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Maurice
Utrillo, Place du Tertre, oil on
cardboard. Tate Britain, C1910–11
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Peter Hart,
copy after Utrillo’s Place du Tertre. Oil on Canvas
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The word ‘copying’, as
used in the title, does not best describe my undertaking. A copy suggests a
facsimile, something so like the original that it might be passed off as a
forgery. And such a process – unless aimed at learning something quite specific
– would I think be both pointless and tedious. So what have I been doing with
‘my Utrillo’? I think primarily I have been trying to make something new (or
different), while not departing radically from the original (reproduction). So
that, after following the graphic aspect of Utrillo’s painting with as much
veracity as I could, I then decided to make some considerable changes to the
colours. I say ‘decided’, but it would be much truer to say that the colour
changes simply came about during the process of painting. I did follow Utrillo
in using emerald green for the patisserie frontage, but in the buildings to the
right of that I’ve introduced some quite radical changes – especially in the
rectangle of bright red and the triangle of blues beneath the roof. This
central area then set the tone for the whole picture, the brightness of which
makes Utrillo’s painting look comparatively monochromatic. But again, it was not my
intention to bring about such a result, and it is one of those mysteries of
painting that its final form can never be foreseen or preconceived. (In this,
it’s like writing a letter: you cannot know exactly what you are going to say
until you are actually writing it.)
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| Tonal Sketching in |
Making this copy after Utrillo’s Place du Tertre has actually changed the way I see it. I have known
the picture in reproduction for decades, and it is the colours that have always
attracted me: the emerald greens, the earth browns, the yellow ochres, and the
pale pinks – these and the configurations of the building’s frontages. But now
I seem to have made something more solid than this, and I cannot quite recover
my original vision of the painting. I have no regrets about this. The process
has been one of enrichment; and if one work inspires another, that can only be
for the good (and I make no pretentions in saying this).
A note on technique
‘Technique’ is another
of those tricky words. Some artists develop a ‘technique’ and then apply it to
everything they do: a deadening process. Because in truth there is no
invariable way of doing anything in
painting. No one brush stroke should inevitably be followed by another exactly
the same. Difference is the nature of
the visual world, and ‘sameness’ is the death of painting.
In this painting I did
use something I’ve never used before – which is a painting knife. This is not a
palate knife – the primary use of which is to mix colours on the palate – but
what might be defined as a very small and very delicate trowel, unlike the
brush it cannot be used for drawing, but is excellent for providing variety of
colour and texture to flat surfaces. Provided that is that it is not resorted
to across the picture plane: so becoming a lazy ‘device’, ruinous to the
painting as becoming immediately obvious to the eye.
As a painter I am left–handed,
but I realised without thinking that I was using the painting knife with my
right hand: the hand that I use for all tools, and have in the past used for
plaster skimming. In the detail shown below, the use of the painting knife can
be seen particularly in the windows of the patisserie and the restaurant, and
on the wall to the right.
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| Detail. The photograph is over–yellowed due to the electric light |
