There’s a widely held idea about technique that I think is a misconception, which is that technique is a method one adopts to create an effect.  Training in Florence, people imagine I must have been taught a bunch of techniques.  I’m not sure what's imagined these techniques might be, but there’s often the implication that there are certain tricks to create a sense of light, a likeness, believable form or colour or any other element of painting.  The longer I’ve been painting the more I’m convinced that “technique” is actually a bit of a distraction.


Arguably, this is all semantics.  Certainly, each painter has a way of using their materials, which one can analyse and describe as their technique. The material qualities of a painting play an enormous part in what makes for a great painting.  And it is true that when I see a painting I admire, I go up close and stick my nose up to it to analyse the use of paint.  There are some painters, like Van Dyck or Thomas Lawrence, who reward this kind of looking. They have such ease in drawing with oil paint, that the fluid marks show an apparently simple translation from what they see to what they paint.  There is something almost miraculous about it, and I often find myself wondering about their methods, and whether there is some technique I can learn from it. The surface quality is seductive.


Critics have always been as much in awe as wary of artists with great technical fluency.  The seductive can be meretricious. John Singer Sargent was endlessly called “clever” by critics, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.  One critic in 1882 described his Venetian paintings as “extremely clever, and we use the word extremely as indicating at once a danger and a merit”.  Any painter with technical facility is at risk of tipping over the edge into gratuitously flashy paint use.  Even great portrait painters like Lawrence, Sargent, Boldini and De Laszlo could at times guilty of slightly showy technique at the expense of truthful sensitivity.  


There are two big problems with admiring artists for their technique.  First is the abundance of truly great paintings which don’t seem to exhibit this apparent technical brilliance.  No individual brush stroke shows any particular excellence, but the painting as a whole is utterly extraordinary.  I would argue this is true of Titian and Velazquez, two of the greatest painters of all time.  Their work is sober, almost austere, in lacking any particularly seductive surface quality.  And yet they have such force, such life that few have ever come close to them.


The second problem with the idea of technique is sort of the inverse of the first: the abundance of truly horrible paintings with apparently flawless technique.  The nineteenth century saw such an explosion in the number of artists pushing the technique of their realism, and any time I pop in to Sotheby’s or Christies to see what’s coming up (they’re often a great place to see work that is otherwise hard to see in public collections), I’m faced with an endless parade of glossy paintings, often of cutesy doll-like children or kittens playing with bubbles, which are so horrible they make me queasy.  They are probably more in control of their medium than almost any painter alive today, but few would really mind if their work was binned. The fluent technique can’t save them.


What makes both a Velazquez and a Van Dyck so great, when their technique is so different, is their sense of judgement.  Drawing, colour, composition, mark making are all a question of judgement.  There is no trick.  They both saw with extraordinary sensitivity, and painted with extraordinary judgement, using materials however would best express that vision.


Perhaps the best argument against obsessing over technique is the terrible condition of many Reynolds pictures. His endless searching after some technical ‘secret of the old masters’ (a phrase that always makes me wince), meant mixing all sorts of gunk into paint and using very impermanent pigments, resulting in endless blistered and cracked paintings the colour of black treacle. 


I’m sympathetic to ol' Reynolds though, I look at great masters and wonder what materials and methods they were using; I continually experiment with different paints, brushes, surfaces, grinding pigments and mixing mediums, and I definitely want to make my surface quality as brilliant as I can, and when I look back over the last five years, I’m glad to see it has continually improved.  But ultimately I’m trying to improve my sensitivity to what I see and my judgement in how I draw and paint it.  The technique follows from there.

* With apologies to Walter Benjamin

Very often I find that an artist whose appeal I had never really understood only makes an impact on me when I see their work "in the flesh", and then I am blown away. The reverse can happen too, seeing some artwork first in photos, only to be disappointed seeing it for real. Whether it’s the Mona Lisa (smaller than you expected?), or something contemporary (flatter than you expected?), it’s always surprising how different the original can be.  


The ways in which technology is changing the way we appreciate art are almost limitless.  One thing I’ve been pondering recently is the rise in quality photographs of paintings.  Not so long ago it was hard to find a decent photograph of most paintings.  Many art books had frustratingly small reproductions of low quality, and those from before 1990 are generally useful for the text only.  Many of the classic texts of art history, such as Anthony Blunt’s Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1660, have no more than a dozen black and white pictures, if any at all.  


For most of history before this, reproductions meant engravings, and artists in different countries learnt of the great works of other places and times through these.  Inevitably, an engraving is a interpretation of the painting into a different medium.  Composition can be seen (often in reverse), but the tonal qualities could vary dramatically, either due to insufficient skill from the engraver or to the limitations of the medium itself.  

Imagine only knowing Raphael's Gallatea from Marcantonio Raimondi's terrible engraving

Over time new technologies changed this by varying degrees, and the skill of many engravers was breathtaking.  Mezzotints in particular could capture much more of the atmosphere than previous images, but still colour and texture could only be imagined.  Along comes photography and slowly images get better and better.  Art books now have become extraordinarily high quality.  I recently was give the new mega-book on Velazquez from Taschen, in which many details of the paintings are reproduced to the scale of the original in perfect focus.  And online, many galleries show super high resolution images of their collection, and I learn about contemporary artists primarily through seeing photos of their work online.  I’m a huge fan of all of this.  I have more art books than shelf space, and my laptop is full of high quality photos from which I get inspiration and instruction.   This is undoubtedly a Good Thing.  We can see work on the other side of the world which we very well may not ever see in person, and we can see details of work that is hung too high to see clearly.

 This mezzotint does a great job of showing the light effect in the Van Dyck, though naturally misses the warmth of colour.

It is definitely a mixed blessing though.  There is a danger when the reproductions seem so high quality to forget that the photo is not the work itself.  It doesn’t matter how high resolution a photo is, it is not a painting. It can’t capture the experience of standing in front of the painting, and I’m not talking about some mystical aura that surrounds the painting (c.f. Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).  I keep buying Rembrandt books in the hope that one of them will do a better job of this, but I have to give in and accept that a painting by Rembrandt simply doesn’t reproduce well.  In fact, it strikes me that there is almost a direct relationship: the better the painting, the greater the gap there is between the original and the photo.  If forced to list my favourite artists of all time (not that I could), I would find that many of them I rarely look at in reproduction.: Rembrandt, Turner, Titian, Monet…none of these have a fraction of their power in reproduction.

​Zoom in all you like, it's nothing like looking at the original. You'll never feel Rembrandt is looking back at you.

It’s partly a matter of scale; a photo could be 1% of the size of the original, even in a heavy coffee table book.  It’s partly a matter of material.  A painting is painted on a flat surface, but it’s not a flat object.  Layering of opaque and translucent paint, with mixtures of oils, resins and varnishes, create images which breathe, shimmer and glow.  Rembrandt once wrote to his client, Huygens, that his painting should be hung “in a strong light and where one can stand at a distance, so it will sparkle at its best”.  That sparkle, simply doesn’t happen in a book.  Back the the bad old days of dodgy engraved reproductions, one was very aware that the engraving was a mere echo, a shadow of the original.  Now with all our wonderful technology, there is a risk we replace the original with the reproduction.  And with that, we risk losing an understanding and appreciation for the very thing that makes for a great painting.  


This is very much a reminder to myself not to get too absorbed in books and shiny new online resources, but to get on my bike and head to the galleries. It’s also a plea for everyone to go and see the amazing work on display for free all over the country.