Back in the summer of 2021, I read the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, were planning the biggest-ever single collection of Vermeer’s paintings for a Spring 2023 retrospective.
Johannes Vermeer (1632 -1675) is one of the great 17th-century Dutch masters, best known for his tranquil, contemplative scenes depicting everyday life.
February saw the opening of the exhibition, and last week we were lucky enough to experience the show!
What I love about Vermeer’s paintings is how he captures the sense of light fall; it feels like there’s a natural volume. He uses different paint handling to express a different quality.
From subtle gradations in the shadows as light streams through a window and drops away. To sunlight falling onto an object so convincingly, if you put your hand in the painting, it would be warm.
Not only did he capture the light, he told a story.
This week I’m lucky enough to be in Amsterdam to experience the largest ever Vermeer Exhibition!
28 of Johannes Vermeer’s known 37 works, have been brought together from museums and private collections across the world for this unique opportunity at the Rijksmuseum.
It’s currently a sell out show with over 450,000 tickets sold! but they are releasing new tickets so it’s worth checking the site. (Rijksmuseum Vermeer Tickets)
On display is one of my favourites, ‘The Little Street’ and we do a master copy of the painting in the Beginners Water Mixable Oil Course.
When I get back to the studio I’ll put together a exhibition review but for now I’m off to grab a coffee and a Stroopwafel.
The 5hr+ course is best suited if you’ve been working with acrylics and want to learn about the pros and cons of water-mixable oils. We go through lots of materials and options to give you an overview of what’s available with water-mixable oils.
Morning class, this week we’re going to look at how to paint this beautiful moonlit harbour scene using acrylics in this two-part painting study. It’s of Smeaton’s Pier in St Ives, Cornwall, and the reference is a photo taken on a full strawberry moon.
This tutorial is all about colour perception.
Painting landscapes in low light, dusk or evening, makes judging colours tricky. The value range is much more compressed, and we have to overcome our perceived ‘memory’ of an object which can be very strong.
Instead of painting the sand ‘yellow’, we have to paint it a dull purple. And what we know as a bright white sail is now a mid-dusky blue in the evening light. It’s a bit more challenging to focus on what the colours actually are, rather than what you think they should be. It can result in paintings that are too light, too contrasting and not subdued enough.
This is the third project in my series of short courses inspired by morning paintings. All are easy to follow and completed in just a few 1hr painting sessions.
Each one follows the same approach.
A single painting from start to finish.
A limited colour palette.
A handful of brushes.
A small canvas.
A simple subject.
4 x short lessons (under 45-minutes each)
Simple Impressionistic Brushstrokes
I recently came home from the local market with these amazing-tasting peaches and just dropped them in a bowl on the kitchen table, and they looked good enough to paint. The placement felt more casual, like a snapshot of everyday life, which inspired this painting.
In this third short course, I’ve taken all the principles of a traditional still life but kept the composition informal.
This subject has expanded from the first simple modern still-life painting course of a jug and three pears; we’re now introducing folded fabric, adding glass, a vase of flowers and a bowl.
We’ll cover the preparation of your surface & drawing out, mixing colour strings and blocking in.
So although we are expanding our horizons a little bit, the course has been designed with simple learning blocks—clear step-by-step instructions to keep you on track.
We’ll only use six colours, including white, and if you’ve been following some of my other courses, you will already have most, if not all, of the colours.
The focus of this piece is those beautiful colourful peaches, but I’ve designed the lessons so you approach them last.
We start with just two colours, looking at the subtle shifts between the cools and warms, building up the shadows and shapes so that when we get to the peaches, and you extend your palette, all of a sudden they’ll come together so real because you’ve spent the time doing all the supporting work up to that stage. (The counterintuitive approach for this painting is to spend more time with the first stages to balance our form and tones.)
So find a comfy seat, grab a brew and a biscuit and let’s get painting!
What’s in the Course?
1 x Market Day Peaches Still Life from start to finish, based in the studio working from a reference image.
4 x downloadable video lessons, split into separate chapters that follow sequentially. Step-by-step instructional videos so that you can follow along at your own pace.
Each stage is a detailed yet easy-to-follow process.
You have lifetime access, downloadable on separate devices.
One-time payment
Downloadable jpeg reference images & reference line drawings.
Printable Class materials list
Over 2.5+ hrs of detailed video instruction.
(You will need a printer or print shop for the reference image)
Every few weeks, I share my top art inspirations I’ve read, experimented with or listened to. Here’s this week’s edition of things I’ve enjoyed, hoping they might inspire your own work too…
Hanging images in straight lines is relatively simple, using a laser level and low tack tape to mark the height of the fixings. But how do you arrange pictures on the wall of all the different sizes?
After all the concentration and effort it takes to create a work, you’d have thought the final signature would come easy; we sign our names all the time, right?
But there can be so many choices, full name or first name? Initials or motifs? Month or Year? Paint or Pen? Filled with hesitation, we’re left wondering if our final mark on the canvas will ruin the piece.
Here’s a guide to help you decide, practice and sign your work confidently.
Blame it on the Renaissance
Craftspeople have been signing their artworks for thousands of years. In Italy, the most dramatic shift in the use of signatures for painters was during the Renaissance; previously, they had worked within a group guild system.
Guilds (Arti) In most of Europe, crafts and professions had been governed by guilds for centuries, ever since the expansion of towns and cities in the early Middle Ages. These sworn associations controlled trade, limited outside competition, established standards of quality, and set rules for the training of apprentices. Membership was usually compulsory—only guild members could practice their trades within a city and its territory. Italian Renasissance Resources
Artists wanted to be known for their creations, so the signature began to be used more frequently.
It allowed Patrons and collectors to show ‘who’ painted the piece, a chance for work to be seen and admired. The signature became as important as the artwork itself, and in Italy, this change began to elevate painters from craftspeople to artists. So much so, Dürer commented on how he was perceived whilst travelling there.
“Here I am a gentleman, at home a sponger [dauber – a crude or inartistic painter].” Albrecht Dürer
1. Signing your work, overcoming the tipping point
When you’re first learning to paint, there can be apprehension about whether to sign your early pieces or not. If you’re not super proud of your painting, it can feel a little presumptuous to sign ‘like an artist’.
The first decision is a balance between embarrassment and pride. I feel it’s on a sliding scale…
Monet had a real dedication to gardening as well as an obsession with colour. He designed both his flower garden and water garden at Giverny, France, which became his greatest source of inspiration. He painted his water lilies over 250 times, capturing light and texture with effortless ease.
“I perhaps owe it to flowers that I have become a painter.” Claude Monet
Flowers are always a fascinating subject to paint. I got chatting to a beginner painter at a recent visit to Arley Hall, who was expressing their frustration because they couldn’t seem to recreate a realistic study of the rose garden in paint.
They had gone out in the midday sun because they wanted to capture the garden in its best light.
The colours of the rose heads in front of them seemed impossible to match with their paints. Their pigments didn’t seem to have a high enough chroma, and they couldn’t see the detail in the petals because the sun had blown the highlights out.
They had come back the following day at more or less the same time to take more photos to capture it because they were disappointed with their previous efforts with paint. This is when we struck up a conversation about how the photos on their phone just didn’t capture the range they could see with their eyes.
So we had a beautiful subject, brilliant sunshine, but not necessarily perfect conditions for painting a realistic rendering.
After years of painting trips, holidays and a rollercoaster of a property search, we’ve finally found our dream studio in Cornwall.
Leaking roofs, copious amounts of whitewashing, numerous skips, and an epic space once the working studio of Royal Academy artist Sandra Blow, in glorious St Ives.
I’ve been taking lots of photographs and Vanessa has been writing a monthly journal following our highs and lows of creating a studio and new life by the sea (with 12 short videos of the progress). The Renovation Diaries, 12-months in 12 minutes
Phase 1, The Garden Room, (formerly the Annexe) completed
There’s a special exhibition of over twenty works by artists including Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin, Isamu Noguchi, Cerith Wyn Evans and Danh Vo. Sculptures dotted around the historical grounds, in ponds and deep in the woodland groves, courtesy of the White Cube Gallery and it was fabulous to see the contemporary works within this setting.
Play sculpture by Isamu Noguchi. I love how striking the red feels next to its complementary colour green here, it has almost a reverberation to it.
“I like to think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious, and evocative: thus educational. The child’s world would be a beginning world, fresh and clear.”
Painting large scale is not just a matter of having the right size canvas and paint. It’s also about adopting slightly different working methods and brushstrokes than when you work with a small canvas, and it’s one of the best ways to stretch your skills as a painter, even if you predominately paint small.
After months of renovation, I have recently regained the use of our new studio space. For the last 6 months, it had become the perfect place for storing multiple power tools and timber that needed acclimatising. It has been uplifting emptying the space of leftover building materials back to an empty room.
So last week with great relish, energy and anticipation, I propped up a large-scale 2m square canvas against a newly cleared wall and got to it.
I had a loose plan of the final image.
I’d sketched a pen and ink thumbnail of the view and had a palette of colours in mind but if I’m 100% honest I was super excited by the freedom of painting in a big space and seeing how the new studio felt.
Here are five things I learned.
#1. A little colour change is a big colour change.
Mixing the right colours for a large scale is not easy.
On smaller-scale pieces, your reference image is often close in size to the final piece, so you can translate the effect of the colour quite easily, but when you scale up an image everything becomes exaggerated.
As soon as you scale up the surface area that a colour covers, it has more of an intensity to it. The same colour ratio I would normally go for in a smaller piece looked more colourful once it was painted onto such a vast area.
#2. Scale up your brush to match your canvas size.
Just as you have to be aware of scaling down your colour choices and scaling up the volume of paint, you have to use larger tools to apply the paint too.
I rapidly went from a 1/2-inch brush to a 3-inch brush to a mini-roller!
Morning class, last week I was struck by this image of these beautiful colourful cast shadows.
Spring sunshine was pouring through the wrought iron railings on the balcony and casting all these amazing shapes of the plant leaves onto the studio wall. I really, really liked the way they framed the rubber plant and I also liked how flat the shadows were in contrast to all the textures that I saw on the front of the aged terracotta pot.
You can be put off by painting shadows or tackling greens because they seem too complicated.
So for this lesson, I want you to think about the drawing first—a tonal underpainting and then a minimal painting on top. Spend more time on the shadows and the lights to create a painting that captures the feeling of sunlight.
I’ve put together a detailed photo step-by-step (with a few video time-lapses as well), so you can approach painting shadows and greens with ease.
‘People say that it is difficult to know oneself but it’s not easy to paint oneself either’ Excerpt from a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, September 1889
My first introduction to the Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh was at school. A tortured artist who cut off his ear and painted thick, brightly coloured swirly paintings.
He felt dramatic, passionate and extreme.
12-year-olds tend to want to produce art that looks more realistic, so I think at the time, I wanted to try and paint like Cezanne. Cezanne’s still life’s hit the dizzy heights of being recognisable yet achievable, with a nice painterly style.
But thinking back, I probably felt I was being sophisticated and different; copying Van Gogh as a young painter seemed too obvious.
It wasn’t until an art trip at 16 to the National Gallery, London that I rediscovered the Sunflowers…
