look at this website - fantastic paintings

David Prentice paintings
Vivien, thanks for posting the David Prentice site. I really like his paintings. You discover things in the paintings each time you look at them that you missed the last time.

David Prentice biography:
http://www.art-network.co.uk/banca/predav/

You can by a David Prentice stetchbook:
http://www.newartportfolio.com/shop/index.htm

BumbleBeeBoogie

excellent. I especially like his way of capturing a fleeting patch of sunlight .



BBB, I saw the sketchbook. Im tempted to buy it... not yet. I see thjeyve got the David Hockney "secret Knowledge " book. I was verry disappointed in that one

V,
I enjoyed the paintings. I imagine the interplay of colors was more pronounced with proper lighting...right?

art
Yes, Vivien, they are beautiful works. I find it amazing that he makes oil painting look like watercoloring. Georgeous light.

art
Accidental duplication. Erased by author.

vivien. I ran through the site rather quickly, and I'm not much of a critic, but I don't care for the colors. I did like "Moonshine" and Prentice's ability to create the village in such fine detail has to be appreciated.

I've got the sketchbook and love it. His sketches are observed and the colours are more subdued but very good.

The ones that knock me out are the large ones in oil or pastel - when you stand in front of a large canvas the colours envelop you and you get this sense of time passing and changing weather systems passing through. The way the colours are laid over others with some flickering through or a slash of colour is used to outline the edge of a hill is just beautiful - they are paintings that need a long time to look - constantly discovering new things.

Inevitably, seeing them small on screen kind of tightens them up.

i haven't read the David Hockney book but saw the BBC TV programme based on it. That was very interesting.

Vivien, I agree with your observations entirely. Im a big fan of the "Moment in Time" that many artists try to attain and most fail. The scudding cloud and fleeting spots of sunlight of the pastel of the town is especially magnificent. Often the artist has to exxagerate colors to get the effect wanted. You can see his use of small liunes of lilac surrounding the junctions of darks and bright yellow whites. This was a lesson taught us in color and composition. Also his blues, though vivid , are blended with other colors that give it a color perspective that is complex and pleasing. Youre right, you cant just pass his work by and see it quickly. I wish there were a show of his work nearby (Pa)
The Hockney book "Secret Knowledge" Is DH's trip of personal discovery as to how many of the old artists used camera obscura and other techniques to obtain more realistic paintings. He has a short , but lacking history of the development of optical tools used by artists , then he goes on and tries them himself. The book is waay too pompous for me. Im a watercolorist whose enjoyed lesson books by guys like Tom Lynch and Ted Kautsky. Even Emille Gruppe was a good bookwriter of the "How-to" genre

I don't know what I think yet. I see facility, a keen asset commercially but not necessarily convincing; I see beauty in much of the work. Beauty is not the most achieving word you can elicit.
Y'know, I see someone working the market. At the same time I see reaction to beauty. Turner has done much of all of our work before, including of this person. I think.

Still, I remain interested.

Ossobuco - i don't think David Prentice is 'working the market'at all but producing interesting original work. His work moves on, exploring ideas and concepts and developing painterly language to express his ideas. He was a Fine Art tutor at a very respected College of Art for many years and has a sound intellectual foundation for his work.

His work, like many people's may be influenced partially by Turner, but Turner never tried to show the passage of time in one painting as DP does.

What is an 'achieving word' to do with art? it seems more to do with business than an artistic and intellectual thought process.

As with many artists - such as Rothko - it is really necessary to stand in front of the original to see it properly.

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks - hoping to see some more cave paintings in the Dordogne - but look forward to your response when i get back..

Osso-and I mean this in all due respect. Does owning an art gallery make you dubious of artists motives in their work?

Hmm...not really to my taste, but his approach to capturing landscape on canvas is intriguing. It's so tough seeing the pics on the internet, I think they totally lose any power they have. Wish I had seen the paintings at the exhibit.

Back. Hmm, I may have been too fast with doubts. My first reaction was liking and my second was a wash of doubt, which I expressed. I might be phobic to slick. Not that I thought these paintings were slick, but I had a reaction in that direction. Sorry, I can't apologize for that, although I may have been wrong, it was a genuine reaction.

On whether being a gallery owner makes me distrust motives, farmerman, my present function as a gallery owner is about a tenth of my time as a painter, and our gallery is a mere smidge in the world of such places. Just picture yourselves as a small gallery owner, in my place, and you might understand. Or perhaps you can't. We are a quiet space in a small place.

I come to the forum more as a learner than as an expert. In my experience as a painter and gallery owner, I have not met an artist with lousy motives. Whatever may have been right or wrong about artists I have met's motives, total commercialism hasn't been there.

My comments on beauty were, I can see on rereading, obscure. I am something of a veteran on defending beauty as a goal of art. While I think that way, my sense of beauty is pretty wide ranging, encompassing as it does some other people's firm sense of ugly. But there is a lot of painting out there, abroad on the land as it were, that does pearlescent this and that, well, I will be quiet and create a space for what we have all seen in landscape painting, going for the dramatic but not actually being interesting painting.

So I was undecided on this fellow. Sorry if that offends folks. I admit that I was intrigued as I felt doubt at the same time, and I think I said that.

While I type here defending my initial, or actually secondary doubt, why don't you all who are more sure develop why you think this painter is so good. We might all end up agreeing so and be clear on whys.

On motives..once, quite a while ago, when I was someone who had taken studio art courses at night after work, I got to be friends with a woman who came to work at our lab. She had a masters in art as well as a masters in chemistry. We are still friends now, and she is a full professor...of pharmacology at a university far away, but I remember her as a friend who also happened to show me about art. She had a friend, she told me, who decided to make it. This friend read the weekly local ArtWeek, and the many mags reviewing work. She looked at what was within her range and picked something to do that would be in line with what was happening (this was in 1973, or so) and did it. And made it, at least then...

I have another friend who zeroed in, in that way, after being a printmaker for big name artists. He is doing just fine now.

So commercial motives aren't really stupid, in terms of making a living. And it seems there is commercial work, and reputable art. Are they the same or antagonistic? Sometimes they are the same. Talking about originals.

GWlightwizard here on a2k has a lot of experience with the print world, which I barely blink at, since I am mainly in love with painting.

With all these people, my friends or friends of friends and David Prentice, they have found or are finding niches, mostly on purpose, which is undoubtedly smart.

I guess I have my antennae up for too easy. In the case of Mr. Prentice, I agree I was too fast to pounce....but I am not sorry for having antennae.

Where am I going with this, you ask, as I might too. I guess I am less and less interested myself as one's art gets more and more programmed, for market or otherwise.

Osso-Ok, Ill follow your request .
Im a nut for artists who can show "the next moment in time" as Cezanne called it. I am quite impressed with Prentices abilities in showing just that in a difficult genre like landscape. The exagerration of his colors , work to intensify the motion of the sky, which is, after all, the only thing he is able to manipulate to show the fleeting passage of time and clouds. If, in your eyes , hes failed, then he has to use an even more exaggerated palette. If you lok at landscapes, the really great ones were able to skillfully manipulate the viewer, the bad ones, like Kinkaid make me laugh at how hammy handed they are.

i recall all the good landscaped that I have in my own "top gun" category and all of them contain some trick that allows the artist to show time as a silent component of their paintings. Its absolutley a manipulation trick, but its subtle, unless it doesnt get throughto the viewer. Then the artist fails.

Im glad you didnt get all defensive when I asked my question Osso,since I respect your opinions from your POV especially, since you aree the true client for we who peddle our wares. Ispend a lot of time experimenting with my own tricks in depicting the passage of time and , as such, I respect anothers abilities in just this trick.

appreciated the Prentice gallery links! I saw what osso mentioned in her first reactions posted - there is a certain "facility" that is definitely commercially-oriented. However, I think the comparison to Turner early on in this thread was apt. I enjoy this artist's work very much, and also the subject matter. I'm drawn to abstraction taken from nature. The color are pleasing to me and the use of light is on target. I wish I could see other work of this artist and suspect that the "sketchbook" mentionned would do much to widen my appreciation. There seems a lot "there" in the paintings, so there must be more going on in the process that I would find fascinating.

Farmerman, that may be instructive, that I represent the target client. I am no art genius, and from my new found perspective as a person who has had a gallery for a few years and thus has visited the other side of the fence, I think the fence is usually an apparition. I am sure there are some very wise and wonderful gallery owners out there, with various kinds of savvy, but my business partner and I are just two women who like painting and sculpture and try to show local artists well. Our business resides at the edge, and couldn't make it if we didn't also have a second business in design. Sometimes the design bails the gallery out, and vice versa. We do this in an economically depressed economy in a depressed county with a small collector base. Ordinary people are our buyers. And yet I am guessing we are more representative of gallery owners across the country than I have imagined before, when I thought of galleries as so unapproachable, and other adjectives.

People buy from us, if they do, because they really want to have the work in their house or office, wherever, but to have it because it means something to them. I don't think we have ever had a buyer buy because the work would possibly accrue in value.

The gallery most have a mind to show in, the discerning one that carries name artists whose works sell for serious money, whose works are collected...whose shows are reviewed in big city papers...those are fairly few in proportion to the number of artists out there.

I see I am off on a tangent, but want you to not think of me as one of the top tier gallery people (ha!) I am interested in and have been gradually reading up on artist group owned galleries, how they work and what their problems and benefits are.