Conversations around my Cathedral Series
First published Thursday 13th August 2024
I recently had to write a short piece about me and my new work, the Cathedral Series for The Art Show at The Great Yorkshire Show. Most artists will tell you that this task is actually harder than the painting the artworks themselves, and to make it even more difficult I was showing for the first time a new series in a new way of going. As usual, my friend, fellow artist and co-mentor, Julie Cross, came to the rescue. This is what she wrote as the opening paragraph:
“Ruth Buchanan’s new body of work exhibits a contemporary expressive style, utilising dynamic colours and bold compositions. An established equestrian artist, the horse is still Ruth’s central theme, and her work capitalises on knowledge of anatomy, biomechanics and life drawing.”
The Art Show curator, Lucy Morrison, encouraged me to make my main submission Cathedral Series paintings and hung all six as well as using one of the series on the programme cover and in pre-show marketing and editorial. This series felt/feels different, and my audience seems to agree. There has been a very positive to this new work and visitors to the gallery wanted to talk to me about the Cathedral Series – I was in conversation almost constantly for the four days of the show, so I thought a blog about those conversations would be helpful both for people new to my work and for others who are seeing a dramatic change. Comments from people who already knew my work centred around the 'dramatic change' in my work, but as is so often the case, this change has been around twelve years in the making. This is not an overnight thing: there have been many forays into areas that just were not right for me – I hope the lessons I learned in how and what I didn’t want to paint have informed this new series too.
So, what did the gallery visitors want to talk about?
Quite a few of the discussions were about the painting techniques that I had used. Maybe a good few of these people were other artists, but that is OK. I don’t own techniques that I use – I too am influenced by other artists, as they have in turn been influenced, and while some techniques were the result of my own experimentation, others have experimented and discovered them too. The trick there is to be inspired by other artists’ work but ultimately to bring yourself as an artist to the canvas rather than adopt or reproduce another’s ‘style’.
One of the big things in these paintings is the treatments on the substrates (paper and board). All the pieces so far are watercolour though some also use a little bit of casein paint or acrylic paint through a nib, and the treatment of the substrate make the paint sit differently over different areas. I used several different papers and boards, though all were ‘Rough’ surface. For those new to watercolour, the paper surfaces come in ‘Hot Pressed’ ie very smooth surface; ‘Rough’ literally a rough surface; and ‘NOT’, sometimes also called ‘Cold Pressed’, which is somewhere in between. (It might make you laugh to know that ‘NOT’ is short for ‘not hot pressed’!). Different brands have quite strong variations in those surfaces though. I used Canson watercolour board Rough (more like a smooth-ish NOT), Langton watercolour board Rough (rougher than NOT, but smoother than handmade roughs), and Saunders Waterford 300lb/640gsm paper Rough which is very thick and almost like a board. The most successful substrate for me was the Saunders Waterford (a paper that I use a lot), which is made in Wells, Somerset at St Cuthbert’s Mill. It is machine made, but has the rough texture of a hand made paper. This was more successful for me because one of the substrate treatments that I used was to dry brush acrylic gesso onto the paper. The gesso sits on the raised texture of the paper but leaves the dips as the original surface. As the gesso is made from acrylic polymer medium (glue) and calcium carbonate (chalk), it slightly repels the water-based paint which can then be lifted more easily, but does not take layering of different colours easily as the lower layers will lift colour into the upper layers.
These textures, and the bulk of the colour, the ‘ground’ for the painting, was put down on the paper before I had even decided on the piece’s subject, let alone the final composition. So the colour and texture was randomly placed or abstract based around my emotions behind the individual piece.
Those thoughts and emotions also influenced the predominant colour of the piece. I started with colours I don’t normally use much in my painting. They are not quite analogous palettes either. Some use spot colours of complementary colours (eg lavender in Cathedral Yellow - left on desktop or above on mobile) or where the predominant is a secondary colour, I have introduced primaries that you mix for that colour (eg blue and yellow in Cathedral Green - below). Using a predominant colour also helped with the issue of lifting from lower into upper layers of paint on the gessoed areas – not such a problem if it is the same or a variant of the same colour!
Why mares and foals as subject?
I have painted the occasional foal before, but the choice of subject of mares and foals was deliberate and hinged on several factors. In the ‘first covid year’ I had referenced at a friend’s stud. Wandering alone in the fields, sketching, taking images, watching the development of the youngsters and the interactions with their mothers. Let me say now, I am the least maternal person you will ever meet, and never wanted children myself – my babies are born in paint. Yet on the first day of The Great Yorkshire Show last year (2023), I found out that the mare we bought the previous October had ‘bagged up’. She was given an ultrasound the following day which confirmed that she was not just in-foal but would give birth imminently (her filly foal was born ten days later). Having suspected and talked myself out of it a few months earlier, I had spotted all the signs, but had not put them together. Maybe I was just in denial. As I said, I am not a mummy person. I didn’t want a foal, we couldn’t afford a foal, in fact I was horrified at the prospect. My friend at the stud spent twenty minutes laughing at me down the phone when I told her. Like lockdown, I had no choice in this matter - events were overtaking me. I spent the rest of the show in shock with my brain churning over the implications and logistics, gradually resigning myself to the fact that the mare we had bought to ride and enjoy would now be out of work for up to six months and it could be very expensive if things went wrong. I also had to move her at short notice and find somewhere that knew about foals and foaling as I had only really been involved with horses after backing. Fortunately for me, our mare had a straightforward foaling and turned out to be a really great mum. Interacting with her and the new filly taught me a lot about myself and the way I am around horses so my emotions settled then evolved. I deal with things by writing, drawing and/or painting so so again I spent time with them sketching and referencing images. I also decided to revive that lockdown reference and create some mare and foal drawings and paintings to exhibit the following year. I already had four prepared ‘grounds’. These were painted in April 2020, originally for a totally different series idea, but similarly based around swirling thoughts, emotions, changes and resolutions that had parallels with where I was then and now - three years and three months later.
Why the title 'Cathedral' for the series?
I love the word Cathedral purely for the way it moves in the mouth and while I thought of other titles for the series, I kept coming back to this one. Visually I could see echoes of vaulted ceilings in the framing of the foal by the mare. Traditionally, the building of a Cathedral was a coming together of artists and artisans to work on the décor and decorations. Cathedrals were often experimental in design and execution of building and usually associated with advancement of architecture and craft. For this reason, the Bauhaus School (Germany, 1919-1933) named their manifesto and programme publication ‘Cathedral’, which featured a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger, also titled ‘Cathedral’, as the cover.
The Bauhaus movement and influence spread worldwide both during the school’s existence and after the dissolution of the school furthering the school’s ethos of a coming together of architects, artists, graphic designers, typographers and industrial designers to promote the merging of artistic and technical design. A key Bauhaus member and teacher, Johannes Itten, also produced a detailed study of colour theory that is still referenced to this day. Lastly the building of a Cathedral was a long process, more than a lifespan, so construction and artisan families would work on the project over generations. If you want a better illustration of this, you could read ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follet.
The connotations of the word ‘Cathedral’ fitted my aims in my move from straightforward representational realism to rendering within a design that featured interwoven abstract mark and texture. As I said, I began to get disillusioned with the way my painting was going around twelve years ago. My first forays were in ‘loosening’ my work with more implied, rather than stated, detail. My influences were from watercolour landscape painters such as Joseph Zbukvic and my old mentor, Les Packham, as I was not moved by what I saw in the equine painting genre. I started to become more analytical towards my own work as well as the work I was seeing at association exhibitions and in galleries. At the time, social media was becoming swamped with very photo-realistic equine and other animal work, and I started to question the ultimate aim. I was seeing very technically accomplished paintings and coloured pencil drawings coming up on my newsfeed that could be attributed to one of several artists. So, if any one of them could have produced that, then where was the individual, the artist, the creative in the piece? There is nothing wrong with working in that way if it ‘floats your boat’, but I was finding it unsatisfactory for myself, both as a viewer and as a producer. Alongside the technically good pieces, I saw skilfully rendered works with no thought to composition, including unbalanced pieces with off centre subjects on a flat background. In fact, a flat colour or blank paper for background still seems to be the norm for portrait in the animal painting genre. Having been guilty of this myself, I started to play with off centre and one-sided compositions using the Golden sector/ratio/rule for positioning, and abstract marks continuing, echoing and balancing colour or shape movements within the subject. I say ‘abstract’ for want of a better description. They were not truly abstract as that mark making is a response to an emotion, thought or feeling rather than a subject, and the marks and shapes that I used at the time were colours and movements to form a background that was partly responsive to the subject. Some describe this as semi-abstract, but if you follow my previous statement, then the term ‘semi-abstract’ itself is an oxymoron. If anyone has a better word for what I am describing then please let me know!
When I started with exercises and processes to loosen my work (around 2013), the resultant pieces actually drew more comments about my work ‘looking like a photograph’ than when I had tried to make my work photorealistic. That got me thinking as to why. The conclusion that I came to was that the viewer’s own brain was filling in the detail, so therefore they were interacting with the painting. This engagement with the piece was more fulfilling for both them and me. With the Cathedral Series, viewers said that they found them intriguing. There were sometimes emotional tears from the viewer, a response that I have become accustomed to with commissions, but that is (while not unknown) rarer with pieces I have painted for myself. When talking to visitors at the Gallery I referred to this in two ways. Firstly, when painting I have a conversation with the artwork. Once framed and hung on the wall, I want the artwork to have its own conversation with the viewer and that relationship may be totally different from my conversation as the artist, with the viewer brings their own experiences, emotions and memories to the frame. The second way that I described this was that with my realism work I was giving the viewer all the answers, so they stopped at the glass of the frame. With the Cathedral series, I wanted to invite the viewer beyond the glass. That works during the process for me too. With a representational painting I have a clear idea of the outcome from the start and while I can never fully reproduce the image in my head, I have a fair idea of both the technical know-how and how long it will take to get to as close as I can to that. With this new (to me) ‘way of going’, I can get absorbed with experimenting, mark making and responding to both the subject and the ground. I have no preconceived idea of the outcome, no idea how much time I will spend in the conversation, how much the painting itself will take over and take its own course. This way of working also draws a different energy from me. I can spend a whole day – ten hours plus - on a representational piece and still have the brain power to organise my following day, do the sudoku and crossword in the newspaper, etc. etc. Basically, I can still function. After four hours painting on one of the Cathedral Series, I am completely drained and often have to have a lie down!
It may seem an odd thing to say ‘the painting itself will take over and take its own course’. It is not an unknown phenomenon. One of my favourite art quotes is from artist and musician, John Cage: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.” That absence of self is when the magic happens. I have had it before, but it seems to occur more frequently in this way of working. Another thing that ‘just happens’ is things appearing in the painting that I did not consciously paint. Again, this has happened before in backgrounds and before now has usually manifested as skulls or Goyaesque head shapes. Once a wolf’s face appeared, once a whole cockerel. What could be happening is a process called ‘pareidolia’. The dictionary definition of pareidolia is “the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines”. The human brain has a tendency to assign meaning wherever it can, and seeing a rabbit in the clouds, a predatory cat in brush (instead of leaves), or the face of Christ on a tortilla, are all examples of pareidolia. In some of my Cathedral series paintings, mares and foals other than those that I had consciously painted have appeared.
Image above: Cathedral Violet (left) . Emergent horses: grazing mare (middle) and pony head (right)
Image below: Demonstration piece at The Art Show, and work-in-progress, provisional title Cathedral Indigold
In my demonstration piece at The Great Yorkshire Show (shown as work-in-progress - right on desktop, above on mobile), once I mentioned pareidolia, people in the audience started to see all sorts of unpainted things in the piece that I was splashing paint onto! What I saw was a girl with long hair and her arm over the rump of the foal (the first figurative appearance). I have kept her in as she is an image that forms part of the narrative that I have with our filly foal. Another theory is ‘creative big magic’, which is a view that creativity and inspiration are entities separate to ourselves that appear as ‘happy accidents’ in our work. As we ‘leave the studio’ the happy accidents tend to occur with more frequency. For a more detailed treatise on this, try reading writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s book ‘Big Magic’. Pareidolia, or creative big magic, or did I subconsciously arrange my random marks and subject rendering into equine and figurative forms? I don’t really believe it matters what explanation we want to impose. I am just going to keep painting and enjoying the process.
During The Art Show, quite a few people commented that they had not seen anything like my new series before. I was asked in my demonstration at The Great Yorkshire Show if anyone else was working this way. Several artists have been experimenting in a similar direction over a similar time period. While I am not a fan of his work, and not moved by his work, Christian Hook is probably the best known and has applied his style to equine subjects as well as human portrait. Of course, I have influences on my work, and portrait artist Stanka Kordik figures largely in that. She is often grouped with other artists in the USA who work under the umbrella ‘Disrupted Realism’. That seems quite a good descriptor of the aesthetic that I am trying to describe, but the Disrupted Realism movement carries a socio-political manifesto that does not describe my aims and motivations. More influential has been the work, mentoring and friendship of equine, figurative and abstract artist Lesley Humphrey. Both Lesley and Stanka (and Hook) start with the subject then develop the abstract/disruption marks around that, and this is the way I too have worked for a while. What was different in my ‘Cathedral’ Series was starting with a completely abstract, unrelated, even random base ‘ground’. My process was to then interweave that with the subject I had later elected to place on the ground. This process came from studio ‘play’ days with my art-partner-in-crime, Julie Cross, though her process uses negative space to form the subject. Both Julie and Lesley have been encouraging and instrumental in my way of going. Both Julie and Lesley came to see The Art Show and my work there. I am supremely lucky to have such talented, truly creative, truly supportive friends in my corner; artists who, without bias or agenda, want me to become the best, the fullest creative that I can be.
So is this the end result? Is this my style from now on?
Well as I said, I dislike the word ‘style’ in terms of art and artist as it seems a closed, finite description. Galleries and agents like to put (and keep) artists in labelled boxes for ease of marketing and selling. Journalists, critics and art historians like to put artists in descriptive pockets for ease of writing. Artists ourselves, forced to write biographies and artist statements for galleries, exhibition competitions and websites tend to put ourselves in these ‘ism’ and ‘ist’ pigeonholes too. Even in this blog, I have struggled to put my art into definitions: how can we describe our, purely visual, works in words? Once one receives a description, a style, it is easy for that to become an affectation and for our work to become formulaic and soulless. The beauty of moving forward, my ‘way of going’ is that I still have explorations to do as I work towards the intangible creative contributing more and more to my artworks. My representational painting and drawing (which I still use as studies, skills exercises and for certain commissions) still underpins my work. Always, I see individual pieces and series as steps (sometimes missteps) on a path rather than a destination.
I intend to continue to enjoy the ride.
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