Free Your Inner Artist || Penny Stanway

This comes from a publisher and an author I haven’t heard of before and it’s always encouraging to see new faces on the block as they often bring fresh ideas and approaches to a field that can sometimes get a bit predictable.

The thing is, though, that there’s a way of doing these things, of showing how a painting is built up from the initial sketch by using a series of step-by-step demonstrations or by starting with the finished result and deconstructing it. Painting is a linear progression from start to finish and you can’t really get away from that.

This, however, is exactly what Penny Stanway is trying to do. I think it’s fair to sum this up as a guide to art as personal development – indeed the cover blurb says that it “encourages you to let yourself paint”. This is a fine idea and even a little bit “drawing on the right side of the brain” but, amongst letting your creative psyche hang out, you do need to concentrate on technical ability as well. Thump that piano by all means but, if you’re going to do it in public, do at least learn a few of the rudiments of music or risk being the subject of a noise control order.

Reading the author biography reveals that Penny is a doctor and has written on food and cooking as well as health, has been encouraged by her friends and family and is now focussing on art and painting. No qualifications or teaching experience are mentioned and I do get the feeling that collections of her work may be confined to the previously-mentioned family and friends.

So, is the book any good? As a piece of art instruction, I’d have to say no. However, if you feel that a bit of personal development is what you need to help you become aware of the beauty all around you and discover your personal artistic style, then this might be the thing that boosts your confidence and gives you the breakthrough you’ve been looking for. It’s all a bit New-Age for me, though.

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Your Artist’s Brain || Carl Purcell

The whole “right side of the brain” thing can be applied to a great deal of creative endeavour and can be summed up as, “you need to develop an artist’s eye”.

Based on what I’ve picked up here and elsewhere, this comes down to the fact that your left, or intellectual brain, sees flat shapes while your right, emotional, artistic side sees colour, shading and texture whilst also understanding what it sees as a subject, rather than an object.

That’s about it, basically and I’ve saved you the cost of several books. So, is there anything left that you can learn from this one? Well, it’s a perfectly sound look at the creative process, covering a good variety of techniques and subject matter and there are plenty of good ideas. One of the things I struggle with is that, having banged on about colour, shading and depth, a remarkable number of the finished results are, well, a bit flat, which rather overturns the point of the book.

I think this is one you need to see before you buy. If you turn the pages and think, “I could learn from this”, then it’s for you. If, like me, it leaves you a bit disappointed well, don’t worry, there are plenty more fish in the sea.

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Pattern, Colour & Form: new approaches to creativity || Carolyn Genders

This is interesting. Best not to read the jacket blurb, which gets a bit precious and which has as hard a job as I do trying to explain what the book is all about. I think, reduced down to a nutshell, that it’s a look at the way creative people interpret their subject matter. Carolyn Genders looks at everything from painting and photography to jewellery, textiles and glass-making and does actually manage to come up with a coherent analysis of how the same (or at least similar) starting points both inspire and are interpreted.

The end result is a visually-based analysis of the creative process that has you getting further and further into the book rather than being put off by a load of wild theorising. The secret is the huge number of illustrations, the variety of material and the number of different practitioners included. Carolyn doesn’t ask you to believe that all these people create in different ways from a common starting point, she shows you, allows you to make up your own mind and decide for yourself what works and what doesn’t.

It’s rare, indeed almost unheard of, to have not just so many different approaches and techniques, but so many different art forms in one book and it could so easily not work, but we have here an author with a coherent thesis that she presents well.

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