| Winter on Snowdon Keith Bowen
Oils and pastels in
Snowdonia
As a full-time
professional artist, Keith
Bowen has done his share of
travelling. In the
mid-1990s, he made a number
of trips to the US over a
two-year period as he
developed his book Among the
Amish. He has done the
near-obligatory series of
paintings of Venice, and
another series of Provence.
Now, however, he is focused
almost exclusively on his
homeland of north Wales.
It is a decision that
involves him in
long-distance commuting. His
home and studio are in
Scotland. Every four to six
weeks he packs his sketching
materials and storm-proof
clothing and heads off to
Snowdonia.
Once there, every second
counts. "Even if the weather
is awful, I'm out there," he
says. "I haven't got the
luxury of being able to sit
back, waiting for it to
clear. But I feel very
comfortable in these wild
places, much more so than in
a modern shopping centre.
"Spending time in Venice
and Provence was fine, but
I've been mucking about in
the Welsh hills for ever. I
have a greater understanding
of this landscape, a greater
gut feeling for it."
Oils and pastels
Half of Keith's studio is
set out for oils, and half
for pastels. He will work
in, say, oils on several
paintings, until he feels
that a particular subject
might work well in pastels.
Then he switches for a while
until he is ready for a
change once more. At his
one-man exhibition at the
Martin Tinney Gallery,
Cardiff, this summer about
three quarters of the work
was pastel.
Whichever medium he uses,
however, the paintings are
recognisably his. "It is not
a style," he stresses. "I
don't strive for a
particular style. Drawing is
handwriting, and what you
see is my handwriting."
"To me, a single line
would not look right and,
most importantly, would be
out of character with the
rest of the painting," he
explains. "As you come down
the picture the approach
changes slowly from rear to
middle distance, and then in
the foreground the marks are
much more vigorous and
pronounced.
"Even with the patch of
white water, which makes a
solid shape, you have not
one mark but an accretion of
many marks."
But Keith does draw a
distinction between his two
favourite media. With oil
paints — he uses mostly Old
Holland and Winsor & Newton
Artist grade — the
possibilities are infinite,
he says.
"Choices have to be made
between rough canvases or
smooth panels, and between
huge ranges of brushes and
palette knives, according to
the texture I want to
achieve. This is very
exciting, but it does
sometimes mean I can get
sidetracked into thinking
about the medium rather than
the message.
"I am happier with
pastels because I don't have
to think about what I am
doing, just about what I am
trying to say."
Pastels
His oil paintings begin
with a brush drawing in grey
or earth tones, his pastels
with a charcoal drawing on a
finegrade industrial
sandpaper, which he works
and reworks until he is
happy with the
composition. Then, as shown
in his demonstration
painting Carrying Sheep, he
almost obliterates the
original drawing as he
covers the surface with a
mass of lines in randomly
chosen colours — a technique
favoured by Degas.
By allowing some of these
colours to glint through, he
aims to give a depth to his
paintings which, he
believes, cannot be found in
photographs or digital
images. And he has plenty of
colours to choose from —
almost 2,000 pastels in all,
including full sets of Daler-
Rowney, Unison, Schmincke
and Sennelier.
Nothing is invented in
his paintings, he points
out, but that does not mean
all the elements were in the
same place at the same time.
His models are shepherds and
farmworkers who have been
photographed at work, and
then sketched in Conté. "I
have many, many drawings of
the way sheep could be, but
the one I selected in this
instance was right for this
picture. In the same way, I
have chosen the very best
hands I could find in my
sketchbooks. The crux of the
painting is the knuckle of
the index finger, which
shows the strain of holding
the sheep."
Bowen paints the hills
and farmers of Snowdonia not
just because he has known
them since childhood but
because he sees a way of
life that could disappear.
"We and the landscape are
one," he says. "The phrase
everyone uses is 'We are all
moving forward', whereas I
want to cling on. "All of
these things are extremely
important, and we lose them
at our peril. If there is a
link across my work, that
would be it."
|
Carrying
Sheep, pastel, 391/2x291/2in (100x75cm)
