In the galleries

One of the great things about living in London, one of the things that I have never quite become used to since first moving here almost 20 years ago, is the extraordinarily rich and varied selection of exhibitions that are a short distance from home. Feel like finding out what artists were making in Papua New Guinea at the end of the 19th century? Drop in to the British Museum. Wondering about what all the fuss is about with the Turner Prize? Get to Tate Britain. A few old masters? The Wallace Collection. Current state of prawn painting? Go to the National Gallery of Crustaceans. OK, that probably doesn’t exist, but I wouldn’t be so surprised if there was one applying for lottery funding to open right now.

Of course, you don’t need to live in London, or go to London, to delve into this other world – there are plenty of fantastic museums and galleries around the country. But when I am in some London museums, the big national ones especially, it seems that they are mostly being visited by people who have travelled half way across the country, if not all the way around the world, to be there. They are some of the best and most inspiration reasons for coming to London.

I get to galleries quite a lot – it’s part of my job – but perhaps not always the galleries that feed my own practice as an artist particularly well. I was in a library-quiet commercial gallery the other day close to Oxford Street, a contrast of mad bustle on one hand and eery stillness on the other, emphasising the great gulf between the average punter on the street and some contemporary art. But silent galleries let works speak, giving us visitors a chance to get a cosy one-to-one with what’s on display. When did the Mona Lisa last speak? The poor thing is being held under house arrest behind bullet-proof glass by the banks of the Seine and if her muffled cries did manage to escape her sealed world they must surely be saying “get me out of here”.

As it happens, the works I was looking at in the commercial gallery weren’t saying much to me, and what they were saying I wasn’t so keen to hear; at least, I didn’t think they were going to help the art I was going to make when I reached home. The works on show were based on movies, and by the time I left I had my own idea: a video installation made of clips of “The End” appearing at the end of some of the great films in history, perhaps in a loop, so that viewers are caught in continuous track of finality, raising questions of death, reincarnation and immortality, and challenging the viewer to reappraise the place of happy-ever-afterness in their lives.

Oh dear. I needed help. It was at hand. Twenty minutes on the Tube and I was at another exhibition, of contemporary drawings this time. There were a handful of attentive people making their way around it. Some of the drawings were funny and immediate, and made me itch to draw. Then there were some by an artist who sits with a bunch of pencils in each hand mimicking the hand actions of people she selects around her, such as someone cooking in a Hong Kong noodle restaurant, so creating an elaborate abstract trail of marks. Her drawings made me want to experiment more with the ones that I make, to push things further than I do. There were works by other artists that also encouraged me in different ways, to try out new ways, to think about why I do things the way I do.

I find that a good exhibition can be the best boost to my artistic morale, and it is rarely a blockbuster exhibition that is six-deep with visitors. I left with a burning desire to draw. Mind you, I still quite like my “The End” video idea, but I expect a first-year art student somewhere has already done it.

Making a point

Over the years I have collected a wide and rather curious range of artists materials that are stored in an old cupboard in the corner of the studio. Sorting through it recently in the hunt for an A5-sized sketchbook – shades of an alcoholic rifling through the house desperate to find a forgotten and unfinished bottle of scotch – I realise just how much I have restricted myself in the materials I use.

A pile of redundant materials mounts up: aquarelle pencils, rabbit skin glue, hard pastels, soft pastels, oil pastels, oil paints so rich in pigment that a couple of tubes would serve perfectly well as dumbbells, student quality acrylics that look as if they came free with a packet of corn flakes, watercolour masking fluid so old the lid has fused tightly and permanently shut, box upon box of charcoal from, seemingly, every known manufacturer in the western world… And there, lurking at the back, is a blast from the past, a reminder of happy, innocent days from years ago: a bunch of pencils bound together by a now corroded elastic band.

How the memories flood back. There was a time when I hardly went anywhere without a 2B pencil or two in my jacket pocket, along with its inevitable companions, the Swiss army knife and the little black sketchbook. Its place in my pocket has gradually been taken over by the marker pen, which has its advantages, but none of the beauty and naturalness of the pencil. For a start, you cannot look at a marker pen and see how close it is to running out. A one-inch stub of pencil leaves you in no doubt you need to get a new one. And pencils are cheaper, too.

The pencil is still, however, a thing of beauty to me: to bring one to a fine point with a good, sharp knife, to feel that very sharpest point ping and break as it first hits the page, leaving a little splash of graphite dust across the page; to have at one’s fingertips that infinite range of weights of lines and tones that graphic software packages can still only dream of. A pencil is small and light, and available in every high street. It looks and feels organic, the high fibre option. I would even venture to say that, if pushed, a well-sharpened H pencil could be used to perform an emergency tracheotomy. And they work just about anywhere; NASA still uses them on the International Space Station.

In an age obsessed with upgrading and improvement, the pencil is a towering monument to getting something right almost first time. We are now on no more than Pencil 3.0, and considering that it first shipped about 450 years ago that is something to shout about. Of course, there are more recently introduced mechanical pencils and all kinds of coloured and aquarelle pencils that no doubt deserve similar adoration, but the core product, the humble and wonderful graphite pencil, remains gloriously similar to those that appeared in the 16th century. The great lumps of graphite first found on a Cumbrian fell may no longer used in their manufacture (the local shepherds found them useful for marking their sheep), but Nicolas-Jacques Conté’s big innovation in 1795 was to mix graphite powder with clay in varying quantities so that a range of hardness and softness became available. Otherwise, they haven’t changed so much.

There was correspondence in a paper recently about some of the more boring museums that can be found in the UK. The Museum of Lead Mining at Wanlockhead and the British Lawnmower Museum in Sheffield were mentioned. Then someone suggested the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick. Boring? Pencils? I have visited this museum, and suggest you do too. Where else could you find a 26-foot pencil, the world’s longest? It is the pencil lover’s dream.

And so why have I relegated my pencils to the darkened corners of the studio cupboard? It’s a question I am still asking myself. At the moment at least, I am looking for a line that is thicker, blacker, less likely to smudge, and less pencil-like. But they are back in my jacket pocket now, and a relationship has been rekindled.

In the city

I have a day off work and plan to head outdoors with the sketchbook. Inevitably, it rains. Of course, it is the middle of winter and there is no reason to expect that it should do anything else. Who knows what a better climate – induced by global warming or otherwise – might do for our landscape painting tradition?

But having spent too much time in front of a computer – for the day job as well as for scanning in drawings, getting the website set up and applying for things – I’m not going to be put off getting outside to draw. A dose of elemental forces, in the shape of wind and rain, is a relief after too much time spent working in offices.

Discomfort, for me at least, doesn’t preclude creativity. At art school we’d be encouraged to stand up as we worked, which could mean, despite the usual preconceived ideas about art students, that we were on our feet next to an easel for eight hours. Painting can be, should be, a physically draining exercise. Of course, a day spent drawing is a doddle compared with patrolling Basra or being a nurse, and we usually had the strength to stay on our feet by the student union bar in the evenings.

(I still think it makes sense to stay on your feet at an easel if you’re fit and mobile enough: it makes it easy to get in position to make the right marks, especially if you are working large, and it enables you to move away from the work to see how it is going. Sitting down seems to me to be just a little too comfortable.)

King’s Cross in London is hardly the most comfortable place to be drawing either. The area is currently in the grip of developers, as what was once a congested drug-riddled area frequented by kerb-crawlers tries to turn itself into a cosy inner-city neighbourbood where a flat is worth more than the GDP of some African nations. I like its transitional period anyway. The scaffolding is up, cranes abound, and there is an energy about the place that is infectious. The lines of the scaffolding accentuate perspective, shrouding the shape of George Gilbert Scott’s magnificent Midland Grand Hotel.

Drawing somewhere so busy – people are pouring in and out of the railway station, and it is hard to find a place to stand that isn’t in the way – means that one becomes more or less invisible, in a way that is impossible in less populated locations. There is, in my experience, less chance of someone coming up to you in a busy place and asking the dreaded “What are you doing then?” than there is in quieter places.

A few years back I spent six months travelling around England in a camper van loaded with pencils and sketchbooks, drawing every day. I soon became accustomed to people coming over and chatting to me as I worked. At rural Bradford-upon-Avon a man came over to see what I was doing as he waited for his wife and children to finish shopping. As they all left in the car on their way home, his wife wound down the window, and invited me to their home for dinner and to park my van in their drive for the night.

When I turned up at their house on the edge of town that evening, there was roast chicken, home grown vegetables, bottles of beer, and a warmth and generosity that was quite breathtaking. When I left in my van the next morning to head for the next town there was a touching farewell ceremony in the drive, and gifts of home grown tomatoes and apples (that helped keep scurvy at bay). Throwing their doors open to complete strangers isn’t what the English are renowned for. Mind you, if I’d had a similar invitation from someone as I drawn at King’s Cross, I’d have turned it down.

Going dotcom

The idea of having a website for my drawings had been brewing for a while and, after the protracted grind of filing a tax return, it took on the appearance of rather enjoyable and straightforward project. The internet is an important marketing tool for the artist, we hear. How, otherwise, are people supposed to believe you are an artist if you don’t have an exhibition on or they haven’t seen your unsold paintings lying around your house? A website means your work can be seen anywhere from your next-door neighbour’s house to Kazakhstan and Peru. This is the theory, anyway.

Art is, in some ways, ideally suited to the internet. A good website will give potential buyers, gallery owners or curators some idea of which direction an artist is coming from. It is now the easiest way of letting people see your work, but what about selling it? Let’s be realistic. You wouldn’t agree to marry someone by meeting them only on the web, and you wouldn’t buy a house just by reading the estate agent’s details online, so why expect people to do something really important, such as buy a painting, after just seeing it on a website? But going dotcom should, hopefully, make some potential buyers interested in seeing the real thing.

So I spend time checking out other artists’ websites to get ideas about what may work best for mine. Some are like stepping inside the thatched Cotswold cottage of a major purchaser of Beatrix Potter collectibles, with flowery borders and the effect of pixellated potpourri. Others engulf with a blitz of shifting graphics that are as disorienting as travel sickness and draw more attention to the art of the designer than the artist. Some are fantastic, but there is no way I could adapt a similar approach because I am not as prolific, or well exhibited, and am not frequently asked questions of any sort.

The simpler and more direct a site is, the more I like it, and this is good news for my old mate Colin Bowling, who is designing it for me. But there are questions to ask myself first. What really is the point of having this website? Who do I think will view it, and what questions about me as an artist will they want answered by it? What images do I want included? How detailed does my CV have to be? It isn’t a ten-minute job to get together what I want to go in, and although I can improve things in time, it is important to get things as right as possible first time.

Another vital thing to do is register a good address for a site. The best, I think, is a simple yourname.com, but it is likely this has already been taken by a large tractor dealership in Wisconsin or a classical guitar tutor in the Scottish Highlands. Sure enough, other James Hobbses have got in there before me; I have to settle for james-hobbs.co.uk.

So Colin designs it and we spend a week or so bouncing emails to and fro until we have something we are happy with. Soon after he has finished, and it has gone live, I email the people in my address book with its details. I check the statistics page that comes as part of the website package: a generous wave of people logged on as it launched. Someone even contacted me expressing an interest in buying a drawing.

But within a few days the number of people logging on has dropped to a handful. A website is just one club in the bag to take around the artistic golf course. Rather than preparing to employ a full time framer and retire to the coast, the struggle to get people to look at the website has only just begun.

And you can see it at www.james-hobbs.co.uk.

Contact Colin Bowling at info@colinbowling.com.

High street blues

A large sign appears in the window of our local art materials store. “Stock clearance,” it says, “we’re moving!” It’s not as if it is the only art shop around - there are a lot of artists in the area in which we live - but it still comes as a bit of a shock.

The shop is in the middle of a popular high street not so far from where we live. It is an average-sized shop, but with a surprisingly broad range of products inside. It isn’t, perhaps, the cheapest place in the world to buy things,
 but it’s certainly not the most expensive either. But it was where I would often - not often enough, I now realise - drop in to buy a sketchbook or two and a few pens.

What I dropped in for as much as anything, though, was to chat with Steve
 behind the counter. Without wanting to over-romanticise it, the shop could 
be considered the equivalent to the artistic community of the village 
stores. We would spend some time catching up on news, he’d help out with some query, such as making a telephone call to a pen manufacturer for me 
about the lightfastness of their range, and I’d walk out with a small bag of products that would keep me creative. Buying a new shirt or a pair of jeans is the cause of prolonged agony for me, after which I often leave the shop with something unsuitable. I have never, however, had to return a sketchbook for being either the wrong style or the wrong size (although I did, I think, once return a marker pen for being the wrong colour). If I have to be in a shop, let it be an art shop.

What had changed for Steve was the rocketing overheads and the changing nature of his shop’s customers: the
 growing number of people who order his products online 
couldn’t care less where, geographically, they are being dispatched from, as long as they arrive quickly. Why pay over the odds for a shop that depends less and less upon passing trade, if you can find yourself a barn and office with broadband in the Hebrides or on the Northumberland coast?

Steve’s new place will be off the 
beaten track and free of the high rents, and he is hoping in time that he’ll be able to 
spend more time with his family and get some of his own painting done, instead of just enabling others to do theirs.

I’m certainly no expert in business, but it is a mystery to me how small businesses can keep going on a busy shopping street, especially ones 
with relatively low margins, like art material retailers. Steve has been paying a rent 
of £35,000 a year for his average-sized shop, plus business rates of more than £6,000 (“and that doesn’t even cover refuse collection,” he groans, which is another extra), and a wage bill of £60,000, plus loans that need to be paid
 off... I marvel at how he has survived so long and been so cheerful when I have been in to buy something.
 


The most rudimentary mathematics suggests these overheads of more than
 £100,000 a year, or £2,000 a week, are hardly dented by my occasional purchase of a sketchbook and marker pen. If Steve gets, say, a £2 margin 
from a £4 sketchbook, it means he would have to sell more than a boggling 
1,000 of them each week just to cover these overheads, let alone pay himself a wage. Don’t even think about how many pencils that would 
translate to.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that such shops are disappearing from the high street. Choice is something we are always having thrusted upon us as being a good thing, whether it is for schools or hospitals. Buying art materials online is here to stay — getting good art materials at a reasonable price is always going to be an important 
consideration for artists — but it will be a sad day if the small, independent art materials retailer becomes a thing of the past.

Baring all

What exactly is the point of doing life drawing? I was suddenly reminded of this thorny old question when I caught sight of a sign nailed to a tree as I came home from work on the bus. “Life drawing classes” it read, with a telephone number beneath, which I managed to store in the memory of my mobile phone as we went by.

And there the number has remained for several months as I try to decide whether or not it is something I really want to do. On my foundation course we hardly seemed to be out of the life drawing class, and our rate of progress through supplies of charcoal must have been the cause of major deforestation. We would be next to our easels through long hours of the ritual progression of the typical life drawing day: firstly, quick poses of just a few minutes, or even seconds, to get us warmed up (and, more importantly, the model), then a few longer ones during which you realise you will run out of paper shortly before lunch, and then, in the afternoon, by which time you have stocked up, or reverted to drawing on newspaper, longer poses. By about 4pm you find it perfectly normal to stand around chatting to someone who is completely naked with charcoal dust smeared across your face.

This way of working was an excellent way of building up an impressively thick portfolio of work in a very short length of time, in preparation for interviews for degree courses that seemed to start after about three weeks of term. And during the course of this process, drawing soon became, for some of us at least, the most normal and indispensable thing in the world.

But what of the work we produced? I sent mine up in flames years ago, needing the space in the studio, and realising that the drawings weren’t nearly as good as I liked to remember them. I began to think, perhaps, that the act of creating them was often more important than the end result. Maybe that is what the tutors at my degree college thought: I remember their reaction when a group of us asked if a life model could be made available to us to work from for a couple of days. It was as if we had politely requested the slaughter of their firstborn, although later they agreed.

On holiday in the sun this year, sitting on the banks of a quiet Italian lake up in the mountains, the urge to draw the human form stirred once more. It was the usual scenario: children playing happily, partner snoozing contentedly, leaving me with a few minutes to spare with a sketchbook and pen to hand. Around us sat a fairly plentiful supply of potential subjects, albeit slightly more clothed than the average life model.

There is, I found, an art to this, er, art. Unless you want to ask if your fellow sunbathers are happy to model for you (my Italian certainly isn’t up to that and besides, they may demand payment), there has to be an element of subterfuge to the process of beach work. Drawing does involve looking and scrutiny, which can arouse suspicions even among those perfectly happy to expose their bodies on a beach. The secret, I found, was not to draw anyone sitting too close, avoid eye contact, and work quickly. When people did give me a look of suspicion I would hastily move onto my next subject, while making out I was checking the children were OK. I think I got away with it.

The disadvantages, of course, were that I found myself having to draw people quite far away and, in order to avoid suspicion, those looking in the opposite direction. Thus I ended up with a few too many drawings of distant people’s backs. It was a start though. I’d be glad of suggestions from other artists who have tried this out in time for next summer. In the meantime, I still have the number of that life drawing class in my phone.

Worst suspicions

Oh dear. I upset Mrs Traylor of Llandudno in a recent entry by mentioning that I ride a bike. She goes to the effort of writing to the Artists & Illustrators office to express her disappointment. "So Hobbs rides a bike," she writes in the November issue. "This confirms my worst suspicions." And that is it. Thank you, Mrs Traylor.
And thank you, too, to Beatrice Hoyland (any relation to John?) of London, who starts her letter "Cyclists are rude and arrogant" before going on at length about what a grim bunch cyclists are. Oh yes, and Pru Harris of Surrey, also keen to get into the act, signs off her letter with "I hate cyclists too!"
Calm down. I'm only going to work.

On the rebound

So the rejection letter comes through the letterbox and there is that usual rush of disappointment. I scour the single slip of paper several times hoping that I can detect an element of ambiguity, but there is absolutely no doubt. "R in the column above denotes rejected," it says, and there above it is an R. It's a flamboyant R, an R that shows no sign of equivocation. It's bold, in upper case, and couldn't in any way be confused with the A that would have denoted that the work had been accepted. It has been written, I can't help thinking, by someone who has taken some pleasure in it.

This is the kind of rejection that is familiar at one time or another to all artists who enter competitions. I think this to myself quite a lot to cheer myself up. In order to win you have to be ready to lose. Entering art competitions is like falling in love: you can get hurt. There is always the chance that the object of your affections won't see you in quite the same way as you see them. I open my heart by sending in a painting, and get a swift slap around the chops in the shape of an R for rejection in return. (I check the slip one more time to see if I could have made a mistake, but in the intervening hours the R seems a little larger, perhaps a little bolder.)

It's easy to look on the dark side when you're an artist. Every step promises disaster. The work wasn't selected for the exhibition, which was a failure. If it was selected but then not noticed by a talent-spotting gallery, that would be a failure. If that gallery offered me a show and nothing sold, that would be a failure. If the show sold out and received bad reviews, then that, too, would be a kind of failure. It's hard to know where this trail of misery could end, and at the rate I'm going, it's unlikely I am going to find out.

The next job is to collect the rejected painting, which is as discomforting as buying condoms in the chemist for the first time. Anyone you meet when you're picking up a rejected painting is probably there for the same reason and so there's the opportunity for mutual sympathising, but people are quiet and in a hurry, and in no mood to chat.

With anther entry deadline bearing down, I download entry forms for another competition, the Jerwood Drawing Prize, that is more suitable for my kind of work, and enter it on the rebound. It's a squeeze finding time to get things ready for it: I'm framing one of the two drawings I enter on the evening before they need handing in, and crack the glass soon after midnight, and have to frame it all over again. Then I have to cross town on the morning of elder daughter's birthday party to deliver it, which isn't the best timing when there's lots to do, like blowing up balloons and hiding breakable things while 12 eight-year-old girls bear down on the house. If I hadn't already paid the entry fee I may well have persuaded myself I didn't have time to enter at all.

About a week later the phone rings. One of the drawings, of Buxton – another from a series completed sitting in a cafe - has been accepted. I whoop around the house a bit, which draws concerned glances from the children. The feeling of triumph is somehow even better because I had been through the R for rejection episode just the week before. There is a CV to write, a statement to shape and perhaps now I can get around to getting that website sorted out. It's suddenly much easier to look on the bright side.

Mounting tension

In an effort to stem the rising tide of drawings accumulating around the house, I use January A&I’s handy annual round-up of competitions to see if one or two could catch the eye of some judges somewhere. Experience proves that entering open competitions usually takes the form of a short-term loan rather than any permanent departure, but, hey, they aren’t going to catch the eye of anyone if they sit around the studio, so I download the entry forms and set about choosing which works to enter.

Artists, as we all probably know to our cost, are not always the best judges of their own work, so, as usual, I enroll the help of my partner Naomi, who is more qualified than many a competition judge. We whittle the drawings down to a shortlist by sticking them up around the front room and then try them out in temporary frames and hang them over the fireplace. Things are going well until the daughters then also add their views. Celia, who is five, offers an immediate ego-massaging “cool, Dad” but Esther, eight, suggests a “larger, darker frame”. I can see the day coming when the quality threshold required to get past my family is higher than that needed to get past the actual selection panel.

This in-house selection process is fast in comparison with the framing. Has anyone anywhere ever cut a 45 degree mount without wasting at least four sheets of A1 mountboard? I now have enough products that promise to help me cut the perfect mount to open a National Museum of Angle Cutting. If I manage three good cuts – in itself an undertaking likely to take the best part of an evening - the tension is such when I come to make the final one that it invariably becomes banana-shaped. Just as Mr Coleman made his millions from mustard left on the side of the plate, so too must the mountboard manufacturers from the wasted acres of their essential product. So frustrating and time-wasting does this become it is tempting to make new pieces of work to fit the perfect professionally cut mounts I already have.

But the night before the closing date they are ready, and I’m off on my bike - stopping at traffic lights on the way, grumpier A&I correspondents will be pacified to know – with the drawings strapped to the back in a pillow case. On my way to the delivery point I stop off at the Royal Academy to see this year’s Summer Exhibition. As the world’s largest open submission exhibition there is such a variety of work on view to encourage anyone who is wondering if they should bite the financial bullet and enter. However, to be hung is one thing, to be seen another; many of the works are hung so high on the walls that they are impossible to see as intended.

One work on show, however, is a reminder of how selection judges see what they want rather than what the artist may have hoped. David Hensell was delighted to hear his jesmonite sculpture of a laughing head had been selected, but what he didn’t know until the exhibition opening was that the plinth upon which it stood had become detached, and it was this section that had been judged and put on show. The head itself had been rejected.

I’m glad that the stunted work, which is a little wooden fitting on an outsized stone slab, remained on show, rather than being reunited with its upper half. The episode does, as Hensell admits, say something about the state of the visual arts today, and perhaps something about the judges. But I can’t help thinking that if, say, the reverse side of one of my drawings was selected in the competition I was entering I would be more than slightly miffed. Not least because of all the effort I’ve put into cutting that mount.

What’s the big idea?

To get your work noticed it helps if your artistic marketing package can offer the pithy one-liner that puts your name immediately in context. Jenny Saville, the painter who paints close-ups of fleshy, contorted female nudes, Georg Baselitz, who paints people upside down, Howard Hodgkin, the painter of colourful sweeps and dots that spill onto their frames. These descriptions hardly do justice to what they’re really doing, and simplify to a ridiculous degree, but it is the kind of tabloid description that they will be partly remembered by.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Have you had your big idea? For some the idea behind what they are trying to do appears to be more important than how well they carry it through. As long as it looks good on paper – by which I mean in writing rather than as a drawing – then success is assured. But what constitutes a good idea? This is the nitty gritty for conceptual artists. I recently heard of one such artist making sculptures out of carpet fluff and another whose work involves viewers taking off their own shoes and putting on others that he kindly provides. We’ll have to wait and see if the names of these artists become household. But at least they have ideas.

So what about the artists who go out and paint and draw what they see? James Hobbs, the artist who draws what he looks at. That’s hardly going to get me anywhere, is it? It’s hardly one for the epitaph. But that is how, at times, it feels as if I work. Inevitably I’m drawn to some subjects more than others, but I often find I do better if I draw what all my instincts tell me not to. What about this then? James Hobbs, the artist who draws what he really doesn’t want to. It’s hardly any better.

Perhaps finding the big idea involves a little analysis of exactly what you are doing with your art. For the lack of anything else to say about their work, some artists resort to the good old staple of describing it as “raising questions”. A sculptor makes work “raising questions concerning hollowness and solidity”. A painter “raises questions about cultural and artistic identity”. I read about an exhibition recently that “raises questions about what constitutes site-specificity” (which sounds like a mealy-mouthed apology for work not looking as good as it should in the place it has been put). Rachel Whiteread’s recent installation Embankment at Tate Modern, which featured thousands of casts of cardboard boxes, encouraged us, a gallery handout told us, “to think about the space they inhabit”.

Do these artists realise that they are continually posing these queries as they make their work, or is it just the PR people and critics that imagine it? Do you, for instance, consider what your work may be asking as you make it? Is there – and this is the point I’m really trying to make here – is there a chance that, unwittingly, my drawings are already raising questions about something or other?

So what’s so good about asking questions all the time? And how about some answers to go along with them? As anyone who has lived with small children will know, there’s nothing quite as tiring as a continual stream of why-thises and why-thats, lovely as it is to see an enquiring mind develop at the breakfast table. And do people want to buy work that asks questions?

So the hunt for the big idea goes on, for me at least. I’m pondering this in a cafe, and with a little time to spare I get out my sketchbook to draw the scene through the window. Flicking back through it I realise that I do an awful lot of drawings as I sit in cafes. Is this my big idea? It certainly raises questions about how much time I spend drinking coffee.

Unimpressed

I hadn’t laughed as much at an impressionist since watching Mike Yarwood doing Denis Healey about 20 years ago. The BBC1 series The Impressionists (usefully titled in case you happened to doze off during the three-part series and need reminding what you were watching when you woke up) was presumably supposed to be fulfilling some arts remit, but it certainly gave us plenty of comic relief. It became, in fact, must-watch TV just because it was so painfully, blissfully awful.

Impressionism is as bankable as art gets. If a gallery needs a crown puller, they get a few Monets together and then look around for a Renoir, Bazille, Sisley and Morisot, and then a few works by the guys around the edges, who weren’t really Impressionists, like Degas and Cézanne. These artists are to galleries what the face of the Princess of Wales is to front page of the tabloids. They pull the punters in. How could the BBC possibly go wrong?

The problem perhaps stemmed from the way the story of the movement was told in a series of flashbacks to an aged Claude Monet – played by Julian Glover – as he talks to a journalist in his garden at Giverny. His voiceovers, emerging through a soundtrack reminiscent of one of the more saccharine programmes on Classic FM, showed supremely well how we tend to rewrite history when we look back at our past. No believable conversation took place at all between the young painters.

The clichés washed over the script like waves over the beach at Le Havre. “This will be my greatest painting yet!” says Manet. “These are terrible times,” says Mrs Manet, who underlined this by dying soon afterwards. Paintings were unveiled in galleries to cries of “It’s a masterpiece!”, although not, at first, anything by an Impressionist as they were still considered cack-handed daubers by the big wigs at the state-run Salon. (A touch of makeup and the Marquis de Chennevières would have been a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman.) Artists saw the sunrise from their bedroom and ran to the clifftops to paint the glorious reflective effects on the surface of La Manche with their nightshirts still on.

Despite the mirth, what was really disappointing about The Impressionists was that here were three hours of Sunday night television given over to painting, and it told us less than nothing about a movement already mired in misconceptions. Indeed, The Impressionists seemed to have been made by people who had no experience or knowledge of art to ensure that there was no chance of it being in any way elitist or highbrow. (In the same way, Rolf on Art seemed to be aimed at fans of his Animal Hospital rather than anyone with an interest in art, in an attempt to boost ratings.)

If you’re not going to make a series that is going to help you look at something anew, then why bother? There are plenty of other movements in art, not yet bogged down in the misconceptions of Impressionism, that could have made more interesting and enlightening viewing.

An exhibition now at the National Gallery takes a look at this mythologising of the life of artists. Rebels and Martyrs: The Artist in the Nineteenth Century (until 28 August) looks at the way artists came to be seen as heroic and rebellious, misunderstood and suffering, and stuck in a garret. It’s an enduring stereotype that clings on despite the fact that marketing acumen are as important as painterly skills for art graduates now.

I saw three films about artists not long before I decided to apply to art college. One was Running Fence, the story of how the artist Christo negotiated his way to running a fabric fence across 24 miles of Californian wilderness. One was an interview with the painter Frank Auerbach. The other was that of Picasso filmed from beneath while painting on glass. They helped make me want to be an artist. There were no gushing strings. There was nothing remotely romantic about any of them. They showed artists to be lively, provocative and creative. Everything that The Impressionists was not.

Say it with flowers

The obituaries after the death of the Scottish sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay in March 2006 – it was picked up by newspapers around the world – all unerringly mentioned within the first few sentences the one creation for which he will be remembered. But it wasn’t a sculpture, an installation or a video. It didn’t win him the Turner Prize. It wouldn’t fit in a gallery. He never sold it. It was, in fact, his garden, Little Sparta, set into the Pentland Hills not far from Edinburgh.

I have never visited it, but it seems a wonderful place. He and his wife bought the semi-derelict farmhouse in 1966, and worked 40 years to create what is now considered to be the most important post second world war garden in Britain. Within its six acres there are nearly 300 of his sculptures in the form of inscribed stones, monuments and buildings.

Finlay’s garden, labour of love as it may have been, doesn’t seem to have been a place he went to get away from it all. People think of gardens as a retreat, he once said, but his garden was an attack. He seemed to set about falling out with people, and the inscribed sculptures in his garden don’t hold back. Political references abound, and his allusions to the horrors of the Third Reich and his confrontational nature too often landed him in trouble – most famously with the French government and the Scottish Arts Council. Even naming the garden after a temple, Little Sparta, was an attempt to avoid the paying higher taxes it would attract by being classified as an art gallery. So the bailiffs came around.

Gardening, like painting, usually gives the impression of being the relaxing option, the kind of pastime people turn to when they need a break or therapy. Gardening and painting, some think, are the fluffy kinds of things you do when you've finished real work, either at the end of the day or as you hit retirement age. To some they are what stop you going gaga, and help take your mind off the fact that your pension isn't quite as much as you expected it would be.

Finlay isn’t, of course, the only artist to make a mark with a garden in the UK in recent times. Barbara Hepworth’s small, walled garden by her studio in St Ives, Ivon Hitchens’s cleared from woodland in Lavington Common, West Sussex and the painter and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s among the desolate pebbles of Dungeness, are all distinctive and highly personal artists’ gardens.

The processes, it seems to me, are similar for making art and making a garden. You start off with some very unpromising raw materials dragged from the earth. With vision, planning and patience something beautiful and enriching can spring from it, but you shouldn’t count on it. Gardening is like painting in very, very slow motion. Instead of the usual hour or two – or even less – for it to come to your realisation that a painting has gone seriously awry, with a garden it can take a year or two – or perhaps even decades – for it to dawn on you that you should have planted the avenue of poplars at right angles to the laurel hedge.

Finlay proved that gardening can be so much more than an escape, if you want it to be. It can be about colour, light, movement and composition, just as art can, but it can be political too. Gardening with attitude. Little Sparta was evidently something vital and current to him throughout his life. If he did find gardening therapeutic, it certainly doesn't seem to have calmed him much. And painting can be just the same.

On speed

I’m sitting on a train, and I have a few hours to spare. In the rush to catch it I have found myself without a newspaper or a book, and there’s not even anyone to strike up a conversation with. Great as it is to have some quiet time ahead of me, the idea of gawping out of the window all the way doesn’t do a lot for me.

It’s not as if it is the last option, but I get the sketchbook out. A little A5 one nestles in the bottom of my coat pocket with a few pens. (When I was looking for a new jacket recently I spent as much time looking at the inside pockets as how they looked on the outside. Too few seemed to have places to store a decent sized sketchbook – unless you want to walk around looking like a commando on leave - and this could have a detrimental effect on one’s creativity.)

The problem is, this isn’t what I usually draw. There’s landscape whizzing by, but it’s just not hanging around for long enough for me to get it down on paper. You see it, and it’s gone. And that’s not the way I like to work. I’m used to spending time in front of subjects rooted to the spot, even if I do like to draw them quickly. I prefer drawing buildings that have stayed in the same place, preferably for a few hundred years, if not longer. I do my best to avoid committing the human figure to paper; they shift around, make odd expressions and say things like “you’ve got my ears all wrong”.

But I give the rushing scenery a go anyway. It’s a case of glimpse and draw, with minimal lines and maximum speed. And gradually, after a while, it starts to feel a little easier. It’s a sketchbook for goodness sake, so the whole point is to try things out – sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. How do I get the essence of that tree in three quick lines? How do I make that farm look as if I’m looking down on it as it nestles in a valley, and in only a few seconds? By doing it over and over, and by making a whole series of less than successful drawings, something takes over and they almost begin to make themselves.

The experience reminded me of a time when we were life drawing at art college. Tutors tend to have a habit of getting models to do very short poses, particularly in the morning, which are no doubt easier for the model and help to get the artists loosened up too. With only a minute or two to capture a pose you have to capture the essentials pretty quickly. By the afternoon things would settle into longer poses and a gentler pace.

The implication somehow seems to be that working at speed is just an exercise while long and slow is the real McCoy. It’s how, strangely, the hierarchy of art works. To some, the ultimate accolade is to stand in front of an artist’s work hanging framed on a wall and say: “It must have taken you ages to do it.”

But I prefer it the other way around. Seeing Quentin Blake’s drawings again in March’s Artists & Illustrators (although I see them often enough when reading the kids a bedtime story) reminded me how much I enjoy the apparent spontaneity of his work. It made me feel like saying to him: “They must have taken you a few moments to do.” And yet mean it as the greatest compliment. It takes hard work as well as a lifetime’s experience for Blake to make them look so fresh, immediate and so right, but it took a quiet train journey to remind me of it.