Index

The Attic Room

History Room

Gallery

The Street

The New Plan

 I have come to a decision!  Since moving all the painting updates to my new website (not visited yet??) this blogspot has been hanging around a bit.  I have decided to bring this back to life, but closely coupled to the website.  As the website is on a shared server, there is no simple way to provide a comment service, and I don't want to reinvent one if I don't have to.  So I am going to redo this blogspot to follow the page structure of my website so that it will allow comments to be added and so that it feels as joined up as possible.  That means that I will be deleting all the pages I have done here and adding new ones that link up to the website.

The New Website

 I've added another snapshot to the page.  I hope to get it public within the week.

It's gone public!!!

gavinrobertpeacock.uk

A New Street Scene

Here we go - I'm off on a new adventure.  I have done street scenes a few times.  "Street Levels" was an experiment in impersonating a ravine.  "A Shopping Street" tried to capture something of a nebulous town centre.  Then I did two paintings from real streets: one in Bellagio and the other in Prague.  This one is from the imagination and is to be a street in the rain.  I may rename the painting as such.  I tried this before and failed.

Street (2021)

The Toymaker is Made

That wraps up The Toymaker.  That was a good fun painting to break the gap: nearly a year since my last one.  The next one will come along much faster.  I think I had better plan it.

Toymaker Trouble

Working at home in acrylics on my club evening painting.  Disgraceful.  Little bits and pieces and a complete hash.  These things are sent us to make us better painters.

Work done to fix that complete hash.  It is time to sit on this for a bit and come back to it.

New Website Progress

I have ben working hard at putting in a VR menu for selecting the page skin.  This allows switching to a more standard HTML page.  I had a VR flower hanging around, so I decided to recycle it for the job.

I have also been aligning the VR skin with the graphic skin (= standard HTML page) for the home page and the history room.  The content now replicates on both, however, there is still a lot of work to get the graphic skin to use the available space properly.

Lately I have been working on a VR book simulation.  Particularly as I am going to be putting in a fair amount of text, there is a limit to the number of sheets of paper I can leave lying around.  A book is clearly a lot of work so was thinking of avoiding it.  However, I finally got my head around how to break up one of my terribly-overloaded constructs and that made the book idea much easier.  Still lots of glitches in it, and one piece of (small) extra functionality to add to get it to work, but it is finally coming together.

There are lots of items of functionality I have backed up, but the only functionality left now before first release is the reactive page handling.  After that, it is just the remaining content.

The Toymaker Himself

 Another Tuesday evening, and some decent progress.  I am enjoying this painting now, and that's always a good sign.  I have finally attacked the toymaker himself, which I may have (with reasonably argued grounds) been putting off.  Even better, the face came out close to what I had envisioned.

The Toymaker Toy Appears... and a background

 Having had a successful internet connection stay up in the North last week, Robert Dutton's demo went ahead as rescheduled.  That means there was nothing stopping a Tuesday evening class this week.

The Toymaker Page

I have launched into the robot, and its looking quite good now.  The painting may yet work.  At the very least I had a lot more fun than last time, and that's why I paint in the first place.

And the following week... I finally have had a stab at the background.

Lilies Plan

Usually about this time I would have an update of the painting I did Tuesday evening.  However, every third Tuesday of the month is demo night at the Club, so no further work.  This month was woodlands in mixed media... or at least would have been.  The internet gremlins struck a decisive blow and we only got about a quarter of an hour in.  When I say "internet gremlin", I believe the gremlin in question was shaped like a workman down the street.  So it looks like next Tuesday is out as well, as that's when it is rescheduled.

To keep things going I've decided to start a home project.  I took this photo of our pond and thought this would make a good painting:

I like the strong contrast and the deep colours of the pond.  I like the way the flower is caught shining in the sunlight.  I have a 10 inch square canvas waiting for this image, so that's my plan.  AS this is at home it will be in oils.

New Website Info

 As mentioned in my last post, I have been working hard to get my new website up and running.  As it it still some way to go, I have decided to report what I am up to in a new page.  Here's a link to it:

Having finished with the DIY, this is now my number one project.  Well that's the theory.  There's always the sunny weather to distract.

The Toymaker Kick-Off

Did I mention I was stopping this blog in favour of starting up my own website?  I might have.  Guess what: I'm still not there yet.  However, as I have got to the end of all that DIY, I have started the painting up again and so here's a new entry - the first one not from the backlog in lots of months.

This should be curious at the very least.  Meanwhile I thought I would start a page on what I am doing with the website as it is taking up so much of my time.

Bookworm

 Another from 2019, and this completes my backlog up to April 2019.  There were a couple of oil paintings as well (one from Skye and the other of Prague), but I didn't record their production.  I decided not to because I was experimenting with a different way of plotting the scenes out.  Ironically, these oil painting went particularly well.

Back to Bookworm... this wasn't a fantastically successful painting, so having given all the details of its construction, it is not a good demonstration on how to construction anything.  It has its good points and it does show up some of my thinking that goes on behind the scenes.

Bookworm

Puddle Princess

 OK, I know I said I was creating my own website... it's taking a little longer than anticipated.  It will be really good when it's done, but it's not done.  So I'm back here again.  No new paintings as I have been very busy in finishing off the house.  Not much left so I have a bit of time coming my way.  In the meantime, I thought I would do another from the backlog.

Puddle Princess

This one went down very well in the 2019 summer exhibition, so I hope you'll appreciate a bit of background here and seeing what it looked like at various stages.

WADAC Winter Exhibition 2020

We're live!!

I'm still trying to fix the scrolling bug.  Fingers crossed that will work soon.

The scrolling bug after months and months of being ignored has been finally eliminated.  As the number of painting exhibited has broken the 60 mark, I've reused the virtual tour from the summer exhibition, so you can now walk around the paintings should you so desire.  There's a wall at the end which is a bit bare, so a few more contributions would be welcome.

For those using iPad I send my apologies: I can no longer support Safari as Apple has pulled Safari for Windows.

Ordinarily, the club would be gearing up for its "Affordable Art Show".  With the lockdown, we've accepted this just isn't going to hit town, and so we're going on line:

Winter Exhibition Online

On the plus, we can keep this going for all of December, instead of the weekend.  If anyone does drift into Wallingford, you can drop by St. Martin Street to see a handful of the full selection, and we'll keep that rotated.

A Pause

This will be my last entry for a while as I concentrate on a replacement.  Blogger has been useful to get this started, but it is not enabling me to do what I really want.  Hopefully, I shall have something back on line before long.

What You May Find, Part III

Another Tuesday.  No meetings this time, just the intended artwork.  I was a little bit more on form this week, and this painting may be steering back in a good direction.  The jury is still out.

What Yoy May Find

Some more details added.  Getting close now.  I almost like the painting, but a couple of awkward elements still get to me.

Another Tuesday, and that's your lot.  All done, or at least as much as I'm going to do.

Bunkfest Bubbles

I've been a bit busy over the weekends with my head stuck in VR and Tuesdays have disappeared to a meeting and a demo, so I've gone back into the backlog to keep the blog going.

Bunkfest Bubbles

This one was painted last year with the shameful intention of gaining votes in the exhibition.  Yes, I can be that cynical.  Kids popping bubbles at Bunkfest?  What can go wrong?  Here's its shout.

What You May Find, Part II

A bit of a gap since I was last painting.  I had a week off, which ought to have resulted in more work, not less.

What You May Find Page

It took me a while to get back into it, but ideas are bubbling up again.

A day later than intended, but another update.  A lot of paint slapped on, but that's the rough cut.  Now I just have to follow whatever is needed.

Summer Isles Aftershock

I thought I'd have a bit of a moan.

This is not really a project, so it's a bit outside of my "Mission Statement", but...
My Summer Isles painting did not make it into the SAA Paint magazine "Artist Photo - You Paint It".  On the whole, that's not really very striking, except that I've seen the other paintings that were submitted.  There were not that many, so no chance of getting lost in the crush.  Now, I accept that I am naturally biased in favour of my own paintings, but out of the six published paintings, only one came even close.  Most were frankly awful.  So why didn't mine get in?  It was clearly better than five, and I think distinctly better than their best.

This was clearly marked as a competition.  So what were the selection criteria?

My first thoughts were that the decision was very subjective.  Art is subjective isn't it?  Well certainly five of those paintings were anything but beautiful.  The original photo had a wonderful simplicity of colour and form that got trodden underfoot by ham-fisted brush daubing.  They clearly did not have sufficient control over their chosen medium for such a delicate subject.  That is not to say their blobby style won't work elsewhere, but this really did require subtly.

My next thought was that they were aiming to give a feel for the range of techniques so that some variety was shown.  For example, there was one done using wax - fair play.  Also, my painting was similar to one of those there shown.  However, that does not make this a competition.  Moreover, most of the paintings had nothing to chose between them.

Next niggling thought: they didn't want to show up the original painting by the professional artist.  That original was in pastel, which I admit is a medium I've never mastered, but can be very impressive.  In this instance it was not that impressive, but okay.  However, there is more to being a professional than getting it spot on every time, and you don't get far unless you take risks.  I can make my own dismal failures as much as anyone else.

It is clearly the case that the SAA want to present less than perfect artworks.  They advertise themselves as a society for all artists, and that includes all stages of learning.  A stated aim of the magazine is to inspire, and to inspire you need to make the goals reachable.  That means a mixture demos, and they pretty much do this.  However, that doesn't stop you celebrating the best of that inspiration when it lands on your doorstep.  So may be they intentionally want to show a variety of levels, but this is a competition.  Competitions are for the best.

Here's what I now think was going on: this was not a competition.  Whilst I wouldn't say that the paintings were picked at random, I would say that no selection criteria existed and that a couple of SAA people picked what they thought looked interesting, whatever 'interesting' meant to them.  It is the curse of modern art: as photography can take the perfect copy, the value of a painting cannot be in its perfection.  No one therefore looks for perfection, we look for added value.  The trouble is that added value is a slippery thing and cannot be pinned down.  The result is that people are prepared to pick winners based on groundless instinct, for who can contradict them?  It no longer matters if an artwork is good as long as some form of personal pain went into it.  The artwork is therefore irrelevant, only the plea that accompanies it.  This gives of us a culture of mediocrity.

This is plain unfair on those of us who are trying our best to produce something decent.  If you are going to run it as competition, then do so.  Use your judgement.  Without it, participation is meaningless.

I don't know if many of you managed to see Grayson Perry's Art Club on Channel 4.  It was a low-key encouragement to get people doing art.  It had various celebs on that you might not have associated with art.  The paintings were mediocre, but that is fine because it is trying to inspire.  The occasional genius artwork would have been nice, but possibly in the way of the aim of the program.  On the whole I watched it for Grayson Perry who I have a lot of time for, and I have no problem with the people sending in their scrawls.  However, what I found baffling was when the celebs were asked to show how they did their paintings.  Now, although I can appreciate someone's attempted artwork without calling them a genius, why would you want to know how a painting was done when you would never wish to recreate that painting?  A demonstration of a poor painting can only be taken as an example of what not to do.  Where does that put the celeb painter?  I can't imagine anything more embarrassing.  We are celebrating mediocrity.  We can do better.  We really can do better.

So here's my plea: don't mistake inability for style.  To get a really convincing painting that captures the feel for the original scene, a lot experience in how to bend perception is required.  To beat the camera, we do not aim for copies, but to go further and make something more convincing that talks to us at a deeper level.  You can't do that purely through destruction, whether that destruction is through inability or experimentation.  The best paintings that seem real, pull apart the scene in ways that are not obvious, that slip under the radar and do not stick in the eye.

Moan accomplished.

Comments welcome!