rob miller paintings and drawings.: Rivington A Watercolour painting by Rob Miller

New Work in new gallerys

New paintings of the Lake District, Cartmell and the Lune Valley are now shown at the Bellwood and Wright Gallery Lancaster, and the Courtyard Gallery Appelby, New Hebrides work appearing at Artisan Fine Art Gallery Bolton in the studio gallery. Wharfedale Impressions 4 works from this popular series along with some oils of Cumbria are for sale at Barefoot alongside James Naughton, Paul Stone, Colin Hallliday and others at Barefoot Gallery Boston Spa Wetherby North Yorkshire 1st-21st September 2011

"To the parallel question, What makes a true painter? Pissarro would answer that a true painter is very seldom found: he is one who can put two tones of color in harmony. In other words,Pissarro defines the nature of true painting in specifically visual terms. I've pasted the section on Pisarro from the "artchive" website which makes a great read. You can find it at the bottom of this blog. I've blogged it for the reason that currently I see it as a base reference for my work and because I rate the efficacy of this painter very highly...

The romantic north,

"The power of place is well known to all of us. For most of us hypo-sensitivity isn't neccesary for us to know whether we dislike a place or not." As Eduardo Santa Anna wrote in an article on my fellow northern painter Colin Halliday, "for artists however the notion is on a different scale, they can transform a place into poetry, music or painting..." or as a more noted English source Constable said "painting is but another word for feeling", I was brought up in 50's, 60's and 70's in the heart of industrial East Lancashire and at its ending. If I looked and travelled South East to my Aunty Edi in Failsworth,or Grandad in Burnley I saw Lowreys Lancashire and when I looked North West and followed in the footsteps of fellow Blackburner Wainwright I saw Wordsworths and William Mallard Turners nature and its elemental forces at work, you could even visit quite easily the places on the River Lune were he painted and which the romantic art critic John Ruskin saw as the definitive romantic landscape veiw. The struggle of love for myself as a northern Landscape painter was and still is this conflicting choice of powerful material that is accessable and to hand; so many moods, so much conflict and so much poetry of place; for me the real sublime feeling of the north maybe lies in the geography of the mid ground of existance, and its that that I currently explore. Rob Miller 04/03/2011

Jackdaw Arts Newsletter A GREAT READ

The Jackdaw is a bi-monthly paper six a year) founded in 2000.Its purpose is to keep interested parties informed and entertained about aspects of art which are in the news.
By and large it’s pretty nasty and critical of many things, and especially of the art establishment which stinks like the rotting carcase it is.If The Jackdaw isn’t amusing in parts then it has failed. It’s pretty childish sometimes too and do beware because parts of it are not entirely true – I’ll leave it up to you to believe whichever bits you like and to disregard the rest.
Some of it is serious. Some of it is just downright bad. Some issues are better than others. But no other art publication dares to be like it.

The last thing I want you to think is that The Jackdaw has an agenda. On the contrary, it doesn’t believe in anything at all and, by the way: “It’s totally unsuitable for Birmingham”*.

I’ll send you a complimentary copy if you email your address.

David LeeEditormailto:dg.lee%40virgin.net

"There is only one master here - Corot. We are nothingcompared to him, nothing." Claude Monet, 1897
"He is still the strongest, he anticipated everything..."Edgar Degas, 1883Introduction [to the 1996 catalog of the exhibition "Corot"] Today it is rather surprising to read the unqualified praise for Corot voiced over and over again by the generation of painters who were maturing just when he died. It seems peculiar that these artists so greatly esteemed le père Corot, since Corot pretended to be out of touch with artistic developments at the end of his life and disapproved of the confrontational nature of the work produced by Monet and the other Intransigeants seeking to commandeer the walls of the annual Paris Salon. The very notion of modernity that infuses much of Monet's art, the knowing urbanity of Degas's, the ceaseless experimentation that characterizes both these oeuvres seem completely at odds with Corot's contemplative vision of a timeless, unchanging Arcadia - or what some call his monotonous views of Ville-d'Avray. Reading further, one learns that in the late 1920s and early 1930s both the painter Jacques Emile Blanche and the historian Alfred Barr, founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, believed that Corot's impact on twentieth-century art would rival Cezanne's. These views are so far from the present day conception of Corot's importance to the history of painting that a thorough reappraisal of his art is clearly long overdue. Since the 1930s historians have attempted to establish Corot as the precursor of Impressionism, the inventor of sunlit landscapes untroubled by anecdote or meaningful incident. Struck by his marvelous studies painted in the open air in Italy, the writers Germain Bazin and Kenneth Clark saw Corot as the perfectly optical painter with a perfectly innocent eye - in short, the unthinking man's painter - so long as he was only sketching from nature. Comparing the on-the-spot study of the bridge at Narni with the finished Salon painting of the same view, Bazin called the former "a marvel of spontaneity in which there is already the germ of Impressionism, [while] the Salon picture, even though it is painted in beautiful thick paint and with great delicacy, is nonetheless a rather artificial Neoclassical composition." In Clark's opinion, the same study "is as free as the most vigorous Constable; the finished picture in Ottawa is tamer than the tamest imitation of Claude." Since the 1980s, when Peter Galassi directed attention to the outdoor painting of Corot's near contemporaries Michallon, Bertin, Granet, and Caruelle d'Aligny, art historians have linked Corot to the generation of painters who preceded him as opposed to those who followed him. As those and other painters in Corot's Italian circle became better known, Corot was more and more seen as the obedient disciple of Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, the codifier of Neoclassical landscape painting; as the last in a line of painters continuing to work an aesthetic forged in the eighteenth century. Yet while both views contain much truth, neither characterization of Corot - as the last Neoclassicist or as the first Impressionist - is sufficient to encompass the totality of his achievement. For example, neither explanation satisfactorily accommodates the extraordinary history paintings, among them Hagar in the Wilderness, Diana Surprised in Her Bath, Democritus and the Abderites, Homer and the Shepherds, that actually made Corot's reputation in the 1840s: the kind of painting that prompted Baudelaire to write, "at the head of the modern school of landscape stands M. Corot." These are the works that continue to disturb modern critics. Nor does either theory adequately account for Corot as a painter of figures. When pressed by an interlocutor, Degas proclaimed Corot an even greater figure painter than a landscapist. It was largely the figure paintings that Degas recommended to his collector friends, such as Henri Rouart, who owned Lady in Blue. Degas's colleague Mary Cassatt actively counseled American collectors the Havermeyers, the Palmers, Colonel Payne, and others to buy figure paintings rather than landscapes. It was Corot the figure painter who impressed Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne; as Edward Lucie-Smith has observed, paintings such as Corot's Dance of the Nymphs may be the key to Cezanne's late paintings of bathers. In the 1910s, Juan Gris and Picasso copied figures by Corot. The exhibition of his figure paintings organized at Paul Rosenberg & Cie. in 1928 profoundly affected the work of Andre Derain and Andre Lhote, and it prompted Blanche and Barr to reevaluate Corot's impact on the art of the present century. Yet today Corot continues to elude art historians and critics, which is why we believed it important to mount a retrospective in which every aspect of his painted oeuvre would be fully represented. A different kind of exhibition might have shown Corot only at his most ravishing, but it would be deceptive: a fundamental aspect of Corot's work is that his drawing is sometimes awkward, his compositions sometimes formulaic. An exhibition tightly focused by theme or period might have shown Corot as a more coherent and consistent artist than he appears here; but his oeuvre does in fact reflect the seemingly contradictory tenets of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. Nonetheless, artists from Delacroix to Courbet to Renoir to Picasso, who knew Corot's work well, stubbornly held it in the highest possible regard. We hope that this exhibition will enable a new generation of viewers to know Corot's art well and to discover for themselves all that his paintings have to offer.
from Corot introduction by Prof Micheal Pantazzi

Highland Renewal

Highland Renewal are a charity based on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

We manage the Tireragan estate at the very southwest tip of Mull for regeneration, conservation and educational purposes.

Tireragan encompasses wild rocky coastline, upland heath and bog, nationally important native woodland communities and associated wildlife all regenerating to a increasingly natural state.

Highland Renewal is also committed to the promotion of conservation through education and environmental arts.

Please explore our web site to learn more about Highland Renewal and Tireragan. Over the coming year we will be publishing online more educational materials and research data.

www.highlandrenewal.org

Art Practice Tips

Working with Charcoal.

This is a totally renewable resource, and if you work directly with nature like I do than you should celebrate the moments of use. Charcoal is a great medium once you have overcome its nature to make marks and you take some of the initial control. For me its all about speed, impression, gesture and the pressure you apply when you use it. You can draw with it on almost any type of paper, canvas, board, linen, meant for drawing or painting. Remember, though, that Char(coal) is also very messy. It comes off your skin very easily but watch your clothes, to avoid your self and everything around you becoming all black, you have to learn how to handle it with your hands and fingers giving it some respect. Charcoal comes in various sizes and compressions the most compressed can be very black, Also charcoal can be used alongside any other medium and its velvet hue is just a wow alongside oils, inks, acrylic or whatever.Lots of people will want to advise you on the use of an eraser with charcoal, and give some stuff about negative image... but don't be taken in, the best thing about charcoal is its ability to be instantaneous and spontaneous. It certainly tries to help you capture in a stroke the movement of a body, the line of tree or the ripple of light in water. Get some cheap paper and practice, practice, practice. Use it on its edge, on its side or however. Grind it down and use a cloth to spread it. Tips After working with charcoal, you will probably get your hands and face dirty The best cleaning material for your skin are baby wipes especially when working outdoors when soap and water isn't readily available.

The Practical Business of Painting by John Piper

Abstraction is a luxury. yet some painters today indulge in it as if it was the bread of life. The early Christian sculptors, wall-painter and glass-painters had a sensible attitude towards abstraction. However hard one tries (many attempts have been made to make them tow the line with modern art) one cannot catch them out indulging in pure abstraction. Their abstraction, such as it is, is always subservient to an end - the Christian end, as it happened. Abstraction is a luxury that has been left to the present day to exploit It is a luxury just as any single ideal is, and like a single ideal it should be approached all the time, but not pre-supposed all the time. To pre-suppose it always, if you are a painter is to paint the same picture always: or else to give up painting altogether because there is nothing left to paint....

John Constable

John Constable

The English landscape painter John Constable once wrote, "I should paint my own laces best." This precept guided his career, as Constable developed a unique style combining objective studies of nature with a deeply personal vision of the countryside round his boyhood home. While most landscapists of the day traveled extensively in search of picturesque or sublime scenery, Constable never left England. His name is so closely associated with his native Stour Valley that the area is sometimes referred to as "Constable country. Although his family hoped that he would join his father's business, they permitted him to enter the Royal Academy Schools at the age of twenty-two. Until he completed his studies nearly ten years later, Constable divided his time between East Bergholt, where he would sketch out of doors in the spring and summer, and London, where he exhibited finished oil paintings based on these open-air studies at the Academy. Rejecting the accepted hierarchy of genres, which ranked idealized landscapes that told historical or mythological tales above views observed in nature, Constable sought recognition for humbler scenes of cultivated land and agricultural labor (The Cornfield ; 1826; The National Gallery, London). The small, precise painting Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815; Ipswich Borough Council) seems to record every detail of his father's domestic garden, as well as the barns and fields beyond. Beginning with the 1819 Academy exhibition, Constable demonstrated his aspirations more boldly by exhibiting large-scale scenes of working farms and waterways painted in his studio, using increasingly broad brushstrokes and thickly applied highlights. The Hay Wain (1821; National Gallery, London), one of these so-called six-footers, was among the three paintings that Constable exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, where he was awarded a gold medal. His strikingly fresh, apparently spontaneous transcription of the landscape, described by the French writer Stendhal as "the mirror of nature," caused a sensation among French painters. For Eugène Delacroix, in particular, Constable's rich, shimmering surfaces came as a revelation, and, during his 1825 visit to London, he sought out the reclusive artist. Yet success had come late to Constable, who often struggled to support a large family (his wife Maria bore seven children before she died in 1828). Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, Constable supplemented his income by painting portraits (06.1272) of local dignitaries. The patronage of Dr. John Fisher, whom Constable first met in 1798 and who later became bishop of Salisbury, remained crucial throughout his career. Between 1811 and 1829, Constable often visited the Reverend Fisher at Salisbury, where he sketched the Gothic cathedral (50.145.8) from a range of viewpoints under various weather conditions. These preliminary oil studies served as the basis of several paintings that picture Salisbury Cathedral alternately menaced by storms, framed by puffy cumulous clouds, or surmounted by a rainbow. Intensive studies of clouds and skies enabled Constable to achieve these unique atmospheric effects. In 1821 and 1822, during his intense "skying" period, he produced dozens of watercolor, crayon, and oil studies of the clouds over Hampstead Heath (2009.400.26). His cloud studies—celebrated today—were not exhibited in his lifetime. Painted rapidly, wet-in-wet, Constable used short strokes and a restricted color palette to train his hand and eye, and to enhance the realism of his later paintings. He labeled almost all of these images with scientific precision, indicating the date, time, wind, and weather conditions under which they were painted. Yet his ultimate goal was to paint the sky—which he deemed landscape's "chief organ of sentiment"—more expressively. Indeed, landscapes from the time of his wife's death (e.g., Hadleigh Castle, 1828–29; Tate, London) feature dark, turbulent skies that carry the brunt of the works' emotional weight. In the later part of his career, Constable made fewer open-air oil sketches. Instead, he increasingly prepared studio sketches inspired by his earlier outdoor drawings. He undertook one major project in his final years—a series of twenty mezzotints after his paintings entitled Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery (39.68.27) to be engraved by a little-known printmaker, David Lucas, under his supervision. The series, known as English Landscape and published from 1830 to 1833, became a manifesto of his views on landscape painting and a summary of his career. The second edition bore the subtitle "Principally Intended to Mark the Phenomena of the Chiar'Oscuro of Nature," reflecting his belief that chiaroscuro, or the contrast between light and dark, was a principle of nature, and therefore crucial to landscape painting (the medium of mezzotint excels at conveying such tonal gradations). This emphasis on naturalism distinguishes Constable's approach from the classical tradition of landscape painting. Today he is often considered, along with J. M. W. Turner, one of England's greatest landscape painters.

Elizabeth E. BarkerDepartment of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Albert Marquet

About a year after I was born 1955, Kyfan Williams, a Welsh landscape painter I have come to admire, visited Paris, he mentions seeing Marquets paintings in the diary of his visit. His work being " a continuation in all that was good in French Landscape painting. I thought it worth putting in this piece on him along with some images...

Albert Marquet was born on March 27, 1875 in Bordeaux. In 1890, he moved to Paris to attend the Decorative Arts School, where he met Henri Matisse. They were roommates for a time, and they influenced each other's work. Marquet began studies in 1892 at the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau, a symbolist artist who was a follower of the Romantic tradition of Eugène Delacroix. In these years, Marquet exhibited paintings at the Salon des Indépendants. Although he did not sell many paintings, the artistic community of Paris became aware of his work. His early compositions were characterised by a clear and painterly Fauve approach, in which he had a fine control of the drawing and responded to light, not only by intensifying the strongest tones, but also by seeing the weaker ones in coloristic terms. In 1905 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne where his paintings were put together with those of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Henri Charles Manguin, Georges Braque, Louis Valtat and Jean Puy. Dismayed by the intense coloration in these paintings, critics reacted by naming the artists the "Fauves", i.e. savage beasts. Although Marquet painted with the fauves for years, he used less bright and violent colours than the others, and emphasized less intense tones made by mixing complementaries, thus always as colors and never as grays. At the end of 1907 he stayed in Paris and dedicated himself, together with Henri Matisse, to a series of city views. The fundamental difference between the two is that while Matisse used strong colours, put on the canvas with decided brush strokes, Marquet favored grayed yellows, greyed violets or blues. Black was usually used as a violent contrast to light colors for such forms as bare tree trunks or calligraphically drawn people contrasted with very light, often yellow or orange streets and sidewalks. Another difference is that Marquet used an approximation of traditional perspective, although his colors and compositions constantly referred to the rectangle and cut its plane with their calligraphy. From 1907 to his death, Marquet alternated between working in his studio in Paris and many parts of the European coast and in North Africa. He was most involved with Algeria and Algiers and with Tunisia. In his voyages he painted the sea and ships, but also the lights and animated life of the city, especially cities on the waterfront, like Algiers. Among European cities Marquet remained impressed particularly with Naples and Venice where he painted the sea and boats, accenting the light over water. He adopted a technique nothing like the impressionists', painting water as a large area of simple tone which held the plane of the water surface without illusionistic perspective, from which the ships arise into a different plane. His views of the lagoon in Venice do this very economically. The water stays at a right angle to the picture plane and the large ships float with ease, with their reflections exactly the correct tone to project the required space. His color is much like Matisse of the 1920s, here. His contrasts of vivid colors describe the waves of the sea with simple drawing which accompany the exactly observed color tones, giving a scene of placid movement. The human figures are much simplified, calligraphically drawn in a way related to Japanese Shijo style work. Matisse is said to have called him "our Hokusai". During his voyages to Germany and Sweden he painted the subjects he usually preferred: river and sea views, ports and ships, but also cityscapes. Over the course of his career he often returned to the same subjects, even years later, recording subtle differences in the light. He painted a few portraits, and between 1910 and 1914 he painted a series of nudes in whorehouses, and prepared the illustration of a work on lesbian lovers. But he is best known for his many landscapes. Unlike Matisse, there are no obvious periods of change in his work. To the end he was one of Matisse's closest friends, and they discussed each other's work with the greatest openness. His death was unexpected and sudden, from a gall bladder attack and subsequently discovered cancer, for which at that time there was no therapy. Marquet died in Paris, on 13 June 1947.

article from www.artinthepicturecom

Using Colour Van Gogh

When you look at a landscape painters work long enough and then take a trip down a country lane or through a town do you start to see the way the artist sees?

"Instead of trying to exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully."
When he first devoted himself to painting full time, in 1880, Van Gogh used dark and gloomy earth colors such as raw umber, raw sienna, and olive green. These were very suited the miners, weavers, and peasant farm laborers who were his subjects. But the development of new, more lightfast pigments and his exposure to the work of the Impressionists, who were striving to capture the effects of light in the work, saw him introduce bright hues into his palette: reds, yellows, oranges, greens, and blues.

Typical colors in Van Gogh's palette included yellow ocher, chrome yellow and cadmium yellow, chrome orange, vermilion, Prussian blue, ultramarine, lead white and zinc white, emerald green, red lake, red ocher, raw sienna, and black. (Both chrome yellow and cadmium yellow are toxic, so some modern artists tend to use versions that have hue at the end of the name, which indicates that it's made from alternative pigments.)

Van Gogh painted very rapidly, with a sense of urgency, using the paint straight from the tube in thick, graphic brush strokes (impasto). In his last 70 days, he is said to have averaged one a day.

Influenced by prints from Japan, he painted dark outlines around objects, filling these in with areas of thick color. He knew that using complementary colors make each seem brighter, using yellows and oranges with blues and reds with greens. His choice of colors varied with his moods and occasionally he deliberately restricted his palette, such as with the sunflowers which are almost entirely yellows.

"To exaggerate the fairness of hair, I come even to orange tones, chromes and pale yellow ... I make a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky."

article qouted http://www.about.com/ 'painting'

Art Practice Tips The Small Sketchbook

Keeping a sketchbook is a great way of keeping track of creative ideas and getting in the habit of regular drawing, as well as being a useful resource for large works when you are feeling short on ideas. I tend to use the small sketchbook for making quick impressions of what I see or aides memoir for later. It is your invaluable personal tool and usually it isn't something that you would show someone else except as a discussion point. For me the small sketch book contains drawings some paintings, notes about a certain painting such as colours and moods. Notes and memos to aid yourself plan for a show, an outing or a new line of work.Remember that not every drawing you do needs to be a finished work of art. You can use a sketchbook for rough notes, thumbnails and ideas, too. When you open your sketchbook, think about what your intention is for your drawing session. While trying something challenging is always worthwhile, simple subjects can often be rewarding. Don't feel constrained by what others think art should be about - make your drawings about whatever you find interesting, be it an unusual object, an interesting face, a beautiful landscape or an invented fantasy.The great English sculpture Henry Moore for example made large sculptural shapes, his sketchbook however contains detailed beautiful drawings of the sheep that grazed outside his window the drawings eventually led to large sculptural pieces. In fact its true to say that the sketchbook is the crucial piece of kit for sculpture, designers, dancers and many other creative artists as well as painters.I have posted 6 notes from a small sketch which are pages from my Andalucia sketchbook as examples of the kind of work that I do. They are currently small drawings 19 x 14 using both sides or pages of the book when it is fully open. The books are Daley Rowney and are far from expensive, the paper which I think is recycled is very soft almost like sugar paper, and has an off white colour. I was put aback a little because it is quite porous and for many years I have used a more expensive solid cartridge paper sketch book from Windsor and Newton. But having got used to this ones character I have in fact grown to like the way the pen strokes or paint soaks through the paper.

Forthcoming Events 2009-2011

Exhibitions

Ascot Studios 2009/10
Van Gestel Marbella Espana July-August 2009/10
Festival International de Arte Marbella, Junio 2009
Cotswold Cranham Private show UK 28th November 2009
Global Art Barcelona Espana 21st December 2009/10
Miami Museum Art USA March 2010Chelsea Untitled Art fair 6th June 2010
Frankfurt Germany International Art Show 2010
Artisan Fine Art Gallery 2011 throughout
Brewery Arts Centre Kendal Dec -June 2010-2011
Wensley Gallery Bury Gt Manchester throughout 2011
Wensley Gt Manchester Solo show May 2011
Salle St Germaine de bois Paris France April May 2011
Montimore del Norte Lisbon Portugal 2011
Lancaster Bellwood and Wright Gallery July 2011
Yorkshire Group Show September 2011

Art workshops.
Rob Miller, James Naughton art workshops
Pennine Workshops at artisan April -MayWorking with oils June Southport 2011
Ribchester working with colour and form March 2010
Working with Water Rio Gedal Andalucia July 2009
Clough Head Farm Painting the West Pennines

Explorations 2009-2011

Granada and the Alhambra

Cork Oak Portugal with Manual e Casa Branca

15 Views of Lancashire's Ribble Valley

Land and Sea 'A Cotswold Tradition'Science and art a collaboration
The road to Kendal and beyond
15 Pennine Views

Cumbria from sea to the highest peaks

Inner Hebrides exploration

River Thames and Seinne

Normandy

Rivington A Watercolour painting by Rob Miller

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