Somerset Art Weeks

Where does time go, when you are having fun? The magazine - Construction Computing - has taken large chunks of it, along with the Monthly newsletters, press visits to exhibitions and conferences, as well, and a number of trips abroad, but time seems to go faster the older you get.

The last year has been even busier, as having finally reached the end of the queue for membership of the Roadwater Art Group, I joined early in the New Year. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to be invited to join a group exhibiting for Somerset Art Weeks - running from the 19th of September to October 4th in Townsend House, just over the road from us here. There will be four of us - Gary Mills, Gina Stuart and myself working as artists, textile and mixed media creators, and Linda Trump, a ceramist. The theme is impressions of Somerset's natural and industrial heritage.

It's some years since I first exhibited any paintings at SAW, and I suppose I shouldn't have been at all surprised at the latest prices for picture frames.  You can't really buy these off eBay, or at The Range, as canvases require a deeper rebate to accommodate the thicker medium.  Some of the prices quoted were double the prices I have previously paid, and now constitute a significant proportion of the overall prices that I normally put on my painting - quite absurd when you calculate the time spent on the canvases and paint and the hours spent on each painting against the amount of time it takes to put a frame together - but market forces dominate everything - framers have to make a living, and the general public have to be persuaded that your efforts would enhance their lifestyle - whilst the poor old artist in his garrett has to scratch a living out of it, as well.

So, I'm putting a lot of paintings together. I've lived with some of them for a while, but. realistically, need them to go, to give me space to start some others, and put some more on the walls. The most interesting thing I have realised recently, though, is that the learning process is still very much alive. I reckon I can put that down to a couple of factors.  The current surge of AI applications within the construction industry in my other role has forced me to look more closely at the evolution of AI and the different ways in which it can be used, the resources it needs, and how they affect the environment, the different techniques involved, and it's widening impact on people's lives. In architectural design, there are sometimes overlaps with artistic design - one of which, Gaussian Splats - is used to supplement AI based rendering techniques that rely on precisely defined meshes to place colour - whilst Gaussian Splats introduce a degree of randomness to splodges of colour that, basically, allow the imperfect human brain to better assimilate the design.

If you look at my painting of Tarr Steps, the same technique was used for the tree canopy, and for the tree next to Cleeve Abbey gatehouse, which providing a more natural balance of colour than if I had painstakingly painted each leaf.

Exploring the intricacies of the AI world - which I must do to produce half a dozen articles in each issue about AI, some of which I write myself, reflects a book I have started to read about the complex evolution of the tools that earlier artists had - or didn't have -before they embarked on their tasks.  'The Materials of the Artist', written  in 1920s by Max Doerner, it is described as the most valuable book in existence on the craft of painting. 

The 400 page book, printed in NY in 1934, looks in great detail at all of the steps required and learned over the years to provide suitable supports and paint media for an artists work - preparing the canvas, priming it, mixing paints, and working out the impact of different paints, ground from a wide range of minerals and ores, and the oils they are blended with, on different surfaces so that they don't fade, react badly with other chemicals or interact with the medium. 

In those days you couldn't just pop down to the 'The Works' in the High Street, and many artists had to prepare their own media. There were some early artists supplies companies setting them selves up in the 18th an 19th centuries, like T. & R. Rowney" in 1783 - two brothers Thomas and Richard Rowney, perfume maker and wig suppliers with a shop on Holborn Hill in London, who diversified into writing materials and then artists' materials. The brothers then went out of partnership, with Richard concentrating on the perfume and wig business, and Thomas on the artists' supplies - don't know when he started working with Daler). 

I suspect many artists in the early twentieth century went through the same learning process, and probably produced a lot of paintings that haven't stood the test of time.  The book goes into great detail and I am only a couple of chapters in, but it provides you with a lot of cautionary examples guiding artists towards a better understanding of the volatile and complex materials they have chosen to work with. 

Whether you get to the Somerset Art Weeks exhibitions or not, feel free to respond with your own experiences as an experimental artist, and the relationship that you have with the subjects and the techniques that you have chosen.