Here you can find all of our recommended art exhibitions that are on in June. Below is a list of our 7 must-see art shows for the month, along with a navigation that can take you to smaller weekly listings that are worthy of note. This section is updated with new shows every week. If you want to see exhibitions in London or in your area simply go to our Artist Calendar – let us know about an exhibition using the form at the bottom of that page for the chance to be included in one of our Art Exhibitions on Now posts!

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in June

Interesting Exhibitions upcoming in June:
*Exhibitions on at the Beginning of June

Find out about further art gallery and exhibition listings.

Tell us about an exhibition, art class or opportunity.

---

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions in June

This month’s not to miss choices include some of the most renown group exhibitions in the world, alongside artistic investigations into culture, faith, the unconscious, and the destruction of cultural heritage.

---

1. Michael Rakowitz

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (Northwest palace of Nimrud, Room N), 2018 (detail), 13 Reliefs: Middle Eastern packaging and newspapers, glue, cardboard, wood

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist best known for his conceptual art, often displayed in unique non-gallery settings. Rakowitz’s work has appeared worldwide and last year he created a piece for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth as part of his project ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’. The work is a recreation of a sculpture of a lamassu (a winged bull and protective deity) that stood at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh, Iraq, from 700 B.C. It was destroyed in 2015 by Islamic State.

Since 2006 Rakowitz has sought to reconstruct more than 8 000 artefacts from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad that are missing, stolen, destroyed or ‘of status unknown’. As the exhibition explores, the sacking of the museum was, he has said, the first event of the war about which there was a consensus – whether you were for or against the conflict, this was a tragedy.

In What Dust Will Rise (2012), Rakowitz pursues creativity from destruction in another context; working with Afghan artisans, Rakowitz honours Jewish and German libraries destroyed in World War II by carving stone books from the ruins of the Bamiyan Buddhas. By uncovering unexpected connections and stories, Michael Rakowitz’s art explores uncomfortable truths, erasure and invisibility across cultures.

This exhibition is showing at the Whitechapel Gallery until 25 August 2019.

---

2. The 251st Summer Exhibition

Charles Avery, Untitled (Duculi), 2013, Bronze, 165 x 300 x 145 cm

Following on from last years Summer Exhibition will not be easy; it celebrated the Academy’s 250th anniversary and was the biggest Summer Exhibition in their history. We are, however, in safe hands. Acclaimed British painter Jock McFadyen RA will take the mantle from Grayson Perry to coordinate this year’s Summer Exhibition and it promises to be just as extraordinary as last years.

For those who don’t know, the Summer Exhibition has been run without interruption since 1769 and is the world’s largest open submission art show. It brings together art in all mediums – prints and paintings, film, photography, sculpture, architectural works and more. Around 1,200 works will be on display, most of them for the first time.

Highlights this year will include an animal-themed ‘menagerie’ in the Central Hall, with works by artists including Polly Morgan, Charles Avery and Mat Collishaw. Artist sisters Jane and Louise Wilson RA will curate two galleries, one of which will showcase work exploring light and time. Further artists exhibiting include Jeremy Deller, Marcus Harvey and Tracey Emin RA, and Honorary Academicians Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell and Wim Wenders.

Outside the galleries, international artist Thomas Houseago will take over the RA’s courtyard with a group of large-scale sculptural works, and the exhibition will spill out into nearby Bond Street with a colourful installation of flags featuring work by Michael Craig-Martin RA. There are certain things the Summer Exhibition delivers on every single year: a broad spectrum of art in all mediums, a remarkable mixture of emerging artists and household names, and more to see and explore than any other exhibition you’re likely to visit this year.

The Summmer Exhibition is showing at the Royal Academy of Art until 12 August 2019.

---

3. Huguette Caland

Huguette Caland, Bribes de corps, 1973, Oil on linen, 152.4 x 152.4 cm

Shifting between figuration and abstraction, Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s large, colourful canvases and detailed drawings from the 1970s and 1980s offer a delicate balance between the suggestive and the explicit.

In the 1970s, after moving to Paris from Beirut, Caland achieved artistic recognition with her exuberant and erotically charged paintings that challenged traditional conventions of beauty and desire. The female physique is a recurrent motif in her work, depicted as landscapes or amorphous forms. Caland has often used her own body as a subject, and her self-representation comes from a desire to liberate and control how her own body and the bodies of other women are depicted.

Her first UK solo exhibition will include signature large canvases with bright colours, such as her Bribes de corps (Body Parts) series. Alongside these paintings are Caland’s intricate drawings, which demonstrate her mastery of line. In these works, portraits of friends and lovers transform into landscapes, and landscapes into overtly sexualized body parts.

This exhibition is showing at the Tate St Ives until 1 September 2019.

---

4. Natalia Goncharova

Natalia Goncharova, Curtain for Le Coq d’Or: Third Act, 1914, Watercolour, Gouache, Graphite

In the first retrospective of Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) ever held in the UK, visitors will experience her bold and innovative body of work and be taken on an exploration of her diverse sources and inspirations, from Russian folk art and textiles to modernist trends and beyond.

Goncharova found acclaim early in her career. Aged just 32 she established herself as the leader of the Russian avant-garde with a major exhibition in Moscow in 1913. She then moved to France where she designed costumes and backdrops. She lived in Paris for the rest of her life, becoming a key figure in the city’s vibrant art scene.

Goncharova’s artistic output was immense, wide-ranging and at times controversial. She paraded the streets of Moscow displaying futurist body art and created monumental religious paintings. She took part in avant-garde cinema, experimented with book designs and designed for fashion houses in Moscow and Paris.

This exhibition is showing at the Tate Modern until 8 September 2019.

---

5. BP Portrait Award 2019

Carl-Martin Sandvold, The Crown, 2019

Portraiture is one of the oldest and most important art forms, dating back at least to ancient Egypt. While initially a practical method for records – being the only way to record the appearance of someone – portraits have always been more than just a record.

Portraits have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or other qualities of the sitter. They document the context of a time and place, giving clues to later generations about cultures and societies that might be otherwise difficult to understand. For this reason, portraiture remains an essential art form, and the BP Portrait Award reflects the cultural and historic importance of portraiture.

The BP Portrait Award remains the most prestigious portrait painting competition in the world and represents the very best in contemporary practice. 2019 will mark the Portrait Award’s 40th year at the National Portrait Gallery and 30th year of sponsorship by BP. The four portraits in the running for the First Prize are Emma Hopkins’ portrait of her friend Sophie and her pet dog Carla, Sophie and Carla; Quo Vardis? by Massimiliano Pironti, which shows the artist’s 95-year-old grandmother Vincenza Pesoli in her kitchen; Carl-Martin Sandvold’s self-portrait, The Crown, and Charlie Schaffer’s portrait of his close friend, Imara in her Winter Coat. The BP Portrait Award exhibition continues to be an unmissable highlight of the annual art calendar.

This exhibition is showing at the National Portrait Gallery until 20 October 2019.

---

6. Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold, American People Series #15: Hide Little Children, 1966, Oil on canvas, 26 x 48 in

This June the Serpentine Gallery is mounting an exhibition of works by American artist Faith Ringgold. The show celebrates the artist’s 50-year career, which has challenged gender and racial inequality with unwavering directness. Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930 at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, an intense period of cultural creativity spanning fashion, art, music and theatre, which celebrated African American identity.

Among the works going on display are Ringgold’s political paintings, narrative quilts and children’s books. She also made posters for the Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s. Ringgold’s activism didn’t stop at art – in 1973 she co-founded the National Black Feminist Organisation with her then 18-year-old daughter, Michele Wallace. The two led protests against the lack of diversity in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition programme. Inspirational and challenging, Ringgold’s work is as relevant now as it ever was as she continues to challenge the realities of the American Dream.

This exhibition is showing at the Serpentine Gallery until 8 September 2019.

---

7. Brilliant Visions: Mescaline, Art, Psychiatry

Anonymous Mescaline Painting – Blue and Red Abstract, 1938. Image courtesy of the Museum of the Mind

Brilliant Visions presents drawings and paintings by Surrealist artists who took part in the Guttman-Maclay mescaline experiments of the 1930s. Julian Trevelyan, Basil Beaumont and Herbrand Williams are some of the artists featured next to archival materials and additional artworks from the Bethlem Museum’s collection.

In the 1930s two psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital, Dr Eric Guttman and Dr Walter Maclay, encouraged patients suffering from schizophrenia to make art in an attempt to ‘explain themselves’. However, they noted that only a minority of patients had the capacity to translate their hallucinations into pictorial form. These findings led the doctors to invite professional artists from the Surrealist movement to take part in experiments involving the drug mescaline, as it was believed to produce an ‘experimental psychosis’.

For the Surrealist artists, it was an opportunity to delve into the unconscious mind to find creative inspiration. The artistic depictions of the hallucinations – which ranged from ecstatic to terrifying – were understood by the psychiatrists as illustrations of psychopathic states, and used as tools for analysis and classification.

This exhibition is showing at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind until 1 September 2019.

---

Interesting Upcoming Artist Shows on this Month:

This is a selection of UK art exhibitions in June, including group, solo, artist-led and gallery curated shows, that we think are interesting or unusual in some way. We update this section every week so you know the exhibitions to see now. If you want to submit your own, follow the link at the bottom of this section.

---

Exhibitions on at the Start of June

---

POST LUX TENEBRAS (After Light, Darkness)

29 May – 24 June 2019

POST LUX TENEBRAS (After Light, Darkness) is an exhibition of rich and multi-layered works which illustrate Alison Meek’s exploration of the loss of wisdom she perceives in the modern world.

Harking back to the many discoveries of the ancient Greeks, the loss of this knowledge and its rediscovery centuries later, Alison’s exhibition uses a historical lens to explore artistic, scientific and political concepts.

The show will also feature a short film illustrating the background of the pictures.

Lauderdale House
Waterlow Park
Highgate Hill
London
N6 5HG

---

Tactile Mk.3 ~ An International Showcase of Sign Painters

30 May – 4 June 2019

Tactile aims to spread awareness and celebrate the craft of Sign Painting through an immersive annual event to satisfy letter lovers of all kinds.

This spring, Tactile will be returning to Hackney Road for its third annual event, inviting Sign Painters from across the globe to contribute to Tactile’s Letter Tile Exhibition, which will showcase the work of 50+ guests from the International Sign Painting community. All pieces are one-off, designed and painted by hand, and will be available to purchase.

Tactile
188 Hackney Road
London
E2 7QL

---

The Oval Window

29 May – 1 June 2019

Bringing together six artists, The Oval Window explores fictional, historical and mythical figures, using sculpture, film, painting and print to develop new narratives grounded in embodied, relational experience.

The Oval Window refers to a membrane that separates the passage between the inner and outer ear, and to a poem by the avant-garde poet JH Prynne, who pieces together a mosaic of voices drawn from diverse sources, from ancient Chinese poetry to the language of computer programming. In the context of the exhibition, the notion of the aural passage and its evocation of interior corporeal space opens questions of memory, inheritance and the politics of the body in relation to the process of devising new narrative forms.

Gerald Moore Gallery
Mottingham Ln
London
SE9 4RW

---

Bank Job: ‘Big Bang 2’

11 May – 14 July 2019

Hilary Powell and the Bank Job team, 1000 Bond
255 x 204 mm. Screen Print, letterpress, foil blocks, company seal. Somerset velvet antique 250gsm paper. Gilt edge

HSCB (Hoe Street Central Bank) opened in 2018 printing art/money in order to buy up and cancel £1.2M of local predatory debt. In May 2019 this debt was literally exploded in a van in an action/artwork called BIG BANG 2.

Between 11 May and 14 July 2019 Walthamstow’s rebel bank will open its doors to bring home BIG BANG 2. Come to the bank to explore the aftermath of this explosion as the van is made into commemorative coins and the bank becomes a space to imagine and take steps to a fairer society. Witness the project in progress as this community heist of an art project / feature documentary film ‘Bank Job’ reaches its climax. Read our article on the project here..

Hoe Street Central Bank
151—155 Hoe Street
London
E17 3AN

---

The Jealous Prize

30 May – 23 June 2019

This year The Jealous Prize celebrates its 10th Birthday and to commemorate this milestone, the annual award has been presented to four winners; Lydia Boehm MA Royal College of Art, Alvin Ong MA Royal College of Art, Phillip Reeves MA Goldsmiths and Francisco Rodriguez MA Slade School of Art. The Prize is a residency in Jealous Print Studios, London, to create an exclusive screenprint edition with Jealous’ dedicated Studio Team, and for many winners this is their first experience of creating an edition.

To coincide with the release of these beautiful new editions, Jealous presents a dedicated exhibition featuring each of their screenprints alongside original works, which further explores each artists practice and how it has developed since their graduation in 2018.

Jealous Gallery
53 Curtain Rd
Hackney
London
EC2A 3PT

---

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf: The Daughters of Medusa

30 May – 14 June 2019

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Things That Never Happen But Always Are, 2019, Oil, acrylic charcoal on canvas, 110 x 182 cm

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, The Daughters of Medusa features bold, figurative paintings of women – both self- portraits and subjects Rebecca knows – inspired by the mythological characterisation of women’s cycles, as well as personal stories and experiences.

She explains: ‘Medusa is a symbol of woman as the other. Beautiful and pure on the one side and monstrous on the other. This image exists in many different forms and is one we’ve carried culturally for millennia. It still shapes our views of womanhood and is inextricably linked with menstruation; the inherent ability to hold the cycle of life and death within oneself.’

Zebra One Gallery
1 Perrin’s Court
Hampstead
London
NW3 1QX

---

The post Art Exhibitions on Now: June 2019 appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Here you can find all of our recommended art exhibitions that are on in July. Below is a list of our 7 must-see art shows for the month, along with a navigation that can take you to smaller weekly listings that are worthy of note. This section is updated with new shows every week. If you want to see exhibitions in London or in your area simply go to our Artist Calendar – let us know about an exhibition using the form at the bottom of that page for the chance to be included in one of our Art Exhibitions on Now posts!

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in July

Interesting Exhibitions upcoming in July:
*Exhibitions on at the Beginning of July
*Exhibitions on in the Middle of July

Find out about further art gallery and exhibition listings.

Tell us about an exhibition, art class or opportunity.

---

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in July

This month’s not to miss choices include summer blockbusters and American cultural icons, plus works inspired by some of the greatest British painters.

---

1. Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking

Cyril Edward Power,The Tube Station, 1932, Linocut, 26 x 30 cm

This fascinating exhibition explores ten pioneering printmakers who played a key role in the story of Modern art. In the first major show of work from the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, Cutting Edge brings together 120 prints, drawings and posters from Claude Flight and a number of his leading students including Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power, Lill Tschudi, William Greengrass and Leonard Beaumont.

The Grosvenor School of Modern Art became a leading force in the production and promotion of modern printmaking works – particularly linocuts. The school taught a foundation in art history, with each artist lecturing on their speciality. Flight lectured on the art of linocutting and Cyril Power on architecture. The young Sybil Andrews was the School Secretary.

The Grosvenor artists were renowned for their iconic, vibrant prints that championed the energy of contemporary life in the interwar period. This exhibition explores and champions the medium of the block-print linocut, which Claude Flight described as ‘an art of the people’ due to its affordability and accessibility. Influenced by the radical expressions of Futurism, Vorticism and Cubism, the Grosvenor School found its own unique interpretation of the contemporary world, incorporating art deco elements, geometric style and a vivid palette. Their prints still carry a wonderful sense of the excitement and movement of life which has translated seamlessly into the 21st century.

This exhibition is showing at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 8 September 2019.

---

2. Igniting Sight: Contemporary Artists Inspired by JMW Turner

Alex Lowery, West Bay 289, Oil on canvas, 61 x 148 cm

JMW Turner has provided an inspirational and aspirational artistic landscape to artists ever since his talent was first recognised. The Victorian critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most ‘stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of nature’ – Turner’s work still continues to inspire in the same way. By 1910 a wing of the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain) housed his national bequest. In 1984 the annual Turner Prize was named in his honour, and in 2011 the Turner Contemporary gallery opened in Margate. In 2016 Turner’s image was chosen by the Bank of England to appear on the £20 note, honouring his profound contribution to British art.

Turner’s influence beyond the art world is staggering, but it is his influence on practising artists that this exhibition focuses on. Igniting Sight explores the ways in which his influence lives on in contemporary landscape painting, particularly in the work of six artists, all of whom to some extent belong in the great English Romantic tradition which began with Turner’s paintings.

One example is Alex Lowery, an artist known for painting in West Bay, as well as Portland and a select few other places. Turner’s sketches for his West Bay painting (c. 1828) are of particular interest to Lowery: ‘A few lines serve to evoke a stretch of coast that is instantly, and movingly, recognisable after more than 200 years.’ Lowery is aware that he looks for the still point, or what he calls ‘an essence, a kind of unchanging distillation,’ rather than for the drama of a landscape. Lowery’s own use of colour, his juxtaposition of solid land, of regular modern manmade buildings or street furniture against his broad translucent skies, certainly evoke such sensations.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Bridport (West Bay), Dorset, c. 1828, Watercolour and graphite on paper, 342 x 489 mm

Igniting Sight includes work by Fred Cuming RA, Luke Elwes, Vanessa Gardiner, Frances Hatch, Janette Kerr PPRWA RSA Hon, Alex Lowery, Richard Batterham and Petter Southall.

This exhibition is showing at the Sladers Yard Gallery until 8 September 2019.

---

3. Keith Haring

Keith Haring, Pop Shop I (1), 1987, Screenprint, 30.5 × 38.1 cm

Keith Haring was a key part of the legendary New York art scene of the 1980s and was hugely inspired by graffiti, pop art and underground club culture. Through clean lines, bold colour and simple images, Haring’s work communicated his compulsion to speak for his generation. His art responds to urgent issues including political dictatorship, racism, homophobia, drug addiction, AIDS awareness, capitalism, and the environment. By the mid-1980s he had befriended fellow artists Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Haring’s style gave new life to figuration in painting, in contrast to the more abstract and conceptual approaches of the previous generation, and the more expressionistic gestural painting of his contemporaries. Haring designed record covers for RUN DMC and David Bowie, directed a music video for Grace Jones and developed a fashion line with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. In doing so, he introduced his art and ideas to as many people as possible, removing the reliance on traditional gallery spaces.

Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989 in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, day care centres and orphanages.

This exhibition is the first of its kind in the UK and shows more than 85 artworks by Haring, including large, vibrant paintings and drawings. Also on display are posters, photographs and videos that capture the vibrancy of New York street culture in the 1980s.

This exhibition is showing at the Tate Liverpool until 10 November 2019.

---

4. María Berrío, Caroline Walker, Flora Yukhnovich

Exhibition View, María Berrío, Caroline Walker, Flora Yukhnovich, Victoria Miro Gallery

This summer Victoria Miro is presenting an exhibition featuring three exciting young artists who rethink traditional genres, touching upon themes of migration, the workplace, and the gendered language of painting.

In her large-scale paintings, London-based artist Flora Yukhnovich adopts the language of Rococo. Yukhnovich brings classically-inspired painterly traditions into a more consciously feminine and contemporary real, highlighted by the wisps of millennial pinks and purples. Existing in a fluctuating state between abstraction and figuration, Yukhnovich’s paintings are deeply captivating and instantly recognisable.

Caroline Walker is a Scottish-born, London-based painter who focuses on intimate portrayals of women at work in domestic and public spaces, including hotel maids, office workers and shop assistants. Walker’s subjects possess a unique psychological intensity; we come across them almost as intruders into their world, witnessing narratives hinted at but never fully told. Walker complicates the traditional idea of ‘woman as subject’ while illuminating the overlooked subject of the workplace in contemporary painting.

María Berrío grew up in Colombia and is now based in Brooklyn. Her large-scale works, carefully crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history. Populated predominantly by women, Berrío’s art often appears to propose spaces of refuge or safety, utopias inspired in part by South American folklore, where humans and nature coexist in harmony.

This exhibition is showing at the Victoria Miro Gallery until 27 July 2019.

---

5. Kiss My Genders

Installation view of Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, courtesy of Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo: Thierry Bal

Kiss My Genders is a group exhibition celebrating more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity. It brings together over 100 artworks by more than 30 artists from across the world, all of whom approach gender not as a fixed set of categories, but rather as something to be challenged, reconsidered and in some cases rejected altogether.

Working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation and video, many of the artists move beyond a conventional understanding of the body and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form. As well as addressing gender identity, many of the artworks in this exhibition explore subjects that include national and cultural identity, ethnicity and religious beliefs. The exhibition includes new and site-specific works by Chitra Ganesh, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings and Jenkin van Zyl.

Featured artists:

Ajamu, Travis Alabanza, Amrou Al-Kadhi & Holly Falconer, Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Flo Brooks, Luciano Castelli, Jimmy DeSana, Jes Fan, Chitra Ganesh, Martine Gutierrez, Nicholas Hlobo, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Joan Jett Blakk, Tarek Lakhrissi, Zoe Leonard, Ad Minoliti, Pierre Molinier, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Planningtorock, Christina Quarles, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Hunter Reynolds, Athi-Patra Ruga, Tejal Shah, Victoria Sin, Jenkin van Zyl and Del LaGrace Volcano.

This exhibition is showing at the Southbank Centre until 8 September 2019.

---

6. Serpentine Pavilion 2019

Serpentine Pavilion 2019 designed by Junya Ishigami, Serpentine Gallery, London, © Junya Ishigami + Associates, Photography © 2019 Iwan Baan

The Serpentine’s annual commission provides a global platform for experimental projects by some of the world’s greatest architects and artists – this year is no exception. A flowing canopy roof of slates decorates the pristine gardens of London’s Serpentine Galleries, supported by a forest of slim columns. The cavernous space is the galleries’ 2019 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami.

Ishigami is celebrated for his experimental structures that interpret traditional architectural conventions and reflect natural phenomena. His philosophy explores pushing the boundaries of what is possible in architecture, by challenging existing architectural methodologies and proposing alternatives.

You can visit the Serpentine Galleries anytime and see the Pavilion until 6 October 2019.

---

7. Francis Bacon: Couplings

Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 116.5 cm

Considered one of the most influential British painters of the post-war period, Bacon’s disturbing images radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century. Bacon is best known for his searing and raw depictions of popes, crucifixions, and portraits of close friends. The human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which bodily traits are transposed or fused.

This exhibition explores a theme that preoccupied Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological. At the heart of the exhibition are two rarely seen images: Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). These interrelated works have not been seen publicly together since the major retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971. After completing Two Figures in the Grass, Bacon did not return to the subject until 1967, the year that homosexual acts in private were decriminalized in England and Wales. That same year he painted Two Figures on a Couch (1967) – this work was last exhibited in London in 1968 and is also included in Couplings.

This exhibition is showing at the Gagosian London until 3 August 2019.

---

Interesting Upcoming Artist Shows on this Month:

This is a selection of UK art exhibitions, including group, solo, artist-led and gallery curated shows, that we think are interesting or unusual in some way. We update this section every week so you know the exhibitions to see now. If you want to submit your own, follow the link at the bottom of this section.

---

Exhibitions on at the Start of July

---

Mao Jianhua: The Spirit of the Valley

27 June – 7 July 2019

Mao Jianhua, Harmony 6, Ink on handmade paper, 122 x 122 cm

Chinese artist and entrepreneur Mao Jianhua will present a new series of 48 works on specially commissioned handmade paper at Saatchi Gallery, London.

The exhibition showcases a series of landscape ink paintings created on Xuan paper, a material handmade from the Sandalwood tree which has traditionally been used for writing and painting. Varying in size with several large scale works, the paintings immerse the viewer in Mao Jianhua’s spiritual exploration of nature and his time spent in the Chinese mountains.

Saatchi Gallery
King’s Rd
Chelsea
SW3 4RY

---

The Fall: A Woman’s Descent into the Unconscious | Daniela Yohannes

28 June – 20 July 2019

Daniela Yohannes, Dark Matter, Deeper Into The Abyss, 2019, Acrylic on linen, 116 x 89 cm

Daniela Yohannes’ rich and layered works are full of complex narratives and symbolism. They transport the viewer to an alternative universe where life and human nature are in a constant dialogue in search of a better world. The dark, unclothed figures, stripped of their social context, are juxtaposed against the black and richly coloured backgrounds hinting at the possibilities of an alternative universe.

The artist invites the viewer to question not only the identity and social context of the painted figures, but also their own identity and position in society, re-imagine the predetermined terms of their existence.

Addis Fine Art
47 – 50 Margaret Street
London
W1W 8SB

---

ALPHA male: Tim Fowler

7 July – 21 July 2019

This July Tim Fowler will host a solo exhibition of a brand new body of work focusing on family, fatherhood and a mans role in the contemporary household.

The exhibition will consist of several paintings, some scaling over 6ft tall, depicting intimate family scenes, stolen moments alone and the adorable bond between the artists’ twin daughters. Throughout this project Tim has developed a more liberated style of painting, creating deconstructed images by utilizing abstract marks and his signature colour palette to express candid family moments. These subvert ideas of a males role within a contemporary household and, in Tim’s case, a female-dominated home.

Tim explains, ‘Since becoming a father the twins have obviously taken centre stage, and the dynamic between them has always fascinated me. Though they are two individuals and have their own little quirks, they are also always together and almost make up one entity. Capturing that distinct relationship between the two of them has been central to this project.’

studionAme
2 Brougham St
Leicester
LE1 2BA

---

Seema Manchanda

11 July – 14 July 2019

Seema Manchanda, The London Stone, Oil on Canvas, 4 x 3 ft

Seema will be showing a series of five paintings inspired by Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire and based on her experiences as a town planner in London. Thomas Cole’s original series painted between 1835-1836 charts the history of an imaginary nation, clearly alluding to the rise and fall of ancient Rome but addressing issues he saw for America and London at that time. Like Cole, Manchanda considers the cyclical nature of history, whether or not we repeat mistakes and where power is held. She explores the changing form of cities over time, our persistent fears about the state of the world, economies, allegiances, technology, war, climate change, control or lack of it.

Art Academy – London Diploma Show 2019
155 Walworth Road
Elephant and Castle
London
SE17 1RS

---

Street Art Festival 2019

28 June – 20 July 2019

This Summer at Surface Gallery sees the return of the most anarchic, the most spectacular show in town: the Nottingham Street Art Festival. This hugely popular exhibition supports and promotes Nottingham’s vibrant alternative art scene by showcasing some of today’s best local talent.

The exhibition will occupy their three-story building and feature a salon-style hang with artwork packed from floor to ceiling. The central exhibition spills out onto the alley walls at the back of the gallery where you’ll discover work by some of Nottingham’s finest.

Surface Gallery
16 Southwell Road
Nottingham
NG1 1Dl

---

Glitch

6 June – 27 July 2019

Matthieu Leger, Toucan III, 2018, Oil on Canvas over birch Panel, 50 x 70 cm

Finding inspiration in the digital and the natural world, Matthieu Leger presents oil paintings that collide and merge both environments together. In doing so, he creates a new realm where the digital and the natural co-exist in figurative representations, broken digital abstractions and explosions of colour.

Sock Gallery
Market Place
Loughborough
LE11 3EB

---

Exhibitions on in the Middle of July

---

Hold Tight

10 July – 3 October 2019

Kentaro Okawara, Trip of Love, 2018, Acrylic Spray on Canvas, 200 x 200 cm

Kentaro Okawara’s debut UK solo exhibition unveils a new series of painting, sculpture and drawing that explore the theme of love through symmetry and the artist’s unique yet universal language.

The exhibition continues Okawara’s long-held belief that making art is an expression of love and a means to connect with each other. Throughout the show, the notion of ‘connecting’ manifests in a variety of ways; literally through the act of embracing referenced in the title, visually through Okawara’s focus on symmetry, and intelligibly through universal motifs.

PUBLIC Gallery
17 Amhurst Terrace
Hackney Downs
London
E8 2BT

---

Connections

2 July – 7 July 2019

Print by Hartash Dale

Connections at Espacio Gallery showcases new work from a hugely diverse national and international group of artists living and working in the UK and invites visitors to explore the personal, social and artistic interconnections between them and their work.

The exhibition combines photography, printmaking, painting and mixed media in a human network connected and separated by geography, language, culture and collaboration.

Espacio Gallery
159 Bethnal Green Rd
London
E2 7DG

---

Mathe Shepheard RBSA: Japan revisited in the mind

1 July – 17 August 2019

This exhibition features watercolour and Indian ink paintings inspired by Mathe’s travels to Japan twenty years ago.

RBSA
4 Brook St
Birmingham
B3 1SA

---

Elizabeth Murray. Flying Bye

5 July – 15 September 2019

Elizabeth Murray, Wake Up, 1981, Oil on canvas (three parts), 282.3 x 268.3 x 4.1 cm

This is the first UK exhibition of celebrated American painter Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007). The exhibition highlights a dramatic decade that saw Murray’s work dominate the art scene of 1980s New York. Her innovative paintings paved the way for a revival of the medium that included Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Anselm Kiefer. This landmark exhibition will focus on her vibrant, monumental, multi-panel and three-dimensional paintings and innovative works on paper from the 1980s and early 1990s.

Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Rd
London
NW3 6DG

---

The Summer Show 2019

4 July – 12 July 2019

Scott Bauer, Sarabande, 2019, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 76 x 105 cm

The Summer Show 2019 will showcase a selection of multidisciplinary national and international artists with the opportunity for visitors to buy the exhibited artworks.

La Galleria Pall Mall
5b Pall Mall
30 Royal Opera Arcade
London
SW1Y 4UY

---

Royal Society of British Artists 2019

4 July – 14 July 2019

Annie Boisseau RBA, Pink-Moon, Oil on canvas, 44 x 50 cm

The exhibition is sourced from member artists and through open submission, to produce works of the highest standard brought together in an eclectic mix of style and media. The show also includes entries from the finalists for the Society’s prestigious Rome Scholarship award, as well as work produced by the recipient of the Rome Scholarship from the previous year.

The Mall Galleries
The Mall
St. James’s
London
SW1

---

The post Art Exhibitions on Now: July 2019 appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Here you can find all of our recommended art exhibitions that are on in August. Below is a list of our 7 must-see art shows for the month, along with a navigation that can take you to smaller weekly listings that are worthy of note. This section is updated with new shows every week. If you want to see exhibitions in London or in your area simply go to our Artist Calendar – let us know about an exhibition using the form at the bottom of that page for the chance to be included in one of our Art Exhibitions on Now posts!

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in August

Interesting Exhibitions upcoming in August:
*Exhibitions on at the Beginning of August
*Exhibitions on in the Middle of August

Find out about further art gallery and exhibition listings.

Tell us about an exhibition, art class or opportunity.

---

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in August

This month’s not to miss choices include bright, bold and illusory abstracts, as well as retrospectives investigating social and political issues across the globe.

---

1. Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud

John Ruskin, Dawn, Coniston, 1873, Watercolour over pencil

This fascinating exhibition is the first in-depth examination of the relationship between John Ruskin and JMW Turner. The exhibition will include more than 100 works and stretch across six rooms. It is one of the biggest exhibitions in the UK during the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth (8 February 1819).

The exhibition examines both men’s work and the impact Ruskin had in highlighting climate change. In 1884, Ruskin wrote about an encroaching ‘Storm Cloud’ – a darkening of the skies that he attributed to the increasing environmental damage of the modern world. The imagery also allowed him to articulate his ongoing mental struggles. This can be seen more closely through the haunting portrait of Ruskin from the National Portrait Gallery, made in the aftermath of his first serious mental illness. 

As part of the exhibition, Royal Academician Emma Stibbon was commissioned to go to Chamonix and record the glaciers around Mont Blanc. This is where, in the early 1800s, Turner painted watercolours that inspired Ruskin to embark on his Alpine tours decades later, photographing and drawing awe-inspiring glaciers such as the Mer de Glace. By following in the footsteps of JMW Turner and John Ruskin, capturing the breathtaking sites in the French Alps, the work reveals a stark depiction of how climate change has taken its toll on the glaciated landscape.

This exhibition is showing at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery until 5 October 2019.

---

2. Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, Nataraja, 1993,  Oil on canvas, 165 x 227 cm

Bridget Riley is a British artist known for her Op Art paintings. Her clean lines, colour arrangements and geometric precision, create optically compelling visual effects that divided critics. Her paintings first came to international notice when she exhibited with Victor Vasarely and others in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in an exhibition called ‘The Responsive Eye’ in 1965. While some critics dismissed the works as trompe l’oeil (literally ‘tricks of the eye’), the exhibition was a hit with the public. Riley held another popular exhibition at this time in the US, at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York. Tickets sold out on the first day they went on sale – a remarkable achievement for an artist who was still in her early thirties.

Bridget Riley’s paintings present more than just simple visual tricks. Her works are very large and may take six to nine months to develop. She begins by making small colour studies in gouache – she hand mixes all of the paints as the exact hue and intensity is vital and must be kept consistent.

Successful studies lead to a full-size paper and gouache cartoon which prefigures the final work. These are then enlarged, ruled up, under-painted with acrylic and over-painted in oils. Everything is painted by hand – no rulers or masking tape is used when actually applying the paints. Riley has worked with assistants since the 1960s because of the large scale and the need for great precision.

This comprehensive exhibition, which takes over both floors of the Royal Scottish Academy, will be the first museum survey of Riley’s work to be held in the UK for 16 years. Spanning over 70 years of work, it will place particular emphasis on the origins of Riley’s practice and will trace pivotal moments across her career.

This exhibition is showing at the Scottish National Gallery until 22 September 2019.

---

3. Helene Schjerfbeck

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1912, Oil on canvas

Through over 60 portraits, landscapes and still lifes, UK audiences are for the first time seeing works by one of Finland’s most revered artists.

Helene Schjerfbeck’s pensive, melancholic paintings offer an intimate insight into the life of an outsider. Schjerfbeck progressed Finnish painting further than any contemporary – many critics consider that, because of her vantage point away from the main artistic centres, she could more easily forge such a distinct style. Her work encompasses a broad range of references, from the Old Masters to the French Impressionists.

The exhibition shows an artist of compassion and great intelligence. Schjerfbeck was very particular when choosing her sitters. She admired the Old Masters, above all El Greco and his ability to render psychological intensity and drama. This became an important consideration when selecting her models. Her skill as a portraitist lay in her ability to bring out the character of each sitter in a way that has been described as ‘emotionally candid’, rather than straying into the sentimental. This trait also reflects Van Gogh’s influence.

This exhibition is showing at the Royal Academy of Art until 27 October 2019.

---

4. Frank Bowling

Installation view of ‘Frank Bowling’ at Tate Britain. Photography: Matt Greenwood, Tate Photography

Bowling landed on British soil as a teenager in 1953 and later studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield. Yet, while both were causing a stir in the arts scene, Bowling’s approach to painting was overlooked. This neglect was not just because of race – it also has to do with the unfashionable character of his painting for much of his career. At this time the British art scene was leaning towards figurative, narrative-driven painting, whereas Bowling favoured shapes, structures and colour.

In 1966 Bowling moved to New York and his paintings of the early 70s reflect it. He was surrounded by garish colours, gestural improvisation and new dilemmas: as the civil rights movement intensified, artists of colour began to feel pressure to rank politics above aesthetics. This created tension between what Bowling ‘ought’ to be making work about, and what he wanted to create.

The result is an expansive body of work that gels thought and commentary with action. This nine-room takes visitors phase by phase through an enormous body of work that covers decades of Abstract expressionism, Colour Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. He became increasingly interested in the effects created by paint, and in 1973 he began to pour paint directly onto canvas, angled so that the wet paint would slowly flow to the bottom. In his New York and London studios Bowling built a tilting platform that allowed him to pour the paints from heights of up to two metres.

Bowling exhibited the first group of these ‘poured paintings’ in New York in the autumn of 1973. Over the last fourty years Bowling has developed his technique, adding other materials and thick layers of paint to the canvas. Colour and the material structure of the paint remain his focus.

This exhibition is showing at the Tate Britain until 26 August 2019.

---

5. Bartolomé Bermejo: Master of the Spanish Renaissance

Bartolomé Bermejo, Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil [Detail], 1468, Oil and gold on wood, 179.7 x 81.9 cm

Bartolomé Bermejo was one of the most fascinating figures within Spanish art of the second half of the fifteenth-century. Bermejo’s work exploited the potential of oil painting techniques – a new development at the time. He developed a realistic language with a particular emphasis on illusionistic effects, coupled with an ability to interpret themes and iconographies in new and often visually terrifying ways.

His urge to carry on exploring new avenues, especially in landscape and portraiture, led him to produce some of his most complex and innovative works during the last stage of his career. Though fewer than 20 works by the artist are known and much of his life remains a mystery, Bermejo’s paintings set him apart as a technically skilled and visionary master. At the heart of this exhibition is Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil, widely considered the most important early Spanish painting in Britain. Its technical skill and excellent state of preservation are even clearer following its recent year-long conservation treatment.

This exhibition is showing at the National Gallery until 29 September 2019.

---

6. Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance

Paula Rego, The Maids, 1987, Acrylic on canvas-backed paper, 213 x 244 cm

This exhibition is an ambitious retrospective of the Portuguese artist’s work that puts heavy emphasis on politics. Spanning Rego’s career from the 1950s through to 2012, the works in this exhibition address António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist regime, the 1997 referendum on legalising abortion in Portugal, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its allies and, from 2009, female genital mutilation.

The exhibition includes previously unseen paintings and works on paper from the artist’s family and close friends, which reflect Rego’s perspective as a woman immersed in urgent social issues and current affairs. Many of the images begin with the artist’s Portuguese roots and childhood experiences.

Driven by folklore, fairy tales and literature and cultural visions of the nineteenth-century, Rego weaves dark narratives as contemporary folklore – her paintings seem to be taken from a cruel tale and evoke women’s issues in strange scenes, going against social codes. Showing these paintings in Portugal, as well as a series of etchings on the same subject, undoubtedly influenced a 2007 referendum which led to the legalisation of abortion – her images were republished in Portuguese newspapers.

This exhibition is showing at the MK Gallery until 22 September 2019.

---

7. Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

Félix Vallotton, Sandbanks on the Loire (Des Sables au bord de la Loire), 1923, Oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm

Compared to his contemporaries Bonnard and Vuillard, Félix Vallotton is little-known in the British public eye. Despite this, the influence of Vallotton’s striking colour combinations, each laced with quiet detachment, have permeated into twentieth-century art – from the paintings of Edward Hopper to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Born in the Swiss city of Lausanne in 1865 and raised in a modest, Protestant household, Vallotton moved to Paris as a 16-year-old aspiring artist, situating himself at the heart of the contemporary art world. He began to capture frenetic life on the city’s streets and his work soon caught the eye of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. With them he joined a group known as ‘the Nabis’, although he was never a fully committed member. The group took inspiration from the decorative, Post-Impressionist style of Paul Gauguin and popular Japanese woodblock prints.

Despite living through such a significant period of change in the history of Western art, Vallotton ultimately remained loyal to traditional modes of depiction, developing the ‘disquieting’ style which defines the many nudes, still-lifes and landscapes he produced in the final 25 years of his life.

This exhibition is showing at the Royal Academy until 29 September 2019.

---

Interesting Upcoming Artist Shows on this Month:

This is a selection of UK art exhibitions, including group, solo, artist-led and gallery curated shows, that we think are interesting or unusual in some way. We update this section every week so you know the exhibitions to see now. If you want to submit your own, follow the link at the bottom of this section.

---

Exhibitions on at the Start of August

---

Contemporary Painting

25 July – 4 August 2019

Exhibition view at The Bricklane Gallery

The Brick Lane Gallery is proud to present its new upcoming Contemporary Painting Exhibition. They have works from the following artists:

Antonella Baldacci, Emily Ma, Sophie Baker, Haser, Maurizio Fioretti, Mikio Urasaki, Halcyon Jarrett, Lili Da Silva, Salman Alhajri.

The Brick Lane Gallery
216 Brick Lane
London
E1 6SA

---

Lucy Jones: Awkward Beauty

26 July – 6 October 2019

 Lucy Jones, Lead You Up the Garden Path, 2008. Photograph: Lucy Jones, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

A new showcase of selected works by British artist Lucy Jones will be coming to the University of Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre, in collaboration with Flowers Gallery, London.

The exhibition includes a new portrait of Attenborough Arts Centre’s patron, artist Grayson Perry, which was commissioned by the centre.

Attenborough Arts Centre
University of Leicester
Lancaster Road
Leicester
LE1 7HA

---

B L A K E

25 July – 1 September 2019

Sir Peter Blake, Sources of Pop Art V, Silkscreen, 50.5 x 50.5 cm

After a near sell-out show 5 years ago in Sheffield, Pop-art pioneer Blake returns this time to ‘The Viewing Room’, a new gallery aptly located within a re-purposed 1965 department store. This new ‘show & sell’ brings together a collection of new works plus a selection of rare classic pop-art-masters.

Blake’s work crosses all generational divides and inspires great respect from younger artists such as Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Pure Evil and Tracey Emin. Knighted in 2002, an honorary doctor of the Royal College of Art, and with his work represented in major collections throughout the world, Peter Blake truly is a grandee of British Art.

The Viewing Room
Kommune
Castle House
Angel St.
Sheffield
S3 8LS

---

Alchemy

25 July – 18 August 2019

Helen Bur, Self Reliance, Oil on panel, 36 x 36 cm

Alchemy is an exhibition of new works by Broken Fingaz, Carrie Reihardt and Helen Bur.

Alchemy was a branch of natural philosophy that featured in many cultures around the world. It is most closely associated with attempts to transform base metals into more valuable noble metals. Both alchemy and art are each often perceived as blends of science, magic, mythology and religion.

Within this exhibition, the artists utilise base materials and transform these into more valued works of art. The artists use various elements to transform abstract ideas and emotions into physical works of beauty.

Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York’s HQ
King’s Rd
London
SW3 4RY

---

Divergent Motion

25 July – 19 August 2019

Delphian Gallery is pleased to present ​Divergent Motion, their first annual summer group show featuring artists working across painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture.

This summer show provides the opportunity to continue a visual conversation with previously exhibited artists by showcasing their new work alongside other exciting contemporary artists whom they have yet not yet shown.

Delphian Gallery
76 Montague Square
London
SE15 2LR

---

Urban Angles

30 July – 11 August 2019

The artistic heritage of a city is created and shaped by the artists who live and work there. Urban Angles reveals the city as a hub which enables the cross-pollination of multiple ideas and cultures.

In the same way that the city provides each individual with the anonymity to be themselves, Urban Angles offers each artist within the collective, the opportunity to present and express their unique and individual perspective of the urban environment.

Artists: Moich Abrahams, Kanwal Dhaliwal, Geraldo Frazao, Kirsi K, Marc Martyr, Noriko Michigami, Rosana Miracco, Amravati Mitchell, Alice Richards, Jack Smith, Carole Thomas, Martini Yoganini.

Espacio Gallery
159 Bethnal Green Rd
London
E2 7DG

---

Exhibitions on in the Middle of August

---

Paradise Skies by Julio Guerra

2 August – 30 September 2019

Julio Guerra is a London-based graphic artist with a bold, geometric and colourful style.

He studied Graphic Arts as well as Sociology in his native Venezuela, and his work has been exhibited at The Cruz-Diez Museum of Print and Design in Caracas. Julio went on to further training at Central Saint Martins in London.

Julio is strongly influenced art movements such as geometric abstraction, Renaissance painting, Suprematism and colour field painting. However, as an artist-cum-sociologist he also takes inspiration from contemporary fashion and culture, and 20th Century art and design.

Paradise Skies is an exhibition of Julio’s tropical birds; flamingos, parakeets, pelicans and some colossus toucan heads.

Of Cabbages & Kings
127 Stoke Newington High Street
London
N16 0PH

---

My Friends Are Geniuses II – Hochoul Lee – Iris Mathieson – Tristan Pigott

1 August – 31 August 2019

Tristan Pigott, Saint George Mocked, 2019, Oil on board, 110 x 122 cm

Tristan Pigott, Saint George Mocked, 2019, Oil on board, 110 x 122 cm

Recent Graduate Exhibition from Hochoul Lee, Tristan Pigott and Iris Mathieson. Opening night on 1 August.

A Second in Thousands painting performance by Hochoul Lee will be on 1 Aug 7:00-7:25 pm.

Projection by Iris Mathieson will be played on the opening evening, as well as Thursdays, Fridays and on request.

White Conduit Projects
1 White Conduit Street
Islington
London
N1 9EL

---

What’s great about Britain?

3 August – 31 August 2019

Take a look at Britain through the eyes of Nathan Bowen…

Nathan Bowen is a guerrilla street artist, he actively works as an art vigilante, seeking for dull, lifeless spaces around London. By openly using his imagination he transforms old walls, creating new and inspiring works of art. His style is unique, fast, dynamic and unpredictable, his signature characters known as ‘The Demons’ invade building site hoardings all over London, using the streets as his own gallery.

Curious Duke Gallery
173 Whitecross Street
London
EC1Y 8JT

---

Singular/Cellular

1 August – 25 August 2019

Nick Wild, Multicell,, 2019, Watercolour, 33 x 26 cm

Showing a selection of work from the last three years comprising of large scale bird portraiture in oils and abstract watercolours with a cellular theme.

Studio 1.1
57A Redchurch St
Shoreditch
London
E2 7DJ

---

Drawings / Flowers Group Show

1 August – 25 August 2019

Works include the delicately formed and exquisitely executed ethereal hair drawings of Denmark’s Alexandra Buhl; Mexican Guillermo Monroy’s found objects reimagined and given new life as a menagerie of new creatures; Paul Robinson’s Pink bear who lives a life of highs and lows in beautiful technically intricate produced paintings and prints; Graham Carrick’s paintings writhe at the notion of what we perceive to be attainable goals. Alex Allmont provides the rhythm with a new kinetic Lego piece.

The Tommy Flowers
50 Aberfeldy St
Aberfeldy Village
London
E14 0NU

---

Convo

1 August – 1 September 2019

Matthew Fortrose

StolenSpace Gallery is pleased to announce the new group show ‘Convo’, featuring new work from Australian artists Tom Gerrard, Matthew Fortrose and Elliot Routledge. Gerrard, Fortrose and Routledge have struck up a correlating ‘convo’ between their work to create a show of unison but uniqueness.

Stolen Space Gallery
17 Osborn Street
London
E1 6TD

---

The post Art Exhibitions on Now: August 2019 appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Here you can find all of our recommended art exhibitions that are on in September. Below is a list of our 7 must-see art shows for the month, along with a navigation that can take you to smaller weekly listings that are worthy of note. This section is updated with new shows every week. If you want to see exhibitions in London or in your area simply go to our Artist Calendar – let us know about an exhibition using the form at the bottom of that page for the chance to be included in one of our Art Exhibitions on Now posts!

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in September

Interesting Exhibitions upcoming in September:
*Exhibitions on at the Beginning of September

Find out about further art gallery and exhibition listings.

Tell us about an exhibition, art class or opportunity.

---

7 Unmissable Art Exhibitions on in September

This month’s not to miss choices include ground-breaking group shows and three-dimensional abstracts, as well as exhibitions that show innovative artists in ways the public might not have seen them before.

---

1. Elizabeth Murray: Flying Bye

Elizabeth Murray, Exhibition View. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London. The estate of Elizabeth Murray.

This landmark exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK, will focus on Elizabeth Murray’s monumental multi-panel and three-dimensional paintings, as well as innovative works on paper from the 1980s and early 1990s.

Murray’s work blurs the distinction between abstraction and representation, a style that caused her to be central to the art scene of 1980s. Her shaped canvases and multipart supports challenge traditional conventions of painting and paved the way for a revival of the medium that included Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Anselm Kiefer.

Using bold colours with striking forms, figures, and everyday objects, Murray introduced a dynamic sense of movement and the everyday to her imagery. She transformed modernist abstraction by redefining the sculptural dimensions of the medium and exploring layered planes of the canvas.

With influences from Arp to Kandinsky, as well as her contemporaries including Andy Warhol and the Chicago Minimalists, Murray was part of a group of like-minded artists who rejected the hard-edged painting style of the previous generation in late 1960s New York.

This exhibition is showing at the Camden Arts Centre until 15 September 2019.

---

2. Henry Moore Drawings: The Art of Seeing

Henry Moore, Sculpture in Landscape, 1951. Drawing. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. © The Henry Moore Foundation. Photo: Michael Phipps.

Henry Moore’s significance to twentieth-century art was remarkable and, although best known as a sculptor, Moore was also an exceptionally talented draughtsman. He produced a body of nearly 7,500 drawings, all of which have a fascinating relationship with his sculptural practice.

This exhibition explores the many different ways in which Moore used drawing. He found drawing an ideal medium for a wide range of purposes, from a tool to study natural forms to a means for the development of new sculpture, or as a way to experiment with new shapes and techniques.

However, drawing was not merely a means to an end for Moore. Drawing was also a medium for finished artwork in its own right – so much so that he was sometimes referred to as a ‘sculptor and painter’.

‘Drawing, even for people who cannot draw, even for people not trying to produce a good drawing, it makes you look more intensely … Just looking alone has no grit in it, has no sort of mental struggle or difficulty. That only happens when you are drawing.’

This exhibition includes examples of preparatory studies and ideas for sculpture, prints, studies and copies of works by artists Moore admired, such as Picasso, El Greco, Rembrandt and the French Impressionists. Visitors can also see studies of the human figure, animals, the landscape and the weather, portraits, designs for textiles and magazine covers, and some of Moore’s more famous drawings – the two series in which he chronicled wartime Britain.

This exhibition is showing at the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens until 27 October 2019.

3. Turner Prize 2019

Turner Contemporary. Photo: Benjamin Beker

The Turner Prize is one of the best known visual arts prizes in the world and this year it’s being hosted at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Every other year the prize leaves the Tate Britain and is presented at a venue outside London. This year is particularly exciting as it’s the first time that the venue has had a direct connection with JMW Turner.

The art gallery in Margate, Kent, opened in 2011 and has acted as a catalyst for the regeneration of the seaside town. It celebrates the association of the town with Turner, who went to school there and visited throughout his life. The gallery stands on the site of the artist’s lodging house and enjoys views of the skies that Turner felt were ‘the loveliest in all Europe’.

The Turner Prize is awarded annually to an artist born, living or working in Britain, for an outstanding exhibition or public presentation of their work anywhere in the world in the previous year.

The four shortlisted artists for the Turner Prize 2019 are:

– Lawrence Abu Hamdan
– Helen Cammock
– Oscar Murillo
– Tai Shani

This exhibition is showing at the Turner Contemporary until 12 January 2020.

---

4. William Blake

William Blake, Newton, Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper, 460 x 600 mm

This exhibition shows William Blake’s visionary art in ways only dreamed of by the artist. Blake was a painter, printmaker and poet who went largely unrecognised during his lifetime. Born in London in 1757, Blake went on to produce some of the most iconic images in British art. His poetry also inspired later generations – it was in the Modernist period that his work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists.

Blake’s personal struggles came in a period of political turmoil and oppression and yet, through his technical innovation, he worked to bring about a change both in art and the social order. Blake would report seeing visions throughout his life, including angels and spirits walking through the world. Inspired by them, he created transcendent art and poetry.

Inside the exhibition is an immersive recreation of the small domestic room in which Blake showed his art in 1809. Visitors can experience the impact these works had when they were shown for the first time. In another room, Blake’s dream of showing his works at enormous scale is made a reality using digital technology. With over 300 original works, including his watercolours, paintings and prints, this is the largest show of Blake’s work for almost 20 years.

This exhibition is showing at the Tate Britain until 2 February 2020.

---

5. Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary

Anna Maria Maiolino, Por um Fio (By a Thread) from the Photo-poem action series, 1976 – 2000. Estension analog black and white

Born in Italy during World War II, Anna Maria Maiolino travelled and worked before moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Here she joined the independent studio run by printmaker Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition explores the notions of subjectivity, belonging and place, themes that come to light through her experience of exile, deprivation and survival under authoritarian and patriarchal regimes.

Her work perfected a dialogue with contemporary movements in Brazil at the time, such as New Figuration. Given her eclectic background and its relationship with contemporary movements, one of the strengths of Maiolino’s works is their reflection on the negotiation of identity.

Maiolino also explores concerns about the effects of mass culture on the realm of domesticity and the subjectivity of women. This is achieved by using simple materials like clay, paper and ink. Through these materials, she constructs a fascinating world rooted in human conditions such as longing, fragility and resistance. Visitors can see hundreds of simple shapes made of clay – gestural forms that evoke baking, housework and objects of ritual.

This exhibition is showing at the Whitechapel Gallery until 12 January 2020.

---

6. Worlds Beyond Words

Carolina Piteira, Wagasa Master, 2019, 200 x 250 cm

‘Worlds Beyond Words’ will show an eclectic mix of contemporary original paintings, illustrations and sculptures. The group exhibition will feature 15 established and emerging artists from London, Brighton, Kent, Cornwall, Hastings, and Lisbon.

Multi-award winning Carolina Piteira will be displaying large-scale portraits that take viewers on a journey into the emotional and spiritual lives of communities that are slowly disappearing. Carolina’s work has been placed in numerous private collections internationally, including Luciano Benetton’s art collection. In 2014 she was nominated by the Ministry of Economy of Portugal to represent and support the Portuguese market as an emerging artist abroad.

Since she finished her studies, Piteira has won several prizes including the DegreeArt Signature Art Award and has exhibited in Lisbon, Malaga, Cyprus, Athens and London with various group and solo shows.

Catharine Armitage’s striking organic forms also feature. The landscapes and light of Cornwall have been an invaluable source of inspiration for Armitage’s simplified forms – her approach has been described as modernist due to her work inhabiting a characteristic two-dimensional plane.

Catharine Armitage, Frozen Lake II, 2017, Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Catherine Armitage & The Redfern Gallery

Other artists featuring in this exhibition includes Simon Chinnery, Sandy Dooley, Cecil Rice, Beatriz Uva, Tamsin Pearson, Lesley Beaupré, Emma Haines, Lindsey Light.

This exhibition is showing at the Menier Gallery until 21 September 2019.

---

7. Vuillard: The Poetry of Everyday Life

Edouard Vuillard, Intérieur ensoleillé, Distemper on paper on canvas, 832 x 638 mm

Jean-Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was a French painter and rebellious co-founder of the avant-garde group ‘Les Nabis’. Vuillard was known for his paintings which assembled areas of pure colour, as well as interior scenes that were influenced by Japanese prints. He also was a decorative artist, painting theatre sets, panels for interior decoration, and designing plates and stained glass. After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, he adopted a more realistic style, painting landscapes and interiors with rich detail and vivid colours.

This exhibition focuses on the first 10 to 15 years of Edouard Vuillard’s mature career, exploring the artist’s emotionally charged interior scenes. Vuillard shows off beautiful decoration and ornate surfaces while also exploring the pathos of the intimate interior. Through this he also focused his attentions on suppressed or unstated emotions.

Work by Félix Vallotton, another member of Les Nabis, is currently on display at the Royal Academy of Art until 29 September 2019.

This exhibition includes prints, works on paper and oil paintings, many of which are from major private collections and have rarely been seen.

This exhibition is showing at the Holburne Museum until 15 September 2019.

---

Interesting Upcoming Artist Shows on this Month:

This is a selection of UK art exhibitions, including group, solo, artist-led and gallery curated shows, that we think are interesting or unusual in some way. We update this section every week so you know the exhibitions to see now. If you want to submit your own, follow the link at the bottom of this section.

---

Exhibitions on at the Start of September

---

Anno’s Journey: the World of Anno Mitsumasa

22 August – 27 October 2019

Explore the remarkable work of Anno Mitsumasa, one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific artists. Since the 1960s, Anno has illustrated hundreds of books. Inspired by the traditions of Europe and Japan, his varied works are characterised by a sense of curiosity, warmth and playful sense of humour, and have appeared in children’s publications for over the last 50 years.

Japan House
101-111 Kensington High St
Kensington
London
W8 5SA

---

Alice Wilson: Gated Community

14 August – 13 September 2019

Work in progress, Alice Wilson studio, 2019

For the final installment of their 2019 summer exhibition series, painter and sculptor Alice Wilson presents new works in ‘Gated Community’ in the windows of the Camden Peoples Theatre.

Glass Cloud Gallery
Camden Peoples Theatre Windows
58 – 60 Hampstead Road
London
NW1 2PY

---

That’s Entertainment! – Drawings by Stella Tooth

20 August – 15 September 2019

Stella Tooth, Southbank Acrobat Manuele de’Aquino

Fascinated by performers both on the street and on the stage, Stella Tooth presents a vibrant selection of her latest drawings of entertainers in action.

Skylark Galleries
Unit 1.09
Oxo Tower Wharf
Barge House Street
London
SE1 9PH

---

Pop-Up Abstract Art Show by Oliver Needs

21 August – 29 September 2019

A pop-up abstract expressionist influences art show by Oliver Needs. Oliver studied an Art Foundation at Chelsea School of Art completed in 2001 later studying BA Fine Art at East London University completed in 2004.

Pop-Up Gallery
2b Devonshire Road
Walthamstow
London
E17 8QJ

---

Between the Dog and the Wolf | Max Wade

30 August – 21 September 2019

Max Wade, Wind For The Sails, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 115 x 140 cm

Max Wade (b. 1985, London) studied Fine Art Painting at Brighton University, following a Foundation at City of Bath College. Wade has exhibited extensively.

Sid Motion Gallery
24a Penarth Centre
Hatcham Road
SE15 1TR

---

Made Routes: Mapping and Making

30 August – 26 September 2019

‘Made Routes: Mapping and Making,’ curated by acclaimed academic and art historian Tamar Garb, brings together the work of two South African artists: Vivienne Koorland and Berni Searle.

The encounter between them speaks to their shared artistic concerns and their participation in the landmark exhibition ‘Trade Routes: History + Geography’ at the 1997 2nd Johannesburg Biennale under the artistic directorship of the late Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) to whom this exhibition is dedicated.

In ‘Trade Routes,’ Enwezor and his curatorial team explored the way in which contemporary art interrogates and negotiates national boundaries and cartographic hierarchies, as well as the global movement and flow of people and commodities across modernity’s variegated landscapes.

Richard Saltoun Gallery
41 Dover Street
London
W1S 4NS

---

The post Art Exhibitions on Now: September 2019 appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the People’s Choice Award, Amateur Artist Award, and Student Award for the Jackson’s Painting Prize 2023. Congratulations to the following artists who have each won a £1000 cash prize as well as a £500 worth of Jackson’s Art materials.

People’s Choice Award

Lucy Gable

Menopausal Me, 2022
Lucy Gable
Oil on panel, 40 x 40 cm | 15.7 x 15.7 in

“I’m particularly drawn to painting portraits in oil, often female, and I try to capture the over-riding emotion of a particular singular moment. I often find that those emotions are obscure but intense, and include exhaustion, fury, exasperation and joy. I try to challenge the artistic stereotype of female beauty which tends to depict women as passive, acquiescent, inviting or in pain.”

Amateur Artist Award

Kuangyi Liu

Interior No.5, 2021
Kuangyi Liu
Oil on canvas, 54 x 46 cm | 21.2 x 18.11 in

“I would like to capture what I see and how it makes me feel using the brushes and oil paint, be honest, from heart, by observation. I believe there is always something better to come, from practising and challenging myself.”

Student Award

Ginny Elston

The Burden of Being, 2022
Ginny Elston
Acrylic on paper, 120 x 168 cm | 47.2 x 66.1 in

“The Burden of Being is an uncomfortable confrontation of our ceaseless habits of consuming and discarding materials that will long outlive us on the planet. We spend our lives accumulating ‘stuff’, and I wanted to make a painting that speaks of the overwhelming and overbearing nature of this stuff.”

Upcoming Schedule:

Jackson’s Painting Prize 2023 Winner Announced: 14th April

Affordable Art Fair Hampstead: 10th – 14th May

Bankside Gallery: 24th – 30th July

The post Jackson’s Painting Prize 2023 People’s Choice, Amateur Artist, and Student Award Winners Announced appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

We asked eight leading landscape painters for tips on how to resolve a landscape painting composition. Artists who work in pastel, acrylic paints, oil paints, and watercolours share their thoughts below.

The Importance of Drawing

Big Field, November, 2022
Tor Falcon
Pastel on paper, 28 x 38 cm | 11 x 14.9 in

Tor Falcon on Landscape Painting Composition

Drawing is everything to your picture. At no point in the process can you relax and forget drawing. It’s sometimes fiendishly difficult but attend to it, make it your friend. Don’t be precious, be bold, be prepared to correct mistakes and move things about – even if you think you’ve very nearly finished. Don’t be afraid to move that beautifully painted tree if you suddenly realise you’ve got the span of the spread of its branches wrong. The finished picture will be better for it and if you’ve painted a beautiful tree once, of course you can do it again.

Tor Falcon is having an exhibition of Cumbrian drawings at the Archive Gallery, Heaton Cooper Studio in the Autumn.

Visit Tor’s website

Follow Tor on Instagram

Queen Elizabeth II Remembered, 2022
Adebanji Alade
Oil On board, 30.5 x 40.6 cm | 12 x 16 in

Adebanji Alade on Landscape Painting Composition

Drawing is so important. This is what helps you as an artist to have first hand connection with whatever you plan to paint in the Landscape. Your ability to draw gives you an edge because this is where you make the first marks, skeletal marks, planning where your shapes are going to fit and how your lines are going to depict each element in the landscape. It’s through drawing that you are able to get all your proportions and positioning right. It doesn’t matter what method you use: plumblines, gridlines, a view-finder, sight-size method or freehand- it’s all to make sure that the foundation of the main elements on the landscape are properly and proportionately positioned – all this comes down to being able to draw properly.

Where this fails and the drawing is faulty, the landscape will be weak no matter how embellished the tones, texture and colour may look.

How do I improve my drawing? By constant practice from life, you observe, analyse and respond, it’s all about your eye-hand coordination. Training yourself this way will improve your drawing which is the most important element in approaching landscape painting.

Adebanji will be exhibiting with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters from 29th of November to the 16th of December 2023 at the Mall Galleries, London.

Visit Adebanji’s website

Follow Adebanji on Instagram

Don’t Be Afraid to Edit, Select and Move

Deadwood, 2017
Ian Sidaway
Watercolour, 54 x 74 cm | 21.2 x 29.1 in

Ian Sidaway on Landscape Painting Composition

It sometimes seems that nature has an inherent sense of design, as elements come together so perfectly no adjustment is necessary, however help is sometimes needed, and adjustments should be seen as perfectly acceptable. Moving position is not always an option so visually editing out those elements that look wrong or even adding elements that strengthen the composition is a legitimate course of action. These adjustments often come naturally to the seasoned landscape artist, with even very subtle alterations making a huge difference. Moving trees, adding clouds, using cast shadows, changing the colour or scale of an element, using paths or streams to direct the eye can all be powerful tools. The essential thing is that these changes do not subvert or alter the place one is painting beyond all recognition.

Visit Ian’s website

Follow Ian on Instagram

Use the Subject as a Vehicle for Self Expression

Looking West, South Downs, 2022
Louise Balaam
Oil on canvas, 110 x 140 cm | 43.3 x 55.1 in

Louise Balaam on Landscape Painting Composition

Spend some time making pencil or charcoal thumbnail sketches to explore the expressive potential of the position of the horizon (higher or lower). We generally prefer a painting to have more sky than foreground, or vice versa, rather than have a horizon which divides the painting roughly in half (though there are plenty of painters who break this rule!). A dominant sky gives a feeling of openness, airiness, freedom, or awe if there are huge storm clouds. A larger area of foreground makes us feel closer to the earth, grounded, more aware of its textures and complexity. It’s also good to play with how the angle of your strokes change the feeling of the work. Steeper, more diagonal marks give a sense of drama and energy, while more horizontal brushstrokes make us feel calm and peaceful.

Louise Balaam’s Online Landscape Painting Course

Visit Louise’s website

Follow Louise on Instagram

Tessa Coleman on Landscape Painting Composition

Be clear about what your interest is in the subject you chose to paint. I work from both line and tonal drawings made out in the landscape along with colour notes made in gouache or watercolour, and then recreate the impulse that first drew me to a particular landscape back in my studio. I find note taking about what that initial visual impulse is always helps, be it a particular colour relationship, tonal relationship or interesting compositional structure that draws one to the view in the first place.

Once back in the studio I spend time deciding on a palette and mixing paint to create my colour world. I always work with a limited palette of five or six colours but the initial colours vary according to the subject. Over the years I have built up a huge library of palette references that I save at the end of each day’s painting which I can use to find the starting point for new work according to the season and type of light that I want to make. Once I’ve got my drawings and colour world sorted the painting fun begins. I start large paintings with a first layer of what I call a colour map, in order to stretch my colour gamut in every direction from my restricted palette. It doesn’t really matter what goes where but it does give me a palette to sample from as I add successive layers to the painting.

Stourhead Lake, Spring, 2023
Tessa Coleman
Oil on gesso panel, 120 x 170 cm | 47.2 x 66.9 in

This is the point in the making of a painting where ‘naer het leven’ becomes ‘uyt den gheest’. ‘From the life’ is combined with ‘From the spirit or imagination’. In the Dutch Golden Age, the ideal painting encompassed both modes of thinking to a greater or lesser extent. I was reminded forcibly of this two-way painters’ pull whilst looking at Michael Andrew’s paintings at Gagosian a few years ago. He had a perfect pitch drawing eye, but also the most original imaginative and spiritual viewpoint, using both photography and many other sources of material, both visual and literary to develop his painting imagery. He also had an absolute mastery of painterly techniques, knowing just when to describe and when to leave well alone and let the paint do the work for him. Many of his paintings, particularly in the Lights and School series, visualize scenes impossible to paint or draw on the spot: deep under water, high in the sky. He nevertheless captured something much more than the merely visual, he captures the feeling of what it must be like to inhabit those spaces: floating high in the sky in a hot air balloon, submerged deep underwater, silently watching fish swim by.

I make cartoons to transfer my drawings over my coloured shapes and slowly areas of the painting start to coalesce into spaces that need description, and spaces that need to breath. Once the main elements are in place, colour decisions take centre stage. This part of the painting can go on indefinitely but there will be a point in the making of the painting where the decisions that you’ve already made will start to guide you if you let them. A landscape painting six feet wide can turn on a sixpence sized brushstroke of saturated colour, entirely changing the time of day, season of the year, the weather, everything.

Stourhead Spring is one of a series of four paintings depicting the seasons at a beautiful lake not far from where I live. Each painting uses a different compositional strategy in picture making: Spring is all about high intensity colour and the space is flattened right up on the surface of the picture. The other three seasons use very different ideas of space, but all are made with very similar colour worlds stretched in completely different directions.

Tessa Coleman is exhibiting with Stella Agnew and Judy Buxton at Eastwood Fine Art this June (by appointment after 17th June). She is a member of the Royal Drawing School Faculty.

Visit Tessa’s website

Follow Tessa on Instagram

Read Tessa’s Faculty Profile from the Royal Drawing School

Let Colour Lead the Way

Red Sea, Pink Foam, 2023
Josie Clouting
Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm | 35.4 x 27.5 in

Josie Clouting on Landscape Painting Composition

It is easy to get overwhelmed with information when painting a landscape, especially painting on location. Try to simplify the scene by focusing on colour and shape rather than detail. Often features in the distance appear more blue/purple and muted, whereas areas in the foreground will appear brighter and more saturated. Make the most of the variety of colours and textures the landscape has to offer and don’t be afraid to play; unexpected colour combinations are often the best.

Josie Clouting is exhibiting in Associations 1st – 9th July, Ayres House Studios in Wallingford.

Visit Josie’s website

Follow Josie on Instagram

Black Arrows Westway (12), 2016
Chloe Fremantle
Gouache on paper, 23 x 31 cm | 9.05 x 12.2 in

Chloe Fremantle on Landscape Painting Composition

“Urban landscapes are a fascinating challenge – I find it useful to note the areas with the strongest colours and use them as the key to the composition, whether to accentuate & exaggerate them a little, or use them as tiny highlights.

This focus can help you place the rest of your image into a balance, and allow your painting to be very much your individual response.

Awareness of what the “complimentary colours” are to the tones & shades you are using, and how these affect your colour choices can help make your selection simpler & surer.

It’s best to have a variety of tones in your work, & including some very dark & very light areas, (even if only small) will help bring structure & intensity to your composition.

Visit Chloe’s website

Follow Chloe on Instagram

On Worthing Beach #6, 2022
Olivia Adamczyk O’Sullivan
Acrylic on watercolour paper, 26 x 24 cm | 10.2 x 9.4 in

Olivia Adamczyk O’Sullivan on Landscape Painting Composition

I often paint the landscapes of Southeast London where I live (usually acrylic on paper) but recently have done more work with rural and coastal areas. Even the harshest urban setting can provide flashes of colour and light which excite me visually, and can lead to a sketch and/or painting. I tend to use one or two dominant colours in a painting, captured from my observations, sketches, iPhone videos and photos – sometimes is isn’t possible to sit and sketch. Several of my paintings have focused on the recycling plant at New Cross Gate in Southeast London. I live locally and love to see it from the train to London Bridge and back. I don’t use colour in a literal way. For example in the case of the recycling plant paintings I’ve used mainly blue and yellow for blocks of colour which dominate the painting.

In other paintings, it’s the colour, light and shade on a house that I pass regularly which form the focus of the painting. More recently I’ve been drawn to the beach at Worthing – due to family connection, I go there often. The beaches are brown, the light there is endlessly varied. Again it is not a typical beauty.

I have done a series of paintings and many sketches. My starting point is usually creating rough blocks with the brown of the beach, together with grey/blue, often adding flashes of orange or blue, which might come simply from a piece of nylon rope left on the beach, and then set out to create more textures. I like my paintings to reflect the feeling of a place and use colour to do that. Use limited colours boldly to create your painting. Sketch out rough shapes with a brush and use tonal values and marks (eg from stubby crayons, inks, using a thin brush) to vary your work. But also, if you find a subject you like, go back there at different times of day, even night, in different seasons and lights, and see how the colours change. The more you get to know a place, the more you find to paint in terms of colour, light, shadow, form, and everything else.

Visit Olivia’s website

Follow Olivia on Instagram

Further Reading

Adebanji Alade: the Addictive Sketcher

Haeeun Lee: Abstract Compositions

Inside the Sketchbook of Suzy Fasht

Painting a Master Copy

Shop Art Materials on jacksonsart.com

The post How to Resolve a Landscape Painting Composition appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Jackson’s Wooden Panels are made of smooth, sanded light plywood, reinforced on the reverse to prevent warping. Sturdy yet lightweight, they are perfect for plein air painting projects and work in the studio. Painters, Alys Elisabeth Davies and Louise Campion test Jackson’s Wooden Panels for oil painting.

Alys Elisabeth Davies Tests Jackson’s Smooth Wooden Panels

I’ve been using Jackson’s Smooth Wooden Panels for my oil paintings for a few years now. Having tried out a lot of other brands, I have always returned to them as they are often better quality than other market competitors and cheaper! Boards are much more cost efficient than good quality canvas, but I also prefer the smooth texture of board and how the paint applies to it.

Materials

Jackson’s Wooden Panel 8 x 10 in 20 mm Deep

Jackson’s Wooden Panel 10 x 10 in 20 mm Deep

Jackson’s Wooden Panel 12 x 12 in 20 mm Deep

Jackson’s Wooden Panel 12 x 16 in 20 mm Deep

Jackson’s White Synthetic Mottler Brush 75 mm

Jackson’s Acrylic Gesso Primer 1 Litre

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Long Flat No.1

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Long Flat No.2

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Long Flat No.3

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Filbert No.2

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Filbert No.0

Jackson’s Procryl Brush Filbert No.4

They have an extensive range of sizes and two depths, depending on how you would like your finished work to look on the wall. As an artist who produces a lot of commissioned paintings, I love that the boards are cradled so they arrive to my clients easy to hang, without the need of framing. They also look fab with a Jackson’s Ready-made Ayous Wood Box Frame too.

First coat of primer

You can also buy boards ready primed, but I prefer to prime and prep them myself for oil painting as I find that the paint applies much better. The boards are already sanded to be lovely and smooth, so I can apply my first coat of Jackson’s Gesso Acrylic Primer straight away. For this I’ll use a priming brush or large flat paintbrush. I’ll leave this to dry for an hour or so before applying a second coat. I might use a fine sanding block or sanding paper in between layers. Once the second coat is fully dry, I’ll just rub over the top again with the sanding block to make sure I’ve got an even surface.

Fully primed boards

I’ll normally use a burnt or raw umber thinned with some solvent to tone my board. I’ll use a large paintbrush and some cotton rag or kitchen towel to work the paint into the surface. If I’ve been organised, I’ll try and do this the day before starting a painting. Or, if really organised, I’ll prime and tone multiple boards in advance so I’m ready to start new paintings as and when!

Toning the board

Still life progress – underpainting

I then will begin to sketch the composition of my painting before working in the colour. As you can see in the images, I work with quite thin layers of paint and like to keep the paint creamy and smooth with the help of a medium (I like to use linseed oil) and I also find the Jackson’s Procryl Brushes great for this type of velvety effect. The texture of the boards would equally work well for more impasto paint or mixed media application. For my works, I prefer the result and texture that is achieved with boards and prefer it to being able to see the texture of the canvas through the paint.

These images show a still life in progress using one of Jackson’s Smooth Wooden Panels, as well as some of my finished commissions and the finished texture.

About Alys Elisabeth Davies

Alys is an East London based artist who enjoys capturing the buzzing and ever-changing local area through her work. As well as painting the urban landscapes around her, she specialises in creating commissioned paintings with the aim of creating an heirloom for families to treasure.

She attended Cardiff Metropolitan University to do a Diploma in Fine Art & Design where she specialised in painting. She went on to complete a BA History of Art at UCL and subsequently worked for a few years at galleries (most recently as Curatorial Administrator at Tate Britain) before returning to her passion of painting full-time in 2021.

Follow Alys Elisabeth on Instagram

Visit Aly’s Elisabeth’s website

Louise Campion Tests Jackson’s Wooden Panels

My first impression of the Jackson’s Wooden Panels is really good. They arrived promptly via mail and the packaging was both secure and limiting plastic waste which I appreciate very much. Right away, I feel the panels: they are strongly built, they won’t move, and the wood is super smooth already which will make the rest of the process easier.

Materials

Jackson’s 5 mm Wooden Painting Panel 14 x 18 in Pack of 5

Jackson’s 5 mm Wooden Painting Panel 14 x 18 in Pack of 5

Jackson’s Artist Oil Paint 60 ml Set of 8

Jackson’s Shiro Professional Hog Bristle Hair Brush Set of 5 – 4 Round, 1 & 6 Bright, 4 Filbert

Jackson’s Wooden Panel 12 x 16 in 20 mm Deep

I sized them twice on both sides with gelatine and water which I prepared on a bain-marie, and the wood absorbed it really well and didn’t stain. I then taped the sides of the panels to keep them clean and applied three layers of white acrylic gesso on the surface, sending it in between each with some thin sandpaper. After letting it dry completely overnight, I applied a pink wash of oil paint mixed with citrus based solvent and a bit of linseed oil. The panels are now ready to use for my next paintings! I encountered no issue: The process was fast and satisfying and I honestly would recommend these to my peers.

About Louise Campion

Louise Campion is a French artist currently based in Glasgow, UK. She attended the Fine Arts School of Lyon in France, and obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts in 2019 from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke – Mooniyang; Montreal in Canada. Primarily interested in painting and drawing, Campion’s practice focuses on the exploration of awareness and emotional survival within a context of global violence.

Campion has exhibited her work in galleries such as the Fofa Gallery (Montreal, Ca) and The Untitled Space (New York City, USA). She was part of Artch-Emerging Contemporary Art in 2020, Yes Montreal’s Connecting Creative Youth Through the Arts program in 2021, and recently completed artistic residencies with the Art Souterrain Festival and the Jano Lapin Gallery (Montreal). She is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art (Scotland), for which she was awarded The Ranald and Jennifer May Postgraduate Painting Scholarship.

Follow Louise on Instagram

Visit Louise’s website

Further Reading

Creating Oil Paintings That Stand the Test of Time

Aluminium Painting Panels

Underpainting in Oil and Acrylic

Jackson’s Smooth Wooden Panels as a Surface for Encaustic Painting

Shop Jackson’s Wooden Panels on jacksonsart.com

The post Two Artists Test Jackson’s Wooden Panels appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

An Art Fair can be a great opportunity to showcase your art practice and meet potential collectors face-to-face. Art Fairs that welcome self-representing artists allow you to show your work exactly how you’d like to, and have both full control and responsibility for the presentation of your work within the confines of your stand. This Art Fair checklist will help you prepare for such an event and make the most of an exciting exhibition opportunity.

Above image: StART Art Fair 2022

StART Art Fair 2022

Choosing Which Art Fairs to Apply to

Today, there is a huge array of art fairs that you can choose to apply to, many of which welcome self representing stands, as opposed to gallery stands. The advantage of this is that you do not need to pay commission on sales, but you will need to pay for a stand. You’ll also need to work for your sales; arranging transportation of art work, labels, pricing, promoting your stand and presence at the fair, and so on. In essence, you take care of everything, but if your efforts are successful, you stand to have the opportunity to directly communicate with your audience, meet your collectors, and take 100% of the sales.

Affordable Art Fair – Hampstead 2019

Because there are a lot of art fairs for artists that take place annually and sometimes more frequently around the world today, it’s worth doing your research. First of all check out the artwork that they have shown at their fairs in the past, and ask yourself whether the work you make is a good fit for the identity of the fair. Can you see your paintings or prints sitting well among the work they have presented on their website or Instagram?

Print Fest
Photo credit: © Kate Kirkwood

Some art fairs are more eclectic than others – you might come across fairs that deal in only one artform, e.g. original prints or drawings, while other fairs such as the Other Art Fair have an array of all kinds of visual art forms. See how long the art fair has been running for (one that has fully established itself is more likely to be better organised, while a younger fair might have more affordable stand prices). It’s also worth taking a look at the marketing for an art fair – even if your work is a good fit, you need to check if the price level fits with your pricing for your own artwork – and if not, are you prepared to adjust your prices so that you don’t appear to be underpricing or pricing yourself out of the event? If you know previous exhibitors, ask them about their experience of the event in the past.

Bath Art Fair
Photo credit: Anna Barclay

Another consideration is the logistics. Will you be able to transport yourself and your artwork to the venue? If it’s too far away to commute to and from throughout the event and you need to stay overnight, you’ll want to factor any accommodation costs into your budget to see if taking part in the fair is financially viable.

Preparing a Successful Art Fair Application

Many of the best art fairs will vet their applications in order to select a variety of artists whose work will complement one another. Make an honest application – presenting work that is a close representation of what you intend to take to the fair. If you only show work that you think fits better with the identity of the fair but doesn’t accurately represent what you make at the moment, it won’t help you and it won’t help the fair organisers. When writing an artist statement, be straightforward in describing what drives your work, and be concise. Organisers tend to favour text that is written in the third person as it makes it easy for them to cut and paste into their marketing, but be sure to read any guidelines carefully to give them what they want. Enthuse about the concepts, materials and processes that drive your practice (i.e. ‘Simmons revels in the wide array of effects achieved with acrylic mediums and uses these to describe the drama of the British coastline’) and it will help you to create a statement that is lively and engaging. Focus on what sets your artwork apart where you can, and don’t make anything up!

Bath Art Fair
Photo credit: Anna Barclay

Deciding What to Show at an Art Fair

Remember that unless you are a well-known artist, the art fair experience often presents your work to an unfamiliar audience, and many of the potential sales you make will be impulse buys. Therefore if you want to maximise the potential for sales my advice would be to take some smaller, lower priced works that are easy to take home and also easier for purchasers to decide on. However on the other hand, you may not want your audience to think that you only make small works, and if a large part of your practice is painting huge canvases, then be sure to take at least one of these as it will grab people’s attention and give your stand a more well rounded presentation of what you do.

Important Additional Extras

Once you’ve decided what you want to show, you will need to consider how to present the work. Is the fair a table top event, or will there be walls that you can hang your work on? This will influence how much work you will want to take, and whether you want to show the work framed or unframed. A browser is a great way to present a larger number of unframed works.

Print Fest
Photo credit: © Kate Kirkwood

Unframed work needs to be kept safe. You can do this by slotting it into plastic sleeves that can be kept in a portfolio, or you can back them with mountboard or foamboard and wrap with cellophane wrap, or slot them into polypropylene sleeves. You will need a craft knife or scalpel, a cutting mat and a metal ruler if wrapping in cellophane wrap from the roll, as well as some some scotch tape (this is best as it doesn’t age the way regular sellotape can).

L – R:
Jackson’s Portfolio Sleeves – 140 Microns – Singles and Packs
Mapac Retrofolio Case A4
Mapac A2 Professional Presenter Leather Look – Spiral Bound 2

L – R:
Studio Essentials White Core Mount Board 60 x 80 cm Extra White
Crescent Art Foam Board White 3 mm 19.5 x 27.5 in
Jackson’s Self-Seal Polypropylene Bag Pack of 10 – A6

L – R:
Handover Ruler Steel Ruler 60 cm (24 in)
Jackson’s A4 Grey Cutting Mat Double Sided Centimetre and Inch Grid
Jakar Heavy Duty Utility Knife with Retractable Blade

For framed works, ready-made frames can help keep costs down, although this only works if your pieces are standard sizes. In the Jackson’s framing section you will find ready made frames that fit standard canvas and panel sizes. For any pieces that are irregular in size, Jackson’s offer the Jackson’s Bespoke Frame Builder, where you can upload an image of your work and preview how it looks in any of the mouldings available.

Jackson’s Handmade Board 696 Fine Grain Clear Primed Linen and Ready-Made Frame Set

Remember to consider how the work will hang. Mirror plates make work extra secure on the wall, but if it’s the kind of fair where works are taken away as they are sold, you’ll need to keep a screwdriver handy for getting the work down again! Otherwise there are other hanging options, such as picture cord and string or a sawtooth hanger, which is attached to the back of a picture and then hangs on a nail which is hammered into a wall. A ruler with a spirit level can help with getting pictures hanging straight, although in most cases judging by eye is best as sometimes venue walls (especially in older buildings) can be a little wonky and cause optical illusions!

L – R:
Jackson’s Framing Accessory Pack 16 – 2 x 46 mm Brass Picture Plate and Screws
Lion Framing Hanging and Framing Hardware Picture Cord Roll White N 100 m
Lion Framing Hanging and Framing Hardware – Strong Picture Hanging Nails – 8 in Pack

L – R:
Lion Framing Hanging and Framing Hardware Saw Tooth Hangers – 4 Hangers and Screws
Jackson’s Framing Accessory Pack 3 – 75 cm Low Stretch Cord and 2 x (2 Hole) D’rings
Handover Cutting Ruler & Handle 60 cm

For table top fairs, finding a way to create height on your table could help you to display more work. Table and display easels can help show work vertically, which makes it easier to catch a passer-by’s attention. Old boxes, shelving units, and point of sale displays for shops can be used to help make the most of your table top display.

L – R:
Studio Essentials A-frame Display Easel 12 in
Jackson’s Tripod Display Easel Beech Wood 30 cm
Jackson’s H-Frame Table Easel

Promotional Materials

Business cards can be a great way to keep your work in people’s minds after the fair – make sure you mention your website, social media and contact details on the card. Greeting cards can double up as business cards with contact info stated on the reverse, and what’s better is you can sell them! There are many QR Code generators online, and it can be a fun way to get your audience to visit your website or social media platforms straight away – simply create your QR code to link to your website and print it out to put on your display.

L – R:
Biyomap Biyosafe Foam Corner Protector – Sides 100 mm Long – 25 x 35 mm – Set of 4
Biyomap Reusable Artwork Shipping and Storage Bag 40 x 50 cm (Light Blue)
Biyomap Biyosafe Foam Edge Protector – 20 cm Long 25 x 35 mm – Set of 4

Wrapping and Transportation

Biyomap Art Bags and foam protectors will save you a lot of time wrapping artwork for transportation in comparison to the less eco-friendly alternative of bubble wrap. The art bags are available in a range of sizes, and it takes seconds to slide framed and unframed works in and out of them. However, if you’re going to let collectors take the art bag away with them, remember to factor this cost into your artwork price, or bring some bubble wrap in case of sales so you can hold on to the art bag. Foam edges and corners offer extra protection if needed. If you order frames for delivery from Jackson’s, hold on to the packaging it comes in as it can be really useful for transporting work to art fairs.

Print Fest
Photo credit: © Kate Kirkwood

Art Fair Checklist

1. Research what art fairs are happening when, ask contacts for their experiences of art fairs, check that the art fair websites show images that align with what you make and price points align with your pricing. Consider too the transport costs and logistics of getting to the fair.

2. Make a list of deadlines and art fair dates for the events that interest you.

3. Make an honest application – showing images that truly represent what you will want to show. Write a statement in the third person (unless otherwise instructed) that focuses on the themes and processes that you use in your practice.

4. Plan what you would like to show, taking a range of work and making you have pieces that are a range of sizes and prices. Ask yourself if your stand will reflect your practice in general, and will it be as eye-catching as possible.

5. Think about how you will plan your display with plenty of time, so that you have time to order any display materials you need, as well as framing.

6. Order business cards and greeting cards (or you could make your own).

7. Create a QR code and print it out (you might like to mount it on mountboard so that it is sturdy and reusable).

8. Order Art Bags and foam protectors to fit the works you want to take to the fair.

9. Make labels for artworks if needed – parcel tags can easily be attached to picture cord on framed works, or otherwise you can print out labels and spray mount them to foam board or mountboard. Labels are usually attached to a corner on the front of unframed work, or on the reverse, using a sticky label.

Bath Art Fair
Photo credit: Anna Barclay

Further Reading

The Relationship Between the Artist and Their Materials

Jackson’s Painting Prize 2022 Exhibition at the Affordable Art Fair Hampstead

Jennifer Conner: Jackson’s Painting Prize 2022 Expert Judge

How to Create the Best Digital Photographs of Your Artwork

Shop Art Fair Materials on jacksonsart.com

The post Art Fair Checklist for Artists appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Look inside the sketchbooks of Adebanji Alade, artist and President of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. A prolific sketcher, Adebanji’s sketchbooks are filled cover to cover with drawings from observations of his daily life. Here, he shares his advice for making the most of your drawing practice on the move.

Adebanji Alade Takes Us Through His Sketchbook Practice

I love sketching and it has been something I have done naturally for the past 45 years. I started at the age of five or six by sketching football players from a comic called Roy of the Rovers and I haven’t stopped sketching since then, it’s been a lifelong obsession! I probably use four sketchbooks a year, depending on the size, one for each quarter would be an average amount that I can say I use over a year. I got affected during the pandemic, as I could not go out and about, so my output has dropped a bit, but hopefully as we have gradually settled down in normality, I hope to get back to four a year. I use every single page, back and front and I try not to leave any gaps, I literally want my money’s worth from each sketchbook.

My sketchbooks are mainly used as a medium to practice, to train my draughtsmanship and to make me better at drawing skills. This means I use all my sketchbooks for this purpose, once in a while I might use them to build up an idea for a painting.

I have used a number of different sketchbooks but the ones that really stand out are Moleskine, Stillman & Birn, and Daler Rowney Sketchbooks. Most recently I use Moleskine for all my sketching purposes. For instance, I use it for sketching on public transport, sketching landscapes and urbanscapes, and practising. I use the Daler Rowney Sketchbooks when I teach students to use a simple medium like graphite to get great effects. Stillman & Birn Sketchbooks are just great for all my work in general but I choose them because of their supreme paper quality and thickness.

The size and paper quality I love the most is the Moleskine Sketchbook, the size I love best is the A4. It has smooth paper, it’s a bit off-white, creamy in colour and makes the finished piece have this museum-like feel to it. It is versatile and great to use for my pencil work, coloured pencil work and work with Tombow Brush Pens and ballpoint pens. I like the Daler Rowney Ebony series in A4 size too, I prefer this purely for graphite work.

The Stillman and Birn Sketchbooks I love best are the 8 x 10 inch ones. There are different varieties of them, alpha, beta, zeta etc. The key thing here is that they can take a battering of heavy attacks from scrubbing, washing, to hard lines and scratches. For instance, the Beta range has 270 gsm, now, that’s no joke! A pure delight to work on if you love to work with heavy layers of successive washes. I definitely love the hard cover ones, but the soft covers are also great.

The materials I use in my sketchbooks are mainly graphite, coloured pencils and Tombow Dual Tip Blendable Brush Pens with a trusty ballpoint pen. Then occasionally I use watercolour, gouache and Posca Pens.

I love graphite because it’s the most natural, easy to access and trusty medium ever. You can easily get a range of tones with it and it works well by using the sharpened tip for detail and the side for brilliant painterly-like broad strokes. I use coloured pencils because it’s so immediate and not messy. You can easily get high chroma results and it really works well for me as it was what I started out using when I couldn’t use paint, I started by using coloured pencils. When it comes to Tombow Brush Pens and the ballpoint pen, I love this combination because it’s the closest thing to pen and ink washes but without the stains and dripping.

The Tombow Brush Pens give brilliant wash like tones, in which layers can be added to to increase the tones without any mess and the ball point pens make clean lines with no blotting or staining ink. I love using watercolour with gouache because I can get really great transparent washes with the watercolour and whenever I think I need some strong opaque tones, like where there’s a burst of light, then I use gouache, especially gouache white with the watercolour. Then finally I just think the sketchers world was blessed when the makers of the Posca Pens introduced them into the market. Up until they were introduced, I never really enjoyed any liquid paint pens, but the Posca Pens, especially the white ones, are very useful for adding highlights to my sketches.

I frequently refer to my sketchbooks. They are mainly for practice and observational exercises. I use them to improve my drawing skills and to discover the world around me. I use them as a way of understanding all the things that are of interest to me. So maybe when I’m painting and I need a certain figure or face, I can easily use one of my sketches as a reference. This doesn’t always happen as most recently I work either directly from life or from a picture reference with all the information I need. Hence the sketchbooks serve as a sort of gym where I practice my drawing skills, which helps my paintings to have a solid drawing foundation.

80% of my sketches are finished works in themselves, I hardly have to translate them to finished works unless I have a particular project or piece, I’m working on in which I need to generate a number of sketches before I arrive at the finished piece.

The use of sketchbooks is so important to my practice as an artist, without the mileage I have covered in my sketchbooks I don’t think I would have the right drawing skills to help my paintings to look believable and accurate. Because I am purely a representational painter, everything I paint is easily identifiable. My sketchbook practice has given me enough ability to take on any painting project with ease, as the hardest part of painting for me has always been the drawing part. If the drawing in portraits, figures and landscapes are accurate, half of the job is done in my opinion, because a faulty drawing, lacking in right proportion, perspective and placement will not have strength and conviction, and I always love my work to have the power in those areas. Dodgy drawing freaks me out, so to avoid this nightmare, I go to my sketchbook for refuge, for practice and for improvement.

For any artists wanting to make the best of their sketchbooks, I would say, “Go around with it, don’t put it in your pocket or your bag, hold it in your hand and whenever you see something that inspires you, sketch it!” That’s what I do, and I hope this can inspire you to go out there and see all the beauty around you, and make beautiful sketches of it.

Materials Used

Graphite Pencil – Faber Castell Jumbo 2B, 4B, 6B, 8B

Tombow Dual Tip Blendable Brush Pens – Cool Gray 3, Cool Gray 5, Sand, Tan

Lyra Coloured Pencils – mostly browns and black.

Faber Castell Polychromos Pencil – mostly browns and black

Winsor & Newton Gouache

Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolours (Tubes)

Winsor & Newton Professional Half Pan – Field Set of 12 Watercolours

Posca Pens – mainly white and black.

Winsor & Newton Brush (Pro)Markers

About Adebanji Alade

Adebanji Alade is the President of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and Founder of the Addictive Sketchers Movement. He has exhibited widely throughout the country and has won numerous awards for his dynamic, mostly urban, paintings that are full of people and life. He currently works full time as a painter from his studio on Lots Road in Chelsea, London.

Whether he works indoors or outdoors, Adebanji strives to bring the life, vitality and movement of ‘the sketch’ into his paintings. He is inspired by the atmosphere, historical importance, mood, and the play of light that a particular place can offer at any point in time. Adebanji frequently presents films and interviews for BBC One’s The One Show and his sketches of commuters on the underground have also been made into the Channel 4 animated short film Two Minutes.

Follow Adebanji on Instagram

Visit Adebanji’s website

Further Reading

Adebanji Alade: The Addictive Sketcher

Adebanji Alade: 250 Portraits in 250 Days

How to Resolve a Landscape Painting Composition

Five Minute Drawing Exercises

Shop Sketchbooks on jacksonsart.com

The post Inside the Sketchbook of Adebanji Alade appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Maliha Abidi is a Pakistani-American multidisciplinary artist and author based in London and Los Angeles, who always has a sketchbook close to hand, should a moment of inspiration strike. Here, she discusses how her sketchbook practice supports her prolific output across a diverse range mediums.

Maliha Abidi Takes Us Through Her Sketchbook Practice

As an artist, my journey has been intricately tied to the sketchbooks that accompany me in every step of my creative process. I am a portrait artist, I like telling stories of people, I am inspired by my travels, as well as the complexities of our time. I often describe my art as “Come for the art, stay for the cause” because so much of my work is focused on social justice and talking about causes that are close to my heart.

Sketchbooks are not just tools for jotting down ideas; they are companions that capture my rawest thoughts and translate them into finished masterpieces. In this write-up, I invite you to delve into my practice and discover how my sketchbooks play a pivotal role in my multidisciplinary art.

One might wonder how many sketchbooks an artist truly needs. If that’s the case, then I must confess, I have more sketchbooks than I’d like to admit. My sketchbook collection extends beyond the realm of mere artistic tools. I keep one by my bedside, for inspiration often strikes when the world slumbers. These late-night sketches may be messy, but ideas wait for no one, and I’ve learned to capture them in their rawest form. Other sketchbooks have specific purposes – some are dedicated to travel sketches, capturing the essence of different cities and the colours that inspire me on my travels.

Speaking of sketchbook preferences, there are two that hold a special place in my heart. The first is an A3 size sketchbook from Daler Rowney. This serves as the birthplace of ideas for my art works, where the sketches are more refined, knowing they will be developed into paintings or digital art. On the other hand, a slightly smaller sketchbook from Royal Talens, brought home from Barcelona, acts as my travel companion, capturing the essence of my journeys and the sources of my inspiration on the road.

The materials I use in my sketchbooks are a testament to my journey as a self-taught artist. Faber Castell Polychromos Pencils are a constant, providing the comfort of familiarity since my early days of creating portraits and capturing those stories in the form of my art. Micron Pens, especially the brush pen variant, add fluidity and depth to my sketches. And lately, I’ve been exploring the world of Sennelier Oil Pastels, drawn to their unique properties and blending capabilities. My journey has been one of continuous experimentation with various mediums, unbound by rules and free to follow the path my heart leads. Being a self taught artist has taught me to not follow rules of any medium and has allowed me to have a multidisciplinary practice as an artist.

It’s fascinating how often I find myself referring back to my sketchbooks. Every single day, my sketches serve as the foundation for my creative endeavors, whether they manifest as physical paintings, drawings, digital works, or animations. The sketchbook’s pages become like puzzle pieces, waiting for the opportune moment to be plucked and added to the canvas, bringing my ideas to life with a sense of nostalgia.

The seamless translation of my sketches into finished works is made possible by the unfiltered nature of the ideas I put down on paper. Sketchbooks grant me the liberty to have my imagination untethered by expectations or pressures of perfection. By revisiting my sketches, I rediscover the essence of each idea, ensuring that the final artwork maintains its authenticity and captures the essence of its genesis.

For aspiring artists seeking to make the most of their sketchbooks, I offer a piece of practical advice: consider your sketchbook as a trusty companion. Carry a small one with you always, for inspiration can strike at any moment. Let your sketchbook be a sanctuary where ideas flow without inhibition, and where experimentation is encouraged. Embrace the joy of discovery and the thrill of unearthing hidden gems that will find their place in your future masterpieces.

Materials

Faber Castell Polychromos

Prismacolor Coloured Pencils

Micron Pens

Winsor & Newton Pro Markers

Faber Castell Mechanical Drawing Pencil

Sennelier Oil Pastels

Golden Acrylic Paint

Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic Paint

Liquitex Professional Acrylic Paint

Winsor & Newton Artist Oil Paint

My sketchbooks are not just a collection of random sketches but rather a testament to my growth as an artist. Each page is a chapter in the story of my creative journey, filled with ideas waiting to be explored and brought to life. With sketchbooks as my trusted companions, I continue to explore new horizons and push the boundaries of my art, embracing the unknown with excitement and enthusiasm. One sketch can be drastically different than the other. As I walk hand in hand with my sketchbooks, I am certain that the path ahead is paved with endless possibilities and artistic discoveries.

About Maliha Abidi

Maliha Abidi is a Pakistani-American multidisciplinary artist and author living between London and Los Angeles. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, she migrated to California at the age of 14. As a South Asian immigrant, her experiences play a huge role in her work. Her art focuses on advocating for social justice including women’s rights, girls’ education and mental health. Using bright and bold colours, Maliha hopes to get people interested in complex issues that impact our societies.

Maliha is also the founder and creator of Women Rise NFT, a Web 3.0 initiative with the focus on women’s rights and girls education through using art as a tool for advocacy.

Her work includes illustrations, animations, NFT art and illustrated books. In her spare time, she loves to travel, read books, go bicycling and explore new blends of coffee.

Follow Maliha on Instagram

Visit Maliha’s website

Further Reading

Inside the Sketchbook of Frances Ives

A Guide to Manual and Electric Pencil Sharpeners

Inside the Sketchbook of Akash Bhatt

The Relationship Between the Artist and Their Materials

Shop Sketchbooks on jacksonsart.com

The post Inside the Sketchbook of Maliha Abidi appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was an acclaimed artist and colourist, whose inventive art techniques transformed the possibilities of what abstract painting could be. Frankenthaler’s career spanned six decades, though it is said to have officially begun in 1952, with her creation of the soak-stain technique. Through her career, her use of colour shifts and develops, yet every artwork is still bursting with rich colours. This article discusses Frankenthaler’s treatment of colour and puts together three palettes inspired by her paintings.

Helen Frankenthaler in her Studio, New York, 1956.
Photo credit: Gordon Parks

Abstract Expressionism and the Soak-stain Technique

To understand Frankenthaler, we must first get to know the art movement, Abstract Expressionism which arose in New York in the 1940s, after World War II. Influenced by the Surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind, the Abstract Expressionists aimed to make art that was a pure expression of emotion. Amongst the style, are two broad groupings: action painters, like Jackson Pollock, who created spontaneous and large mark makings, and colour field painters like Mark Rothko, painting flat planes of colour.

Helen Frankenthaler sits in the midst of this. Morris Louis once described her as “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible”, meaning that she was influenced by his expressive mark makings, but imbued it with a fresh outlook. Here, he is referring to her soak-stain technique which she invented in 1952. This is the process of pouring turpentine thinned oil paint from coffee cans onto an unprimed canvas on the floor. This meant that the thinned oil paint would permeate the canvas, creating pools of bright colours, allowing the colours to bleed into, and through each other.

Pouring oil paint diluted with low odour solvent directly onto canvas

Colours interacting on the canvas

The following palettes are inspired by some of Frankenthaler’s artworks. They have been swatched on both oil or acrylic painting paper (which is relatively non-absorbent) and raw canvas (which is extremely absorbent) to explore how Frankenthaler harnessed the effect that surface absorbency has on colour.

Colour Palette One:

Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue and Viridian Green

Palette One, oil paint on oil painting paper.
From top, left to right:
Yellow Ochre and Alizarin Crimson
Alizarin Crimson and Cobalt Blue (plus Titanium White)
Cobalt Blue and Yellow Ochre

This colour palette is inspired by Frankenthaler’s 1952 artworks, the first artworks in which she used her radical, new soak-stain technique. Frankenthaler’s use of colour in these early artworks is fascinating as the bright colours she has chosen have transformed into paler versions of themselves. This is due to the amount of turpentine used to thin them down, as well as the unprimed canvas which is highly absorbent so makes the colour appear more muted. Due to this, it was difficult to imagine what colours Frankenthaler may have used, so I experimented with her technique (which I would definitely recommend trying out!)

Palette One with dilute acrylic paint on unprimed canvas

Mountains and Sea is the perfect example of Frankenthaler’s treatment of colour in the beginning of her soak-stain technique. The painting is based on her memory of the Nova Scotia seacoast in Canada. The depiction of the coastline is visible through the Cobalt Blue and Viridian Green sea crashing into and in between the firm Alizarin Crimson shapes of the bouldered coast. The complementing, pale pinks and greens, with the Cobalt Blue, all almost Cezanne-esque in their pale tones, evoke a softness in the composition, as they are all evenly spread around the canvas, each one taking up the same space as the next. There are visible charcoal guideposts that were made prior to pouring the thinned paints. This shows a surprising control, or hesitancy over a technique that seems like it should be more free and fluid, like other action painting techniques. As she settled into her new-found technique, the charcoal guides were gone, and more colours were added to the palette.

Mountains and Sea, 1952
Helen Frankenthaler
Oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, 219.4 x 297.8 cm | 86.3 x 117.4 in
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Colour Palette Two:

French Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue Hue, Bone Black, Naples Yellow Hue and Magenta

Palette Two, acrylic paint on acrylic painting paper.
From top, left to right:
French Ultramarine and Bone Black
Cobalt Blue and Bone Black
Naples Yellow (hue) and French Ultramarine
Naples Yellow (hue), French Ultramarine, and Bone Black
Magenta and French Ultramarine

This colour palette is based around a series of artworks Frankenthaler made in the summer of 1974. The series, Sea Change, marks the time she spent in Connecticut by the water, which is visible by all the blue paints used. There is a big change in Frankenthaler’s approach to colour, which can be seen in two ways. Firstly, she made a switch to acrylic paints in 1962, to allow her to achieve a richer, more saturated colour. Secondly, she has filled the canvases with colour, leaving barely any space unmarked. This presents her movement towards Colour Field painting.

Palette Two with dilute acrylic on unprimed canvas.

Ocean Drive West is the first of this series, and displays a canvas filled with a bright Ultramarine Blue. Using tape, she has cordoned off areas of unprimed canvas and made dry and thin horizontal strokes of bright colours, which can be recreated by using a Magenta, Cadmium Orange and Bone Black. This presents a transitional, but at the same time unifying movement from action painting to colour field painting, as the horizontal action painting lines attempt to swim through the colour field abyss of blue.

Ocean Drive West #1, 1974
Helen Frankenthaler
Acrylic on canvas, 238.8 x 365.8 cm | 94 x 144 in
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Another artwork from the series, Blue Bellows, was painted just two years after Ocean Drive West, but her treatment of colour is visibly different as her palette has become even more limited. This colour palette is made purely of blues, and can be recreated using Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue and a Prussian Blue for the darkest parts of the painting.

Colour Palette Three:

Manganese Violet, Prussian Blue, Cadmium Orange and Titanium White

Palette Three, oil paint on oil painting paper.
From top, left to right:
Manganese Violet and Prussian Blue (plus Titanium White)
Cadmium Orange and Prussian Blue (plus Titanium White)
Cadmium Orange and Manganese Violet

In this colour palette, I picked three strong and complementing colours that Frankenthaler has used in her colour field paintings. Even though she didn’t mix a lot of colours together in her later paintings, I thought it would be interesting to see what it would look like.

Palette Three with acrylic on unprimed canvas

Cloud Burst is one of Frankenthaler’s later works, and is a prime example of her movement towards colour field painting. This artwork can be recreated using a limited palette of Cadmium Orange, Titanium White and a Bone Black mixed with a Prussian Blue. Interestingly, although the whole canvas is filled, there is still a nod to her old painting style, as the turpentine that has been added to the acrylic Cadmium Orange has created this wash of orange that is in competition with the dark blue-black colour emerging from the top of the canvas.

Cloud Burst, 2002
Helen Frankenthaler
Acrylic on canvas, 201.3 x 173.4 cm | 79.2 x 68.2 in
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Frankenthaler’s palettes show us how even though her style of art developed and ultimately changed through her life, from action painting to colour field painting, her trope of bright, but washed-out colours always remained the same. Her love of colour bursts out of every painting she’s made, even if she’s only used two colours to make it!

Further Reading

Recreating Rembrandt’s Colour Palette With Modern Pigments

Underpainting in Oil and Acrylic

The History of Potter’s Pink (and Why It’s a Watercolourist’s Secret Weapon)

The Unexpected History of Payne’s Grey

Shop Colour on jacksonsart.com

The post Recreating the Colour Palette of Helen Frankenthaler appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

This guide will help you prepare for your first life drawing class. Whether you’re working in-person or online, there are some strategies to get the most out of your time with the model. I’ll describe the benefits of life drawing, good life room etiquette, some material recommendations, and give you some helpful exercises to keep in mind. The most daunting part is showing up to your first session, but hopefully this guide will have you looking forward to your first class instead.

The Benefits of Life Drawing to Artists

A common misconception about life drawing is that it isn’t useful unless you make figurative art. The life room as a practice is steeped in tradition, but it no longer solely exists in the traditional sense, of long academic drawing and careful measuring. It absolutely can be this if you wish, but classes are as varied as the artists that lead and participate in them. There really is a life drawing session for every kind of artist, and an untutored class can be whatever you choose.

Life drawing not only helps us to describe the human body, but through practice instils an understanding of composition, form and balance to our work. With often limited time to place the body on the page, having to rapidly conjure up a visually appealing image ingrains these skills as second nature. The body becomes a vessel for experimentation through material, mark making and technique.

Practising observational drawing is a core skill, and the life room is the perfect facility for honing it. When you are completely focused in the life room I find that you can forget you’re looking at a person, and it becomes much more about focusing on tone, texture and structure. The silence and time you consistently work through allows you to tap into this kind of concentration more easily when you’re back in your own studio. It’s like a muscle of sorts that needs to be trained. I find that when I’m regularly life drawing, I can focus better on my own work outside of these sessions.

Good Life Room Etiquette

Once you’ve committed to going to your first life drawing class, it’s important to know the appropriate behaviour whilst you’re there. Much of this seems like common sense, but if you’ve never been before it’s good to keep these points in mind so that the model and attendees are comfortable, and can get the most out of the class.

1. The most important rule is to have complete respect for the model. What they are doing is brave, requires great muscle endurance, and is an art form of its own. Brilliant life models can hold poses that seem effortless despite being under great strain. For context it can be interesting to try to hold a pose you’ve seen in a life room, to understand the tension different muscles in their bodies were under for a prolonged time. Never forget that these are people working at their job, and it is never appropriate to touch or take photos of a posing life model unless they have given you express consent to do so.

2. Alongside this you should never get your phone out whilst they are posing. To you it may seem like replying to a quick text, but it’s impossible to know that you aren’t secretly recording or taking photos. When a model is posing you have to pay attention to them and your drawing, and if you suddenly need to do something else then it’s best to leave the session.

3. Arriving on time to your class (especially in person) is very important. If you’re attending a tutored class you should hear the introduction to the session and meet your tutor and model. It is rude to turn up late and be the person opening the door half way through a pose, where the tutor has to re-explain things, the model may be distracted by the movement going on whilst they’re focusing, and the class is distracted by a person moving around and setting up when they’re getting into the zone.

4. Silence is expected in life rooms whilst you’re working. Avoid being the person who is chatting or whispering away.

5. Try not to expect to be brilliant on your first try! Even if you are great at drawing people before your first life class, this is a totally different environment & skill set. You don’t have unlimited time to perfect drawings, and it can be hard getting those first marks down. The life room is a space to improve and grow, and you’ll only get better through practice. No one is great at life drawing until they’ve put countless hours into it.

6. Finally, contributing to a supportive environment in the life room is so important. It’s easy to assume that everyone knows what they’re doing and thinking that you’re the only one who’s new, but this is almost never the case. Everyone there is trying to improve their skills, and it is a lifetime pursuit for many. If you’re given the opportunity to have a chat about each other’s work in class by your tutor, speak up! There’s a lot to learn from your peers.

Choosing Your Drawing Set Up

In general most life rooms will be full of easels or chairs in a circle or semicircle around the model. If you haven’t drawn from an easel before it can feel unnatural, but I would encourage you to try it. Make sure that you stand with the easel on the side of your body that has your dominant hand, and feel free to move it around to suit you. You want to have an unobstructed view of what you’re drawing without looking back over your arm. Make sure to adjust the height of the easel too – you want to be able to naturally reach all of the corners of the paper without straining up or down.

Once you’ve set up the angle and height of your easel, just quickly check around you that you aren’t in anyone’s view. There’s nothing wrong with asking someone if they can move along a little if they’re encroaching on your space. Getting the spacing right at the start of the session saves time later when it starts to bother both of you.

When you stand at an easel keep both feet planted on the ground. It can be tempting to lean and sway but your whole body should really be engaged in the drawing. If you’re standing unstable and shifting around, your drawing will have continually different angles of reference. Some life rooms will have high chairs or stools that you can sit on too, and I’d give the same advice where you should try not to shift around too much during a drawing.

Some life rooms will also have donkey easels that you can sit on. They are a little bench that you straddle and sit on, facing an angled piece of wood that you prop your drawing board on. These can be great for a lower angle on the pose, and give a real sense of stability.

You can also draw from your sketchbook in the life room, on your lap or on a board. This can be useful for quick poses, or for drawings that you want to be able to refer back to in a portable format. Some sessions that are untutored require you to bring a sketchbook and don’t have easels, whereas others you’ll have total freedom, so make sure you check. For your first class I would encourage you to go to a tutored session, so you can hear the advice of someone who’s done lots of life drawing.

Useful Materials to Bring With You

The most common life drawing dry media is definitely charcoal. Many sessions will have some you can borrow, but it’s good to keep a pack in your bag. Developing on your charcoal drawings, conte can be a useful addition. You can reach deeper blacks, and make much more permanent marks with it once your charcoal drawing feels resolved. Most venues won’t allow you to spray fixative on your charcoal drawings inside, so definitely take them home with some newsprint or spare paper in between and spray them, or possibly spray them outside of the venue.

Pencils are of course another key medium. I don’t love using graphite pencils in the life room as I find I end up smudging them when working rapidly. I much prefer using coloured pencils, in black or grey, for similar effect but much greater permanence. Sharpening can be annoying when you’re trying to work through lots of drawings, so I find that a lead holder can be a great addition to your kit to bypass this issue.

Once you’re feeling more confident, pastels are a great way to introduce colour into your life drawings. Painting in the life room can also be rewarding, but you’ll need to check the requirements of the venue. Some won’t allow oil paints, but a watercolour palette is usually fine. Acrylics can be great too if you’re working on a longer pose.

Ink is great for creating rapid, expressive drawings with a brush, or careful considered ones with a dip pen. I personally love the speed at which you can lay down tones and vary your mark making.

Once you’ve tried many of these media at your classes, mixing them together can be an exciting next step. Here I’ve shown a few examples of drawings with mixed media.

Many classes will have some standard paper you can use, usually newsprint or some basic cartridge paper. These are ideal if you’re working through lots of studies, but when you want to make something with greater intention, considering a higher quality paper to bring along will enhance your work. Consider toned paper, the weight of the paper, and the medium you’ll be using on it. I usually bring a variety of a few papers with me to see which I may be inclined to use when I see the poses.

Life Room Exercise Ideas

Once you’ve been to several life classes, you’ll get to know some of the exercises that are regularly used in tutored classes. You’ll find lots of classes have ingenious new methods to offer, but in general there are some classic exercises you’ll encounter. Knowing what they are can be helpful when you find yourself in an untutored class if you’d like to add some structure to your session, or if you’d like an idea of what to expect before you go.

Many life drawing classes begin with quick poses to warm up the class and get you visually engaged. These can be as quick as 30 seconds to a minute, and you’ll have to rapidly capture the essence of the pose in a few marks.

Another is when the model moves around the room or dances, and you are tasked with drawing the movement rather than the model themself. This can be tricky at first but becomes intuitive with practice. The model may stop several times and hold a pose during this movement, and you draw on top of the movement map you’ve created. This makes for a drawing full of vitality and energy

Drawing with your non-dominant hand can be interesting to free yourself up if you’re getting too bogged down in the technicalities. The other hand always has a very different language, and can open up new potential mark making techniques that your dominant hand can adopt.

In a similar vein, making a drawing without looking at your paper heightens your reliance on your observation rather than your own invention, and can teach you to trust what you’re seeing more than what your brain is correcting you to draw on the page.

Prolonged poses are the opposite of these rapid, spontaneous exercises. You may be drawing from the same pose for 30 minutes up to a whole day session, or over several classes. This can be great for achieving a much more developed work that has evolved past being a study.

Continuous line drawing can be a great cure for when your line lacks confidence and purpose, and working out how to describe volume with just line engages you creatively.

Online Life Drawing Classes

Life drawing from a remote session has its own pros and cons. The immediate pro is that the size and shape of your screen become a framing device for the position of your model on the page, like a viewfinder. This can be helpful if you’re working on where to place the figure in space, but also can be a drawback if you begin to rely on it too much and don’t exercise your personal choice. Working in total privacy in your own space can be a huge pro for some people, without having anyone walking around and watching you draw. Although comforting, the slight pressure of drawing in a group can often make me focus better and longer, and the more you do it the more confident you’ll feel anyway.

Remote classes are also brilliant if you are drawing from a remote area, or want access to a specific tutor that lives across the country without having to leave your studio. The freedom of materials you can use in your own space is liberating too, where a venue may not allow you to paint, you can decide for yourself what media you need online.

In terms of drawbacks, working from a screen gives you a huge loss in detail and sense of weight and scale of the figure. There is no way to work from a laptop that will give you the same encounter as drawing from a person a few metres from you. I find it harder to breathe life into these drawings in the same way. Also, losing the immediate interactions you have with classmates and the tutor online can be a drawback. I find that although you can chat online, you miss those important little snippets of one-on-one advice that you can in person. Everyone attending life drawing classes contributes to a community environment, and this is a different feeling on a video call with cameras off.

I’d encourage all artists to try a life drawing class, regardless of their personal practice & experience level. The more you put into it, the more you gain, and it can be very rewarding through the challenges. Often I’ve found that the exercises you find the most frustrating in the life room are the ones to really focus and push at until you make something that you love.

Further Reading

Why You Should Join an Online Life Drawing Class

Five Minute Drawing Exercises

Developing a Daily Drawing Practice With the Royal Drawing School

Bill Murphy on Combining Materials to Reinvigorate His Drawing Practice

Shop Drawing Materials on jacksonsart.com

The post How to Prepare for Your First Life Drawing Class appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Louise Balaam paints expressive, gestural landscapes in oil, but her process begins in the landscape, drawing with water-based materials. In this Inside the Sketchbook feature, Louise discusses how sketching is a practice of gathering information, and shares her advice for drawing on location.

Louise Balaam Takes Us Through Her Sketchbook Practice

As a landscape artist I believe drawing in the landscape is absolutely essential for my process – and such an enjoyable thing to do as well. I don’t see the drawings as particularly important in themselves and I don’t paint directly from my drawings, but I see the sketching process as a crucial way of gathering information for the artist. Being in the landscape with your drawing materials keeps you there for much longer than taking a photograph, and it gives you a chance to absorb and be aware of all the other aspects of where you are – birdsong, other sounds, the breeze, the feel of the air, the ground you’re sitting on… It all feeds into your understanding of the place, not just the visual aspects. I’ll often make notes on my drawings about particular birds I can hear, or what plants are around me, for example. I like to work quickly and spontaneously, capturing different aspects of the landscape in a range of sketches and media. I’m not aiming to make exact drawings but to somehow capture the feeling or the essence of where I am.

Sketchbooks

I use a range of sketchbooks when drawing outside. I find it very helpful to have two or three on the go at once – I often use water-based media and having more than one sketchbook means that I can put one drawing aside to dry and start to work on another one. I don’t have a favourite sketchbook type, though I do like to use paper which is heavy enough to take water-based media without cockling. I like to use a range of formats and sizes when I’m drawing, from square to a very wide double-page spread. In some situations, for instance drawing from other artists’ work in galleries or standing up in the landscape, a spiral-bound sketchbook is very useful as the sketchbook can be bent back on itself.

Media

In terms of media, I use a range of different media when I’m drawing outside. I find that having media with colour really helps to remind me of the particular atmosphere of a place when I’m looking over my sketchbooks back in the studio. I like water-based media because of its fluidity and its painterliness. Although I don’t think of myself as a watercolour artist, I’ll usually have a box of watercolour pans, plus a watertight folding plastic palette which I use with tube watercolours. I like to have a tube of white artist’s gouache to use with the watercolours, which gives me some opacity and allows me to work in the spontaneous, gestural way I like.

I also use Derwent XL Water-soluble Sticks, which are so useful – they’re chunky sticks which can be scribbled with and then washed over with water, used on already-dampened paper, or used with a brush as a solid block of colour. The other water-soluble media with colour I use is acrylic inks. I like drawing directly with the bottle dropper and then using water to release the colour onto the page.

I like to have some monochromatic media as well. I find that using monochrome helps me focus on the structure of the landscape and its tonal values, without the distraction of colour, so it plays a different role. I generally have pencils (water-soluble pencils such as Derwent and propelling pencils with a rubber which are very handy to scribble with), charcoal, compressed charcoal and a water-soluble brush pen such as Tombeau. I like the Artgraf tailor’s chalk block of pigment, which is soft and fun to use.

I often use different media together on the same drawing, depending on the particular colour or consistency I’m looking for.

As I mentioned, I prefer not to use sketches or drawings directly to paint from. I find that this can lead to trying to copy the drawing with paint, and in my work I’m aiming to keep spontaneity and energy in the painting. I can’t do this if I’m trying to copy something, so my process is to look at the sketchbook to remind me of the feeling of the place and the colour relationships, but then to put it aside when I start to paint. I want the painting to take its own course – it will be informed by the drawings and by my experience of doing the drawings, but not necessarily be directly related to any one drawing.

I feel that drawing in the landscape is such a crucial part of a landscape artist’s practice. It provides the source material which the paintings come from. In my work I want to communicate my emotional response to the landscapes which are significant and meaningful to me, and I find it’s so helpful to have gotten to know those landscapes in different seasons and different weather. To my mind drawing is one of the best ways of getting to know those places at a deeper level.

Practical Advice

My advice to artists (which I don’t always manage to follow myself!) is to make sure you have your sketching bag packed and ready wherever you might be – including water to draw with and a range of sketchbooks as I’ve mentioned. I find a rucksack the most practical way of carrying everything I need, plus a very useful bit of kit is a little folding seat pad (from camping shops.) I like to sit on the ground when I’m drawing as I can have all my media around me and I feel more in touch with the landscape. The seat pad means I can sit comfortably on wet grass or sharp rocks. Bulldog clips are handy to hold down the pages of a sketchbook in windy weather.

I find it useful to label sketchbooks with the relevant places and dates. Where possible I try to keep the drawings for one place – for example Pembrokeshire or St Ives – in the same sketchbook, so I can review a range of drawings from the same place together.

Materials Used

Sketchbooks

Moleskine Sketchbooks

Fabriano Classic Artist’s Journal

Royal Talens 140g/m2 Sketchbook

Stillman & Birn Mixed Media Sketchbook

Hand Book Journal Company Drawing Journal

Seawhite Travel Journals

Water-soluble Materials

Daler-Rowney Aquafine Watercolour Tubes

Seawhite Artists Gouache – White

Derwent XL Inktense Water-soluble Blocks

Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink

Daler Rowney Acrylic Ink

Mijello Watertight Folding Plastic Palette

Pro Arte Polar Brush

Monochrome Media

Coates Willow Charcoal

Jakar Compressed Charcoal (Black and Greyscale)

Derwent Water-soluble Sketching Pencil

Artgraf Tailor’s Chalk Pigment Blocks

Papermate Non-stop Propelling Pencil

About Louise Balaam

Louise Balaam is a member of the New English Art Club and of the Royal West of England Academy, and has a degree and a Masters in Fine Art. She has work in many private collections and has shown in the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Threadneedle Prize, the Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize, and the Discerning Eye exhibition. She is represented by Cricket Fine Art in Chelsea, London and other galleries. With the New School of Art she tutors workshops in Lewes, Sussex as well as producing online teaching content.

Follow Louise on Instagram

Visit Louise’s website

Further Reading

How to Resolve a Landscape Painting Composition

Inside the Sketchbook of Evie Hatch

Louise Balaam: Painting With an Earth Palette

Inside the Sketchbook of Ann Witheridge

Shop Sketchbooks on jacksonsart.com

The post Inside the Sketchbook of Louise Balaam appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is perhaps the most well-known artist of the 19th century and his bold colour palette is instantly recognisable. Some colours he used are still staples in artist palettes today, however others have fallen out of use due to their toxity or impermanence. This article looks at three obsolete pigments in Van Gogh’s colour palette, and creates three palettes around their modern alternatives.

Van Gogh and the Post-Impressionist Palette

Vincent van Gogh only began painting in earnest during the last decade of his life. It was in Arles, in the south of France, between 1888 and 1889 that some of his most brilliant paintings were produced. In the orchards, wheat fields, and cypress trees of Arles, he found rich subjects through which he could explore light, colour, and form. Alongside Cezanne and Gauguin, Van Gogh is considered to be one of the foundational artists of Post-Impressionism, a movement that both built upon and broke away from the work of the Impressionists. Van Gogh’s colour palette is characteristic of the Post-Impressionists: his colour choices were informed by the natural world, but he was also concerned with the symbolism and emotional power of colour. These ideas were accompanied by exciting developments in artist colour taking place in the 19th century. Vibrant new pigments like Cobalt Blue, Viridian, and Cadmium Yellow, were introduced in quick succession, providing artists with more chromatic possibilities.

Madame Roulin and Her Baby, 1888
Vincent Van Gogh
Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 50.8 cm | 25 × 20 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Van Gogh’s Colour Palette

Van Gogh’s choices of pigments have been well-studied through his surviving letters and through pigment analysis of his paintings. Some of the pigments that Van Gogh used are still commonly used today:

• French Ultramarine Blue (PB29) – A synthetic version of a historical mineral pigment made from lapis lazuli. French Ultramarine Blue had been invented in the 1820s and was an immediate success. It continues to be one of the most widely used artist pigments today.
• Cobalt Blue (PB28) – another relatively new pigment at the time. It is slightly more green and more opaque than Ultramarine Blue, and it was used by many of the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists.
• Prussian Blue (PB27) – A dark greenish blue invented in the 18th century. Much deeper and darker than any other blue pigments available at the time, and very useful for getting the darkest values.

 

Three blues used by Vincent van Gogh: Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, and Prussian Blue. All three blue pigments were used in his famous painting Starry Night (1889)

 

• Viridian (PG18) – a blue-green pigment loved by the Impressionists. Instead of mixing natural greens, Van Gogh often applied Viridian and other bright green pigments directly, giving the landscape a hyper-vibrant vitality.
• Cadmium Yellow (PY35) – Cadmium Yellow was very new when Van Gogh painted with it. He used a early, cheap version of the pigment that slowly degraded in contact with oxygen. However, the forms of Cadmium pigments used in artist paints today are very lightfast and are no longer a concern.
• Earth Pigments (Pbr7, PR102, PY43) – Like most artists working during any time period, Van Gogh used a variety of earth pigments including red and yellow ochres and brown siennas and umbers. They were inexpensive and extremely lightfast and permanent.

Pigments that Van Gogh used, all oil colours.
From top: Ultramarine Blue (PB29), Cobalt Blue (PB28), Prussian Blue (PB27), Viridian (PG18), Cadmium Yellow (PY35), Yellow Ochre (PY43), Burnt Umber (PBr7)

Other pigments in Van Gogh’s colour palette are no longer in use due to their impermanent nature or toxicity:
 

Red Lead

First used in China as far back as 300 BC, Read Lead could be produced by grinding the mineral minium, or synthetically by roasting lead white pigment. It was a bright, opaque red that was actually closer to orange than red. Red Lead was an extremely toxic pigment, but it was used during a time when many pigments were potentially harmful so this fact didn’t stop artists from using it. What did put artists off was Red Lead’s impermenance- it can degrade in many different ways depending on the environmental conditions. In some cases it turns black, and in others it turns white. This makes it hard for conservators to detect, because chemical analysis does not easily distinguish between degraded Red Lead and Lead White pigment.

Cadmium Red Light (PR108) seems like a natural modern replacement of Red Lead because it hovers between red and orange, and also shares Red Lead’s high opacity. Van Gogh died around 30 years before the introduction of Cadmium Red, but if this pigment had been available during his lifetime he certainly would have loved using it. However, a more modern pigment could make an even better replacement. Benzymidazolone Orange (PO36) is one pigment in a large family of Benzymidazolone pigments that were introduced in the 1960s and 70s. Like Red Lead, it is technically an orange pigment, but it is so close to red (especially when used straight from the tube) that it can play the role of both. In the following palette I’ve mixed it with Prussian Blue, Viridian, two varieties of Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, and Zinc White:

Langridge Azo Orange Oil Paint (PO36) across bottom row. Incrementally mixed with (from left to right): Prussian Blue (PB27), Viridian (PG18), Cadmium Yellow Lemon (PY35), Cadmium Yellow Medium (PY35), Yellow Ochre (PY43), Zinc White (PW4)

The mixtures with Zinc White reveal Benzymidazolone Orange’s extremely warm undertone, and it proves itself to be a perfect companion to the Cadmium Yellows. It needs just a touch of yellow to make some beautifully rich oranges that seem characteristic of Van Gogh’s colour palette.

Geranium Lake

Geranium Lake was a favourite pigment of Van Gogh’s. It is a red lake pigment derived from eosin, a fluorescent red dye, and like other historical lake pigments it has very poor lightfastness and rapidly fades to grey. As a result, many areas in Van Gogh’s work have lost their chroma. A dramatic example of this is in Irises. The flowers were originally set against a pink background, but it has faded to white.

Irises, 1890
Vincent Van Gogh
Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm | 29 x 36.3 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It’s hard not to turn to the Quinacridone family of pigments when looking for a lightfast replacement for historic red lake pigments. Their transparency makes them perfect for glazing techniques, a role which the red lakes have historically played. Any of the Quinacridone pigments would have been at home in Van Gogh’s palette. Quinacridone Magenta (PR122) and even the redder varieties of Quinacridone Violet (PV19) lean too far towards blue to be an accurate replacement for Geranium Lake, but Quinacridone Red (PR209) would make a good match and it is one of the pigments used to make Geranium Lake hues.

For the following palette, however, I wanted to try something a bit different. Napthol Red (PR122) is a synthetic organic monoazo pigment that is primarily used for plastics and cosmetics. In artist paints it is a bright red that can have either pink or yellow undertones. For the following palette I used one that has a distinctly pink undertone, so it would be naturally suited to making the purples and violets that have faded in Van Gogh’s work. In masstone, Napthol Red is very similar to the Benzymidazolone Orange in the previous palette, but in the mixture with Zinc White you can see how pink it actually is. I also combined it with Cadmium Yellow Deep, Viridian, Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue, and Ultramarine Blue:

Williamsburg Fanchon Red Oil Paint (PR112) across bottom row. Incrementally mixed with (from left to right): Zinc White (PW4), Cadmium Yellow Deep (PY35), Viridian (PG18), Prussian Blue (PB27), Cobalt Blue (PB28), Ultramarine Blue (PB29

The darkness of the full-strength mixtures of Napthol Red and Ultramarine Blue make it difficult to see, but they make some brilliant purples that become clear in tints with Zinc White:

From top: Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Napthol Red (PR112) plus Zinc White (PW4)
Ultramarine Blue (PB29), Napthol Red (PR122), and a touch of Emerald Green (PY3, PW6, PW4, PG7) plus Zinc White (PW4)
Napthol Red (PR112) plus Zinc White (PW4)

Emerald Green

Emerald Green was an extremely poisonous, but vibrant, blue-green pigment that was extremely popular in the 19th century. A key ingredient in Emerald Green was arsenic and it earned a deadly reputation, especially when the pigment was used in domestic interiors. For artists, Emerald Green’s brilliance and opacity made it a valuable pigment- it is easy to see why Van Gogh liked using it

L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux, 1888-1889
Vincent Van Gogh
Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 73.7 cm | 36 × 29 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Genuine Emerald Green was phased out of the artist palette from the beginning of the 20th century when the dangers of using it became well-known. It is no longer available to artists today, and there aren’t any modern single-pigments that really fill the gap it left. Perhaps the closest is certain varieties of Cobalt Green (PG50), like this one from Michael Harding, but the tinting strength of Cobalt Green is relatively low. Instead, I’ve used a mixed-pigment Emerald Green hue. There are quite a few of these in oil, acrylic, and watercolour ranges, and each one uses a different blend of modern pigments to recreate the original colour. Here I’ve mixed the Jackson’s Emerald Green Hue Professional Oil Paint with Zinc White, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Raw Umber, Prussian Blue, and Viridian:

Jackson’s Emerald Green Oil Paint (PY3, PW6, PW4, PG7) across bottom row. Incrementally mixed with (from left to right): Zinc White (PW4), Cadmium Yellow Lemon (PY35), Cadmium Orange (PO20), Raw Umber (PBr7), Prussian Blue (PB27), Viridian (PG18)

Usually, I would prefer to use a single-pigment colour as a modern replacement for a historical colour, but this mixed pigment works quite well. It is quite a dominating colour, and makes some lovely acidic greens when mixed with Cadmium Lemon Yellow, as well as an enigmatic warm brown when combined with Cadmium Orange. It has a kind of punchy, ‘synthetic’ quality that will not be useful for all artists, but which feels very much in the spirit of the Post-Impressionist colour palette.

Further Reading

Tips for Setting Up an Oil Painting Palette

Pigment Stories: Viridian Green

Recreating Rembrandt’s Colour Palette With Modern Pigments

The Relationship Between the Artist and Their Materials

Shop Colour on jacksonsart.com

The post Recreating Van Gogh’s Colour Palette with Modern Pigments appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Stefanie Trow is an artist living and working in Manchester, who works in a variety of different sized sketchbooks, with up to five on the go at any one time. Here, she discusses how experimenting with materials, and making a daily habit of her sketchbook practice, helps to uncover new ideas for her paintings.

Stefanie Trow Takes Us Through Her Sketchbook Practice

I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to sketchbooks, I have about five on the go now, all small, each with different coloured covers. I know what is in each of them, but I’m not logical with my sketchbooks. I jump around from different sketchbook to sketchbook; mostly whichever one is at hand. I have tried to be methodical in the past, but it does not suit my personality or style. I try not to impose any rules in my sketchbooks, using them as an ideas bank, where anything goes. When I’m starting a new collection of paintings, I will look back at my most recent sketches, to see if there is a theme developing or similarity with what observations have drawn me in, which I can use to move my work forward.

I have several distinct size sketchbooks on the go, but in general they’re small and I tend to use the same size Royal Talens Art Creation Hardback 12 x 12 cm Sketchbook, because it’s very portable. This is particularly important to me as I use my sketchbooks daily, so they need to be with me all the time. They are the first place I go to to draw out an idea or capture a moment of my day that would make a great subject for a painting, so I always need them at hand. They must be small enough to pop in my day bag, my suitcase on holidays, holding them whilst going for a walk, or sit in the sun (not that often of late in Manchester).

The sketchbooks that I use have thick gsm pages, which allows me to use a variety of mixed mediums, especially paints. I use my sketchbooks as a testing ground for mixing different mediums. My art is very process driven and experimenting with different mediums is key. This is where my sketchbook comes into its own, as it is a place that is not often seen by other people, and there’s not really expectation from myself on what need to be produced or how a final piece should work out. It is a place to experiment, play, and be free with mediums, marks, and compositions. When I work in them, I try to think of them as diary entries, little notes to myself that are not going to be seen by anyone else. Some pages you will find filled with little notes, quotes or song lyrics that have caught my attention, which all feed into my work.

When I’m out with my sketchbook its mostly pen and pencil that I use, as they’re easy to carry in a pencil case whilst I’m on the move. When I’m back at the studio, I sometimes work over these quick sketches or enlarge them onto separate pieces of paper to then experiment with different medium such as inks, acrylic, pastels, pencil, charcoal, and collage.

I love to use inks now for their free-flowing nature. I like to think of inks as acting like a memory, blooming, seeping and morphing past its intended edges and taking on a life of its own. Working in ink I have found they act like a springboard into my imagination, like a Rorschach test, where I interpret the inkblots, looking for clues or suggestions of where to take the work next. I do not like predictability in my work, and working with varied materials takes away an element of control which I embrace. I work with collage in a comparable way, cutting and completely reassembling the image is sometimes the way forward, so the image does not become too contrived and encourages spontaneity.

I refer to my sketchbooks daily and they have become a habit in my practice now. In the past I worked just from photographs, but I felt constraint working this way, getting bogged down in details, ending up trying to replicate the photograph. By using drawings as a reference for my paintings, it has opened a wide range of compositions and ideas.

I see my sketchbook work as an idea catcher, a record of a moment, and a way to test different mediums. From my sketchbook pages, I select the ideas which resonate with me, ones I have a deep emotional connection too and that I think would work as a larger painting. I make second sketches on larger pieces of paper, working out the final composition and these second sketches often become the blueprint for larger paintings on canvas.

Sketchbooks allow me to be creative with my compositions and my mark making, which then translates into my paintings. Without my sketchbooks I do not feel like my painting practice would have grown like it has. And without these fleeting glimpses sketched out so quickly in my sketchbooks, I would not have a bank of ideas to then move forward with. So really drawing is crucial to my practice, even though it might not be the result you see in my final exhibited works. Drawing has become meditative, and drawing from life, photographs, memory, stills from films and archival images draws my focus into the essence of the everyday.

My advice to other artists would be to get a sketchbook you do not feel precious about, do not splash out on one with fancy crisp white paper, you will become scared to work in it and you will want all your drawings to be perfect, and that’s definitely not what a sketchbook is for. It was Maggi Hambling that said drawing to her is like a pianist doing the scales, and that is how I treat drawing in my sketchbooks. Use your sketchbooks as a warmup, which means it is not going to be perfect and do not expect it to be.

Do not be afraid to get messy and try out different mediums and ideas that seem a bit off the scale or out of keeping with your normal work. You never know where these experiments might lead you. Get a sketchbook that is portable, again, if its too big, you just will not take it anywhere or use it. Remember it is important to keep your drawing and ideas flowing into your sketchbook.

Reflect on your sketchbook weekly or monthly and see if you can see any recurring themes in your mark making, narratives or colour. There might be something in your most recent drawings that needs exploring further. Or the next step in your work may just looking back at you, but you might not have become aware of it yet.

Materials Used

Royal Talens Art Creation Hardback 12 x 12 cm Sketchbook in Red

Royal Talens Art Creation Hardback 12 x 12 cm Sketchbook in White

Royal Talens Art Creation Hardback 12 x 12 cm Sketchbook in Black

Pencils

Acrylic Ink

Acrylic Paint

Charcoal

Collage

Pastels

About Stefanie Trow

I am a British painter, born 1982 in South Yorkshire, UK. After graduating from Salford University in 2004 with a degree in Visual Arts, I now live and work in Manchester, UK with my wife and two children.

Driven by a fascination of the natural world and human experience, I explore these themes through the act and process of painting. Often using my own connections with the landscape and my immediate surroundings, I seek out moments where nature meets human activity, creating paintings which are often large, textural works in Kodachrome tones. Drawing from theories and the visual language of magical realism, Les Nabis and abstract expressionism, I elevate colour over detail and embrace thick impasto brushstrokes balanced alongside delicate washes of colour.

Recent exhibition highlights include public solo show Walk with You at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, and past solo shows at Comme Ca Art, Dez Rez Projects, and Cass Art, Manchester. I have exhibited in two person shows at Albemarle Gallery, London, and selected in group shows at Saul Hay Gallery and Contemporary Six (Manchester).

Most recently I have been longlisted for the Jackson Art Prize, ING Discerning Eye Exhibition, and elected as an associate member of MAFA. In 2021 I was selected to participate in STUDIOBOOK by Mark Devereux Projects.

Visit Stefanie’s website

Follow Stefanie on Instagram

Further Reading

Inside the Sketchbook of Louise Reynolds

How to Prepare for Your First Life Drawing Class

Review of Jackson’s Indian Ink

Three Plein Air Artists Test Jackson’s Professional Oil Paints

Shop Sketchbooks on jacksonsart.com

The post Inside the Sketchbook of Stefanie Trow appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker, known as one of the last Old Masters, and the first of the Modern painters. Goya’s unique position in art history is exhibited through his life works. His early art, as a court painter, is typical of the style of old master painting, characterised by the realistic representation of proportion and perspective. However, his later works plunge into the freedom of modern art, with what was later known as Romanticism. This article will examine how the palette of Francisco Goya evolved, his use of colour in his artworks, as well as how he treated colour as a vehicle of expression and symbolism.

The Painter Francisco de Goya, 1827
Vicente López y Potaña
Oil on canvas, 95 x 78 cm | 37.4 x 30.7 in
Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Colour Palette of Francisco de Goya

The portrait above, Francisco de Goya by Vicente López y Potaña, displays how Goya arranged his palette. Frédéric Schmid in his The Practice of Painting (1948) listed these colours from left to right: Vermillion, Lead White, Yellow Ochre, Brown Ochre, Light Red, Burnt Sienna, Bone Black, Lamp Black, Ivory Black, and Peach Black. After a pigment analysis of a few of Goya’s paintings, the paints discovered differed to Schmid’s theory. Here’s a list of the colours that were noted: Vermillion, White Lead, Yellow Ochre, Transparent Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Rose Madder, Prussian Blue, Bone Black, and Charcoal Black.

Lead White was a very important part of Goya’s palette. He ground it himself, and used it as a canvas primer, and as a primary colour in his paintings. In 1793 (aged 46 and in the prime of his career as a court painter) he suffered with an undiagnosed illness which resulted in him losing his hearing. It is possible that Goya had cumulative lead poisoning because of how much he used this paint.

Charles IV of Spain and His Family, 1800-01
Francisco de Goya
Oil on canvas, 280 x 226 cm | 110.2 x 88.9 in
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Colour Palette One:

Charles IV of Spain and His Family

In 1786 Goya was appointed painter to King Charles III, and, in 1789, he was promoted to court painter under the new king, Charles IV until 1801.

Charles IV of Spain and His Family is quite bright and airy with an abundance of earthy colours, interrupted by bursts of red and blue that draw the viewer’s eye around the painting. For this colour palette I’ve focused on the brighter colours as these are the ones that stand out of this painting, which can be recreated by using Cadmium Red, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, and Yellow Ochre.

Many modern interpretations of this painting argue that the painting is satirical. The main reason for this is because Queen Maria Luisa, Charles IV’s wife, is placed in the centre of the painting as a symbol that she held all the real power behind matters of state. However, this was a pretty standard composition in European family portraits. Moreover, the composition itself is also equal as the blue sashes and large accents of red draw the eye in a circle around the canvas. Significantly, Charles IV is also placed in between the two paintings in the background of the work against an earth-green wall, thus making his face stand out more than the others.

Colour Palette One: Oil Paint on Cotton Canvas Pad.
From top, left to right:
Cadmium Red and Yellow Ochre, plus Cobalt Blue
Yellow Ochre and Green Earth
Cobalt Blue and Green Earth, plus Titanium White
Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, and Titanium White

Romanticism

Romanticism is an intellectual and artistic movement that began in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism emphasises a rejection of the classical rules, and instead favoured the gothic style and a focus on emotions, feelings and mood. Particularly in art, the Romantic style was seen as more impulsive and rebellious, compared to the considered and almost stoic and impassive nature of classical painting. In terms of artistic technique, Romanticism rejected the thin, fluid mark makings of the Old Masters, and championed rougher and impasto mark makings (large and thick amounts of paint). Many of Goya’s paintings are thought of as an exemplar of romantic painting, particularly in his artwork The Third of May 1808.

The Third of May 1808, 1814
Francisco de Goya
Oil on canvas, 268 cm x 347 cm | 105.5 x 136.6 in
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Colour Palette Two:

The Third of May 1808

The Third of May 1808 depicts an event during the Peninsular War between France and Spain. It was created alongside the companion work The Second of May 1808, which displays the moment in which Spanish citizens rebelled against the news of their new French ruler, Joseph Bonaparte. The Third of May 1808 shows Spanish civilians being executed by French soldiers as a reprisal for the attack the previous day. The Peninsular War lasted until 1814 when Napoleon was defeated, and these artworks were commissioned shortly after. It is also noteworthy that this was the first emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare.

Colour Palette Two: Oil Paint on Cotton Canvas Pad.
From top, left to right:
Pure Cadmium Red Hue
Raw Sienna and Ivory Black, plus Titanium White
Burnt Sienna and Lamp Black, plus Titanium White
Raw Umber, Green Earth, and Titanium White
Burnt Umber, Ivory Black, and Titanium White

In this colour palette I’ve focused on the abundant browns and beige colours in The Third of May 1808. These colours can be recreated using natural brown iron oxides, namely, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, and Burnt Umber, mixed with Titanium White (in replacement of Lead White), Ivory Black and Green Earth. Other than these colours there seem to be only three other colours visible, red, yellow and green.

In The Third of May 1808 Goya uses brown and beige tones as a backdrop to the painting, allowing red, white and yellows to appear brighter. Due to this, every element of the painting draws your eye to the Spaniards, and away from the faceless French soldiers in the shadows. Equally, the Baroque-style use of a lantern in the centre of the canvas aids this as it illuminates the Spanish civilians. It is also argued that this beaming Lead White light is a symbol of the Enlightenment.

This painting has been described by various art historians as a symbol of martyrdom due to the central figure who stands with outstretched arms, which resembles Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. This theory is further embellished by the bright red stigmata on the central figure’s hands and the outline of a church on the horizon. The clothing of the figure also leans into this idea, as the brilliant white top and yellow trousers are the heraldic colours of papacy. Overall, Goya’s use of the natural brown iron oxides to create chiaroscuro enlivens the red, white and yellow colours. This displays the important role that the colours play in order to present the symbols of martyrdom to the viewer.

Colour Palette Three:

Goya’s Black Paintings

In 1810-20 Goya made a series of 82 etchings named The Disasters of War. Art historians argue today that Goya’s pessimistic view on humanity from seeing the war, transformed into these embittered and violent thoughts. These ideas are emphasised in ‘The Black Paintings’ he made in 1820-3, in which he frantically painted 14 disturbing images directly onto the walls of his home. Equally, the amount of lead white he had been exposing himself to over his long career, could have been causing hallucinations.

Saturn Devouring One of His Children, 1820-3
Francisco de Goya
Wall-painting in oil transferred to canvas, 146 x 83 cm | 57.4 x 32.6 in
Museo del Prado, Madrid

For this palette I have focused on Goya’s use of colour during the making of ‘The Black Paintings’ which he painted in little more than red, white and black. I thought it would be interesting to do a black palette so we can see the comparison between the different blacks, or synthetic versions, of them that Goya used. For this palette I’ve used Ivory Black, Lamp Black, and Mars Black, mixed with some Titanium White (in place of Lead White), Cadmium Red Deep Genuine (in place of Vermillion), and Green Earth. I was really excited to make this palette because I think a lot of people think of black pigments as being one in the same, but mixing each of them with other colours shows off the different tones and depths that each one has.

Colour Palette Three: Oil Paint on Cotton Canvas Pad.
From top, left to right:
Ivory Black and Titanium White
Lamp Black and Titanium White
Mars Black, Cadmium Red Deep and Titanium White
Mars Black, Cadmium Red Deep, Titanium White, and Green Earth

Further Reading

Recreating Rembrandt’s Colour Palette With Modern Pigments

Robbie Bushe’s Imagined Landscapes

Colour Mixing Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Palette

Recreating the Colour Palette of Helen Frankenthaler

Shop Oil Paint on jacksonsart.com

The post Recreating the Colour Palette of Francisco de Goya appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Rosie Phillips won the Animal Award in the Jackson’s Painting Prize this year with her work Babs. In this interview, she discusses her process for getting started with an oil painting, how she captures fleeting moments, and why animals are an overlooked artistic subject.

Above image: Rosie Phillips in her studio in Norwich, May 2023

Babs
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm | 24 x 24 in

Artist Interview with Rosie Phillips

Josephine: Could you tell us about your artistic background? How did you become an artist?

Rosie: I have been creating from a really young age, pretty much as soon as I was physically able to. I vaguely remember scribbling away on this big plastic fisher price easel/drawing board at home, so that gives you an idea! Drawing and painting is my favourite way to process my experiences and ideas.

I used to have to go to this after school club because my parents would be working, and I would literally just spend all of my time there at the art table. I did get told off in lessons for drawing and reading, so much so that my teachers actually let me get on with it in the end. My parents aren’t particularly arty, but they always encouraged me and kept me stocked with pencils and paper, which is all I really needed to keep myself busy. Competitions were a great way for me to come up with new ideas, I liked having brainstorming sessions with my grandad about colouring designs, drawing techniques, things like that. At 12 I won a competition to produce the cover of a local arts magazine, at 13 it was illustrations for a YA novel, at 15 I took part in my first group exhibition at Holt Hall, Norfolk, with a handful of sketchbook drawings and paintings. I was lucky to grow up in Norfolk around such a great art scene – people were always telling me about opportunities they’d heard about.

When I was around 16, I ended up meeting incredible local artist and BP Portrait Award finalist Paul P Smith, who has been a phenomenal technical mentor and friend. At this time I was also completing an A-level in art at Paston College, where I was challenged to think critically about my practice and experiment in new ways. One of my favourite nuggets of wisdom, given by my tutor, Matt, is to “let paint be paint”.

I haven’t been to anything like an atelier, art school or university, which is why I have referred to myself as self taught, but I feel like this term can mean different things depending on who you ask. All this being said, the ‘becoming an artist’ pipeline has always felt quite blurred, and there’s a lot of growing I plan to do.

Rosie’s studio

Josephine: What is your process for starting a painting, and is it always the same approach?

Rosie: The ideas for my paintings tend to stem from time spent with my friends and family. Moments will just sort of present themselves; I’ll notice the way that someone is draped onto a sofa, or a chance photoshoot with my friends before a night out will result in some interesting compositions for me to tackle. For Babs’ portrait, we were just hanging out after a long walk and she was staring up at me from the sofa while I got on with some little jobs – she is the most inquisitive dog ever and she’s always shooting me these little knowing looks. I like the mystery surrounding body language in paintings, especially in animals, and I enjoy exploring materiality to distort the context further in my own work. She was sitting so still that I ended up rushing to set up my easel in front of her and got straight to work, which turned into a 4 hour session! This sort of scenario works best because I’m acutely aware of how precious each second is and will get really into the zone.

Sometimes there will be more planning involved, for example I have recently been exploring my love of live performance, so I have been actively out and about with my sketchbook looking for these moments of visual tension and storytelling. I’ll usually produce a series of drawings and thumbnails to decide what works, then some small colour studies to get a sense of harmony. Though most of the time I will get impatient and excited and end up throwing myself straight into the painting, solving the problems as they appear. I think a bit of that is healthy because it keeps me engaged and selective throughout the process. In terms of actually painting, I will use charcoal to sketch out big shapes, then go in again with some soft graphite for more detail, and then start blocking in large planes of colour and tone. Though with Babs I think I actually prioritised the details in her face because I really wanted to nail that glance – it really depends how much time I have to work with.

A painting in progress

Josephine: Something that makes Babs so compelling is the balance between detail and restraint. How do you know when to hold back?

Rosie: I think in this sense I was lucky to be working against the clock – I was scrutinising the painting in detail as I worked so that I could make every mark count and only convey the areas that I was initially drawn to. I have also become much less set on representing everything ‘accurately’ – my ultimate goal is to create a fresh and interesting image. I’ve grown comfortable with experimenting, tweaking, adding things and taking them away to achieve an overall sense of balance, letting my marks breathe. I’ve come to learn that erasing is just as much a part of the process as adding a bunch of layers, it keeps things from feeling muddy. Plus it’s fun to loosen up and explore the tools that I am working with – I really enjoyed working in the swirls of hair along Babs’ back and legs with an old, fractured brush. I also try to not get caught up in chasing changes that happen naturally during a live sitting, like lighting and posture – I really like that areas of the painting feel dynamic, for example, her irregular front legs. It reflects the passing of time that has occurred.

Babs sitting for her portrait

Josephine: Do you always work from life, or photographs too? Which do you prefer?

Rosie: Both. I rely on photographs a lot to achieve different things, but I absolutely love to work from life and will do so whenever I get the chance. Processing a 3D environment gives me a lot to chew on; I find myself less inclined to slavishly represent everything, and, in comparison, I find that paintings end up with a noticeable vitality and sense of atmosphere.
That being said, when I’m trying to convey fleeting moments over the course of months, or a specific composition, photographs can be an absolute life saver to work from. With a couple of exceptions, I always use photos that I have taken myself and so am able to retain a lot of creative control. There are a lot of random photoshoots on my camera roll where I’ve been hanging out with someone and have suddenly felt compelled to make a painting – it’s such a great way to record a lot of information in a short time.

July, 2023
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 127 cm | 40 x 50 in

Josephine: What is your favoured surface on which to paint, and which paints do you like to work with?

Rosie: I have pretty much always painted on primed, pre-stretched canvas (usually Winsor and Newton or Jackson’s own brand) as I enjoy working with a noticeable surface texture. The Jackson’s painting prize afforded me the opportunity to invest in some equipment to start stretching my own surfaces, and more recently I’ve been trying out Belle Art oil primed fine linen – it’s a lot tougher and I’ve been enjoying finding new ways to work with it. Oil paints that I use include Michael Harding, Gamblin, Winsor and Newton, and Jackson’s. I’m starting to experiment a lot more with mediums, but have tended to gravitate between linseed oil and Liquin in recent years

Brushes in Rosie’s studio

Josephine: Which historical or contemporary artists have influenced you the most?

Rosie: I’m inspired by a huge range of contemporary artists and creatives. Lisa Brice, Rachel Jones and Noah Saterstrom are among my strongest influences right now. If I’m looking at historical artists, I really admire Velasquez and John Singer Sergeant for their confidently loose marks and tonal range, and Ingres for his striking compositions. I adore Art nouveau and Vienna secessionist art for this too. Gustav Klimt’s paintings are magical – I was surprised to learn that he would actually paint his figures in full before obscuring them with pattern and colour.

Josephine: Are there any unconventional or experimental techniques you’ve tried that have become part of your practice?

Rosie: I’m not sure if it would be considered majorly unconventional, but as a result of playing around with various techniques I’ve started to incorporate the sketching and planning process into my paintings, as opposed to treating it as something that happens ‘behind the scenes’ of a painting. I really enjoy using soft graphite to mark and outline my work, then applying medium, or working more paint into the lines to achieve a smoky effect. I also like to embrace the ‘underpainting’ stage by applying thin layers of paint to a rough surface texture, to contrast with highly rendered areas.

Pause, 2023
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 50.8 cm | 20 x 20 in

Josephine: How do you deal with artist’s block or moments of creative stagnation during the painting process?

Rosie: I try to keep my hands busy no matter what, and I’ll allow myself to make some really bad stuff. It can be helpful to step away and spend time doing other things I enjoy, but I will still usually bring my sketchbook everywhere to scribble in and practice different approaches to a problem I’m working on. I use it as a tool rather than display – I find that this takes the pressure off. Podcasts are also really great to have on while I paint, if I’m feeling stuck in my own work then it can be helpful to listen to a creative pep talk or learn about something, especially if it’s art history related (I’m always recommending the show ArtHoles, it is SO funny, sometimes tearjerking, and packed with unusual little nuggets of trivia).

Unsaid Things, 2023
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 30.48 x 40.64 cm | 12×16 in

Josephine: As the Animal Award winner, what do you hope to convey in a portrait of an animal?

Rosie: Anyone that spends time in the company of animals knows that they are interesting, intelligent, and complex; I believe that this should be respected. Throughout history, their sentience seems to have been disregarded, we only really see them represented as accessories, working tools, entertainment, food. I try to bring about an unspoken connection between the animals that I paint and the viewer, through capturing a gaze, or the way that they engage with the space and people around them, for example – the kinds of things that are typically reserved for human representation in art and culture.

Flo, 2023
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 40.64 x 50.8 cm | 16 x 20 in

Josephine: How was your experience taking part in Jackson’s Painting Prize’s first independent large-scale exhibition at Bankside Gallery?

Rosie: What an incredible space! It was absolutely bonkers to have my work up at Bankside – I remember going to shows there as a teenager to see the work of some truly incredible artists, so to be showing there myself, in the heart of London, literally a stone’s throw from the Tate Modern, was unbelievable. The process from start to finish was seamless. I got to meet and chat to so many fantastic artists as a direct result of the exhibition, some of who’s work I’ve admired for years, as well as the Jackson’s team and a whole community of art lovers who have all been so lovely and enthusiastic. I can’t thank everyone involved enough. I feel so privileged to have been a part of this new development in the painting prize, and look forward to seeing it flourish in coming years.

Chien d’amour, 2023
Rosie Phillips
Oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm | 19.69 x 27.60 in

Josephine: How do you know when a painting is finished?

Rosie: Rarely, ha! I don’t think I’ve ever reached a point with a project where I’ve not had to pry myself away – that usually happens a number of months later when I’ve moved on to new projects, or once something has been posted online or exhibited. At points during the process I will have a cup of tea and a good long stare, and compile a to-do list of things that bother me. When it gets to the point where nothing is jumping out at me and I feel satisfied, I will usually call it. I seem to have a habit of pulling all-nighters when I can sense that I’m close to finishing a painting, I’ll just get so sucked in, telling myself “just another 20 minutes, I’ll just tweak this bit”, and before I know it it’s 6am the next day (I wish I was exaggerating here).

Follow Rosie on Instagram

Visit Rosie’s Website

Rosie at her duo exhibition, Fairhurst Gallery, Norwich, October 2023

Further Reading

A Guide to Oil Painting Mediums

Portrait Painting on Jackson’s Aluminium Panels

Tips for Setting Up an Oil Painting Palette

Choosing the Right Canvas for Your Painting

Shop Oil Painting on jacksonsart.com

The post Rosie Phillips: Connecting Through Portraiture appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Li Ning won the Still Life Award in the Jackson’s Painting Prize this year with his work A Room Of One’s Own. In this interview, he discusses making his own oil medium, connecting spiritually with his audience through evoking memories, and the difference between creative stagnation and a creative barrier.

Above image: Li Ning in his studio

A Room Of One’s Own, 2019
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm | 27.5 x 19.6 in

Artist Interview with Li Ning

Josephine: Could you tell us about your artistic background? How did you become an artist?

Li: I was born in a family of artists; the elements of art fulfilled my childhood. I travelled around the world to see masterpieces since I was very young. Among all forms of art, painting touched me the most. When I stood in front of the works of great painters such as Titian and Rembrandt, those portraits, myths, and allegories revealed to me how divine and powerful art can be. Those silent masterpieces contain another dimension of time and manifest that painting is the most internal form of art which affects people in a most consistent and subtle way. This divine quality of painting rooted deeply in my heart and directly influenced my understanding of art.

About my education background, I studied at Nanjing University of the Arts majoring in painting, tutored by Chinese leading contemporary painter Mao Yan. Then I studied at Royal College of Art majoring in painting, tutored by Emma Talbot. After graduation, I completely devoted myself to my painting practice.

Party, 2019
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm | 39.3 x 31.4 in

Josephine: What is your process for starting a painting, and is it always the same approach?

Li: I do spend a lot of time exploring differences of each colour, with regards to their drying speed, stability, transparency etc. I prefer a grey tone rather than a bright colourful tone. Among red colours, I prefer venetian red, burnt sienna, madder lake. Among blue colours, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, and ultramarine blue are my favourite. Among yellow colours, I prefer to use Naples yellow, yellow ochre, raw sienna. Beside those, raw umber and burnt umber are my favourite brown colours. After accurately mixing, these colours produce a beautiful and calm effect.

Hidden Path Of Puppet, 2021
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 50 x 35 cm | 19.6 x 31.7 in

Josephine: What materials or tools could you not live without? Do you use anything unconventional?

Li: I believe that to produce a good work, all the relevant materials are essential. Every material has its implacable function. I do have preferences when choosing materials. For example, I favour nylon long-round head brushes, as they give delicate touch to the canvas and are able to produce beautiful details. If there is anything unconventional, I do make my own oil medium. After lots of experimentation, I find the balance of colour fluency and density by a particular proportion of several ingredients. With the oil medium, my works stay a flexible effect even after many layers of paint.

Puppet Drama, 2019
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 120 x 60 cm | 47.2 x 23.6 in

Josephine: Your artist statement says your work contains ‘another dimension of time and become[s] abodes for spirits to live on’. Is there an otherworldly concept behind A Room of One’s Own? What is the context behind the scene you depict, and what do you hope the viewer takes away from it?

Li: Those words are actually my description of masterpieces in painting history and how their works touched me deeply. The Renaissance painters taught me that figurative paintings can transmit psychological, imaginary and spiritual meanings, even become riddles and allegories. In the painting ‘A Room of One’s Own’, I aimed to show that a still life painting is able to transcend its physical form to give a spiritual impression to the audiences regarding the subject of time and intimacy.

Stranger, 2019
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm | 39.3 x 31.4 in

Josephine: Is portraying a sense of familiarity/nostalgia and evoking memory an important element within your work?

Li: Viewers naturally have emotional connections with paintings. Because of different life experiences, the connections vary hugely between individuals, while evoking memory is the common one. Because painting is a silent and inner-oriented form of art, it is naturally attached to memories. For me, the working process is intense and slow. I focus on elements of paint such as composition, light, form, and texture. By proper arrangement of those elements, I tried to combine observation and imagination, enabling the subject to transcend its physical reality to achieve more imaginary possibilities.

Portrait Of K, 2019
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm | 31.4 x 23.6 in

Josephine: How do you deal with artist’s block or moments of creative stagnation during the painting process?

Li: It is important to distinguish creative stagnation and creative barriers. A creative stagnation is a situation in which we do not specifically realise the problem of the work, therefore unable to make progress. A creative barrier is that we know exactly what’s the problem, but do not know how to solve it. The two situations should be discussed separately.

It is painful to meet creative stagnation in painting. When it happens, I usually have two ways to face it. One is taking a rest, trying to think more and paint less. It is very dangerous to paint under this situation, as we may repeat mistakes unconsciously. The other way is finding someone, friends, or tutors, who we admire as a better painter, to judge our work critically, which I feel is quite a useful way to break the stagnation.

If it is a creative barrier, I will keep working on it until I figure it out. I enjoy this process because I know I am making progress. However, I will be worried when I process a work too smoothly, which can be a dangerous sign of creation stagnation.

To conclude, a painter’s relationship with his/her painting is familiar to that of an admirer with his/her lover. “The muse of art is a cool lover. Only by enthusiastic hands holding the sword of calm, one could possibly touch her heart.”

Josephine: Do you have a dream project that you would like to realise? If so, could you tell us about it?

Li: In the upcoming practice, I will produce a series of shadow portraits. I will try to abandon the existing traditional structure of my painting, to explore a new way of depicting portraits in dark tones, which is different from my previous work.

Caged Bird, 2023
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 90 x 65 cm | 35.4 x 25.5 in

Josephine: Which historical or contemporary artists have influenced you the most?

Li: Among historical painters, Titian influenced me significantly. I admire the sincerity in his works, and I learned a lot of painting skills from him, including paint layers building, brushwork, texture, colour using etc. The way he uses colour inspired me a lot. He barely uses dazzle bright colour in his painting. By using rich, dense colour, he achieves a sense of calm colourfulness.

Among contemporary painters, Chinese painter Mao Yan is my favourite. He discovered a unique way of mixing paint and medium, which distinguished his works from conventional oil painting. As my tutor in college, he inspired me a lot.

Night Play, 2020
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm | 39.3 x 39.3 in

Josephine: Do you work on multiple paintings at once? How long does a painting take, and how do you know when it’s finished?

Li: I have my standard regarding the level of completion in a work. I think no matter what style a painting is, it should reach a certain level of completion. My painting usually takes months, which varies between size and subject. I normally work on two paintings at the same time. When I am satisfied with one painting, I will lay it facing towards the wall and commence the other painting. After weeks when I come back to the first painting, the defects I cannot see before will normally appear. The process repeats constantly until I am pleased with both paintings. When I have the same satisfied feeling as the last time I look at the painting, I know the painting is finished.

Bonfire – Secret Garden, 2021
Li Ning
Oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm | 59 x 39.3 in

Josephine: How was your experience taking part in Jackson’s Painting Prize’s first independent large-scale exhibition at Bankside Gallery?

Li: The exhibition shows the importance of figurative painting in contemporary art context, so as the Jackson’s painting prize. This is why I think the prize has valuable meaning for all contemporary painters who insist to inherit the great painting tradition. I feel honoured to participate in the exhibition and become one of the award winners.

Li Ning’s Studio

Follow Li on Instagram

Further Reading

A Guide to Oil Painting Mediums

Portrait Painting on Jackson’s Aluminium Panels

Tips for Setting Up an Oil Painting Palette

Choosing the Right Canvas for Your Painting

Shop Oil Painting on jacksonsart.com

The post Li Ning: Evoking Memories in Oil Paint appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Paula Rego (1935-2022) wove stories that are both empowering and grotesque through her figurative paintings, drawings and prints. Often referring to folk tales from her childhood in Portugal, she intertwined them with narratives from history, current politics, myth, and her own personal life. This article will explore the palette she used in three of her works, spread over her prolific oeuvre.

Paula Rego’s works question power dynamics by defying convention – from the role in the family, to depicting rage and endurance through difficulties. Many of her paintings stem from an impulse to “mock” the people she found issue with, transforming them into creatures and beasts to disguise their identity, and often placing them in conflict with powerful figures. She worked from a selection of recurring life models, props, and sets for her pieces, and was an adept observational draughtsperson. In 1993, she began experimenting with pastels, and from then onward favoured them over oils. Her early work was much more abstract, with a collaging of imagery, before she gradually moved towards representation through her career.

Paula Rego’s Personal Life and Her Political Environment

Rego always drew as a child, and grew up under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. His regime was characterised by a broken justice system, strict rules, and secret police. Very early on Rego developed a political consciousness because of this, with an awareness of human injustice and cruelty. She commented, “That society was a deadly killer society for women. And I despised it for that.” Her parents sent her to a finishing school near London when she was sixteen, but she dropped out to study instead at the Slade School of Fine Art. There she met her husband, the artist Victor Willing, and they had a tumultuous relationship. There are several works where she reacts to the difficulties they had, transforming them into grotesque creatures. Her passion is palpable in the work, from her personal life to how she felt about the world around her.

Two of her most celebrated series confronted taboo women’s issues, and gave important visual acknowledgement to the experiences they continue to endure. The Abortion series (1998) depicted women having backstreet abortions in large pastel drawings and prints. At the time there was fierce debate in Portugal over its proposed legalisation, with Rego’s work being partially credited for bringing it back to public consciousness when it was finally legalised in 2007. The works aren’t bloody or gory, they depict women with faces of resolve, and resist making them into victims. She visually normalised something that was untapped in painting history. She always confronted the conventionally uncomfortable, and said,

“Shame is something that interests me profoundly,” she said. “It is exactly those areas of shame that I like to touch on. It makes you sometimes squirm, but why, what is shame? I think shame is one of the most interesting things we have.”

Another series, Dogwoman (1994), was inspired by a Portuguese folk tale she recalled, where an old lady heard the wind in her chimney tell her to eat all of her pets. She worked with model Lila Nunes who was her long-time collaborator, and served as a kind of surrogate figure for the artist in her works. In the series, the Dogwoman does all of the behaviours a dog might, whether that be to bark, sleep, or scratch. She saw them as self-portraits, and a representation of how she felt in her marriage to Victor. This alludes to themes of loyalty and subservience but also power and the ability to bite back. Through her work she was able to take extremely personal experiences and make them widely understood and relatable. In conversation about her work she said,

“The picture actually allows you to feel all sorts of forbidden things, and that’s why you do pictures.”

Paula Rego’s Wide Palette

Rego’s work is so far reaching that it’s hard to come up with one definitive palette. If I were to generalise, in her figurative work there is a recurrence of the staging of the painting operating in dusky blues, greys and purples – allowing the figures and costumes to be thrust forward which are generally much warmer, with oranges and yellows. This gives a stage-like quality to the work, where we feel they are performing for us. For this article I’ve chosen three very different artworks to focus on to represent the breadth of her career. From my research, it’s difficult to find information about exact paints, pastels or pigments she used, so these acrylic colours are my best estimates.

Colour Palette One:

Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Carbon Black, Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Cobalt Blue, Cadmium Orange

The first is The Firemen of Alijo (1996), which she made after observing a group of firemen out in an incredibly cold winter. She was having a difficult time herself, struggling with her terminally ill father and her husband’s mood, combined with her anguish over the poverty and struggle she saw in this town. She said she “felt a sense of the end of the world” when she made this piece, and wanted to pay homage to these unpaid workers.

The Firemen of Alijo, 1996
Paula Rego
Acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal, graphite, resin, ink, paper and aluminium foil on canvas,
153.9 x 184.3 cm | 60.5 x 72.5 in
TATE, London

The reddish-brown solid background holds the fragmentation of the work together. I mixed it using a combination of Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Carbon Black and a speck of Titanium White. The ‘ground’ at the bottom of the work is a layer of bright orange on top of a bright greenish blue, leaving a small strip along the top. I made this by layering a mix of Lemon Yellow and Cobalt Blue with Cadmium Orange and a dab of Lemon Yellow. The distorted figures in the work are actually made by collaging on previously made drawings that she cut up. She sees the figures that are above the ground as fighting angels, referring to medieval painting. As mixed media drawings it was slightly more challenging to replicate, but I’ve made some estimate mixes of Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, and Lemon Yellow, and a couple with a touch of Alizarin Crimson and Carbon Black too. There are lots of graphic areas creating the energetic flow of this work, and I replicated these areas with pure Carbon black, and Cobalt Blue mixed with Titanium White. The pink sections in my swatches are a mix of Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White.

Acrylic paint on canvas primed with gesso
From top, left to right:
Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Carbon Black and Titanium White
Cobalt Blue and Titanium White
Carbon Black
Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White
Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Alizarin Crimson and Carbon Black
Lemon Yellow and Cobalt Blue under Cadmium Orange and Lemon Yellow

Colour Palette Two:

Prussian Blue, Payne’s Grey, Titanium White, Emerald Green, Lemon Yellow, Carbon Black, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue, Viridian Green

Next I looked at The Dance (1988) which depicts eight dancers on a moonlit beach. It’s been interpreted as representing the many ways a woman may determine herself socially, on the left as the individual: as a partner, wife, mother, and grandmother. The fortress on the cliff in the background is a looming presence, giving the work a sinister edge despite its relative romance. It’s dream-like, mysterious, and the dance seems endless.

The Dance, 1988
Paula Rego
Acrylic paint on paper on canvas, 212.6 × 274 cm | 83.7 x 107.8 in
TATE, London

I interpreted my version of the blue used for the environment as a mixture of Prussian Blue, Paynes Grey and a touch of Titanium White. The vibrant lime green of the central woman’s top is the centre which the painting swirls around. I made mine with Emerald Green, Lemon Yellow, Titanium White, and a dab of Carbon Black. The dark cliffs and the skirt of the figure on the left were easily recreated with some toned Burnt Sienna. I think we also see a Burnt Sienna on the vest of the woman on the far right, a Yellow Ochre skirt on the central woman, and the mother and grandmother in the background in toned Cobalt Blue and Viridian Green. This work seems to have a simple palette, but there is actually a lot of variety in colour in these specific areas.

Acrylic paint on canvas primed with gesso
From top, left to right:
Prussian Blue, Payne’s Grey and Titanium White
Emerald Green, Lemon Yellow, Titanium White and Carbon Black
Burnt Sienna and Carbon Black
Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White
Cobalt Blue and Carbon Black
Viridian Green and Carbon Black

Colour Palette Three:

Cadmium Red, Burnt Umber, Carbon Black, Cobalt Blue, Lemon Yellow, Titanium White, Payne’s Grey

Finally, I looked at Snow White Swallows the Poisoned Apple (1995). Of course referring to the classic fairy tale, here we see Snow White dressed in her Disney costume – Rego was a huge fan of Disney, and loved the grotesque elements of their early animations. In her version though, Snow White isn’t idyllic and youthful, she’s a middle aged woman contorted in pain. She clutches her skirt and her throat on top of overturned furniture, her youth and supposed societal value disappearing. The raw red beneath her head suggests her imminent death, the outcome of her naivety.

Snow White Swallows the Poisoned Apple, 1995
Paula Rego
Pastel on paper
The Saatchi Collection, London

For my palette recreation I went for a Cadmium Red mixed with Carbon Black and Burnt Umber to create the blood red below her head. Her costume is made up of Cobalt Blue and Lemon Yellow tinted with Titanium White. I made the greyish patterning colours of the ground and fabric next to her using a combination of these colours, with some Payne’s Grey mixed in. The dark overturned chair and her hair were recreated with Burnt Umber and Carbon Black. Her warm skin that cuts across all of these opposing colours, heightening the tension, was recreated with a combination of the Lemon Yellow, Titanium White, Cadmium Red and Burnt Umber already used. It’s clear that by using pastels many layers have been built up to create these surface colours, so to recreate them in paint perfectly would also require some of this on the surface, optical mixing.

Acrylic paint on canvas primed with gesso
From top, left to right:
Cadmium Red, Carbon Black and Burnt Umber
Lemon Yellow, Titanium White and Burnt Umber
Cobalt Blue, Payne’s Grey and Titanium White
Cadmium Red, Payne’s Grey and Titanium White
Burnt Umber and Carbon Black
Burnt Umber, Cadmium Red, Lemon Yellow and Titanium White

There are few modern figurative artists as influential as Rego has been, and it is difficult not to see her impact in the huge surge in popularity of contemporary figurative painting in the past five years or so. After completing my acrylic studies I have a new understanding of the colour combinations used in Paula Rego’s palette. I see a tendency towards having at least a couple of strongly contrasting colours in each of the works to heighten movement or tension, which propels her figures through the spaces she created.

She also tended towards including the three primary colours in some form in each work, which I think gives them a complete finish, with a full range of cold to hot colours in each piece. Across my studies I tried to limit the amount of total colours as much as possible to see how these colours could be mixed, despite how different each work is. Hopefully this is helpful in seeing the potential for recreating the palettes, and in turn mood, of her incredible artworks.

Further Reading

Tips for Setting Up an Oil Painting Palette

Recreating the Colour Palette of Helen Frankenthaler

Meet Lorena Levi, Winner of Jackson’s Painting Prize 2022

Colour Mixing Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Palette

Shop Oil Painting on jacksonsart.com

The post Recreating the Colour Palette of Paula Rego appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.

Petra Schott won the Abstract Award in the Jackson’s Painting Prize this year with her work And Then She Decided to Take a Bath. In this interview, she discusses unexpectedly reconnecting with art, dancing in her studio, and how her work changes with the seasons.

Above image: Petra explaining her work

And then she decided to take a bath, 2022
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm | 55.1 x 55.1 in

Artist Interview with Petra Schott

Josephine: Could you tell us about your artistic background? How did you become an artist?

Petra: I transitioned into the realm of artistry unexpectedly during my first law exam. Amidst the stress of that period, I found myself yearning for a hands-on outlet that didn’t require constant contemplation. This led me to unearth my collection of watercolour paints. Reconnecting with these vibrant pigments brought me immense delight, and from that point onward, I wholeheartedly embraced the world of painting as a part of my journey.

Will Need Some Lipstick Today
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm | 55.1 x 55.1 in

Josephine: What’s your relationship with colour and how do you decide on the colour palette of a painting?

Petra: I rely on my intuition when selecting colours and embarking on a new painting. Frequently, my affection for particular hues persists across multiple works. Presently, amidst the balmy weeks of summer, my canvases are infused with vibrant reds, while the subdued tones dominate my art in the winter months. My faith in my intuition is resolute; I might even mistakenly reach for what I believe to be a blue, only to discover it’s green — yet I embrace it regardless. This practice primarily holds true for the initial layers. As the painting progresses towards its final form, I become progressively more deliberate in my colour application.

Healing
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm | 47.2 x 47.2 in

Josephine: What materials or tools could you not live without? Do you use anything unconventional?

Petra: My selection of tools adheres to conventional options, primarily relying on an array of brushes in varying sizes. On occasions, I incorporate rags to strategically remove specific pigments, unveiling the underlying colours in select areas. Additionally, I occasionally employ sewing or adhesive techniques to affix elements onto the canvas. Also, I sometimes use my fingers. However, these techniques encompass the extent of my artistic toolkit.

Josephine: Your award-winning painting is an homage to Pierre Bonnard and his paintings of his wife taking a bath. Do you imagine a scene when painting, and blur it to the point of abstraction, or are you painting a depiction of something intangible e.g., a feeling?

Petra: In the award-winning painting titled ‘And Then She Decided to Take a Bath,’ I envisioned a scene akin to what Pierre Bonnard might have beheld. However, my canvas became a vessel for my own emotions and concepts intertwined with the act of bathing. While the colour palette diverges from Bonnard’s, the scene itself assumes an abstract form—though observant eyes might discern the graceful contour of a body submerging into a bathtub, accompanied by subtle hints of personal articles, evoking an intimate atmosphere.

Venus Needs a Break
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 140 x 130 cm | 55.1 x 51.1 in

Josephine: How do you deal with artist’s block or moments of creative stagnation during the painting process?

Petra: Experiencing creative block is a rarity for me, owing to my engagement with oil paints and my practice of concurrently working on multiple pieces. Upon entering my studio, there’s usually at least one painting — or more — that beckons with ideas for progression. Yet, if a rare instance of blockage emerges, I peruse the works of artists I hold in high esteem through catalogues – or I begin to dance in my studio. This simple act often kindles the spark of inspiration anew.

Mediterranean V
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 140 x 130 cm | 55.1 x 51.1 in

Josephine: How do you find the balance between conscious decision-making and spontaneity in your process?

Petra: The interplay between intuitive painting and conscious decision-making is a captivating journey for me. Describing this process adequately often proves challenging. I commence with my favoured colours, guided by intuition, letting the canvas evolve naturally. From there, it’s a dance of assessment: liking what emerges, modifying or layering anew if not. When working on larger canvases, I adopt a gradual approach—applying paint judiciously, allowing intervals for drying, then revisiting with fresh eyes. As layers accumulate, I take a deliberate pause to pinpoint what’s needed. It might entail a bolder form, heightened contrast, an additional hue, or delicate lines. This intricate phase defies straightforward explanation. Regardless, I persist until the artwork resonates with a harmonious vitality that speaks to me.

Josephine: Which historical or contemporary artists have influenced you the most?

Petra: The artistic currents of Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown, Leiko Ikemura, Martha Jungwirth, and Frank Bowling have profoundly shaped my creative path. These painters, among others, have ignited my admiration and artistic resonance.

Bring Me a Rose
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm | 59 x 39.3 in

Josephine: How was your experience taking part in Jackson’s Painting Prize’s first independent large-scale exhibition at Bankside Gallery?

Petra: Participating in the opening was truly a remarkable experience, and I’m filled with gratitude for the opportunity. The Bankside Gallery is an exceptional venue, and being present to witness the collection of award-winning and shortlisted artworks was an exquisite delight.

Journeying On
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 130 x 140 cm | 51.1 x 55.1 in

Josephine: How do you know when a painting is finished?

Petra: Determining the completion of a painting is a nuanced challenge. Occasionally, I grant it a pause for a few days, allowing clarity to emerge. Other times, I continue and recognize a misstep later. Starting a new similar piece and mirroring its progress aids my decision-making process. Yet, in many instances, certainty arises unexpectedly. Like a gentle revelation, I step back, and there it is— undeniably finished.

Childhood Alphabet
Petra Schott
Oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm | 55.1 x 55.1 in

Follow Petra on Instagram

Visit Petra’s website

Further Reading

A Guide to Oil Painting Mediums

Portrait Painting on Jackson’s Aluminium Panels

Tips for Setting Up an Oil Painting Palette

Choosing the Right Canvas for Your Painting

Shop Oil Painting on jacksonsart.com

The post Petra Schott: Intuitive Colour appeared first on Jackson's Art Blog.