Oscar-winning UK helmers recruit Polish painters for "Loving Vincent"

PanARMENIAN.Net - In a damning indictment of Britain's art schools, two Oscar-winning British film-makers have recruited 60 Polish painters to work on their latest animation, The Guardian reported.

Loving Vincent tells the story of Vincent van Gogh through moving images of his masterpieces. Hugh Welchman and David Parfitt, its producers, hoped to hire British artists to recreate more than 1,000 of the painter's works, but say they were unable to find sufficient homegrown talent.

Welchman, who won an Oscar in 2008 for his animation of Peter and the Wolf, said British art schools, unlike Polish ones, did not train students to acquire figurative skills and pushed them instead towards conceptual art. He said that few British artists had been up to scratch, yet 320 Polish artists had put themselves forward, many with "incredible skills". Of the 60 selected, only six made a living from their art. "It's sad, you don't get those kinds of people in the UK," Welchman said. Figurative training "needed [a] … rigorous and traditional education".

Parfitt, who won an Oscar in 1998 for his film Shakespeare in Love, said Polish painters were also cheaper and so kept the film's costs down. He said the animated images of Van Gogh's paintings "pulsated with life". "It's quite amazing. You can almost see paint moving, because it's that thick oil painting style that Van Gogh used. Without seeing the paintbrush, you can see the paint strokes," he said.

Michael Daley, director of ArtWatch UK, which campaigns for artistic standards, said: "Whenever you see competent paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, they're by people who've been studying in ateliers in Florence or New York."

Skilled artists were "in serious danger of being killed off by bigoted progressives against traditionalism", he added. "Once they're gone, they're gone for ever."

Diarmuid Kelley, a portrait painter whose sitters include the Duchess of Cornwall, said there was a lack of classical training in British art schools: "Everybody's self-taught. You turn up … and then you get a degree show at the end."

But Joan Ashworth, professor of animation at the Royal College of Art, was surprised the film-makers could not find homegrown talent. "What I can imagine is that those artists might want to be paid a little more. There are some very fine painters, but the focus is on innovation and finding a new way of painting."

Loving Vincent will question whether Van Gogh's death was suicide or murder. Welchman points to a Frenchman's "oblique" admission that he shot the artist and that police have never found a weapon.