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HOW MUCH DOES SIZE MATTER ?

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 22:13:00 GMT

In response to a recent post on my Facebook Group (‘Russell Dorey’s Studio’) about my imminent exhibition (at THE CROWN, All Saints Street, Hastings Old Town, East Sussex, TN34 3BN. From 17th NOvember to the 31st December 2020) my friend Gill commented that she loved the little painting of a single pear. She’s right; it’s a small but a perfect painting.

I’m going to use the Pear to make a postcard and I’ve been thinking about how to price that painting.

My gallery in London closed down a few years ago taking my career with it). I had an on-going… disagreement with the gallery director over the pricing of paintings. She insisted that the price of a painting should be in proportion to its size; that if I ask more for a little painting that for a larger painting then people will think that there’s something wrong with the larger painting.

I can see her point but I disagree. Of course size is going to have an influence on the price on a painting but I would like to present the case for small and simple over big and bold; size does not necessarily matter, it’s what you do with it that matters.

( BOTTLE AND GLASS oil on canvas 21″ x16″ cat 619 )

Looking at canvas that’s no bigger than a face is a different and more intimate experience than looking at something when you have to move your eye or your head around to get it all. I’m not saying that one is better than the other. A large canvas can be impressive, powerful… all sorts of stuff but it is less likely to be the sort of perfect that a little painting can be.

I’ve made paintings that I think are perfect and these are half a dozen examples. They are not always but usually small paintings and simple compositions with just one or two objects. These have been the paintings of which I am most proud.

( HORSES SKULL oil on canvas 29″ x 21″ cat 598 )

LEMONS

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 18:52:00 GMT

I like painting lemons and the best ones are the big lumpy lemons that you don’t find in supermarkets (a friend went to Brighton to buy lemons for me a month ago). Painting yellow is unlike painting anything else. I can’t build the forms methodically and analytically. The only way that I can finish paintings of lemons is to get lost in them and muddle through to a resolution that I don’t understand how I achieved.

A few years ago I made three paintings of the same simple Still Life; lemons in a wooden bowl with a couple of books.

This first painting had the objects in the centre of the canvas. After that I pushed everything against the left side of the composition so I had a lot of empty space. I like empty space in paintings.

I sold two of those paintings and gave one to my girlfriend. Some time later she saw sense and she left me. A couple of years later she sent me an email saying that she didn’t want my paintings any more, would I like them back? I replied immediately that even though we weren’t together I had thought that she would always like the paintings but yes, if she didn’t want them I would like them back. Within minutes I got another email “Sorry they went to someone else”. That has always seemed like a really shitty thing to do.

Someone contacted me recently asking if I still had the same painting of lemons, the one I gave away. She had found it on Instagram. I said that I didn’t and I told her the story. I happened to be painting another composition with lemons but she said that it was on that original painting that she had set her heart… so, I tracked down one of the other paintings, one that I had sold, and I went to London to borrow it back for a few weeks and I am making, not exactly a copy, but another version.

This is my new version as it looked a few days ago. I’m still talking to the Instagram woman and I am hoping that she’ll be interested if and when I get it finished.

BEING BORING

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 19:33:00 GMT

Every week I cycle to Rye, up through Ore, down Battery Hill to Pett Level and then along the coast and through the bird sanctuary to Rye Harbour. It’s a fabulous ride and most of it is downhill or on the flat. I meet my Friday lunch buddy and then I peddle home, inland through the countryside; out of the back of Rye and along a track and onto Dumb Woman’s Lane (you couldn’t make it up… not now anyway). There are four hills on my way home. I do it to get a bit fitter which doesn’t work because I invariable reward myself with a brace of apple donuts from Jempsons in Rye (once I managed to resist the temptation in Rye but by the time I got back to Ore I burst into the COOP and bought a pack of five apple donuts. I ate them all).

I cycle the same route every week. People have suggested that I might try other routes but I don’t want to; I like that I know every bend, drain and manhole cover along my route, that I know that I can take the bend at the bottom of Battery Hill without even touching the breaks, that I can stick out my arm and run my hand through a rosemary bush in Winchesea and that I can now get up the third hill without wishing I was dead.

It might sound dull but in a world that seems to want only novelty I don’t.

Similarly in my work I paint many of the same objects on the same three shelves, two of which have followed me to France and back and from studio to studio for forty years.

As I paint a familiar object again and again the experience is richer.

AFTER POUSSIN

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 13:54:00 GMT

( My Massacre of the Innocents. Oil on canvas. 34” x 29” )

Over a year ago I began working on my own version of a painting by Nicholas Poussin, the Massacre of the Innocents which he painted between 1625 and 1631.

It is a complex painting, a riot of shapes and of colours and it is perhaps the opposite of the still, calm, controlled paintings that I usually make. If they are three minute pop songs then this beast is an opera.

( Nicholas Poussin. The Massacre of the Innocents. 58″ x 67″ 1625-1632 )

Cezanne wanted to do Poussin again from nature and I have always wanted to get under the skin of one of Poussin’s paintings to better understand his composition.

I also have enormous respect for Euan Uglow’s work. Between 1979 and 1981 Uglow had made his own copy of the Massacre of the Innocents. I thought it would be interesting to walk in both Nicholas Poussin and Euan Uglow’s footsteps. I deliberately didn’t look at Uglow’s version during all of the time that I was wrestling with Poussin. Only now that I have finished am I comparing Uglow’s painting to my own, seeing how he dealt with exactly the same problems that I have had to resolve.

(Euan Uglow. Massacre of the Innocents, after Poussin. 16 1/2 ” x 19 1/4 “)

I worked on my painting for three months but it was not resolved. I did like bits of my painting; the economy with which I described the soldier’s red cloak and the baby who is about to be murdered (he looks like Ian Hislop) but I didn’t ever feel that I had brought everything together, my colours didn’t belong together as though they were lit by the same sun. In March 2018 I put the painting aside.

For the next nine months the unfinished canvas… gestated as it leaned against a wall in my studio.

It took a while to work out that the problem I had with the painting, and the reason that I put it aside, was an existential one; more to do with the nature of the task than a technical problem. I had not had a clear idea of what it was that I had been trying to achieve.

I have never seen the original painting. I had been working from a photograph, a good photograph but less than half of the size of my canvas and a photograph, any photograph, is a distortion or a part of the truth.

Was I trying to copy a photograph ?

A part of the right hand side of the original painting looks as though it might have been damaged because the colour seemed to have leeched out.

Why would I faithfully reproduce damage on the original painting ?

Or, should I be trying to recreate whatever I imagined Poussin’s original painting probably looked like?

Or should I be using the original painting as I would use a still life and constructing his objects in my own painting ?

During the dead days between Christmas and the New Year I began again and I promised myself that I would spend only one last month working on the painting

It is as if a skin forms and I have to break through an imaginary varnish. I find it hard to begin working on a painting after an interval. I always go back to drawing when a painting gets lost. When I’m drawing I’m trying to simplify and understand how it all fits together, as much in my head as on the canvas. I redrew the objects and relationships across the canvas.

In photographs the pillars on the left of the original painting are so dark that I could not quite work out what was going on. I finally found this etching, an old copy of the painting, which helped.

I wrote about my lack of and then slow progress on my Facebook Group (RussellDoreysStudio) and in response to one post a couple of people commented that it wasn’t really their kind of thing. It takes a comment like that to remind me how little I notice the subject of a painting. I had worked on this Massacre of the Innocents for weeks before, one evening, after a long days painting, I stepped back and thought with surprise what an awful thing to do to a baby! It might seem unlikely but when I’m working I’m looking at line, colour and tone, volume and space, harmonies and contrasts.

and now i’ll have to sell the damn thing !

TROUBLE

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 23:58:00 GMT

My father wrote a lot of letters to politicians and to the press.

In these letters he would rant about a number of diverse issues, so his letters were not always succinct.

I think that he wrote so many letters about the many subjects that exercised him that he may have relied upon the text of an occasional reply to remind him of the subject of his original letter.

Winston Churchill did reply but my father could never remember what his original letter had been about.

It must have been a rambling letter because Churchill’s reply was succinct:

“Dear Mr Dorey, I could not have failed to have disagreed with you less”

I’m working on a half a dozen paintings and my friend Peter recently asked why I’m having trouble finishing anything.

It isn’t, as he supposed, that I don’t know when a painting is finished. I’m reminded of my father’s letter writing in that there is there is a similar lack of focus so the work is confused and I’m a dog chasing his own tail.

Painting is not mindless copying; colours change throughout the day as the light alters so a painting is a synthesis and a contrivance. I have to decide what I want to say or to build and then to organize everything I put on the canvas to support that.

Colours and tone and line are like the words and grammar in a poem that should rhyme or clash and flow or jar.

One has to establish contrasts of light and dark and warm and cool and to place colours so that they reinforce each other. This is an early stage of one of the paintings I have been working on. I’ve decided that the light from the left is cool and so the wall on the right is warmer. The darker ‘greys’ of the photograph have violet in them whilst the back of the box has a bit of yellow in it but sometimes I look too hard, I find to much nuance in colour and tone and I alter colours pursuing the light as it changes … like a dog chasing his tail.

The photograph that I used in this still life and to which the painting owes so much is by Eric Kellerman, an English photographer who has lived for decades in Holland.

http://www.erickellermanphotography.com

GLASSES

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 11:50:00 GMT

Someone wrote in my Facebook group (Russell dorey’s studio):

“I’ve seen somewhere a piece of your work including a pair of spectacles. Would you ever use the same ‘prop’ twice?”

( Only a heap of broken images. 32″ x 38″ cay 569 )

Yes. I would and I do. I’m like a dog with a bone when I find a new object. Nearly ten years ago I started to need glasses and I liked these because the wire frames already look as though they are a line drawing, and they only cost 99p from ESK in Hastings. I bought a handful at a time and had a drawer full of glasses. Then I used them in at least half a dozen paintings where they often appeared with the blue cup (although rumors of a relationship, of anything beyond a strictly professional coupling were denied)

(detail)

I’ve always kept a cast of objects to use as characters in Still Lives but I’ve tried not to allow myself to repeat the same idea so that it becomes a gimmick.

( The cry of the Commuter. 12″ x 16″ cat 635 )

However, just a couple of years ago someone wanted a painting that I had already sold and I suggested that I make her, not a copy, but another version. It took me weeks, was difficult but I found that in attempting another version of a painting I was not repeating myself. I discovered that it was a new discipline.

( Sassoferrato’s Virgin. 14″ x 14″ cat 579 )

After that I allowed myself to make versions of The Blue Cup and The Tape Measure painting.

( Screaming Woman. 10″ x 12″ cat 657 )

DOUBT

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 17:12:00 GMT

When I was younger, so much younger than today I never needed anybody’s help in any way. But now these days are gone and I’m not so self assured…

I’ve been looking at this painting. I wrote a post about it when it was finished some months ago, but I’ve already finished it so many times.

(SOUVENIR DE PARIS oil on canvas. 24″ x 28″)

There was a story that went with the painting: That almost nine years ago I was in Paris sleeping in Patti Smith’s bed (she wasn’t in it and anyway that’s another story).
I used a primitive phone to take a photograph of this female torso; a Greek or Roman sculpture in the Musee Rodin. When I had the photograph printed the colours were quite distorted towards violet and greens but I liked the image and so I used the print as a part of a still life beside an enamel jug and some other objects.
Although I don’t give up easily I could not make the painting work so eventually the canvas joined the pile of other unresolved paintings in a corner of my studio.
I hauled it out every year or so, put it onto an easel, wondered what to do with it and then put it away again, until last year when I stripped almost everything away. I carefully painted out everything apart from the photograph taped to the wall, the light across the shelf and the wall. Then the canvas went back to wait in the unresolved stack.

( stripped down state )

It might have been last Christmas that my daughter’s endless dredging of local charity shops dragged a small turquoise 1950’s (?) vase into the light. The colour seems to work nicely with the curious distorted colours of the photograph and the shape of the neck of the vase fits nicely against the hip and leg of the figure. I tried to add a tall Chinese lemon yellow vase… but that wouldn’t settle so I took that out again and replaced it with small enigmatic boxes.

This is an odd business; painting and being an artist. I choose what it is that I do and how I’m going to do it. I create my own language and grammar and I’m my only judge.

My paintings are poems. I put shapes and colours and images together and I don’t have to know what a painting means but I do have to believe it.

I used to be able to place objects and shapes and colours into compositions so that they belonged. I can’t always describe what it was but I was confident and I could do it. It was something like being able to juggle (although I have never been able to juggle).

Now I almost wish that I hadn’t taken a photograph of the painting last year. I do like the turquoise vase against the torso but… but I’m not convinced. I think I’m going to have to take out the vase and the boxes, to scrape down the surface and try to take the painting back to it’s stripped down state.

I recently heard the author Madeline Miller on Radio 4 talking about her novel ‘The Song of Achilles’. It was about to be published when she decided that the whole book had to be rewritten. Similarly I’m trying to convince myself that this return to an earlier state is not days of work wasted but is a sort of progress; that if I’ve worked another twenty hours on a painting I will better understand the painting even if it looks the same as it did a year ago.

I did made a small painting of the turquoise vase with the boxes.

(Larger Turquoise Pot with Boxes. 16”x18” cat 660)

NONSENSE

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:57:00 GMT

It’s still the afternoon of day one and I’m still in Cezanne’s beautiful studio at Les Lauves.

I am jealous of that studio.

A little French woman insisted on breaking into my reverie giving a terrible talk in not very good English.

There were some interesting facts and some of it was rubbish but some of it was just … French. Is it a peculiarity of the French to insist on a symbolic meaning for everything?

The three human skulls that Cezanne painted are still sitting in his studio and she explained that for Cezanne they signified mortality. She said that when he painted apples they signified life, and that the candle in a candlestick signified the passage of time; alight it signified life and extinguished it signified death.

Save me !

I buttoned my lip but got to the point where if she had said ‘signified’ one more time I would have had to tell her, politely, that she was just being very silly.

Cezanne’s skulls are symmetrical and complex subtle forms, they’re perfect objects to draw and to paint. Apples are bright coloured spheres and the candlestick is a useful vertical in a composition. People get it very wrong when they try to impose meanings onto Cezanne’s paintings. We are more used and more comfortable with words than pictures and so we want everything translated into words. They can help you to approach a painting but the point of a painting is that it is itself; a discussion about something with line tone and colour as the grammar and vocabulary.

I remember similar nonsense in the catalogue for the Cezanne portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Whoever wrote it was ladling on meaning with a trowel; it went on about how Mme Cezanne’s expression hovered somewhere between a smile and … some other emotion, as though, being a good painter he was also able to peer into peoples souls which is, I believe, rubbish. Cezanne was socially hopeless.

Zola said (and this may have been early in his career) that Cezanne did most of the actual painting when the sitter had left because the presence of an actual person distracted him, he just mostly looked and made colour notes while the sitter was there.

When he painted his wife he was using a figure to build a composition. He was interested in her head as an object, but he wasn’t much interested in her expression and certainly not interested in capturing or conjuring an emotion, but a face has to have a mouth so he made a mark.

L’ATELIER LES LAUVES

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:34:00 GMT

Ten minutes before Cezanne’s Studio reopened after lunch I was waiting on the road outside.

Cezanne had his studio built on the hill, LES LAUVES, north of the town in 1901. The studio was then the only building beside the track that is now a busy road with houses and flats along it as Aix has grown.

He had a farmhouse, a Bastide, knocked down, kept the cellars, and built his studio upon them.

I visited the studio about 25 years ago and in the intervening quarter of a century I have changed more than it has, but I didn’t realize then quite how perfect a studio it is.

In 1955 or 56 there was a famous bitter winter referred to as Le grand hiver or le grand gelé. The cold killed most of the olive trees that carpeted Provence. In place of the olives there are now mostly Mediterranean pine that are much taller. Cezanne’s studio at les Lauves was originally surrounded by low olive trees. He would have looked out of his studio over the olives towards the town and nothing would have blocked the light from the north.

The courtyard is now shaded under pines (it’s the English Provencal fantasy and you half expect a hunchback Depardieu to greet you).

This time they let me in.

The studio is on the first floor and I walked up the stairs which Cezanne walked, trod on the same carrelage with my hand on the same wooden bannister rail and turned the doorknob to open the door to his studio as he would have done.

This must seem a bit over the top but it is the closest I’m going to get to meeting the man who made me a painter and who has been my guide and example since I was ninenteen years old.

His studio is almost eight meters square and five high. There is a very huge window on the north side and two windows on the southern side, which have shutters both on the outside and on the inside to stop any light penetrating. Northern light is even throughout the day but light from the south pours in through the windows bleaching out everything so you can’t see what you’re painting.

Cezanne mixed his own colour for the walls; black, white and a bit of ochre and red etc. He made a colour that would absorb rather than reflect light; the colour photographers use. He also had a wooden floor laid in the studio instead of the ubiquitous red carrelage tiled floors of southern France and this had the same deadening effect as the walls.

There’s a tall slot in the corner of the studio so he could bring in and take out his large late Baigneuses compositions.

I used to try to paint in a room with a rose coloured carpet and it was difficult, and I’ve never had a studio with northern light.

I bloody love that studio (and I should have taken more photographs).

A PILGRIMAGE TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:18:00 GMT

One month ago I left my house obscenely early one morning in the pitch black and plodded down to Hastings station to catch the first train of the day to Gatwick airport.
I didn’t see anyone or a single car moving and I didn’t really believe that the 5.08 train would run. There were however a few worn and desultory souls on the platform and the train arrived. I flew to Marseillles and was in Aix-En-Provence by lunchtime.

The following morning I walked a couple of kilometres out of the town, to the north, up to Les Lauves where Cezanne had a studio built in 1901. I approached like Abraham going up the mountain to meet his god… or as one might approach Bob Dylan.
And the buggers wouldn’t let me in. Me ! His number bloody one disciple. The studio was full with a pre booked group of Americans.

SOUVENIR DE PARIS.

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 23:36:00 GMT

(SOUVENIR DE PARIS oil on canvas. 24″ x 28″)

Eight years ago I was in Paris sleeping in Patti Smith’s bed (she wasn’t in it and anyway that’s another story).
In the Musee Rodin I used my phone to take a photo of this female torso, a Greek or Roman sculpture.
When I had the photograph printed the colours were distorted towards violet and greens, but I liked the image and I used it as a part of a still life composition.
I could not make that painting work. I don’t give up easily but eventually the canvas joined the pile of other unresolved paintings.
I have hauled it out every year or so put it onto an easel, wondered what to do with it and put it away again.
Until last year when I carefully painted out everything apart from the photograph taped to the wall and the light across the shelf and the wall.

(unfinished state, bit it’s a better photograph)

The canvas then went back to the unresolved stack to wait patiently.

Quite recently my daughter found me a small turquoise 1950’s ? vase. The colour seems to work nicely with the strange distorted colours of the photograph and the shape of the neck of the vase fits against the hip and leg of the figure. I also added a tall Chinese lemon yellow vase… but that wouldn’t settle so I took it out again and replaced it with a couple of small enigmatic boxes.

( Cat 660. unfinished state, despite the signature. It’s not a very good photo)

I begin to think and hope that after an eight year gestation the painting of the photograph from Paris is almost resolved and I’ve also used the vase and boxes to make two small simple compositions which are also nearly finished.

BLUE CUP AND MEASURING TAPE

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:01:00 GMT

( BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE IV )

This painting PINK BOX from 2013 may have been first time that I used the Blue Cup. It’s the first mention of it that I can find.

( PINK BOX oil on canvas. 26” x 16”. Cat 509 )

Six months later I finished a rather cluttered composition involving the blue cup. I took some of the elements out of the still life, pared down the composition, and arrived at BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE almost by accident, I’m not sure that I even have a photograph of that first painting.

I sold BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE to a friend almost immediately but people kept asking me for it so I put the objects back on my shelf and painted a second version, which I also sold.

( BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE VII. Cat 645 )

I was initially a little embarrassed about this; I wondered if a similar painting devalued the original but the light and the time of day are different in each painting and I have enjoyed returning to the same composition so they are never identical nor sterile reproductions.

( BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE VIII. Cat 655 )

People continued to ask about the painting and so I made a third version and I have continued to paint the same composition. I reassemble the cast once or twice a year and paint another version. I have so far made eight versions of BLUE CUP WITH MEASURING TAPE and I’ll stop when I’m bored.

ANOTHER WOMAN ON THE EDGE

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 17:33:00 GMT

I began this painting a little over a year ago. I got stuck, I couldn’t make any progress on it and I abandoned it but I fished it out of a corner of my studio last week, I’ve been working and it’s going well. I’ve put almost everything right in just a couple of days.
It wont be finished in time for the exhibition in Rye next weekend, and anyway I couldn’t get her framed in time, but she will be ready for my exhibition at Vinehall School in Robertsbridge at the start of June.

(ANOTHER WOMAN ON THE EDGE. oil on canvas. 18”x24”)

THE ADVENTURES OF A BLUE CUP

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 18:55:00 GMT

In the forthcoming group exhibition, TENTERDEN ARTISTS IN RYE on the weekend of the 21 ^st and 22 ^nd of April I’ll be showing three small recent paintings with a blue cup.

(A BLUE CUP IN BATTLE GREAT WOOD. oil on canvas. cat 646. 10″x14″)

I found this unassuming cast off cardboard coffee cup on the pavement of a south coast seaside town and it became the subject of a series of twenty still life paintings co-starring alongside Paul Cezanne, a detail from Picasso’s Guernica and the Virgin Mary.

(THE CRY F THE COMMUTER. oil on canvas. Cat 635. 12″x16″)

It was the startling colour, that little piece of summer sky, that I bent to scoop up off the pavement but it is also a mundane everyday object, a take away coffee cup and that has lent itself to a narrative within so many paintings.

()

I’m never confident with colour and although I like to involve saturated colour in my compositions I keep those strong colours controlled and corralled; I set them against areas of subtle muted colour or pale walls and I rarely let them play together.

The first painting in which I can find the blue cup was PATISSERIE from the summer of 2013. I still have the painting and another PINK BOX (26”x16”. Cat 509) which were my own hymns of praise to Waitrose’s Sultana and lemon Danish pastries. Their patisserie used to be put into these shockingly pink boxes.

The Blue Cup went up onto my shelves to be jostled by the throng of characters, repertory actors waiting for a role in a painting. Its longevity was probably due to one little painting, BLUE CUP AND MEASURING TAPE (Cat 526. 8”x10”). I sold it to a friend but perhaps because of the size of the painting (about the size of a sheet of A4) or its moderate price, I could have sold this painting fifty times and so I’ve made other versions of the composition over the past five years.

(BLUE CUP AND A TAPE MEASURE. oil on canvas. 8″x10″ cat 526)

To my mind the Blue Cup’s moment came when I brought a Postcard back from a trip to Venice. Sassoferrato’s Virgin had hugely impressed me and I wanted to include it in a composition. Blue was the prescribed colour for the Virgin Mary’s cloak (a Renaissance painter was not allowed to show Christ’s mother in an orange roll neck sweater).

(Sassoferrato’s Virgin. oil on canvas. Cat 579. 14″x14″)

Sassoferrato’s Virgin was one of those rare paintings that arrive effortlessly like gifts and I sold the painting at Bedford School last year. The blue cup, the Postcard, a pair of wire reading glasses and a couple of coins worked together, they seemed to suggest a narrative that hung just under the surface of being understood.

(unfinished state. CEZANNE WITH THE BLUE CUP. oil on canvas. Cat 638. 40cm x 40cm)

LEMONS

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 14:45:00 GMT

(LEMONS. cat 642. oil on canvas. 18″x16″)

I’ve sold the Lemons. Actually they sold themselves, it wasn’t as if I did anything clever to make the sale but at least I didn’t manage to unsell them.

Ironically the buyer of these lemons is the sister of the woman who tried to buy another painting of lemons years ago, which allows me to tell the little lemons story, again.

I once showed paintings at the house of friends in Islington. My paintings were as a backdrop to their party. The hostess, I’ll call her Janis (because it’s her name) is an very good cook, it was a good party and Janis worked the floor for me. She asked people if they liked the painting they were looking at and if they said that they did she suggested that they buy it and, for the most part, they did.

I was swanning about with a glass of something lovely in my hand, being alternately a bit of a star and a little nervous, talking to people as red dots were being deployed when my sister’s friend Liz told me that she would “like to buy the little painting of the lemons”. “The lemons !” I (allegedly) exclaimed, “Why do you want to buy that one ? It’s the worst painting here” and I led her to it and started to expound about the painting’s faults. Janis had seen and heard the exchange and some time later I felt a hand on my shoulder and her voice in my ear saying “And she didn’t buy the lemons did she.”

ENLARGEMENT CAN HELP.

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:22:00 GMT

(Bourgogne and a Glass of Wine. unfinished state. 10″ x 18″)

I began this painting of a bottle of Bourgogne and a glass of wine in May of 2014. I showed it at Lucy Bell’s Gallery in 2014 but later I cut it down to 10” by 16” and reworked it for my exhibition in the Crown last year but I was never happy with it, the spaces around and especially below the objects were too mean.

Last week I took it out of it’s frame. I was going to strip the canvas off the stretcher and throw the painting away but I wondered if there was enough canvas too put onto a slightly larger stretcher.

There was, just. It’s still skinny but I managed to find another two inches on the height. Who says that size isn’t important? I still have the shelf and the bottle and the glass so I’m going to give the painting one more chance.

When I started writing this blog and posting on Facebook about about a year ago I wanted to demystify painting and to describe what I do as a job.

I used to think that it was Michelangelo who said ‘Artists are the fitting consorts for princes and kings’. I suspect that it was someone around then, perhaps Vasari, but neither Google nor I can find the quotation. That idea did a lot of damage; until then artists were like masons and carpenters, they were craftsmen now art is now shrouded in mystery and artists pose behind the idea of genius.

PLODDING ON

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 17:17:00 GMT

My original idea was of a long canvas and a lot of bison; a huge herd of the beasts, but in the process of contriving the composition and making the drawing the idea altered.
I wanted to be able to see each of the objects, so each bison needed some space. Then I found that I couldn’t push the edges as far as I had hoped; the distortion became too pronounced on the right and the left and so my composition had to be less wide and I lost a couple of bison.
One of my bison was originally raised on a box as if it was an outcrop of rock but I got rid of the box. I also exchanged the bright green vertical of a cactus for a smaller grey dead tree, that was, in turn, edited out. I have eventually taken out everything that interfered with a gentle current, the pattern or the movement of the bison across the canvas and through the composition and I am still paring down the composition and the colour to what seems essential.
I have drawn the bison as accurately as I can. They are identical objects but they are each seen from a different angle. The other relief is that there are two different coloured manes on the bison, that I can twist their tails around and raise or lower the heads.
I’ve been thinking of this painting of Bison along my shelf as a piece of music. I watched a couple of documentaries over Christmas and one was about Keith Richards. He was filmed in the studio playing guitar with other musicians and it seemed that he might be doing something similar to what I ought to be doing.
I’ve a drawing, a composition that are insistent but I can play down elements in the composition, quieten areas on the canvas if I need to or strengthen parts, even empty areas, by allowing my paintwork to become visible.

I wrote above ‘what I ought to be doing’. I’ve not been painting well. I fear that my method is holding me too tight, that I’m not managing to play loosely enough with paint within the precision and rigour of the drawing and the composition. Am I just playing the tune without allowing emotion in ? Am I plodding along like the bison, working so little in this pit of winter that I never get under the surface ?

The canvas doesn’t look like this photograph now, it is chaos and discord and there’s paint everywhere but I didn’t do much yesterday and I haven’t painted today so the canvas is almost dry. I hope the paint will be dry enough so that I can take the canvas off the stretcher. I want to move the whole composition down a centimetre on the stretcher. Now that I’m establishing areas of tones in the composition I feel that there is too much space under the shelf and I want to feel that I’m looking down onto the shelf.

A HERD OF BISON IN WINTER (a work in progress).

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 18:22:00 GMT

(for Lynne, who might read this)

There is life after lemons. Last month it was endless lemons, now it’s bison. Should it be Bison or Buffalo ?

I was encouraged by the sale of two of my Playmobil compositions at my exhibition in Bedford. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t paint another until I had sold some. I have now sold three and this will be my fifteenth Playmobil painting.

I cleaned up the wall above my shelf with a coat of white emulsion exorcising the ghosts and traces of past Still Lives and then I carefully arranged my herd of Playmobil Bison (all eight) along the length of the Ikea shelf. I tried lots of daft ideas like building up a landscape of different levels and slopes with some books and other junk but I decided to keep the composition simple.

I positioned a cactus exactly on the golden section, for my own pleasure as much as because it often looks right. I wanted that note of colour in the painting but later I felt that it was just too wild and changed the cactus for a Playmobil plastic dead tree stump.

I began a drawing about ten days ago intending to enlarge the finished drawing by 16% with an idea for the composition on a long horizontal canvas, that would be 48” wide and only 18” high, on which the bison will be just a little larger than life size.

Over the past couple of weeks the light hasn’t been good, even for drawing, and the days are too short so I’ve been plodding along, not building any momentum with this project. My drawing became getting heavy in the gloom and I ploughed into the paper.

It was slow and I plodded, like a Bison, along the shelf and the drawing grew. I nailed seven of the beasts and then I decided that there had to be a break in the rhythm of the Bison’s march along the shelf, or it would be about as exciting as a Kitchen Roll. I spent an afternoon trying to remove two of the bison and taking out a pointless box on which I had stood one of the bison just to alter the height.

I also decided that I wasn’t going to get to the ends of the shelf before the distortion became too extreme and the ends of the shelf curled upwards. I changed my plan for the size of the canvas. The new one is smaller, 36″ x 18″.

The way vision works is that what is presented to our brains are countless snapshots which we edit together. Each is only an undistorted cone of no more than 30 degrees on the back of our retina. Outside that small circle what we see begins to distort. I wanted to achieve a sense of the shelf and the bison being an arm’s length away so it was essential to pin down the exact distortion of the shelf. I could have drawn three straight and parallel lines for the shelf and then moved myself along to the left and the right drawing patches of the still life directly in front of me and ‘fudging’, allowing the gaps to absorb the distortion. It might have been a horizontal equivalent of Euan Uglow’s 1967 painting ‘NUDE FROM TWELVE REGULAR VERTICAL POSITIONS’. That would have worked but there would have been no sense of presence, no feeling that you were in front of the shelf, that it was three feet away.

The edited drawing wasn’t as long as the original idea and it was a smaller herd, only six animals. These ‘bison’ are an identical object repeated (not quite true, Playmobil produced two slightly different coloured manes). Everything depends upon the precision of the drawing. Each object has to have a presence in relation to me, my eye. If they aren’t drawn well I might as well have done as my friend Peter suggested and made a rubber stamp or traced a row of identical bison, like an Egyptian frieze.

WHERE WERE YOU ?

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 11:41:00 GMT

I took thirty eight paintings to Bedford at the weekend. It tok nearly seven hours to drive from hastings to Bedford ! But I had recovered by Sunday morning when I met Michael Croker, who is the head of the Art Department, at Bedford School.

The exhibition space was a surprise. It’s red, very red and I felt like a Foetus for a while.

Save for an occasional warm splash most of my colour is cool and so the red walls worked nicely against my canvasses. Michael really is used to the space and he and my team (my Marketing director, Technical director the driver) and I managed to hang thirty five paintings. I think they look good.

It isn’t an ideal exhibition space; it’s a thoroughfare, a busy crossroads and some of the shapes were curious, like these wedges under the stairs, but even these turned out to be opportunities rather than problems.

I like that idea that my work will be here for a month, largely ignored by the majority of five hundred schoolboys who will rush back and forwards past my paintings every day. Perhaps just one or two boys will stop and notice something.

There will surely be many boys at the school who will have played with the same plastic cowboys and Indians that I painted in my series of Playmobil tableau and I wonder what they will make of seeing their toys in this new context.

(Michael Croker and Russell Dorey on the morning of the hanging)

AN EXHIBITION AT BEDFORD SCHOOL

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:31:00 GMT

I’ve just had to get forty paintings finished, framed varnished, bubble wrapped and to my BEDFORD SCHOOL EXHIBITION, how the hell did Hannibal* get a load of elephants across the Alps ?

I’m about to put up an exhibition at BEDFORD SCHOOL.
The Private View will be from 7.30 until 9 PM on Friday the 3rd November and the exhibition will run until Wednesday the 15th November. But I have no one to invite. Almost the only person I know who live near Bedford is in the process of moving to the Isle of Wight (I’m astonished at the trouble people will go to not to have to come to my exhibitions).
Does anyone know anyone who is both wealthy and has impeccable taste and lives near Bedford who might enjoy my paintings ?

PICTURE PLANE

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 16:18:00 GMT

(drawing for painting. 1999. catalogue no.239)

I worked late into the evening on Wednesday carefully spoiling the little painting that had been going quite well.

Yesterday, Thursday, was a rubbish day, there was little light in the morning so I kicked about the house until I decided to build a table under my shelf for Still Lives. I’ll be looking down onto my subjects on the tabletop.

I begin each piece of work with a drawing and almost the first decision I have to make is about the picture plane.

The picture plane is like an imaginary sheet of glass between the artist and the subject.

Working on still lives on shelves the picture plane will often be a vertical plane (that is parallel to the wall) but if I’m looking down onto objects on a table the picture plane will be tilted, perhaps to 45 degrees to the wall (and if I were drawing my feet it could even be horizontal, the same plane as the floor).

Once I have a picture plane I establish a vertical that is bisected by a Horizonatal at the centre of the composition.

I’ll often draw a horizontal and a Vertical line onto the wall behind my still life.

If the picture plane is parallel to the wall (that’s to say if I’m examining things on a shelf up at somewhere up near my shoulder height) I’ll establish a horizontal line on the wall at my eye level.

If I‘m looking down at objects on a table the picture plane will be tilted, the horizontal will be well below my eye level perhaps amongst the objects on the top of the table.

The Vertical and Horizontal lines are important in the construction of the drawing because they are the only lines that will not bend.

A vertical that occurs on the central Vertical is the only vertical in the composition that will not distort, the same is true for a horizontal occurring along the Horizontal. I can measure along the Horizontal and Vertical lines and plot these positions onto the horizontal and Vertical in my drawing.

I’ve been pouring through piles of drawings and this very tight plotted drawing of bottles from eighteen years ago shows nicely what I’m trying to describe. My picture plane was probably vertical. The Horizontal is above the top of the paper. My vertical drops through the tallest bottle. Look at the beer bottle (with a stag’s head on the label) and the Perrier bottle; all of the vertical lines to the left and right of it distort towards the centre as they descend.

I find it hard to break down my working method into bite size bits but I hope that all this has made sense.

LINES AND MARKS

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 08:51:00 GMT

I have created a group on Facebook called RUSSELL DOREYS STUDIO. Someone asked me why I leave lines on my paintings, if they are an affectation. In trying to answer what seemed to be a simple question I wrote reams and I spiralled off in all directions but I’ve pruned the reply (but I have some of those cuttings in water so that I can develop some of them for future posts).

The ticks, marks and the lines across the surface of my paintings are the marks I make in its construction. I don’t want to hide them and they emphasise the flat surface and the process and I can return to these stable points if and when the drawing gets lost. They aren’t my invention; you’ll find similar marks on Euan Uglow’s paintings, but I don’t want them to become an affectation, I do try not to let them become a trademark or gimick.
I’m a draftsman more than I’m a painter, and perhaps almost a scientist before a poet and I make paintings by rigorous analysis of objects and the space I’ve arranged in front of me, measuring and plotting with a pencil on paper. I analyse and examine what it is that I see, I don’t ‘sketch’, I try not to trust what I think I see but instead I measure and plot and test everything (I’ll describe my method in another post). I think that the process gives the work a conviction.

MODULAR FORMS

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 13:52:00 GMT

It has taken me a long time to work out how specifically I seek out modular forms. I’ve known that I like repeating similar objects in the same composition but it is only recently that I have noticed how many of my still lives are made up of these modular forms be they bottles or Playmobil figures, Bison or Fir Trees.

Five Green Bottles. Painting Stolen in France. (oil on canvas. Cat 155. 27″ x 22″)
Involving repeated modular forms in a composition is a nice way to study distortion.
My drawings are about precision, I try to pin down the distortion as shapes edge away from the centre; as vertical lines rise and fall from the centre of the composition they bend inwards and a similar thing happens along the horizontal axis (so the shelf appears narrower to the right and left of the centre).

(Photograph of subject for Berlin Beer Bottles)
Even when I’m not drawing a row of the same object I look for geometric shape, circles and rectangles. Getting ellipses dead right is vital; the specific shapes of the base or the rims of cups and bowls and the tops and bottoms of labels on wine bottles all provide clues to their positions and their relation to one and other.

(My growing herd of Playmobil Bison)
I’ve been collecting these toy Bison for a large canvas, a herd of Bison moving across the plain, and the Fir Trees for a Playmobil Forest, only a small one so far, a wood or perhaps a thicket.

(My Playmobil Fir Trees)

I NEED ANOTHER PALETTE

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:25:00 GMT

My house is a mess and so is my studio but my palette has to be clean and well laid out. I don’t know how anyone can use a palette that is a crusted moonscape, a riot of dead dried oil paint. I think that I made this palette soon after I moved into my […]

AN ANECDOTE: TRUTH AND MARKETING

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 17:37:00 GMT

FEMINA. (oil on canvas. 25″ x 34″) cat no 289

Since I wrote a post on Facebook about my Red Corsican Coffee Pan just a couple of days ago I’ve received two (private) Facebook messages. Both told me that it was a mistake to have said, about an unsold painting, that I would like to have used the old ‘twisted bottle’ that I had broken in the painting instead of the bottle I used.

The gist of both messages was that they felt that my comment made the painting seem less good and so it was less likely to be sold. They shared a commonly held belief that Russell is utterly crap at marketing his work. That is not untrue; I am a bit rubbish at marketing because I’m not interested enough in selling. A gallery owner did once suggest that I stay away from my own Private View because I have been known ‘unsell’ paintings. He did not get his way and I disagree with the comments I have just received.

My defence is always the same anecdote: I once showed paintings at the house of friends in Islington. My paintings were as a backdrop to a party turning it into an event. The host is a Tax lawyer and his wife is an excellent cook and it was a good party. The hostess, I’ll call her Janis (because it’s her name), worked the floor for me. She asked people if they liked the painting they were looking at and if they said that they did she suggested that they buy it and, for the most part, they did.

I was swanning about with a glass of something lovely in my hand, being alternately a bit of a star bit and a little nervous, talking to people as I watched more red dots being deployed when my sister’s friend Liz told me that she would “like to buy the little painting of the lemons”. “The lemons !” I (allegedly) exclaimed, “Why do you want to buy that one ? It’s the worst painting here” and I led her to it and started to expound about the painting’s faults. Janis had seen and heard the exchange and some time later I felt her hand on my shoulder and her voice in my ear saying “And she didn’t buy the lemons did she.”

Yes, I know, so far this seems to be perfect proof of my finely honed ability to screw up a sale, but there was more…

ZAZIE SE CACHE (oil on canvas. 28″ x 30″) cat no 275

A little later I watched a man going back and forwards between the two paintings that were also my favourites in the exhibition. People buy paintings for all sorts of reasons and sometimes it might just be that there is a certain sized patch on their wall they want to cover. It’s nice to sell any painting but it’s especially good to feel that someone ‘gets it’, that they understand the painting and like it for the right reasons. I asked this man why he liked those two paintings and we talked and he asked me which of the two paintings I would buy. I said that ZAZIE SE CACHE was just too quirky so it would be FEMINA. He bought FEMINA and for five times the price on the lemons and he told me that he too had overheard me unselling the little lemons painting and it was that which had persuaded him to take my advice and buy his painting.

My sister has that little painting of lemons. I asked her and she has just sent me a snap of it… I sort of wish she hadn’t replied, I’ve had to force myself to post the picture (it was a dreadful painting) but at least I’m pretty sure that no one ever reads my BLOG !