Visit her at www.alicockrean.co.uk. See more or book demonstrations at Art Profile.
| Ali had a 20" x 24" Daler Rowney canvas board on her
easel. On the table were a selection of painting knives, some rubber colour
shapers, a couple of biggish brushes (which she was never to use!), a 10"
diameter roll of cheap paper towel and a very neat pile of what looked like 3"
or 4" bits of J-cloth. She had also dug out knife-fulls of half a dozen Atelier Interactive Acrylics and put them round the edge of her palette: a large white dinner plate. This slower-drying acrylic showed its value during the demo: the room was warm but the paint was still usable two hours later. She said that student quality System 3 or Galleria give results just as good, especially for amateurs: they are cheaper than the Atelier, but she didn't recommend really cheap ones. |
 She buys many of her materials from www.artdiscount.co.uk - 500ml tubs about £8. |
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As an infant, she loved drawing - even from the age of
13 getting commissions to copy things. Colour was secondary: just pen and wash
initially. Ali did well in A-level art at school but decided that formal art college wouldn't teach her anything (!), so she started a career in Marketing and Business, continuing to draw and paint on the side. She says it is important to keep working outside your comfort zone and to realise that you will have many failures. "Art can affect your mood but it also exposes your emotions, sometimes with surprising results" |
| She enrolled for a couple of short courses, one of
them at the Slade to study portraiture. Very traditional. Very regimented.
Rules had to be followed. She came away loving the feel and colour of paints
but wanting more freedom of expression. When she first started more abstract work, a lot of it was a complete mess. After a few months things started getting better and she decided she wanted to give more time to painting. Her business experience gave her the confidence to put on a one-day exhibition ("You're my friend. You must come. Bring some of your friends, too"). She sold £1500 of work that day but the feedback she got was even more valuable. "Whom you know is more important that what you know" led her to exhibit in New York as well as London. |
 She's swung from realistic drawing to very abstract and is now almost half way back towards realism. |
 * "Don't buy process black: use a 50:50 mix of french ultra and burnt umber" |
Ali first mixes all the colours she thinks she
will need. "Use only the tip of a knife, don't ruin your brushes". Adding
minute amounts of a dominant colour to a lighter one she produced patches of:
 a pale blue
(Prussian blue and a touch of burnt umber mixed into white) a cream (either yellow
and umber or ochre mixed into white) a mid brown (burnt umber into white) a modified yellow (umber
into yellow) a
dark purple (red-black into white)* a mediterranean sea (phalo turquoise into
white).Then we solved the mystery of the bits of J-cloth (actually a tougher cheaper cloth, "Swifty" from Costco, but old T-shirt or any lint-free cloth will do just as well). Roll one of these bits round the index finger, fold over at the top and hold it with the thumb. |
| Moisten the end of the cloth (on the finger, dip it in
water and squeeze out). Then use it to pick up a small amount of paint from the
palette and apply it with a light round-and-round motion. Don't take the finger
off the canvas. Starting with the sky colour, Ali covered the whole sky, extending slightly into what was to become the tops of the mountains. Then, using the same bit of cloth, she picked up some of the mid-brown and worked this, wet-into-wet, to start the clouds. "Begin in the middle and work out". Then she added some of the cream. "Your brain is your enemy here but you can beat it by working so fast that it can't keep up!" |
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She started the mountains with burnt umber, getting
more precision and modifying the tone by rehydrating the bit of cloth. Then
these were merged into the middle distance by introducing the ochre from the
sky. The darker blue water needed some of the reflected blue sky colour (was there enough?) before she started into the dark purple foreground. After the coffee break came a half-hour of continual looking and adjusting, accompanied by a stream of comments: |
| Varying tone is vital. Soften distant edges and add lights and
darks to define closer edges and establish distance The less you put in a
painting the harder you have to think Ideas come as you work: act on them Don't be scared about
taking risks - errors can be corrected (you already have the right colours on
the palette) A
touch of paint spread with the flat of a palette knife gives interesting
textures A
pointed (not wedge-shaped) colour shaper makes precision marks but with an
interesting broken-ness |
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Some bits of a picture need much more work than others Small pictures still
need decent frames (say 3" on a 9" picture). People "know" which way
up to hang a really abstract painting - but different people will make
different decisions! Messing about with paint is an excellent way of motivating
children, even otherwise disruptive ones. You needn't waste
acrylic because you can return clean paint to the tub. Mixed paint keeps for
months in a small airtight Tupperware (or cheaper) container. |
Keep drawing - as
frequently as possible Except, of course, when she is doing portraits or life drawing,
Ali rarely uses a visual reference. But she still finds it inspirational to
paint outdoors (getting puzzled looks from bystanders who cannot see how her
painting relates to the surrounding scenery). Lack of time, not completion of the work, let alone the wishes of the audience, ended this intriguing evening. |
The painting still needed a few more
hours of "looking and adjusting" but Ali said she would try to remember to let
me have a photo of the finished work : "It may be several weeks". |
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