Paintings with answers
10 things I'd like to remember
Painting metaphors extend their reach into the rest of life. After looking at paintings, I see the whole world differently.
So I’m here quickly digesting a weekend spent at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, RA degree show, wandering Cork Street, and dipping into the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery Award Exhibition - before a new week of work runs away with me.
10 things to remember:
All materials are valid. Expensive isn’t automatically more impressive. Pastels might work better than oils. Charcoal can survive on canvas.
The frame or framework can make or break the painting. A fresco made with exposed plaster on straw speaks more loudly than the paint on its surface.
Ugly, unexplainable paintings stay with me the deepest. I love them more for their strange audacity.
Large expanses of darkness can bring everything else together.
Gold usually gets away with itself, wherever it is.
Beautiful paintings can have ugly brush strokes when you get close.
Cleaner colours work harder.
Composition, composition, composition.
The things you need to see will guide you towards them.
You love what you love.
Those that stay with me:
Sir Christopher Le Brun - Light in Avalon (above - my favourite of all the favourites)
Edouard Vuillard
And also inspiring…
I like to pretend I’ll have learned from all these brave ones, but the studio is teaching me that the process of painting is the process. Mathew and I had a discussion last night about how, no matter how hard we try to make beautiful work like other people, the work that appears is what it is - our own. Not always beautiful, though the process of trying remains honest and true. There’s a line in a Twain song:
“You’re going to have to learn to love the parts of yourself you’ve hated for so long”
which just about sums it up.
(Mathew has a very interesting new Substack here, by the way, in case you’d like to keep an eye on his ceramics, music and general tinkerings with this that and everything. And a shiny fresh website made by me with a beautiful new collection on it here.)
One more delight…
Was that quite by accident (if there is such a thing), the heroine of my novel, Ann Catley, found me in the National Gallery, where I wasn’t planning to be.
Tucked away among a sea of faces on a screen made for Byron by his fencing teacher, featuring popular celebrity actors and boxers - there she lives. Think of it as Byron’s Instagram.
I’m always thinking of Ann when walking London, down streets she triumphed along in the chaos of the late 1700s - a layer of time I feel is always just a little below the surface of our current moments. Here she is…
Okay. Time for work. Much to be done before paintings and words are allowed me.
Blessings on your week: may your beautiful ugly honest creative selves find space in it.
Your posts have such a light in them Agnes it’s always a pleasure to open one and read it, and enjoy what you’ve chosen to share. I absolutely L O V E that you met Ann Catley in this way - I can imagine your delight ! I’m intrigued too, with the idea that the 1700’s are really just so close to us, that somehow really touched and reassured me. Blessings for your week too ♥️🪭