Illusions: An exhibition of paintings and photographs by Mike Calder
Stuart House, Liskeard; 10th to 14th April 2007.
The major purpose of this exhibition is to get feedback. I would very much appreciate feedback and comments of any kind, about specific paintings or in general. My email address is michaelcalder at btconnect.com - or you can write to me at:
Mike Calder
South Boduel Farm
Moorswater
Liskeard
Cornwall PL14 4JZ
United kingdom
This website showing the pictures will be available for at least six months after the exhibition.
The Paintings
It's often a problem to name an exhibition that's not of a particular project or theme, and the works here are a very mixed bunch; so "Illusions" it is. All art is illusion, so the name is safe enough.
Then, thinking about it, I realised that there's more to it than that. Like many if not most painters, I'm fascinated by the problem of how to render space and light. Many of the tricks are well known, others less so. This exhibition is of my work over the past four years since I came to live in Cornwall, and in that time, as well as practising the well-known ones, I've learned a few new tricks (new to me, that is; I don't pretend to any amazing originality); see how many you can spot.
Abstraction
Just to get you started, one trick I learned with the painting of the "Gig Racers". Setting aside the light and colour, most of the illusion of space here is straightforward perspective. Many would call this a figurative painting; I wouldn't. I think it's very abstract. Quite apart from the question of "how realistic is a photograph?", in rendering this image I've thrown away an awful lot of the elements. The craft of the painter is in rendering the elements onto the surface; the art of the painter is in seeing the image and selecting and arranging the elements to be rendered.
The trick I'm talking about here is the simple one of creating the illusion of the surface of the sea. At one level, this is straightforward; according to the rules of perspective, the waves get smaller the further away; all the painter has to do is to lay them down at appropriate sizes on the imaginary surface; a simple pattern gives a flat surface, more complex ones rolling surfaces, and so on.
Waves on water aren't that simple, though. If you look at the surface of even a slightly disturbed sea, you see waves of all sizes; there's what an engineer would call a "continuous power spectrum"; a lot of small ripples, quite a few larger ones, up to long rollers, but not of specific sizes, but of all sizes grading from one category to the next.
That's actually a devil to paint. In this painting, I first used the "rule of threes" to apply to this. This rule is usually used to simplify tones or shades in paintings; the painter often thinks in terms of "lights, mediums, and darks" (though of course there'll be gradations even in these). Here, I painted "longs, mediums, and shorts". I think it's quite effective in rendering the image of the sea, though on inspection the detail is quite different from reality.
The Photographs
I've always been a keen photographer, and used to follow the fashion for technical 35mm SLRs in the 70s and 80s, on to digital in the past few years. When I got my latest 8 megapel digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 8800), I was astounded at the detail and sharpness of the images I could capture and see so quickly.
Now that I'm slowing down, I've rediscovered the beauty and detail that can be had by going back a generation, to the medium format film cameras of the 1940s and '50s. These old cameras just leave the modern digital and 35mm ones standing, as I hope these examples will shew. I'm currently restoring a 1920s Zeiss Maximar, which I hope will be capable of even better results, if I can find a big enough tripod.
I've been told I can buy a professional digital camera that will give the same level of quality and detail; unfortunately it would cost me over £20,000. I can't afford it; fortunately I can get the same results with my Kershaw and Rolleicord, which cost me £60 in total.
I take a lot of photographs, and most of my paintings are done from them; not copying a single photograph, but usually working from anything up to six, taking different elements from each, combining them, or using them to construct a composite viewpoint.
Sometimes, however, if you're lucky, you can find yourself taking a picture that is just not capable of improvement, that itself says everything you could say or more; or perhaps says it in a way that you couldn't express in a painting.
