In the bleak midwinter..

One of my favourite paintings is Pieter Bruegel's 'Hunters in the Snow', a wonderful evocation of winter and one of the coldest works of art that exist.  So cold, in fact, that you can almost feel the cold air folding out from it into the room.  Not much is known about the painter, his date of birth is unknown; he is mentioned in a list of members of the painters guild in 1551, his first son was born in 1564, his second in 1568 and he died the following year.

The types of painting he produced are mysterious, strange, metaphysical and have informed the modern view of the late medieval world probably too strongly for accuracy's sake.  When you look at his paintings together it is hard not to assume that the painter was a little disturbed.  Paintings such as 'Dulle Griet', and 'The Triumph of Death' have a strong impact and their obsessive tiny details (as seen in Dadd's 'The Fairy Fellers Masterstroke') suggest madness.  But I don't think Bruegel was mad.  You just need a degree in medieval art history to tease out the meanings of the details and interpret them.  So sorry, can't help you there. 

Hunters in the Snow.  Detail of the mountain range.

 But when you look at 'Hunters in the Snow', although I'm sure it's jam-packed with hidden meaning, it's the basic representation that we can all understand and appreciate.  It's apparently one of the most popular medieval images to appear on secular style Christmas cards.  It's a beautifully realised image of three men as they make their way through a snow covered - landscape on a hunting trip.  It's unclear if they are coming back or starting out, they have no animal carcasses with them so they might be starting out, but on the other hand maybe they've been unsuccessful and are returning empty-handed.  The figures are framed between three thin stark tree trunks, and following behind them are about thirteen hounds.  They pass by houses, an inn on their left where the people are burning something outside their door.

The hunters are on the peak of a hill, and are starting their decent.  Below there are a number of large frozen-over fish ponds, offshoots from the nearby river visible in the background, and at the bottom of this hill stands another red brick house, complete with a raised brick arch conveying a road over the pond.  At one side of this house, is a large brick structure that may possibly be a boathouse with a tall arched opening from which hangs a thick mass of icicles.

An Artist with his Patron.  Possibly the main figure is a self portrait by Bruegel.

 I remember these kinds of winters, although the UK doesn't have them any more; when I was a child between the ages of one and ten, the UK had real winters with real bite, the last such winters the country had in the twentieth century.  I remember it would snow in early December, a good fall, and then instead of melting the next day as it always did after about 1970 (global warming deniers take note) it would stay on the ground, freezing hard until a few days later a second fall would cover it.  The temperature would remain constant and there would be a third fall of glittering white snow, frequently with the clear blue sky that always accompanies really cold days.  Its these sorts of memories that come back to me when I see this painting.  Bruegel's painting however has a grey green sky, a great colour choice for representing a certain kind of cloudy sky.

Yes, I remember the kinds of days Bruegel is depicting, although I suspect his winter was harsher than any I ever experienced, the air so cold, it seems to attack you, makes your skin sting and toes and fingers ache, even though the air is still, with no wind.  Bruegal's painting is wonderfully detailed, you need to see it for real or have a very high quality print reproduction to see it all.  It is one of the best landscapes I know, receding back - and back again and filled with lively activity and incident.  Beyond the frozen ponds on which tiny figures skate and play there are more houses and trees, a church and beyond them more tinier figures are hurrying across a bridge over the river, carrying a ladder - the reason?

Hunters in the Snow.  Pieter Bruegel  A painting of space, cold and silence.

On the other side of the river is their house, and other people are in the process of climbing another ladder on to the thatched roof - because the chimney is on fire.  (See top of page)  A little drama all played out in miniature in the background of this painting.  But the painting goes back further, more trees, copses of trees, hamlets, a profusion of churches and to the right a large mountain range projects upwards towards the green sky.  To the left is the distant coast, and some large town, maybe a busy harbour or fishing community with a prominent church steeple.

I suppose if it has a meaning it's something to do with the smallness of human endeavour and the hugeness of the world; although we are close to the hunters and see them looming large in the landscape, all the life around them is there to be seen, so much in fact that they begin to dwindle in importance in their own picture, they become part of the landscape, merely compositional marks on the white.

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A little bit of madness.

 Over the past month or so, I've written about a series of artists who might be considered distinctly odd.  Last week there was Géricault with his paintings of severed heads and other medical bits and pieces.  Then there was Girodet with his strange and humourless ideas about what constituted 'painting in the grand manner'.  Girodet insisted on painting at night, by the light of specially constructed lanterns, because he preferred nighttime to work in.  Most artists do their night scenes by day, using curtains etc so they can control the darkness and light, needing lantern light only as a necessary prop to a night scene.  Eccentric.  Arnold Böcklin was next, he seemed a little saner than the last two, but showed signs he was living under stress the older he got.  Then, closer to our own time there was Robert Lenkiewicz, who's lifestyle could certainly be summed up as eccentric.  They all produced work of a high standard but were they actually mad?

This is a question that's hovering in the ether at the moment, is artistic talent, skill,  that catch all word 'creativity', some kind of evolutionary buffer against mental illness - or even a sign of possible mental illness.  If we consider being a wild-eyed bohemian, dressed in rags, hair in disarray while mumbling over your work is a sign of  'creativity' then I suppose we might agree with the premise.  Doing outrageous things, drinking excessively, taking drugs are all things that today are sited as the kind of approach 'creative' people have to life.  Some of them like to pose as strange, 'it's my artistic freedom that makes me a little mad'.  They never want to be seen as completely mad, just touched by madness as if it were the latest fashion accessory.

Richard Dadd.  (1817 - 1886)  Self portrait.

 Of course we do have one case of a mad artist that gives us some insights into the question of whether artistic creativity is a buffer to mental illness, a sign of it or a cause of it.  This artist and his case are well known.  Richard Dadd.   Born in 1817 in Chatham Kent, he was one of seven children.  His family moved to London in 1834 when he was eighteen and his father gained work as a bronze sculptor and woodcarver, and it seems that Dadd met some of his fathers artist associates and gained some instruction in drawing from them.  At twenty he entered the Royal Academy schools where he made contact with a number of artists who later became stalwarts of the Victorian art world such as Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith, and William Bell Scott, and in their student days formed themselves into a group nicknamed 'The Clique'.  If all had gone well, Dadd would have joined them in their success.

 The details of what happened once he had left the schools are fairly well known, he took a job with his patron Sir Thomas Phillips to accompany him on what amounted to one of the last 'Grande Tours' of Europe and the Middle East.  During their time in Europe all seemed well, they travelled down to Greece, Turkey and then on to Cyprus and Beirut.  They took an extended tour of the Holy land before moving onto Egypt.  Here things started to go badly wrong.  Dadd, began to have headaches, behave erratically and become violent.  They began to retrace their journey and by the time they reached Italy, Dadd was worse, feeling an uncontrollable urge to attack the pope when he saw him make a personal appearance.  He was having delusions about being followed and spied on and it was all put down to exhaustion and sunstroke.

Insignificance.  A watercolour image summing up Dadd's view of an artists life painted in Bethlem Hospital.

He had become obsessed with the Egyptian god Osiris who he believed was talking to him, and giving him instructions to fight the Devil, who could take on any form.  He apparently took to staring at the sun for long periods of time because he associated it with Osiris.  They arrived in Paris and Dadd crossed over to England leaving Phillips and the rest of the group in France.  In England Dadd went directly to his studio in Newman Street  and continued to live for a while,  on an almost exclusive diet of hard boiled eggs and ale.  Because there were signs of mental illness in Dadd's brother George, (and subsequently three of his other brothers) his father took him to see a doctor in Harley Street who pronounced him insane.  His father agreed to accompany Dadd on a trip to Cobham (in spite of the diagnosis) on the 28th of August 1843, and after they had eaten, went for a walk in the surrounding countryside.   During this walk Dadd attacked his father with a knife, stabbing him to death, and then immediately left Cobham and went to Dover, boarding a ship for France.
 

The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke By Richard Dadd

 He attacked a man in France with a razor, and was detained by the police.   In the meantime the Police in London had found the body of his father and had investigated his studio at Newman Street and discovered a number of sketches of his friends and family all with their throats cut.  In France the police had discovered on Dadd a list of 'people who must die', his father's name being the first on the list.  He was placed in five different asylums while in France and eventually taken back to Britain.  Obviously insane he was sent to the Royal Betham Hospital where he spent the next twenty years and under the auspices of Dr William Hood he did most of his well known work here.  The most famous of these paintings is 'The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke' a complex painting made for Dr Hood's family, which took about eight years to mostly finish but not complete.  It is a 'fairy painting' of a type that became popular in Victorian Britain, inspired by Dadd's love of Shakespeare.  He drew numerous sketches and watercolour paintings throughout his life, and a handful of fully finished oil paintings which are all notable for their strange other worldly atmosphere.

So did painting and creativity save Dadd?  It certainly didn't warn anyone of impending mental illness as he'd been painting for years before the first signs appeared.  Did it act as a buffer against the encroachment of the illness.  Obviously not, but who knows, it may have slowed it down.  Probably Dadd suffered an acute emotional pain throughout his illness and possibly his painting helped him remain calm and occupied, and Dr Hood was a fairly far sighted person to have understood this so early in the study of mental illness.  In an essay on the painter  and 'The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke', by writer Neil Gaiman he makes the point that in a series of photographs taken of the inmates of Bethlem Hospital in the 1850's only one is actually doing something - it's of Dadd, and he's painting.  Today patients are encouraged to paint pictures and this work is often shown in exhibitions of so called 'outsider art' and praised for its particular qualities.  Does the ability to paint have any effect on the life of a person like Dadd?  Apart from helping him get through the forty or so years of his life after the murder I don't think so.  Mental illness was just something that was going to happen to the Dadd boys, even the one's who weren't creative, and madness didn't effect all those creative friends Dadd made in the Royal Academy schools.  

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Raft of Terror! - Or how to fan the flames of scandal with one gigantic painting.

 In the 1820's and 30's if you had visited the studios of artists across Britain and Europe, amongst the various casts and other studio props you might very likely have seen hung on the wall, a reproduction death mask.  It would have been of a very gaunt face, almost skull like and with a straggly beard, the face of a man who has died after a long drawn out and debilitating illness.  Those artists of the time who had the mask on their walls, or near their easel used it almost as an icon, a talisman of good luck and a symbol of their artistic aspirations.  The thin worn face was that of Théodore Géricault.

Born in Rouen in 1791, the son of a lawyer, he was an early Romantic painter inspiring such artists as Delacroix and Chassériau, and was seen as representing great promise, and yet also unfulfilled ambition.  He was trained in the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin, but did a great deal of study on his own account, copying in the Louvre artists such as Rubens, Velázquez, Titian and others.  Like so many other French artists of this period he seems to have rebelled against his masters approach to art, who in turn held a disparaging opinion of him as an artist, and in this he was similar to Girodet who I wrote about recently.  In fact in some respects he might be considered as Girodet with taste.

The actual Raft of the Medusa.  A lithograph based on the carpenters drawings of the raft he built.  Wikipedia Commons.

He didn't have any contact with the painters of the Neo-Classic 'old brigade' such as David and Ingres, but he would have been only too well aware of their work and influence; he turned away from them and had the touch of genius to turn the progress of French painting along a different route.  His first major painting to be exhibited in 1812 was Chasseur on Horseback followed by The Wounded Chasseur, both of which were popular at the salon but which left the artist dissatisfied.  Above all Géricault was indecisive about what projects he wanted to pursue, often setting himself a task and then abandoning it while half finished or only in the preliminary stages.

Maybe he was undecided about being a painter at all, a pretty unpredictable profession at the best of times.  He decided to join the army and for a short time was garrisoned at Versailles.  After a failed love affair he left for Rome, (how he got out of the army I don't know ) to study the great Italian masters.  He started a large canvas of the Barbari Horses, but never finished it, starting a trend of unfinished projects.

Théodore Géricault. (1791 - 1824)  Wikipedia Commons

 

His most famous painting (because finished?) is the canvas, The Raft of the Medusa, which follows in the tradition of French historical painting by being Gigantic.  Painted between 1818 and 1819 It is sixteen feet one inch by twenty-three feet six inches, and the figures are larger than life size.  The paintings subject derives from a scandal that took place about a year previously in which a French ship was wrecked and the captain abandoned ship, leaving the passengers and most of the crew to their fate.

As the ship was slowly sinking the ships carpenter was able to quickly make a raft from the ships timbers and ropes, and everyone on board was able to take to the raft, setting out on rough seas with just a few barrels of water and wine and little food.  There were one hundred and forty seven people at the start of the perilous voyage, only fifteen survived after thirteen days on the raft.  There had been fighting between groups armed with knives and cutlasses, barrels of precious water had been lost to the waves in the tumult of violence, the weak had been killed and thrown overboard, others had been swept away in stormy seas and eventually the canibalism the people had been forced to resort to to stay alive helped project the story to the forefront of public attention.  The failings of incompetent public servants was held to blame, who were percived as ancien régime placeholders, merely in office because they were favoured by the returned monarchy.  And so the scandal flared,

When preparing himself for the work Géricault approached the task like a journalist, finding and interviewing two of the survivors, getting the carpenter who had survived to make a model of the raft from memory and reading any accounts he could find about the tragedy, finally resorting to studying corpses at the local morgue to get the 'look' of death correct.   This went to even creepier lengths, where Géricault, shaven headed (to prevent him leaving the studio on self indulgent nights out) obtained the guillotined head of a criminal and painted studies from it.  These and a number of studies of severed arms and legs are, however unpleasant, really powerful works.   Whether he was successful in capturing the look of death is debatable.  Like Girodet before him, his palette is dominated by greens, greys and muddy browns, and subsequently all the figures look deathly.  Perhaps he painted corpses to get into a state of mind, to conjure the atmosphere that reigned on the raft itself.

Théodore Géricault.  The Raft of the Medusa.  The figure lying face down with arm extended in the centre of the painting was modelled by Eugéne Delacroix.

 He used friends and assistants as models for the figures on the raft, most notably the young Eugéne Delacroix and painted the whole thing in about eight months.  The finished result impressed Delacroix when he first saw it, causing him to run back to his studio to begin work with new inspiration.  However, such works, that criticise establishment faults and seem to have a political content always cause controversy and fan the flames of existing scandal.  Conservatives hated the picture, although it also had many supporters.  It had the effect of keeping a scandal that the government had hoped would fade away with time, alive and before the public gaze.
 

A bronze reproduction of the death mask.  The mask has been altered during the mould making stage to include the open eyes.  Wikipedia Commons.

 Although Géricault made attempts to paint another large canvas they all came to nothing.  The 'Raft' had made money in a travelling show in England, but the artist had gone through bouts of depression and ill health.  Back in Paris he indulged his love of riding fast horses, and one evening as he was waiting for the city gate to be opened as he returned from the country, his horse threw him and he landed on his back.  The art critic Kenneth Clark suggests the injuries he received caused a cancer of the spine, but others have suggested that the illness that killed him was tuberculosis.   That gaunt sunken face of the death mask gives us no clues, for either illness could have been the cause, but the mask went on not just to represent Géricault but the actual ambition of subsequent artists, it was a kind of Romantic manifesto in the shape of a death mask.

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Rackham and Dulac

The years between 1890 and 1920 could be said to be the golden age of British illustration.  The number of periodicals throughout the 1890s and into the Edwardian era was large and always needed a good supply of fresh talent to do the pen and ink line illustrations, which accompanied their stories and articles.  Two such artists were Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Arthur Rackham was born in Lewisham in 1867 and worked for a time as a clerk in the Westminster Fire Office.  He took night classes at Lambeth School of Art and began to get work illustrating for magazines such as The Windsor Magazine, usually supplying an end design for an article or story, often a silhouette or small roundel.  His first book illustration was for 'To the Other Side' by Thomas Rhodes, which appeared in 1893, and he then followed this with illustrations for 'The Dolly Dialogues' by Anthony Hope, in 1894.

Arthur Rackham

But his first big success came in 1905 when he was commissioned to illustrate Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle'.  He produced no less than fifty-one colour plates for this, which must have been a struggle, but it put him at the forefront of the luxury-book gift market.  He followed it equally successfully with 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,' By J. M. Barrie.  He produced beautiful colour work for some wonderful books, some of his best being for Wagner's Ring cycle, that really capture the dark northern world of gods and dwarves, dragons and heroes.  
 

'Loge, Loge, appear!'  Arthur Rackham.  One of the best Rackham images from his work on Wagner's 'Ring 'cycle, depicting the God Odin calling on the God Loki.  At the time that Wagner and Rackham were working, it was thought that Loki was a fire God (which he wasn't) and that's why he's shown in flames.

 He really did  for the 'Ring of the Nibelung,' what Alan Lee later did for the 'Lord of the Rings.'  When Rackham died in 1939 he had produced a wide range of superbly illustrated storybooks, always indulging his love of twisting pen lines and the grotesque; his world is one of dark gnarled forests, wild mountains and is rugged and bracing.  It is overlaid with a certain sweetness but is never far from the threatening and mysterious.  

Edmund Dulac

  But for most of his career Rackham had a rival, in the form of Edmund Dulac, another brilliant exponent of  luxury book illustrations who was born in Toulouse, France in 1882.  At first he set out to become a lawyer, but soon left his studies and went to study art instead at the École des Beaux Arts, and then briefly at the Académie Julián.  He did work illustrating magazines in Paris, but came to London in 1905, and was soon given a commission to illustrate 'Jane Eyre,' which was followed by nine other Brontë novels.  In Britain, like Rackham, he regularly contributed to popular periodicals and magazines, and went on to illustrate 'The Arabian Nights,' and then Shakespeare's 'The Tempest.'  Dulac became naturalised in 1912.

Dulac's work is softer and sweeter than Rackhams; the Englishman tended to use pen and ink lines to define his images, colouring them with watercolour, so his work has a harsher look - it's spiky, with lines of varying thickness to delineate masses and forms.  Dulac was essentially a painter, and rarely picked up a pen, his work is almost completely watercolour and Gouache.  Both artists understood the new printing techniques that were being used in the early twentieth century, and knew exactly how their work would look, varying it slightly to accommodate types of paper.

Scene from the Tempest, by William Shakespear.  Edmund Dulac.  I love the use of space in this design, that great cloud of mist billowing down, so that the figures stand out really well, and look at the movement of both the creature and the men!

 And of course these two artists weren't really rivals, as the kind of work they did suited particular types of subject.  Rackham was great for northern fairly tales, and tales of knightly quests and Nordic gods, while Dulac fitted 'The Arabian Nights' and Chinese and Persian subjects beautifully, although there was some overlap in the subjects they tackled.

Dulac lived further into the twentieth century than Rackham, being a little younger but does seem to have experimented more with the look of his work than Rackham who's work, however good was fairly static in it's approach.  There is a noticable change in Dulac's work, as he moved through the thirties, where something of Art Deco painting starts to show up in the way he paints the human figure, and the decorative way he did landscapes.  His last work was for the 1951 Great Exhibition and stamp designs commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second.  He died in 1953.

Together they represent the short time when these kind of lavish colour works would have been a fixture of children's Christmas gifts, filled with pictures that were realistic, exacting, and intelligent.  What a shame they will probably never appear again.  

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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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Under the influence.

When I was seventeen I saw a copy of Alessandra Comini's Book on Gustav Klimt.  It was the first time he had come to my attention and that magical effect that I was talking about the week before last took hold of me again, where you are swept along by an artists work and just can't get enough.

I think most people aren't all that interested in art, so they experience the same effect through popular music, and the following of a particular band or singer but it is essentially the same thing.  You become a super fan.  A young artist might follow bands as well, but a really interesting artist will grab their attention in a very special way.

Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918)  photographed by Josef Anton Trĉka.  Wikipedia commons.

Klimt was one of the artists I copied, and learned huge amounts from the study of his work.  He's usually known for his 'gold paintings' but I was as aware of his drawings and poster designs as the paintings.  I particularly liked the Comini book because it was an economically produced colour book - that actually had gold effect printing so that the images of the paintings could really be appreciated, which I suppose for 1977, was pretty adventurous for a publisher.  It seems to have been a success because Klimt's present popularity seems to stem from this books publication.

Comini compared Klimt's Pallas Athena (left) favourably with a similar painting by a contemporary Franz Stuck (1863 - 1928).  Klimt's is great and more inventive, but I still Like Stuck's.  Both Images - Wikipedia commons.

For about five years I drew and painted Klimt inspired work until I finally got him out of my system.  It's quite possible that I paint less well now, I won't dispute it and I still think he's great but an influence like that is like having artistic measles.  Its effect is quite obvious.

I mentioned in that last blog how strong the influence of H. R. Giger (1940 - 2014) has been on young artists after 1979, and the introduction of his work to a wider audience through his production designs for the film 'Alien'.  Again I caught the bug, but this time I had a stronger immunity.  Still, it didn't stop me buying the book on the production of the film, a second book 'Giger's Alien' and his book of posters and other designs, 'Necronimicon'.

H. R. Giger.  Biomechanical Landscape (Detail).  One of my favourite works by this artist, and I think one of his most successful.  Here's someone's generic photograph of it.  It's not from a poster site!  Click on it to see Giger's own website.

  But the influence on my own work didn't last anywhere near as long.  I'm not suggesting he's not a worthy artist, but his work is so dark and dank, after a prolonged exposure to it you feel like you're sitting in someones rubbish filled cellar watching water run down the walls.  Having said that, Giger's work can certainly shake you up when you see it for the first time, and make you realise new possibilities.

I suppose that being aware of the strength of influence that some artist may have on your art is essential, but is also challenging because to improve and grow you have to be aware of and be exposed to different approaches and styles.

On the face of it I think they are two strangely different artists to have developed a liking for in the space of a few years, Klimt with his ethereal lovelies and ornate decoration, and Giger with his brutal industrialised images of biomechanical hell.  But then - that's the teenage years for you.  All those hormones make you jittery.  So that's what I was under the influence of all along.

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Painting the Lions of Nectanebo.

This exercise is intended as a guide for anyone with a desire to do a bit of painting, who has a little skill, and doesn't mind following my dry and slightly erratic instructions.  It's not meant to be the last word on anything, but only meant as a 'tryout', something that might be followed for as far as is desired.  It might be possible to pick up a few useful points along the way - but if not, then at least we got our paint boxes out and had a try.

If I'm going to colour a real drawing on real paper or board - with real paint, I usually start with a ground colour, and for me, my preference is always yellow ochre.  This is an excellent neutral colour that can be used in many ways, (not least as a component of flesh colour) as a background colour its useful because it can be used to 'kill' almost any other colour (therefore good for painting over things and making corrections), and its light so it won't obscure a drawing if its applied as a thin glaze.  It's also good for drawing onto as the lines stand out well against it.

I either paint in gouache or acrylic (rarely in oils or watercolour - too complicated) and all types of painting have their pitfalls, you just have to know them.  With acrylic you have to remember that it's a form of coloured liquid plastic, and that once it's allowed to dry - that's it.  When dry, it can be successfully scratched off glass, hard plastics, and polished wood but get it on clothing and that's another matter. If you get it on clothes that you care about, you'll have to completely immerse the garment in water and start scrubbing right away - run, run - don't let that paint get a chance to dry.  But as they say in the old books - I digress.

I'm going to use acrylic for this exercise, because it dries very fast and because of this I shall be using it more like watercolour or gouache in that you can apply it in dilute form in thin washes.  When you put the colour on thinly you can see the drawing lines through it.  Also, the wetter the paint is, the more time you have to do things with it - such as blending or mixing more colour in to it on the surface.  The board I'm using is Daler Rowney Line and Wash 'Fine', and I'm using five paints, namely -  yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, titanium white and burnt sienna.

So I will paint a layer of thin dilute yellow ochre over the entire drawing, and then wait for it to dry out completely.

The original drawing, with a thin wash of yellow ochre.

When it is dry, (shouldn't take more than ten minutes - depending on how much water you mixed with the paint) we need to start to re-define the lines of the drawing by using a darker paint to accentuate the more important lines.  It is up to the artist to decide what colour they want to use for this; I usually use burnt umber, raw from the tube and mixed with enough water to keep it smooth and not too dark.  Its a slow easy process of building up an image, the shading and cross hatching lines of the drawing can be ignored, they are important if you just want the drawing as they help to give form, but less so in a painting process.

The main outlines of the drawing darkened with burnt umber.

It's all about washes, and touches of less watery paint to give shadow and depth.

As we apply watery washes onto certain places, we have to be ready to use a large brush dipped in clean water to help smooth the edges of paint areas.  Remember acrylic will dry with a strong edge, and it may be difficult to get rid of the edges later.   Throughout the painting process you should be using brushes to smooth out all paint edges, so that a smooth transition between areas may be achieved.

Always check that your main lines are still visible, and haven't faded away under the washes of other paints already applied.  Go over them with darker paint if they need it.  About now we can go over some of the deeper shadow areas with a darker colour, and I would use burnt umber mixed with ultramarine to get something that looks almost black.  Painters rarely use real black as it's a very deadening substance, which doesn't mix well with other colours except in minute quantities.

This darker paint should be used to accentuate particular points on the drawing to emphasise shadow and bring the image forward.  At this stage what you should have is a flat yellow ochre square over the original drawing, with the drawings main lines  over-painted with a darker colour, and the lines of the main shadow areas painted in with a very dark brown. 
 

What we have at this stage - a yellow ochre covering, with an umber outline, and with the heavily shadowed lines darkened using a mixture of umber and ultramarine.

Now we can begin to use washes of paint to bring out the form.  Although the finished image is a colder grey brown, it has like many things, warmer colours showing on its surface like yellows and red browns.  It's easier to place these colours down at the beginning and let them 'bleed' through than try to apply them later.  As I said earlier, its a process of building up with layers of wash.  So I will now delineate shadows with washes of brown/yellow, created by mixing yellow ochre and burnt sienna with a lot of water.  The consistency you need is so the paint is like a puddle of melted butter.  If the colour seems too rich then quickly mix in more water. 
 

The first washes are applied.

But to move on, we need now to introduce some colder colours to help with darkening the deepest shadows.  I mixed burnt umber, ochre and ultramarine to make shadow washes on the left side of the head applied with lots of water, always using the brush to smooth out the edges.  Note that as we go on, the original lines and crosshatching begin to disappear under the colour washes.
 

Darker washes are applied at left side of head, under nose and chin.

The washes should be concentrated under the lion's cheekbones, under the chin, along the left side of the head, down the left side and under the nose and around the sides of the muzzle.  The light is coming from the right, so shadow is strongest on the left.  Put a little wash in the eye sockets and also into the hollows of the ears.

As in watercolour, I've tried to use the lightness of the board, allowing this to show through for the lightest parts of the face, such as the nose, muzzle and chin.  As you progress and build up the layers of wash, you have to keep asking yourself if you like it with a thin layer of paint, where you might still see some of the underlying drawing showing through.  The drawing showing is not wrong, but a little thicker paint here and there might be more to your taste.
 

The finished lion.

In the finished image I've put a little white onto the top and tip of the nose, a trace along the bottom lip and used some white mixed with yellow ochre on the right cheek and on the whisker lines of the muzzle.  As you can see, quite a lot of the drawing can be seen, especially at the top right of the head, near the eye and around the cheek, but it would be easy to cover these lines sufficiently with washes of slightly thicker paint content.

Well if you've struggled through my dodgy account and peered at my questionable photography to this stage you are to be truly congratulated, and I hope that you can come away with at least something that's half useful.

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