Terminal Five Expo Gallery

It seems obvious, once you've seen it, that a gallery of original art in an airport terminal is a good idea, especially when the work is by artists from the country where the airport is sited. My work is now on display in the Terminal Five Expo Gallery at Heathrow Airport, as part of an exhibition called "Legacy". It's a lovely space and, because it is at the quieter end of the terminal, is amazingly peaceful.

With check-in having to take place at least two hours before a flight, people have a lot of time on their hands. They are drawn into the gallery to see something they normally would not encounter at an airport. Once inside, visitors say that it is like being in an oasis where you can forget you are in a terminal.

I've met some delightful people from all walks of life in the time I've spent in the gallery. Airport staff often drop by for a chat when the terminal is quiet. Travelers seem to love to discuss all the work. There are sculptures by Susan Leyland, Lorne McKeen and Mike Speller, and paintings by Jeremy Houghton and others, as well as yours truly. The guest book speaks of how delighted and surprised passengers are with the concept, and it is a lovely experience to be involved with something that obviously brings such happiness to so many people.

Robert Bateman

When we look at a realist painting we tend to think that we are looking at the items within it — a face, a chair, a street scene, etc. But what pulls us into the painting to start with has nothing to do with detail and how well it is painted, it has to do with overall design. Take the wildlife paintings of Robert Batemen. He paints animals exquisitely, no doubt about it, and his scenes are rendered in perfect detail. What elevates him above the many other artists who are superb draughtsmen is his great design skills. His paintings are almost abstractions and come to life and engage us because of their daring arrangement of space on the canvas.

Classic Bateman sees the main object of his work set off to one side of the canvas. There is dramatic use of very low or high horizons and huge areas of white space. Animals are viewed from unexpected angles and often seem to disappear into the background, just as they would in nature, so that we must go searching for them and then enjoy the act of discovery. His paintings are first and foremost about shapes and design and because they jolt us with their daring arrangement of blocks of colour upon the canvas, we can then become aware of the detail and of the skill that lies behind it.

Creating Harmony

Most of us are visual creatures, even if we don't realize it, and we have an innate tendency to seek out patterns in our surroundings. After all, if you were living in the savannah of Africa as our ancestors were, your survival could depend upon whether or not you recognized that all the prey animals were avoiding a particular stand of trees because a leopard had just moved in there.

We also have a tendency to be attracted to visual harmony and it can make a painting attractive to a viewer, even when there are faults in the execution. There are many factors to be considered when setting up the composition of a picture. One way to create harmony in a painting is to repeat the same lines of direction throughout a composition. If directional lines, such as the edges of objects and areas of contrast between light and dark, run parallel to one another, then it will give a far more harmonious feel than if those same lines point in many different and random directions.

In the painting shown here, most of the parallel lines of direction point from the top right to middle bottom left of the image. The line is repeated many times throughout the composition, creating a repeating pattern that gives a feeling of harminy. I have found that the slope of a line relative to the horizontal or perpendicular affects the message being sent by the composition. This is a portrait of love and contentment, so the lines are nearer to straight up and down, where a diagonal drawn from corner to corner would imply more energy.

You're not usually going to have all lines pointing in the same direction, because then there is nothing to hold the viewer's eye within the composition. To pull the viewer back into the picture, I chose lines running from top left to bottom right. They form a gentle angle to the first set of lines and do two things:

1. the angle of intersecting lines creates tension. The greatest tension is when lines are at right angles to one another. In this painting the lines intersect at a wide angle, giving the feeling of harmony.
2. the intersection of some of the lines create cups in which important features of the painting can rest. In this case it is the chin of the woman and then her elbow, which is not present in the picture but would be a natural projection of the two lines following the outside of her arm.

The Victorian Artists

"The Music Lesson" by Lord Leighton

I've always loved the paintings of the Victorian artists. For many years people turned their backs on works by artists such as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, John William Waterhouse, Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, rejecting them as cheesy and overworked.

"The Pot Of Basil" by Holman Hunt

Yet these and other realist artists working in the 19th century reached amazing heights of artistic representation in their work. Never had the human form looked so real and natural as it did in their work. They reintroduced dazzling colour and beautifully observed nature into their paintings, even as photography appeared to kill off the genre.


I've recently been introduced to another artist of the period whose work I have now added to my stable of favourites. His name is William-Adolphe Bouguereau and, unlike the other artists I mentioned, he worked in France to produce paintings on classical themes. Many of his pieces are of nude women and exquisitely painted observations of the human form.

"After The Bath" by Bouguereau

Classical realist painting fell from grace as the impressionists gained popularity. Yet they have so much to teach us about composition, the use of colour and of draughtsmanship, as well as classical beauty.

Pulling it together

The first in the series was "Morning Inspection". I wanted to convey how many people were involved in preparing for the soldiers to leave for duty at Horseguards — that was my narrative. The major decision when starting any painting, however, is the composition and this has nothing to do with the cast of characters chosen for the work. The layout is crucial, and this is based upon shapes and their distribution on the canvas. I knew that I wanted the captain to be my central point, but there needed to be a dynamic around him or the piece would become too static. I thus decided on a composition based around two interlocking triangles, one large and one smaller, with an offset curve to hold them together at the top (the archway).

Since all the subjects in the painting are vertical, it became important to use other lines to stop the eyes from sliding of the top and bottom of the painting. I tried to do this by creating repeating diagonals throughout the image that form a zigzag leading from one subject to another, leading the eyes around and not out of the painting. These diagonals, such as the red arm on the right leading visually to the arm in the centre then onto the rider and down to the khaki uniform on the left, also serve to bracket the faces which are the important parts of the piece.

Colour distribution also plays an important role in a painting, especially where there are highly differentiated blocks.   Red is a dynamic colour, so I ensured that it created dynamic right angles in the painting to indicate tension and give movement whilst carrying the eye from left to right. The white areas are then designed to carry the eye in the opposite direction.

Lastly, I wanted to pull the viewer into the painting and this means setting up a dialogue where the subject "talks" to the viewer. I had two characters who were in profile, creating a wall to the viewer and one whose face is partially obscured. To compensate, they are balanced by the same number of objects interacting directly with the viewer — the soldier on the left, the horse, and the soldier in blue on the right. The interacting and non-interacting objects form an alternating pattern, to keep the viewer engaged with the characters in the painting even if they aren't attracted to the subject matter or the style of painting.

It might not be immediately apparent, but the dynamics of composition apply just as much if not more to a painting of a single subject. The first decision about the painting must always be one of how shapes arrange themselves on the canvas. There are time honoured principles that can be used to help decide the correct balance of shapes in a painting and Juliette Aristides http://www.aristidesarts.com/ book, "Classical Painting Atelier" gives a really great insight into how these work in a contemporary context.

Choices, so many choices

Photographers and realist painters are both involved in the process of making art about recognizable subjects. A good photographer will compose their shots, just as any good painter will compose a piece of art. Both disciplines require experience and hard work in order to translate the image in ones head into the work before our eyes. Both must make choices about what to leave in, what to take out, how to crop and balance an image.

In many ways the painter has the easier job because, unless a photographer has complete control over the environment they are shooting, there will always be extraneous pieces of imagery that will be included in the shoot especially when  out of doors. The photographer must be able to see the potential whilst taking in all that noise that could change the focus of the shot.

The painter, on the other hand, can pick and choose what to leave in and take out of a piece. They can change their mind and paint objects in and out of their work. The trick then becomes combining objects in a way that is harmonious and doesn't make a piece look like a collage. They have to lose the noise and keep the essentials and that doesn't just mean what objects are included in the final piece, because the painter makes constant choices about colour, direction of brushstrokes, emphasis, etc. as they paint.

I took thousands of photos of the Household Cavalry on my visit to Hyde Park Barracks. They were essential references for the paintings I created. The works themselves, however, are not copies of those shots. Once again, the snapshots were jumping off points for the paintings, which are based on a series of impressions, rather than a specific event.

A painting is not a photograph

We can now capture moments of beauty with cameras that allow us to trap every detail in digital format. Why then attempt to paint beauty if a photograph will do? It's an argument that's essentially been around since the introduction of the camera and is probably more relevant today than ever before, because the quality of photographic imagery is so good. People can take and edit unbelievably good images these days.

For me the answer is that a painting is not a photograph and their superficial similarities are deceptive. Yes, both the painter and the photographer must decide on the composition of their image and make choices about lighting, etc., but there the similarity ends. What may be a great photo will often be an abject failure as a painting. This is not to say that as a painter one will not recognize potential paintings in photographs, because one does. It is just that a photograph can only ever be a starting point for a painting and never the final piece.

An interesting photo but not something that would make a good painting

A painting of the same horse

Much of my work focuses on horses in motion painted in great detail. Horses are a very complex subject with a difficult anatomy. Yet we all seem to have an almost instinctive understanding of how they should look and when an image is "not quite right". To paint a horse in motion requires the use of photography to truly understand their movements. Before the cinematography of Muybridge in the late 19th century, we had no real idea of how the legs of a horse moved at the faster gaits, and even the best painters of horses would paint them looking like rocking horses if they wanted to show them galloping. Yes, photographs are a huge bonus if you're trying to get it right, but they can also lie. They can flatten and distort causing muscle definition and even bones to seemingly disappear and they can foreshorten so that a head can appear to be growing straight out of a shoulder.

I take thousands of photos of horses in motion, yet I never paint any of them. I use my snapshots, together with my understanding of the horse, as a jumping of point for my work. I may use a particular image as the basis for my composition but there will be numerous other factors, including my memories, that play into the piece as I try to bring the horse to life on the canvas. It is why I have learned to insist that I must see and photograph my subject myself, because a painting is not a photograph and can never be.