Reality check

IN CONVERSATION Brian Henderson uses enhanced light and contrasting textures in his acrylic realist compositions, as Caroline Saunders discovers

Brian Henderson studied at Edinburgh College of Art. He has won numerous prizes and exhibits widely in the UK. He currently has work in the Morningside Gallery, Edinburgh, Resipole Studios, Argyll and Scotland Art Gallery, Glasgow. brianhendersonpaintings.com

Brian Henderson is a bit of a perfectionist. His style involves acute observation and precise attention to detail. Regardless of subject matter, Brian investigates the way that natural and artificial light interacts with a range of surfaces and materials. He carefully crafts compositions, paying particular consideration to how light strikes or shadows fall.

The combination of surfaces and textures are just as important as the choice of objects themselves. Great satisfaction comes from the challenge of depicting the pearly surface of an onion or shallot with its papery, translucent skin or alternatively the shiny, reflective surfaces of metal or glass. ‘What should be a chrome-plated surface looks no more than a series of patches of paint. Then there comes a point that I can seldom define, usually after a break, when it seems to come together. It’s a relief every time.

‘A tiny part of my heart sinks when people say a painting is like a photo; I think most realist painters would agree that a decent realist painting is more than a photographic image.

One of the main differences is usually depth of focus. A close-up photograph is likely to have a blurred foreground and background. Photorealist painters such as Chuck Close would include this effect, but for most realist painters, the whole image is sharply focused from front to back.’ Brian never copies exactly what is in front of him. ‘I select, change, ignore, simplify, and invent. Shadows are darkened and reflected light exaggerated.’

Influences

Brian attended Edinburgh College of Art in the 1970s and at that time there was a lot of enthusiasm, which he shared, for the New York School and large-scale, abstract-expressionist painting. ‘My tutor encouraged me to use big brushes and throw paint around a bit. I did try, but it turns out that to paint like Robert Motherwell isn’t as easy as it looks. My fourth-year tutor, seeing that I was slightly lost, advised me to stick to what I was good at and gave me a book about the Canadian realist artist Alec Colville. It was a huge relief, for which I’m still grateful.’

Brian also really admires the hyperrealist paintings by David Evans, Scotland’s James Fairgrieve and the late American still-life painter William Bailey. ‘These painters are meticulous; their paintings have a profound feeling of stillness and expectancy, which I am still trying to achieve.’

Composition

Typically, Brian arranges a composition with one central object and finds other objects to complement it. ‘I might home-in on flaws and I’m not above deliberately bruising a pear or dogearing a page of a book for effect. I have realised just about any object can be interesting as a subject for still life, so a few kitsch things have started to creep in. I began picking up Homer Simpson and Betty Boop figures and, more recently, figures from the Tintin books.’ The figures Brian uses are good quality and expensive. He sometimes puts them into little tableaux, juxtaposing

them with throw-away items, which adds an unusual twist when the work has been so finely executed. ‘There’s something satisfying about spending days painting the edge of a bit of cardboard that I ripped in a second.’

A lot of time is spent arranging and rearranging the objects, using a card viewfinder. If there’s a strong vertical element in an otherwise fairly horizontal composition, he will tend to put it on the golden section, but he is not bound by that. ‘I use my eye and instinct. I first produce an actual-size line drawing, which I then trace in reverse, using a light box. The tracing is used like carbon paper to transfer the image to a gessoed panel.’ His compositions are always worked out at the drawing stage, although he does make alterations as he paints. For a very low eye level and a horizontal composition he uses an easel; otherwise he uses a flat drawing board.

‘Usually I black out the studio windows and opt for artificial light. An LED light box mounted on an easel gives soft, cool light from one side, balanced by a warmer directional light from the other side or from above. I spend as much time moving lights around as I do moving the objects’

Working method

After applying a dark ground Brian paints from dark to light in thin layers with quick-drying acrylics. A combination of glazing, cross-hatching and stippling techniques are used. ‘With the aid of a hairdryer, I can build up several layers relatively quickly, but the speed with which they dry means that colour blending is difficult. I often do this by hatching from one tone or colour to another. On a big area this is incredibly time-consuming and often frustrating.’

Brian’s preferred brand of acrylic is Daler-Rowney Cryla. Starting a picture with fairly big brushes they then get progressively smaller, down to size 4/0. He likes Pro Arte Prolene Plus synthetic brushes, and occasionally hog-hair brushes for a textured background. Ampersand Gessobord panels provide a surface with a slight tooth that he really likes.

‘My palette is a thick sheet of glass, painted white on the back. It’s good for mixing on with a palette knife and it’s easy to clean. I lay out titanium white, cadmium red deep, permanent yellow, ultramarine and usually burnt umber, always in that order. My colours tend to be fairly muted, so these primary colours will give me just about all the shades I need. Ultramarine and burnt umber make a velvety black. If I want a very black accent, I might use Mars black, but I never use it to darken colours, there’s no need. For colours that I’m going to need in any quantity (usually a series of greys), I mix too much, in the hope that they won’t dry

out during the week or two or three that it takes to complete a picture. I keep the paints wet with an atomiser spray, and cover with my stockpiled plastic packaging trays. Four or five coats of thinned-down gloss varnish give a fairly robust finish, so paintings do not usually need glass. If a painting is to be framed and mounted under glass I use matt varnish.

‘On I typical day I paint all afternoon for three or four hours. I usually paint again in the late evening; If I have an exhibition coming up, I’ll do more than that. Working on one painting at a time, Brian doesn’t tire of working in detail. He is quite content to persist with a picture, however long it takes.

‘One of the most rewarding things about painting is that we never stop learning. I recommend the book New Techniques in Egg Tempera by Robert Vickrey, it taught me a lot about glazing, cross-hatching and stippling techniques even though I’ve never used egg tempera.

‘When realising different textures I often find myself thinking “I don’t know how to do this”. Frustrating though this can be, it’s why I keep doing it, and I keep trying until I solve the problem. In the end this is usually very satisfying. Highlights can present a problem too. Often I darken the whole tone of an object to allow highlights to shine. Stuart Semple recently invented “the blackest black” paint, called BLK 3.0; I wish he would now invent the whitest white.’

p Parcelled Painting, acrylic on canvas, 23¾323¾in (60360cm). ‘I wrapped the pears painting (top) in bubble wrap and brown paper with this picture in mind. There’s just one light source, because I wanted that definite shadow cutting across the picture. Having first more-or -less completed the central area with the framed picture, I mixed quite large quantities of several shades of brown, using burnt umber, burnt sienna, cadmium red deep, permanent yellow, ultramarine and white. I painted the whole thing roughly at first, using large filbert brushes, then worked over and over it using ever-decreasing brush sizes. I took a section at a time, using folds in the paper as dividing lines, and gave myself daily targets. As I had slightly cynically hoped, the two pictures were sold simultaneously.’

p Green Williams, acrylic on board, 8310in (20.5325.5cm). ‘Pears have a satisfying shape and, maybe because they’re taller than they are wide, we perhaps relate to them almost as characters. The negative shapes between the two pears were important, so I put a lot of time into moving them around until I was happy.’

p Les Voitures de Tintin, acrylic on board, 11¼314in (28.5335.5cm). ‘My wife gave me the car for Christmas, correctly believing I would want to paint it. I liked the tantalising, Russian doll-like way the various boxes nested together, so I decided to stack them up for the picture. Unusually, I used real afternoon daylight, along with an electric light on the right. The pattern of competing shadows and light on the grey box lid appealed to me. The picture originally had a pale, grey/taupe background and I wasn’t happy with it, so I re-did it with a blue/black mixture of ultramarine and burnt umber. I then had to re-paint the inside of the plastic box and its reflections. For the warm red/ orange of the car I used cadmium red as well as my default cadmium red deep. I used more Blu Tack than was strictly necessary to hold up the small plastic figure, and made a point of including it in the picture.’

p Glassware II, acrylic on canvas, 15¾315¾in (40340cm). ‘The symmetrical, triangular composition is slightly unusual for me. The round grappa bottle is one of my favourite still-life objects. I liked the repeated spherical shapes and the contrast between the glossy and frosted glass. Filling the bottles with water seemed to emphasise their roundness – I exaggerated the reflections on the glossy plinth. The group was lit from the front with a warm electric light, and from the right with a large LED light box. ‘There is a bright red base under the dark warm grey background colour, which was applied in several thin washes so that the red shone through very slightly. I darkened the tone of the plinth a little to allow the highlights on the bottles to shine. I was quite pleased with the small colour accent of the grappa bottle top and its jaunty angle which, along with the slight angle of the plinth, softened the rather austere arrangement. The liquid drops were glycerine because water dries too quickly and doesn’t bead up so much.’

t Strings, acrylic on board, 12316in (30.5340.5cm). ‘This one was technically quite challenging. It took a few tries to paint the mandolin’s wood grain and sunburst colouring, the high-gloss finish and eight strings (I have shaky hands!). Lighting was from a single, directional source, giving the mandolin quite a hard-edged shadow that partly impinged on the postcard. The reproduction is a 1787 painting in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery by Sir Henry Raeburn of Niel Gow, one of the most famous Scottish fiddlers of the 18th century.’