How not to be Precious in Studio Painting - Lewis Noble

okay so today what i wanted to have a quick chat about was um how i approached some of the studio work that i do um i was talking about a little bit last week um but uh it's it's the kind of use of the sketches uh the small paintings that i do when i'm outside and i come back and i collage with them and i um kind of gather ideas that way and what i want to talk about this week was um some of the things that go through my mind when i'm actually approaching my studio paintings using those small sketches and small paintings that i do outside and and how i um use those in the studio to to go forward producing work which takes a little bit longer there's a little bit more involved more layers more texture and so what i've got in front of me at the moment is um just some boards these are just little gesso panels they're quite nice to work on but they you know they don't have to have this kind of cradling on a lot of the time i'm working on just pieces of small board but these could be larger canvases like this one or they could be just canvases or they could be on board or they could be more work on paper or large pieces of paper really what it is it's about taking the work that i've done outside um playing around with that in the studio getting those collage pieces that i do and then pushing that forward into more involved pieces with more texture more layering just things that take a little bit longer that i'd like to work on in the studio so like i said it could be this size it could be this size or you know on anything really but it's really the approach um there's sort of things i think about when i'm going from those uh studies if you like um to the studio work in front of me is my ipad and um what i've got on here if i've put together i'll do a bit more in a minute i'll show you what's on here but i've put together that sort of a an album um with a few of the sketches that i'm thinking about working from now that's quite a handy way of doing it because um a lot of the time my sketches are either in different sketchbooks or they might be on bits of loose paper or they might even be sold or they might be looking at pieces of work that i'd done quite a long time ago and i'm using those for sort of inspiration going forward so it's nice to kind of gather together um a group of uh pieces that i want to look at that i've got the the look or some of the color or the marks the things i'm kind of interested in at the moment um so i can use those um to to kind of push forward the pieces that i'm working on now so i'll show you that now if you like yeah so as i was saying i've got the ipad in front of me and i just kind of had that propped up over here but it has a you know a few of the recent um sketches that i did uh sort of harbor wall type paintings like really interested in those i thought that was going quite well um you know so i've got this kind of um not a slideshow as a sort of collection um of things i'm interested in right now i've just put them together so i can kind of flip backwards and forwards and i can say i quite like this mark that's here or like that marker where it's dark down the side and you know there's all those kinds of things and maybe pick a you know a different type of mark out of one of the other ones so it's nice to be able to flip backwards and forwards between different sketches um what i like to do is pull different bits out of different ones rather than taking a sketch or a small painting um and trying to just blow that up make it a bigger version a lot of the time i don't really see the point of just doing a sketch and or what you know because i look at these small pieces of work and they're finished they're they're done um i don't need to do another version of it i don't need to do a bigger version of it there's no value in that um to me to do a just do a larger version of the same thing over again but what i do want to do is take those ideas and push them forward and turn them into something else so it's good to have this collection and i can just pick different bits out of different ones and then turn it into something new okay so i have these four small boards in front of me i'll probably only work on a couple of them actually right now but i just want to um have something on the go so um i've got something to talk about while i'm while i'm doing it so what i like to do is you know i'm just looking at these um like i said i'm just looking at these pieces of work there in front of me i just want to make some marks on these boards um you know just glancing up at these in this sort of treating them almost as if they were the the landscape again or the seascape in this case um so just picking picking bits out in the same sort of way that i do when i'm when i'm outside sketching so i'm sort of sketching from the from from the paintings if you like um and like i was saying i i don't want to end up with versions of these you know just bigger versions or or just you know versions of them on a different surface or something um because like i said there's no there's no there's no point in that i don't i don't see the point in doing that they're they're kind of done those and uh i want these to be something else i think that's quite that's quite important for me is that each piece of work has a individual purpose to it so i'm just sort of looking at them and picking out lines and shapes and colors and just having a play and really again using these uh pieces of work on the uh on the ipad in front of me here as a starting point as a as a beginning um and hopefully these will end up going somewhere else [Music] and you might be wondering why i've got more than more than one piece on the go and i think i've talked about this in the last videos that it's um it's really useful i think to have a series of work [Music] on the go because then it i can carry ideas through from one painting to the next um i don't have to feel like everything is invested into the one thing um because that way you know you i feel that i'm you've got that that preciousness that you know has to be you know this is the one painting that i'm doing so you know this is the one here that i'm doing and it's got to say everything that i uh i want to say and that's puts an awful lot of pressure onto one little painting so it's much better i think to have a group of paintings a series of paintings that are um working together in a along along a theme so i can play around with that theme in this case you know looking at the harbour the harbour wall those sorts of shapes and textures and colors and uh not any one painting doesn't have to do everything [Applause] another good reason for working in a series like this is that this is something i often talk about on the workshops that i run um is that if you've got a painting you know if you're working on a couple of paintings like this working away at this one and it gets to a point where you're looking at it and thinking you know i really like this so no it's not finished at the moment but i really like this painting is this it's really working it's not it's not finished but there's something about it that i really like and uh but i don't know what to do with i don't know where to go next and i don't want to ruin it [Music] i don't want to spoil it by overworking it now if you've only got one thing you've suddenly come to a point where you've got nowhere to go you've kind of painted yourself into a corner um by you know getting a areas of the painting that you really like but you're kind of stuck because you don't know how to finish it you don't know where to go with it um so maybe it won't go anywhere it could just end up sitting in the studio for months until you get sick of it and paint over it i'm speaking from experience you can probably tell um so if you've got two or three or four then each painting doesn't have that pressure on it doesn't um it doesn't have to be perfect so if you get to a point say with this one and say hey you know i really like this part of the painting it's working really well i'm not really sure what to do with it okay i'll tell you what it does i'll put that one to the side for a minute maybe bring this one in carry on working on this one do a bit of work on this one and hopefully over the course of the afternoon or the day or the week or whatever um you may end up preferring this this this second one or you might find well i actually know i've done that thing i really liked in this one i've done it again in this one so it stops becoming quite so precious i hope this is making sense i'm painting and trying to think and paint at the same time um so it takes that precious preciousness away and i can say okay well i've done it again i've done that thing i really liked i've done it again so it's not so precious anymore so you're not so afraid to take risks with that um [Music] with that painting you thought was really nice or bits of it you thought were really nice i do feel like i'm gambling a little bit but never mind i'm just looking at this um whether you can see it let's bring it up there's a kind of red dark red uh kind of rusty thing going on there and that one i'm quite enjoying so i just thought i'd get some of this uh rusty kind of cover in there it's quite nice maybe get some of that orange in there as well i'm not going to go on orange i'm not going to go on too long with these really um because i do like to keep these videos fairly short because um i don't want to bore you but you can see i'm just sort of [Music] just playing around with them really just not expecting them to go anywhere at this stage certainly not at this stage it's too early you know i've only just started doing them but i think it's nice to actually let's see this is kind of working a bit better than this one over here so maybe i'll just leave that for a second [Music] what is it going on there that's working and this may be too much of that i'll scrape back through it a bit [Music] i might bring some of that quite this is um quite a nice green this one it's a winsor and newton olive green as the artist's quality one so it's really nice and uh it's got this sort of translucency which is really nice it's a good color so let's get some of that in there and i often find that taking the paint off is as important as putting it on i like to kind of scratch and scrape back through the paint particularly so i quite like working on board or a reasonably hard surface or maybe even a canvas that's had paper laid on top of it so it's got a little bit more of a rigid surface [Music] building up layers of the paint [Music] so yeah i mean that was kind of all i wanted to talk about in in this one really i mean i want to do go crazy do too much but so you know if you've got some work on the go it's really good to have two three four um and you can sort of just try different things out on different ones or even the same thing i'm trying a sort of similar kind of mark on this one over here as i was doing on there and see where it goes because often you know one's going to work better than others a lot of these have got this fairly uh vertical sort of um mark making going on um which i quite like at the moment so uh it's quite nice to have these sort of verticals a lot of landscape paintings have got you know you kind of just assume it's going to have these horizontals in it and i quite like to kind of break that up a little bit find find something a little bit different um so when i was looking at when i was sketching i was out there and i was looking at these different things trying to find those different angles and shapes textures um quite deliberately looking for them really i think the temptation a lot of the time is when you're you know particularly when you're doing um seascapes and i've talked about i did a whole video on horizon lines but particularly seascapes can be terrible it's the worst it's the worst for horizons you look out to the sea and you've got a straight line a third of the way up you paint two thirds of the way up your painting there's nowhere to go then is the you're stuck so anyway that's really all i wanted to talk about on this one it was the idea of moving from one to a next having a couple of paintings on the go working in series and it just really helps to um loosen the way you think about your work stop feeling too precious about any particular painting there's some nice bits going on in that one i might just flip them around and just keep experimenting i like to think of all you know every painting is a a bit of an experiment quite like maybe i'll flip it over that way see what it looks like these early days it doesn't really matter i'll find that composition at some point okay so anyway i hope you found that useful and uh i'll do another one soon and thanks for watching

Channel: Lewis Noble Artist

Views: 44,177

Rating: 4.9343433 out of 5

Keywords: Artist, landscape, paintings, fine art, Lewis Noble, peak district paintings, oil paintings, acrylic paintings, artist talks, art demonstration, plein air painting, art courses, art workshops, art tutor, paint with me, Art courses Cornwall, Art Courses Yorkshire, Art Courses Derbyshire, Northumberland, seascape, SKETCHBOOKS, sketching, landscape sketch, lewis noble artist, acrylic sketching, Charcoal drawing, Compressed Charcoal

Id: zl9ul8rMfr0

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020