Victor Askew, ROI, FIAL

Rummaging through my drawers, as it were, I've just discovered an old (undated so far as I can see) pamphlet written for  George Rowney & Co, by Victor Askew.  I think it was produced in the mid-seventies or earlier, judging by the painting style.    Oil painting for everyone, 35p.   I don't know if such pamphlets are produced by paint suppliers nowadays - because I don't buy introductory sets of oil paints.  But how useful it must have been, back in the day, to have a simple, short guide written by an established painter, with your introductory set of oils.   Askew was plainly influenced by the Impressionists - no fussing over detail here, nor reference to older ways of producing paintings - he went right in with the paint, in at most two or three layers.  It'd still be a good guide today - which you can't say of every oil painting booklet produced back in the 70s.  I wonder how I acquired it. The first simple booklet I got was published a LOT earlier than this one - I don't know what happened to it, I suspect it disintegrated from over use; I think it was also a Geo Rowney production; and I remember that it sought to teach one how to paint barns - which didn't excite me an awful lot at the time (around.... 1966?).  It did contain some delicious colour mixes though, from durable colours as they were understood at the time: and always with Flake White, and not that nasty modern interloper, Titanium!   Ee, it teks yer back....  Was there perhaps an early booklet with your first oil paint selection which inspired and informed your work?  Did - I wonder this a lot! - did the advice in those commercially produced brochures, yet written by professional artists, inform or take from what you might have been taught at art school?   Over the gap of some 50 years or more, I remember (dimly, mind) brochures written by Adrian Hill; Leslie Hill; John Mills; Hesketh Hubberd - I also remember the American books published by Walter Foster, featuring US artists like Béla Bodó, Puthoff, Leon Franks, Charles Leighton, and many others whose names escape me now.   We tended to regard them as guides to the amateur - serious artists concerned themselves with their art-school education: and yet - they didn't!  Or didn't alone - I was surprised to discover in later years how many art students sort of bore the tutelage at art school (this of course must have depended very much on how good it really was) yet took far more from the professional artists who condensed their learning into far briefer expositions, and still managed to get their points across without much of the baggage. Now, I do not suggest that Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud gained more from the Walter Foster art books than they got from their academic education - but at the same time: I wouldn't be THAT surprised.