Painting, permission and plagiarism

I love the tattoo style. One day, I will tattoo. Until then, I practise, and try to develop a style of my own.

Recently, I have remembered being blown the hell away by a gentleman called Derek Noble. I looked him up, and looked at his paintings. I love his work. I think I should reserve a large patch of skin for him.   Right lower leg, I think. Both sides. More likely, I will be able to get him at a convention some year, and he'll do a few hours worth on me. That's all off in the future though. Right now, I want to talk about influences.

It's easy for me to be influenced by another artist. It happens a lot. I imagine it happens like this to a lot of people. You see some new variation on images, some slight change to a set of understood symbols, and you add it to your own artistic vocabulary. I imagine influences apply like this to any creative endeavor (sewing, cooking, woodcarving, writing, film-making etc etc). It can be hard, especially if the new insight you have is really different for you, really profound, really hard hitting, not to fall into near- or outright plagiarism. People want to emulate their heroes. It's really common.

I'm trying hard not to plagiarize. I don't think I am - but seeing Derek's work gave me the confidence - and a sort of grammar of artistic expression - to use something that I have loved for a while. Big fat lines. Big fat fuck-off black lines. Happy man with a chubby marker pen. (of course, it's important to use varied width lines for a nice effect - more of that in the next post.) I swear, it was a revelation. Plagiarism, however, would be to copy something outright, without giving it credit as a copy. It's not creatively healthy to do either, but in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants: I see no reason that I cannot do the same
     To get the idea, imagine you want to write a novel. You have a hard time, though, thinking of how to express yourself just right, in a way you like. Maybe it's a fight scene in your book. So what do you do? You can just hammer at it and hope to stumble across a format that you like, or you can look at novels that have already been written, and see what you like. Emulate it. Take someone else's idea and bash it out of shape and into something that fits you better. Like George R.R. Martin, or Dan Abnett. Those guys write fight scenes almost blow by blow, then pull back for a big picture, then go back in close for a gory finish.

That's what it was like for me to see Derek's work. It was like getting permission to do something I had always wanted to do, and shown how it could be done. Shown the gory finish.

Without much more ado, then, I present Snake Lady, in ten parts:

Aberdeen, the Silver City

I know it's been a while since my last posting, and I've been unable to maintain my commitment to discussing and presenting artwork on this blog; I'm sure that everyone can appreciate the hectic upheaval of suddenly moving cross-country. Now the dust has settled, and I'm getting back into a routine. At any rate, my move to Aberdeen, which might as well be referred to as the Windy City, has been exciting and informative. I've met some cool people - Nicole Porter of the Nicole Porter gallery, the friendly dudes at Rapport Tattoo and Tattooed Freak Body Piercing, which I think is related.

I've also met the Aberdeen Artists Society (at least one of them), which I'm looking to become a member of when I've got some stuff to bring along. I'm hoping that there I'll have some folk to talk to about art, and perhaps receive some instruction/motivation/inspiration. Speaking of which, I've also met Kenny, of my nearest art supplies shop, The Artist's Pad.  And another thing - the Aberseen Art Gallery. It's brilliant. It's far beyond my expectations. The McBey room, where the work of Scottish artist James McBey is displayed, is magical. It also houses Rembrandt etchings, but I was't looking at them. And it has a free-to-the-public art library! Needless to say, I've had a busy wee while.

Now that my oils have come up from Glasgow, I'm looking forward to getting stuck right in. With some brand new canvas and a few photos of the Aberdeenshire village Collieston to hand, I'm about to have a batter at it.
Photos of that hilarious effort to be published on this blog, tommorow.

Oils, Inspirations and Visions

So I've recently been painting in oils. Water Miscible Oils, to be precise. They're made with safflower oil that has been chemically altered at the molecular level to be water-soluble. Paint and chemistry - together at last!

So it was important for  me to try and do some research on the subject, since I have no formal art training and I understand that oils are a highly technical medium. I want to do well right away. I read some online tutorials about the subject as preparation,  knowing, of course, that they wouldn't be quite enough. But at least I have a theoretical understanding of the very basics. I did some Googling around for these tutorials, scanned a few and discarded them, but there were two that stood out as being sufficiently nuts-and-bolts to help me - Jess Bates's website and Bill Martin's. There are, presumably, others that are technical in intention, but I'll have to get arounfdto them later.

It's also not enough to simply know how to do a thing - one also must know what to do with it. Sure I could be trying to do dry tonal exercises on spheres and cones, but to be honest that sucks boaby. I don't have the time or the canvases to spare on that, and little interest. I am aware that I'll probably have to do it to progress in the future, but right now I am focusing on having fun with the medium, mostly just figuring out for myself how the paint feels and works. The only problem is that to do anything other than dry technical exercises, it seems that one needs inspiration. And many days, I find that lacking.

Everyone has their own method of getting some inspiration together. When I feel like I need to do something, but don't have a clear idea of what I need to do, I generally round up my artbooks and leaf through them. I also do this with websites of artists whose books I don't own. So to present a very few of the colossal number artists whose work gives me ideas: dark-themed hyper-realist Michael Hussar, providing, if anything, a gruesome and insightful commentary through his symbolism (check out the piece entitles Vasoline), Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson who evidently delighted in the 'voluptuous delights of life', the expressive work of Chris Dingwell and the fantasy hyper-realism of Christophe Vacher, Paul Bonner and John Howe (I know, there's clearly something about me that loves highly detailed fantasy art). I might also suggest that one checks out the sculptorial/assemblage work of  Christopher Conte, which I discovered through the tattoo blog Needles and Sins. I love me some mechanisms and biomechanical stuff. Oddly not so much in tattoos, though.

Anyway, these are a few of the things that I am drawn to when languishing in the doldrums, or lost in need of direction. Like a dog that instinctively grubs for the roots and herbs that it somehow knows will cure it of its maladies, I return again and again to these people's work, most of all the sketches and preliminaries. There's more, of course, but that'll have to wait for another day.

So there you have it - a little technique, a little inspiration and a buttload of determination, and I'll go from here.