We (the 21st century audience) differ from our 1930 counterparts in more than just our social attitudes. An important difference affecting perception of the two paintings is our greater familiarity with moving images. 80 years ago, a trip to The Whiteladies Picture House would have been a novelty for Bristolians. Today, moving images compete incessantly for our attention. The altered visual expectations arising from this situation were a key consideration in developing the new painting.

In 1930, a Clifton cinema-goer might have marvelled at an early talking picture like Blackmail. In 2010, the multiplex screening of a blockbuster like Iron Man 2 is accompanied by internet trailers, clips on television, a video-game, smartphone apps and a motion comic. We are repeatedly exposed to streams of visual data like this, which exploit the passage of time to communicate. How do they influence our reactions to static images like paintings? How can a group portrait (traditionally a motionless genre) incorporate representations of time in order to better engage the modern viewer?

Ernest Board’s painting treats time in a fascinating way.  He has distilled a single impossible instant from lives spanning eight centuries, posing an interesting question: where in time does this momentous, momentary meeting take place? 1930? The future? Or does it exist outside time?

How did Victorian cricketer W.G. Grace come to be standing next to 12th century lord Robert Fitzharding? One explanation for their unlikely juxtaposition is that the scene takes place in the afterlife. Temple Gate, which separates the figures from their city, might represent the gates of Heaven, separating them from the mortal world. All Board’s subjects were dead by the time he painted Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous, so a celestial interpretation is certainly plausible.

Science fiction offers another interpretation. Perhaps,  the artist envisaged a net-wielding time-traveller, plucking specimens from their native centuries and pinning and mounting them in a display case? Board’s figures might well be pinned, there is so little movement in their portrayal. This stately, respectful stillness flatters his subjects but is distancing to a modern gaze bombarded by rapidly changing images. By injecting time into the new version I hoped to animate it, creating a four-dimensional illusion which could catch the attention of 21st century eyes accustomed to ubiquitous motion graphics.

Methods of showing time and movement in the new painting:

Depictions of transport

The list of Bristol icons to be depicted in the painting included the ss Great Britain, which carries 15 subjects across the new painting. Seven more are taking off in a hot air balloon, a familiar mode of transport in summer skies over Bristol.

Posing of figures

While most of Board’s subjects are standing still or seated, several of mine have been put to work pulling the balloon’s tethers to guide it safely into the air. Others are made to look in the same direction (at the balloon), in an effort to give a strong left to right sweep to the composition.

Fragmentation

One way to introduce the vital ingredient of time to the new painting was through the inclusion of multiple images. The use of sequential imagery to represent consecutive moments in time is much more widespread today than it would have been in 1930. Our capacity to follow progressive narrative picture sequences begins at a young age with bedtime picture books but it develops when we read more complex sequences like comic strips. Comics were not so well-established when Some Who Have Made Famous was painted. 80 years ago, Superman belonged to Nietzsche and Shaw, not Siegel and Shuster. Beano and Dandy appeared later in the decade and American comics would not arrive in great numbers until after the war. Now, after generations have grown up reading comics, our ability to read the conventions of this visual language is demonstrated in everyday literature as diverse as DIY assembly diagrams, aeroplane safety cards and even tabloid newspapers’ agony aunt photo-stories. It was clearly possible to use multiple images to convey a sense of time, but this should not deprive a large painting of its impact. I found David Hockney’s work helpful at this stage.

Talking about his ‘joiner’ photo-collages, Hockney said:

“when you put one piece of paper on top of another… you put two pieces of time together”

In both Pearblossom Highway and the enormous A Bigger Grand Canyon (comprising 60 individual canvases), each component image represents a single moment in time as well as a viewpoint in space. Putting several of them together immediately creates a narrative.

If the large scene I had envisaged could be fragmented into smaller views, it would lose the appearance of a single frozen moment but retain the spectacle that a meeting of famous Bristolians deserved. Our tendency to interpret multiple images as narrative would encourage the viewer to consider each facet’s location in time. This realisation prompted me to turn the painting into a polyptych, or to be precise a dihectahexacontakaihenaptych, of 261 individual images.

Multiple timelines

The pictorial time suggested by the composite image allowed me to weave more than one narrative into the new painting. Borrowing from the Bayeux Tapestry, I devised a frieze-like sequence, a series of visual footnotes providing biographical information about the people portrayed in the main scene. This was prompted by the difficulty of identifying some of the original painting’s subjects without the accompanying diagram thoughtfully provided by the museum. Following the conventions of comics once again, the sequence flows from left to right and top to bottom, depicting the life of the earliest subject (John Cabot) in the top left corner and ending in the bottom right with the youngest (Wallace and Gromit).
The presence of a comic-like sequence around the border acts as another indicator to the viewer that time is unfolding in the painting.

As this illustration demonstrates, the two time-streams are held together by a grid underpinning the entire painting. Each component image is aligned to the grid and equal in size to one or more of its units, creating the beats and bars of a visual time signature intended to unify the composition.

Last week I returned to full-time work on the painting after a break for other projects. After months working mostly in Photoshop, it felt good to be handling real materials once again. This is an overview of what I’m using to paint Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous.

I had decided from the start that, if I won the commission, I would use watercolour on Bristol board (the choice of materials is explained in the proposal section of this blog).  I needed to obtain new brushes, paper and paint because nothing I had in the studio was suitable for a large-scale permanent painting like this. My brushes were too fine for large-scale work and I only had Bristol board in the readily available A3 size, far too small for my purposes. Furthermore, my collection of watercolour paint contained tubes of both permanent and fugitive colours, some completely transparent, others opaque. What I needed was a palette of only permanent colours, preferably at the transparent end of the opacity scale.

Brushes

The ‘sable’ hair used in the best quality watercolour brushes actually comes from the Kolinsky or Siberian Weasel (mustela siberica) and not the better known Sable (martes zibellina). Kolinsky pelts are used in the fashion industry and the tail hairs are turned into highest quality paintbrushes. Although nothing matches the spring and point of a Kolinsky brush, there are several good synthetic alternatives available, so I am using synthetic rounds and flats which keep their shape well.

Paper

The Bristol board I normally use is a fairly lightweight 250g/m2 and would buckle under wet washes. What I needed was an exceptionally large, heavyweight version which could withstand a lot of water. My local art materials shop rang the only supplier they knew who might manufacture paper of this sort, but even they were out of stock. Luckily, I did find an online supplier selling large, acid-free sheets, in weights up to 924g/m2, ‘with high-archival permanence’; in other words exactly what I needed.

Paint

As an illustrator who often works digitally, I have enjoyed researching ‘real’ pigments with poetic names like alizarin, ochre and ultramarine instead of numeric CMYK values. The most important consideration in choosing the colours for this painting is that they must be permanent. Despite being perceived as a very traditional medium, watercolour has benefited from enormous technological improvements over the last century; even in my years of using them the number of permanent colours has increased noticeably. In order to help me choose the right colours for this project I have been reading Ralph Mayer’s classic book The Artist’s Handbook Of Materials And Techniques. The in-depth colour chemistry in that book, written in the middle of the twentieth century, has informed my understanding of the newer pigments now available from paint manufacturers. Out of the 96 colours in Winsor and Newton’s highest quality Artist’s Water Colour range, 93 are now permanent. Their definition of permanence of watercolour is:

“its durability when laid with a brush on paper displayed under a glass frame in a dry room freely exposed to ordinary daylight and an ordinary atmosphere”.

From this permanent range I have chosen a palette of the most transparent colours, with some semi-transparent ones and just a few of the more opaque ones, to be used sparingly. The emphasis on transparency is intended to make the best use of the brilliant white Bristol board surface and to enhance the layered application of colour which I am using (See proposal for more on this painting technique.)

The photo below shows the colours I’ve chosen.

Transparent

• Permanent Rose
• Winsor Blue (green shade)
• Ultramarine (green shade)
• Olive green
• Permanent Sap Green
• Burnt Umber
• Hooker’s Green
• Raw Umber
• Burnt Sienna
• Prussian Blue
• French Ultramarine
• Cobalt Blue

Semi-transparent

• Scarlet lake
• Winsor Yellow
• Winsor Lemon
• Van Dyke Brown

Semi-opaque

• Yellow Ochre
• Payne’s Grey
• Light Red

Opaque

• Naples Yellow
• Cerulean Blue
• Venetian Red

(Alizarin Crimson appears in this photo,  in the bottom right corner, but it is not permanent and therefore is not used in the painting.)

In the right sidebar on the homepage you should be able to see highlights from the dedicated Flickr account I’ve just set up.  A lot of the images there will be used to illustrate articles on this blog but it will also be a place to store reference shots.

Finally, I’ve created yet another Twitter account. @bristolfamous will hopefully avoid confusion between updates on this painting and any unrelated Gurr Illustration news on the @gurrilla Twitter feed.

Proposal sketch for Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous

• 2009 – April:  The judging panel requests more detailed information from the shortlisted artists.

Brunel portrait from proposal supplement

• 2009 – July:  My appointment is announced on the Festival of Ideas website. I spend the month completing current projects so that I can convert my illustration studio into a space suitable for creating a large painting.
• 2009 – August: Research. I already have files on many of the subjects through research for previous projects, notably The Bristol Story, written by Eugene Byrne, now I’m filling the gaps in my knowledge.
• 2009 – August: This blog created as a way of managing research info and monitoring progress.