Notes from the boundary: Peter Hart: The making of a painting: 1 Surrey Landscape

Since I started Notes from the boundary – in September 2009 – I have written several blogs on the subject of art, but have never attempted to describe the making – for want of a better word – of any of my own paintings. If there’s one thing that’s stopped me it’s probably the idea of ‘showcasing’ – something that I am at all comfortable with. However, I think I can avoid that pitfall simply by giving a straightforward account of my experience. But, before attempting this exercise, a certain amount of ground needs to be cleared:

Although I went to art school and have periodically thoroughly immersed myself in the practice of art, I am not an artist. (A friend – who is – objects to this – on the grounds that “I can do, therefore I am.” But I won’t have it!)

The disjunction between artist’s pronouncements and what they actually do is truly marvellous . . . It would seem that they cannot work without theories, which yet tend to be belied by every brush stroke they make. I would say that artists need to theorise, and yet produce their best work despite them. This is paradoxical, but causes few problems. I do not intend to theorise in this piece, but simply raise the topic here for the sake of interest.

When I was at art school in the early 1960s, a question – apparently of great import – hovered at the back of our minds, and tended to spoil our days: “What did we have to say?” Well, the vast majority of us had nothing to say! We did not have that level of sophistication, and we were not political. All we wanted to do was produce interesting or exciting work, and we had not the least thought of expressing meaning. (And, to speak plainly, only the Kathe Kollwitz’s of this world are capable of the expression of powerful emotion.)

So, rather than expressing theories, I intend to do no more than describe the kinds of things that tend to happen in the making of a painting – and which have also been experienced by others known to me, whether artists or practitioners of art at different times in their lives. The only thing I do not want to be called is a ‘Sunday painter’!

The first work I’ll discuss – in this series of two – was painted fifty years ago. The subject is the view from my paternal grandfather’s cottage, near Bletchingley in Surrey. In the far distance – and mercifully out of sight – would be Crawley New Town. The landscape is perfectly straightforward, and my influences – as I remember perfectly well – were the Impressionists and Van Gogh (and, thinking about it only now, it seems to me that had I never seen a Van Gogh the painting would have been less ‘grounded’ – as being less linear. The Impressionists tended – quite deliberately – to dissolve their landscapes into colours, but Van Gogh was, I think, too rooted in the earth to follow their example).

Surrey Landscape near Bletchingley, 1961. Oil on Daler Board

The ‘ground’ of this painting is Daler Board – a cheap student alternative to stretched canvas – and the colours used, Winsor and Newton’s Student range oil colours. The latter – now called Winton – are a considerably cheaper substitute for Artist’s oil colours: they are standardised in price, and lack both the purity (of colour) and permanency of artist’s colours. For example, 40mg of Student’s ‘cadmium’ yellow will cost approximately £4.00, and the same quantity in Artist’s cadmium yellow approximately £24.00. The brushes I used would have been student quality: a hog’s hair substitute. Given all this – plus the fact that the painting has hung for at least thirty years in my mother’s sunlit sitting room – it is remarkable that the colours have not significantly faded.

I cannot at this distance remember anything about how I started the painting, or how it

progressed. However, there are some things I distinctly remember. I loved all the earth colours – the ochres, and the siennas and umbers (raw and burnt). Yellow ochre was, and is, my favourite, and that is the underlying colour of the field on the right. The field was not that colour, but had I not introduced it, the composition as a whole would have lacked variety. The spot of red on the post was introduced for the same reason. (Someone once complained – not unreasonably, if inaccurately – that the English countryside consisted of too much Hooker’s green. Hence the reason for Constable’s often introducing a red jacket, or some such, in his paintings. And in the foreground of Hadleigh Castle there are spots of red and of yellow ochre that bear no relationship to the natural scene, but are introduced to enliven the landscape).

The painting of the sun hidden by the clouds is straight out of Van Gogh’s repertoire. I felt a bit guilty using this, instead of trying to invent something myself – but there you go! An aspect of the painting that remains a mystery to me is

the strip of blue–grey that forms the horizon just below the cloud–covered sun. I knew how important grey is in a painting – which will otherwise appear brash or overly ‘clean’ – but I have no remembrance of having this in mind at the time. (There is such a patch – of infinitely greater power! – in Utrillo’s Les Toits a Montmagny 1906–7). The hedge was painted using a palate knife, and while this provides ‘variety of mark’ here, its use tends generally to be crude in the extreme. As far as I am aware, the only two painters to make successful use of this most unyielding of painting tools were Courbet and Cézanne. Of the two, probably no painter used it with such barely controlled passion – bordering sometimes on the violent – as Cézanne. This in his early paintings, where he was asserting himself with phenomenal determination. While he was still working in his father’s bank, he wrote this couplet:

“Cézanne the banker sees not without trembling / Behind his counter a future painter being born.”

For the second in this series of two I shall be looking at a painting carried out in 2002. This with Artist’s oil colours and hog hair brushes on a stretched canvas.