Forgotten hero

14 April 2023

Forgotten hero

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 April 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The idea of portable oil colours had been kicking around on the continent for a while before the invention of the ‘tinny tube' of ready-made pigments. Painters up until the arrival of the tube with a screwable top had been using pig bladders sewn up to make them function as small portable pockets of colour. Yuck!

The squeezibly practical tin tubes came on the London market in 1841. The inventor for this bright idea was an American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand, who was living in London and painting portraits. His US patent soon brought him wealth beyond measure when the paint maker Winsor Newton began selling his tubes full of their own oil paints. Alas, with this income, Rand invested in an exotic idea for an Aeolian Pianoforte(?), an idea that never took off. So sadly in debt, he sold his patent to Winsor Newton and the rest, as they say, is history. Rand went back to America where he continued painting portraits but with little apparent success. Despite this, he was a happy man with a large family, as it was noted in his obituary a few years later. I like that happy-go-lucky American spririt that pervaded entreprenuers in those early days. 

Here in the 21st century, don’t we all seem to take everything for granted? Needless to say, Rand’s idea changed everything for the painting world. Would we have had the wave of Impressionist pictures or the millions and millions of amateur artists painting today? Imagine the effect this had upon the work of someone like Vincent van Gogh, born merely twelve years after this invention? Somehow, I cannot imagine Vincent filling pig bladders with Chrome Yellow or Ultramarine Blue on the night before his outings in the fields around Arles. 

And the funny thing about it, is that no one has yet improved upon it in almost 200 years. Yes, the cheaper versions are now made of flexible plastic, but nothing has changed about its use. Personally, I am forever both indebted and endeared to Mr Rand here at the beach where I come most nights to make order out of all these colours housed in little tin homes and squeezed out like toothpaste on the palette. 

This picture was one of two from the other night. It was a wonderful bloom,  and just being out at the beach did me a load of good. These beach afternoons are in an uneasy truce with the Autumn weather. There are whole weeks when I‘m cooped up at home. But rain is good, so they say when it’s been dry, and which it has. When I do get out to paint I often feel like I’m visiting my therapist. But despite the uneven météo, some days are super clear and they bring on some great blooms too. This one I managed to catch and reel in like a fisherman. I’m not sure what to think about. It certainly reveals the melodrama that spills into the night, or maybe just all the melodrama within me.

Looking at it now it suddenly occurs to me that there is has no black in its DNA. Indeed, none of the paintings in this book has even a tiny scintilla of Mars Black, Ivory Black or any other black. I know lots of people use black in every genre of painting, but why would anyone use black of all colours, in a seascape? But hey!

In these pictures I never need to get close to black, but if I ever did, I'd use Prussian Blue with some Alizarin Crimson and a dash of strong Chrome Yellow, give or take the proportions, and adjusting it like a festive cook in his kitchen. 

And speaking of black, unlike the sartorial soberity of so many of my fellow collegues in this art game, I never wear black. I’m a light-grey kinda fella, for I like to be no one and nowhere, invisible in fact,,, socially speaking.

Black is defiantly Post Modern though. It’s also pretty Goth too, so there is humour in there somewhere if one has the patience to find that. Years ago, When I lived at the Chateaunoir outside Aix. A ‘serious poet’ moved in for a time. Every 10 days or so, after washing his laundry, he hung it out on a line between two immense pine trees in a small clearing above. Everything that on it was black. Though slightly faded, there were black socks, black underwear, black tees, black dress shirts, black shorts, black slacks and black jeans. It was weird, like living next to the Adams Family.