 Adam's Art weblog Adam McLean is one of the few recognised experts on hermetic, embelmatic and alchemical symbolism. Since 1978 he has published over 50 books on hermeticism, alchemy and related matters, edited the long running Hermetic Journal in the 1980's, and now organises the largest and most comprehensive web site on alchemy. He also offers study courses on the interpretation of alchemical symbolism. He also has one of the largest collections of modern tarot decks and is very interested in the artwork of modern tarot. As an artist he is not one given up to exploring in a free or indulgent way his own ideas, but instead he works essentially to restore and invigorate traditional emblematic and alchemical imagery. In March 2008 he decided to create this occasional weblog dealing with his artistic interests and research, his ongoing projects, his enthusiasms for traditional emblematic allegorical works and criticisms of some of the more risible aspects of modern art. 
28 May 2008Over the last week or so I have been finalising work on an edition of the Solidonius series of alchemical emblems, for which I made 18 facsimile paintings. I was very much amused today when I came across a reference to the Solidonius in the notable Italian art historian Maurizio Calvesi's interpretation of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass or The Bride Stripped bare by her batchelors. Calvesi links this idea to the sixth emblem in the Solidonius series. He further suggests that stripping of the bride is a metaphor for the philosophers' stone in the writings of the 17th century alchemist Solidonius. This is rather risible as the figure in the Solidonius is not a woman but a man. It clearly states this in the text. Also the idea that the emblem is illustrating, is the purification of Sol or gold (the young man) through having its impurities stripped away. The text says this can be done through heating it with antimony metal, shown as the figure in brown on the right, or by using aqua fortis (nitric acid), shown as the figure on the left. So nothing to do with brides or the philosophers' stone. Art historians can read far too much into an image ! 19 May 2008 I have decided that I am going to define myself from now on as a 'facsimile painter'. I am getting a bit fed up with people making, what I consider, fatuous and ill-informed remarks about my paintings, saying I should, with all my knowledge of symbolism, do something original and creative, instead of copying the work of others. I fear people are missing the point of my work entirely. Everyone else is doing "something original and creative", so much so that most of these new creations are totally tedious and vapid. My work is to try to uncover and restore the powerful emblematic material from the past that has been neglected, often almost entirely lost and buried in libraries or the basement stores of museums. Just as in my work over the last decades with alchemical texts I have tried to recover obscure material and make it accessible to people, so with my painting I try to make this lost emblematic material also become visible again. My abilities lie in being able to create facsimile paintings, in which the faded colours of the originals can be refreshed and damaged areas repaired, so that the original work itself is able to speak again. Most artists just want to express their own vision, but I am rather tired of this. Instead I want, through my work, to enable the artists of many centuries ago, particularly those involved in alchemical and related allegorical and emblematic material, to have their work appreciated again. In a strange way, in this modern age when every artist is pursuing their own vision, I find myself out on a limb, in a minority of one. Recently, an artist colleague of mine, on seeing my copy of the Rogier van der Weyden, rather hurtfully said it was a complete waste of my time. Well I take delight in the technical details of making a copy of an original work. It satisfies me. At the moment I am working on the Solidonius series of alchemical emblems, and later I will make a start on the Bonacina series. There are also some wonderful paintings that I want to make facsimiles of in the coming years, despite it being a "complete waste of my time". I abdicate from being an "artist" in the modern sense and instead embrace the lable of "maker of facsimilies". 18 May 2008 I have been rather busy with my book publications and unable to finish the many paintings I began this year, however, my editing of books and my painting have at least come together in one project, the making of facsimile paintings of the Solidonius series. As I am beginning to work on publishing this illustrated text, over the passed few days I have been working on the finishing the eighteen small paintings (9 by 7 inches) that are found in this manuscript. I began working on these earlier this year and hopefully should complete them in the coming week. These are based on illustrations in a French manuscript, but I have corrected the faded colours and some small points where the descriptions in the text are at variance with the emblems. I have also made these facsimiles in oils rather than watercoloured drawings.  8 May 2008 Sadly I have not had any time to devote to my painting for a number of weeks. I have just had so much to do binding up books and dealing with various routine chores. I did manage a few hours to frame up the Paracelsus portrait which I have now put up for sale. I also have a pile of books of illuminated manuscripts to look through and study. I also now have to rework the Solidonius alchemical manuscript images, which I made facsimile paintings of earlier this year. These have to be amended in light of the descriptions of the colouring in the text, which I now have had translated. 21 April 2008 Over the last few days I have been pondering over angels' wings. Angels, of course, were a well used emblematic element in illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings. One especial feature that has always intrigued me is a convention that grew up to depict angels with multi-coloured or rainbow wings. This so intrigued me a few years ago, that I made a facsimile painting from a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Musaeum in Cambridge. What attracted me to that piece was the angel's rainbow wings. Recently I have found many examples of this emblematic convention. Someone recently told me that this arose from the idea of God's Covenant with Noah when God had said that he would show the sign of the rainbow. I was not enirely convinced by that explanation. It seems to rather conflate two separate ideas. No angels were mentioned in the Noatic covenant. So I will keep looking for the source of the rainbow coloured angels' wings, however, like the pot of gold, it may not be easy to find.  
Fitzwilliam Museum. Northern French, before 1468. Angel from the Crucifixion. Fresco by Taddeo Gaddi, before 1366. 
18 April 2008Many illuminated manuscripts are religious in nature, being Books of Hours or other devotional tracts. There must be tens of thousands of Books of Hours preserved in libraries and private collections, and they regularly appear in fine art auctions. During the 14th and 15th centuries there arose a class of people who became relatively wealthy, and one way they could display their status and wealth was to have scribes and illuminators prepare a lavish personal book of devotion. Apart from a few notable examples, I find the content of most of these, though often having amazingly beautiful paintings within them, does not truly engage me. However, there was arising in that time other more secular works, which often allowed the artist a freer expression outside the straightjacket of the formulaic Book of Hours. Thus we find a number of manuscripts with illuminations of Dante, Boccaccio, and even stories such as the Roman de la Rose, Tristan and Isolde. Ovid's Metamorphoses provided a opportunities for the artist/illuminators to explore emblematic material. Here is a beautiful example of Hermaphoditus and the nymph Salmacis from a manuscript of the Metamorphoses in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Astronomical/astrological works began to appear with many wonderful illustrations, even a particular format depicting the Children of the Planets. The Apocalyse provided a source of powerful emblematic imagery and many manuscripts appeared exploring this theme. We also find manuscripts depicting the Triumphs of Petrarch, processions in which a triumphal chariot is being pulled by various people or animals, and this was so popular a format that the imagery was extended beyond that expressed in Petrarch's poems. Indeed, by the 15th century, manuscript illumination had expanded far outside the formula of religious devotional works. This is what makes the artwork of this period so exciting. There is so much to uncover and explore here. 17 April 2008 Last evening I noticed the film of Umberto Eco's novel In the Name of the Rose was being broadcast on television. I took a short glance (for a few minutes) at the film, as I have seen it a few times before, and happened upon the scene when the medieval detective and his sidekick (really Holmes and Watson) first entered the labyrinthine library. The novel is set in 1327 and constantly alludes to manuscripts being copied in the scriptorium by monks. This led me to wish to point out that this is a bit of an anachronism. Many people believe that illuminated manuscripts were all made by monks, indeed some of my correspondents think that alchemical manuscripts emerged out of monastic scriptoria. This is a fanciful idea but not really true. During the 12th century there developed craftworkers, scribes, limners, and illuminators who quickly became much more skilled at their work than monks, so much so that by the beginning of the 13th century they were usually employed to undertake the copying of manuscripts, and by 1250 monks were no longer devoting time to this task, as it was so much more convenient for the religious house to pay these craftsmen for the work. This was happening long before alchemical manuscripts had appeared in any numbers. 15 April 2008 People have been asking me why I seem to be diverting so much of my time to researching 14th and 15th century illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings and they wonder what relevance this can have to alchemy. Well it seems to me that the earliest alchemical manuscript paintings, which only appear early in the 15th century Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1412), Aurora consurgens (around 1420), are influenced by the art of the illuminated manuscripts of their period. One thus cannot truly contextualise and understand these images unless one has some grasp of the illuminated manuscript tradition. Let us just consider the images from the Aurora consurgens. We should look at the famous monkey violinist figure. The particular representation of rocks seen below the figures is found in a number of Italian and French manuscripts of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. In the middle is an 14th century example of the stylised rock formations. This stylised representation gives way through the 15th century to a more realistic depiction of rocks and cliffs. The intense red background on this and other images from the Zurich Aurora consurgens is puzzling, until one realises that these were probably prepared as grounds for what is known as diaper work on manuscripts (from the French diapré 'variegated' a repetitive geometric pattern). This was apparently often left for a specialist to do after the paintings had been completed, so it may be with the Aurora consurgens (Zurich manuscript) that this was left unfinished. On the right I show another example of such diaper works from a French manuscript of the mid-14th Century. This use of elaborate patterned backgrounds to images in manuscripts gradually passes from favour through the 15th century and was replaced with naturalistic scenes.   
14 April 2008 For a while I have been looking for a portrait painting of Edward Kelley. There is a famous painting of his colleague and travelling companion Dr John Dee in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, but on Kelley I seem to have drawn a blank. There is a portrait engraving apparently made close to the time of Kelley's life, but not a painting. While undertaking research I was led to some later portraits of these two made at the end of the 19th century for a Polish book. These were made by a book illustrator called Michal Elwiro Andriolli. Through the good offices of my Polish colleague, the writer and academic, Rafal Prinke, I have been able to obtain some scans of these later portrait engravings. I found these rather amusing. Andriolli has chosen to represent these two as rather dissolute. Rather than the imposing view of Dee, confidently engaging the viewer in the Ashmolean portrait, we see here someone rather broken down and suffused with melancholy. Kelley is also shown as rather old and world weary ! It is quite fascinating to see how different ages choose to depict those figures. I wonder how an artist nowadays would chose to show them.  
  13 April 2008 I have spent a great deal of money this weekend, some hundreds of pounds, buying books, primarily on 15th century manuscripts and paintings with an emblematic and allegorical content. This is a subject that cannot be easily researched on the Internet as much of the material online is not well described and the illustrations are very low res so one cannot truly appeciate the artwork. The University library here in Glasgow has an excellent collection of art books, but there are still many gaps and I find I have to buy some books if I want to have easy access to them. The area of 15th century art is quite obscure, being primarily the province of the more academic type of art historian, so there are many manuscripts and painting which have not been well exposed in the public domain but kept within the sphere of a small group of specialists. I find myself really engaged by some of this material, particularly the artwork that moves away from the conventionally religious. Of course, a major part of the artwork of this period are Books of Hours and similar devotional pieces. Artists of that time were primarily commissioned by religious institutions, or wealthy patrons wanting to possess an illumined book to impress their friends of their piety, but there are some wonderful emblematic works alongside these. It is this that I am currently drawn to investigate, thus the large hole in my budget and a pressing need for some more bookshelves ! My own research library is at the moment a complete mess, piled up with books, articles, various prints and images and I will have to sort out some storage shortly or I will not be able to locate things quickly. 
12 April 2008A couple of years ago I undertook some research into the Voynich manuscript. This is a strange manuscript on vellum written in a weird unreadable script which some people suggest is a code though it has never been broken. It seems to date to the late 15th or early 16th centuries. It contains many drawings, a section which is obviously a herbal with pictures of unidentifiable plants, an astronomical section with circular diagrams, a balnealogical section with picture of bathing women, and some other graphical material. About two years ago I presented some new information to the Voynich discussion group that the balnealogical section could well be representations of the thermal and sulphurous healing baths at Pozzuoli in the area called the Phlegrean Fields, West of Naples. This is a volcanic region where hot springs bubble up, and it has been used since Roman times, but was still actively being used in the Medieval and early modern periods. The Voynich discussion group rejected my research as they were taken up with grand theories and most of the contributors did not have their feet firmly planted on the earth and consequently their heads were rather in the clouds. So I had just pushed this to the back of my mind, when today looking at a book on Italian Renaissance book illumination what should I see but a manuscript showing yet another image of the Baths of Pozzuoli, written in the third quarter of the 15th century and thus contemporary with or slightly predating the Voynich manuscript. It seems to me so obvious that the creator of the Voynich manuscript had seen a manuscript depicting the Baths at Pozzuoli, either this one or some other (there are a number which have survived), however, the Voynich speculators are not interested in something so prosaic and obvious. The text of the Voynich cannot be read, but the images can be contextualised and thus the subject matter of the manuscript can be revealed. Art and images so draw on earlier examples, that one can see how images emerge from an earlier context. Just as Bosch drew on the depictions of zitirons and other strange beasts in Flemish manuscripts available in his time, so the author of the Voynich drew on depictions in earlier manuscripts of the baths at Pozzuoli when drawing his figures. Click here to see my 2006 research into the Voynich manuscript. 12 April 2008 Following up on the zitirons (also known as Zeeridders) a correspondent pointed out to me another example in a manuscript in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague of Jacob van Maerlant's poem Der Naturen Bloeme. Jacob van Maerlant lived in the 13th century but this particular Flemish manuscript with many illuminations was made around 1350. 
11 April 2008 One of the features I especially like about 15th century art, both in manuscript illuminatons and in paintings, particularly Flemish, are the wonderful stylised landscape forms, usually as appearing as a background to a portrait and often glimpsed through windows. So I was delighted today to find an illustration from the Savoyard Apocalypse which sets the powerful and horrific events of the Apocalypse in this rather charming, gentle and safe landscape. It is this delicious contradiction which especially delights me. Here we see the Whore of Babylon seated on the beast with seven heads, but somehow one does not feel the world is about to end ! I must try and find more images from this manuscript.  10 April 2008 Last night I came across a word I had not heard before - "zitiron". This is a strange beast found depicted in some medieval manuscripts. A zitiron is man-knight riding on or fused with a fish body. Here are two examples, the first from from Queen Mary's Psalter, made in England around 1310-1320, and the second from the Book of Hours of William Lord Hastings, around 1480.  
Hieronymous Bosch must have seen examples of zitirons in manuscripts as he closely mimics these in his Garden of Earthly Delights (created around 1504), and other paintings. It is obvious that Bosch was not entirely driven by imagination or fantasy, but had made a deep study of such imagery in the manuscripts of his time.   9 April 2008 I came across an interesting fact recently when reading Paul Binski's little book Medieval Craftsmen Painters. One is used to the term "miniature" being applied to the paintings in illuminated manuscripts such as the Tres Riches Heures. I had always presumed that this was derived from some Latin word for "small" but it turns out it is instead from the Latin "miniatulus" meaning "coloured with red-lead or cinnabar", through the Italian word "miniatura" which was early on applied to the art of illumining a manuscript. In the ealiest period the creators of manuscripts often embellished pages with delicate illuminations and bordered them with the red lead pigment "minium". It is strange that I have read and studied illuminated manuscripts without picking this up. How many other little blind-spots do I have in my knowledge, I now wonder? 8 April 2008 A few days ago I was looking at a book I have with high quality illustrations of the early 15th century illuminated manuscript Tres Riches Heures, the work of the Limbourg brothers. This Book of Hours was made for the Duc de Berry between 1410 and 1416, and has many wonderful full page miniatures painted on vellum. I was paticularly interested to see some extreme close up illustrations of these illuminations, as one could clearly see that areas of the painting were made with little short strokes of the brush, applied one beside another on top of a ground colour, to give the modelling. Such detail of the way in which the artwork was painted is not easily seen in most illustrations which are very small, and the half-tone screen of the colour lithographic printing obscures this further, but the detailed illustrations in this book revealed this key aspect of the way in which the paintings were created. I show one example here, though the scans I made from the book, in fact, only just show these little stab strokes. You can see these in the sky and the dragon's wing. It reminded me somewhat of the way in which Hieronymous Bosch painted. Bosch's large paintings look, in book sized modern reproductions, to be smoothly modelled, as in the work of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, or Hugo van der Goes, but on close examination the paint surface is in fact thin and seemingly applied in small strokes.  
7 April 2008Today I have put up for sale the Dee portrait, which I finished in March and have now had framed. This is the first time I have attempted to sell one of my paintings for about three years. Click here to see a larger photograph and details of price. 4 April 2008 I always seem to find it difficult to finish a painting. Once all the forms are well established and the bulk of the painting achieved, there remains a time when one tinkers about with the details, strengthening a shadow here and there, altering the modelling, or smoothing out and blending some transitional tones. Nothing much changes as far as the viewer is concerned, but somehow I feel a bit happier with the result. Unfortunately this process can just go on an on and one must eventually call a halt. Usually I then apply a layer of glaze to smooth and blend the different surface paint textures together. One can still overpaint on top of this thin glaze layer of course, but I rarely do this as it can look like a correction, especially when trying to lighten a dark area. So I fiddle about with the little details for weeks until at last I apply the glaze. 3 April 2008 I have almost completed my facsimile copy of the Splendor solis image in oils. I just have to tighten up and rework some of the details - say another 6 to 10 hours. You can see this on my page showing what I am working on at present. 30 March 2008 I have now obtained good quality photographs of a number of those fascinating tracing boards used in Freemasonry. Most of these date to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A few years ago I made a painting of a masonic tracing board which I subsequently sold. I find these gatherings of symbolism into a stylised painting rather interesting. As far as I understand, these tracing boards were originally made as line drawings on cloth, which were laid out on the floor of a Masonic Lodge during one of their rituals. Later some of these were made into coloured paintings, and it is these that especially interest me. So, when I find the time I will make paintings of these boards, probably in a relatively small format, say 16 by 12 inch in size. As some of these are rather old and have become damaged I will be able to restore them to their original form when making the facsimile paintings. They are a strange form of symbolic artwork but well worth recreating and making them available to people again.        
26 March 2008 It rather saddened me recently to hear that the bulk of the Robert Lenkiewicz paintings are to be sold off next month at an auction house in Exeter. The Lenkiewicz estate have had no choice because of the debts (reportedly around two million pounds) that this wonderful artist left behind when he died in 2002. Some of his paintings were sold a few years ago and also much of his library. Robert was deeply interested in occultism and religious philosophies, not that he was a believer but rather that these aspects of the human condition fascinated him. I got to know him in the 1990's when he would sometimes phone me up to ask my advice about whether he should buy some rare book he had noted in some sale. Eventually I managed to meet up with him at his studio in Plymouth, where he showed me his amazing library, and talked about his project to establish this as a permanent collection open to the public as a research resource. He also wanted to keep his major paintings in Plymouth by setting up a museum/galley for his work. Sadly, his ambitious project is now not to be. He died too young, only 60 years old. Had he had another ten or fifteen years to further his reputation, and establish higher prices for his paintings, I feel sure he would have been able to raise the funds to set up this project. The Lenkiewicz Foundation, no doubt, struggled to rescue Robert's vision, even a part of it. They can probably take comfort in knowing that with the paintings being widely dispersed, Robert's stature will be increased, as these now find their way into public collections and museums worldwide. His paintings are quite breathtaking, few people cannot but be impressed when they first see these works. They have such flair and technical brilliance, and yet they deal with deep social matters. He was certainly one of the greatest British painters of the modern period, though almost totally neglected by the British art establishment who prefer artwork as light switches turned on and off, and packets of adhesive coloured dots to stick on your wall. He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. At least one painting will never leave the area, as it was painted on the walls of circular room in a private house. I was privileged to have been able to see this piece, the Riddle Mural which is so technically amazing, even including anamorphic figures. Now what artist has been able to do that since Holbein in 1533? 25 March 2008 Over the passed few days I have made considerable progress with the Splendor solis painting. The illuminated border was particularly difficult and exacting work to copy. This was probably painted by Simon Bening or someone of his stature. I am working on a twice sized copy but I am really pushing at the limits of what can be done. Of course I am using the medium of oils, whereas the original is painted using water based colours on parchment. With watercolours tighter detail can be achieved. I suppose I could have worked in water based acrylics, but I find oil painting more satisfying, and the end result seems much more substantial somehow, but even working with small brushes, there is a limit to how accurately one can push the paint about. The border certainly tests ones ability to paint flowers and multicoloured birds and is a great delight. I have already substantially completed the central image and once I finish the border, I will return to the central image and rework that with more detail. I am rather happy at finally being able to work out a convincing representation for the river estuary in the background. The original is ambiguous and suggests forms with a few strokes of paint. I decided to interpret some areas as being islands in a wide estuary and suddenly the image seems to work for me. As an added bonus, by accident I have created a little atmospheric reflection of light on the water, and this provides a rather nice focus point for the central image. This painting has reached the point where it looks close to completion yet one is aware that there is so much more to do, and there are quite a few problem areas to sort out. Now I have invested many hours of work into the painting I find myself becoming a little paranoid that I might ruin it with a bit of carelessness or a rush of ill-placed enthusiasm. I spent most of the evening working on the two stags in the foreground of the border. 20 March 2008 I took a short break from the complex paintings I am currently working on, and made a painting based on a small illumination in a 15th century Flemish manuscript. This is by an unidentified artist, the Master of Evert Zoudenbalch, sometime around 1465-70 and the manuscript is now in Wolfenbüttel in Germany. I have substantially completed this, though it needs a few hours more work to tighten up the detail and soften the colours. I have enlarged it considerably but it is still a small painting about 7 inches (180mm) square. For comparison I show the original.  
18 March 2008 On seeing that I was now devoting time to painting one of my contacts amused me with the remark that I seem to be the champion of lost causes, constantly swimming against the tide of current opinion. With my attempts to pursue alchemy as it really was, through looking at its original documents, rather than jumping on the esoteric bandwagon that is so popular nowadays. Also my interest in modern tarot as art, when the art world just sneers and ridicules this as junk and ephemera. Now he says, I have gone one better and am trying to interest people in art that died 500 years ago. He thought me completely misguided in trying to make facsimile copies of 15th century artworks, and even suggested that one can buy these from various Chinese factories for around $50, so why bother. I must say I found this a little bit insulting as this person has not seen the quality of my paintings nor compared them to the output of the Chinese sweatshops. I saw a documentary on these Chinese mass produced paintings recently. One artist was making a copies of the same painting by van Gogh working on a kind of assembly line, where he did 20 or so at at time, going from painting to painting working on the same area. It seems he was making hundreds of copies a day! I wonder how he would manage making a copy of the Rogier van der Weyden or an detailed alchemical work such as an image from the Splendor solis. Anything can look good when it is shown as a small image on the computer screen. As always I seem to be out on a limb, pursuing a vision that few seem to share. I am lucky to have a sense of humour and not take too seriously such criticisms. To have my work compared to the rubbish being churned out of China is depressing yet amusing at the same time. 15 March 2008 One of the difficulties I have is in finishing a painting. The sort of work I produce is so very detailed and when I am working on a painting there always arises a point when all the major forms are well established and the rewarding task of solving all the problems of construction and finding ways of creating particular effects and balancing the colours across the piece has been completed. One is then left with the task of finishing all the details. This requires quite a lot of will power. Other artists tend just to leave out the details and textures, merely suggesting them with some broader brushstrokes. It is perhaps my folly that I like to view paintings up close, and thus I want the detail to be there, even when it is viewed from a foot or so away. Usually when the painting looks complete to most people, I am not satisfied and feel I have to do at least as much work again on the details. Though it might look good when seen from 4 or 6 feet out, I feel I need to put in more detail so that it will look even better from that distance and will stand an even closer viewing. At the moment I have four paintings at this stage, so I must over the next few weeks use all my will power and determination to work on the details. I saw a documentary about the artist Whistler recently, and he was striving to create effects in his paintings that would be seen from a distance. Thus he had special long handled brushes made for him (seemingly about three feet long) so that he could stand some considerable distance from his canvas when painting. There are a number of Whistlers here in Glasgow in the Hunterian Art Gallery and I have looked at these a few times. I can see how his art works when seen from across the room, but I cannot really appreciate it up close as the texture of the brushstrokes seems to get in the way. 
13 March 2008I have almost completed my portrait of John Dee. I probably need another short session of a couple of hours just to tidy up a few areas and blend some elements together. Then I have to leave it to fully dry for some weeks before varnishing it. I will have to sort out a frame for it then hopefully I will offer it for sale, probably early in May. I expect this will sell rather quickly as I have already had a couple of enquiries. It is a small painting on board 11.25 by 8.75 inches (285 by 223 mm). 
11 March 2008Recently I was able to obtain high resolution scans of the Splendor solis manuscript which is now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg. Most people only know the Splendor solis as the version in the British Library and few realise that it is a copy made in 1582 from the Nürnberg version which was painted in 1545, some 37 years earlier. The Nürnberg version seems much more finely painted, particularly the illuminated border, but rarely reproduced in modern books on alchemy, as the British Library version is much more accessible. Some people have even suggested that the border and the central image were painted by different specialist artists. Unfortunately the Nürnberg manuscript images have sustained a little damage, at least some colour changes, possibly due to dampness, degeneration in the underlying vellum, earlier attempts at cleaning, or perhaps some surface varnish which has changed its translucency. It seems to me to be a surface phenomenon. When I have time I intend to make a facsimile painted copy which will attempt a restoration of these colours of the famous image of the man emerging from the swamp. 9 March 2008 I have decided that the next painting I will attempt is the miniature by Jean Perreal (c1460-1530) which prefaces an alchemical poem, La Complainte de Nature, in a manuscript in the Sainte-Genevieve library in Paris. The painting has been dated to 1516, (thus predating the Splendor solis). I did make a facsimile of this back in 2000 which I sold rather quickly, and, as I did in that painting, I will extend the image to the left of the plant form so as to include the bud. I always felt the image looked a bit cropped off. The vanishing point for the perspective in the original is outside the image, which can be unsatisfactory for the viewer. I will also reddraw and extend the image to the right of the alchemist's tower a small amount, as I find the incomplete door and window slightly unsatisfactory. I will also extend the painting upwards a little as one does not clearly see the light descending down onto the flask. I have just been reading an excellent article on this painting by the alchemical scholar Barbara Obrist. Scholars are so good at finding things and she tentatively associates the image of the large plant with a gigantic lily set up on the Bourgneuf Gate of the city of Lyons to celebrate the return of King Francis I in 1515. Perreal may have been involved in planning these celebratory decorations. Anyway I have made a provisional tracing for the painting enlarging it a little at the sides.  
8 March 2008 I have decided now to allocate as much time as possible over the next year to producing more paintings. When working on my recent painting I found that the colour temperature of the light under which I was working was too low, too red. I use a dual quartz halogen floodlight some distance back from my easel and some daylight spotlamps close up to the painting to add more blue to the lighting. This is inadequate, so I have now installed a metal halide floodlight high up on the wall of my workshop. This is a much higher colour temperature light source but being basically an arc light it is rather harsh, so I have mounted it on the other side of the room from my painting work space and this just adds to the colour spectrum without dominating the illumination. The light thus shines from above over my shoulder, hopefully mimimising casting my shadow onto the area I am working on. I will try it out over the next few days in the hope that it solves a few problems. It is essential not to look direct at this light source as it is so bright. 7 March 2008 People sometimes say to me, "you should make some original paintings rather than copying these old works". To many people, art is all about originality, an artist is someone who creates something entirely new. Of course this does not apply to music, as so many people prefer to hear the works of long dead composers such as Telemann, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy and all the others, and even avoid listening to music being composed nowadays. In an inverted way, my work is very different in that I am not interested in creating something original, but in restoring and reviving artworks of centuries ago, and especially those with allegorical, alchemical and emblematic import. The world is full of artists all doing completely different and original things, many of which seem very poor, apart from being entirely devoid of technique. The art world is full of such rubbish, all labelled as "original". Yesterday I came across one of those silly entirely media driven art stories. Helena Seget has a pet rat whom she calls 'Tony Blair'. Somehow she has managed to get some bits of wire, discarded food and nuts which have been chewed by this rat, exhibited in the Lime Studio Gallery in Newcastle and even mentioned on the prestigous Saatchi Gallery website. This rat even has a weblog. It is rather depressing to see such nonsense given public exposure - no doubt some sad individuals will buy these chewed up shreds, or she will get some publicity for her other work on the back of this. Here I am struggling with the nuances of the different earth tones, the wonderful transparency of raw and burnt Sienna, how the opacity of Naples Yellow is useful in flesh tones, and how a delightfully subtle greyish green arises from mixing Prussian Blue with burnt Sienna and Vandyke Brown. We admire technique in a concert pianist, a ballet dancer, an ice skater, or a jazz musician, but it seems that it is no longer much valued in art. 6 March 2008< |