Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Ghosts

oil on canvas 100x80cm

Before we begin, get the speakers on and the music track clicked. Hear the piano? Off we go…

Some of you will recognise that this is Kate Bush singing ‘Wuthering Heights’. For those too young or forgetful, this was her debut hit single, which featured memorably on Top of Tops in 1978. You’ll probably be aware that the song is based around Emily Bronte’s novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ – the Heathcliff and Cathy story. 

Some paintings seem to paint themselves, this one didn’t for some reason. Not only is it larger than usual, but it’s quite heavy due to the much thicker stretchers needed, and I pulled my back quite seriously one day while raising it awkwardly on the easel. The blue sky and upper clouds were washed off and repainted once, then overpainted three or four times during the campaign to achieve the right colour and wispiness. The hardness and cragginess of the rock cliffs were built up – counter-intuitively perhaps - with thin veils of opaque/transparent paint, so they took a long time. The cumulus masses on the left kept developing unwanted hard edges, and the colourful young lady (inserted last, after the sky was completed) got very stroppy and refused to be convincing in all the important criteria – stance, colour, tone, solidity, and recognisability. 

Which was annoying, as she is obviously the primary attraction, seeing as how she’s dancing around in a bright red dress against the sky at the edge of a cliff. The grass, happily, took pity on me, and its painting went fairly effortlessly.

Arriving at the right image source for the rocks was a lengthy process too. Initially I was trying to work with composites of Buckstones Edge, but I just couldn’t get a workable skyline shape. (I think it might have been the chance discovery of these rocks that sparked the whole idea) At one point I was desperate enough to consider looking at Salisbury Crags up the road. Luckily it was raining, so I did one more picture search and discovered the Almscliffe Crag. This outcrop was everything I was looking for, and it has a wonderful shallow concave cliff face. As a bonus, it’s a proper Yorkshire feature, which is nice. I’ve flipped the crags left-to-right and altered the scale – they’re actually a lot more massive than suggested here – but the lighting on the source image was perfect for the bright sky I’d already chosen, so I just bluffed the scale. The vital green counter-curve of sunlit ground was a serendipitous contrast with the dead, hard rock.

On the left there’s a bundle of smaller cumulus clouds, and this is where the piece’s title makes sense. If you haven’t spotted them already, there are a couple of transparent figures there, looking up with interest at the young singer. They are, of course, the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff. They’re taken from a couple of stills from William Wyler’s Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon film version. I didn’t want them to be immediately visible so I’ve camouflaged them a bit by putting them against a more contrasting cloud background. Possibly too invisible, but we’ll see.

My scenario is that young Kate is belting out her piece at the very crags where the young lovers used to meet – where the novel suggests their shades were last spotted - and that Heathcliff and Cathy are still there. Though the singer is telling their story, she is oblivious to their presence.

Boiled down, it’s an image about the continuing presence of the dead, and, perhaps, a comforting notion that they can be approving of the living.

I’m aware that the narrative isn’t obvious, and that it will probably become impenetrable within a couple of decades. The viewer has to know all four of the elements - the singer, the song, the novel, and its storyline – which will become a rarer and rarer occurrence as time grinds on, and the recognition factor might be stronger if the title was ‘The Ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy’. Hmm. Purely as an image though, without the pop and literary references, I still think it has legs, and it does have some interesting bits of painting in it (the rocks and grass if you hadn’t noticed, and I’m also quite pleased with the mix of reds in the dress)

Anyway, it’s done now, and I’m going to have a bit of a rest before starting on to the next piece.

Which, with a bit of luck, will go a bit easier…