Author: David Goatley

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Too Much of a Good Thing?

Outside the Louvre, Paris
Outside the Louvre, Paris

If you’ve ever been to the Louvre or the Prado, the National Gallery in London or the Met in New York – let alone the Hermitage – you will know these great galleries are vast and packed with mile on mile of treasures. Got an afternoon to spare? Don’t attempt one of these museums – or rather, don’t be rash enough to try to cram all they contain into a few short hours. It is possible to OD on Art, to see so much you stop seeing at all, and stumble out into the daylight overloaded and numb.

You might want to whisper this, but what if you’re not really into Medieval Altar Pieces, or endless Madonnas, or more Saints than you ever knew existed? It’s OK! Many people share your secret. You don’t have to look at them. You can just go straight to the rooms full of the stuff you do want to see – no one will know.

If I have limited time, my first stop is always the gallery book shop. Here you can thumb quickly through the gallery catalogue, discover the things you really must see, consult the guidebook and go straight to them, guilt free! If I’m in London, there are a couple of old friends I have to visit – two Rembrandts and a Caravaggio. I know where they are in the National Gallery and go right to them if I only have a few minutes – admission there is by donation, so I can just pop in and say hello.

The halls of the Louvre
The halls of the Louvre

Of course, if you have more time – the whole day perhaps, or a couple of days so that you can split your visit into manageable chunks – you can try and see it all. Sometimes wandering from room to room in an unfamiliar gallery yields wonderful surprises and not consulting the guide first makes entering each room a voyage of discovery. When I went to the Prado, specifically to see the Velasquez’s, I let the rest of the collection take me by surprise. It was thrilling! To come into a room and stumble on Hieronymus Bosch was a revelation – likewise Roger van de Weyden’s ‘Descent from the Cross’ – masterpieces I have loved for years and yet known only from books, suddenly in front of me – and perfectly preserved, their jewel-like colours as fresh as the day they were painted nearly 500 years ago. Wonderful! A long room full of Raphaels. Rubens for a hundred yards. A fabulous and unexpected Van Dyck. Marvelous Spanish painters that were new to me – and so much more. I was glad, for once, that I had not prepped for this visit, so that the whole thing was an unfolding dream.

My first visit to the Louvre was quite different, we had very little time and company that had a low threshold for artistic exposure, so I picked up the catalogue and we sat down for coffee. We quickly agreed things that we would all like to see and made directly for them. I was happy to see the Rembrandts and Vermeers and Caravaggio’s scandalous and wonderful ‘Death of the Virgin’, Sharon enjoyed a breeze through the Egyptian collection and my daughter’s boyfriend loved the ceilings, so everyone was happy.

In the Louvre viewing The Fortune Teller by Caravaggio
In the Louvre viewing ‘The Fortune Teller’ by Caravaggio

If you have the time and like a challenge, make yourself see the parts of these magnificent galleries you thought you might like to miss. You might stumble on an artist you have never heard of and find you love or discover that, actually, those Medieval Altar painters really knew what they were doing and that their beautifully preserved works are real treasures you’d have hated yourself for missing. And if you want to fall in love with the Madonna, Sassoferato’s simply exquisite portrait in the National Gallery is a great place to begin.

Sassoferato's Madonna in The National Gallery, London
Picture of Sassoferato’s Madonna taken during a visit to The National Gallery, London

Above all, there is no substitute for seeing great paintings in person, it’s a visceral, thrilling experience that no photograph of them can ever match. No matter how familiar you think you are with a work from books, the real thing will always yield surprises, and be so much richer. You will likely be poorer however, especially if you’re like me, because having found all of these new artists, you now have to buy the books!

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Heroes

Portrait of Johnny Jonas by David Goatley

Everyone needs a hero. Not the kind in tights and capes, but someone out in front of them to admire and emulate, somebody who has already achieved the kind of things you are trying to get to. This is certainly true for artists.

When I first began painting I was inspired by Rembrandt, as I’ve said. I didn’t believe I could be Rembrandt – I’m not delusional – but I wanted him out in front of me like some kind of Grail. So, while he remained the unattainable goal to shoot for, I needed to pick someone as a first hero who was doing things I could maybe realistically achieve if I worked hard enough, things I could learn from to help me get started. I was very fortunate in meeting a real live artist – Johnny Jonas – who offered to show me ‘a few tricks’ and who was kind enough to encourage me to believe I could do what he did – even if, as I was to discover – it wasn’t as easy as he made it look. Johnny was my first hero and he remains a dear and valued friend to this day. He became a true mentor as well as a friend. I was lucky.

Portrait of a Woman by Johnny Jonas

What if you are not similarly fortunate in meeting someone like Johnny? Well, there are plenty of ‘how to’ books on portrait painting, some of them a little older now and perhaps not as easy to find in your local store, but they are out there if you search on line. Books by artists like John Howard Sanden, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Tom Coates, Burt Silverman, Chris Saper and so many more who have had wonderful careers and offer great practical tips and advice. If you are keen to develop as an oil painter, Richard Schmid’s book ‘Alla Prima – Everything I know about Oil Painting’ available at: www.RichardSchmid.com is the Bible. Essential on any oil painter’s shelf. These are all terrific representational painters, living in the real world, who are themselves in awe of past masters like Rembrandt, Sargent and Velasquez, so the goals they set can seem more attainable and less impossible to ever reach.

Images of How To books - essential reading for new artists
Essential reading

Many of today’s successful artists offer instructional DVD’s rather than books and these are wonderful tools for learning. On DVD you can actually watch how they work, see them make their first decisions, mix colours and build the foundations of a portrait before bringing it to a wonderful conclusion. Everyone has a subtly different approach, a different choice of palette, prefers different brushes and so on. I find it’s wonderful to see as many as I can and learn from them all. There’s no one way of painting, no single formula, but there are fundamentals of drawing, tone, colour temperature and edge control that all these artists aim for, goals they would all agree on, even if they set out for them by different routes. Find what works for you.

Fortunately for all of us, many of today’s great portraitists offer workshops. These may be expensive to attend, hard to get into, and often far from where you live, but they can make a big difference in discovering the way forward. And how often do you get to be in the same room as a hero? I learned an enormous amount from a week with Burt Silverman when I was already 20 years into my career and would love to spend time in workshops with other of my heroes. There is always so much more to learn.

DVDs and books by portrait artist Burton Silverman
My Burton Silverman collection!

When I first started I looked at work I thought I just might be able to do if I practiced enough. As I got closer to those first targets, I found the goalposts shifted and I was looking at work that was tougher to match, techniques and skill sets that were further into the distance. New heroes. By trying to copy them, by experimenting with their materials, approaches and techniques I discovered things that worked for me and began to grow. I’m still doing it, still looking towards the gods on Mt. Olympus, still scrambling up the slopes, scraping my knees, but the example of those heroes keeps me climbing.

For the past 26 years I’ve also been teaching classes and workshops of my own, passing on all I’ve learned and growing further through the process. That so many people have wanted to learn from me is a big responsibility. Perhaps in my own small way I have may have been a bit of a hero to them and whilst I certainly don’t see myself that way, I am proud to be a part of the chain of learning through doing that goes all the way back through my heroes to the Masters of the past.

If I had said ‘It’s Rembrandt or bust’ right at the outset, I’d have doomed myself to a lifetime of disappointment, but by picking more mortal heroes I have managed to keep learning – and I hope I always will.

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The Best Painting in the World?

Guernica by Pablo Picasso
Guernica by Pablo Picasso

At the end of teaching a week-long workshop in Spain, my wife and I had decided to stay on a little longer and cross a couple of things off my bucket list. I wanted to pay a visit to Madrid and see two paintings that had haunted my imagination for many years, one in the Prado, the other across the street in the Reina Sofia. We began in the Reina Sofia, with Picasso’s Guernica, the powerful, towering indictment of fascism he painted for the 1937 World’ Fair in Paris. Familiar from countless books and television documentaries, endlessly celebrated and discussed, heralded as one of the artists’ greatest works and lauded as one of the strongest anti-war statements ever made, the picture is both what you thought you knew and yet powerfully more when you are confronted with the enormity of the original.

It’s sheer vigor, inventiveness and emotional clout overwhelm. It is both horrifying and wonderful. Immediately comprehensible, universally understandable and yet in a language all Picasso’s own. If he had made nothing else, it would have established him as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. You need to see it to believe it. Truly. That 10-inch-wide print in your art history book doesn’t even begin to do it justice. Whether you are in love with the Modern or abhor it, the sheer audacity of inventing an entirely new visual language takes your breath away. It is a stunning achievement.

I’ll admit I find the apparent cruelty of many of Picasso’s works difficult (he said, himself, that life was cruel and his work was at least honest – Art being the lie that tells the truth). I don’t always like his technique or his palette and I find myself thinking he perhaps repeated himself too often – that less might have been more – but I cannot think of anyone else who so commandingly seized his chosen mode of expression and changed it so totally. He sits astride 20th century painting like a Colossus, his presence as belligerent as the bull, or Minotaur, he used so often as a motif, his visual voice echoing across much of what followed.

But I still had to see what is often hailed as “the best painting in the world”, Las Meninas, by Velazquez, in the calmer halls of the Prado, a block or two away.

What does an epithet like that even mean? “The best”? The greatest of all pictures among millions? Is it even Velazquez’s best? What about his stunning portrait of Pope Innocent the 10th? Many artists and critics hail that as the finest portrait ever painted. Or his profoundly moving portraits of the Court dwarves and jester that give these people back the dignity and humanity their positions seemed destined to deny them? These moved me to tears.

Las Meninas by Velazquez
Las Meninas by Velasquez

Well, it certainly commands the room, and there, in black, his doublet adorned with a red cross, controlling the paintings’ enigmatically engineered space and his cast of characters, is Velazquez himself. Ostensibly a portrait of the young princess and her attendants visiting the studio to view the enormous canvas we tantalizing see the edge of in the foreground, it is also a puzzle. What is the subject of the painting we don’t see? Is it the Infanta herself? Or her parents, the King and Queen, glimpsed dimly in the mirror at the back of the room – surely too far away to be a true reflection of someone standing where we are? And who is the courtier in the doorway and what message does he bring? We can identify all the players, but are left with the mystery of the play.

Of course, the King rules all he surveys, his daughter is a figure of authority, the courtier in the background and the Royal retinue are all important – but who is in command here? It is Velazquez, admiring his own handiwork with a certain swagger, who is at center stage, elevating his own status with assured confidence. They may all be royalty and he a mere employee, but here he reins supreme, creating an undoubted masterpiece. I am properly awed.

So, is it the best painting in the world? I have no idea, but standing in front of it is an awesome and humbling experience – the draftsmanship, the confidence in the brushwork, the bold deft looseness that surprises up close, the sheer audacity of the concept are all breathtaking – so at that moment it just might be. Whatever, it’s damn good. And like the Picasso we saw earlier, it demands to be seen in person – at just over 10 feet tall and 9 wide, it’s full majesty cannot be condensed into a book, nor experienced in a film.

That both these paintings are by Spanish artists and in the same city is remarkable and well worth the trip. Now, let’s see.. how can I afford to go again?

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What do you want to be…

What do you want to be when you grow up?

An engine driver. Everyone wanted to be an engine driver. Back then, we had steam trains and if you’d ever seen a steam train you’d want to drive one too. Diesels’, when they replaced steam, just didn’t cut it and my ambitions shifted to naval hero, England goal keeper, explorer, and then, post-Beatles, rock star and romantic poet. All along I was drawing these fantasies, and my real skill was staring me in the face, but drawing was just something I did, like a nervous habit, it didn’t occur to me it could be an ambition. And then I saw Rembrandt.

Self portrait by Rembrandt age 63
Self portrait by Rembrandt age 63

I was 15, visiting the National Gallery with my parents, and we walked into the room featuring the Dutch Master. There was his extraordinary self-portrait, aged 63, the resigned yet defiant face looking at itself for signs of affirmation, for the memory of all he had been, yet also looking at me- the viewer- and challenging me to know him and to attempt to make something that lived out of paint. 

Old Man in an Armchair by Rembrandt
Old Man in an Armchair by Rembrandt

There too, was Old Man in an Armchair, a care-worn, balding, white-bearded figure with his head resting on one hand, painted in deft, bold, masterful strokes. I looked at the portrait and saw the man my father would become as he aged, and thought, that’s what I want to do, I want to paint, I want to be able to paint my Dad like that when becomes that man. It was an epiphany. A certainty was born in me that somehow, someday, I would paint portraits. I knew finally, in that moment, what I really wanted to do when I grew up.

Of course, I didn’t grow up to be Rembrandt- part of growing up is the realization that no one grows up to be someone else, you can only grow into yourself and make the best of what you have been given, but the idea that I might make people that have life in them, people you might want to know, out of paint has been my sustaining vision, as it was his. And I have discovered, as he did, that this life isn’t always easy, that there are disappointments as well as wonderful highs in the life of an artist , that each day brings fresh challenges and new discoveries.