The Rules are Made to be Broken. Eventually.

I have just returned from the 5 Star Summer School at Bullclough Art School: five days of painting on the moors, being taught by extraordinarily good artists - Tom Voyce, winner of Landscape Artist of the Year, anyone? - and discovering that ‘loose and expressive’ does not mean ‘do whatever you like and give it an interesting title

afterwards’.

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The course was a journey through landscape: sketchbooks, quick studies, still life, abstraction, representation and long days in the studio.  It was completely absorbing.  It was also a reminder of the particular inconvenience of being taught by people who really know how to look.  They see the shape that is almost right.  They see the moment that you should have stopped.  They see that the section you have been quietly congratulating yourself on is taking the entire painting in the wrong direction. Occasionally, they suggest painting over it.

What made the week so good was that the tutors did not teach us to paint like them - or like one another - although I took huge inspiration from my little group.  They brought different ideas, approaches and processes, but kept returning us to the foundations: composition, values, colour, perspective and where, exactly, we thought we were sending the viewer’s eye.

Apparently, ‘I just liked that bit’ is not a complete compositional strategy.  Although John Button will sometimes agree that it works anyway.

I have always been attracted to painters who leave things unresolved, distort colour, lose edges and allow the original grid or underpainting to remain visible.  The finished work can appear instinctive and gloriously free.  But is it as easy as Nellie Shepherd makes it look?  God, no.  The awkward truth is that this freedom usually rests upon an enormous amount of knowledge.

There is something very special about going back to being a learner, particularly when you spend your working life teaching.  It reminds you how vulnerable learning can feel.  You bring your habits, abilities and half-formed ideas to someone who can immediately see where you stopped looking and started relying on what you already knew.

The rules of painting are numerous - and occasionally overwhelming - but understanding them gives you the control to make deliberate choices.

Some of those rules are made to be broken.

Eventually.