Artist Statement
Learning to paint is like mastering the piano, once you’ve learnt, your desire is to make beautiful music. Perhaps to play Beethoven or Mozart.
Technical proficiency with any one medium is just the beginning. A master of the medium can go onto to express their thoughts and feelings about the world to one and all. One can create a masterpiece.
My desire is to express the beauty in what otherwise might go unnoticed. Whether it’s the subtle nuances of colour in a flower, or the interesting flicker of light on a piece of wood, I want to draw ones attention to the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Something’s are intrinsically beautiful they need no introduction, other things are quiet and understated and need careful handling in order to draw out. All these things have a place in my work.
Impressionist or Realist
Is someone who paints in a representational manner, in reality a painter of abstraction?
Certainly my concern is with the basis of abstraction with which the painting is based upon. But am I an abstract painter as is understood in modern day parlance, the answer is surely no.
An impressionist perhaps?
Certainly the impressionist movement headed up by the likes of Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt and Renoir have influenced many contemporary oil painters, me included. But French impressionism is concerned primarily with the play of light and how it effects the colours. This is is paramount in impressionism and to the exclusion of other things . As the famous American Painter Richard Schmid says ‘ I prefer to use the full orchestra’. As do I.
Surely then a realist?
This would be so, were it not for the influence of the American impressionists, and I would include John Singer Sargent, amongst them. I believe that a painting that is not fully resolved, that allows the observer to finish in their mind’s eye the picture, has a much greater interest.
A British Painter
I’m fond of saying as did Prime Minister John Major, that much of my training has been learnt attending the university of life.
Today there’s much greater opportunity to study the painters of any other country. I continue to study the likes of the artist Raphael, Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolai Fechin, Joaquín Sorolla, and so to the international contemporary artists Gregg Kreutz, David A. Leffel, Ken Howard and the like.
Brad J Gerrard
Welcome to my studio
