People gather to hear about David McEwen's Paintings, at the Galerie d'Art, Cave & Bar a Vins. Lodeve

O.K. I know, I’ve not been around of late, let me explain….

I‘ve been busy. I know that’s not a very good reason, especially for Kate. Kate built and looks after our site, she is otherwise known The Dark Lady of the Lash, in a former life she was expelled from The Spanish Inquisition for excessive cruelty, she nags! She nags constantly and has no understanding of what I,  a sensitive creative artist,  have to go through without being badgered constantly. (Kate says: I DO understand…I just don’t CARE… get on with it David!)

So to get back to what I’m supposed to be doing here. Last time I was here I was working on a watercolour of some Gendarmes marching with muskets on their shoulders. Well, while I worked on the painting I kept careful notes of the colours and methods that I used and…. well… I lost them.  It’s not my fault… all of a sudden we had painters arriving out of nowhere and I had to clean up my studio and the notes are somewhere safe… somewhere.

The picture is in an exhibition now so it wouldn’t be a good idea to write it up blind so if you’ll bear with me just for a while longer as soon as I see it again I’ll probably remember how I did the blessed thing,  hopefully,  probably.  I can’t be blamed.

So let me tell you about exhibitions instead. It’s not a good time to try and sell paintings, unless of course the painter has been dead for years and is called Picasso,  so why go through all the stress of cold calling on galleries, being rejected… sometimes not too kindly, then the terror of being accepted.  It’s a very strange type of addiction, we have to do it, we have to go through not only all the above but also the painting, re-painting and re-bloody-painting of enough pictures to be able to choose and reject sufficient for the wall, produce an invitaton list and force (by threats of physical violence) those on the list to promise to come, talk to newspapers and hope that nothing more important happens, hang the blessed things, bite nails until at least ten people arrive, make a speach and promise wife not to kill people who just eat and drink but don’t even bother to look at your children on the walls. We do it because it’s the only thing on earth that we can do….Oh, we can do other jobs, but this is the one that makes our pulse race our breathing shallow and our pockets empty.

How do I know this with such surity? Because I’ve just put up 62 paintings in a huge local gallery, that’s how. And I have to offer apologies to every one to whom I have been like a bear with a sore….well a sore something, especially Sally who has had to put up with me 24/7.

So opening night has passed and gone and I’ve sold… nothing. It’s good publicity however. It’s strange, we’ve lived here for 14 years and people used to ask Sal, “What does your husband do?”  Not any more,  so that’s nice,  eh.

So next time, I promise, I’ll tell you how I did the watercolour…….or,  you could come and see us and I’ll show you how I did it…much more fun.  Pip, pip,  see you soon.

David McEwen, painter, to have his work displayed in Lodeve, France

David McEwen in his studio with students. Photos by Rich Rawling

Warm chevre salad ala Sally McEwen and Rich Rawling paints at La Couvertoirade in France.

Sometimes David feels like adding to his blog. Sometimes he doesn’t. Luckily Rich Rawling, a recent workshop participant, sent these lovely photographs proving that David DOES, indeed, exist and is helping people to paint. Looking at Sally’s warm chevre salad and David’s studio makes me long for the South of France… –Kate, webmistress.

This painting of Venice has been lurking for four years.

Our town, Lodeve, is known as the town of the Artists. That’s not all that special as about ten other towns in this part of The Midi are known as the same but there are quite a few painters here; good, bad and abstract (so they don’t really count… I may get letters after that comment). Anyway, we met a painter shortly after we arrived in the area, his name is Shelley and he has been a painter for a long, long time. He paints the most beautiful landscapes in pastel on brown wrapping paper and uses acrylic to produce some rather unpleasant nudes. Shelley is the only person, apart from my brother, who I’ve ever allowed to paint on my pictures; they are both exceptionally good teachers.

Shelley is 83, or there abouts, even though he acts like an 18 year old, especially when there’s a pretty girl nearby, and he totters up to my studio every-now-and-again. He might stay for five minutes or thirty, he looks at whatever I’m working  on and sometimes makes a comment, a suggestion or just nods, grunts and wanders off like a white haired, bearded Yoda. There are a thousand stories to tell about Shelley and I’ll tell them one day.

The other part of this story is that there are two galleries in town. One is enormous and exhibits the work of ancient and modern Masters, this summer we have Gaugin, and it attracts about 70,000 people to each exhibition. The other is a converted Methodist Church and its reputation is growing fast. The lighting is well positioned and its great attraction is that the owners are also wine merchants, so the opening nights are always rather good!

Shelley was offered an exhibition at the smaller of the two galleries, he did want the other one, but you really need to be dead before they hang your work. So he started to move paintings about his studio which wasn’t a good idea as some of them are very heavy and he is rather small and very independent. Of course the real problem isn’t the weight of the paintings, it’s the weight of years.

He has cancelled the exhibition and some days he doesn’t remember. The gallery has offered his space to me and I feel… guilty, elated but guilty. So I’m frantically getting all kinds of work ready.

I’ve mentioned, I think, that I work on quite a few paintings at the same time. They hang all around me on the walls of my studio waiting for their turn under the brush. There are many reasons for this, sometimes they’re waiting to dry, waiting their turn because I’ve been given a commission which takes precedent or…. because I don’t know how to force the paint to do what I want it to do. So some big canvases have been in the studio, in a state of suspended animation for a long, long, long time.  Perhaps they needed a little something to force me to GET ON WITH IT so….

The painting of Venice has been lurking for four years and every now and again I’d put it up onto my easel and I’d whack on a glaze or two but I was afraid of it, perhaps I was really afraid of finishing the damned thing and discovering that the paint didn’t do what I’d wanted it to. One problem is that its huge and the detail that looks OK here is magnified hundreds of times, so mistakes tend to scream out from the canvas. It was time to “Fish or cut bait.” So a week’s work, a few brushes and one hell of a lot of concentration and the ripples were done. It was boring at times… well it was hugely boring, but it had to be done and I painted what was there not what I thought was there!

"Dancers in Mannon" by David McEwen

I’ve made two paintings of world reknowned dancers in Mannon. The first one was based on reds and was sensual, soft and blended colour, this one is blue and green and in some way rough. I’m a realist, but not a photo-realist so this painting shows brush marks and globs of colour. I held the brushes at the tip at arms length which forced me to avoid all sorts of detail.

"Michael Whitaker on his horse Portofino" by David McEwen

Now, sometimes a painting, a big painting, can take weeks but occasionally one flies on wings of white spirit. When Sally found a photo of our friend Michael Whitaker on his horse Portofino and showed it to me I felt the tingle that comes only once or twice a year. Whereas Venice and Mannon have taken years between them, the power in Michael and his horse seemed to give power to my brushes and in just over a week from start to finish he was done.

Now I have to do a bit of work to the last oil of the Cavalry and then I can get on with the watercolours that I was going to write  about this time.

Keep painting and have fun.

Watercolour in progress

I‘m having a ” never again” moment at the moment. I’m sure that you’ve had them too,  for one reason or another you wake up and think, I’ll never EVER do that again as long as I live and you make all kinds of promises to all kinds of people and Gods,  that if only…

One of the Falkland Island series ...

Well, a few years ago I was invited to The Falkland Islands where I was given a commission by a Marine Company to produce fifteen board room paintings. I was really pleased and I did many drawings, took hundreds of photos and sailed almost four thousand miles around the Islands before coming back to my studio in the warmth of  France to decide which images to put onto canvass. Several months later as I got towards the end of the commission I thought that if I ever had to paint another wave or ripple, or even see one that it would be too soon. I thought that I would ” never again “  do a series of so many of the same sort of paintings.

How the years make us forget !

Last year in a moment of absolute insanity I decided to repeat the process and produce a series of paintings of the  Garde Republicaine who are the cavalry regiment who escort the President and various visiting dignitaries. Insanity because they are the last word in smartness and every painting would have to be perfect, colours would have to be ‘uniform and every aspect of their horses and tack correct enough to be recognised by both their riders and the Colonel.

I wanted to find a way to lessen the problem that  so many of these paintings  would seem the same. So variety ! Well, one way was to vary the media so I looked at all the preparitory work and decided which image would work best in oil, watercolour, pastel and pencil.

What I hope to do with this episode of the blog is to let you look at how I’m going to work on a watercolour of some members of the Regiment. These guys are dressed as Napoleonic Guards and are carrying muskets  and I want to make the picture a little different,  not just soldiers marching…boring, so I thought that I would only use the middle portion of the figure and musket and an odd number of people. It’s strange but odd numbers  and triangles really work in paintings.

So the drawing was done using my wonderful projector linked to a digital disc, they had to be exact… the colonal was waiting. Once the first drawing was done, I took it down off the easel and with the help of an illuminated magnifying glass I went over the whole drawing correcting, refining and getting to know EVERYTHING about the subject. I think that this is the most important part of the picture, if you know the subject, if you start with a correct drawing then you have more than a head start towards a painting which will work.

I use Daler-Rowney Artist Quality watercolour paints, there’s a simple reason, I think that they are the Best in the World. Most of the pigments are transparent colours and I use glazes so each coat shows through and I build up colours little by little. So working from left to right, top to bottom I get the first layer on. Here it is, next time we’ll get to detail.

So screwing up all available courage we would go off to County Shows, Show Jumping Competitions, Point to Point Meetings and anything else we could think of with a five person tent as a mobile gallery and smile, smile, talk and every-now-and-again sell paintings or gain a commission.

When we moved to France we had to work an 18-hour day building up the painting holiday business, B&B, teaching, cooking, cleaning, and all the other 1001 things that cropped up on a weekly, sometimes daily basis so paintings took a back seat. Until recently!

The business had taken on a momentum of its own so we took a little time to market my paintings.

As you have seen I’m a realist, not a photorealist, I don’t really like that. I think if you want something that detailed, take a photo. Oh, I appreciate the skill… I just can’t see the point. So I paint real things but will leave brush strokes, leave blobs of paint and even leave bits of the painting unfinished. That means that I do not belong to the Avant Garde of contemporary art so very few galleries will look for long at my work.

We came across an absolutely stunning example of that sort of thing late last year when we called into a small gallery in Montpellier. The lady owner took some persuading even to look at my website and after a few minutes she looked at me, with her head on one side and one of those smiles you only give to a slow child and said a slow, slow noooooo, we don’t bother with portraits. The exhibition around her was about 50 badly painted portraits from India! Er, um.

So, how to market? We thought of  how shows had worked in the past, so why not try it again? Go back to basics.

Each year there is a horse show in Avignon so we booked a stand, took a car-load of paintings and publicity fliers and headed east.
Sal has been into P.R. most of her career so when she suggests something I’ll have a go…but…when she said you should paint on the stand it’ll attract loads of people, I thought …I don”t like painting in public…but I said…yes dear!

The main performers at the show were to be The Garde Républicaine. They are the formal cavalry regiment of France and are present at every special occasion. They provide colourful protection for celebrities (real ones not Paris Hilton).  So after finding a photo to use as inspiration,  I started a large watercolour of two mounted Gendarmes which did attract much attention. So much in fact, that the Colonel bought the painting and then invited us to his headquarters in Paris.

We went, we saw, we took about four hundred photographs, came home, looked at them all, made a choice of several and started to work.

Now back to the present. I decided that I’d work on five large and three medium sized oils, five large and two small watercolours, three or four pastels and a dozen or so drawings.

Last week we went back to Avignon to show works in progress to the Colonel and I was nervous…what if he said…what if he said NON!

Well, he really liked the watercolours and one of the pastels (well, it was of him).  But his boss, a General no less, said that he preferred the oils and invited us to show the finished collection in Paris in September! REEEESULT!

In the next episode of this meandering missive I’ll write about the how I did ‘em. Have fun.

I’m working on a series of watercolours, pastels and oils of  The Garde Républicaine for an exhibition in Paris at Easter. We’re going to see the Colonel of the Regiment in Avignon on Friday with some works in progress, which I hate doing, I don’t like anyone but Sally seeing things half done, but he’s the boss.

I hope to have about eighteen ready in the end. The series is teaching me a lot but it’s boring to go from painting of Gendarme to yet another painting of yet another bloody gendarme. I do hope you understand that the life of a painter is not all drink and wild bohemian parties, it’s HARD work.

DEATH.

After the jet lag and residual “amazing” food lag gradually died away I began to think of the huge amount of work we had to do… choosing the work to send back to the gallery in the U.S.

Watercolour by David McEwen

When I go out with other painters to the various villages and places of outstanding natural beauty we have here. I not only teach but I paint as well. So after twelve years, I do have alot of small to medium sized watercolours in various portfolios to choose from. Some I like, some, as one Victorian writer put it, ” Look upon them, I dare not.”  Because they’re not very good. (Not every painting one does is worthy of wall space.)   So I looked through a huge amount of sketches, and fully worked paintings and made piles of work labled:
- Probable
- Possible
and
- I don’t believe I could paint that badly

I asked Sally to check them over and make her choice. That done I went on to the next, and most delicate stage…making a photographic record.

The Photos.

As you, dear readers, get to know us better, you will realise that Sally and I are under the cruel thumb of Kate, a former U.S. Marine sergeant (who built this site). Kate was a professional photographer who nags me endlessly about my shortcomings with a camera and tells me about f-stops, settings and things. I nod, smile and point the thing, press a button and hope for some gaurdian angel to protect me from her wrath. I’m a Luddite and am quite happy with the mid-nineteenth century and use cameras as a tool to record a scene or my work, for me its not an art form. For Kate ( Mistress of the lash ) it is an object of celestial beauty. (I will bang on at length about the uses of a camera for the painter, it’s enough to say for now that I think anyone who says things like, ” a real painter never uses a camera,” is balmy!)

So. I set up the camera shoot. It was a slightly overcast day but with enough light to work with as I placed my sturdiest easel at right angles to the floor, my sturdiest tripod with camera at right angles to the image. (Kate’s smiling and nodding so far.) I used to photograph them on the wall from any angle…that way I got foreshortened, distorted images, but I thought then, hey, it’s good enough. Put what I prayed was the right setting ( Raw something or other ) and started to photograph about eighty watercolours and medium sized oils.

They’re O.K. for me…for Kate, well that’s another day’s story.

Packaging and delivery is in the next episode.

Right Click on image and choose save target as, to download the brochure. (88 MB)

As you may tell by my work, I’m a modern realist with a classical background so it is difficult, these days, to find an agent or gallery who likes my work enough to take a chance, and give me either an exhibition or represent me to the world. Of course I could be happy to have paintings on the walls of the local bank or restaurant, BUT, I’ve already done that and sold a few… a few… not many though… so think Shakespeare, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…”  (O.K. so it’s said by Brutus in Julius Caesar – he lost — but still it’s the thought that counts.)

So, Sal and Kate got together and produced a three-fold brochure with eight or so paintings and contact details, and on and we flew to Florida. Why?

Well, when I show my work to galleries in France (where I live) and the U.K. (where I am from), owners smile gently and hand the photos back with that look that shows both pity and incredulity that this fool is showing such old fashioned and impossible to sell stuff.

So we came to Florida, a world horse capital, to show paintings of  polo, show jumping and portraits. With the help of an old friend, Frank, who lives near Palm Beach, we hit the galleries… and talked… and talked…  and talked. We showed photos, left brochures and cards, called back,  and talked more. We saw owners, wives, husbands, partners, and other bits of fluff. We smiled until ours ears screamed from the added pressure and movement; we listened, nodded and smiled again. We listened to advice, we even took some of it. We pounded pavements and pretended not to mind when people were less than polite about my children.

Then… the nicest couple in Delray Beach, who had run a gallery for 18 years, said that… (modesty forbids the next few comments) they would take as many as they could have, landscapes, townscapes and portraits. Callooh Callay, oh frabjous day!   They want them before Christmas.

All we have to do is pack em, send em and wait to see if it leads to fortune.

David drew this doodle in less than 15 minutes during a meeting. Practice wherever you can.

Here are some hints and suggestions which I have picked up over the last 30 years or so and I hope that you will try some, if not all of them.
Remember, there are no right or wrong ways in art – if something works for you – do it. There is only one rule – there are no rules!
If you want to use black – use it – Turner did!  If you want to use photographs – use them. (Most painters use them but pretend they don’t!)

There are only two things which come close to be rules:

1. Drawing - This is the most important thing that any painter can do. It teaches you to SEE instead of just looking and then teaches the hand to put on paper what the eye sees.
Draw every day.

2. Practice - Don’t expect to get it right first time. When someone learns to play the piano they don’t start with Mozart’s 21st Concerto - they start with scales and practice them. Painters must do the same – Practice, Practice, Practice. — David McEwen