Stunning portraits
The informative interview with Tim Benson in the March 2022 issue provided wonderful large images to analyse and absorb. I'm a great admirer of Tim’s paintings, both landscape and portraits, and his use of muted high-tonal contrasts and broad positive painterly brushmarks of thick oil paint all working in harmony to create an exciting and spontaneous painting. That Tim uses a limited palette of just seven colours, with no initial drawing out on the canvas, coupled with his use of a single large brush throughout a portrait was useful information, and the latter rather surprising. De nitely something worthy of note, as was the fact that he doesn’t grid-up a canvas, preferring to rely solely on observation.
This took me back to my college days; in the life class observation was the key word – there were no iPads with grids available then, but they are commonplace these days, leaving the model left sitting there largely redundant, apart from the occasional cursory glance in their direction!
Alan Bickley, by email