字體：小 中 大 |
|
|
|
| 2009/07/29 02:34:21瀏覽841｜回應1｜推薦1 | |
"You want to paint professionally in watercolour? It's a difficult medium! Why, I've been painting for 20 years and STILL can't master it so how someone just beginning can plan to make a career in it beats me... I'm lucky to make enough to pay for materials..." In the need to be technically skilled, a career watercolourist is in the same position as other professionals. The expectations of clients will normally mean they have to deliver a high level of service and skill. Put bluntly, people won't pay much for work they consider 'amateur'. As a career painter, you will certainly have to know your craft, ensuring that your works are painted in high quality paint onto a high quality ground. Regardless of style or subject you will be expected to deliver and maintain a high and consistent level of technical quality in all of your paintings. The art market seldom gives long-term support to artists who can only 'pull off a good picture occasionally' or whose work physically deteriorates. At the same time, nothing is worse than seeing a badly painted example of your work hanging permanently on a wall for all to see. It's a lousy advertisement. So you will certainly want to know that every painting is well painted, well framed and well loved by its owners. Satisfied clients lie at the heart of the relationship marketing process on which many art careers depend: and a beautifully painted watercolour, shown off to one and all by its proud owner may well provide you with the best advertisement you can possibly have. This will assist you to further sales. "Watercolour skills can only be acquired by doing. Skill is an important measure in the eyes of many potential buyers, The more skilled you are at painting the better off you will be when it comes to selling." These and similarly discouraging comments (above) are very likely to be thrown at those who set out to make watercolour their career. And if, as I did, nearly 30 years ago, they have made their decision BEFORE acquiring all the skills needed, then they really are likely to receive some discouragement...Yet, when you think about it, if someone announced the decision to `become a doctor' we wouldn't laugh - because we all know that they can always go out and acquire the necessary skills and qualifications. It will certainly take time and effort, but the educational systems are there to support them. Can we do the same thing in watercolour? Is there some sort of `university' where you can reliably acquire the understandings and technical abilities that will equip you to follow your dream? Is there even a reliable way to learn the medium? The answer is both `yes' and `no' because, while there isn't a University of Watercolour to enrol at, there are thousands of painters teaching and some of them are teaching very well. There are courses, magazines, books, DVDs, seminars, tours, clubs and art schools devoted to teaching the skills of watercolour. But can these, in themselves, provide you with the level of skill required for you to take your vision forward into the marketplace with a realistic chance of actually making an income? The answer to that is, unfortunately, No. So I think that a professional needs to take a `professional approach' to learning watercolour, working as any other business person would to systematically acquiring the skills required from the sources available. There's lots of instruction to be had out there and of course International Artist is one of the great resources readily available to amateur and professional alike. Yet no amountof magazines, books or DVDs will deliver success unless you also have a professional perspective on the learning processes involved. You want to paint, but you also want a business. Traditionally, Japanese culture gives us a very interesting take on this, identifying three distinct stages to the learning of almost any traditional craft. The first stage of studentship is called `shu': when you simply copy your teacher, trying very hard to acquire their skills through imitation. Watercolour skills can only be acquired by doing. Your teacher's mastery is, of course, a combination of physical skill AND understanding. So to attain a comparable mastery yourself, you start with the physical skills and through the process of practice also acquire understanding. (Much of what you will need to learn in order to become a consummate painter will have to be learned this way - sometimes called `learning through the body". The reason I'm mentioning it is to reference the need to study mindfully - understanding the learning process - so that later, when you have learned all that you from teachers you can structure your further progress through experimentation and discovery. In my own case, I wanted to understand the approach of JMW 'Turner and others of his time, and the only way to do this was to create my own course ó studying and working from Turner's originals, examining his sketchbooks and visiting locations where he worked. This was how watercolourists learned in Turner's own era.) The second level of learning (known as `ha') is only reached when we have acquired the fundamentals of our master's skills and these have become our own. What was previously unfamiliar will now be familiar and what was previously unnatural to the hand now seems natural to it (we learn to walk and talk by the same process) . The final level - called 'ri' - is only reached when the pupil can turn the body of knowledge towards their own goals - using their skills to forge a personal direction. All that you have learned from past masters and teachers goes into your original works and you are finally expressing your own ideas in your own way - but at a very high level of skill, coupled with understanding. This might well be the point at which your career takes off . What about tutors? The trick seems to be to remember that there are three things you need from a teacher: information, instruction and inspiration. You will need information to equip you to follow the instructions (hopefully coupled with a clear demonstration of the skill you are trying to learn. Demonstration is the most powerful means of communicating technique: revealing relationships between brush and hand, qualities of wash and so on.) Finally, you want to be inspired by the teacher's input, so that you feel EMPOWERED yourself and ready to practice and practice until you become as one with the skill you are trying to acquire. This is very different from the typical approach of a hobby painter, who may only want to have fun and to enjoy the pleasantexperience of painting in watercolour. You want to SELL your work. Your situation is different, because the professional watercolour market is highly competitive. Skill is an important measure in the eyes of many potential buyers. The more skilled you are at painting the better off you will be when it comes to selling. Art is also about painting what YOU want in a way that does justice to YOUR vision and so either way you need to know the medium. List all of the things you see as essential. My own list would include all the basic washes and methods of working such as in flat, graded and variegated washes. I'd include mingling, charging, dry-brush. wet-in wet, scraping back, stopping out and many other processes as basics to work at. (I have always needed to really work at tonal values so I devised a system of charts where I painted tiny studies in a single colour (Paynes Grey). Such monochromatic value-studies were known as 'scale practice' in times past. It was said of Turner that his dazzling virtuosity was grounded in such scale practice. I found this invaluable. Your list will help you to structure the ongoing process of shu ha ri. Your art buyers will probably expect to see you moving forward in both skill and self expression, while you, inturn, will want to see your paintings selling for better prices as time goes by. So why not structure the acquisition of skills to a regular practise of drills built around the learning that you consider essential? For example, to improve your capacity to lay a graded wash - or your skill at painting birds in flight (the ones that circle the masts of yachts, bringing life to the sky in marine paintings) - simply isolate the skill you want to acquire and drill yourself with the processes involved onto scraps of paper, or in a sketch book or a sheet of paper masked into a `chart' of tiny picture spaces as I do? It makes more sense than waiting until you have beautifully painted a harbour then spoiling the whole thing with a badly painted bird. Seems crazy doesn't it, but lots of people habitually spoil their paintings - when a little lateral thinking and skill practice might quickly solve the problem. (The way a sports coach would, by making the athlete focus on improving a skill-area that was a weakness.) Over the last 25 years or so I've evolved a personal approach to teaching that is structured around the traditional skills of the 19th century British watercolour school - but I only did this because I was so frustrated with the lack of instruction I had received myself in my tertiary art education while training to become an qualified art teacher. However, 1 was also keenly studying a martial art (Aikido) under a wonderful Japanese master and the contrast of educational systems could not have been clearer. My Aikido master turned out to be the best 'art' teacher I could have because he was systematic, organised, prepared to demonstrate the skills I would need and also expected me to put in the hard miles towards acquiring my own mastery. I noticed that he isolated skills into bite-sized chunks which students were encouraged to work at and, most important of all, made it perfectly clear that the aim of his teaching was NOT to make us into clones but, to assist us to become "more ourselves". I also learned the importance of working in harmony with the medium - something readily apparent in the original works of many of the greatest watercolourists... They had become one with their medium! Can you study on your own? Absolutely! And the hard reality is, you may have to. There will always be more to learn and it makes watercolour thrilling. Your personal excitement at the discoveries you make for yourself along the way will also show in your work and give you an edge that assists your sales. Excitement is the parent of creativity. Pursuit of the things that really give you a buzz you may well make you a truly individual artist. David Cox, a famous British watercolourist of the early 19th century, put it something like this: "if no excitement is felt when you are painting then its perfectly natural that there is none apparent in the finished work.." Lots of people believe watecolour is a difficult medium, but the realty is actually the opposite. Like many other things in life, when you know how to do it, watercolour seems easy. The difficulty lies in learning it. At that's the point of this second article. Information is everywhere but to learn from it and raise your understandings and abilities to a `professional' level you may also have to be professional about the learning process. A career watercolourist has to remain an active, intelligent learner. This alone can mean the difference between a long and successful career, or its alternative, a rather frustrated life where one's watercolour skills are merely sufficient to the immediate task but won't support the dream of long-term, self sufficiency.
SUMMING UP @ High level skills are probably fundamental to a career in watercolour @ Identify a system that helps you to learn in the way that you learn best @ Take note of the 'professional' painting skills you aspire to then try to structure your learning programme to ensure that you acquire them Isolate what you v ant to learn into interesting exercises, then drill and drill until you can do them with ease. Then challenge yourself with variations on the theme. @ You have to learn by doing, because meaningful understandings very often come only after you've acquired the skills (rather than the other way around). @ Despite everything I've said about the importance of having 'high level painting skills', in my own experience, the people who purchase watercolours tend to value aesthetic quality and originality above all else. @ So don't become too obsessive about skill acquisition. Your skills should facilitate your passion - not the other way around. @ Next issue: the 'business' elements of a watercolour career Tony Smibert's art is influenced by a number of very distinctive aesthetic sources. The period known as The Golden Age of British Watercolour (1750 -1850), his lifelong study of the martial art of Aikido (giving him insight into calligraphic brush work) and the bold gestures of Abstract Expressionism have all found a place in his art. Working primarily in watercolour, he exhibits world-wide and, in Japan remains one of the few westerners ever invited to create their own signature range of high-fashion kimonos. He now collaborates with the Tate Gallery in London as an Artist Researcher - recreating JMW Turner's 19th century painting methods - and is the author of a number of books including the award winning How to Paint Landscapes from your Imagination as well as the classic Watercolour Apprentice series on DVD. The Smibert Gallery in Northern Tasmania specializes in building collections for private, corporate and public clients. |
|
| ( 在地生活｜北美 ) |
