Art Capener did a short amount of formal art training at UK Liverpool Art College way back in the early 60s but found he didn’t really like it, instead taking the long road of being self-taught. “Being taught how to do something is OK but the excitement of discovering it for yourself is much better, I feel. Quite often new techniques are discovered by what I call ‘happy accidents’ – that’s when you’re almost giving up and so you try again and again. Suddenly you find yourself standing back and saying, wow did I do that?”
Art Capener did a short amount of formal art training at UK Liverpool Art College way back in the early 60s but found he didn’t really like it, instead taking the long road of being self-taught. “Being taught how to do something is OK but the excitement of discovering it for yourself is much better, I feel. Quite often new techniques are discovered by what I call ‘happy accidents’ – that’s when you’re almost giving up and so you try again and again. Suddenly you find yourself standing back and saying, wow did I do that?”“I have no idea what drove my interest in art, I do a lot of geneology research and have gone back over 1500 years, but amazingly I never found an ancestral artist. Having said that, I’m sure many of them would have drawn or painted at some point. I get all the inspiration I need from nature – not just the scenery but the vast array of colours, it’s also very theraputic as we all know colour can lift your spirits or have an opposite effect, adding beauty or drama to a picture. I admire the work of many artists such as Jonathan White, Tim Wilson and the works of 18th century Russian artists, such as Ivan Aivazovsky.
