My Painting by Jenny Waterhouse
Jenny Waterhouse is a talented artist who can also write well so who better to tell us about herself than Jenny.
The question I am most often asked about my painting is "Why don't you use photographs?" Many artists do use photographs in a variety of ways and in fact al fresco landscape painting is now considered to be a 19th Century throwback, a method of work not used by any serious artist since Van Gogh. It would be more convenient to paint in the studio, no risk of the wind blowing the easel over, mosquito's biting, sudden showers and other hazards of painting outside, but photos don't inspire me, so I always start on the spot then later work in the studio.
A photograph freezes a moment in time, whereas looking at a landscape or person one is faced with a moving target. The light and angle of the sun are constantly changing causing variations in colour and tone, the wind moves the trees and the clouds and in the case of a person their posture and expression change. The movement and rhythms which flow through natural forms are clearer in an animated object and this I find more stimulating and challenging.
I have done a number of paintings and drawings of a goatherd and his goats which graze the area round my finca and for me they are ideal models. None of them keep still to pose, least of all the goatherd who talks and looks around to see where the goats have got to. On occasion I have done a drawing of him in several different places because the goats were frisky and kept moving, so I had to pick up my sketchbook and continue again wherever they stopped. Working in this way it is impossible to measure the face with any accuracy, one is forced to base the drawing on a global impression of the proportions, character and expression of the person.
As far as I am concerned my painting has to work on three levels. First it has to work topographically or anatomically in that a person looking at it can "read" it and understand how the space works - that that hill is further away than this - or how the features relate to the head as a whole. This depends on drawing and requires a lot of patient observation and application. It is perhaps the simplest part but if it doesn't work nothing else does.
Secondly the painting has to work in an abstract sense as a composition of different forms, colours and lines. At this level it is very important to me how the paint is applied, the kind of marks I make, the brushstrokes and the textures. I want a brushstroke to be a leaf or a cloud or a ray of light rather than to represent it, or an area of impasto to be the paint equivalent of a wooded hillside. I mean that what I am trying to achieve is to recreate my subject in terms of paint rather than just paint a likeness of it.
Finally I want my painting to work in a psychological or feeling sense in that it says something about the particular characteristics of that place or person. I have done a number of paintings of people in patios of cortijos in the country because I am enchanted by this subject and want to capture something of the qualities of space and light, the interrelationship of people, plants and other paraphernalia peculiar to these places. The Spanish would describe it as the "duende" of the place.
Another subject that fascinates me is the view towards the Straits from Gaucin, where sometimes we can see the Djebel Musa and the Rif mountains. There is a feeling of an enormous bowl of space, constantly changing. The sun catches the edge of the hills and the side of the Rock in the mornings, ragged edged rain clouds roll in from the Atlantic, or the Rif suddenly rears up violet against a pale turquoise sky in the evening. It is this life which animates the scene I am painting which I would like to grasp and stick on the canvas.
This is the most difficult aspect of painting for me and how it is done I don't know, I can only keep trying.