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How to Paint Like Turner
JMW Turner is one of the greatest artists Britain has ever produced. His watercolours, with their extraordinary effects of shifting light and dramatic skyscapes, are especially highly regarded. For the first time, the secrets of Turner’s technique are revealed, allowing present-day watercolourists to learn from his achievements.This book is for watercolourists, which is a medium I'm not as happy in as with oils, but certainly I am very interested in this book.
This book combines unrivalled knowledge of Turner’s working methods from Tate curators and conservators with practical advice from some of the world’s most respected watercolour experts.
(Any watercolourists among you: would love to see what you thought of this book.)
I would especially be curious to speculate how my owm project would've developed if I'd had a book like this to guide me along during the sojourn. Even though oils are not watercolours I'm pretty sure I could have learned something.
In any event, I didn't seriously set out to reproduce, 100%, Turner's ouvre. If nothing else, the medium makes that task impossible.
For instance, Battle of Trafalgar is a painting that is taller and wider than me in real life! That in itself makes any attempt and desire at absolute reproduction impossible.
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| Battle of Trafalgar in process on old barn wood; Marshall, NC, 2012 |
As well, the wood itself, with its flaws, pockmarks, and texture, added something to the work that Turner's did not have. That would be my contribution to the piece.
The obvious third reason is my skill level clearly is not the same as the old master's. Try as I might, clearly I do not have his genius, but neither did I have his timeframe.
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| A Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron on panel in progress (underpainting), Marshall NC 2012 |
As stated before, the purpose of the Kickstarter project (seen here) was to recreate, one per day, a Turner piece onto a piece of wood. For me, artistically, fabricating one of these per day was an exciting technical as well as creative challenge. Some of the pieces were no big deal to pull off in a few hours; whereas others took like 12+ hours to finish. Some, in which i had to use layering techniques, were only possible to complete over 5+ day time - what I would do in this case is have 5 simultaneously in production, and work them all every day so that at the end of the 5 day period (if I wanted 5 layers) I would be finished with 5.
In general am very pleased with the result, and am happy with the artistic outcome that the raw wood and the frenetic pace allowed me to capture of Turner's work, without, clearly, having the collection be anything like a perfect replica of Turner's work. I am glad to have been able to put some of my own artistic process and limitations into these wonderful, epic pieces.
In any event, I will get the book, and see if I do anything interesting with it.
