another llandudno watercolour

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 26, 2009 under Art, landscape, painting, seascape, watercolor, watercolour | 12 Comments to Read

Here is tonight’s studio version of yesterday’s scene:

Llandudno

Posted by Stephen Quirke on under Art, landscape, painting, seascape, watercolor, watercolour | 6 Comments to Read

This is a beautiful beach tucked away on the Atlantic coast South of Cape Town.  We all went down there on Christmas morning to relax a little before a family lunch.  I had time for one small painting:

There was no time for the people on the beach – next time maybe

pipe 20091223

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 23, 2009 under Art, Strand Pipe beach, en plein air, landscape, painting, seascape, watercolor, watercolour | 7 Comments to Read

Today I had my final coaching session for 2009.  This was good.  Intense!  And exhausting.  When I returned home Calvin wanted to go for a surf.  It was overcast and windy and I was too tired to think of surfing.  Dr Richard Restak suggests the only worthwhile course in this state is to sleep.  But I took my art-box down to do a painting.  I was not thinking clearly and spent a whole long time setting up the three legs and this really fiddly sliding arrangement for holding a board which was too high when I sat.  When I stood my water was too low.  And there was nowhere to put my palette which almost fell face down in the sand.  Eventually after a frustrating half hour of balancing and juggling, putting things down and picking them up again I decided I needed to paint something.  So I took out my squirrel mop and did this watercolour of the mountains at Gordons Bay.

mmmm.

In the interests of starting the process and showing what I have done here is the painting:

I don’t know how the blot in the sky got there but there it is.  The blot to the left of the poles appeared while I was fiddling with all the stuff.  I have just taken the easel apparatus off the box.  Part of the problem is also that my palette only just fits in the handy drawer and when that is in there – nothing else fits in.  So there is some planning to be done here.  I have seen Alvaro Castagnet’s work on his website – he just uses squirrel mops of various sizes.  Amazing work!  I am also pre-occupied with my visit to the gallery this morning to take my work in.  Ai!  The margins in this game are so slim to be split in two.  Anyway – this is all good reason to get my own marketing up and about.   Now I am off to snooze.

Off to the gallery

Posted by Stephen Quirke on under Art, figure, painting, watercolor, watercolour | 6 Comments to Read

A gallery owner has asked me to supply paintings for his gallery in Strand and in Hermanus where he says he sells well.  Yesterday I took some of the paintings from the exhibition and today I am taking these down to him.  He says his customers are looking for figures so I have put in the work I have done from a while ago.  I still have a way to go before I can get my D90 and XR520 so it is time to put it all out there.

I was thinking that there was more to do on this painting but I think it is finished.

I have strengthened the foreground based on feedback from the last submission for the last juried exhibition.

I had this, framed in a gallery for a while but have taken it out of the frame and cropped the painting.

This is from my sunbather exercise at the beginning of this year.  I still like this set.

This is a small sketch on some dimpled paper that I found – I am not even sure what it is.

I loved the light on this girls body.  I have glazed a lot on this painting.  Any more will hit overworked land.

And this was the other submission for the juried show.

I got a RA!!

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 13, 2009 under Art, RA award | 10 Comments to Read

Carol has sent her trusted friend Kaiya over with a special surprise:

Thanks Carol – I will treasure this and consider the next recipient carefully..

BTW – check out the short note I dashed off on this subject at:

http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Ra-Sun-Worship-Ancient-Egypt/dp/0500051070

Now – how about that????

helderberg watercolours – 20091208

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 8, 2009 under Art, Helderberg, landscape, painting, watercolor, watercolour | 10 Comments to Read

At last I feel I am making progress in capturing the mountain and the pond in watercolour.  It helped leaving out the water-lilies – too much detail and fuss.  This is the latest:

This is 19×28 inches on Arches 185gm cold pressed.  And this is the one I did earlier this morning:

this is 28×38 on Arches 300gm cold pressed

Helderberg

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 6, 2009 under Art, Helderberg, en plein air, landscape, watercolor, watercolour | 6 Comments to Read

I have received a number of requests for a painting of Helderberg mountain from people visiting the exhibition.  So I thought I would sit and bang off a few sitting there – lots of confidence there.  And I have found the scene to be a whole new party.  There are so many shades of green, grey and red in the mountain.  And there is the matter of the body of water complete with water-lilies.  Dear me – it is quite a project.   There were a small number of people who did a LOT to help me prepare for the exhibition and I wanted to give them each a painting of the mountain.  I think I am getting close but there is still a way to go.  Here is what I have done so far – more or less in chronological order.  These are all 19×28 inches except for one.

In the following painting I tried to organise all the colours on the page.

Below is the last one I did sitting at the pond.  This is 15×22 inches:

I did the following three in my studio over the last couple of days.  I have been feeling rather tired lately so I battled a little with concentration.  But I feel as though I have made some progress that I can take back to the field.  My new art box is part of a display in the exhibition, with a board on it on which I have taped the unmounted paintings from the wedding commission.  I am looking forward to getting it functional again.

I have been reading about how other people capture water.  This is definitely my new area of endeavour.

the exhibition

Posted by Stephen Quirke on December 3, 2009 under Art, Exhibition, watercolour | 12 Comments to Read

My exhibition of watercolours opened on Friday evening.

I had thought I would set up on Friday morning but Maresa, from Rialto Art Centre, who did my framing, advised me to give myself at least a full day before the opening to set everything up.  So I went in on Wednesday afternoon put my stands together and began to re-arrange the room.

I fetched all the of paintings out of my house on Thursday morning :

Calvin and Neil came to help and all the big stuff was done by Thursday afternoon.  But there was still much to do.  We really needed the second day.  On Friday afternoon I was working in my shorts and crocs.  There had been a constant stream of hikers and other visitors looking for tickets and route maps who stopped by to look at the paintings.  At 17:00 I suddenly realised the people in the room were my guests and I shot out change into smarter dress in the parking lot.

And then it all happened.

Here is the information centre where we held the exhibition:

And here is how it looked inside:

This is my friend James, Dr JB Krohn,  doing  the talk about creativity.

And here are the guests standing in the garden:

It was a wonderful evening.  Magnificent!  One more milestone.

This is Rene who organised stuff for me, with the Friends of the Helderberg Reserve:

OK and here is the artist – hem hem

Here are the notes from James’s talk – he filled them out some more and one day – if I sell enough, I will get a video recorder and record the talk for this blog.

INTRODUCTORY TALK AT THE OPENING OF STEPHAN QUIRKE’S WATERCOLOOUR EXHIBITION

By Dr James B Krohn

Friday 27 Nov 2009, Helderberg Reserve

Preamble

I am delighted to have been given the honour of saying a few words at the opening of this watercolour exhibition by Stephan Quirke. And it is an even greater honour to honour in this way, albeit very briefly, a remarkable friend.

Richard Nichols said that:

“Art is the representation of that which the mind can imagine – but only the heart knows to be true.”

“That which the heart knows to be true”, is not only a wonderful description of the essence of good art, but also a description of the character-intentionality of the real artist. And I think this is especially true of Steve. Because, to make and enjoy art, is a barometer of our humanity. As GK Chesterton put it; “Art is the signature of man”, no animals practice art any more than they worship.

Let me tell you how I met Steve …

Our lives intersected at a very impressionable stage in my life, and I like to think of it’s providence as a little bit of shrewd and sagacious orchestration, a pulling of the strings, on the part of God. I was sentenced to military conscription in WalvisBay, and in my pursuit for freedom threw out a line of inquiry for a rock-climbing partner, the giant desert monolith of the Spitzkoppe was beckoning. And in an uncannily ordinary unfolding of events I was introduced to Steve and Aura, who were living in nearby Swakopmund. Never would I have realised then how significant that meeting would be, not only in terms of a few epics on the mountain, but also in terms of an awakening within me what has become two major strands in my own life (and in this sense I was just mimicking Steve); the first is the formation, the shaping of an integrated Christian worldview—the reading of Francis Schaeffer’s book “The God who is there” from Steve and Aura’s bookshelf (so influential in my life!), and secondly, the beauty and the lure and the inevitability of art. And of course, all that came so easily in the haunting desert of Namibia

In his spare time, Steve was doing painting lessons with a locally celebrated artist, Nicholas Galloway. Nicholas painted these beautiful desertscapes. And Steve started doing desertscapes too, and in some ways may have had a greater influence on Nicholas Galloway, than Nicholas thought he had on him. (I was devastated to hear the other day, in chatting to Steve, that he had sold most of those paintings, and I for one can kick myself for not getting one.) But, he has been there again, and in Brandberg #2, the centrepiece of this exhibition, you will see exactly what I mean.

And Steve would so often go on his “small adventures” (as he loves to call them); cycling across the Namib-Naukluft (desert) on his own, wandering alone in the Brandberg, or hoping to be forgotten in the Cederberg. I suspect that’s why he chose watercolour, because unlike canvas and easel, it can travel lightly, and with it the artist can travel with light, and luminosity, and make shade filled with reflected light, the way you would for yourself in the desert.

About ART

Allow me to say a few things about ART and in relation to Steve’s paintings.

Hillary Brand and Adrienne Chaplin in their book “Art and Soul” (Solway, 1999) wrote a chapter on “Art and how art works”. I want to pick out three aspects that I think are applicable to the Quirk work. [Much of what follows are direct and expanded quotations from this chapter.]

1. Elusive Allusivity

Perhaps the characteristic that best defines art is allusivity—a state defined as ‘hinting or referring to something indirectly, without being explicit, in a covert manner or in a passing way’. Art can never be, and never has been, simply a carbon copy of reality.

As Virginia Woolf put it: “Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough.”

So art always suggests, or hints at, something beyond itself. It depicts the subject matter not as is, but as experienced.

Bear in mind the allusive quality of the work you are enjoying tonight.

2. Evocative Memory and subsidiary ambiguity

Contrary to common belief, artists do not usually give form to preconceived meanings, but instead discover meaning in the forms and shapes and colours. In this sense the work of art becomes an allusion to the way we experience the world. Good art creates forms which not only concern an artist’s incidental private associations, but which tap into the deeper stock of common human sensations and feelings. This is what gives good art a universal quality, the power to transcend boundaries of time and place and nationality. The artist manipulates the particular medium, in this case watercolour, in such as way as to allude to sensations which we all have but are normally unable to grasp because they defy verbalisation. Herein lies the seductive power of art.

Alfred North Whitehead said that “Art attracts us by what it reveals of our most secret self.”

Ask yourself what evocative memory is stirred within you as you look at each painting.

3. Unconditional generosity and playfulness

Art is not a good vehicle for literal meaning. This is probably where many Christian artists go wrong, or even the concept of Christian art goes astray. Art does not do well in service of a direct statement of dogma, simply because the audience is invited to explore it with all its hints and nuances as they see it appropriate. In this way art is generous, an unconditional and uncontrolled gift. The artist entrusts it to others with the knowledge that they may use it in more ways than he/she ever anticipated or intended. Art is a generous gift. However, make no mistake, art always carries with it spiritual implications, because even though there may be ambiguity in intention and reception, it is still truth-telling at the most basic level. It reveals the heart of the artist, and attracts us only in what it reveals in ourselves.

Finally, there is a playfulness in everything that Steve does that reminds me of one of my favourite anonymous statements,

that “angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”

Concluding remark

Stephan has put on display for you tonight his delight and joy in what his eyes have seen and his mind has imagined, and his heart has come to know to be true …

It is his gift to us, and we are grateful to him for it.