I learnt to draw with Robin Child at Marlborough College in the seventies.
I learnt resilience, resistance and reactivity at Camberwell School of Art.
I art directed, taught, coached and painted. I’m still painting, coaching and making music.
My work is sourced from what I see transformed into a patchwork of colour. Reflections and shadows, clouds and roads are often the figurative starting points, but my main preoccupations are abstract. However, I almost always leave the figurative elements as a way to invite the viewer in, to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.
In an increasingly ugly and mad world, I am trying to create lasting, thoughtfully crafted things of beauty. No pressure then!
Further web visibity at:
Instagram- jdjgracie
And music:
www.misterg4.bandcamp.com
Thoughts
2020.1
Matisse said that the most important thing for an artist to have was rigour and that a work of art was the result of sheer hard work. Unfortunately it’s a common misconception that artists are born with a gift that results in facile prettiness. It’s more like a virus than a gift and you always struggle. Cézanne likened the artistic adventure to the priesthood. Dégas referred to the planning and realisation of a work of art as a similar process to the execution of a crime.
All this to say that if it has any lasting worth it’s likely not to have been easy; learning to fly as you jump off the cliff never is.
My recent cliff-jumping has involved working with oil paint as if it were an extension of watercolour. Three deep colours and a glazing medium plus white when I need the contrast of opacity. With a bit of patience you get some deeply resonant areas of colour. Yum yum.
Technically it’s more flexible than watercolour and allows you to keep the handling loose and natural but there is a lot of planning needed too.
In these covid times life has changed for everyone. In the studio much is as before, but there are no exhibitions planned and the economic situation is really hitting all the arts. It’s always difficult to just plod on regardless and at the moment it’s especially so as self doubt reduces traction.
So here I am with four on the go in the studio that are challenging. After a few ‘visits’ they can and do become almost too saturated in colour; like a pinball machine you bounce around but don’t settle. So I need to simplify and calm certain areas to allow others to breathe. At the same time I’m working on digital paintings exploring it in a different way.
Exhibitions
In the Renaissance patrons commissioned work and thereby funded artists’ studios while works were being created. Over time galleries began to represent solo artists and build their reputations selling individual works. Nowadays social media has changed the landscape once more. It is possible to commission an artist without ever meeting him or her and it is also possible to give direct financial support to musicians, illustrators, bloggers et al because you believe in them and their work. Through websites and social media it is possible to get a very good idea of what works are really like but a bit difficult to imagine them on your walls.
In the past I have had numerous exhibitions in galleries, companies and in private homes but since my tbi and its consequences it has been difficult to rejoin the gallery circuit and the recent covid pandemic has put an end to many artistic endeavours of the traditional kind. Watch this space!
2021.1
Digital news
Confinement/lockdown has positive effects too. I haven’t been able to work on my paintings since October last year so I have been exploring digital painting on a Cintiq tablet. It’s really drawing rather than painting and is a no mess, no smell, no preparation instant process. So I save an hour’s energy every day.
Continuing the exploration I started with watercolour in oils, several of the pictures are a result of ‘Cotman meets Cézanne on a mac’. They will feed back into my paintings when I eventually go back to the painting studio. Others explore ´retouching’ and overdrawing photographs or patching in a pointillist way. The latest use a combination of glazing, patching, blending, dissolving, layering and hatching. I’m beginning to find how to manipulate this new language.
To make things more difficult I’m now working on a non landscape image as well. In parallel I am experimenting with print techniques and adjusting my colour selection to compensate for changes brought by the print process.
2021.2
Good writers write, great writers write what they know.
Or something like that….Mark Twain and Hemingway both discussed this.
Some major truth here. Same for painters methinks or any real creative. Authenticity and being in touch with who you are, what makes you tick, what gets you up in the morning are what really matters. Otherwise you can only hope to produce slick, skillful, hollow decoration. Plenty of that around masquerading as the real thing, being promoted as such, but will not merit a second glance in the cool light of tomorrow.
A second glance is what we’re after and a third, fourth and fifth. We want to bring the viewer in, share emotions, visions, opinions, create a dialogue; not deliver a quick fix.
2021.3
The digital painting process is essentially a drawing process, or it is as it’s developing for me. A plastic nib is hardly a brush, but using software that has thousands of possible combinations of mark-making I am using only three ‘brushes’, pastel, linseed loaded and glaze; pastel, oil paint and watercolours if you like, with varying intensity, opacity, size, et al. I mix them all up and voilà as I might say. The combination is interesting as it would be impossible using ‘real’ materials.
Then there is the issue of scale and size. I’m working on a double portrait which will be 120*60 cms when printed out. The tablet has a 22 inch diagonal screen so I can only work on a small part at a time and then zoom out to see the whole picture at about 20% of the size it will be. The smaller image is graphically much tighter and can be deceptive.
But, despite or perhaps because of the issues I am making progress. I will probably need glasses soon and will wear holes in the screen with the scratching!
Drawing is about understanding what we see, not copying, but transforming it into a visual language and fixing it to the surface. Each mark is a decision leading the viewer to understand how we saw what we saw. Adding colour adds another dimension, other responses, but colour without drawing is flesh without bones; painting is essentially an extension of drawing.
The rigour of this approach leads to carefully crafted, considered, long-lasting works; the antidote for the social media’s quick fix and instant fame. Today everyone is an artist; no they are not.
2021.4
I have always worked in series. When you start on the first one a second suggests itself and to avoid losing the initial focus you start the second; very quickly you have a series.
My latest series explores multiple viewpoints from the same motif. A painter or photographer selects from one point of view and fixes the image, but our eyes and brains entertain constantly moving and changing images, using peripheral vision, focus and scanning. This new series of square images attempts to address this showing varied viewpoints, lights and colours. They are designed to be seen together but are not inter-reliant compositionally.
But when all is said and done they are worthless if no-one gets to see them.
2021.5
After ten months of absence from my painting studio here we go again. Curiously not as alien as it might have been.Transferring from the digital process back to painting and alternating between the two will be interesting, to see if one will feed the other. Mixing on the palette rather than selecting the colour directly from a colour wheel is one of the main differences; creating the harmony on the palette before applying it to the canvas.
2022.1
I have been pushing the boundaries using photographic starting points for the latest series of digital paintings. The mark-making has got smaller and smaller; as such the photographic source remains evident and you may wonder what it is you’re looking at, more photograph than painting? Actually the meeting of the two, the hybrid is where the interest lies. The more I managed to remain loose and painterly the better they seem to me.
Be yourself. This is a non- competitive, solitary, determined stance; essential to the creative process. Like most important things it’s true to life in general; failure to adhere will lead to misery.
So social media success et al is unimportant. I’d rather be ‘quietly successful’. Easier to live with as fame may well be index-linked to fortune; but this way madness lies.
I’m out on the track in the car as I have been for sometime now. Lap by lap I improve, leaving the braking a little later, timing the gear changes better, getting closer to the optimum line. Not far away are other cars similar to mine but not the same; they’re in their own races. Way out front are the specials covered in sponsor stickers. Not my scene. A similar distance behind are the beginners just learning the ropes, getting a feel for their cars.
Lap after lap the car and I continue our journey, smoother and smoother. Occasionally we lose concentration, traction, timing, motivation and we drift off the line into the gravel traps. No harm done except to pride. Back in the saddle so to speak, onwards and upwards.