Being original in your own work comes down to a few of simple things. More importantly it comes down to the choices you make. Your selection of subject matter. The way you look and perceive it. And the way you interpret what you have found, will have significant influence on the identity of your painting. Moreover, what you take out and what you leave in, what you enhance and what you diminish, the total arrangement of shapes on your surface will all point towards your own originality. If you just copy what you see and don’t edit your work, originality suffers. Be true to your inner voice. Listen to it and take control of your paintings.
Years ago after years of painting in my spare time while working full time, I took the plunge and left full time work and started my career as a full time artist. While this step was very scary I am pleased that I took it because I have found something that I excel at and love at the same time. At the time I decided to be an artist I didn’t know where I needed to start but a wonderful instructor and friend suggested that I enrol full time in the Julian Ashton Art School.
This lovely school is bases its training on the training the old masters imparted. They taught you how to see so you can draw and render your subject accurately in pencil and paint. A large portion of this study was learning how to draw the figure. It was highly focused on accuracy and knowledge of anatomy to assist you to capture your subject faithfully on paper or canvas. At the end of each day you could walk around the room and see the figure beautifully rendered from every angle. Each drawing had little differentiation bar the angle. Don’t get me wrong these drawing were absolutely gorgeous and captured the model perfectly. But there was little life in them and the drawings or paintings didn’t reveal anything about the artist that painted them. We were all recording the facts of the subject with little to no interpretation from the artist.
New Painting by Leanne Halls
As a typical beginner artist, I was so pleased when I was able to render the subject accurately, even if it wasn’t originally. I graduated art school feeling confident that others too would be attracted to my craftsmanship and they would line up to purchase. When I painted or drew I looked for subjects that I knew how to draw and I would search high and low for the perfect scene or the perfect vase so that I could create accurate pictures of these subjects. I didn’t edit the subject before me. If a tree existed in the scene I placed it exactly where it was. Or if a vase had a particular colour and design on it that is how I painted it. And so what I created was carbon copy pictures. Not paintings. My work didn’t have soul or life because I wasn’t involved in it. And I soon become bored with creating the same subject matter over and over and it lead me to wonder if there was something more to painting.
As I developed as an artist I realised that the artist work that I was attracted elicited feeling and emotions in me. And I noticed that each of these artist works didn’t faithfully copy the subject. Rather they made decisions about what to include and what to exclude in the work to ensure the feelings and emotions they had for the subject come through in their work. They designed their work by effectively using line, shape, tone, colour, texture and edges to create feeling and emotion. This realisation pulled me away from rending to more impressionistic work with elements of abstraction. It has been an amazing journey and I am no longer bored with my work.
Every day I go to my studio, I set up a visual problem to explore and develop. It could be about line, or it could be about colour. It doesn’t matter what it is about. I am in my studio exploring and discovering what happens with all the different elements that make up the language of drawing and painting. I am never bored.
If you find yourself in a situation where you are getting bored with your work, set up a visual problem to solve. The visual problem could be how to make things move through space in your work just with tone or texture. You could find out what happens if you lose all the edges in your work. What kind of feelings does it elicit? Through play you will become your own teacher and you will learn what works and what doesn’t.
I recently was introduced to this lovely artist’s work, Patricia Moran, who painted the most beautiful movement filled still life paintings. An artist friend had her books and DVD’s and as we poured over them we also googled her. Sadly we found out that she had passed away a few years back but her legacy of amazing paintings and wonderful instruction books and DVDs are left here with us to explore and learn from.
As I felt I couldn’t deprive my friend of her books for too long I purchased them for myself and have been devouring them every night for the past couple of months. Her knowledge of painting flowers in oils is just amazing but one of the key things I picked up in her book was on brushwork. She talked about this term “painting against the form”. If you haven’t heard of it before it is referring to the laying brushstrokes in a criss cross fashion across the objects being painted rather than painting in straight brush strokes that follow the form.
Pages from Patrician Moran’s book about painting against the form (left) & my version of painting against the form (right)
For example if you were to paint a stripped shirt on a figure rather than paint straight lines to create the stripes you paint across the stripe in a brushstrokes that go in different directions to create a more painterly appearance. The stripes are painted but they now have movement and a feeling of life. The same is true for painting petals on a flower. Rather than paint every single petal you paint the silhouette of the object and place within that a few well placed brush marks to indicate petals and the flower now looks like it has movement and life.
It was such a revelation for me that I created a short video on how I interpreted her instructions. I honestly think a picture is worth a thousands words and because we are visual artists I think it is more so for us. That is why I have created this video. I honestly hope it helps transform the way you paint objects.
When I first went to art school one of the first things we were taught after learning perspective, anatomy, and proportions was learning how to see dimension and render it on a two dimensional surface. Such a simple task. Drawing 3 dimensional form on your surface. And yet it can be taught in such a way that makes things super complex and impossible to understand. There must be a better way to understand this stuff.
Fortunately I finally had a great teacher who taught us how to see light and its interaction with objects. He showed us how the direction of light determines what happens on the surface of an object. He started with a simple sphere and based on the understanding how light interacts with a spherical object we learned how to apply it to other more complex shapes such as eyes, noses, hands, vases and so on. What a revelation!! By simply understanding how to draw light falling across a spherical object I suddenly saw how light interacts with other objects. My eyes were open and drawing dimension was revealed. Therefore as part of a short video series I am creating I thought I would start with a brief introduction to how to draw light falling across a spherical object.
Alla Prima is a new body of work from the working studio of Leanne Halls
Wet-on-wet, or alla prima (Italian, meaning at first attempt), is a painting technique, used mostly in oil painting, in which layers of wet paint are applied to previously administered layers of wet paint. This technique requires a fast way of working, because the work has to be finished before the first layers have dried.
Leanne trained at the Julian Ashton School, Sydney and also studied traditional Japanese techniques, disciplines which have strengthened her awareness and response to both light in the landscape and also to the importance reduction of composition bringing a focus to a work, highlighting a tree or a array of flowers or fruit.
Leanne has gained strong recognition through her works in landscape as well as still life works, being listed as Finalist in numerous awards including The Glover, Lloyd Rees Art Prize, and Eutick Memorial Still Life Prize.
Join us 5.30pm Friday 6 April for drinks with the artist.
Winter Tangle – “Alla Prima” Exhibition – Opening April 2018
Again time has disappeared and I haven’t posted a blog. I was telling a lovely young lady the other day that the reason for this was that I have been hibernating. But this hibernation wasn’t because it was cold outside, quite the opposite. I live in Australia after all and it is our summer. No… I was having what I call an art hibernations. What is an art hibernation? You know the ones where you have a deadline for an exhibition or a painting competition and you knuckle down and get lost in creating your art and you only come out for food and sleep. So that is what I have been doing for the past 3 months – preparing for an exhibition. And now I am done… all I have to wait for is to have it hung on the walls of the gallery in April. Which I am waiting for with great anticipation. So today’s blog is going to be on what I do when I prepare for an exhibition.
Some of you have probably gone through the process of preparing for an exhibition. I feel it is an exhilarating but sometimes daunting process. Especially if you have to get a set number of painting done to fill a gallery space in a set period of time. I was very fortunate to have some guidance along the way when I first start exhibiting.
Tip #1 – Start Painting
I know this sounds like a strange tip, but it is seriously my first tip. If you start thinking about all the paintings you need to get done and in the time frame that you have to do it, if you are like me the task of preparing for an exhibition becomes so overwhelming you get inertia. And then before you know it, that time frame you had gets smaller and smaller every day. So I usually start by just painting a few ideas. I keep them small and I paint them quickly. If I choose not to do small paintings, I will instead draw up a number of different thumbnails of different ideas – nutting out my compositions and designs. Usually by doing this new ideas start popping into my head and before I know it I hone in on one theme/idea that I want to explore. More often than not through this process I get a number of different themes/ideas but I will only choose one. One theme for one exhibition. I can always come back and explore the other themes for another exhibition. I will spend only a couple of days on this as I need to get into my main body of work as time is of essence.
Tip #2 – Have a theme for your exhibition
I know it can be great to have a lot of different paintings of different subjects etc to showcase what you can do but I found out early on in my career that the exhibitions that hang really well are the ones that have a central focus. A clear idea/theme running through them.
My first exhibition was at a local council chamber and I had been selected to hang a number of my works there for a weekend. Other artist too had exhibitions on at the same time. My exhibition had a lot of great paintings. They were paintings that I had done over the course of the year. But they didn’t connect with each other. The still life paintings had no connection to each other. The landscape paintings consisted of seascapes, landscapes and city scapes. They didn’t share a connection. The other lady that shared my space had a body of work that were all of seascapes and each painting connected with the other paintings.
That short weekend I discovered the “buzz” that was created around an exhibition that had a cohesiveness. A central theme. People were coming into the exhibition space, walking past my work, straight into the other artists exhibition space, as if they were being pulled by in invisible rope. The paintings just drew you in. They mesmerised the audience. The central theme of her exhibition meant that all the paintings hung well together and they feed off each other. The exhibition looked stunning. My exhibition didn’t.
If that didn’t convince you, my other example is group exhibitions. Have you ever noticed that when you go to see group exhibitions it can sometimes seem like a mishmash of different paintings and different styles and it just doesn’t seem to gel. (Obviously not all group exhibitions are like that but for the most part they are). It is really hard to hang a group exhibition and make it look good when all the paintings are not connected and the paintings styles are so very different. So my point is try and make a connection between your paintings. Your exhibition will hang better for it. And it also helps when you start painting all the paintings for it. Usually each new idea is feeds off the old idea. Well that is how it works for me.
Tip #3 – Start your Focal Painting
Once I have honed in on theme I usually like to start work on my focal painting. This painting for me is usually my largest painting and the painting that the whole exhibition focusses around. I start here because for me the biggest painting takes the longest time and once I get this painting done it usually helps pull my focus to the theme of the exhibition. It also helps me work out how many other paintings I need to get done to fill the exhibition space in the space of time that I have allotted. Also with my focal painting finished usually I feel much more relaxed about the time frame and it seems like all the other paintings just flow from there.
Tip #4 – Give Yourself Time
Because I work in oils I need to always factor in drying time, framing time and delivery time.
I don’t think there are many galleries out there that appreciate getting wet oil paint on their lovely fashionable work clothes. So I am always factoring in drying time so that by the time my exhibition rolls around my work is dry and framed. I know there are some artist who work right down to the last minute. But I am not that kind of person. If I worked like that I would be stressed out and a complete nightmare to live with. I put myself in the category of person who plans and prepares things in advance so if there are any hiccups along the way – like paintings going missing in the mail etc I have time to find them and get them back on track. Things don’t always go according to plan so that is why I give myself more time than necessary. Just in case of problems. That way by the time my exhibition rocks around I am relaxed and ready to enjoy the exhibition opening.
Other aspects of an Exhibition – Administrative stuff
The thing I learnt when I started exhibiting was that as an artist I not only am the creator of my work, but I am also the warehouse operator, the dispatching clerk,the administration worker, the client services representative and social media/internet and marketing officer. There is a lot more involved in having an exhibition than just painting the paintings and displaying. There is all the behind the scenes stuff like liaising with framers, couriers and organising with galleries, taking photos of my work, preparing it for transit and other things like that. The exhibition is just the fulfilment of all that behind the scenes work.
Always remember to take good photos of your work. They are good for your records but also it is important to have good photographic reference on your internet or social media presence. It can help draw people to your exhibition.
Always remember to pack your paintings well when you transport them. Just in case they drop them or something bangs into them. And also give the couriers time to get the paintings to the location. Don’t cut it too short. The worst thing that could happen is an exhibition opens without any work because it is still in transit.
Have a good dialog with your gallery. Keep them informed of what is going on. Like the status of the paintings etc.
And finally have a good working relationship with your framer. I love seeing my work framed because it feels like it has finalised my painting.
I do love it when an exhibition opens because it shows that all my hard work and the hard work of the gallery, the framer and the courier has paid off.
Would love to see you all at the opening of my next exhibition in Tasmania.
“Alla Prima” opens the 6th April 2018 @ the Colville Gallery 5:30pm.
Looking back I have noticed that not just one month but over 3 months has past since I posted a blog. Although I have been absent from my blog, fortunately I haven’t been absent from my easel. So today I thought I would just post a small sample of work that has recently been on my easel.
I have recently been experimenting with “Alla Prima” paint application. What is “Alla Prima”? It is an Italian word that means at first attempt. Alla prima is a painting technique where layers of wet paint are applied on top of previously painted layers of wet paint. Also known as “wet on wet”.
I love this way of painting because depending on the pressure you apply to your brush when painting a fresh layer of paint over another layer determines how much of the under-paint you pick up and disturb. This type of paint application helps create lovely passages of broken colour, soft edges and beautiful colour mixes.
Like me, do you have a number of paintings dotting the walls and shelves of your studio that for some reason or other don’t work and haven’t connected with your viewers. Every time you walk pass them they torment you, challenging you to take another look and work out how to make them right. For months I had been avoiding this one painting that sat propped against my wall. Every time I looked at it, I would think, I need to reassess that painting. I need to work out how to make it better. How to get it to work. How to get it to connect with the viewer.
Finally after months of procrastination and avoidance, the painting made it back onto my easel.
Old Painting – Colour Concept
I sat with it for a good 30 minutes before I lifted brush to canvas. During those 30 minutes I mindfully assessed the painting. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I always start a painting with a visual concept. So when I am assessing a painting that has gone wrong, I always start there. My first question is what is the concept for this painting? From there I then look at the different parts and assess whether or not they have fulfilled their role in the overall concept. By doing this I can see what parts are causing problems and the parts that are working. Once these parts are determined I can then assess them in relation to the whole. I start asking questions like – How does the colour, shape, tone, texture or edge relate to the surrounding areas and how does it need to be adjusted to make it correct so that it fulfils it place in the visual concept? By mindfully looking at the different parts of the painting and seeing their overall role in the visual concept, fixing a painting that has gone wrong becomes a whole lot simpler.
So the next time you hit a problem while working on a painting or if you pick up an old painting to fix it, remember to ask yourself the bigger question. What is my concept for this painting? And what role does this part of the painting that I am struggling with play in that? For example, is it a piece of dark that is to be used to hold the light? Or it a section of bright colour to move the eye? Or does it need to be flat so that the textured piece next to it comes to life? As you can see everything you put down on your canvas relates to the parts around it and to the overall concept of the painting.
Like me, do you have a number of paintings dotting the walls and shelves of your studio that for some reason or other don’t work and haven’t connected with your viewers. Every time you walk pass them they torment you, challenging you to take another look and work out how to make them right. For months I had been avoiding this one painting that sat propped against my wall. Every time I looked at it, I would think, I need to reassess that painting. I need to work out how to make it better. How to get it to work. How to get it to connect with the viewer.
Finally after months of procrastination and avoidance, the painting made it back onto my easel.
Old Painting – Colour Concept
I sat with it for a good 30 minutes before I lifted brush to canvas. During those 30 minutes I mindfully assessed the painting. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I always start a painting with a visual concept. So when I am assessing a painting that has gone wrong, I always start there. My first question is what is the concept for this painting? From there I then look at the different parts and assess whether or not they have fulfilled their role in the overall concept. By doing this I can see what parts are causing problems and the parts that are working. Once these parts are determined I can then assess them in relation to the whole. I start asking questions like – How does the colour, shape, tone, texture or edge relate to the surrounding areas and how does it need to be adjusted to make it correct so that it fulfils it place in the visual concept? By mindfully looking at the different parts of the painting and seeing their overall role in the visual concept, fixing a painting that has gone wrong becomes a whole lot simpler.
So the next time you hit a problem while working on a painting or if you pick up an old painting to fix it, remember to ask yourself the bigger question. What is my concept for this painting? And what role does this part of the painting that I am struggling with play in that? For example, is it a piece of dark that is to be used to hold the light? Or it a section of bright colour to move the eye? Or does it need to be flat so that the textured piece next to it comes to life? As you can see everything you put down on your canvas relates to the parts around it and to the overall concept of the painting.
Painting a still life in the studio with my friend
A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of painting along side a wonderful artist friend of mine. She came to visit me in the studio to paint. During our two days of painting we both sat in front of the same still life and at first we sat doing our own things. But as time passed we took some steps back, looking at each others painting and seeing how we both approached the subject. And although we both went to the same art school with the same teachers etc, we had approached the subject in a different way. My friend had covered her entire canvas with bold wonderful colours, whereas I had blocked in the major relationships of tone and colour in some of the objects but hadn’t covered the entire canvas. By looking at how each of us worked, it was apparent to me that there is no wrong or right way to paint. It is entirely up to you how you approach the subject. You should approach it in a way that you see fit. Obviously there is some sound advice out there how to approach painting but at the end of the day you should try and use the best techniques that attain the quality of painting that you are looking for. Try and find smart simple solutions to your problems. If you are like my friend and want to cover the entire canvas, and then carve and mould the shapes into form, then what is stopping you. At the end of the day all that matters is that you are pleased with the results of your own work. That is my guiding force. I approach each painting in the best possible way so that I can achieve the desired end result I am looking for.
Creativity Permit Required 