Event: Patty Ampleford painting demonstration
Date: October 18th, 2009.
Venue: Hycroft, Shaughnessy, Vancouver.






"My, that is a lot of paint" I said, somewhat taken aback.
I was at a painting demonstration and the painter, Patty Ampleford, had just squished out an entire 200ml tube of oil paint onto her palette. She proceeded to do the same with a half dozen other colours. On these large mounds of paint, she squirted walnut oil out of a squeeze bottle, and attacked the canvas.
"Don't you worry that it will dry out?" I asked.
"That hardly ever happens," she said. "I'm always painting."

I am always impressed by people that can paint quickly - it takes me ages to finish a painting, and even after I'm done I'm always tempted to make revisions. This is a very different type of painting from the traditional portrait style that I tend to gravitate to, and even though she would stop painting and take questions from the audience, I would say that she was probably more than 80% finished by the time the two hour presentation was over. I couldn't help thinking that this was probably how Van Gogh painted. Towards the end of his life, he was putting out paintings at the rate of better than one a day. Patty Ampleford can certainly apply a lot of paint quickly, and the influence of the Group of Seven is quite obvious in her work, both in the subject matter and the technique. She works exclusively from rough sketches or plein air, and the speed at which she applies the paint belies the fact that she has an excellent eye for perspective and colour. Another interesting detail I noticed was that she exclusively used Escoda brushes, which really are an excellent brush, but more surprising was that she used the Chungking classical white filbert bristle brushes, all of them in quite wide sizes, and all with handles that are almost two feet long. This is really quite excellent because it's exactly the way painters used to paint 100 years ago. These days most art stores carry relatively short brushes, but pictures and paintings of the Impressionists and even Valasquez and Goya painting show enormously long handles.
This is extremely useful since it facilitates painting at high speed without having to continuously stand back to see the results - the default stance is already far back enough that the entire painting is continuously being evaluated. I know from experience that when doing detail work the tendency is always to get too engrossed in the details and overwork an area which then has to be un-worked once a step back is taken.

She does not use turpentine due to health reasons, and uses walnut oil exclusively as her medium. She uses the water soluable Windsor Newton brush cleaner.

Someone was indiscreet enough to ask how much the painting she was working on would be worth. For this size, $1800 was the answer.



Patty uses conventional off the shelf canvases, double primed, and puts on a thin glaze of colour, in this case a light magenta, since she doesn't like starting out with a white canvas. Once this is dry, she quickly sketches in the main elements of the composition with a smaller brush, and then proceeds to apply large dabs of paint to flesh out the landscape. She always paints the sky last because she likes the brushwork associated with painting around trees and mountains. She works exclusively wet on wet, but at this speed that is more a necessity than a choice. At one point while painting, a gob of white paint fell off her brush and fell into the green field of grass below. Unfazed, she grabbed another brush loaded with the same green paint, picked up the white dab, and continued with the sky. "Happy accident," she said.

She is currently represented by Ian Tan Gallery.