Virgil Hammock

4 August 2013

We were now in our sixth sitting of my portrait and getting into a routine; move the kitchen table, find where to place my chair, put up the easel and start the painting along with the conversation. “Stephen, where do you usually paint?” I asked “I have a studio in Fredericton and I go there every day to work,” he said, “and I take Echo (his dog) with me.” “I thought that you worked in your house (in Nashwaak Village, a very small town a few kilometres from Fredericton),” I said. “I have, but I need to get out of the house.” “I thought you were a hermit?” “Yes and no, but I like painting in my Fredericton studio. I need a lot of variety in my life.”

Stephen paints, seated, with his palette in his lap for the small oil sketch he is doing now, and quite close to me. The paints are arranged on the edge of the palette in a circle from lights to darks and he mixes his colours in the middle of the palette. His medium, walnut oil, is in a small jar or tin cup. “I do love the smell of the paint. It brings back the smell of my studio and the classroom,” I said. “I think that it is only a smell that painters can appreciate,” he said. Painting is a very tactile experience for the artist–the feel of the brush against the canvas, the flow of the paint and, of course, the smell. I can tell that Stephen enjoys the act of painting, through his eyes, looking at both me and the painting, and the way that he uses his hands. There is a magic that only the artist can feel as they work. It is a different kind of magic that a viewer gets from a painting, or any art of work, but magic nonetheless.

“I wish that I had more skill,” Stephen said. “I think you have skill in spades, so why do you say that?” I said. “You can never have enough skill and sometimes I wish I just had more of it. It would make life a whole lot easier,” he said. “There is more to art than skill,” I added. “Like what?” “I know it when I see it. It is what makes art, art.” That less than helpful comment just added to the confusion. We had been talking for weeks about what makes something art much less great art. “It really boils down to content,” Stephen said. “Really?, And what do you mean by content?” “Content, in the end, dictates form,” he answered. “I think that we are talking about different things. You can paint a picture of a flower or a person, they are both content,”I said. “I am talking more about reading content,” he said. “And how does one read content?” “I am looking for the intention of the artist. Two paintings can have the same subject yet one can be great art and the other banal. It’s all in the intention,” he said. “Are you talking about brush work?” “It’s more than that. It’s everything and nothing. It’s is where the end is more than the sum totals of the parts.”

“You know, there are high points and low points to painting and I am not sure where I am now,” he said remarking on my portrait. “How about the middle?” I asked. “I know what I am doing is valid,” he said. “I have no doubt about your validity, but I have problems with some things which pass themselves off as art,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “most of my art heroes are from the 19th. Century and before.” “I don’t think that it all goes back to realism. There are some 20th. Century artists I like. It is about, as you said, intention,” I said, “Good painting is timeless. Good painting has been done, is being done and will, in the future, be done.” “Sometimes the first stroke of the brush on the canvas leads to the divine path,” Stephen said, “but, mostly painting is just hard work.” I got his point as I have often watched him work up a sweat over the past two weeks as he painted my portrait.

Art is hard work and I get annoyed when people dismiss art, particularly realism, as mere skill or the result of some God given talent. The good artists I know, of all stripes, work their butts offs and most have spent years getting to a point where they occasionally produce something fine. This I know from my own failures. It is a revelation to sit for Stephen and watch art come about, come alive. He starts with a blank canvas, a blank piece of paper and, foremost, an idea. I sit and provide the subject. Mine is the far easier task. Composition is a task for an artist looking at a blank canvas. Where to start, where to put the first mark. When, as an artist, I looked at a blank canvas, I saw the painting before I picked up my brush and started to paint. The painting was there, it was just a matter of putting it down. In reality it wasn’t that simple and the finished painting was always quite different than the one I had in my head at the outset. My vision was, of course, always better than the finished product. It is the same with Stephen; he has some idea what the painting will look like before he starts. “The problem is a matter of scale,” he said, “how it’s going to fit.” His painting of me was coming to life somewhat like a photograph in a tray of developer (for those of you who can remember that process), from a blank sheet to a completed image, only much slower. “I need to stop, have a cup of coffee and regroup,” he said.

“I need to do another drawing or two,” he said, as we were drinking our coffee, “and think about another oil sketch.” I could see how deeply Stephen was immersing himself in this project. He really wanted to capture me in paint and I certainly wanted to see my image played out. It’s all about time, I thought. I have been doing self-portraits over the years starting with drawings and paintings and now digital photographs not because I am in love with myself, but to gage the aging process which scares the Hell out of me. Stephen’s painting, or paintings, of me are very different than the daily digital photograph I take of myself. Mine are 1/60th of a second snapshots and his are observations of me over many hours and days. His is art, mine is record keeping. There is much more of me in his painting than in my photographs.

Back in position, Stephen takes up his sketchbook and pencil and proceed rapidly to draw my face. “It’s all in the drawing,” he said. “I like to work from drawings as it gives me different information than painting from life.” I understand where he is coming from as black and white drawings reduces things, images, to values of light and dark. It can also simplify the image into visual essentials. His drawings of me contain basic information that can be transferred to the paintings. “I should draw more,” he says, “I really like drawing.” I remarked that old master drawings really turned my crank, “Look at Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt–their drawings say it all,” I said. “Yes, it really reveals their hand, doesn’t?” he said.

“Do you have any idea where all of this going?” I said. “What are we shooting for? One big honking picture?” I continued. “I haven’t a clue. Good art, I hope,” Stephen said. At the start, I had hoped to record the painting of a portrait with words and photographs, but it was becoming something much more, a record of the artistic process at work. A painting is, in the end, the product of a process in time that becomes a moment in time. Stephen’s portraits of me will be a record of both of us over the summer of 2013. “Why do you paint Stephen?” I said. A dumb question, but I asked it nevertheless. “There is nothing else I can do,” was his obvious answer, but what he does do, is something that very few us of can do, and that is create out of imagination and talent, art.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Monday, 23 September, 2013.

1 August 2013

“My summer is not going to plan,” Stephen said, “I was going to do drawings and small paintings of the marsh, but now I am doing this”, referring to painting my portrait. “Actually, aren’t you doing both,” I said. “I am, but I am spending a lot of time painting you; not that I am complaining.” Stephen was looking at me while he was putting paint on his palette and figuring out which brushes he was going to use. “You know, I really didn’t know anything about art history until I came to Mount A (Mount Allison University),” he said. “I hope that we set you straight. What did you learn?” “Well, I figured out that I didn’t like (Marcel) Duchamp very much.” “You are in good company, Ad Reinhard (American Minimalist painter) famously said: ‘I have never approved or liked anything about Marcel Duchamp. You have to choose between Duchamp and Mondrian’,” I said. ( Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhard, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1981, p.195,) I doubt that Stephen would have chosen Mondrian, but he clearly did not like Duchamp’s attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the values of traditional art.

“Easel painting has survived Duchamp, you know,” I continued, “and he certainly knew how to have fun and make a name for himself.” By this time, Stephen was painting and paying attention to what he was doing. “Let me repeat myself, art is all about intention,” he said. “And by intention you mean serious, don’t you?” “Yes, art is serious stuff.” “It may be, but art is all over the board these days and has been for some time,” I said. “But, much of it is not very good,” He said and I would have a hard time arguing his point. “Good and bad are rather subjective, but I would like to think I bring at least some objectivity to the table. To my mind, there is the beautiful and that is a quality that can be observed,” I said. “Yes, I like your idea of the separation of art (beauty) from life,” he said. Now we were into a subject that could occupy the rest of the afternoon.

“The idea of anti-art goes back at least a hundred years. Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel was done in 1913 and the urinal (Fountain) in 1917. Things haven’t been the same since,” I said, “and in between those dates you had Dada.” Clearly, Stephen wasn’t cheered by my art history lesson. “Why?” he said. “There was the little matter of World War I, which screwed up everything including art,” I answered. “There was still beautiful and wonderful art being done after the war. Matisse for instance,” he said. “Granted,” I said, “everything did not go down the tubes but, art was changed forever.” Stephen was painting while he pondered the idea of anti-art. “History is a real pain in the ass. It seems to repeat itself with some regularity like some never ending circle,” I said and I was beginning to depress myself. “Art reflects it’s own time, it cannot help it. There can be no real Futurism. It is just that most people live in the past. It’s more comfortable,” I added. “And these are dangerous times,” Stephen said, “with the world at our fingertips via the Internet. It makes it difficult for reflection.” “Good God, yes, I have thousands of books I have collected over the past half a century and now everything is a click away,” I said. “I still like books,” he said. “And real paintings,” I added.

Surely, I thought we were two old guys too technologically savvy for our own good. Here I was sitting for a traditional oil portrait by first rate figurative artist and we both had iPhones at our sides, indeed, we would use them to settle arguments we had about artists and dates. It was too damn easy. “I have artists friends in Fredericton who don’t use this stuff at all and seem to be happy about it,” he said. “Yes, me too and just isn’t an age thing. There are people a lot younger than me who get by just fine without all this stuff. Hell, I am seventy-five and I keep running out and buying new toys.” The discussion was somewhat idiotic as we were using my blog and all sorts of social media to record this project and our conversation, but I have never claimed to rational.

“The more I am into this project the more I see how difficult it is going to be,” Stephen said. “It’s going to take more than one oil sketch.” I didn’t know if the difficulty was my ugly puss or the act of painting. I was hoping that it was the later. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “Just getting it right,” he replied. When I looked at what he had completed thus far, I thought that he had done a good job of catching my likeness. “I am going to have to do some more drawing as well,” he said. “What do you mean by right?” I said. “I know it when I see it,” he said. I told him that I know when a painting that was done by someone other than myself was ‘right‘ and that I was surer about that than I was about my own art. “Right is when everything comes together,” he said. “Surely, everything cannot be together. Is there not always something more that can be done?” I said. “Of course, nothing is ever perfect,” he said, “but close is pretty good.” “I knew a painter, John Hultberg, who was a teacher of mine, whose dealer would go to his studio and take his paintings away from him, right from the easel still wet, because he never thought that his paintings were finished,” I said. “I can identify with that. Maybe, I need somebody to tell when something is finished.”

The question of the completion of an art work is something that has haunted artists for centuries. Painting, particularly oil painting, is too bloody fluid. The paint dries slow and invites messing about. X-rays of old masters show all sorts of changes under progressive layers of paint. I had been talking to Stephen since he came to Sackville and about how a painting always calls for another painting. After all, if an artist ever did complete the perfect art work, why would want to do another one and risk failure? John Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice, says something to the effect that every great work of art has an element of imperfection. I think it is that imperfection that drives artists, including Stephen, to keep banging away in the studio.

“I am certainly glad that you have good coffee here,” he said, “it keeps me going.” I took that as a hint to brew us each an Americano and that a short break was in order. “This painting is really hard work,” he said taking the cup in hand. “If you think it is hard for you, think of me, I have to stay awake and ask semi-intelligent questions,” I said. “All those years that I taught figure drawing and painting, I never thought how hard it was for models to hold a pose and they were naked, to boot.” I asked him how he thought the painting was going. “Not bad, but there is still quite away to go,” he replied. “I can always tell you when I think it is finished,” I said. “I don’t think so, but let’s do another bit before it gets too dark to paint.”

“We should think what we are going to do with all this stuff (the drawings and paintings) when we are done. I think that it might make a nice little exhibition,” I said, back in position for the painting. “Where?” Stephen said. “I would like something in a civic gallery, but a high quality commercial gallery would work as well,” I said. “Look we will have a finished large portrait along with the drawings and oil sketches that proceed it and all of the conversation about the process along the way,” I continued. “You are assuming that everything is going to work out. What happens if the painting is a flop?” he said. “That’s not going to happen. You are really good painter and the world needs a good picture of me.” We left it at that for the afternoon.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Sunday, 15 September, 2013.

25 July 2013

We are at it again on a warm summer Thursday afternoon trying to find a way into the oil sketch Stephen had started a week ago. “ I am always on the edge of disaster,” he said picking a up a brush, then discarding it for a larger one. I continue to be amazed by the large size of brushes he uses in working on such a small canvas. “Where do you start when coming back to a partially completed painting?” He tells me that he is looking for some light areas. “The nose has some highlights,” he said dabbing some white on the canvas to what I assumed was my nose, as I was sitting facing the back of painting. I try to sit still, but I am taking notes and trying to engage in conversation.

“I have been looking at your book Surface Reflections and it is pretty interesting,” I said. “Yes, it was written by my friend Robert Barriault,” Stephen replied, “and I think he did a good job summing up what me and my art are about.” “It has taken you a long time to get to where you are now,” I said. “You talk, in the book, about a moment of truth at beach at Agadir in Morocco when you were twenty years old.” “Yes, it was then and there that I decided to be a painter,” he said. A fine decision, I thought, to myself. Often some of us don’t follow our hearts and regret it for the rest of our lives. How many would be poets end up as accountants? Deciding to be an artist is a romantic choice and sticking to it can be viewed as foolhardy by those that want a practical and financially successful life. Thank God, for people like Stephen who looking at the sea, saw his future.

“The hard thing,” he said, looking rather intently at the canvas, “is getting into the zone.” The ‘zone’ is that magic place where things appear to go right as you are doing them. I know the zone myself from writing when the words start coming from somewhere within your consciousness and, more often, when they don’t. “Sometimes everything seems to fall together, but it is hard to get there,” he said. Painting is a struggle, each brushstroke a fight. I enjoy watching Stephen look at me, take a stab at the painting, sit back and look at what he has done and then repeat the process. It’s likely more fun for me than him, but I do know that he enjoys the act of painting even if it is often a fight.

In realistic painting, directly from the subject, like the portrait Stephen is doing now, there are times when the painting takes over from the subject matter. This is when you find that you are painting without looking at the subject. In the end, a painting is its own thing–an object, and to use Harold Rosenberg’s term, an ‘anxious object’ and not, as Plato would have us believe, a pale imitation of reality. We have talked a fair bit about what is real in realism. Friends, who have seen this sketch even its early stages, have remarked how Stephen has nailed me. It looks more like me than I do, they remark, but this is no slick photo realist portrait. It is boldly painted in broad marks and, I know, by the time it is finished it will be thickly encrusted with paint.

Last night at my regular Wednesday night salon, if you want to call drinking and eating with a bunch of friends, a salon, somebody remarked that the painting made me look like The Smoking Man in The X-Files. I don’t know if Stephen, who was there, took that as a complement, but I did. I like the idea of a man of mystery even if I stopped smoking fifty years ago. “Nothing interests me more than art. The rest is boring,” Stephen said just before he suggested a coffee break. He needed coffee to have the energy to paint and I needed to stay awake. It’s not that I was bored, but, being an old guy, I usually take an afternoon nap and if I sit too long I start to nod off. A break also gives me chance to see what Stephen has been up to.

The picture seemed to be taking shape, the result of more paint and looking on his part. I did like what I saw. I had painted some self-portraits in the past, but, in addition to being mirror images (backwards because of the use of mirrors) that were nowhere as good as Stephen’s painting. What is the idea of portraiture? Flatter the sitter? Record what someone looks like for history? Stop a moment in time both for the sitter and viewer? Perhaps all of these things, but great portraiture is something more. I brought the subject up while we were still drinking our coffee. “ What do you think of Goya’s portraits,” I asked, “The funny ones of the royal family?” “He was a good enough painter to get away it,” he answered, “ They are honest pictures of real people even if they were the King and Queen.” “Not at all like Velazquez’s paintings of Philip IV,” I said, “In reality, Philip was drop dead ugly.” “But, they were nonetheless beautiful paintings,” he countered. Hard to argue that. So portraits can be truthful or flattering and still be great art. It is the artist who makes the difference and not the subject. “How about Lucian Freud’s portrait of the Queen?” Stephen said. I had to agree that it is an official painting of the Queen that I am sure most of her loyal subjects hate, but it would be interesting to know what she thinks.

Back sitting for my sitting my ‘official’ portrait and thinking what future generations might think: “Now there is an ugly man.” or “The painter did best he could having what he had to contend with.” I really hope that young women would say: “Now, there is a handsome fellow, if he were not dead, I would fall in love with him.” I guess that I will have to leave the results to Stephen as love after you are dead is a moot point. “Stephen, you must be careful. I have got my vanity to think about,” I said, not wanting to be like the subject of a Freud portrait where it is a great painting, but the subject is to be pitied. “Not to worry,” he said, “I paint them the way I see them.” Not sure that was the answer that I wanted, we continued with our conversation about painting and, in particular, portraiture. “You know someone else I like is Graham Sutherland. There are a bunch of his portraits in the Beaverbrook (Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick),” he said, “I first saw them when I was very young on school outing to the gallery.” “Yes, there are are a lot of studies for his portraits as well. I really like the drawings of hands,” I said. “Me too,” he said, “ Sutherland got into a lot of trouble for his portrait of Churchill. Winnie did like the painting very much. I think that he destroyed it.” “ Rather like Freud’s painting of the queen, but, at least, it still in one piece. I think some of studies for the Churchill painting are at the Beaverbrook,” I added.

“There is certainly the question of control when it comes to portraiture–the sitter or the painter,” I said, “ Conventional thinking might say, he who pays the piper calls the tune.” I told Stephen that I was thinking in terms of commissions like those for university presidents and C.E.O.s. rather than the kind of thing that we were doing now. “I know I would have a hard time with something like that,” he said, “I am likely too set in my ways.” “I think if you are good enough and, I believe that you are, that sitter will let you do what needs to be done,” I said, “The Queen didn’t tell Freud what to do and, for that matter, neither did Churchill tell Sutherland how he should paint. Mind you, he did trash the work.” “Of course, Churchill was an amateur painter and likely thought himself an amateur art critic as well,” Stephen said. “But, so was Hitler,” I added. On that note, we decided to call it day. “How about Ducky’s for beer?” he said. “Sounds like a plan,” I replied.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Monday, 9 September, 2013.

23 July 2013

Stephen Scott spends a lot more time with me than just at our sittings. We have dinner together almost every night and meet most days at the Black Duck café for coffee. His wife, Sophie, is also in Sackville for the summer and she is with us a lot as well, but not during the sittings. We talk endlessly about art. It’s a flood of talk. I haven’t talked about art, and in particular, about its process in years and neither has he. It turns out that most of our friends are not artists. It is not that our friends are not interested in the arts, they are, but not in the intense way we are and I really haven’t talked to Stephen at length since he graduated from Mount Allison thirty-five years ago. I had seen his works over the years at various galleries and always liked them, but our paths seldom crossed. So here we are like two long lost friends at a high school reunion trying to catch up on each other’s life.

“A lot of things artists did in the past to make a living no longer exist,” Stephen said over a cup of coffee at the Black Duck, “Like graphic design. It’s all done now with Photoshop on a computer.” “Yes,” I said, “The Group of Seven almost all worked at the same Toronto ad agency in the early 1900s.” We talked a bit about illustration. “Look at somebody like N.C. Wyeth. I saw a show of his book illustrations at the Farnsworth (the art museum in Maine) a couple of months ago and they were all full blown oil paintings and quite nice at that,” I said. “I have been to the Farnsworth and seen his work,” Stephen said, “That kind of stuff just isn’t done any more. Too much work, too expensive,” he added. “There just isn’t the market for that kind of work. Besides, I doubt that there are that many fine arts graduates out there who could actually paint like N.C.,” I said, “and, besides they wouldn’t want do. They wouldn’t see it as art, only skill,” I concluded. “Don’t get me started on the subject of skill,” he said.

That afternoon we were back in my kitchen for the third sitting. It was a cloudy, lazy, at times dark day not ideal for painting as Stephen wants to paint with natural light, but we decided to go ahead anyway. He brought an artificial light fixture with him which we were to try later in the afternoon, but not with much success. Colour looks very different under artificial light because of the Kelvin temperature of artificial light which is quite different from that of natural light. Painting with such light often brings unpleasant surprises when the results are viewed under natural light. “It is about light, you know,” he said, “That is one of the things that painting is all about.” He is right. When I think about painting that I like, it’s usually because of the way that the artist has used light. It is certainly what draws me to Impressionism. Monet can take my breath away.

“Didn’t you like Ted Pulford’s teaching while you were at Mount Allison?,” I asked. “Yes, he was really a hard task master, but he knew his stuff. Particularly watercolour.” Stephen answered. “I don’t think about you as a watercolourist.” “I have done a few decent watercolours, but it was Ted’s approach that was important not the medium. He taught me that you have to be serious if you are going to be a real artist.” I was interested in Stephen’s remarks because during the time I was head of the department and Ted was still teaching, from 1975 to 1980, I had more students come to my office and complain about his teaching than any of his colleagues. They thought that he was too old fashioned and he didn’t allow them to do what they wanted and he marked too hard. However, some students, including Stephen, liked his teaching and, interestingly, when I talked much later to students who studied with him, including those who complained, said that he was their best teacher and they wished that they had paid more attention to him while they had the chance.

There was the continuing question of what students were and were not taught in art schools and programmes in last fifty years or so. The whole thing about the making of the artist. As someone who had taught and ran an art department for nearly forty years, I would like to think that I have done more good than harm. Talking to Stephen, who was a student in the department while I was head, gave me pause about my preconceptions. It turns out that most of what he knows about the technique of oil painting he learned on his own after leaving the university. I believe that skill is important in art and Stephen is certainly skillful both as a draughtsman and painter, but why didn’t he get a better formal education? “Too much talk about art and too little doing,” is his answer. The hot-shot art teachers are likely to be short on basic techniques and many art teachers want to be buddies with their students and treat them like artists rather than students. Art students end up thinking that they are making ‘real’ art in second and third year painting classes when clearly they are not. “Most of the stuff I did in school was crap,” he said. This was troubling as Stephen had spend a year in Europe and another at the Ontario College of Art before enrolling at Mount Allison which he thought, at the time, was the best place to learn to be an artist and what is even more troubling is that perhaps it was. It does not say much about the quality of art education in North America.

“I was born in the wrong century to be an artist,” Stephen said, “I would have been happier three or four centuries ago.” Other artists have told me the same thing particularly those who are realists. When he, and other artists of his ilk, look around the high end commercial galleries and major public art museums they don’t always like what they see. He feels that there is little critical and, hence, commercial interest in the kind of work he does. “There is a lot of stuff out there that is just bad, but gets attention and brings in the big bucks,” he said. “Look at Tracy Emin.” He stops painting and brings up some images of her drawing on his smart phone to show me. I have to agree that the drawings, at least on the phone, look pitiful. “She’s hot stuff in Britain and internationally,” he said. I can offer him no reason why. Stephen is a long way from a full blown reactionary. He does like some contemporary art as do I, but it is easy to understand his frustration. “I can’t see it getting any better,” I add, which doesn’t help much.

“You know the urge to paint realistically does go back a long way,” I said, “Look at the caves of Altamira and Lascaux. Lord knows what purpose they served, but they are damn fine images.” I pressed Stephen to tell me what he thought about progress in art. “Is it linear or does it go in circles?,” I asked. “It sort of jumps around,” he said. “It is hard to think in terms of progress when you see what people painted five hundred years ago. Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Rubens are pretty damn impressive. Hard to improve on quality like that,” he added. “I have a big thing on surface,” I said, “The way those three guys throw paint around; the three dimensional surface of their work. You just don’t see that in illustrations in books.” “You know,” Stephen said, “an artist should be allowed to touch work like that in galleries just to get the feeling of the paint.” While not a really practical idea, I know where he is coming from and I certainly would like to rub my hand over a juicy late Rembrandt painting. I used to blend colours in my paintings with my fingers and the palm of my hand and that felt good. So far, I have not seen Stephen get that tactile while painting. Time will tell. So far he has stuck to brushes and the odd poke of a pencil point to make a line in wet paint.

“I do talk quite a bit to Will (William) Forrestall about art in Fredericton. We do have some stuff in common,” he said. That is interesting as I know Will rather well myself and have talked to him a number of times, but have never put the the two of them together. They both graduated from Mount Allison’s fine arts programme many years ago and they have both been able to eke out a living as artists. I should have guessed, as both of them are realists and removed from the mainstream of contemporary art and Fredericton is a small place. Will, like his father Tom, paints in egg tempera rather than oil, but, unlike his father, generally paints still-lifes. “I like Will’s stick-to-it-ness. He is an odd man out, like myself,” Stephen said. “Your surface qualities are really different,” I said, “tempera is dry and flat and far removed of the richness of your oil surface,” I added. “True,” he said, “but art is not all about surface, it is about intent and there is certainly intent in Will’s paintings.” And what is intent?, I thought. If it exists, then Stephen paintings must, and do, exhibit the quality as well. We had talked around the subject since starting this project. Intent is a certain seriousness about the act of painting and keeping to the qualities of your own beliefs about art. In short, it is stubbornness in the face of opposition to the mainstream which both Stephen and Will continue to do.

It was nearly four o’clock and because of the overcast sky, too dark to paint with natural light. The artificial light, which Stephen had bounced off the ceiling of the kitchen, wasn’t, as I said before, was really working well, so we decided to stop. “Why don’t we continue this conversation over dinner,” I said, “Let’s pick up Sophie and go to the Schnitzel Haus; perhaps German food will get us in the mood to talk about your time in Berlin and German art.” Stephen said, “What do you think?,” giving me a look at the painting which he had been working on for the past two hours. “Well, it does look like me.” “I think it going to take a lot more work. I think I want to do another oil sketch after this one before I move on to a finished painting,” he said. What is meant by finished appeared to be another topic for another time.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Friday, 30 August, 2013.

20 July 2013

A couple of days later we are back in my kitchen to start the second session of Stephen painting my portrait. We are trying for a schedule of about every other day, at the same time of around two in the afternoon, depending on the weather as he wants to use natural light and for it to work, it needs to be sunny. Normally the plan is work for around two hours. The plan now is for a couple of oil sketches, some drawings, all leading to a larger finished painting. Everything based, of course, on direct observation–no photography. Stephen has used photography in the past as an aid to memory, but really doesn’t like it. “Photographs make it too easy,” he says, “and, besides you can tell when a painting based on a photo.”

It was a portrait of Stephen’s based on photographs, that of the poet Alden Nowlan (2009, 125cm x 100cm), that was included in an exhibition I curated at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Art Treasures of New Brunswick, earlier this year that made me want to learn about how the artist worked. Stephen did the painting as a commission for the University of New Brunswick Library. What drew me to the painting was the evidence of the artist’s struggle. This was no slick photo realist painting or usual university official portrait. I have seen plenty of both. They are all over the place at universities, mine included, which look like painted photographs of really boring people. I had known Alan and he wasn’t boring and Stephen’s painting made him look like how he was, a very interesting person.

It’s hard to explain what I mean by struggle, but I know it when I see it and it’s a good thing. It is the quality that separates art from the mundane. Where to find struggle? I see it in the paintings Rubens, Halls, Sargent and Freud among others. In the finished product it might look easy, but there is the evidence of fight in every brush stroke from these artists. There is movement in the paint that comes together in some sort of dance. I saw those qualities in Stephen’s painting of Nowlan. Now, I was hoping to see that struggle first hand as he painted my portrait. Perhaps, I am being overly romantic and in today’s Postmodern art world, if that’s is where we are, I plead guilty.

Today Stephen was painting. Laying down the base lines, the underpainting, with thick brush strokes of paint. He was looking intently at me while I was trying to keep somewhat still and at the same taking down notes in my little black book. If he wasn’t going to use photography, then I wasn’t going to record our conversations. I figured we could be both old fashioned and as out of touch with technology as humanly possible. “I try always to work at the peak of my abilities,” he said in answer to my rather vague question about methods of working. “I am always looking for something new,” Stephen continued. New, when you are talking about a tradition, oil painting, that goes back to the early 15th. century, is a loaded concept. What’s ‘new’? What’s ‘different’? Is there anything that is truly new painting or are we talking about different? Every work for an artist is new even if it looks similar to what they may have done before. Different might be hanging your painting upside down (it has been done) and the result is likely: so what? New might be the invention of Cubism or as simple as seeing the world in a different way and showing it in your art.

When Stephen was talking about something new, he was not talking about me. He could have been painting a picture of a potted flower and still would have been looking for something new. There is much talk about originality when it comes to the contemporary visual arts. It appears that there are unlimited amounts of originality and it is the chief quality that separates good art from the bad. I do not agree, and neither does Stephen; originality is not the same as new. What, at best, passes for original in the visual arts is usually variations on a theme. The upside down thing, red in place of blue, ironic takes on historic art works and so on. The worst claim for originality is based on the pure ignorance of art history. How many exhibitions I have been to of blank canvases, empty frames, rocks on the floor or inane text painted on the wall? Too many and counting. Idea art, if there is such a thing, is good once, but it pales in repetition. Marcel Duchamp has much to answer for. New, on the other hand, happens when each an artist makes a mark on a piece of paper or a brush mark on canvas; those marks have never been made before nor will they ever be repeated. Good is an entirely different subject and certainly does not happen as often as original or new.

Good is the subject of many of my conversations with Stephen while he is painting my portrait. “Painting is about small things,” he said, “trying to get it right at the outset.” He was paying much attention to laying down the underlying darks and lights in the picture’s composition. “It’s what is in between the lines that’s important.”, he continued. As a painter myself, I understand what he is saying and, indeed, doing. You always need to be one step ahead of what is on a canvas. It’s rather like a conductor of a symphony orchestra where you need to be at least one beat, and likely more, ahead the orchestra and have some feeling where the music is going. The baton is signaling what is next, not what is already happening. Music has much more in common with painting beside the use of many common terms like composition, texture, rhythm and colour. There is, however, the question of interpretation. In music you have the performance and performers and the work of the composer who writes the music. The painter must do both. The interpretation of a painting is done by the viewer, but it is passive not like the role of a performer by whose action a composer’s music is brought into life either well or, perhaps, badly. Painters interpret what they see, or think, and then physically make the object (the painting), in essence both performance and composition. Music, and its relation to painting, is also the subject of a lot of our conversations.

I normally have streaming radio playing in the background while we work and it is always tuned to classical stations. Streaming radio, music played through a computer to a radio, is the greatest thing since sliced bread as I can listen to classical music 24/7 from all over the world without insipid comments or commercials. Today it was a station from Greece that plays nonstop Baroque music. “What’s that?” he said, “Henry Purcell?” Turning my head to check the radio which is close by, as it often displays what’s playing, and to my surprise, Stephen was right. He has a very good ear for music, even for that he has never heard before which is something that I like to think I can do as well. “Stephen,” I said, “you know this is rather like walking into an art museum where you have never been before and picking out paintings you have not seen before and know correctly who did them?”

“It’s true,” he answered, “it is like know a code and once you have mastered it, you have it.” A painter’s style is like a signature. Even if an artist changes their apparent style, like Picasso, over their lifetime they leave clues to their identity. Of course, it helps to know something about art history if you are going to play this game and Stephen does know a fair bit about the subject.

We keep coming back to Sargent and Freud who, to both of our minds, are bookends to late 19th. and 20th. century portraiture. What they have in common is their paint quality and I am not referring to the brand of paint they used, but their painterliness. They use a lot of paint expressively in their work to get their point across. “It sure would have been neat to have been in their studios, a fly on the wall, and watch them work,” he said. It is the nature of the craft that artists work alone without an audience. There is, however, that wonderful Courbet painting The Painter’s Studio (1855) with everybody (and their dog) from Paris society watching the master paint. God knows what the naked lady is doing watching him paint a landscape. I certainly would have been interested in watching Courbet paint and he did include a contemporary art critic (Charles Baudelaire) in the painting.

Actually, as the subject of Stephen’s painting it is difficult to watch what is happening on the canvas directly. I see that the back of the canvas and his palette, watch as he put the brush to the palette and then, try to figure what is going in the painting. I have to wait until we take a coffee break about half way into the sitting and, of course, at the end of the session, to see what is going on. We sit quite close during the sessions. This does afford me the smell of the paint which I quite enjoy. I ask him about smell and touch. “Yes, there is something quite special about the smell of the paint and the oil. Doesn’t happen with acrylic paint. The touch is the touch. What you feel with the pressure of the brush against the canvas.” It was just around four o’clock and we decided to stop. I had a look at what Stephen had accomplished and was pleased with what I saw. He, on the other hand, wasn’t. “It’s got a long way to go,” he said. I knew then that I would be sitting in my kitchen with Stephen painting my picture for some time to come.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Monday, 19 August, 2013.

18 July 2013
(This is the first of series. There will be one post for each day of the settings. They will be published for the next several weeks.)

My friend, the artist, Stephen Scott likes to take his summers away from his Fredericton area studio and home to travel and paint in a different location. This year he decided on going back to his roots in Sackville, New Brunswick where he had studied art at Mount Allison University from 1974 to 1978. I was the head of the fine arts department when he was a student here. Now he is nearly a senior citizen and certainly a senior artist. What that makes me, is left to your imagination. Soon after his arrival this summer, we fell into a conversation over coffee about the act of painting. I told him about a book, Man with a Blue Scarf, I had read written by British art critic, Martin Gayford, of sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud and how interesting it was to follow their conversation over the very long time it took Freud to complete the painting. One thing led to another and we decided to repeat the idea with me as the subject. Stephen is a very good portrait painter and likes to paint from life. It is a very different process from painting from photographs and Stephen, like Freud, is a very slow and meticulous artist.

So on a mid-July afternoon, Stephen set up shop in my kitchen for what we both hope would result in a good portrait. Since I am retired, I have the time sit as long as it takes and as we both like to talk, we began. The first thing was to do a couple of pencil sketches to try to figure out how my face worked and a pose for the oil sketch. We floated the idea of a large painting if time allowed, but the oil sketch was to be around twelve by eighteen inches. Alex Colville had just died and we talked a great deal about him and his work as he was an artist we both admired. Alex’s paintings and his methods are very different than Stephen’s, but they are both about the real — what is in front of you, translated into artistic reality by vision and thought.

“Colville’s life is so different than mine. His experiences of the war formed him and his art”; said Stephen, “My life was nothing like that.” Yet, to my mind there was a common bond and that was being raised in Maritime Canada. “Being from here you have more in common than you think”; I countered, “New Brunswick is not a major art centre, not in Colville’s time nor yours. It was isolated from modern contemporary art and not exactly the centre of the art universe today.” Alex was born in Toronto, but moved to Amherst, Nova Scotia as a child. Amherst, a border town, it might be noted, is about ten miles from Sackville, New Brunswick. Stephen was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and raised in Fredericton. Both artists were educated at Mount Allison University in Sackville.

Stephen was looking closely at me as he continued the first pencil sketch on paper. He was looking at the natural light which was coming through a glass paneled door on my left that resulted in dramatic shadows. I had to stay somewhat still and remain in a pose that I could hold for many hours. Age has carved a number of nooks and crannies into my face that do form a lot of places for shadows to form. He works quickly with a pencil using solid line with little or no erasure. His technique comes from many years of experience. Drawing is all about doing over and over again.

I told him about how I based my teaching of drawing on how I was taught photography in the US Army and that was by repetition. “Every class, in first year drawing, was the same. You start with quick gestural drawings and slowly build up to longer poses. They were pretty much one hundred per-cent from the figure and there were lots and lots of crits”; I said,  “and by the end of the school year most of my students could draw OK.” Stephen agreed that drawing is key: “If you cannot draw well, you never will be a good artist.” Yet, today drawing is played down in the education of the artist in favour of ideas. Drawing is passed off as ‘mere’ skill. I repeated my mantra to Stephen:  “I can teach someone to draw or paint, but I can’t teach someone to be an artist.”

We stopped for coffee, the first of many times that we would do that, and a break. I had a chance to look at the drawings. To me, they seemed to capture a good likeness and certainly a sense of the lighting of the situation. Stephen told me of visiting the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton as a child: “Right away I was impressed with their collection of British art”, he said, “It looked like what I thought painting should look like.” The gallery does have a very good collection of British art thanks to the largesse of Lord Beaverbrook who both build the gallery and supplied the collection in the early 1950s. Stephen was lucky when, at an early age, was able to see high quality real art something that many other Canadian artists were denied while they were growing up in areas of the country where there were no civic galleries. It does make a difference and, in Stephen’s case, would prove important when he finally made up his mind to be an artist years later. Childhood is critical to who we become and just visiting an art gallery as a child can change your life forever.

Coffee over, Stephen said, “Let’s paint.” I was keen to see what palette (colours) he would use and was surprised about how limited it was–mars yellow, ivory black, permanent rose, yellow ochre, vermillion, mars violet and titanium white. “It’s a palette that (John Singer) Sargent used.” Stephen remarked. “Sargent would have, of course, used flake white as there was no titanium white in his day. I sometimes kill the titanium by adding a bit of flake and sometimes, in addition, I use brown madder for my darks.”, he added. It is remarkable just how much you can get out of a limited palette. Artists in the distant past had to get along with a very limited palette as many modern pigments just didn’t exist, but even artists like Sargent liked to use a smaller choice of colour and, often, their choices made for remarkably stable paintings that have stood the test of time with little are no shifts of colour. Beside mixing two or more colours together to get another colour, artists, Stephen included, rely on local colour to fool the eye and make us think a colour is there that really only exists in our imagination. Local colour is the effect of a colour being seen next, or within, another colour which to the eye looks like a different colour. Trust me it works. Cut a hole in a piece of cardboard and isolate a colour in an old master painting like a Rubens, he was a master at this, gauge the colour, then take cardboard away and see what happens. You have to do this test with a real painting not an illustration in a book.

Stephen also uses mostly medium to large hog bristle flats and brights brushes even in a small painting like the oil sketch he is working today. (A bright is a short bristled flat brush. A flat is, of course, a flat bristled brush; your classic oil painting brush. There are also filberts and rounds, but let’s not get too technical.) I was surprised that he didn’t use much smaller brushes. “I can use the edge to get the detail I want.”, he said. Stephen likes to use walnut oil rather than linseed oil as a medium which again surprised me. “I thought that you would use a more classical medium with your paint.” “No, I like to keep it simple.”, he replied. (A classical medium, which is what you use to control the texture and viscosity of your paint, would be a mixture of linseed oil, damar varnish and turpentine.) I had the impression from looking at his paintings in the past that he was using a more complex technique. I was wrong. It is the result that is important rather than any technique provided that the painting in the end is stable and by stable I mean that the art work will endure for a very long time. I am quite certain that this is the case with Stephen’s paintings.

Another surprise was that Stephen used a pencil to lay down an outline on the canvas before he kicked in with oils. “Yes, I know that might bleed through”, he said when I questioned him on his technique, “but, there will be so much paint on the finished painting, that it will never happen.” You have to understand that I was always a purest following Ralph Mayer’s book, The Artist’s Handbook of Material and Techniques, when I taught oil painting. Use vine charcoal, never compressed, for an outline, then rub as much off as you can and apply a fixative before oil ever touches the canvas. I was learning a lot from Stephen, in particular, not to be so anal about classical technique. “Well, if it does bleed through, we will both be dead and gone”, I assured Stephen.

The important thing that he does do, however, is to use high quality paint such as Williamsburg, Michael Harding and Winsor & Newton. “ You should never skimp on paint. It will come back to haunt you”, he said. About this time, we were both getting tired. We had agreed that each session would be around two hours long and at about the same time of day, two to four in the afternoon, so the light would be about the same. “ That does it”, Stephen said, “Let’s leave it for a day or two.” At last, I had a chance to take a look at the canvas. “ It’s only the beginning.”, he continued. To me, it was a very nice beginning, but I knew that I would be sitting in the same chair for many hours to come.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Sunday, 11 August, 2013.