David Bellamy’s Arabian Light

If you thought the Middle East was just sand and showy ziggurats, think again. David Bellamy has always been a travel writer at heart and this book explores the spirit of a region the West often dismisses. His skill lies in finding the hidden corners that define the character of a place rather than its public faces and spaces. He also explores the life of the region through its people as they go about their daily lives; again, these are things done for practical purposes rather than public show. Thus, we get a quiet corner of Cairo at night (David doesn’t completely eschew the larger settlements), the eerie light of midday heat among the rocks of a wadi (a dry valley), where scale is provided by middle-ground figures. At the same time, David also visits Petra and Abu Simbel, somehow managing either to avoid the crowds, or at least edit them out. These results typify his ability to capture atmosphere – in words as well as pictures – with an assuredness that betokens both familiarity and understanding.

David is no wide-eyed first-time tourist and the book tells the stories of several journeys, giving each section an effective narrative arc, for he is also a master storyteller whose words and pictures are part of a whole, rather than one being an adjunct to another. Travel books are often separated between a writer and a photographer whose visions are – even if subtly – different. As a result, you look at the pictures as one piece of the jigsaw and the words as another, the illustrations being a counterpoint to what you are told. When the author is an artist, the images are not necessarily a blindly faithful record, but rather an assemblage that captures both the essence of the scene and the impression it made on the painter. That eerie light would be almost impossible to capture with a camera, but responds perfectly to the subtle hues and granulation of watercolour.

The overall impression of this beautiful book is of the narrative arc I referred to before. It’s the story not just of a journey, but of a place and its people and David has done it supreme justice.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

David Bellamy’s Landscapes Through The Seasons in Watercolour

This is an expanded version of David’s Winter Landscapes which appeared in 2014. It’s therefore no surprise that this is the season that gets the greatest coverage. Overall, on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, about two-thirds is new material. For a ten quid paperback, that’s not exactly daylight robbery if you have the previous book (which, as one of David’s super-fans, you will).

If this is all new to you, be assured that the integration is good and you won’t be able to see the joins. Search Press are very good at this kind of thing and the progress is seamless. What may appear slightly odd is that it begins with Summer, especially as it comes out in Autumn. This is all down the Beastly Virus – it was one of the many titles that got delayed, having been slated for the middle of the year. Most books on the seasons begin with Spring because – well – because any start point than that is always going to be idiosyncratic. Move on, it’s not a biggie.

The whole thing is sound and well executed, with the demonstrations and overall quality of work fully up to the standard you’d expect but (whispers), sometimes don’t get from David. One or two of his more recent books have felt – to me, at least – a little rushed and almost as though his heart wasn’t in it. If you wondered whether he was losing his creative mojo, though, just look at Arctic Light. That’s a tour de force.

So, anyway, this is as thorough a guide to painting outdoors at all times of the year and in all weathers as you could wish. At 96 pages, it’s practically concise, but there’s no wasted space and it feels a lot larger. David isn’t just a great painter, he’s a great distiller of information and the way it’s presented. Do you get the impression I’m telling you to buy this? Good.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

David Bellamy’s Seas and Shorelines in Watercolour

This is David’s best book in a long time and his Arctic trip seems to have rekindled his love of all things rugged. It tells the story of the littoral – the point where land and sea meet. Astonishingly, although there have been books on painting the sea and on coastal scenes, this moment of transition has largely passed the instructional book market by. It’s possible that this is because margins are always hard to define – they’re small and tend to vanish when you look at them.

So, is this a book about nothing at all? Well, no, of course it isn’t. What David has done is to combine the two conventional approaches – sea and land – and show you how they inextricably interact. So, you get waves both crashing and lapping on cliffs and beaches, harbour villages clinging to rocky slopes that teeter down to the water’s edge, as well as boats, buildings, birds and people.

There’s also a nicely complete narrative to the book’s construction. You don’t just get a series of unconnected exercises and demonstrations, but rather the story of how the coastline connects land to water and the margin to itself, creating a string of scenes and opportunities. It’s as thrilling as it is informative and the results are stunning.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

David Bellamy’s Arctic Light

I first encountered David Bellamy almost by accident. The husband of a friend of my wife’s was a freelance designer and happened to remark that I ought to see the book he was working on, which was The Wild Places of Britain. It was amazing. I followed it up with the publisher, struck a deal and sold an awful lot of copies. I said of it then that David visits hidden and out-of-the-way places and brings back their atmosphere, people and stories.

Since then, there have been many more books, mostly instructional, and the work he does for exhibition has only occasionally been seen in print.

The Arctic is one of the world’s last great wildernesses and getting to it imposes a huge number of difficulties. Simply existing there is also a challenge and carries very real dangers. Imagine, then, trying to paint in freezing winds, snow and ice when your body and materials are as unwilling to co-operate as they can be. David has a reputation for painting on the edge and has been shown hanging off ropes on desolate crags before. This, however, is a whole different ballgame.

If this was just a tale of endurance, it would have little to recommend it. Sure, learning that gin is a great antifreeze (for your painting water) is all part of the fun that David manages to make this seem, but if the art wasn’t up to scratch, the book would be meaningless.

It’s therefore a pleasure to report that David is at the peak of his powers. The conditions that make the Arctic a challenge to visit also make photography difficult and painting captures the landscapes better than the camera ever can. Few of us will ever make it this far north, and that’s as it should be. Wildernesses like this can only be preserved by their remoteness and lack of visitors. The Antarctic is already being endangered by tourism.

The value of the book, therefore, is the tale it tells, in both words and pictures, of a beautiful region that is filled with mystery, unfamiliar creatures, and inhabitants who live on the edge and have strange legends. This is both a traveller’s tale and a love story and David is perhaps the only person alive who can tell it so effectively. His paintings, all exquisitely reproduced, are breath-taking and the words he weaves round them create the nearest impression of actually being there that most of us will, or should, ever achieve.

This is a major contribution to science as well as to art and a magnificent production of which all involved should be proud.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

DVD Winter Landscapes in Watercolour || David Bellamy

“In winter, there’s generally a bit more colour around and you get away from all those awful summer greens” – and I don’t think he’s talking about cabbage.

That’s quite a challenging statement, especially as David is standing in a landscape thickly covered with snow at the time. “Monochrome” is the word that more obviously springs to mind. However, this is a film as much about overcoming preconceptions as it is about the process of painting.

If you’ve been following David’s career, you’ll remember that his earliest films were “adventures” and featured him hanging off ropes or clinging onto vertical surfaces like a mountain goat. All that was a lot of fun to watch, but it had less to do with the practicalities of what the rest of us would call the real world. I’ve remarked before that it’s been noticeable that his recent work has been much more centred in valleys and that’s true here. Even the opening demonstration, where he makes the remark about colours, is filmed at the roadside and all the locations in the film are perfectly accessible.

So, this isn’t a film about investing in extreme-weather equipment and where best to source a distress beacon. Rather, it’s about wearing enough layers – actually, scrub that: it’s about painting, pure and simple. What David demonstrates is how to make quick sketches – one of the most successful, and also quickest, is done with a single Inktense block – either from the car or close to its refuge. Getting out in cold weather isn’t about endurance, but practicality. Take a minimum of equipment and work quickly, make colour notes, concentrate on the main meat of the scene rather than too many details. Oh, and yes, do wear plenty of layers.

Because everything’s done quickly, there’s a good number of different demonstrations here and David does indeed show you how subtle winter colours can be – skies are rich with reds and yellows and the buildings of a moorland farm stand out against a snowy background instead of blending into it as they would in summer.

Demonstrations done, David returns to the warmth and shelter of the studio. Here, there’s space to use stretched paper rather than a block, and not to have to worry about being able to keep hold all of your equipment while you work. There’s also time to consider composition and this becomes, for me, perhaps the most interesting section of the film. Remember that Inktense sketch? If you were watching closely, you’ll have noticed that David was already tightening up the relation of the two buildings in it. Now, he brings them together even more as a compositional unit, changes the way the foreground leads in and the background hills frame the whole thing. A previously non-existent piece of farm equipment also makes an appearance as a foil to the centre of interest and a useful splash of red to provide focus. This exercise isn’t so much about painting in winter (though that’s the subject) as about the authorial content of painting. If you wanted an essay that refutes Fox Talbot’s claim, relating to photography, that “from today painting is dead”, this would be it. You can’t do what David does in anything other than a painting. There’s no viewpoint that would give you want he presents, which isn’t a representation of the scene as it was, but of its element, its spirit. It’s a bit of a masterclass, actually, and I’d buy the film for this alone.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

Winter Landscapes in Watercolour || David Bellamy

Winter, David tells us, is an ideal time for painting. The cold weather brings crisp, clear light and views are unobscured by leaves and vegetation. Long plein air sessions are not necessary and modern clothing offers enough protection for quick sketching and photographic trips. It’s also a chance to practice with colours other than the inevitable green!

The subjects covered are largely those you’d expect from David: hills, mountains, waterfalls, trees and buildings as well as people and animals. His treatments are by turns both dramatic and pacific. I’ve observed before that a calmness has crept into his work in recent years and that’s well in evidence here, even when accompanied by his trademark dramatic skies.

Structurally, the book begins in autumn and finishes in spring, so that winter itself is nicely bookended and David is able to demonstrate the subtle way that the landscape changes through the seasons, with colours muting progressively before they subdue completely and then re-emerge.

This is a timely and worthwhile book that will delight both general painters and David’s (many) fans alike. There’s a good variety of material and plenty of examples and step-by-step demonstrations.

Click the picture to view on Amazon

Skies, Light & Atmosphere in Watercolour || David Bellamy

After some forays into more general books, it’s nice to see David getting back to the subjects he’s best known for and, let’s be honest, he’s most comfortable with. The book follows David’s fairly discursive style, with explanations, examples and demonstrations for each section – the three elements of the title are taken separately.

There’s an excellent variety of material here, from mountains to landscapes and settings both in the UK and abroad, which makes for a good choice of approaches.

There’s really not a lot more I can say. This is classic Bellamy and well up to the standard we’ve come to expect of him.

	David Bellamys Skies, Light & Atmosphere in Watercolour Book

David Bellamy’s Mountains and Moorlands in Watercolour

Well, here’s a thing. Somehow, when I first heard about it, I assumed this was going to be a much larger book than it is but, if it had been, it would have been too much of a re-hash of many of David’s previous books.

So, having got over the slight shock of how he’s managed to concertina the subjects he’s best known for into a mere 80 pages, has David managed to do himself justice? A quick flick through gives a strong sense of a return to form and style. David’s previous book, the Complete Guide to Watercolour Painting, maybe suffered a little from being spread too thinly and perhaps going into a few areas he wasn’t completely comfortable with. Can I say he’s maybe not the greatest figure painter that’s ever lived? What he’s done here, however, is to create a guide to painting mountains that manages to be entirely about its subject and, in spite of the above-the-title billing, not just David Bellamy’s mountains.

Books about upland painting are not entirely thin on the ground, but this is David’s speciality and, in this amazingly compact and comprehensive guide, he’s reclaimed the subject and stamped his authority firmly on it. If you ever had any doubts, when it comes to rugged subjects, David Bellamy is the man.

The book consists of a basic introduction to materials and techniques, moving into subject matter: trees, water, rocks and buildings. After that, there are four demonstration paintings, each with a good, but not excessive number of steps, which give you ample opportunity to try out the ideas and techniques previously learnt.

As an introduction to landscape painting, this is, perhaps inevitably, hard to beat. At the same time, it’s also going to satisfy David’s many fans and leave them relieved that, even after all these years (sorry, David!), he hasn’t lost his touch or started to repeat himself.

	David Bellamys Mountains & Moorlands in Watercolour Book

David Bellamy’s Complete Guide to Watercolour Painting

There are some artists who get above the title billing and it’s traditional by now that David Bellamy’s books are not just by him, they are his own, no-one else’s. I’m being unfairly flippant, because David is one of the most popular writers and teachers of painting around, a status he has deservedly held for many years.

In the past, a lot of David’s work has been on the athletic side and he’s painted hanging off ropes from mountains and in the teeth of snow, ice and gales. This, of course, was all good knockabout stuff, but there was some excellent work underpinning it and a lot of the entertainment disguised solid and sound instruction; a lot of teachers forget that an entertained audience learns more readily. In recent times, however, a greater sense of tranquillity has entered David’s work and he’s as likely to paint the valley floors as he is the tops of the hills. It also means that there are more buildings and people and even, let if be said: flowers.

So, what does this offer that we haven’t already seen in David’s previous books? Well, a change of publisher often brings a change of pace and the move from a landscape to an upright format gives a more logical flow to the step-by-steps. There’s also, as I hinted before, a much wider variety of subject matter and overall a slightly greater emphasis on the how-to-do-it than the how-I-did-it: more step-by-step and less analysis. Just flicking through the pages gives a sense of a cornucopia and makes you want to get down to the contents in more detail. This may sound like a superficial way of judging a book, but it’s remarkably effective. If it doesn’t grab your attention as the pages flick past, the chances are it doesn’t have much to say. This one grabs hard and holds on.

Overall, I come down to the view that this is a great deal more than just another one for the fans. David’s many followers will buy it, of course, but this could (should) bring new converts, or maybe just provide a really rather quietly excellent introduction to watercolour for readers are aren’t bothered by personality.

	Complete Guide to Watercolour Painting Book (Paperback) with David Bellamy

Learn To Paint Watercolour Landscapes || David Bellamy

Given the popularity of the Learn to Paint series and of David Bellamy as an author, it was inevitable that Collins would put the two together eventually.

Shoehorning David’s broad and enthusiastic approach into 64 pages was always going to be a struggle and there was also a risk that his rather individual approach might overwhelm a series that’s supposed to provide basic introductions rather than more extensive studies. For all that, both author and publisher have made a good fist of it and David, ever the professional, has clearly understood the brief and not tried to go beyond it.

The book has a feeling of being well filled and probably works best as a Bellamy primer, and is no bad thing for that either.

Collins 1999, reissued 2008
£8.99

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=artbookreview-21&o=2&p=8&l=as1&asins=0007271794&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr