My studio - Just what is going on

I thought I’d take you into my studio and let you have a look round at what I’m doing and how I do it. Quite often artists are a bit of a mystery, they produce finished artwork that turns up at a gallery or an exhibition that looks great, but they hide a secret. Most times nobody really sees the process behind the work, the struggles, the happy accidents and the ideas behind it. Yes there will be an artist’s painting on show, but often for every painting on show there will be a painting scrapped or half-finished as work in progress or just not ever shown. As an artist I’m no different, and sometimes I never exhibit a particular painting. There can be times when I never finish a painting for a variety of reasons, and often I quite like leaving some paintings unfinished (at least that’s how I justify it). This is nothing new for artists and comes with the territory. A productive artist often produces more paintings than he or she sells, and although I sell quite a few of my paintings and paint commissions I still have many tucked away in my studio. The short tour of my studio below shows how I store and display my paintings, but if you look closely you can see paintings wrapped up in bubble wrap! My studio can also get untidy particularly when I’ve got a lot of work on the go, although the video clip shows it as fairly tidy for me.

So when I’m working, how do I actually work? A good example of how I paint is best shown in the time-lapse video of one of my portrait paintings below. I’m working ‘alla prima’ which is an Italian phrase for ‘at first attempt’, and this means I’m trying to create a painting in one sitting. As I use oil paints this involves adding wet paint to previous layers of wet paint - a wet-on-wet approach. Many artists will use grids, tracing paper and projectors to create an image. I try to avoid this, as for me I tend to lose my flow in creating an image to paint. Hopefully, you can see this in the video. So my portrait is created free hand, but I’m constantly correcting and repainting the image as I paint to ensure my facial measurements and anatomy is correct. I start with the large shapes and dark areas first, rather than jump in and try to paint detailed eyes, nose and lips. Now this can go wrong, sometimes I can never achieve a likeness of the person I’m painting, and that’s when I might never finish a painting. It can happen! Alternatively, I might just scrape the painting off completely and start again.

I’ve worked this painting on a dark ground, which is a dark brown coloured support (background) for the painting. This has an impact on the tonal value of the portrait (the light and dark areas in the portrait), and the chroma (intensity of colour) of the flesh. What is satisfying with such a dark ground is that it makes the flesh tones really sing and pop out. Also you can see as the painting progresses I start to paint the smaller details of the eyes, lips and the final highlights to create the form of the face. This approach to painting large to small, general to specific, is key to how I paint, and is something I demonstrate and teach in my painting workshops for both portraits and landscapes.

Despite having a methodical approach, painting can often be a struggle, and is often about overcoming problems that present themselves as you progress. The key to a successful painting is how you resolve these issues and get out of trouble! Sometimes you manage it, and produce a good painting, but other times you never get there. Not all of what I create is the finished article, and it’s all part of my working life in the studio.