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At the start of a new term, it is always useful to recalibrate our skills, and the acrylic group did exactly that at the start of 2024. We started looking at Notan studies. Notan is a Japanese term that literally means “light-dark harmony”. Artists use “notan studies” to explore different arrangements of light and dark elements in a painting without having the distraction of other elements like colour, texture, and finer details. In practice, this involves painting the darks with black and the lights with white. Sometimes, grey is also used as an intermediate value. So we studied this week how to use Notan sketches in our paintings. Every painting has some kind of balance between light and dark elements. Sometimes there is a strong clash between lights and darks (like in the Renaissance paintings), and sometimes it is more subtle (like in the Impressionist paintings). However, the balance of light and dark elements in a painting is not always apparent at first glance, as there are many other elements competing for your attention, like colour and brushwork. A notan is used to filter out all these other elements so that the balance of light and dark elements is shown. In this way, we discover the most basic abstract design of a painting. Our acrylic group had a go at this, as we show below.  In a recent session at our art classes – both acrylic and watercolour - led by our tutor David, we discussed our ability to capture life, energy, and emotion in our paintings, causing us to ‘feel’ life in the work, as much as to be visually entertained by it. Producing art and paintings with life and energy has many challenges. There are guidelines and techniques, but there are no rules. No certainties. Focusing heavily upon techniques in our paintings will strangely cause ‘it’ to remain elusive. The artist must engage one’s body and spirit in the process, allowing the body to be more of the instrument/conduit for making the marks than the mind! So our tutor David had us retirees doing something very different – drawing in continuous lines to a variety of music – fast, rock, gentle, easy listening. The watercolour group together produced a long continuous sheet of marks using charcoal, while the acrylic group discovered coloured mark making – again as a team. When they weren’t arranging furniture, that is. e to edit.   We’re delighted so many of our artists are taking part in this year's Bath Open Studios exhibition in support of the Art at the Heart project. In the central ground floor corridor of the Royal United Hospital, artists from all seven of Bath’s art trails and open studios have come together under the banner of Bath Open Studios to show their amazing artwork! We know how brilliant the established and emerging artists are in Bath and how hard they work to make their annual art trails the great community events they are. Showing this success in the RUH to a wide range of hospital staff, visitors, outpatients and inpatients is a privilege, with one third of sales supporting Art at the Heart. Martin Hobday  This autumn, in the acrylic class, we have been painting using sponges and doing small paintings, about A5 size. This stops us fiddling with unnecessary detail. Using a sponge on larger paintings covers the ground very quickly, although it does use quite a lot of paint but you can get quite a bit of texture. In this painting the background was done using just a sponge and the trees and the reflections were done with a piece of old credit card which is very useful for making straight, sharp lines. This is only a quick sketch to find out the effect of the tools used. I will try it out on a larger, more detailed painting. This shows that you can paint with other tools apart from brushes and get effects which are not possible with just brushes. Rosalind Darby 
 As students of David Chandler, we have very much enjoyed getting to grips with underpainting. As David comments, "We begin our watercolours by establishing the tonal values of the scene first, with a Payne’s Grey* underpainting. Paying attention to value before we add colour, helps us to give our work contrast, form and depth. Subsequent colours are then laid on in thin glazes, in the manner of the tinted drawings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. *Before the invention of Payne’s Grey, shadows were most often obtained with Lamp Black, an unsubtle and sooty pigment which has a dirtying effect on other colours. To address this, Payne, an art teacher from Exeter, created a formula from Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake, that enabled artists to darken their colours without either changing their hue or overly dirtying them. You can read a little more about Payne’s Grey in Jackson’s most recent blog post. Using the same view that inspired John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), we then produced two more underpainted watercolours of Durham by day and at night. Then we moved on to update our palette to the late nineteeth century by employing a triad of colours that were favoured by Post-impressionists like Cézanne and Van Gogh and rather more fitting to the warm, sunny South where they painted than the colours of Cotman’s cold, grey North…Viridian (or Phthalo or Emerald green), Alizarin Crimson (or other blue red) and Primary yellow (or New Gamboge or other mid yellow) all feature in David's painting of Église Sainte-Symphorien, Bunzac.  As David said, note how the Viridian in the sky ‘flips’ to blue once the yellow is added. Proof, once again, of the power of one colour to alter the nature of another.
AuthorRobin Peachey At a recent Art Fair I came across an artist exhibiting pictures using a Japanese technique called Gyotaku which I had never heard of before. The technique was originally used by fishermen who recorded particularly unusual or large fish by painting them with a mixture of soot and water and then using the painted fish to print an image on to paper. Artists are more recently using the same technique to paint fish and other sea creatures with various types of water soluble paint, having first removed any slime, and then covering the subject with a sheet of fairly thin paper so that an image of the subject is transferred to the paper. There were some quite beautiful pictures of sea bass, prawns, crabs and other sea creatures produced in this way showing extremely fine surface details. It requires considerable care and persistence to get good results and the prints can be tinted after they have been made. If you look up ‘Gyotaku’ on the internet there are a number of videos giving details of exactly how to use the technique. In the meantime, I am very grateful to Jane Evans.-contact:- jane@gyotakugifts.co.uk - for letting me include these images. John Sell Cotman was a British painter best known for his distinctive watercolours of architectural features set amidst the English countryside. In his hallmark work Greta Bridge (c. 1805), Cotman employed washes of tonal colour to great effect, creating subtle forms and light through built up layers within precise shapes. In the last few weeks, we Members at the Claverton Art Group have very much enjoyed studying how Cotman built his pictures. Cotman's colours are built up through the technique of layering colours, each layer slightly darker than the previous, rather than a single heavy layer, which gives his darks complexity and richness.
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