“… producing more ideas creates more chances for a genuinely strong idea to emerge … [though q]uantity does not magically transform mediocre work into great work.
… As humans, we are remarkably bad at predicting which idea will become brilliant. We suck at figuring out which work of art will be a masterpiece. We don’t know which experiment or prototype will be groundbreaking. So, instead of trying to make every first attempt brilliant, we increase our odds by creating more possibilities.”
There isn’t an art rule that stipulates you may paint a particular subject only once and then need to move on to something else. Yet it’s something I encounter frequently, with both beginners and not-beginners. “Do it once and move on”, whereas it wants to be “do it once, then again exploring what ideas the previous painting prompted or weren’t explored”. One attempt leads to another and another.
This is not to say it all has to happen immediately, the timescale can be short and long.
2016 sunflowers. SOLD2017. In my personal collection.20212021. In my personal collection.2026. Available in my studio.2026. My favourite of this year’s sunflower paintings. Available in my studio.
“If you have twenty colours sitting next to you, every problem can appear to have the same solution: Reach for another tube.
Take those options away, and you have to become more inventive. You start paying much closer attention to value … to how much paint thickness can affect colour. … the surface underneath. …
Rather than asking, What colour is that object? You start asking, what does this area need in relation to everything around it?”
It’s no secret that my favourite colour-mixing combination is orange and blue. That I enjoy the brightness of cadmium orange and the dark depths of Prussian blue. Mix them to create an array of browns and greys. Change the blue or orange pigment, and you change the results.
Amongst the new example pieces I’ve been painting for my workshop at Higham Hall later this month is a new favourite colours chart.
If you compare it to the old one below, which dates back easily half a dozen years, you’ll see a couple of additions and fewer blues.
I do still have an assortment of blues to hand, but find I reach for Prussian or phthalo turquoise first.
There’s now diox purple, for dark shadows and interesting mixing/glazing with yellows. I also like it for covering unresolved paintings to reuse a canvas.
And there’s a red because I can’t get to a satisfactory red sandstone colour without it, so I need it for this coastline.
I do still prefer magenta for mixing rather than a red, because I find it leans into purples rather than my rapidly heading into browns. And I do enjoy magenta as a starting colour (coloured ground).
SOLD. Burn of Durn, Portsoy. 30x30cm.
I’ve also added Payne’s grey ink because I use it a lot now, though rarely as a mixing colour.
Portsoy: The Burn of Durn II, 42x30cm, acrylic on wood panel
A “happy accident” in a painting is something unplanned or unintended that gives a result we like or that is interesting to work with. But I don’t have to simply wait for one to happen: I can deliberately create the conditions in which happy accidents occur, increase the odds of something intriquing happening though never having control of the outcome.
Acrylic ink is one of my favourite mediums for doing this. To do a drawing and then spray it with water. The result depends on how much ink is on the surface, how much has dried, how much water is sprayed and how close to the ink I spray it. Bonus: it freaks people out who’ve not seen it done before because it gets messy.
Here’s a photo of my final painting, before I get into the layers in it. As you can see, even though a process may be chaotic and messy, the final result need not be overtly so. The reason for doing it is that it benefits me in the making of the painting, it’s exciting and challenging in a way that colouring in a line drawing can never be.
A Piece of Portsoy Harbour. Mixed media on A2 watercolour paper. Sold.
My first step was to do a drawing in the ink.
I could have let it dry and then add colour, but I want something that’s wilder, so sprayed it with water. (Click on a video to see it full size.)
(Click on a video to see it full size.)
The result:
I placed paper towel over the result to lift off a bit of the excess inky water.
Then I scrunched up the inky paper and stamped across the surface.
The result:
What a delightful chaotic mess to work into. It’s hard to be patient waiting for it to dry, but any wet medium added will mix in and ruin the effect, whilst coloured pencil can tear the wet surface, so I usually work on something else.
I don’t stress if my drawing has dissolved as I can always refind and redraw it. Dealing with what has happened is part of the process. I enjoy responding to what’s there and nudging it in a direction.
Next I got out my watercolours and added a layer of “harbour wall colours”.
Once this had dried, I used opaque acrylic paint to draw in the rusty ring and chains. I also added some opaque colour to some of the harbour wall stones.
Next I added a layer of coloured pencil. It’s subtle in many places, you only notice it up close.
Next layer was oil pastel, both lights and darks. The watercolour paper I’m using has a slight texture to it, which breaks up the pastel line.
I went back and forth with coloured pencil and oil pastel until I got to this point.
After pondering it for a while, I decided the darks weren’t strong enough. Time for something dramatic rather than faffing about. So I poured ink over the whole thing and sprayed this with some water.
(Click on a video to see it full size.)
Relax, remember there’s a lot of oil pastel on the surface and the ink won’t stick to that.
I left it vertical, to drip-dry overnight.
The next morning I added some light orange oil pastel to the rings, and declared the painting finished.
A Piece of Portsoy Harbour. Mixed media on A2 watercolour paper.
“When I need a break from whatever project I’m working on, I often like to paint small. And I like to paint from memory.
“A small piece painted from memory doesn’t ask for detail. It simply asks for shapes and contours and changes in value.
“For me, as a landscape painter, it asks me to remember impressions, the way I felt in a place. I can invent the color and the way the light moves across these imagined landscapes. Trees grow where I want them to grow and I get to decide what time of day it is.”
Well that’s my studio-gallery all neat and tidy, ready for North East Open Studios (shortened to NEOS when talking about it) starting Saturday 12 September 2026. I’m venue 35 of some 250, open 11 to 3 except for Monday and Friday. Fingers crossed for lots of visitors and sales!
For those of you who’re further afield, here’s a look around. If anything catches your eye, if you’d like more photos or a price, do let me know.
(Click on video to view it full size)
This concertina sketchbook is now also in the display cabinet, and they are for sale.
“What is play when drawing… drawing for drawing’s sake I guess. Play has no expectations, no projected outcomes, it’s a journey of discovery that so many of us feel we’ve lost. It’s a headspace full of empty and just being. It’s drawing in the sand with a stick, with a finger on misted glass, it’s pulling hands through wet paint and daubing it somewhere. It’s doesn’t ask for validation or approval, it just is.”
How do you get yourself to pull a pen across the surface of a piece of paper with the same ease and insouciance with which we pull a twig through the sand as we sit at beach?
A twig-in-sand drawing is inherently impermanent; if the wind doesn’t erase it, the tide will. So it doesn’t matter what we draw.
A pen-on-paper drawing is but one piece of paper and a few millilitres of ink; if you ruin the sheet, turn it over and have another go.
It feels counter-intuitive but it helps to use ink rather than pencil. It forces you to respond what’s happening in the drawing rather than being able to change your mind by reaching for an eraser. Aim to accept that mistakes are inevitable, let them be, and keep going to see what happens.
Accept that it’s about the doing not the result. About putting down ink on a surface, about playing with lines, not predetermined outcomes.
(The in-house art critic bought me this Playmobil artist in a toy shop in Paris in the early 1990s. He’s known as Monsieur P Artiste. He/we never could resist a toy shop.)
“These works aren’t designed to make themselves immediately understood. Lennox [Dunbar] builds, dismantles, layers, removes and rebuilds. Painting, collage, found forms, marks and fragments come together through intuition, experience and chance.
His work asks you to spend time with it. To look. And sometimes to accept that not understanding something immediately is precisely the point.
Instead of instantly asking “What is it?”, ask yourself “How long have I looked at this?”.
Not looking with a negative judgement uppermost in our thoughts, but looking that’s paying attention to what we’re seeing and letting our brains unpick, connect elements, shapes, colours, layers.
We’re never going to like every piece of art, not even everything by our favourite artists. Being intrigued by a piece and engaging with it, even if you ultimately don’t want it hanging it on your wall, is learning to look beyond the obvious.
“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” by Marion Boddy-Evans. 15x15cm. Acrylic on wood panel. Tighnabruaich Gallery
With confident humility, you remain confident in your ability to learn while remaining aware that your current knowledge may be incomplete. Humility without confidence often leads to anxiety and risk-aversion. We should absolutely feel confident about concepts we’ve learned, knowledge we’ve attained, and skills that we’ve mastered. But that sense of mastery should be tempered with a humble recognition that there might be new ideas or better approaches that we might be missing.
… when you want feedback on a performance asking, “What can I do differently next time?” (An advice based question) works better than “How did I do?”
… We don’t simply need lifelong learners. We need lifelong unlearners and relearners.
What can I do differently? What if I had chosen another option when making a decision in a painting, where it have led? How do I remember the choices later on? What if whenever I make a choice I write a quick note in a sketchbook of what I chose and what I didn’t? I wouldn’t end up with a recipe book, more a dictionary of ingredients and possibilities.
I was enticed to the beach by the forecast of an extra-low tide of 0.5m, which reveals seldom-seen rocks and changes my mental images of what the beach looks like.
There is a heron in this photo if you know where to look.
I found a comfy rock to sit on, put out my concertina sketchbook by my feet and began drawing in it with ink. No sooner had I started than it began to spit with rain. Looking around there wasn’t an obvious raincloud, so I hoped it would soon stop. Spoiler: that didn’t happen.
I kept going until I got across the length of the concertina sketchbook, then turned it over to prevent the rain from washing away all my ink. Waited for a bit, and it did indeed stop raining, but by then the watercolour paper was well damp. I turned it right side up, pushed some of the ink around with a brush, and dabbed some off with paper towel. The result: more of an abstract tonal chaos than the line drawing I had envisaged. My solution: to add Inktense pencil and some watercolour. This is where it ended up:
At this point I wished I had brought my oil pastels with me, to add colour that would sit on top of what was here. Instead I watched the seagulls and heron while waiting for the paint to dry enough to fold up the sketchbook.
Back in my studio I added oil pastel, plus some acrylic and watercolour, stopping here:
With a Seawhite concertina sketchbook that contains cartridge paper, I have occasionally gotten it too wet and the paper has torn on a fold with rough treatment (such as holding the cover to pull it along to get a bit closer to myself). I’d wondered if the ones with 350gsm watercolour paper would too and the answer is yes (but it was very wet and I wasn’t being gentle). I’ll fix it with strips of wet-strength tissue paper and glue.
There’s no “rule of art” stipulating that we may only paint a subject only once. We can paint as many variations as we wish, whether it’s pursuing an idea that hasn’t yet resolved itself sufficiently, in different mediums or sizes, across the seasons or years or times of day, or for the sheer enjoyment of the subject. Such as sunflowers, which I’ve been painting again, for a few weeks now.
Watercolour and ink.Watercolour and ink.Acrylic ink on wood panel.Mixed media: watercolour, acrylics, oil pastel, ink.
The one below I painted on Saturday during my open studio. I might still strengthen the yellow and add a touch of green, or maybe not, it’ll depend how I feel when I see it with fresh eyes.
I’ve put a sheet of newsprint underneath the dying sunflowers, partly so the falling petals are clearly visible and partly because it will make it easy to deal with them when I decide it’s time they went into the compost.
