Question from David Roberts: Do you like modern art? If so who is your favourite modern artist?
Rolf Harris: I'm very stuck on the feeling that things should represent something, look like something. Quite often I become despairing about paintings, which don't represent anything, but I get a great charge out of seeing the joy that the artist got out of doing the painting. For example I loved the work of Jackson Pollock, who would drip and splash paint on a huge canvas laid out on the floor, and I must say that whenever I'm doing big mural paintings, I get great joy in just throwing paint around and seeing how it mixes and how it runs. I love to do all that. Modern art I get lost in, a little bit. I always feel that if you are setting yourself up as an artist, you should have some talent in the use of brushes, paints, and pencils, or whatever medium you're using. You should have studied pastels, and have some basic talent to use them. I find myself completely lost with conceptual art, where somebody shows a room after a party, and says this is a finished work of art. I find myself totally lost there.
Question from James Henderson: Rolf, are you interested in any of the artists nominated for the Turner Prize?
Rolf Harris: I find myself a bit lost by that. No, not really. I've been so bound up in doing my own programmes that I'm not really aware of much about the Turner Prize this year, so I'm speaking, as it were, from a vacuum. No comment would have been a better answer, I guess.
Question from Martin Sears: Fantastic series Rolf! Are there any other periods in art besides Impressionism that fascinate you?
Rolf Harris: I'm totally fascinated by Rembrandt and I went to see the exhibition Rembrandt's Women recently. I was stunned and amazed by the tiny detail in the jewellery and adornments of some of the subjects. In some cases, when you looked up close at the paint, you found that the jewellery was painted with such thick paint, in such tiny detail, that each surface of for example, a diamond that was represented, would be on a different flat plane, moulded in the oil paint and left to dry. So when you moved around the picture from left to right, you saw the light playing on the different planes of the thick oil paint in that tiny detail of the jewel. This had a wondrous effect. I have always admired the way in which Rembrandt's paintings deal not only with all the brilliant light areas, but also went into great detail in the darker areas of the painting. He was a master of getting the right tonal effects. I'm also very interested in Frans Hals, and in Vermeer.
Question from Donald Clark: How will the internet affect art?
Rolf Harris: I'm just getting to grips with the internet, I keep getting lost on it. I can't really comment! I must say that e-mail is a wonderful way to send images around the world very quickly, and you can send scanned photographs of your paintings to people on the other side of the world in a matter of seconds. It's amazing from that point of view. A great way to exchange information.
Question from Ian Fairy: If you could have studied under any artist, alive or dead, who would it be?
Rolf Harris: Wow! That's a good one. I think I would have loved to have found a little more out about Rembrandt's approach, but the problem is you don't know whether a brilliant artist would also have been a brilliant teacher.
Question from Clare Wood: What would you advise a very timid, scared beginner with a longing to draw and paint?
Rolf Harris: Good question. The important thing is not to try to paint finished works of art on your first attempt. The best thing would be to try and find out what medium you can work in easiest. Watercolour has always been a very difficult medium because, by and large, watercolour is a medium of tricks and it's a medium that doesn't treat very well with mistakes. In oil painting, if you make a mistake, you can wipe it off and paint over it, or you can let it dry and paint over it. whereas in watercolour you really have to plan your painting like a battle campaign, know exactly what you're going to do. You need to plan where you're going to do this wash of colour, and how to flood more colour into it when it's almost dry. You have to paint watercolours much more vividly than you expect, because when the watercolours dry, the painting loses vibrancy very much, in the way that beautifully coloured pebbles picked up from the sea, lose their colour when they dry. Acrylic colours are good because they dry so quickly, and you can paint over them very rapidly, but they also tend to clog up your brush, so you need to keep washing them. They are good in so far as you can use acrylic paint as watercolours or as thick body colour, like oils, so you have the best of both worlds there. See if you can find any books on the impressionist approach to painting, to see if this would suit you. My approach, from the artist who taught me, Hayward Veal, was to try and paint the whole canvas as a blurred image of what you are looking at, and then gradually refine the blur. Almost like having an out-of-focus camera image, and gradually focusing it up so things become more recognisable. His approach was to look at the blur you've painted, and look at the subject, and try and find three important things which you think you should change about the subject, and make a decision as to which was most important. Then change it on your canvas.
Question from Rolf Harris 2: Have you ever been challenged with something you found extremely hard to accomplish?
Rolf Harris: I've tackled subjects which didn't work, and I've had terrible disasters with things like every artist, I guess. I find that sometimes I want to paint trees with lots of branches, and I get bogged down in the mechanics of doing all the branches. I find it very difficult to paint them in an impressionistic way. I somehow get lost. But the best thing is that you can always paint over that canvas and do another picture later.
Question from Susie: Do you think any of the Impressionist images have been 'over exposed' and lost their emotional impact?
Rolf Harris: Probably, yes is the answer. When you see things reproduced in every way, shape or form, they become the norm instead of something unique. You get a situation where everybody has seen them to death. Probably Toulouse Lautrec would come under that heading, his images from the Moulin Rouge seem to have been pushed and pushed and pushed, until they no longer excite and thrill.
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