The great struggle to finish.

I've painted and drawn all my life, and I've long realised that sometimes no matter how well you plan, however many rough sketches you do - things start to go wrong.  And I also know that sometimes you can produce pretty good work with little preparation, almost as if by magic.  And it's difficult to know what happened in either case.

Sometimes you can exhaust your commitment to a project by working and re-working the design over too many times.  For instance if I design a picture with a number of figures and other elements in the background, I sometimes find myself redrawing each figure over and over so that when I come to paint the finished image I can get it right quickly.  I suppose it's like an actor rehearsing a role over and over so as to be as good as possible on the night.  But I often get to the stage where I've done the drawing so many times it starts to feel stale not sharp, and I get so sick of it that my enthusiasm wanes.

But I keep doing it because experience and common sense tells me that the finished result should be better if I've 'rehearsed' the thing.  If you don't put in that extra work the whole thing is liable to go awry.  But that extra work can also be the thing that bores you to a standstill.  It might, I suppose be something to do with my bad technique which has been largely self taught, and therefore lacking in system.

The Shrimp Girl by William Hogarth. (1697 - 1764)  This fine work was once lauded as an impressionist painting before the fact, but its free handling is really all due to its being unfinished.  Why is it unfinished?  Only Hogarth knew the answer to that.  Wikipedia Commons.

Uncertainty must also play its part in this, because if you know your drawing is sound because your training is good then maybe you don't feel constrained to re-draw it so many times.  However the scores of great drawing studies by famous artists show they always did the groundwork, and made superb studies that are works of art in themselves.

  But there are still a lot of unfinished paintings out there.  Like books and musical compositions often they're not finished because of that old excuse - death, however there are a lot of paintings that were left unfinished for various reasons ranging from the artist falling out with the sitter of a portrait or the patron who had commissioned a work suddenly changing their mind about the cost half way through the work.

Jacques Louis David (1748 - 1825)  Madame Récamier.  I think this seems finished enough for a Neo Classic painting.  They're meant to be spartan.  Jean Auguste Dominic Ingres (1780 - 1867) painted the lamp stand.  Wikipedia Commons.

J. L. David is supposed to have left his portrait of Madame Récamier unfinished because he felt insulted that she had invited another artist, Gerard to paint her, because David was taking so long.  It was reported that she liked Gerard's painting better.  David wrote her a letter stating that just as ladies had their whims, so did artists, and that he would leave the painting unfinished.  But is it really unfinished?  It has the sharp emptiness that the Neo Classic artists valued, its simple and elegant.  Even that scumbling that you see in the background, usually a sign that the artist has only just placed in the undercoat doesn't mean much with David who often used that approach for his backgrounds.

Gustav Klimt (1864 - 1918)  The Bride.  One of a number of uncompleted paintings found in his studio at his death.  Wikipedia Commons.

Death prevented Klimt from completing a number of works.  He had a stroke which put him in hospital partly paralysed and according to the account by Alessandra Comini while he was in hospital burglars broke into his studio and were confronted by these large paintings still on their easels and in various stages of completion.  He had painted the naked figures and had begun to paint patterned clothing over them.  Comini imagined the burglars in the darkness of the studio, bemused by these strange visions as they came to light before their torches.  

This was 1918, the year the First World War ended, but also the year the terrible influenza epidemic began, killing almost as many across the world as the war itself had done.  And Klimt in his weakened state did not escape it.

The one unsettling note is that these artists only left work unfinished with a good reason, whereas I seem to find it harder to finish paintings now I'm older than I did when young.  I tell myself that its because the better I am the more exacting I have become and that it all takes longer.  Nothing to do with laziness then.

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Copy everything.

When I was a kid my mom said that you should never copy another’s work, and I know what she meant by that, she meant never claim another’s work as your own.  And she was right. But an artist has to be prepared right from the start to copy other peoples art, because unless they do – and do it thoroughly - they will never get the experience or the enrichment of ideas that are required to learn to ‘see’ as a designer must. 

Yes, copy from nature as well, but only by seeing what another mind has understood about an object or a scene will prime you to fully understand the same object or scene yourself.

Be open about it, let people see you copy the thing and never sign it with your own name, but copying is essential.  The masters of the past knew this simple fact when they ran the old studio/atelier system; forcing their pupils to endlessly copy casts of classical statues, or copy painting or engravings.  It makes you notice the important points that you must pay attention to if you want to achieve the same effects.    I was talking about this with my sister and I remembered when I was about twelve or thirteen trying to copy Michelangelo’s famous chalk preparatory drawing for the Libyan Sibyl of the Sistine Chapel.  If you want to see the full page drawing go here.

I tried to copy this drawing when I was thirteen.  I still have the nervous twitch.

If you know this drawing, you will think I’m probably writing this blog from a padded cell somewhere, but no, I am perfectly sane.  And I was then as well. My parents always took the right attitude, never tell a kid they can’t do something (even if you privately believe so), just let them get on with it.

So nobody told me I shouldn’t try, and I was never told my efforts were foolish and that they would never amount to anything. This is how you learn to draw, no matter what anyone thinks – copy, copy copy. 

And what if you make no money from it and nobody knows your work?  Doesn't matter, you still have the skill you worked hard to aquire and nobody can take it away from you.

So was I a butter wouldn’t melt Little Lord Fauntleroy in a velvet suit, copying the great masters before taking my piano lessons?  Hardly. Most of the copying I did, as a child was from comics and cartoons, and being based in the UK I saw an equal share of British and American publications. I had the velvet suit though!

But of course that's not me.  My hat was much bigger than that.

Frank Bellamy and Frank Hampson were the top comic artists in Britain along with newspaper cartoonists like Carl Giles.   I learned my share from all of them.  Also from US publications like MAD magazine,and Marvel.

I discovered the earlier British artists like Arthur Rackham, Heath-Robinson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) and even further back in time there was the great Hogarth.  I remember seeing the horrible image from Hogarth's quartet of prints, 'The Four Stages of Cruelty' in a school textbook.  The quartet of prints tells the brief story of a Tom Nero who starts as a cruel child torturing animals and progresses through his life to murder.   The prints were a moralistic lesson to the poor about the cruelty they daily handed out to animals.  Hogarth saw that cruelty every day in London, and in the 1750's had made the connection that one kind of cruelty always leads to another, in this case murder.

In the final print we see him after sentence of death has been passed, at the surgeons hall where he is being dissected.  Its a truly disturbing image that still has impact today, and although I didn't copy it I did study it with the morbid fascination that children always bring to such things.

I suppose that Hogarth's example shows what a practically self taught artist can do, copying from his master when apprenticed as a silver smith, and later from the artist who he greatly admired and who later became his father in law Sir James Thornhill.

So Hogarth knew the score - copy, copy copy.

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