65th Painting

64th Painting

63rd Painting

62nd Painting

61st Painting

60th Painting

This is a close up image of one of the 7/7 survivors. Reliving the trauma in court and speaking to reporters afterwards clearly left its mark on her face. Sun and deep shadow added to the drama and emotion of her experience and in order to paint this with a degree of accuracy I painted this upside down.

59th Painting

I used the blissful human situation of a loving father and new baby (the original models were David Cameron and his new baby daughter) and contrasted this with an American female soldier, heavily equipped and ready to fight. Traditional gender roles are questioned in the painting. The release of Wikileakes information regarding politician's knowledge of torture in Iraq scarily highlights man's inability to genuinely respect the human situation.

58th Painting

The original image was a sublime photograph of two young Afghanistan girls. Their composure and simplicity offering no suggestion of the tragedy happening in their country instigated by both the Taliban and foreign troops.

57th Painting

The trauma of the human condition involved in war is forever caught by photographers in the faces of children. The original image gave me no information as to why the child was crying but the fact that he stands so close to a heavily armed soldier creates its own unnerving narrative. The jewel-like colours of the child's red hoody and turquoise background sit behind the power of the camouflage and weaponry.

56th Painting

Another image taken from a domestic violence site. These are sites I've been looking at in preparation for work on some bigger paintings which will at first glance appear to be mainly contemplative pieces. I'm interested in Matisse's notion of a painting being like an armchair at the end of a long day of work. I want to include areas of contradiction into the piece by adding a more political area to the work recognising our own problems, struggles opinions etc. I really admire Martha Rosler's collages.

55th Painting

I've been looking at some images which encompass the contemplative and also something edgy. I found this image which I think was on a site to do with domestic violence. I painted the image completely upside down in the space of about an hour not paying too much attention to what the image was but concentrating on colour and shape and shade. When I turned it up the right way I felt it had some energy which I don't think it would have had if I'd painted it the right way up.

54th Painting

This image was taken from a fashion magazine and generally I don't often find images with a great sense of 'truth' to them in those type of magazines but this was obviously taken without the knowledge of the people around her so it looks relaxed and honest.

53rd Painting

Mohammad Aamer, the 18 year old Pakistani fast-bowler implicated in deliberately playing no-balls in the fourth Test against England. He had just been named Pakistan's man of the series, and now he is suspected of bringing shame to the game and to Pakistan. Blessed with good looks and talent obviously wasn't enough for him and his greed has brought him disgrace and scandal.
For a painter his face offers a striking image full of energy and thought and this is the 2nd painting where I am engaging with the paint marks rather than focussing on the photographic details.

52nd Painting

It's hard to imagine such a well respected person such as David Hockney having such a small minded view with regard to smoking. He's obsessed with the rights of smokers to the point of calling non-smokers 'mean-spirited' and has taken on the mantle of grumpy-old-man His angry rants at non-smokers include complaining to the NHS for banning smoking in the buildings and grounds. Grow-up Mr Hockney, you're living in the dark ages.
My painting of him defiantly smoking is a change in style for me. I painted this completely upside down focussing on colour and line trying hard not to be so obsessed with detail.

51st Painting

Looking for inspirational resource material is a daily event for me and the photographic image I've used as a reference to this piece of work rightfully made the front page of the free paper Metro. The image shows a man and a boy knee-deep in water wading to safety near the village of Basira in the Punjab in Pakistan. The flood-ravaged country has lost villages and livestock with millions of people seeking high ground as the main Indus river burst its banks overwhelming some of the largest dams ever built. This image glows with a spiritual essence, back lit, casting a glow of white light behind the figures with the photographer's shadow spreading across the body of the man. My painting can never do justice to either the subject matter or the sad beauty captured by the camera but as I paint I can spend time considering their plight.

50th Painting

Nigerian novelist Helon Habila sees the act of writing as a political act and his debut book, Waiting For An Angel, draws attention to suffering and injustice. His third novel Oil On Water speaks about the tragedy of the power of the greedy oil companies in Nigeria who he says 'get away with murder'.
How can I make a comment on the world through painting faces? How can I get paint to tell a story about people and their stories?

49th painting

48th Painting

Facial expression in an image has the capacity to hold the viewer's attention beyond the passing glance we often give to a portrait. I thought this child's bewildered reverential stare was definitely worth a longer gaze and I adored painting his beautiful face and couldn't help remembering my own children at this age. Keegan Carty, aged 2 was enjoying a special trip to the Newcastle United's training session.
Artists have used the whole colour palette to depict the face and the flat plane of the canvas means the artist can experiment in order to suggest the arcing and the arching of the face.

47th Painting

This week has seen the aid worker Karen Woo murdered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. She was only 36 years old and about to be married. My painting doesn't do her justice but as I was painting it I had a real sense of her.
Her short life and the unfairness of her situation resonated strongly with me. I'm spending a lot of time with my mum and dad, both in their 80's, and until recently in great health, doing everything together and a bit of an institution in their local neighbourhood. I wanted to show the tenuous hold we all have on life and as I was finishing the painting it seemed apt to let some of the paint drip. The running paint seemed to remind me that we're never complete and never have total control of anything.

46th Painting

Painting of the prize winning poet Jo Shapcott whose primary interest is in the body, '...it's edges, it's weaknesses.'
This image was taken from the recent Saturday Guardian article of her and shows to me a strong intelligent face full of questions and maybe even some answers. The article was highlighting her new book of poems 'Of Mutability' and the spirit of the book is about the late artist Helen Chadwick whose work often references the role and image of women. Artist painting poet referencing artist!

45th Painting

This image was taken from the 24th July's Independent. According to the journalist David Usborne, Anna Wintour, editor of american Vogue, has recently been fighting for the preservation of the 'unique historic neighbourhood' where she lives in Manhattan. She has recently complained about a new Jamaican restaurant about to open near the swish exclusive garden oasis which her apartment backs onto. Not normally seen as a protector of the community, urban or rural (she believes it's ok to wear real fur), she has amused the restaurant owner who sees her community spirit as "...the funniest thing I've ever heard".

13th July 2010

I've been taking some time out of this blog in order to finish my degree and then take the work to London as part of the Truman Brewery's Free Range graduate show.
I'm in the process of setting up a website:-

bernieclarkson.co.uk

which I'm hoping will be active before the end of the summer when I'll be returning back to university to commence an MFA.

44th painting

My friend Tom looking into the distance of Newcastle University grounds. This image was part of the group of images which I took to set up my 'crowd' scenes for the main paintings for my degree show.
It's reminded me to go and take a photograph of everyone so that over the summer I can make a painting each day of a different student in my year. It's going to be hard saying goodbye to everyone as the course comes to an end, luckily about 8 students are going to be staying in Newcastle after the course finishes.

43rd Painting

An election candidate who came second. Finally the 2010 general election has been sorted and we have a coalition. Conservative David Cameron and Lib Dem Nick Clegg are going to work together!
Two weeks to our degree show so hope our band of 45 4th year students manage to coalesce and put on a really good exhibition. We're also working towards taking the show to London, negotiations going on as I write this.
My own work is slowly reaching a point of completion. A solid week of painting should bring it all together. The work is still turning towards a 'realistic' technique as opposed to being freer and looser but maybe that is something I have to accept for the time being.

42nd Painting

The new tv arts programme 'Modern Masters' is introduced by Alastair Sooke and this painting is a 30 minute rendition painted the right way up mainly because I forgot to invert it. It's a very good hour long 4 part programme featuring Warhol, Matisse, Picasso and Dali. My only criticism is 4 programmes aren't enough, there's a lot more out there who could be classed as masters.
Our graduate show is less than 3 weeks away and I would like my quick paintings to number 50 by then so that I can chose 10 to be part of my exhibition work. I do feel that the quick paintings are having an affect on my main work, mainly to do with decision making and confidence. I'm very pleased this is an exercise I've embarked on.

41st Painting

I haven't done the beautiful Eva Green any favours in this painted-upside-down entry. The photographic image I used was from the Independent Traveller and she looked stunning with the blue and the red adding loads of interest. Actors appear to spend their lives struggling to stay in work/stay slim/stay beautiful...
Although each painting is taking a bit longer than I would like I'm still completing them in about 30 minutes. Each painting is roughly 29cms x 42cms, although there's nothing too rough about those measurements!
A fellow student Alice, has just given me an article about Avigdor Arikha a Romanian-born Israeli figurative painter who also paints quickly although his deadline is one day, EASY! Unfortunately he has just died at the age of 81 otherwise it would have been good to talk to him about his working practices.

40th Painting

This seemed an apt image to paint today, election day, and poor old Gordon Brown looks in need of all the support he can get.
This very elongated head looks troubled and heavy, it might take more than his hand to ease his furrowed brow.
Doing lots of painting upside down and really concentrating on angles within the piece and proportions. All the images are 2/3 i.e. the width is two thirds of the height so I'm able to get a chance to to plot where an arm comes in or how much room the head takes up in relation to the whole painting. Bit of maths involved initially to get the photographic image cut to a 2 to 3 ratio but then its relatively plain sailing.

39th Painting

I found the image for this painting very touching. He's called Rafael and he's had a 30-hour face transplant operation. His own face was being very badly affected by tumours. The painting shows him hugging his mum after leaving hospital. A very brave man.

38th Painting

Mrs K was in terrible debt to a loan shark who took advantage of her plight. A muslim, and with a fear of her community finding out, she suffered in silence watching her debt go from £1,000 to £10,000 even though she only borrowed once. The loan shark was a 70 year old man in a wheelchair who was eventually convicted.
I've been looking at this image for a few weeks before I finally painted it. There was something uncomfortable about not seeing her face, but her sadness seemed to move towards me through her hands. I had a stronger essence of her because she had hidden her face. This has helped me to have a clearer focus of what type of images I want to work with. This woman's struggle was part of the inspiration for the painting as well as the colours and composition, but primarily it was her struggle. So I've decided to make the theme of 'struggle' a focus for these quick paintings, and this can be interpreted in many ways as most humans struggle daily in one way or another. Health, money, relationships, disasters...the list goes on, but of course a positive outcome can be the result of a struggle so hopefully this will be a feature of the work too.

37th Painting

Very strange painting of Hilary Clinton which took me far too long to do. I found the image in Saturday's Guardian where she was talking about Afghanistan and its potential to look after itself against the Taliban. She's quite a hard looking lady but my painting portrays her like some aging blow-up doll. Scarey.

36th Painting

Face of a boxer, Nottingham born super-middleweight champion Carl Froch was featured in Saturday's Guardian. The article was accompanied by a close-up of the boxer's face and I was drawn to paint it. Cropping a face as close as this gives the edge of the work interesting lines. His chin creates a lovely 'U' shape against the edges and his eyes go right to the fringes of the painting. There's nothing else to look at, you have to connect with the message the face is telling you, and that can be a different message for each viewer.

35th Painting

This painting is of Charlotte, a lovely student in my year. Another student Tom very kindly gave me this image of Charlotte as he has been painting her too. It's actually given me an idea about painting some of the other students, it makes sense, ready-made models. I've been looking at the work of a Chinese contemporary painter called Liu Xiaodong who uses his friends all the time as the models for his work.

34th Painting

This is a very unfortunate painting of Raj Patel, he of the 'chosen one' fame. I say unfortunate because he's actually very handsome in real life and my painting definitely doesn't do him justice. I painted this one upside down and obviously got all the measurements wrong.
He was my first 'male' painting on the blog so I'm really sorry I didn't do him justice.

33rd Painting

Got this image from a film website for the film 'Happy Go Lucky', a Mike Leigh comedy starring Sally Hawkins. This is her in the painting. Again painted it upside down but had lots of problems with the hands so finished it off the right way up. Spent about 30 minutes on it. I've begun a bigger painting, 90cms x 120cms, which is the face of a beautiful woman captured photographically in the style of Vemeer. The whole painting is the face and I've begun it upside down without any pre-drawing of it!! Good advice from a tutor was to do the whole of the first layer just as blocks of colour.

32nd Painting

Two weeks from the election and the political wives are being aired, in more ways than one. I painted 38 year old tory wife Samantha Cameron, of aristocratic heritage and descendent of Nell Gwyn, upside down. I was beginning to take far too long painting these 'quick' pieces and had forgotten the reason why I'd started the activity in the first place which was to 'abstract' a notion of a portrait rather than paint one.
Painting upside down meant I could stop looking at it from the standpoint of trying to make it perfect (as if !?). This one took 15 minutes, still too long but better than the 45 minutes I had gotten into.

31st Painting

This is the other part of the image with the 2 women sitting on the bus.
In some respects the painting is unfinished and yet the 'space' places it in a more interesting environment.
The faceless blur behind her is another passenger.
I need to start painting men!

30th Painting

I found this image while rifling through a few websites, can't even remember which ones now.
The woman was sitting on a bus with another woman who I've painted in the next painting.
The work is definitely 'taking' longer. Of course I'm allowing it to take longer and I'm still thinking about whether this matters or not. I'm inclined to think that the main criteria is that it's a quick painting and not one that I go back to.

29th Painting

Painting of Roopi Farooki (great name) the Pakistan-born author who has lived in England since a baby and writes about "what's under the skin" rather than the colour of it.
I was quite pleased with how this painting turned out hope it caught some of the energy I saw in the face of the photographic image.

28th Painting

Painting is of the mother of 5 year old Sahil Saheed from Oldham who was kidnapped in Pakistan.
The photographic image shows her holding Sahil in her arms with an ecstatic smile on her face.
My painting shows her with an expression which could be read as a mixture of her pain and her happiness.

27th Painting

Found this image on a photographic website I happened upon. There's obviously a huge resource of images for me to trawl through. The paintings are definitely taking longer than 10 minutes though and I'm not too sure how much I want to worry about that. Today's work took me about 30 minutes as I often get interruptions while working. Have bought new paints and changed from zinc white (which wasn't covering very well) to titanium white, which I much prefer. Have decided to do some technical research on pigments and oils (only in dribs and drabs!) in order to build my technical knowledge which is abysmally poor.

26th Painting

Mother and child wait for news of her husband trapped in a flooded mine in Shanxi province in China.
This image reminds me of the The Tempi Madonna by Raphael as the 2 mothers are obviously getting great comfort from their child. The positioning of the figures and background information act as parallels too.
In both images the young child looks out away from the mother as if onto another world.

25th Painting

Image is a posed model for a mental health article in The Observer. Mental health patients particularly children can face long waits for therapy and mental health problems affect one in three families in Britain and are a great cause of misery.
Although the image is posed it has a lot of sensitivity about it. A student I share my studio with made a comment about the way I am portraying the women in these quick paintings, she didn't exactly say but I'm hoping she felt it too was with a bit of sensitivity.

24th Painting

The face of money. German heiress Katrin Radmacher trying to hold onto her £100 million pounds inheritance after divorcing her husband.
A tense face, far from happy. The beautiful white collar on her dress made me think about white paint and how it used to be made from poisonous lead compound.

23rd Painting

Image of a young 18 year old girl stabbed to death in London on the way to a party.
Difficult to follow that sentence with other information. The incident is too shocking to then add relatively unimportant info about the painting. All I will say however is that the painting looks doll-like and helps to focus on the fact that she was only a child.

22nd Painting

Image of Heather Mills' former nanny at a tribunal where she is suing Mills for constructive dismissal.
Struggling at the moment to find time to do the paintings for this blog. Jusy about seven weeks left to get 2 large paintings of 'Crowd Scenes' done and lots of little ones continuing my theme of authenticity. Haven't even begun those yet. Can't contemplate the amount of work needed to get my essays finished. Easter Bank holiday this weekend so got to work on my second essay which is about aesthetic violence. Just read a really good essay by Jonathan Friday called 'Demonic Curiosity', contemplating emailing him.

21st Painting

This was posted on a Pakistan news website: "She left her country, her family and everything she had for us and this is how we pay them back'. This woman was born in Cardiff and met a young Pakistani on a train and ended up marrying him. He was killed by the Taliban and sadly she was killed by a huge explosion in a Pakistan market.

20th Painting

Finally getting back to the blog paintings after about a week and a half of interruptions. Brilliant family wedding, deadlines for writing modules and interview for the MFA course at Newcastle Uni. Good result from the interview so looking forward to another 2 years studying. What more could I ask for!!!
Painting from the film 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Brilliant but very violent. Busy writing a piece on aesthetic violence in film and its links to paintings such as Caravaggio's 'Judith Beheading Holoferne'. Interesting deciding what is and isn't gratuitous.

19th Painting

Really enjoyed doing this painting of the Queen, hope you recognise her. However, got interrupted in the middle of it by a tutor, so I have no idea how long it took, possibly about 15 minutes. She was featured in the Guardian making Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Alan Johnson laugh. Goodness knows how. Left the rest of the image blank, learning to 'leave a space'!

18th Painting

Painting shows a model at the John Galliano show in Paris. Fluffy ruffle dresses echoed the hairstyles and in the image I used, the hair looked see-through and delicate. Very different image to yesterday's and Monday's. Feel the need to analyse what it is I'm doing here each day. Am I trying to capture a likeness to the original image or am I trying to demonstrate a particular art practice within the confines of '10 minutes'? Definitely the latter. More thoughts on this tomorrow.

17th Painting

3rd week of adding work to the blog and this is the 1st of the Guardian images. The painting shows a young woman with a man's arm around her neck. His other hand holds a long sharp knife. His face is hinted at in the top left-hand corner. My painting has cropped a 3rd figure, a policeman who was wrestling with the man. I've not really caught the tension and terror in the woman's face but as a painting composition I really like some of the angles and the simplicity of colour.

16th Painting

This image, taken in Wootton Bassett, was taken from the free paper Metro and shows a family member of a young rifleman who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. The mention of this town in newspapers and on television has become synonymous with soldiers killed in action. Family members, friends and towns-people line the route taken by the cortege.