Success Successful artists are artists who are successful in a commercial sense and who are critically acclaimed. They could also be just successful commercially and not critically acclaimed, but they can never be recognised as an important artists without any commercial success; that is, they can never be just ‘critically acclaimed‘. Success in this game means financial success and that first and foremost. However, you should feel successful every time you finish a painting, whether you sell it or not.         […]

Understanding Art 2 Art does not have to be explained.        

Understanding Art Art does not have to make sense.          

Art Appreciation Grayson Perry famously said – “you don’t have to like everything“.        

Humour in Art Humour is not the opposite of serious.        

The window on the world There are two sorts of painting. One contains a whole world, all of what there is and all that is necessary. The other is a section of something much bigger.     Cezanne’s Bathers where ‘everything’ is contained within the rectangle.     Francis Bacon innovated a unique and distinctive space of the interior, an equivalent space, like a large mirror. In both the Cezanne and the Bacon there is no world beyond the paintings […]

Scale The word ‘scale‘, when speaking of paintings, is often used when it is simply ‘size‘ that is being referred to. Such as – “I like the scale of these paintings“, when it is clearly the size of the painting that is being appreciated. It would be wrong to comment on the scale of, say, a Jackson Pollock when you are only commenting on how big it is. Scale is not the same as size. Scale refers to the internal proportions of […]

Do not dismiss the obvious I have been criticised for being too obvious and not leaving enough space for the imagination of the audience. I used to tell my students not to discount the obvious, as the obvious can be difficult to deal with but it could be the fundamental, the common denominator, the important thing. You should not dismiss the obvious without investigating it thoroughly. The obvious is not always obvious. The problem with the obvious is that it […]

Titles \ There is no such thing as the ‘purely visual’. All art comes with a text and a context. The viewer is more often than not told what to think, in all those books, magazines, reviews, labels and titles. All art is transformed by text and a change of context. \ Most of this writing is by critics, journalists, reviewers, art historians, curators or gallery education departments and very little by the artists themselves. \ In all this noise, […]

Meaning The meaning of a painting is probably nothing to do with the artist; rather meaning is something that is not within the artist’s control. No matter what the artist’s intentions, no matter what the  artist planned or calculated, no matter what is proposed, meaning comes from the viewer. Looking finishes the work. Meaning is ascribed to the painting after it has left the studio, and this meaning can change. The meaning of works of art is fluid. If the […]