The following is an article of interest written by Nan herself.
ART LINE
BY
NAN
SPURWAY
An
Old book:
It is indeed an honour to have this old
book painting reside in my studio once more, if only for the photographing of
it.
It was painted nearly two years ago and
actually took quite a while to paint. The artist fought to achieve the colours
he required, a new addition here and a little more white there without making
it look ‘muddy’ in the process. I often
stood behind him and watched him as he appeared to carve out the background
with one colour and raise the relief areas with a few more mixtures of lighter
hues.
I asked him why he had a yellow/gold
tinge on the top left corner, and for which he used Indian yellow, a very
powerful colour. His answer was. “When you look up at the window in the late
afternoon, the sun is coloured and it throws this orange sort of colour down
onto my book, but it only catches the corner before it is gone. See how the
colour softly bounces onto the other raised sections of the cover?” Then I
wanted to know what the dull white smudge at the bottom left hand side of the
book was; if in fact it might be a smudge. He looked at me as if I was
completely naïve, and said, “How do you remove a book from a top shelf, when it
is slotted in with other books. I have watched my grandfather remove his favourite
books and all of them have this smudge where the book’s colouring has worn
off.” Well, that said it all, I had no
further questions.
Now comes the crunch, this young man,
when he began this painting was all of ten years old and he completed it when
he was eleven. His father often came to
fetch him and stood shaking his head at the painting while my little artist was
busy. He had paint everywhere, in his hair, and on his clothes. You could not
make out the colours in the tubes unless you opened them, as they were so badly
matted with every other colour in his box.
The painting itself when nearing completion was also a mess, the whole
surround was a myriad of smudges of other colours.
It took some convincing of the father
that he should not throw a bad effort in the shed. I begged that he be given another week and a
longer period, which his father agreed to.
Then the little artist and I sat down and discussed the procedure of
cleaning up, because the basic image of the artwork was already there. He had an idea; that was to work on his own
in another room. I agreed and here is the result. It is an absolute delightful
painting full of meaning to this young man, now twelve years old. He said that
painting taught him patience, endurance and the understanding that all is never
lost in an oil painting.
