The walkway street food market in Nuremberg

The walkway street food market in Nuremberg by Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528)
Source: Wikipaintings

I've always liked Albrecht Durer's work.  It might be because he favours drawing and line.  I was delighted to discover recently some of his landscape works on wikipaintings - including this particular work The walkway street food market in Nuremberg (click this link to see a much larger version of this image)

Albrecht Durer was born in Nuremburg in 1471 and became one of the most famous painters of the Northern Renaissance.

Given that Nuremburg was his home town, this must have been a very familar scene for him - and this painting is presumably an early example of "paint what you know".

What I like about is that it's done in pen and ink with a colour wash - which is a style for recording a scene which I very much like.

The town lies either side of the Pegnita River and this walkway street food market was presumably a Nuremburg equivalent of the shops on the Rialto bridge in Venice.

What's interesting about Nuremberg is that about 90% of the old town was destroyed by strategic allied bombing during the second world war.  However the town has been rebuilt to reinstate its appearance prior to WW2 and the covered bridges appear to still be a feaure of present day Nuremberg's Ald Stadt. You can see a large map of Nuremburg's Ald Stadt (old town) today on Wikipedia

How to see more of Durer's landscapes and cityscapes

• If you click on the cityscape or landscape links in the Wikipaintings Durer page you'll see a range of thumbnails of the works he produced.  
• The paintings are organised in chronological order within each genre
• Click a thumbnail and you'll be taken to the page for that landscape - which then tells you more about the painting

Scottish Landscape Painting and a £25,000 prize

The JOLOMO Bank of Scotland Award For Scottish Landscape Painting 2011 has been won by 24 year old Edinburgh artist Calum McClure.

The award is the largest privately funded Arts Award in the UK with prize money totalling £35,000.

The first prize in 2011 was raised to £25,000. The main sponsor is the Scottish artist John Lowrie Morrison OBE (Jolomo) who awarded the prizes at a dinner at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on 24th June 2011.  Other sponsors are the Bank of Scotland and The Scotsman.

Winning artist Calum McClure had this to say

I can’t believe I have won, this will make a real difference to my work. I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in May 2010 and have continued to work as an artist since then. Among the focus of my landscapes are country houses and formal gardens. I paint these not only because of the interesting botanical specimens and the floral and fauna brought to the estates by their owners, but because it is a side of Scotland that is sometimes overlooked, due to our willingness to purport a skewed vernacular or kitsch version of ‘Scottishness’. The focus of my work for almost two years has been Cammo estate on the outskirts of Edinburgh, in particular its boating pond.

Seven Scottish artists reached the shortlist.  Their names are below plus the part of Scotland they live/work in.

Unfortunately the website does not have good digital images of either the winning work or the work of the shortlisted artists - with annotations for dimensions and media.  You can see something of the works shortlisted in this slideshow - but this is not the standard of presentation which I find on other art competition websites.  However what it does do is give you a better sense of the size and impact of the work when hung in a gallery.

You might like to take a look at the websites of the shortlisted artists which you can find links to below.

Aberdeenshire - Susie Lee (45) - slides 2, 20 and 21 in the slideshow

Suzie Lee website

“The Scottish landscape provides me with the perfect inspiration for my work. Sketches are made on site finding a feeling of place the intention being a poetic visual statement suggesting that a loss of intimacy with the natural world is in itself a loss of self.”
Susie Lee

Borders - David Cass (22) - slides 7, 28-30 in the slideshow

David Cass website

“I’ve always collected old wooden objects, from antique shops and markets; initially, I used these materials to construct wall-based sculptures.  However these found-objects have gradually developed a new purpose: and are now the surfaces on which I paint.”
David Cass

Edinburgh - Calum McClure (24) - slides 4, 22 and 23 in the slideshow

Calum McClure at The Scottish Gallery

“Among the focus of my landscapes are country houses and formal gardens. I paint these not only because of the interesting botanical specimens and the floral and fauna brought to the estates by their owners, but because it is a side of Scotland that is sometimes overlooked.”
Calum McClure

Edinburgh - Jenny Mason (46) - slides 24 and 25 in the slideshow

Jenny Mason website

“There is something reassuring to us as humans in the endless movement of clouds in the sky and the relentlessness of the sea, it is never the same, never boring, and its takes one's attention off the cerebral and onto the visual wonderment of the world we inhabit.”
Jenny Mason

Edinburgh - Allan Robertson (56) - slides 5, 16 and 17 in the slideshow

Allan J Robertson website

“The structures that form our industrial and manufacturing past are often hidden from sight. My aim is to capture their colours, textures and materials, the environment they sit in, to create an idealised landscape that once again makes these structures predominant.”
Allan Robertson

Edinburgh - Beth Robertson Fiddes (38)  - who won second prize (£6,000) - slides 3, 18 and 19 in the slideshow

Beth Robertson Fiddes website

“I work on large land and seascapes reflecting on themes of memory, solitude and scale, while smaller works study unusual rock formations shaped by the tides or mountain rivers and waterfalls.”
Beth Robertson Fiddes

Glasgow -  Katie Pope (26) - who third prize (£4,000) - slides 1, 26 and 27 in the slideshow

Katie Pope website

“Being located in the heart of Glasgow provides an appropriate setting, as my work is strongly rooted in reflecting life and landscape here in the West of Scotland. I hope my work reflects something of the vitality of my surroundings.”
Katie Pope

Artist John Lowrie Morrison OBE (Jolomo), who presented the prizes, said 

It was an extremely difficult job to choose not only the shortlisted artists but the three final winners of awards.  However the quality of all the work shows that landscape painting is alive and well in Scotland, although maybe not in all the Art Schools!


The winners show the best of that painting – Katie Pope’s wonderfully expressive Glasgow urban landscapes, Beth Robertson Fiddes’ primeval shorelines and Award winner Calum McClures’s beautifully intricate Wyethesque recording of garden landscape.  All the shortlisted artists’ work this year was simply stunning – however the three winners were just that bit special.

Criteria for Entry - and How to Enter

It's obviously too late for this year - but for the future reference of Scottish artists and readers of this blog the criteria for entry are as follows. 

Applicants must be painters who:

a. are currently living and working in Scotland and are aged 18 or over on 1st January 2011.

b. have studied, or are studying, at a college of art or in an art discipline at a university, further education college or independent art college.

c. Should more than five years have passed since studying, or if the applicant has no formal qualification, the body of work submitted must be proposed and approved by a suitably qualified referee, e.g. art lecturer, teacher, gallery owner.

d. The Jolomo Bank of Scotland Awards welcomes entries from artists with special needs.

e. There will be a main prize of £25,000 with an additional £10,000 divided among the runners up.

It seems to me that criteria (c) is probably a rather useful one in terms of winnowing down the scope for people entering who are way short of the standard required.  It's very nice to see an exhibition which doesn't have generation of entry fees as one of its main aims and performance indicators!

Applications to enter should be made by way of 

one central, titled image which should be a painting and between five and ten supporting images which may be paintings, sketches or drawings. All entries should be accompanied by title, metric size, the medium used and the year the work was made. Also included should be the entrant's full Curriculum Vitae.

All entries are viewed anonymously by the judging panel of six people.

The Landscapes of Georgio Morandi

Larry Groff (Painting Perceptions), a landscape and cityscape painter living in San Diego, has written an  excellent blog post about Giorgio Morandi, The Essence of the Landscape.

I'm with the person who commented to the effect they had no idea that Giorgio Morandi did landscapes as well as still life.

Here's a YouTube video of some of Morandi's work created by Groff - but I do recommend you take a look at the post too.

Here also is what Larry says about his blog.  His sentiments for starting the blog are certainly ones I can identify with and it looks like one which will get added into my Google Reader list.

After painting for about 30 years I’ve often felt discouraged that perceptual painting has often gotten less attention in the major art publications, online venues and art world in general compared to conceptually-based artists. Eventually I asked myself, “why not start a blog devoted to modern painting done from life?”


There are magazines, like American Artist, which has articles about some very good contemporary realists working from life but many of the articles lean towards a more conservative and non-modern style. There are blogs and forums on the web which focus more on academic realism or photorealism but there is little to be found in magazines or blogs that specifically focuses on perceptual painting with a contemporary modern sensibility. This blog aims to correct that problem.

Wolf Kahn - on painting and being a landscape painter

"A painting with content" (Video 2)

"I was trying even then to do something I'm still trying to do - to get away from description and at the same time still be a landscape painter"

Wolf Kahn

This a two part interview with Wolf Kahn - the renowned landscape painter who works in both oil and pastels.

The two videos from 2008 are from New Art TV

In the first he talks about the earlier part of his life and how his artwork developed and was influenced by the philosophies and contemporary art movements of the fifties.



This is the second part of the interview with Wolf Kahn in which he describes how he got launched and started to sell seriously

"I'm constantly trying to get away from the deliberate...and intentionality"

Wolf Kahn

Thanks to Debora L. Stewart (Contemporary Asbtract Pastels) for alerting me to the videos

Links:

• Wolf Kahn website - pastels and paintings 
• These are links to the original pages on New Art TV
• Wolf Kahn Part 1 of 2
• Wolf Kahn Part 2 of 2

A view of Box Hill, Surrey and English landscape painting

I guess I should not have been surprised to find A View of Box Hil, Surrey - one of the paintings from the BBC programme This Green and Pleasant Land in Tate Britain. 

After collecting my errant sketchbook last week (see ) I got more exercise for the day by walking around all the galleries on the main level.  Everything has moved!  It was a very odd experience because everything has moved (due to a major refurbishment programme - see Tate Britain is changing)

As a result, I found myself looking at everything with fresh eyes.

A View of Box Hill, Surrey by George Lambert (1700-1765)

A View of Box Hill, Surrey (1733) by George Lambert (1700 – 30 Nov. 1765)
considered to be the first proper landscape painted in England
Oil painting on canvas support: 908 x 1804 mm

Location: Tate Britain

I came across one of the landscapes mentioned in This Green and Pleasant Land in the room devoted to eighteenth century art.  This included a small section about very early landscape painting.  That's the point at which landscapes start being painted purely because of the scene.  There are no buildings or landowners with their estates being portrayed as such.

A View of Box Hill Surrey is George Lambert's most famous painting.  This is what the Tate has to say about this painting

Lambert was one of the pioneers of landscape painting in early eighteenth-century Britain.

This painting presents the landscape without the sorts of buildings –palaces or an aristocratic estate – which traditionally featured in such views. Is this evidence of a new appreciation of nature for its own sake? Certainly, landscape became the focus for discussions about the relationship between painting and poetry, and aesthetic ideas such as beauty and the sublime.

 (From the display caption March 2011)

I seem to recall the programme as saying this particular painting is regarded as one of the first proper landscape paintings in Britain.  Certainly Lambert's claim to fame is that he was one of the first artists to develop an English way of painting landscapes.  His paintings were not purely about imitating the Italian way of doing things - landscapes were painted for their aesthetic value rather than as a backdrop to a history story

I discovered that this painting is unusually wide and not a conventional format.  I tried sketching it - and it's much wider than the two squares side by side which I initially thought was the format.  I've taken a look at some other landscape paintings by Lambert and it seems he rather likes this almost letter box-like format.  Just imagine if this had become the accepted dimensions of landscape format!

After George Lambert - Box Hill, Surrey
pencil and coloured pencils

The land in front is now part of the vineyard of Denbies Wine Estate.  Below is an extract from Google Maps which shows both the subject and the approximate location of the artist - although the wheatfields are now vineyards.  It would be interesting to see what the view looks like today from the same fields.

Denbies Vineyard on left, Box Hill on right
the red marker marks the approximate viewpoint of the artist - looking east
From Google Maps - click this link to see full size

I'm doing a post about George Lambert this week as he's an interesting artist and one I was completely unaware of until I watched the programme.

A footnote - the Olympic Road race
 
Interestingly I learned while researching this picture that Box Hill is to be one of the locations involved in the cycle road race at the Olympics next summer.  The zig zag road up Box Hill - so beloved of both cyclists and motorbike riders - provides the hill challenge to the race. See Cycling Weekly's Olympic road race route officially revealed

This Green and Pleasant Land

BBC iPlayer - This Green and Pleasant Land - The Story of British Landscape Painting

If anybody else, like me, forgot that tonight was the night that This Green and Pleasant Land - The Story of British Landscape Painting was on here's the iplayer link for the download

I caught the last half an hour and was gutted that I missed the beginning - until I remembered the joy of the BBC iPlayer!

Here's the blurb - which will surely make all those who can't get iPlayer as sick as parrots!

400 years of art history in 90 minutes? This film takes an eclectic group of people from all walks of life, including artists, critics and academics, out into the countryside to take a look at how we have depicted our landscape in art, discovering how the genre carried British painting to its highest eminence and won a place in the nation's heart. 

From Flemish beginnings in the court of Charles I to the digital thumbstrokes of David Hockney's iPad, the paintings reveal as much about the nation's past as they do the patrons and artists who created them. Famous names sit alongside lesser-known works, covering everything from the refined sensibilities of 18th-century Classicism to the abstract forms of the war-torn 20th century with a bit of love, loss, rivalry and rioting thrown in. 

Contributions come from a cast as diverse as the works themselves, including filmmaker Nic Roeg, historian Dan Snow and novelist Will Self, who offer a refreshingly wide range of perspectives on a genre of art which we have made very much our own.

I'm now off to bed with my iPad to watch it from the beginning!

[Update (the next morning!): A brilliant programme on all sorts of levels - the photography is absolutely stunning.  Plus it was an intelligent summary of how landscape developed as a genre at the same time as covering several important artists drawing and painting landscapes with really insightful comment.  I'm going to watch it all over again!]

Places to Paint - Maine

Slack Tide (oil on panel 16" x 12")- by Kevin Mizner

Recently I came across the work of Kevin Mizner and his blog Maine-ly Painting  

This Blog draws on my over thirty years of experience painting the beauty of Maine. I'll have some pointers, comments and even criticisms on art.

I was impressed with his work - his landscapes and seascapes of Maine - and the way he wrote about art and the places he painted.  I've been to Maine and sketched in Maine and I'd have loved to have had somebody provide me with a guide to the places to paint.  So I decided to ask him to write a guest post for this blog about his favourite places to paint in Maine - and this is it!

________________________

Maine has been a destination for artists for nearly one hundred-fifty years. Why? It's all about the light. 

Maine sits rather high in the Northern Hemisphere, at about the same latitude as Spain, and a little south of the UK, which gives it a raking, angular light. Any artist will tell you that an angled light gives a more vibrant glow to colors than a more direct, straight overhead light.

But in addition to the angle of the sun, Maine juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. Maine has salty, moist air, infusing the light with a radiant shimmering glow. Combine that quality of light with Maine's three thousand miles of rocky coastline, replete with quiet harbors, fishing villages and a few sandy beaches, and it's small wonder artists flock here to paint.

The artists who've painted here are a veritable Who's Who of the greatest ever: Frederick Church, Thomas Moran, Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, Andrew Wyeth, Rockwell Kent, and John Singer Sargent, to name but a few.

Monhegan

One of the more popular spots in Maine to paint is the small island of Monhegan.

Monhegan is a spit of rock about two miles long and half-mile wide, but it has breath-taking views at almost every turn. The only way to get there is by ferry. Once you're on the island, be prepared to walk, as no vehicles are allowed - other than the beat up trucks used by the year-round Lobstermen population.

Acadia National Park

Summer in Acadia (oil on panel 11" x 14") by Kevin Mizner

The next great spot is Acadia National Park.

Acadia may be one of America's smallest National Parks, but it is spectacular, none the less. Located on the ten-mile wide Mount Desert Island, it is the only spot on the east coast where the mountains meet the sea.

Kevin's favourite place to paint in Maine - Harpswell

What is my personal favorite Maine spot? Harpswell, Maine.

Located about thirty miles north-east of Portland, Harpswell is an accumulation of small villages and islands on Maine's mid-coast. Of all the spots along the coast, it is the most unspoiled.

Photograph of Mackerel Cove

Orr's and Bailey Island's offer gorgeous views of the coast that rival Monhegan's.  Mackeral Cove on Bailey Island is in my opinion, one of the most picturesque spots on the coast!

A part of Harpswell, and my home for four years, is Cundy's Harbor. "Cundy's", as we locals call her, is one of Maine's authentic working water fronts-- no condos in sight. It's harbor is chocked full of lobster boats and trawlers, the shore has quaint wooden-piling wharfs jutting out to service the boats.

Cundy's Harbor In Light Fog (oil on panel 11x14) by Kevin Mizner

Huddled on either side of the one road into (and out of) town are old New England Cape Cod style homes that have weathered the harsh seasons for one hundred or more years. I have travelled the state from stem to stern, and Cundy's Harbor is the quintessential Maine coastal fishing village.

Other places of note:

• Vinalhaven Island in Penobscot Bay. 
• Portland Head Light and Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth.  One can stand on Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth and see Prout's Neck-- the home of Winslow Homer. He even painted at Crescent Beach. 

In the footsteps of the Artists

I've mentioned Monhegan, but Baxter State Park in northern Maine has Mount Katahdin, a favorite spot of the great Frederick Church.

Any fan of Andrew Wyeth knows he summered and painted in Maine. Travel along Route 1 to Thomaston, and head out to Cushing, Bristol and Friendship and you'll be trodding the same ground "Andy" walked as he made his masterpieces.

John Singer Sargent painted in Acadia (eg Sand Beach, Schooner Head)

Edward Hopper painted one of the lighthouses at Two Lights Park in Cape Elizabeth (now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

And Kevin Mizner painted in all those places...

The best time to visit

Finally, when is the best time to visit?

If you want to watch and paint the lobstermen and eat some good lobster, come in summer. If you want to see the spectacular foliage of the maples and birches, come in the fall. If snow scenes and some skiing are your cup of tea, come in winter.

Winter Light Cundy's Harbor by Kevin Mizner

Spring for us is called "mud season" and for a good reason! All that melting snow, and bare grey branches are not worthy of painting in the slightest. Unless you're Willard Metcalf. Oh, he painted in the western mountains of Maine near Bethel.

So there you have it. My ideas on what's good to paint and see in Maine! I hope this works for you, and if you would like anything more in way of information, paintings or photos, please don't hesitate to let me know.

This is the latest in a series of posts about Places to Paint.  If you're interested in contributing a guest post click this link to find out what you need to do.

Links:

• Kevin Mizner 
• website Kevin Mizner Fine Art: Landscapes and Seascapes
• blog - Maine-ly Painting
• Travels with a Sketchbook in....... Maine: blog posts relating to these sketches
• Thursday 21st September:  In the footsteps of Winslow Homer - nearly!
• Friday 22nd September: Pemaquid Lighthouse - from top to bottom
• Saturday 23rd September: The Farnsworth, the Wyeths and the rain
• Sunday 24th September: The interior of the Quaker Tavern B&B