I enjoy working on short, one or two day paintings, during the creation of my works that can take many months. As well as making sure I have plenty to work on while layers are drying, they are also a great outlet for my natural drive to create. I don’t cope well if I am cut off from creating, and these smaller works are a lifesaver for me while my larger works progress.

In the same way that working out for keeping slim has the added bonus of toning your body, the added bonus of working on one-session paintings is that it keeps me exploring new ideas, and refining my skills. Artists are perpetual students. We are curious and restless, driven to explore and improve our chosen mode of expression. Each painting is a link in a chain to the next one, and from the previous one, even if the subject matter or style seems at a cursory glance to be unrelated. While a particular artwork may be viewed as an item alone, an artist’s body of work exists as a continuum.

This is an iPhone snap of my completed portrait, after the second session. This has been an exercise in high-key flesh against a dark background, within a more unusual composition. I wanted to explore how dazzling you can make skin, before you lose the ‘color’ of the natural flesh.

A new work, a portrait in oils of my daughter. In this afternoon session, I established much of the white on dark composition. Tomorrow, I will add touches of color, both in the face and background.

The next layers in my new painting in my Geometric Trees series have been applied. Many more to go! Each layers considerations of color, and composition, and relationships, but also technically each layer gets a new medium, with a slightly different ‘fatness’.

One thing in particular I appreciate about the Dallas Museum of Art is how often ~ and creatively ~ they change their exhibitions. Today, I decided to spend a few hours there with my notebook, to refuel my creative juices. It is always a particular delight to visit on my own, when I have no need to talk, or move on, or ‘find somewhere to have lunch’.

Today, their main contemporary exhibition was part of the revamp of the Dallas Arts District, an ambitious project that will transform the Arts district by, among other things, constructing a huge, park-strewn walkway over the existing road system, so pedestrians will be able to walk around from gallery to venue.

Kuitica's curtain, as rendered by Foster & partners.

The grand opening of the new Dallas Opera House as part of this has been hailed as a huge success, also, and the DMA exhibition called Performance / Art is comprised of architectural or performance related art objects.

The first exhibit is by Guillermo Kuitca, the artist who designed the much discussed new curtain for the Opera House. Kuitca creates canvasses and drawings with ‘careful orchestration of images’, to capture the experience of theatre and performance. There are no figures, just shapes and lines composed from the furniture, architecture and atmosphere of the theater. He also uses architectural plans or performance brochures, layering them on top of other images and using color and size to enhance them, as in his ‘Ring’ series. Many of his canvases are oils, or graphite and acrylic. These are well-ordered artworks, impressive in size and attention to detail, using the intriguing language of brochures, maps and plans.

David Altmejid's "The Eye" being installed at the DMA

David Altrejid’s “The Eye” is altogether different. Flashy and constructed of mirrors on a wooden sub-structure, this piece, inspired by John Adams’s opera “Dr Atomic” is a scintillating sculpture, a tower of mirrors, composed as an explosion as it’s inspiration would suggest. Using geometric beams, pyramids, triangular shards, staircases and shattered faces, it casts angular shadows and highlights over the room that it fills. It is a beguiling, superficially pretty glittering sculpture that expresses destruction and chaos. It is as exuberant a piece as are the the school children from whom it drew admiring gasps.

Other pieces that I enjoyed included Francis Bagley and Tom Orr’s “So Beautiful and Lost” (mixed media, 2009), which is based on Verdi’s Nabuco that was staged in 2006 by the Dallas opera. It featured different installations, such as broken mirror shards on the floor that reflected light around the room, sinuous black tubes hanging and draped from the ceiling, and vertical thin black rods, in a still, correct line, but when viewed when leaving the room created an optical effect against the thin stripes painted on the wall.

I studied stage design at an art college in the UK as a part of my art courses, and these installations reminded me again how integral light is to theater, and how much expression can be made with it. I particularly love art created by light, just as I loved the lights of the stage as I was growing up.

Video Installations

Two video installations are also featured. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Talo/The House” (2002) is a masterfully rendered depiction of a woman’s “gradual psychological deterioration [that] ruptures her boundary between fantasy and reality”.

The room contained three large rectangular screens, one in front, two on each periphery. What particularly worked was the way these were used to show the female protaganist’s environment, and thoughts. We see images of cause and effect, past and present, and the screens are used to show these. For example, we see her leaving the car on one screen, on the other the camera shows us a close-up of the door as she shuts it, and another shows the door to which she is walking. With this device, the artist can show the woman’s divided attention and consciousness, different points of view on the same event.

She can also show it break down. She elucidates the fact that many different points of views can be truth. On one screen, the woman looks through a window and can see her car. But, as her scripted words point out, if she steps to the left there appears to be only trees in the garden. What is the truth? Eventually, the boundary is crossed and unreal events happen: a car zooms around the walls of her room, she flies through the trees until she pulls herself to earth down the outside of her house…

I loved this piece, finding in it much of the philosophy of Hume, and other great thinkers who examined perception and cause and effect, and the subjectivity of perception. The film is beautifully shot, and composed in Finnish, and is a thoughtful, careful work.

I found this exhibition refreshingly different, inspiring and thoughtful. So did the school children, as it turned out.

I sketched in pastels as the sun came up today, in my back yard. There’s a particular view that has inspired me, and is now churning around in my head. I will stretch and prepare a canvas for it, today, and work on it alongside my current series. It is related in it is all about edges and depth of field of vision, but it will look quite different.

Claude Monet

Cave Paintings, Lascaux

It is magic, and the state of contemplation an artist enters when painting is a magic state. Plein air painting in particular links us to the earliest artistic stirrings of humankind. Personally there is no doubt. Had I lived 100,000 years ago, I would be the person in the cave covered in freshly dug ochre and and black from charred trees making marks, seeking to understand our existence through pictures.

Picasso's Guernica

An art piece seems, at first glance, to be utterly useless (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It hangs on a wall, or stands in a room, passive, sleeping. It is far from this. It is deeply useful. Art has been used over the years as a tool. It has been used to attempt to influence the outcome of hunts to ensure food; it has been used to acquire money (this comprises most of modern history); it has been used to influence other people and to pass on concepts and beliefs, or to condemn, as in propagandist art. It is also a potent and universal method of understanding the astonishing fact that we are conscious at all. It is a hard-wired expressive response to being able to perceive.

Tracy Emin's "My Bed"

Artist learn to recognize their own impulse to create, to understand it, and how to express and to summarize it in strokes of paint, or the arrangement of physical objects so that the viewer will respond. Every time you glance at a painting or artwork, you are being influenced and, in a sense, manipulated. Artists are master manipulators.

Broadway Boogie Woogie
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944)
1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50″

This painting by Mondrian was a huge influence on my evolution of my image (right), Trees Squared. The use of squares to create movement, the pulsing life, and the the varied colors all found their way undulating through my subconscious as I made it. In Mondrian’s piece and piece and my own, the circulation of the life in both the city and in nature as represented by the tree and my showing the vitality pulsing beneath the bark are captured. My organic picture however uses organic lines; the Mondrian masterpiece uses the geometry of architecture.

It is fascinating and endlessly inspiration to me to note the overlay of images I have as an artist as my images emerge. The references that I become aware of, and the many that remain in my subconscious have a huge impact on my art, although none of them were consciously selected. I guess that I could here assert that ‘art is plagiarism’ but I can also assert that, in a reverse syllogism, that “plagiarism is NOT art”.

Blue Skies (c) 2009 Alison Jardine. 30″ x 42″, oil on canvas

I am so happy to have completed this sunny, uplifting abstract work! It is a view of the sky through the branches of trees in the sunshine. The composition was inspired by the Japan-inspired textiles of the Art Nouveau period, and the rich blues, yellows, whites and golds reference this also. The flat ink-like branches add to this atmosphere, and add rhythm and movement to the softer patterns of the leaves, which are given depth through many colors of yellow, and also gold pigment.

This is a very decorative, beautiful work, full of movement and yet contemplative, and it has inspired me to create similar compositions with different colors, more abstract, and perhaps more Pop Art.

One of the great joys of painting, for me, if that immediate reaction to an element that inspires you as an artist; the pull can be so strong and absorbing. The hard work of settling on a form for the artwork is then followed by a wonderful sense of exploration of the unknown that happens when you embark on your painting, and the ongoing the response to the immediate image as it emerges. Sometimes, my paintings are exactly as planned, sometimes they surprise me!

This work is for sale, please email me if you would like to know more, or contact me through the Contact page on the navigation bar at the top.

If we are creating art, are we creating it for other people? Do we find ourselves modifying what we do to ‘sell’, like producing a reality TV show, rather than scripted drama, because it’s easier?

Lisa Jardine in her book “Worldly Goods” argues that this has been going on since there was a market to support artists. She refers to the commissioning of religious art by rich businessmen who had presumably had to make some pretty dubious decisions over the years, and paying for these expensive, religious artworks such as altar pieces, or architecture, would buy their way to heaven. The result are stunning masterpieces that survive to this day. Also, those great artists would always find ways to express what they wanted to express, regardless of the commission, and the purchaser could just darn well learn to live with it.

Even in the 20th century, we have the story of Matisse and his client who ordered a ‘blue’ painting, but at the last minute Matisse painted over all the blue and made it red. And so, we have the “Red Room”.

Are artworks that are blushingly commercial actually any worse artworks for being so? Does great art of necessity need to be isolated, unpopular, uncomfortable?

History would suggest not.

Olafur Eliasson's wonderful art work

I am so excited by my painting, right now. So much that I’ve been working to improve has consolidated. This feeling is rare for me. I am self-critical to the point of harshness, and I aspire to mastery. A mastery I feel is within my grasp, with a lifetime of study.

I have been furiously copying master sketches by artists such as Seurat, and Ingres, and following their trails further back … following the traces of footsteps back into the past, the influences on influences that takes artists back to the beginning time.

Sometimes, as in the work of Picasso, they loop back to the earliest human artworks, as happened with his inspiration by the cave paintings in Spain and southern France.

I have been reminded, though, in looking at so many pre-20th century masterworks of painting, that modern art is truly vibrant and exciting. The 20th century’s experimentation was an astonishing break from the past in art. Like a kid in a sweetshop, I can never get enough.

For hundreds of years previously, really very little changed; though many paintings were said to ‘shock’ the audiences, the changes were small, though the ripples were sometimes large.

I judge it take me a number of years to achieve the mastery of painting that I am working for; how many years, then, until I can choose to break these rules, and do it well?