Over the past few months I have been busy commuting back and forth to university in Newcastle and painting in my studio there. In the meantime I have been developing a seperate body of work at home, whilst also spending lots of time out in the landscape and in Amble. Read below an essay that attempts to sum up my current thinking about my painting and its direction.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, I am not a pure ‘plein air’ painter. At the moment about 95% of my paintings are being done in the studio, spare a few outdoor studies here and there. I do enjoy working outdoors, directly from observation, however it has its limits.
In recent work I have begun to shift away from perhaps what could be labelled ‘pure landscape’, towards a more emotional ideal of landscape. I see ‘plein air’ painting more as a way of keeping my skills of observation in check. I do not deny that valid ideas come from working outdoors, however I do believe equally in the value of painting in the studio.
This quote by the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell expresses a notion that hints at my current line of thinking about my painting:
“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves with me”
Despite some allusions to natural forms in the titles of paintings like ‘Trees’ and ‘Sunflowers’, Mitchell’s paintings have no reliance on images of landscape, they are non-representational, or ‘abstract’. They evoke the ‘feelings’ of a landscape. As ephemeral as they may be Mitchell is expressing her recollected feelings of nature through painting.
I, on the other hand am a ‘realist’ painter, a painter making images in a representational, figurative manner. I enjoy paint, and relish moving it around on the surface in a painterly way, that is I would distinguish myself from being a ‘pure’ realist, or a photorealist. But my work does have a heavy reliance on imagery and representation of the landscape in a form that is recognisable as such.
The source of much of my thinking over recent weeks has been about the bearing that my paintings have to reality. As I have stated I am not a pure realist, my paintings do not describe reality down to the last detail, however they are not purely abstract either. Perhaps they could best be described as having an emotional realism, that being bound to recreating the feeling of a landscape, at the expense of certain details.
In my studio working process photographs do not play much of a role, I occasionally use them as jumping off point for a painting, as a reminder of key forms, but I never paint from them. My use of sketches too is fairly limited, typically limited to very rough ‘working out’ drawings, notes that lay out the bare bones for a composition. Most of the working out happens on the canvas. My chosen medium, acrylic paint, lends itself well to this manner of painting as it can be quickly revised and edited.
The painting shown above, and at the header of this post, ‘Amble Harbour, November’, is one of my most recent paintings. Done at my studio at university in Newcastle. It is one of my largest to date at 4 foot by 3 foot. I worked on this piece on and off for about 5 weeks. My intial idea was for a painting of Amble Harbour in a pale morning haze, however after weeks of plying on layers of paint to no satisfaction I decided to change direction and reestablish a more solid image.
The result is this painting that I felt was evocative of the feeling of the harbour in winter. After posting a picture of the painting on Facebook I received a comment that left me stumped. Someone questioned where the boats were? It hadnt even crossed my mind whilst painting it as to whether I should add any boats in. It was simply apparent that they would not feature.
Amble Harbour is of course known for its, albeit dwindling, array of fishing boats. The fact that they are not in the painting presents as interesting a quandry for me as it does the viewer. As obtuse as it may sound I would posit the piece as a representation of an ideal of Amble Harbour. An image of how this specfic place feels to me in my recollections of it. In this recollected idea of the harbour it is the physical landscape of the harbour itself that stands out most, boats come and go but the quayside is fixed and solid ground.
Perhaps I was seeking a feeling of solidity or ‘fixedness’, given how much the harbour has and is changing in terms of redevelopment. But these concerns are secondary to the painting process. Foremostly I am concerned with making a good picture. A picture that has an adherence firstly to my own idea or experience of a place, not to being a pure translation of observed reality. That isnt being untruthful or distorting appearences, but rather it goes towards creating a broader sense of reality that encompases more than solely observation, taking onboard feelings and memories.
Another vein of paintings that have been the source of much thinking of late, have been a series of works I have taken to calling my ‘black paintings’. I had originally thought of these as deeply minimalist, abstract paintings. However lately i’ve realised that these too have a deep realism about them. The flatness of these paintings mimics the loss of a sense of depth that one faces out in the landscape at night. The horizon lights too are fairly accurate in arrangement to the horizons of the landscapes each of these paintings depicts.
I surmise that the reason that I have had such an interesting response to these works is the sheer remoteness of the subject, that is the experience of rural night. Most people, unlike myself, do not wander fields in the dead of night. Thus there is a sense of removedness for the viewer, in looking at these paintings you are seeing me recount my own experience of seeing the night. And it is perhaps using this logic that my paintings should be viewed. Not as facsimiles of places but as depictions of the impressions that these places have made in my mind.
This perhaps best represents my own understanding of my work at this point in time. Developing a sense of what realism means to me has been difficult for I have long thought it a dirty word. I have been and still am, fascinated by abstract painting but it is never something I have ever felt able to persue myself. I have always percieved pure abstraction as having a loftiness about it, that it was the only ‘pure’ form of painting, that my work was somehow lesser for its reliance on imagery and figuration. Yes some of my works have an abstract nature in the sense of their composition or tonal or textural quality, but they are undoubtedly still landscapes.
Coming to own this ’emotional realism’, has been the outcome of the past few months of thinking and working. Where I had once felt realism was a dirty word and that the best painters were abstract I now feel that realism and figuration, are of course just as virtuous a manner of painting as abstraction is. For, as painter Philip Guston famously said following his break with abstraction:
“we are image-makers and image ridden…”
Luke McTaggart 
4 responses to “Realism Isn’t A Dirty Word”
I would say that all painting is abstract, even a photo isn’t ‘reality’.
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Thanks for reading it Susanna. I would tend to agree with you, I was even hestiant to use ‘abstract’, perhaps non-representational (maybe abstract paintings could be considered as representational of an idea even?) or non-objective is better. All paintings are at the end of the day some form of coloured material smeared on a flat piece of fabric or wood. I have a hard time reasoning with people how distorting photographs can be, yet they take them to be ‘real’. How many times have you heard about a painting that, ‘it looks like a photo !’, as though that was the ultimate goal. Interesting conversations to be had !
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You are an artist, who paints, and not a photographer who captures true images in real time. Your work shows your perception of what you see and how YOU interpret what you see. I look forward to seeing more of your work
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Thank you for taking the time to read through it Stu. Indeed you are right, keep an eye out for new paintings.
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