Tom Keating On Painters - E01 - Turner

telling most certainly would always be for me the greatest watercolors that ever lived the greatest landscaping that ever lived and probably the greatest artists per se for other artists is born in Maiden Lane in Covent Garden in 1775 on Georg's day his father William Dharma was a hairdresser and Turner lived and worked as a little boy his father shot was a lava boy he owned a precarious living as a child artist enjoying the many customers his father did wigs for of course being primarily a water colorist I'm standing on in the house of dr. Munro with Gertie and Lucy Burke and thousands as off of an evening two and a half crown lot of money then man where was a neurologist and a philanthropist and he learned his craft via via Alomar's I copied them and bounced off hearing dirt and bounced off into the world of commerce actually his commercial artist very difficult work traveling step extensively on horseback with a black horse and so Yorkshire wires and so and then from the early days of the water colorist in which he became a supreme master of the water he turned to it in his old age he encompassed every form of art known graphic arts he was a poet we may not have been a very good one but he was no ii cummings but he certainly could bang out the fallacies of hope or something there's no doubt that his main mass of money engravings of course Lenny he sold poses to enormous sums of money for the time he had great patrons of art the most aristocracy about Egremont a pet for Athens very little amongst the royalty well his sadnesses was that he'd never been knighted but in his day of course they had done there was an enormous need and urge to get away from the ugliness of the life around and they hid themselves in their paintings looking at them it was an escape thing and anyone who could point colorfully and romantically as he could to the incredible degree he didn't lumber his paintings out with many figures you see unlike people that try to represent heaven I want to go to heaven with millions of angels craving about so he created another world of color magic mystery that people bought nearly every painted European painter even the Italians have been influenced by the doubt school the duct school because of the nature of its terrain that is very uninteresting from the point of view of let's call it romantic art mountains and so on so you have shipping rivers sky of the predominant thing and the mass of the ship took the part of the trees in the forest Turner was born and live near Thames most his life and the Thames was an enormous influence on his painting the fighting Temeraire was inspired by Turner whilst he was a Greenwich with another painter and the old-timer was being dragged up to depth had to be broken up and the sad sight this beautiful vessel being towed up which epitomize the romanticism of sailing ships by this ugly little which represented the Industrial Revolution and the smoke and so and Turner made a thumbnail sketch I believe it was on the cuff of his shirt he was apt to do this a lot and said arm painter picked you for the next Academy what oh he never parted with the deaf where he had it in a studio until he died and always referred to it as my darling I understand that I'm now going to do a reverse painting of the temeraire this is the beginning of it I did this about three years ago I wanted to walk in for a picture and obviously it had to swim into the sea or the river um walk into the virgin turn around and see the chat painting it gives you a chance to emulate the style of the last and the reason one does that is to learn the techniques of painting this is about the speed he would have worked from then calm down after and qualified the rest of the work with a blush okay and so he would have gone very carefully over a fixed door and he would have probably used boiled milk and fixed the charcoal and then very carefully with the ruler or more stick drawn the masts in carefully as most masters did to get an inaccuracy for the rigging buildings except knowing that eventually he would be painting in between besides over in parts and this didn't matter he was so aware of the importance of ships that you could almost build a ship from one of Turner's paintings at this stage young we destroy much of what has been put on and he used tempera in this fashion because the light beam from the canvas itself was being obliterated by a wash of ochre and that has one prismatic effect and this has the effect of creating another prismatic effect but in depth three dimension so he would come up with his incredible knowledge of cloud formation and build the lights up into the picture away from the sound although using the same color so intensity he wouldn't worry about losing the mast here or there because afterwards there's meant many more colors and glazes and scammers go in-between he would then block him with different tones sometimes using as many as 11 or 12 or 13 washes the blocking in of the vessel this kind of thing should be done light in its initial stages because art of the tempera under paintings of course it becomes the glazes and if you attempt as the Dutch did to achieve the darks first it isn't quite as luminous at the end of the painting as if you paint in a series of washes as quickly as possible at this stage he would flatten certain areas and the main point of this is that the Sun the disc would be probably the thickest trace of imposter and the worst less by degree of thickness and the cars blend because it is an instinctive thing one can hardly teach it it comes from years of battling burden but I think in my case bread marjorie and when this is dry you've got a better chance of the the form for the next code this is drawing about ten minutes there is no record of the term oer in existence apart from two others painted she was broken up at Deptford but there are two engravings one is a plan of the ship as she was been built and the other is lying on her side and the Breakers yard as a Hulk and I got two of these from Greenwich Museum and reconstructed it from the plan so that within the reason the spars and everything is relatively accurately the gun and so forth this is a relatively limited palette of colors they vary but this is for the second or third application on the painting in tempo which are freshly ground this wine which was done in the studio practices of the Ancients I'll just grind a little more of the blue to show how it's down it's like mixing cement and sand you put the powder down make a little hole in the middle pour little water in this is distilled water and observe how it readily mixes unlike tap water which has impurities in and distilled water can always be substituted by rainwater or could in a clean climate I'm trying to get this into a thick paste this is a molar and the glass is ground glass and the longer one grinds have caused the finer the pigment becomes taking out all the little bits and pieces that's about enough for this and then this is taken up and put on the pallet and this is temper of course if you like an old car you'd grind oil in it or any of the varnishes bottoms and so forth and Turner would undoubtedly work very fast because of his consummate knowledge which I wish I had myself of the many hundreds of paintings he worked on in shipping landscape see scoops and I'm using distilled water and freshly ground turpentine and tempera just making a few arbitrary turns to kill the water at the same time retain the luminosity of it he would soften the effects by stippling or sponge well can see the advantage having a sturdy easel a sturdy person to tap it out this is the way it was achieved and although it looks actually don't from experience one notably one is killing these colors gradually so we kissed this very gently allowing the mind always to remember that you can rectify mistakes very quickly with temper and that in fact I really believe it was used used by the many old masters much much more than let's go and credit for because once it's it's varnished it takes on the physical appearance of oils it's only by on a little chemistry you can tell that isn't in fact all pain the next stage is to give the temper a coat of varnish since the last stage in the development of this painting I am redrawing some of the masks and upper parts of the ship because we lose them as we paint the sky to draw a fine line in painting is one of the most difficult things and it is best achieved by painting the area with varnish varnish it creating an oily surface in which upon which you draw your line with tempera in a brush called a sable rigger so-called because it was used for doing fine lines in rigging the varnish should be tacky and this is the only way you can obtain this lie which you can justice son for this is about as fine as any longer be drawn and by the molecular structure of the temper allied to the oiliness of the varnish the thing as I speak is closing and will be finer in a few minutes than it was when I drew it this painting has now achieved this condition purely with tempera aqueous paint and has been given a coat of varnish which makes it appear to be all plain but it isn't and now I'm going to glaze transparent washes we start this time instead of light darks the light under paint into dark to dark first and here on there it's not to say to pick up too small the tool there's a smaller areas warming and cooling and of course in the flag which is the White Ensign there's a touch of red which could be put in here and the reason for that is who added an advanced in color and a spot of red has cut Eva constable learn from turn I should imagine a spot of red would send the grays and blues back it's good excuse to put a little more weight there even on the funnel or the mast like there's a flag on this hour all this helps to bring a little touch here and there in the water where the light from the Sun strikes the side of the ship it's necessary to create in all buildings all forms the phenomena of the light part in the side of a building or in this case on the side of a ship is brighter it appears to bita upon the edge like here closer to you and great good night off allowing the belly of the ship to go away from you and to help the drawing we warm the side of the ship there which is in fact the fo'c'sle where the sun's hitting it and these little marks in two Spurs in the right direction right places begin to create the feeling movement structure of the ship predating slowly the beauty of oil paint is the ability with which one can good date where you can't do this easily with with tech temper in the drawing of water and when we say drawing we mean painting and drawing with the same action it's very good idea to remember the volume the depth the strength the fearful qualities of it especially of Z and termina would be well aware of this having tied himself to a mast to witness this in one of his famous paintings snowstorm see but we're not doing C we're doing the dirty turgid water of the terms of those days and the little impasto and we let's call it a sun color and on the tip of each imaginary wave as the Sun meets a water we go zigzag because of the movement of the ships causing the water go left right left right left right diminishing towards the Sun until at the far horizon it's a knife-edge thick all this can afterwards be rectified when you stand back and see in fact if it appears to be in any way long when you won't get it right every time no one can and this is one part of it and this part has to relate to the mass of foam being caused by the tug coming through the water which in turn creates this one of Turner's favorite cloud formations was the Cirrus the lighter happier clouds that own the evening sky usually in the early morning he always got up very early at dawn to say hello to the Sun said goodbye an evening probably with a sherry he don't a bottle drown sherry a day to help him on his way and in order to achieve the Cirrus for which his most famous he'd use a round sable dipped in an the heavy media and roll it in a semi-transparent heavy moving like that according to the the painting keeping it going around and by doing this although it appears area at the moment it would remember the Sun would be warming the underbelly of these little clouds so he put a little warm Oh Corrine he's not very important because it gives us a chance to scumble scumbling is a method of painting used where opaque paint and semi opaque paint is placed over glazes on pasture to create aerial perspective now this movement is just done to illustrate the fact that the sun shining up under the bellies of the clouds over and across here into the smoke and I smoke will verge into the clouds and that is more or less sufficient to demonstrate and this would be stiffled out so the scumble goes into the glaze softening both stumble and glazes soften this is why initially the vernacular points of color are placed on thickly with a palette knife strongly with tempo which will not once it's due I will not move to allow for this process so one can with confidence scumble out soften the sky and of course Turner could go on glazing and scumbling scumbling and glazing indefinitely in order to achieve a softness and sharpest effect but always remember that the Sun was the source of light and of great importance this is just a sketch and would probably take another two months to do the rigging and so forth because although it's glazed gum wooden things like this we need time for the rigging to be put in as in this one and even then that isn't of course on perfectly achieved because that this has to have a coat of varnish and of course this picture was painted roughly I think three years ago um Turner in the mixed-media of painting would have had to varnish nearly all the old oil paint isn't ten propellers at divisor because sometimes sinks in and out of the and so and it's only by a code of intermediate varnish that you achieve a total unity to give you a chance to see and this is called oiling out and as as much as I can do for the moment and work on the picture in the future thank you

Channel: TheArtyBartfast

Views: 309,986

Keywords: tom, keating, painter, painters, painting, turner, forger, technique, Paint, art, artist

Id: MDmiOmYnwKk

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 29 2012