I’ve noticed a couple of things over the last few weeks that seem to indicate an interesting trend. I’ve been trying to replenish some of my art supplies, paints, a few new brushes etc., but most of the art supply sites appear to be out of stock for many of the items I would like. I suppose that could be down to production and supply chain problems due to Covid, but from the interest I’ve seen in various art tutorials on social media sites, I suspect that considerably more people are having a go at some sort of art, whether painting, drawing and so forth. Lockdown has certainly provided more time to devote to such things as our social lives have been seriously constrained. I think this is encouraging from the standpoint of getting more folks interested in putting down their thoughts, emotions and love of a particular subject on paper, canvas etc. I just wish the rest of the world wasn’t buying up all the tubes of Alizarin Crimson Gouache and brushes that I’m after.
Flight of The Phoenix: Gouache on toned watercolour paper, A4
This last week we had an informal challenge among some of the members in the Guild of Aviation Artists to paint or draw a scene from a favourite Aviation themed movie. This was not as easy as it seemed, because there are an awful lot of such films to choose from, some well known, some not so much. The obvious choices are classics such as “Dambusters”, “12 O’Clock High”, “The Bridges at Toko - Ri”, and literally a host of others. Being a contrary sort of fellow, I tend to gravitate towards some of the lesser known offerings such as “A Guy Named Joe”, “Spirit of St. Louis” (Well, anything with Jimmy Stewart in it actually), ”Strategic Air Command”….. the list goes on and on. In the end, I choose to depict an imagined scene from “Flight of the Phoenix” ( The original 1965 version, rather than the 2004 remake) partly because the Fairchild C-82 “Flying Boxcar” has always appealed to me the same way the the Blackburn Beverly does. They are great lumbering, slab sided workhorses that do a lot of heavy lifting and never get any of the glory. Maybe that’s why I chose to fly the Caribou when it was time for my Vietnam tour. Anyway, in addition to the lure of the C-82, the movie starred Jimmy Stewart and Richard Attenborough, a winning combination in my book. I think that a challenge such as this one is an excellent way to get you to really look at your own preferences and maybe analyse why you do like a certain kind of aviation story or type of airplane. Being of a certain vintage myself, I tend to gravitate to the flying machines of the 40s, 50s, and 60’s, an era in which I grew up. It was an age when you could walk out onto the tarmac and touch an airplane, talk to the crew and even be allowed to climb into the cockpit on occasion. It’s hard to imagine a time when there was no security, ID badges or any bar to getting as close to the aircraft as you wanted, but I was there, and did it as often as I could. We will not see that level of freedom again, sad to say.
Speaking of freedom, in a sense, it’s come to my attention that in this age of Social Media and the fact that virtually the sum total of human knowledge is available on the internet, some folks feel free to post images of art without acknowledgement of the Artist, writer, what have you. It’s nice to have our work available to the general public, but there seems to be the feeling that anything found online is in the public domain, which it certainly is not. Most images found during an internet search are copyright or otherwise the property of the author and that should be taken into account when the image is used by a third party. This is certainly a sensitive subject, and one that needs some addressing, though how that is to be done remains to be seen. Ideas?
This weeks links to things that are going on in the art world:
Stella Grace Lyons continues her excellent talks that you can check out here: https://www.facebook.com/stellagracelyonsarthistory
Bendor Grosvenor has a very interesting series on BBC iPlayer “Britain’s Lost Masterpieces” which is quite interesting and is available here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096mhvs
The Berlinische Galerie has online tours and exhibitions here: https://berlinischegalerie.de/en/collection/our-collection/
Here are some links to yet more works of great Aviation artists:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/ehangar/media
Roy Grinnell: https://www.brooksart.com/Grinnellist.html
Ronald Wong: https://www.brooksart.com/Wonglist.html
Keep safe and here’s hoping we’re able to get a bit more back to normal in the coming weeks.