James Bland - painter

Tuscany residency 2007

Degas, commenting that the dancers he painted were ‘merely a pretext for drawing’ expressed a relationship between artist and subject worthy of emulation. Everything I paint is merely a pretext for drawing.

Drawing is, I am sure, the most important component of visual art. As I am a painter, I take the word ‘drawing’ to mean the exposition of spatial phenomena on a flat surface. One sees this in Degas, in Fra Angelico, or in the Lascaux cave paintings.

Successful drawing obtains its frisson from the onlooker’s simultaneous apprehension of flatness and form. But beyond the immediate magic of this is a territory in which meaning, thought and sentiment are communicated by purely visual means, and of which no verbal account can be given. Some pictures are unaccountably dull; others, unaccountably moving. A pretext for drawing is also a pretext for this.

I graduated from my Masters degree in 2004. At that time, my work was made predominately from life. Since then, I have come to use other means, relying on memory, or using drawings, bits of sculpture, photographs and so on.

Between 2005 and 2006 I lived in Padua, in northern Italy, where I painted Canale Piovego, Winter. This picture demonstrates one approach I have taken to painting from the landscape, where drawings and colour notes are taken on the spot and transferred to a picture made in the studio.

During my time at the Centro Verrocchio in July 2007, however, the weather was so consistent and the light so good that I worked directly from the landscape, as long as I could find a patch of shade in which to stand. The Reservoir pictures, Ash Trees, Fig Tree and Early Morning Landscape, along with a number of others, were the result of the freedom these superlative painting conditions gave me.

Through the hottest part of the day, I worked indoors. Drinker and Teapot were painted from life, and I also modelled a self-portrait head in clay, which fell a victim to my inexperience with that material.

Life drawing was also available at the Centro, and one drawing I made at the time has since turned into the painting of the Sentry, whose clothes and armour were borrowed from a Fra Angelico Massacre of the Innocents.

I have picked up several other threads of the work made at the Centro Verrocchio. The Study-Evening Light and Wild Fruits were painted since then, but show a degree of freshness owing something to my time at the Centro. I also continue to model in clay, though this is chiefly as an aid to painting and drawing.

My thanks to the Gomperts Trust and to the Centro Verrocchio for my time as resident artist at the Centro Verrocchio. Thanks are also due for the the Janet Konstam Travel Award, which enabled me to make a small Italian tour in advance of my residency, taking in Florence, Bologna, Trieste and Aquileia.

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