Asking advice from an old friend of my parents

The image below is an inaccurate reproduction of a painting from 1952 by William Townsend (1909-1973), a friend of William Coldstream ( Head of the Slade ), and a staff  lecturer at the Slade School of Art. The original is more Cobalt Blue than Electric Blue, more Yellow Ochre than Lemon Yellow,  but I digress.
The point is that I went to see him in !971, only two years before his death. At the time I was two years into an architecture course.  I was unhappy as an architecture student and dreamed of a career in art. William looked at a couple of paintings of mine, and advised me to stick with the architecture.
Good advice, as events turned out, since I have never made much money from my paintings.

William Townsend Hop Gardens in Kent

MIchael Andrews 1980

A beautiful painting by a superb artist who does not get the attention he deserves.
This is another  illustration, like the Ravilious and the George, from David Dimbleby's ' A Picture of Britain'.
I have a clear memory of his paintings at an exhibition in London in the late 1980s. This included some of his distinctive paintings of balloons floating above a desert landscape, with their ghostly shadows cast onto the sand below.
Clean, crisp, paintings, with a still, other-world power to fascinate.
He typically spray-painted acrylic, and worked with photographs, but the results far surpass photography.
Sadly, he died in 1995.

Patrick George in Suffolk In the 1960s

Ravilious : The Vale of the White Horse

Eric Ravilious 1903-1942 : an under-rated English landscape artist.

The finished Haywain , as seen on TV.

My contribution is somewhere to the top right in the darker blue area.
I impressed the  organisers enough to be allowed back at the day's end
so that my panel was not obliterated by someone coming after me.

Painting A Bigger Haywain.

Back in 2004, years before Hockney started banging on about A Bigger Picture,  Rolf Harris put out a Television show in which 150 painters contributed a canvas panel each to produce a huge version of the Constable painting. I turned up early at Trafalgar Square to find an area of interlocked square umbrellas, shading an expanse of brand new red carpet, on which were laid out new and expensive radial easels, each with a layout table. Each table had its own new tubes of paint and new brushes. There was not a speck of paint to be seen anywhere. These were the workstations for the celebrity artists, including Rolf Harris. Literally red carpet treatment.
Around the perimeter of the square were various covered stalls. At one of these the general public could paint a panel, using a black and white photograph of the relevant part of The Haywain as a guide. This is what I did: it was what I had come for. There was a catch, however. The public were only permitted to paint the sky. The tricky bits, i.e. everything else, were left to the celebrity painters. Rolf painted the central figure and the front wheel of the haywain, naturally.
I forget who the other celebrity painters were, apart from Bill Oddie.

Hockney at the Royal Academy, London

A shocker of a much-hyped show. Huge paintings made up of separate canvases. Vivid, clean colours  in oil, many straight from the tube, with a sparing amount of white. Expensive , full pigments, with a heavy gloss varnish. Some very harsh, garish colours: Emerald green, or Viridian green, screaming Chrome Yellow, and violet. Some wonderful small charcoal drawings of logs in a clearing, or trees. Why not more, bigger charcoal drawings?
 Hockney is thrilled by new technology, but I walked through the iPad gallery, and the multiple film gallery, with hardly a pause, or a backward glance. I also ignored the Claude gallery, with due deference to the original source painting.
 Above all, marvel at the brilliant, fluent drawing of  inter-lacing branches, the lines stroked with amazing fluidity and bravura.
 But by contrast an individual painting, seen as a whole, sometimes displays a jarring ugliness, which can be put down to too many strident colours, and too few softer tones, or a lack of aerial perspective.
 Of course, he is a draughtsman of genius, as good as anyone, ever. I long to see him produce large-scale work in black and white.
 Hockney makes much of looking and seeing, but how much is really plein-air painting from life, and how much is studio artifice? Plenty of repetitive pattern-making . Many of the paintings are really huge stage back-drops, or , as Brian Sewell put it on a daytme TV show, scenery for a production of  Bambi.

painting fau(x)ve Hockney red trees.

Going large, having fun, painting red trees, but not from life. I will get into Epping Forest, come the summer, I promise.
Next Monday is the last chance to get to The Academy to see DH. Will I make it ?