In 1989 Alan Cotton had worked almost entirely on a series of paintings based on a region of Provence, culminating in a large-scale exhibition at the David Messum Gallery.
In this article he explains his approach and working methods.
Gordes – Evening light, oil 30” x 24”
'I remember the very first time I saw Gordes when I approached it from the south in the evening, I was just stunned by the image and that one moment has never left me,' says Alan.
'I first travelled to this region as an art student, during my years in the painting school at Birmingham College of Art when, armed with books of reproductions, I tried to trace the exact locations in which some of my Post-Impressionist heroes had worked. It did, however, take a good many years before I felt sufficiently able to paint there.
'The form and structure of the terrain; the colour, mood and climate, differed vibrantly from the lyrical softness of England which I had painted ever since I was a boy. This raises an important point about the choice of visual material for painting; I firmly believe that before you can being to paint you have to get to know the subject extremely well, to the extent that its elements become so much a part of your understanding that you develop a strong point of view as the foundation for your work.
'Although passion for an image usually starts with a ‘gut reaction’, one quickly has to analyse and select those ingredients which will form the basis of the work.
'You need time to be in a receptive mood, when you can look, see and absorb. For me this is where drawing is important; I love to draw, not just as a means of making attractive studies, but as a way of investigating what I see and feel about a subject.
'Here, and for me this is one of the key elements about my working practice, I think ahead to the painting and begin to reach conclusions about, for example, those aspects I want to emphasise, composition, which forms I may wish to make larger and bring into focus, or to reduce or eliminate altogether; about the tonal structure; direction and kind of light; colour and so on.'
Pastels
Lavender Fields in Provence, pastel 18” x 21”
Pastel is very accessible; you get down colours very quickly.
'In conjunction with drawing, I often do pastels on the spot, for example Lavender Fields, reproduced above.
'These are usually finished statements in their own right, but they also provide me with additional information for my larger oil paintings.
'Although I do work in the landscape, directly on the canvas, much of the actual painting is done in the studio. Here, free from the vagaries of the weather, I try to reconstruct my ideas in paint.
'There is often a strong demarcation between the time I spend collecting ideas, walking, drawing, working on pastels, gathering information, written as well as visual, and the time when I embark on a series of paintings. For the quality of the idea is, I believe, of vital importance and provides the key to the success of the finished work.
'For this reason it is probably more fruitful to explore a small number of related ideas in depth; to work thematically; to consider the changes of light on an image at different times of day or changing seasons of the year, when the weather, mood, atmosphere, colour and vegetation alters, rather than to explore vast areas of landscape. In other words: variations on a theme. Think, for example, of Monet’s paintings of the west front of Rouen Cathedral, or Sickert’s nudes of the ‘Camden Town’ period.'
Sunlit Orchard in Provence, oil 16” x 20”
Oil painting techniques
'Most of my paintings are done in oils, using painting knives. But before I begin to apply pigment there is quite a lot of important initial preparation to do.
'Although I haven’t space here to describe the process, I actually stretch and prepare my own canvases since the ground or surface on which one works is of fundamental importance to the kind and quality of marks one makes.
'I always work, even with a tiny painting, on a careful underpainting first, with oil paint in one diluted colour drawn in with a brush to create areas of half-tone shadows. This pins down the composition and attempts to resolve the relationship between the interrelated shapes of the subject and the outside rectangle of the canvas. This half-tone stain is usually a biscuit or ochre colour, thinned down with turps. If I am in a hurry an acrylic stain, which will dry very quickly, does the same job.
'Many artists work directly onto a prepared half-tone surface and my practice of covering the brush drawing with a transparent coloured stain and letting it dry before I proceed, is simply a variation of this.
'Painting is about images, but it is also about paint. This may sound an obvious statement to make, but the artist’s response to pigment, to the sensuality of this wonderful coloured material and to the kind of marks, textures and surfaces it can make, are very much part of our enjoyment of the finished work.
'When I was a boy, paintings that moved me deeply were those in which the physical surface of the painting was a considered, inherent, and structural part of the work. Paintings by artists as different as Soutine, Monet, Van Gogh, Nicholas De Stael and Jackson Pollock seemed to have a great deal of charisma and always excited me.
'In a sense the mark acts as a metaphor and is a permanent record of a physical action, what Pollock called “energy made visible”. Applied by gifted artists, these marks can convey every nuance of intention.
'I regard oil paint as a kind of coloured clotted cream; my response to both is equally sensuous. About four or five years ago I was involved in a TV film called ‘Paint’, which was all about the use of pigment. On the final day of shooting, director Kevin Crooks allowed me to indulge my own childlike fantasy, and plunge my hands and arms into a one hundred-weight container of vermilion oil paint to squeeze and extrude it and talk about my intuitive response to this wonderful stuff.'
Painting knives
'My love for the textural and surface qualities of oil paint, led to my experimentation with painting knives and I began to derive much pleasure and sense of purpose in finding out what they can do.
'I collect them constantly and have about 70 or 80, although I only ever use three or four.
'By varying the amount of paint, the angle of the knife to the painting surface, the amount of pressure, direction of the tool and so on, you can produce a vast range of surfaces from great sweeps of impasto to the most delicate, tiny, textural mark.'
Colour
Farmstead and Apple Orchard near Gordes, oil 36” x 40”
'For me the intuitive part of the painting process is in the colour mixing and in the painting above I have chosen to ignore many of the colours in the landscape in order to create colour harmonies which have even greater impact.
'For me colour mixing is the most intuitive part of the painting process.
'The ways in which artists use colour to orchestrate their work varies tremendously and no two painters use identical colour ranges.
'When working on the series of French paintings, some of which are illustrated here, I discovered a whole new colour vocabulary.
'Compared with painting in England and Wales, which had required a fairly cool palette, in Southern France I used sequences of hot, fierce colours to convey the brilliant light, sunflower and wheat fields, almond and cherry blossoms and the terracotta roofs of the region.
'For the first time I began to use cadmium and chrome-orange, madder browns, alizarin crimsons, carmine, scarlet, Indian red and mauves, alongside and inter-mixed with cooler colours.'
Almond Blossom at Gordes, oil 24” x 30”
'Many of my colour sequences are based on my observation and getting a feel for the colour of a specific place, but many others come from simply mixing on the palette, where I try to create colour harmonies and nuances based on a limited number of pigments.
'Achieving the right balance between working on the spot and in the studio, and between painting from first-hand observation and working from the imagination is a constant challenge, and I am always revising my working methods.
'At times I take the canvas directly to the location and work on it there. I usually find, though, that working directly on the canvas to the point where I ‘put down the image’, together with a combination of written and visual notes, gives me a satisfactory working formula which leads to the completion of the painting.
'The most successful work always comes when I am inspired by a strong idea, and when I can identify those qualities I want to bring out in the finished work. Usually, and because I feel and operate within a strong Romantic tradition, this involves representing a specific place at one particular moment in time and this is always conditioned by the quality of light.
'Although one tries to develop certain practices which allow one to proceed and develop, painting is to some extent elusive because the more you do, the more ambitious your ideas become.
'Since January I have been working Tuscany and Venice on a new series of paintings for an exhibition with David Messum in the spring of 1990.
'It is always exciting, and just a little frightening, to embark on a new series of paintings, but without the stimulation of new images and ideas, painting, which can be such a compulsive challenge, can so easily become clichéd and sterile.'
All paintings were reproduced by kind permission of David Messum Fine Paintings.
This article was originally published in the May 1989 issue of The Artist. Enjoy endless inspiration with access to past and present issues of both magazines, plus exclusive video demos, tutorials and more, with our Studio Membership! Discover how you can join today.
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