1 (page 16) Experiment with a Gilded Lamp 2 (page 18) Indulgences 3 (page 18) Salome 4 (page 19) Hunter’s Moon B 5 (page 19) Kit with dinner plates and Constant Bower 6 Salome and the Dance of the Double Helix
plate, but this father is one step ahead – the table and plate have been cut in two to create the ‘Great Illusion’. For that painting I made a table in two halves and got my model to sit in there. He’s a local chap and I asked him if he would pose for me. When we had done the painting I asked him if his wife would like to see it. He went off, but he didn’t come back. A couple of weeks later I ran into him and he explained that his wife hadn’t come because she didn’t want to see her husband’s head on another woman’s plate. I’ve got what is called a divergent squint, which I have always had. In normal people’s vision, what you see as a resolved area is very small, as if you were holding out a dinner plate at arm’s length. Visually, I am a completely different species. You’ve got hunter’s, carnivore’s vision; I’ve got herbivore vision. I look in two different directions. Your brain takes the slightly different images, puts them together
and creates three-dimensionality, which I’ve never seen. My vision is 45 degrees divergent, so picture two dinner plates, held at 45 degrees. For me, detailed vision goes right out to the edges, but my brain has to ‘fill in’ the gap in the middle. I am consequently very interested in eyes, and how we see. For example, I see that in recent articles in ART both Dame Joan Bakewell and Sister Wendy Becket have mentioned Las Meninas. I’ve been looking at it recently, too. If you follow the lines of perspective, and there aren’t many, they end up at the daughter’s face. That gives us the horizon. You can’t see the horizon at a child’s height without getting down to that level. It could be that he has painted the work from the young daughter’s perspective, as though she could be in two places at the same time, both in the painting, as it were, and outside of it. It’s a fascinating construct. I never went to art college – I’m entirely self-taught. I could always draw at school, but I had a succession of bad art teachers who I didn’t get on with, so I didn’t pursue it. The crafts I like using, such as marquetry and painting, are ones where I can be entirely in control, when it’s all eye, hand and brain. I am then prepared to spend as much time as it takes to get it right. Crafts like ceramics and etching, which I have on occasion done, are ones where you can do a lot of work and then you put it into a kiln or put it in acid and you hand it over to God, and nine times out of ten he sods it all up, so I much prefer to do it all myself. For me, to paint accurately, to use one’s knowledge of materials and to use one’s skills is not an affectation; purposely not to do so is an affectation.’
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For me, to paint accurately, to use one’s knowledge of materials and to use one’s skills is not an affectation; purposely not to do so is an affectation.
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RWA magazine Autumn 2012