Picture Frames

February 22, 2024

Have you ever looked at a painting without a frame, and then seen it framed? Have you noticed the difference? A good frame can transform a painting.

It provides definition, borders, confidence, posture. It adds to the appreciation of a painting in many indefinable, almost ethereal ways. Paintings look better in frames.

So it’s very annoying that the price of good quality frames has increased enormously. It maybe because of Brexit, or Covid or the cost of energy, but whatever the reason, frames have gone up, adding to the overall cost of buying art.

One solution is to re-use old frames. But this is not as straightforward as it sounds. Old frames are often created in standard inches, whereas most modern canvases are measured in centimetres. And that is before considerations of style, it’s quite amazing how tastes have changed, and if a good frame can positively transform appreciation of a painting, a bad frame can do the opposite. But if an old frame looks good, and fits the bill, it has to be made to fit the canvas.

This involves cutting the frame down to size, and to help me do that, I’ve invested in a mitre saw. And just to keep in the spirit of things, it’s an old, pre-loved manual saw. So hopefully, in the future, some of my paintings will be featuring classic frames, providing a defining context in which to present my art.

Summer 2023

August 15, 2023

It’s been a while since I have posted my news here, but that doesn’t mean nothing has been happening. In fact, since the end of the pandemic, (what dreadful times they were) I have been incredibly busy, almost manically trying to make up for lost time.

I’ve visited literally dozens of exhibitions. The two highlights were the incomparable Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which I visited in mid-April and the surprisingly wonderful Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, which I saw in July, just before it closed.

The Little Street - 1658 - Johannes Vermeer

Both these, and all the other galleries and collections I’ve visited, have caused me to think deeply about my own art practice. In particular, exposure to these wonderful artists’ work has made me question what I’m doing, and start experimenting with other styles.

Hilma af Klint - The Ten Largest — The Ten Largest - 1907 - Hilma af Klint

Back in 2020, after I’d sufficiently recovered from my infection with Covid-19 to start thinking about work again, the lockdowns were in full effect. So only able to work slowly, and expecting to have a lot of time on my hands, I deliberately chose to paint in a style that seemed appropriate, slow and long. I paint in oils and decided to use a style based on glazes. Each glaze takes quite a while to dry, before applying the next layer. And as my paintings required many layers to get the full richness of the effect, I knew progress would be slow, characterised by many small steps.

Portrait of Omar - 1776 - Sir Joshua Reynolds - The National Portrait Gallery

I started five paintings, and thought they would take between one and two years to complete. In the end, I painted about eight 70cm by 50cm landscapes, in a traditional romantic style, each with many layers of glazes. I finished the last of these early this year, and most are displayed in the shop. I’m very happy with the results, and they look particularly good under led lights, using a daytime frequency. This allows the brights and highlights to shine, and provides the contrast and depth I was aiming for.

Sicilian Olive Grove - 2021-2023 - Keith JS Ginsburg

But now they are finished, and it’s time to move on. My inspiration comes from the exhibitions, sales and collections I’ve visited. I’m experimenting at the moment, but hope to revamp the website and give pride of place to my new style soon. Hopefully a bit quicker than in two years time!

The Classics as a Reference Point to my Practice

June 17, 2020

A Romantic Vision

For my art, the classics will always be an influential reference point, a romantic vision, an idea of perfection, an ideal of form.

Last year, I painted a number of classical subjects, drawing my inspiration from the rich heritage of classical art, especially classical Greek statues and sometimes the later (but often inferior) Roman statues. To paint a 2D representation of a 3D image, especially one over 2000 years old, immediately presented me with two challenges. The first, was how to represent the form and the second was how to colour the image.

Colour In The Classical World

Each work is a combination of detailed observation of the original statue, plus painstaking desk research. Although what we often see today is a white marble statue, the German scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann researched the colours of ancient Greek sculptures as long ago as the 1980’s, and using a variety of scientific techniques available at the time proved that ancient Greek sculptures were often coloured.

However, more than 2000 years of weather has done its worst and worn out the brightness of the ancient marbles. But a few marbles kept indoors still retain some of their colour allowing for a modern representation of what the original may have looked like.

One can extrapolate from the values and status the ancient Greeks accorded to different colours. Gold, and other bright paints were considered the most appropriate for deities, enhancing their transcendent nature, whilst mortals used colour in a system of codes to represent their social status, so it is likely these were applied to colour statues and busts.

Classical Literature

Additionally, classical literature reveals the physical description of heroes and gods, as well as their colouring and character.

In my painting of Alexander the Great I faced a number of challenges.

All primary images are gone but the best representation of Alexander is usually quoted as that of Lysippus. I used a combination of this, plus the Roman copy in Ny Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen and the bust of Alexander the Great in the Capitoline Museum in Rome as my inspiration for the form.

For the colours, the Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia described Alexander as: ‘strong, handsome commander with one eye dark as the night and one blue as the sky’. Others, however, believe this was an exaggeration. He is often described as having curly hair, lion-maned, or wearing a lion helmet. I painted his hair the colour of a lion’s mane, his eyes using cerulean pigment and gave him a fair complexion.

Classical References

By contrast, in the painting of Achilles and Patroclus, I represented Patroclus with a darker skin, and correspondingly darker hair.

For my representation of Hebe I used many classical references:

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 27. 241 ff : ‘Hebe with her lovely hair’

Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 2. 20 ‘Beautiful Hebe (Youth) . . . the youngest of the gods and the one most revered by them’

Pindar, Nemean Ode 10. 17 ff : ‘Hebe (Youth) fairest of all the goddesses’

Hebe is often described as gold shod, and her head as gleaming and flame haired, and her legs as ‘shapely ankled’. On vases she is often portrayed in a red colour. I used these descriptions as the basis of the treatment I applied to the damaged marble of Hebe that was my primary visual reference.

The Symbolic Significance Of Gold

For the Oceanid Hesione, I used part of the sculpture by Eduard Muller (Prometheus Bound and the Oceanids) from the National Gallery in Berlin, as my inspiration. I used 24 carat gold leaf to represent the rain, as Zeus, in the form of an eagle fights the nymph.

The application of gold leaf symbolises the era of classical richness, and honours and respects the divinity of the gods. On some paintings it is used as a base, anchoring the bust on a solid ground, in others the gold is fractured, mirroring the damage that time has wrought upon the ancient marbles.

These paintings, and others, can be viewed in more detail in the shop. This post was initially part of the commentary on the Classical Collection, but I have decided to remove those pages and transfer this to my blog. I hope you have enjoyed reading this, please like and share. Thank you.

Lockdown Update

June 2, 2020

For any regular readers of my blogs, you may have noticed my slightly long absence from writing. It isn’t that I have had a writer’s block, it’s more that I kept thinking “What do I write about?” and even though I’d start the occasional blog, I could never finish, and I’d end up ditching them. As I usually write about my art experiences whilst on holiday, or my visits to museums and galleries, since lockdown this has been impossible. So I thought, “Why don’t I write about not having anything to write about?” At least that would get me writing again.

But as soon as I started to write about nothing, I found there was something to write about!

Physical Health

COVID-19 has been a bit scary. At first I dismissed it, not appreciating the seriousness of what was about to unfold. I think this was because we weren’t told the full story and I was working from incomplete information.

Then, after a week of feeling a bit under the weather, I developed a fever on March 6. Two days later, I collapsed whilst out for a walk, unable to breathe, and I fainted. I phoned 111, then went online. I was told not to go to a doctor, not to go to hospital, take paracetamol and wash my hands!

That was not very reassuring!

I had a whole range of symptoms, each one quite mild, and no obvious cough. I joined the Covid-19 Symptom tracker app from Kings College, and logged my health on a daily basis. Within a week, I felt quite a bit better. Then, after another week of quite good health, things took a turn for the worse. My lungs screamed with pain. I was short of breath. I had terrible headaches, which resolved around a point at the top of my nose. I lost my sense of smell. I was exhausted and slept all morning and most of the afternoon. I had pains everywhere.

However, as there weren’t any testing opportunities open to me at the time, I guess I’ll never know if it was Covid-19 or not, but given how many of the symptoms matched, I’m sure it was. 111 told me to take paracetamol; and wash my hands! I self isolated for all the rest of March, and much of April. It took a long time to recover.

Then I received an email from Kings College saying my symptoms matched those of the virus, and I was offered a test. At this stage tests were only available to key workers, so they gave me a key worker status, as a volunteer!

I had the test on May 3, 8 weeks after developing a fever, and 9 weeks after the first symptoms surfaced (although I didn’t recognise them as Covid at the time). I had been symptom free and recovering for 3 to 4 weeks and I tested negative, as I expected. Still, it was good to have it confirmed.

Mental Health

During this time, things occasionally got difficult. My holiday to Sicily was cancelled, so was my Sky Sports subscription. I couldn’t read a newspaper or watch the news on TV. It was difficult to paint, and I felt as if my life was being stolen. I was not happy.

I couldn’t go to our wonderful studio in Barnet, or see my fellow painters. I was lonely. Zoom and Houseparty are OK, but I missed my family. I missed the physical. I was tired. I could hardly stand up to paint at an easel. So I sat down and started doodling, watching YouTube videos of other artists. I dug out some old gouache paints and came across some old sketchbooks. I started sketching some designs I used to do as a teenager. Gradually I got back into the swing of things.

Creative Health

As I couldn’t go to the studio in Barnet, I used my home studio. I resumed painting an oil seascape I had started at the end of last year, and started another. In between oil painting sessions, I would sit down and draw in ink, adding gouache highlights. I started gilding some of the designs.

Back to reality

These last few days, things are starting up again. I have been out and collected two of my paintings, which have suffered their own lockdown, from a closed exhibition, in the New Maynard Gallery. I’ve seen family. The streets are busier. I’m nearly recovered. I’ve regained my sense of humour.

Then I had a visitor. A squirrel. Wild animals in confined spaces, even small ones, terrify me. This squirrel had sharp claws, was very fast, and caused mayhem, running up my paintings, knocking things over. I retreated in panic!

I made a short video of my very brave return to the studio, which you can watch here,

https://youtu.be/mvZUIb259wo

So keep your sense of humour, keep a sense of proportion, keep safe, and keep well.

Lessons Learnt at the Victoria and Albert Museum

September 20, 2019

I recently read somewhere that the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, has over 2.2 million items. That’s a lot! Even though the majority of these will not be on display, but are in a “reference collection”, we decided to visit the museum and see them for ourselves.

Founded in 1852 by Prince Albert, it describes itself as the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance, now that’s a leadership position!

The first impressions are that it is a ‘Grand ’ museum that easily stands alongside anything in Vienna or Paris, or on the Museum Island in Berlin. It’s a wonderful intricate Victorian building, with domes, staircases, open spaces, surprising shafts of light, and finished with lashings of marble. You certainly feel special being there.

It quickly becomes apparent that there is just too much to see on a single visit, and having a short list of objectives is essential if one is to get the most out of the visit. Conveniently, the V&A recognises this too, and provides a guide listing 20 treasures which comprise the highlights of the collection. Their number one is the Raphael Cartoons, the same as ours, but as luck would have it, the room housing the cartoons for the designs of the Sistine Chapel was closed. So flexibility was the order of the day, and off we went with just one objective, and the idea of taking in anything else that caught our attention on the way. We set off to see Constable’s paintings, leaving Leonardo’s notebooks and Shakespeare’s first folio for another day.

The building is truly vast, an impression confirmed by the Cast Court, containing casts of Michelangelo’s David, the Portico de la Gloria from Santiago de Compostela, and Trajan’s Column. Passing swiftly through Europe from 1600 to 1815, we navigated ourselves to the paintings, stopping briefly to admire the collection of jaw droppingly beautiful jewellery!

Despite being distracted by an unexpected Picasso, or a Munch, we finally stood in front of a familiar and homely Constable, or two. In fact, I was truly shocked at quite how many Constables there were, some were sketches, or drafts, others fully finished, some small, some full sized.

To the modern eye, the large sketches, particularly of The Haywain or The Leaping Horse, look far more attractive and interesting than the finished versions, even my favourite, the view of Salisbury Cathedral from the water meadows. They have more vitality and creativity in the execution, brimming with life and vigour. The final beautifully crafted and varnished versions seem too studied and detailed by contrast.

This led me to wonder why Constable’s sketches work so well. I think its because although they appear free and spontaneous in the execution, they are based on carefully constructed compositions, with everything in position and proportion, leading the eye around the painting just as Constable intended.

So I learnt, and re-learnt, a few lessons at the V&A. Have an objective, but be flexible. Have a plan, but leave space for spontaneity. Admire the established, but be prepared to ask questions, its the planning and preparation that allows one to be free and creative.

Quite a visit, and that’s even without looking at The Three Graces, and our view that one of them has a boy’s bottom! That’s a subject for another blog post.

Inspiring Ludlow, Shropshire and Worcestershire

April 15, 2019

Last summer, (2018) we decided to visit Worcestershire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. We chose Ludlow as our base, and rented a Sykes cottage three miles outside the town. Ludlow's recorded history begins in 1086 when the castle was first developed as a part of a defensive line of castles along the Welsh Marches but also to subdue the local Anglo Saxon population.

It’s a fine castle, with four main gates and three postern (secondary) gates and I took many photos and drew many sketches. One of these has made it to a framed watercolour, and is currently on exhibition at the HVA Big Art Showcase at the New Maynard Gallery in Welwyn Garden City.

Ludlow itself is a magnificent town, planned with wide main streets, intersected by narrow side streets, so that one is drawn to the centre for the market, church and castle. Ludlow contains over 420 listed buildings, many of them still in regular commercial use. Broad Street, with the Buttercross at the top and the town wall gatehouse at its foot, has been described as one of England’s finest streets.

Outside the town, we were staggered by the wonderful country houses, and the fantastic vistas of the rolling country, with the Cotswolds, Malvern, Lickey and Clent hills all visible in turn from the many rises in Shropshire and neighbouring Worcestershire and Herefordshire. On a visit to Hanbury Hall, the rolling countryside inspired two oil paintings available for sale on this site.

One of the most amazing houses is Stokesay Castle. Often described as the finest and best-preserved fortified medieval manor house in England, it is unchanged for over 700 years. I sketched and sketched, and perhaps one day I’ll try turning these into oil paintings. But I fear I cannot do the scene justice.

Another amazing picturesque scene was on the Brockhampton Estate in Bringsty just outside Worcester. It’s magical. There are lots of amazing buildings and wonderful views. More sketches!

On a slightly different note, we visited Shrewsbury and among much else to admire, I was particularly taken by the railway station. As I was painting it, a friend commented that it looked like the Houses of Parliament, and it certainly is a wonderfully grand building. The finished watercolour is also for sale.

Ludlow and surrounding counties are truly inspiring. Finally, here are some links you may find useful. Please comment, share or like below.

https://www.sykescottages.co.uk

http://www.ludlow.org.uk

https://newmaynardgallery.co.uk

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stokesay-castle/

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/brockhampton

Art in Lisbon

March 29, 2019

Lisbon is by the sea, but the castle, Castelo do S. Jorge, is at the top of a steep hill. It’s a climb, and the streets are cobbled, and we stayed in a great hotel near the top. It can be a hard walk, especially in the heat, but it’s worth it not only for the great views, but for the fresh air and the sense of wellbeing imparted by being above the clamour of Lisbon.

The Museu Coleção Berardo is the main Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Lisbon. And presents examples from the most significant artistic movements from the twentieth century to the present day. Just look at the lists of artists! Just look at the paintings, the sculptures.

Some of the art almost brought me to tears.

It also has an absolutely excellent cafe, with a calm and peaceful atmosphere, great food, and all at reasonable prices which I highly recommend. To sum up, an excellent cafe with a world class art gallery attached.

The Igreja de São Domingos church in Lisbon is classified as a National Monument. Dedicated in 1241, the largest church in Lisbon was once the home of the Inquisition. The church was damaged by the 1531 Lisbon earthquake and almost completely destroyed in the 1755 earthquake. In 1959 the church was devastated again when fire broke out in the building. It almost completely gutted the church, destroying many important paintings and statues. In 1994 it reopened and wonderfully, the restoration left many signs of the fire in place, making an incredibly atmospheric space.

In Lisbon, you take the tram. Its compulsory. It’s the best way to get around the barrios, and quite an experience. A short tram ride outside Lisbon lies Belem and there sits the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a World Heritage Site. When we visited, they seemed to lay on a bit of a reception for us, hundreds of horses, soldiers in full dress uniform, the roads shut to traffic. The monastery was mindblowing, and inspired me to paint its’ dramatic arches, intricate carvings and soaring pillars.

Of course, there are reminders of the Inquisition everywhere in Portugal, and Belem wasn’t free of iconoclasm.

We loved Lisbon, the city, the monuments, the history, the art and the people.

A truly inspiring city. Finally, here are some links you may find useful. Please comment, share or like below.

https://castelodesaojorge.pt/en/

https://www.olissippohotels.com/en/Hotels/Castelo/The-Hotel.aspx

http://www.lisbon-tourism.com/en/how-to-get-around-in-lisbon.html

http://en.museuberardo.pt

http://www.patriarcado-lisboa.pt/

https://www.lisbon.net/jeronimos-monaster

Art in Berlin

March 27, 2019

We love visiting Berlin. We usually stay in the east side of the city, and the last time we went, we decided to spend a serious amount of time in the magnificent museums and art galleries.

The monumental Ishtar Gate was one of the city gates of Babylon, located in modern Iraq. It was built under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II. Built in ornamented glazed coloured bricks it is covered in symbolic animal reliefs. The blue gate of Babylon was named for Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. It is simply mind blowing, and very very big. It’s in the Pergamon Museum one of the five great museums on Museumsinsel - the Museum Island, in Berlin.

The Ishtar Gate, the blue gate of Babylon

Of course, apart from the gate this museum contains the market gate of Miletus, and the Great Altar of Pergamon. They are enormous, about the size of Coventry.

In the Altes Museum, we went to see the Fayum mummy portrait of a young woman. Surviving examples or portrait painting from the ancient world are rare, but they were evidently amazingly skilled. This is so sensitive, those eyes, so beautiful.

Next stop was the Neues Museum, to queue to see the bust of Nefertiti. No photos allowed so the image is courtesy of the Neues Museum. Is there anything new to be said, except that round the corner, ignored by the crowds, is the matching bust of Nefertiti’s husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten. Some say this was once even more beautiful, but it has suffered badly at the hands of his enemies.

The Bode Museum is at the top end of the island and we headed straight for the Byzantine collection. Speechless. Finally we went to the ‘temple of the arts’ the Alte Nationalgalerie. Every so often, we’d come across an empty space with a sign saying something like - here used to be displayed a (Chagall, Picasso, Reubens, Tintoretto etc), but it was taken illegally in 1945 by the Soviet Army and is believed to be in the vaults of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This is illegal and despite repeated attempts to reclaim the art, it is still held illegally in Russia. Huh!

And of course, we went all over Berlin. You may notice how this visit inspired some of my paintings.