Chris Rose - visiting artist

Chris Rose is a local wildlife/bird artist. Although he works in a very realistic style he describes his paintings as about colour, light and pattern and he uses abstract shapes. He will play with horizontals and verticals to make things more interesting.
He started off in illustration as he needed to earn a living. He was one of the artists illustrating Handbook of Birds of the World where he had to research exactly how a bird looks and replicate that exactly on paper. He worked very closely with the publisher who had commissioned him and he did what was wanted. He made the picture a quarter bigger than required so they could be reduced which sharpened the pictures. Illustrating a book like this also meant he had to be able to paint the vegetation correctly and to the correct size and think of interesting ways of painting water so it didn't all look the same.
Now Chris paints for exhibitions and enjoyment. He doesn't have to follow anyone's rules bar his own and he paints what inspires him. He does do some linocuts as well to help him see design and pattern.
He currently paints in both acrylics and oils. The advice he gave us was :-
- he paints in the field with a sketch book (very impressive), he says the camera cant cope with everything e.g. photographing into the sun and the human brain can interpret the scene better.
- He asks questions like - what features tell me this is water and how do I interpret that in paint.
- when he is painting a landscape the first thing he does is decide where the horizon is.
- he uses his composition to get the viewer's eye to look around the picture - he says if you put something in the middle, the viewer will look at the middle.
-  you need correct placement of shadows
-  his process is consider the shape of the painting - is it square, landscape, portrait. Do a series of sketches to work out where to put things then rough it out in thin oil, then block in the colours and tones with thin colours, then add detail.
 - he doesn't always use a brush e.g. for sand he has sprayed a toothbrush of paint to get a speckled look, he has used the side of a credit card for grasses and scratched out paint for light grasses. Experiment with mark making.
- work on the whole picture at the same time.
- in order to put something in in a realistic style you have to really understand it which means excessive observation.
- limit the number of colours in mixes - any more than three makes the colours muddy.
- when oil painting he- look for beauty in the normal things. uses two pots of white spirit - one is for cleaning the really dirty brushes, the other is kept cleaner.
- look for beauty in the normal things.


Overall I was very impressed with his paintings, from a distance they look like they could be photos. I loved the way he did water/the sea. His sketch books were amazing if not slightly demoralizing as they weren't achievable to me, however I will never be a realistic painter out of both it is not my talent, and it is not my wish.