rosa landscape!

Neapolitan painter Rosa (1615-1673) was hugely popular in his day - turning out wildly rugged landscapes, allegorical paintings and etchings, and also outraging society with his satirical plays and poems. His dramatic visions, of moody landscapes with raging storms and colourful unsavoury characters roaming the countryside, later struck a chord with the 19th century Romantic movement.

Rosa was painting en plein air - painting outside on location - over 200 years before the Impressionists. It was the invention of the collapsible tin tube that led to artists being able to easily transport materials out of doors, and enabled Cezanne to pack up his oils and take them across the countryside to paint Mont St Victoire.

It must have been a lot harder for Rosa to do this - he would have had to use something a lot fiddlier, small leather pouches with stoppers - but he seems to have been quite a thrawn and determined character!

Back in the studio...

2012-01-11T05:04:00.000-08:00

Whilst final preparations continue in London for my February solo show, work continues in the studio on the next project.

Today I am doing something a little different - drawings and mixed media work on paper for a very exciting show that is coming up in the spring. Here's one in progress on my board in the studio.

As you can see, I'm working from a photograph that I took on site, and I'm using acrylics, inks, pastels and chalks on a nice rough buff-coloured handmade paper with a lovely unusual tooth, almost like a textile. It's nice to work out of a ground that's not white, as it gives a nice ready-made mid-tone.

To apply the paint, as well as brushes I use a flexible plastic spatula, which gives marks with a lovely volume, and a long stick to apply the coloured inks. Using a stick allows for a more expressive, loose style of mark-making, but anything is fair game - a roller, sponge, edge of a piece of card. This is especially useful for grasses and foreground, as it gives the feeling of the growth and the grasses moving.

I also like using the stick/ink technique for architecture, such as in my pictures of seaside piers or bridges, as it makes the lines of the structure feel less 'precious' and more organic. You become less caught up in the exact delineation of every last detail, and become more focussed on expressing the feeling of the presence of the building or structure.

Eastbourne Pier (Mixed, 30 x 24)

Exploring a subject through mixed media is a good way of thinking through how you might want to express a subject in oils, and how you might achieve a variety of qualities of mark and texture.

You'll have to wait a bit longer to hear what the project coming up in the spring is - plenty of things happening before that!!

'Between Tides' Solo Show

2012-01-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

Very exciting - the date for the preview of my solo show in London At Duncan Miller's is going to be the evening of Thursday 23rd February. It's always a big thrill to have a show in London, and I'm looking forward to this very much!

The new paintings for the show were delivered to the gallery just before Christmas in order to allow them to be photographed for the catalogue. The theme is the meeting of land and sea. There's paintings of the West Coast of Scotland with the white sands around Morar and Mallaig,the wonderful subtle colours of the sands at Morecambe, and the rugged coastline of Northern Ireland with its dramatic light and wonderful colours.

Harebells near Cushendun (Oil, 20 x 20)

I will, of course, be going down to London for the preview, and look forward very much to meeting you all! Everyone is welcome, so if you'd like a catalogue or an invite, just let me know at judith@jibridgland.com.

New Year, New Blog

2012-01-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

The start of a new year is all about both looking back and looking forward. So this is a sort of 'Janus' post, looking back to the events of 2011, and ahead to all the exciting new possibilties of 2012.

To introduce myself, I am an artist living and working in Scotland. I paint landscapes like this:

Distant Yacht on Blustery Day, Rinagree (Oil 32 x 48)

big, bold, textural, meaty, vibrant oils on canvas. And I have a website at www.jibridgland.com where you can read about forthcoming exhibitions and so on.

So over the past year, I have had a very very busy time, with lots of work on show in London, Glasgow, Bristol, the Cotswolds - I had a painting accepted for the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, and I have been up and down the country doing preparatory work for shows which will come to fruition in the first half of 2012.

I have a loyal band of people who support my work and who are very enthusiastic about my paintings (hullo!), which is wonderful, and I wanted to start a blog to keep you all a bit more in touch with what I'm doing, and also for me to hear from you.

So I hope to use these posts to tell you a bit more about the paintings that I'm working on in the studio and how they come about - the places that I'm going to in order to paint, the exhibitions I've seen, the books I've read (not that I get much chance for that, but here's hoping...) and generally all the things that go together in a big patchwork to make the paintings what they are. And perhaps you'll tell me about all the places/exhibitions/books etc that inspire you too.

Hopefully these posts will start to paint a picture for you of what life's like for one painter in Scotland....