Brushstroke - ACE350.2

Brushes tracing outlines in paint. VO says that the brushstroke is one of the painter’s most powerful tools. It’s as personal as handwriting, and for some artists, it’s an obsession. VO of John Virtue saying that it’s not a job; one is aspiring to the world of ideas. Virtue is painting his name and a picture title, Landscape 313, on glass through which the camera is looking at him. Virtue walking along a country lane towards a village on the edge of Dartmoor in order to paint it, just as he’s done every day for the past ten years. The landscape itself, and Virtue crossing a field to find a spot from which to establish his composition. Sketching with a felt-tipped pen. Virtue begins on the painting, on a huge canvas spread on the grass, using shellac. He walks onto the canvas and starts to paint. Virtue’s VO talking about his work and expressing his feelings through art, turning his perceptions into paintings. VO says that self-expression through brushstrokes would have been incomprehensible to painters six hundred years ago. "Brushstrokes got in the way… There aren’t any brushstrokes in nature." Reconstruction of mediaeval painters in the studio. Breaking eggs to make egg tempera. This dried quickly and brushstrokes couldn’t be blended together to make them disappear. Painters using very fine brushes to try to make the strokes less visible. This also meant that the artist was an anonymous craftsman, not an individual with his own style. Virtue folding up his canvas and carrying it away. Virtue in his studio with all his equipment – brushes, sprays, etc. – continues work on the canvas. Virtue VO talking about how this equipment enables him to be relaxed and experimental. Uses brushes, spatula, sprays, and tools to throw paint at the canvas. Film of landscape, swiftly moving clouds, trees blowing in high wind, reflections. Virtue in studio. VO explains the properties of shellac, runny enough to spray, drip and flick, and drying to a tough finish. VO explains that the most versatile paint of all was invented five hundred years ago. Pigment mixed with linseed or poppy oil produced oil paint, which had the advantage of drying slowly, and enabled the artists to blend different colours together on the canvas. Artist working on portrait eliminates brushstrokes altogether. Hand and brush in front of copy of Titian’s Man With a Quilted Sleeve (1510). The mark of the artist blended away to nothing. Reconstruction: Titian was a pioneer of oil painting, and began experimenting, recognising that a flick of paint became a sort of shorthand – light on an arm, the shape of a sleeve. Titian used rags, fingers, toes, to make his marks which became as unique as his handwriting. A Madonna and Child by Titian