Monday, December 24, 2018

Sky Sketch – October 2018

acrylic 15x10cm

More of a currently-showing news event than a recent painting post...

This is a little sky sketch done out of the front room window a couple of months ago. It's been a while since I've done 'live sky' in real time, so I did a little batch of them. What's interesting about these were that I used acrylic paint, as opposed to the usual watercolour. It's 'Fluid' acrylic, and has the consistency of thin cream - unlike the thick 'toothpaste' of the more usual 'tube' acrylic - but has very high pigment density. It dries fast, can take rapid subsequent washes, and the white is so much more reliably white than gouache. Useful stuff...

The real meat of the post is that I've had a painting hung in the annual SSA* open show. It's 'Down to the River' - never been out the house before. This is one of the rare exhibitions where pieces don't have to be for sale, and it's there for display only.

The show is in the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) - the Greek building on Princes Street at the Mound – and is open to the public from now till Thursday 17th January. It's free to go in and wander round. It's a very varied exhibition of current Scottish artwork, sculpture, prints, installations etc, and definitely worth a look. 

So, if you're in Edinburgh for Xmas, New Year, or just hanging around in a gloomy January way, you could good do a lot worse than popping into the RSA gallery and seeing what's what in contemporary art in sunny Scotland


* Society of Scottish Artists


Saturday, December 1, 2018

Fence

oil on card 21x15cm

The last of the four little paintings for the Open Eye Gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show, and there's a music track to go with it - Richard and Linda Thomson's 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' (1974). I'd never heard this song until earlier this year, when it rather gloriously played out the last episode of Channel 4's 'Derry Girls'. Great song, and for some reason it fitted this grey, rainy day.

The source image comes from another photo from a train - hastily snapped in the brief gap between Stirling and Bridge of Allan - looking north at the tail end of the Ochil Hills. Roughly across the field from here

Compositionally, it's an almost entirely unaltered transcription of the photo. I've omitted some unwanted tree stumps, simplified the mid-distance, and left out some optimistic blue tints where the cloud had started to thin out, but that's about all.

I think I got my choice of materials just right with this one. The greens and earths are all in mixes of Stand Oil and Damar Varnish, and all the paint in the sky is mixed with Walnut oil, and softened, smoothed, and blended on the surface with a very fine-haired fan brush. This difference in materials has maybe enhanced the soft, wispy, appearance of the sky. 

The dull colours and close tones in the sky are, for me, a very fulfilling mix of cool and warm
greys. These are made from cool Paynes Grey and warm/neutral Ivory Black, and cool Titanium and Zinc Whites, and Michael Harding's Warm White Lead Alternative*. 

This one just about painted itself, and is the best of the four. As it happens, all four 'On a Small Scale' pieces have sold. I'm happy to say that I know who's bought this one, and I'm very pleased at where it is. 

Which is nice...


*An interesting blend of Titanium and Zinc Whites with a touch of Yellow Ochre. Not like any Lead White I've known: takes ages to dry, and way too yellow, but is a very useful warm white. Schminke have actually recently produced an 'erzatz' Lead White. I'll be using it in the next piece, but an initial test against real Flake White looks very positive indeed


Friday, November 16, 2018

Arran - Altocumulus

oil on card 21x15cm

A short post – with very little tech stuff for a change.

This is a view of Arran from Bute spliced into a sky of altocumulus clouds snapped from a train. Or vice versa.

In the original composition there was another – distant, more solid - bank of stratus cloud that sat behind Arran. Like many ideas, it seemed a good one at the time. I just couldn't make it work convincingly though, and overpainted it at quite a late stage so that it was more like atmospheric haze - quite a dramatic demotion, but an effective one.

I think I've made a fair enough stab at the clouds here, though I fear the upper cloudlets have ended up a bit too lumpy. These altocumulus rafts are very complex, and I'm sure I could've achieved a more ethereal feel – which is what I love about them - over more time and a larger area (and with probably a bit more thought). The island and the sea aren't too bad though and I'm very pleased with the clear transparent blue* in the right half of the sky. 

Lastly, this little painting seemed extraordinarily difficult for me to photograph – in real life it does actually look a little better than the image above (especially the blue). I usually manage to produce something not too far removed from the actual piece, but I do not claim to be an experienced photographer, and I have no idea why that should be with this particular painting. Very annoying.

That's all four taken in to the gallery this afternoon. Hopefully they'll be on the wall (with 350 others) when the show opens. That's at 'On a Small Scale', the Open Eye Gallery, Dundas Street, Edinburgh, from 26 November - 22 December 2018. Definitely worth a look just for the sheer variety of the work on display. I'm going to leave posting the last piece – Fence - till December, for the very pragmatic reason that I won't have anything even half-ready to post for that month.

* First thin layer - cloth dabber - Ultramarine + Zinc White, in Stand Oil + Damar Varnish: second layer Ultramarine + barest touch of Red Shade Pthalo Blue and Zinc White in a mix of Stand and Walnut oils, printed/modified/faded with cloth dabber...


Thursday, November 1, 2018

Luminous Cumulus

oil on card 21x15cm

First of all, here's some floaty 'Nuagist' music - Brian Eno's 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports'. This helped my concentration when doing the fine softening layers of the cloud masses.

This is the second of the set of four postcard paintings for the Open Eye Gallery's pre-Xmas 'On a Small Scale' show. It's another composite piece splicing a cloud photo through our front room window with a quick snap of trees from a train. Like the previous one, I've had to extend some of the main cloud base a little to hide the roofs, but that's about it – and it hasn't altered the 'character' of the cloud at all. 

Compositionally, it's a bit flat distance-wise again, but this piece is more about the variations in brush-work than the spaces. The trees and ground are painted with small jittery, un-softened, brush-marks in fairly transparent varnishy mixes. The paint of the sky and clouds is opaque, but lightly placed onto the surface then blurred softly to soften out edges, and this goes a long way towards the luminous atmospherics in the sky that I was aiming for. The construction of this piece is quite interesting, and can be seen – along with everything else - stage-by-stage through the 'Works in Progress 2018 – development and technical' link under 'Evolution' in the column on the right of this page. 

Now, it's come to my attention that some people aren't aware of the notes attached to these 'Progress' images. Once you've selected and opened one, and have it on your screen, it's worth clicking the 'info' symbol at the top right – it'll make the tech notes visible. Note: materials, brushes etc are abbreviated after their first use. It's mainly for my own own reference, but it's open to anyone interested.

If you do take a look at this painting in the Works in Progress you'll see that I couldn't decide where to place the grass line – it wavers up and down a few times – and how the softness in the sky was built. As hinted at above, walnut-thinned paint was touched onto the walnut-wiped surface, then spread and moved with a very soft fan brush (not a hog bristle one). I bought a couple of very, very soft fan brushes when in Van Beek's art supply shop in Amsterdam earlier this year. They have a golden synthetic hair – very fine and pointed – and facilitate delicate soft transitions with thin paint. I'm currently researching who can supply these in the UK.

Two bits of news. Two paintings have been pre-selected for the SSA Open show (Society of Scottish Artists) – not always a guaranteed inclusion. I once delivered two pieces pre-selected for the RSA, and had to pick both up after being rejected on sight by the selection panel. Oh, the humiliation. So, fingers crossed for December's final selection. And... I've signed a contract for a show at the Open Eye Gallery - September 2019. 

About which I shall no doubt post as and when...

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Cumulus – Box Hill

oil on card 21x15cm

I have four little paintings on the go just now for December's 'On a Small Scale' show at the Open Eye Gallery. The others will be along as they get done.

This is a combination piece. The sky is from a photo I recently took through the front room window, and the hillside is from a set of photos from when we visited Box Hill a few years ago (which turns out to have been quite a productive day - see 2012's 'Madam – Box Hill').

Cloud photos from out of the window are tricky to use as source material – the buildings across the road block out quite a lot of the lower sky. This curling cumulus was too interesting to pass over, so I put my brain in gear and worked out a composition to utilize it. The sunlit hillside covered most of the problem roofs neatly, and some sky and cloud from another photo - taken a few minutes earlier - helped on the right. Bits of original roof and chimney-pot still showing were photoshopped away quickly and easily. It's a fairly conventional composition, if a little lacking in depth. The eagle-eyed might spot that the sunlight in the sky shines from the left, whereas the hillside is illuminated from behind the viewer's right shoulder, but I think it works fine.

This current set of four is taking longer than they should, maybe because I'm being a bit more precise than usual during the initial stages. The measurement and layout are in fine pencil, filled out slightly with weak monochrome acrylic, then the main work is with layers of oil paint. These are, as usual, thinned – mainly with Stand Oil and Damar Varnish. The latter, lighter, stages of the cloud were done with Walnut Oil (not fancy - off the shelf at Waitrose). This is a tremendously fluid medium, very good for wafty soft areas, especially when the surface has been wiped with a Walnut Oil:Turpentine mix (1:2 if you must know), and I'm having a little period of using it again for skies. I have soft fan brushes for manipulating the paint once it's on the surface, using a horizontal, dragging motion - unlike the vertical stippling and 'printing' actions used with Stand Oil. The surface has to be very smooth, as any dried paint flecks, or cat hairs, will show up quite a lot as the paint gathers or is swept off them. As with the Stand Oil, it's a good idea to add a few drops of Driers or Siccatives to the paint before using it; as an ancient Chinese proverb says 'The more oil in yer paint, the longer it'll take to dry. Especially in winter'

The best bits? Surprisingly not the wafty walnut - I'm actually quite chuffed with the birch trunks. Their 'whites' are the primer showing through where I've scratched out the wet paint with a shaped lolly stick. 

Inevitably, current events will shoehorn themselves into the creative process, and the image above cannot help but suggest to me some kind of approaching... what? Let me turn it around, and suggest that anyone who thinks the Sun is going to be shining on that hillside for much longer is a damned fool. No allusion or allegory meant here, oh no, perish the thought...


Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Low Sun - Lomond Hills

oil on panel 73x52cm

There's no music as a scene setter for this piece, but I did revisit The Skids during the last few painting sessions. They were Fife boys from nearby Dunfermline, so here's 'Animation' as a bit of local colour (Not at all mandatory).

The sources for this image were some photos of the Lomond Hills, in Fife - taken from the train coming back to Edinburgh from Perth. It was late afternoon last October – just south of Ladybank I think. 

The real Lomond Hills don't look anything like this though. The one on the left – East Lomond – is really a lot higher than appears here, but that would've been a bit unbalanced. I wanted to make the other hill – West Lomond – the more important of the two compositionally, so I reduced 'East' and enlarged 'West' through the magic of photoshop for an 'improved' source image. The clear sky reaching down the right edge to the low horizon is entirely invented; in the original source the cloud extends, uninterrupted, way past and far beyond the picture boundary. The open 'new' sky defines the central cumulus more, balances East Lomond, and stops the whole composition from sliding off to the right and out of the picture. The hedges, and trees and bushes receding back into the murk were a gift for describing the distance, but they did need something more.

I knew I would have to have figures in the painting somewhere, but I only found them quite late. They are a group of four, taken from a German TV drama on the telly earlier this year, and screen-shotted directly from the BBC iPlayer later. I saw them (and they were in an interesting dawn setting which may come in useful at some point) and knew they were just right, though I do admit that they might be a little bit shoe-horned in. Only a little bit though.

It's all about the horizontally-lit cumulus of course, and I'm quite pleased with the colour and the apparent lightness of the cloud - it's difficult to imagine that such masses really weigh thousands of tons, and are kept aloft purely by rising air currents. I would've liked the paint surface to be finer and softer close-up, but it'll do from a small distance away. I did use the dreaded velvet pads (see August 2018 post) at one point, but luckily they didn't deposit too many 'bits' into the paint surface. I switched back to plain muslin after the velvet debacle, and I think I've got away with it.

Technically, this piece is all thin layers, and for some reason it took me a long time to get to grips with it. I wanted to get the central cloud 'solved' first, postponing the establishment of the overall tonality – it was about the twelfth session (of twenty in all) by the time I had any depth to the hill tones. It's as if I didn't really want to do the painting at all. Which can happen.

West Lomond is a strange and deceptive hill. From Strathearn, going along the A85 from Crieff to Perth, its conical summit pokes above the Ochil Hills, and seems to be a mighty distant peak, like Everest towering over the Himalayas. When you finally see it in its own, it doesn't really seem high at all, and, while an interesting feature in its own right, can be a slight anticlimax if you've been looking forward to it all the way from Perthshire. 

This particular hill group – in Eastern Scotland – are nothing at all to do with Loch Lomond (of Bonny Bonny Banks fame) in the West. As the Interweb says: “The place name 'Lomond' may be from Gaelic – leamhan - elm, though the more popular explanation is that it is from another Gaelic word laom meaning blaze, hence Ben Lomond - beacon hill (though beacon loch is less satisfactory, unless the loch is named from the hill above it)”. The two Fife hills would be pretty good 'beacon' hills, so I'll go with that. 

They are easily visible from Edinburgh when looking north across the Firth of Forth, and are known very colloquially as 'The Paps of Fife', which is very rude indeed. And, frankly, stretching it a bit...


Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Approaching Rain - Craiglockhart

oil on card 30x18cm

This is based on some photos I took a couple of years ago from the summit of Easter Craiglockhart Hill*, looking South West. The landscape has been flipped left/right (photoshop) against the sky, and makes sense when you know that the far hilltops are Dalmahoy and Kaimes Hills.

This flipping puts part of the nearby Wester Craiglockhart Hill in the lower right corner, in opposition to the dark rain cloud rearing up and advancing from the top left, and centres the arcs of the nearer cloud masses onto the receptive angular nick in the rock profile.

Technique-wise, this was fairly straightforward. The land forms were initially placed with pencil then developed with thin Paynes Grey acrylic before laying on the oil paint. The sky is entirely in oil paint as I didn't want any of the acrylic's hard-edgeness showing through. 

I did try something new (for me) in the paint-handling of the sky though. I sometimes use a muslin-covered cloth pad for finer blending and softening, but this time I used a pad covered in velvet. The working properties were great, for both 'printing' the paint on, them fading it out, and for wiping it off too. Unfortunately – even though I'd washed the velvet square two or three times – when the paint dried it revealed fibres and little black bits of the base material. Which is a pity, as it worked the paint very well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm back to my more reliable muslin. Maybe the Next Idea will work out better

I confess to being a little disappointed in the sky – more specifically the central 'warmer' clouds. I mislaid my understanding of the spaces between them (a danger of using photographs!), and this has resulted in a rather weak and unfocussed centre. An alteration I made in the last stages, patched with an invented rain veil, has left a rather weak 'blue-sky'/'bright-cloud' boundary line which deserves to be stronger. If I were starting again (which I'm not) I'd rethink the central mass, if necessary importing some cloud samples from elsewhere, or indeed reducing or eliminating it, and extending the bright and blue area to sit behind the dramatic rainy stuff on the left.

Given all that, I'm quite pleased with the general efficiency of the landscape, and the contrast between the approaching rain on the left and the clear sunlight on the right. I think the acrylic underdrawing has contributed to the 'rockiness' of the near hillsides – especially on the right. I'm also quite chuffed with the tonal restraint of the rain areas – it would've been very easy to make them darker and over-dramatise the scene, and I think it's dynamic enough as it is. 

Which is fine (wish that velvet dabber idea had worked out though...)


* No great physical strain, as the No.23 bus gets you to within a gentle ten-minute walk of the top (where there is a nice comfy bench)...


Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Passing

oil on panel 90x70 cm

When I looked up the date I actually started this painting, I was very surprised to find that it was the first week of February – I thought I'd been working on it a lot longer. In fact, I started composing it last summer, but for various reasons I didn't begin the actual painting till earlier this year. It's seemed to have been a very intense, and very complex painting to do, and it's a relief to see it's done now. I don't know why, but it does now seem to be the case that some time has to elapse between my finishing a painting, and my being able to judge whether it's been a success or not, so I really can't tell just now how it's turned out. I'm still not really sure about the title. I'll know in a few weeks – but here it is.

I wouldn't say that this painting had specific mood-settering, 'zoning-in' music – if I felt particularly lethargic I'd just shuffle a batch 60s, 70s, or 80s pop - but if I wanted a settled, restful atmosphere to work in, I'd probably reach for the Max Richter. His hypnotically minimalist 'Sleep' provided that for many work sessions. Most 'Sleep' youtube extracts are too long and bad quality, but here's a gentle 9-minute live version of one of the themes.

The landscape source is in western Russia, near the village of Belenikhino, and I found it while looking at the Prokhorovka Tank Memorial and the surrounding countryside on Google Streetview. There was a huge tank battle in that area in 1943, but I should stress that the location is not specifically relevant to this painting, and is coincidental.

I liked the arrangement of the masses and open spaces, and the bright, diffuse light. The sky in the source was difficult to work with (though there is a beautiful cumulus round to the left), so I imported a similar one – with just a bit more sparkle and blue - from some photos I took in France some years ago. 

I was baffled by the diffuse jumble of fuzzy grasses and shrubs, and at first I simply had no idea how to depict them. To some extent I made forms out of accidental marks because I had a lot of trouble finding the structures in the sources - and used the streetview images on each side of the original for more information about the masses and spaces. Once the figure was settled in, I realised that there needed to be a finer texture and some delicacy around it, so I planted some daisies and grass that I'd sourced for a painting a couple of years ago. It improved the whole painting a lot, I think, both in terms of marks and texture, and as a more sympathetic bed for the figure.

Technically, this is quite an interesting piece. It's on hardboard panel, with white acrylic priming, gridded, and initially set out with light pencil. The forms and tones were developed with fast-drying thin monochrome acrylic paint – effectively an extension of the white priming. For some bizarre reason I used Violet Brown – which I realised was a mistake by the second session, but felt I had to carry on for the colour continuity, though I did switch to Raw Umber for the figure. My first task for the second phase – building up the surfaces with 'true' colour in oil paint – was to start killing off the violet with broad yellowy-green transparent oil washes. Which was annoying.

If the right under-colour is used this could be a very fast method of establishing drawing and tones, since the drawing shows through the thin oil paint. Substance and weight, and corrections where needed, can be built with opaque paint which can itself be glazed over if required. Indeed, where I had to re-stated light-toned forms – e.g. in the foreground plants - they were painted in white, then glazed with transparent pigments with added Stand Oil and Damar varnish. This may seem quite a roundabout method – and the white seems very anomalous and alien before the colour goes on - but the result is quite a rich surface with a very luminous, almost crystalline, effect. (Which may not be evident from the screen image)

Would I paint with this technique again? Yes, absolutely, and it's worth finding out which paints and pigments are transparent, and which are opaque. Done correctly, it should be a huge time-saver, and next time I'll be using something like Payne's Grey or Raw Umber.

The most efficient painting here was in the sky. Most of it was done with very little paint in about one hour (the whites and light tones are the untouched priming and a mere staining coat of paint) and the darker soft greys are a semi-opaque layer stippled on and faded with my new badger blenders, and cloth dabber pads. That would have been the sky done and dusted had I not decided to lower parts of the far tree-line, which meant very careful tone and colour matching when overpainting the unwanted (quite dark) ex-treetops.

The figure, which I've tried to re-direct the viewer away from, was in a photograph I found on the web. I had always known that there would be someone tucked in at the edge of the grass, and I had been about to start the painting when the nagging doubt about my very first figure made me stop, and look for another. I thought my second one, facing away, was again good to go, but at the last moment I felt that I could do better, and again halted, and did yet more picture searches. As soon as this image, a dead Finnish soldier, came up on my screen, I knew that it was exactly what I was looking for. The face was fully visible, and there was a hurt, drawn-in, fragility in the body. I angled him so that his head was lower than his hip, and his shape rhymed more with the bushes, and he was just right. As usual, I found it very difficult to draw or paint a prone figure, so I cheated slightly by turning the source image and the panel 90 degrees, and worked the figure as if upright.

I took a lot of time to get the face right, touching in small developments and corrections, letting my eyes rest, then refining the image over several sessions. It was a painful subject to paint, and I freely admit that the figure is steeped in my mother's death last year - and there is something of her last breath in the lower lip.

As I said above, it's been a very complex painting to do. I'm glad I took the time and didn't hurry it. 

That's it done now, and I'll move along, and get on with the next one


Saturday, June 30, 2018

Footballers

pencil

I have a larger painting carefully approaching the final turn, and I don't want to hurry it just to meet a blog post deadline, so this month's post was going to be either a wee watercolour or a few more figures. The figures won.

Some may have noticed that the World Cup 2018 is currently running its course. I've never really played the game myself for two reasons; a) I was sent to rugby-playing schools (which I loathed), and b) When I did finally find myself being in a football-playing school playground I was rubbish at it and was always stuck in goal (where I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing). However I got very interested when we started doing the Fantasy Footy at work, and began watching Match of the Day just to be less of an ignoramus. Turns out that it's a lovely game with genuine beauty, indeed Madam gets very involved in a good match, and delights in a classy move when she sees it. This late appreciation has occasionally paid off, and I'm very happy to put on the record that my team – the Prussian Blues – won our little 'Crapleague' this last season – against some clever late plays from Young Mr Richardson's Xhaka Flocka Flames.

The World Cup is an excellent excuse for sitting in front of the telly pretending you're doing something, and I've taken full advantage of that opportunity. Sometimes, though, the guilt breaks through and I feel that I should be doing something a bit more constructive. When this occurs I pick up a pencil and doodle away the dull periods of play. These are some of the more presentable results. 

It's actually a very difficult extreme drawing exercise – I find it so anyway – as the action moves very fast (usually), and the camera cuts tend to be rapid. There are dozens of cameras covering every angle of play, and the directors frequently shift from the more static wide shots to close action shots for replays. Some of these are in slow motion, which is fine for the Video Assisted Referees to spot the Bad Boys at work, but I - perhaps rather sniffily - regard sketching through slo-mo as cheating. These drawings (loose squiggles really) have to be done very rapidly indeed, before the visual memory fades, so they are mostly tiny – for instance, the (Brazilian) figure sidefooting the ball, and the stick figure chasing the ball are 4cm and 2cm high respectively.

Anyway, here's a few marks saying 'footballers', normal service will be resumed shortly...

Friday, May 25, 2018

Window Work – May 2018

pencil, and watercolour

It's been a while, and as nothing I'm working on is going to be finished anytime before June, here's some Window Work. Some were done over the winter, but the most recent – the stripey lady with the pram - is from a couple of days ago, and what I'm noticing about the pencil sketches is that they're much looser and wispier – but still able to give a sense of weight and stance. 

A few of them depict several figures or couples. The four little sketches of the lady digging snow was done over 20 minutes or so as she cleared the pavement across the road. In the one with three figures, it looks as though the old couple are being looked at by the young woman, but actually they just happened to be the next subjects to appear in that session, so this is a false narrative. They make an interesting group on the paper though.

I find drawing couples very tricky. It's obvious why – I'm trying to draw two people in the time I normally get to draw one, so the visual memory is tested quite hard. Not so tough doing pairs of older folk, or couples approaching with a pram (which hides the legs very effectively), but they still have to make sense and link together as a unit.

I have to admit that the the monochrome watercolour wasn't done sitting at the front room window in Edinburgh, but while having coffee and apple pie with Madam at the Blue Teahouse in the Vondelpark. We popped across to Amsterdam for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and visited Van Beek's art shop just along from the Rijksmuseum. We'd bought some watercolours there - one of which was a tube of Daniel Smith 'Indigo' - and I thought I'd try that out while Madam was experimenting with the others. It's quite an interesting purply blue-black – a blend of Lamp Black and Indanthrone Blue pigments - quite unlike the greenish Winsor & Newton 'Indigo', which is a mix of Lamp Black, Quinacridone Violet, and Pthalo Blue. I don't there's any great merit in this sketch, and I really wasn't concentrating very hard, but I thought I'd include it as a bit of fun, and for the interesting colour. On the subject of interesting colour, the Vondelpark now has an established population of bright green feral parakeets. Local Amsterdammers are quite charmed by them just now, but I fear that they (the parakeets) may take over completely in the way they have in South-West London around Richmond Park. Which is not a particularly good way.

Just in passing, while we were in Holland, and it being quite possibly being the last time we were going through the EU citizens channel, we asked a few folk – at the hotel, in the local restaurant and coffee place on the corner (we really didn't stray far!) - what they thought about the United Kingdom's leaving of the European Union. It wasn't a huge presence on their radars it has to be said – one girl didn't know what Brexit was or that UK was leaving – but once coaxed a little, they opened up and pointed out to us what a profoundly stupid thing it was to choose to do. With which Madam and I both agreed. It was a nice little trip though. We didn't feel the need to 'do stuff', and spent most of the time within a few hundred yards of the hotel – which was admittedly on the edge of the park. We did visit the Rijksmuseum (twice) , but we baulked slightly at spending a whole day there, so just had a coffee and a rummage through the gift shop, and then went back for a pee after Van Beek's and a shady sit-down next to a canal. It was just that sort of a trip.

Oh, and there's a sketch of a dog. With a lead but no owner attached to it...


Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Blue Cumulus

oil on card 36x18 cm
Music first. Facing the blank surface on the easel, for some reason I put on Brian Eno's 'Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtrack', and the first track – 'Under Stars' - seemed to suit the mood.

It's another cloud from a train, in the 2:1 ratio again – which I'm finding very interesting. The main cumulus and landscape is virtually a transcription of the photo, but some cloud masses have been edited out so as to have a band of clear sky, and I've exaggerated the blueness of the the 'aerie' elements. It didn't go all that well though; at one point I wiped off a whole day's bad painting – bad because I wasn't really concentrating on what I was doing. Anyway, it's done now.

The clouds were definitely resisting - though I think the landscape went OK – but there were several necessary interruptions to the routine at home. My computer had started cutting out with no warning - luckily I didn't lose any work – so I really had to get a new one organised. Finding my way around a new Windows system, working out exactly where all my old files were, reinstalling programmes, then setting everything up so I could work on it, all took a bit of time. A vexing, but necessary process, and hopefully I won't have to repeat it for some time.

A bit of Technical stuff now. I used Winsor and Newton's 'Transparent White' for most of the whites in this, as a try-out. I'd bought a tube recently and had painted comparison samples of all the whites I have onto some black plastic card. This Transparent White actually appeared blue when the paint was thinned out against the black – which the Zinc White didn't - so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I also tried out Michael Harding's 'King's Blue Deep' for the blue sky. It's a mix of Ultramarine, and Titanium and Zinc Whites, but it's very intense and I can see me using it again. 

Best bits of painting? They would be the hill on the horizon to the right, and the murk underneath the main cumulus.

The music linked to (above) was the soundtrack to a film I saw decades ago on my old black and white telly. It was a 1989 documentary by Al Reinart - 'For all Mankind'. The Amazon info text explains it best -

“During the Apollo lunar missions from 1968 to 1972, those on-board were given 16mm cameras and told to film anything and everything they could, in space, in orbit, and on the surface of the moon itself. Two decades later, film-maker Al Reinert went into the NASA vaults to create this extraordinary compendium of their journeys and experiences.”

It can be yours for less than a tenner, and my copy's in the post as I write. Eno's soundtrack is available separately, but some of the tracks can be heard via Youtube (at time of posting). One in particular - 'An Ending (Ascent)' - has been used a lot for BBC and other productions, and is definitely worth a listen.

There we go then. On to the next one...

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Ragged Cumulus – August 2017

oil on card 36x18cm

A view of West Lothian out of the train window, from last summer. The weather was quite changeable and it was an interesting cloud day, so I daresay there’ll be another sky piece from that day’s trip at some point.

The final source was straight from a photo, but my original ‘vision’ had a lot more sky and land. I was interested in the clouds, obviously, but was also drawn to the late summer contrast of dark August foliage and pale yellow fields. There was a visual rhyme linking the ragged cumulus updraughts and windblown fir trees on the skyline, and to make this plain I had to zoom well into the original image. I had a rethink just before applying paint and zoomed in even further, cutting out a lot of sky and foreground. Not long in, I realised that this reframe made the ground distances uncomfortably compressed, so I abandoned the ‘ragged rhyme’ idea, and shifted the higher ground back half a mile - smoothing the skyline and giving the cloud forms some space.

Technical stuff? Nothing really, except that for the final lights in the clouds I used Michael Harding’s Warm White Lead Alternative – a slightly warmer white (the label on the tube is a bit of giveaway) - with added Walnut Oil. In my enthusiasm for Stand Oil, I sometimes overlook the smoothness and mobility of Walnut – it was very effective for soft effects on clouds before, and it still is. 

This little piece took far too long to paint. I was too hesitant in the initial stages, and then had to wipe off an annoying large tree in the lower right corner – accidentally providing the far cloudbank - then did all that re-working of the hill. Worth it though.

However, it was interesting using the wide 2:1 double square proportions. Madam and I had seen an exhibition of Charles-François Daubigny landscapes in the National Gallery of Scotland a couple of years ago, and saw that he often used 2:1 canvasses. Daubigny was painting just before Monet – his paintwork was a lot looser than the established academic painters, and he liked to paint in the open air. To facilitate this he had a boat converted into a floating studio, in which he travelled - and painted - the canals and rivers of Northern France. Monet followed Daubigny’s example both in the further loosening of his paintwork, the Plein Air thing, and indeed building - and painting in - a studio boat, though I don’t think he painted double squares much. Nevertheless, it’s a panoramic ratio and suits expansive landscapes very well.

And you don’t necessarily need a studio boat to use it…


Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Low Sun - February

watercolour 15x10cm

It’s February, and I find I’ve nothing ready-to-post except Window Work. Most of the window work stuff is of figures – pencil nowadays - but this one’s a quick tiny watercolour of the sun going down behind the buildings up the road.

Before continuing, I should draw your attention to the new ‘Works in Progress 2018–’ link near the top of the list of links to the right. It’s hosted on Google Photos, but should be viewable publicly. It’s the same format as the previous ‘Works in Progress’ in that it shows the progress stages and layers of each painting. Once opened - if you click the ‘info’ symbol - there’s text detailing the pigments, mediums, and brushes used for each session (mostly). It’s done primarily for my own benefit, as an online record of what I’ve used for a particular passage of painting or effect for when I’ve forgotten later, but it’s open for anyone to see if they’re interested. The previous ‘Works in Progress’ has about four years’ worth on it and was starting get a bit unwieldy to update. Both ‘W.I.Ps' are under the heading ‘Evolution’ on the right of the blog page – where there’s also another link to ‘Much, much Older Paintings'. These are from the 1970s and 80s, and I may post better photos, or put up more paintings or drawings from days gone by, if and when I feel like it. Very, very few people have actually seen these, and some of them do have some merit, even if they seem a bit raw. All quite different from the current work. OK, back to the post proper now.

Madam and I had not long done our usual pilgrimage to see the Turner watercolours at the National Gallery of Scotland (they are displayed every January, when the light levels are lowest) and that always gives me a little kick in the direction of watercolour. So…

This little sketch was done at about 4pm on the 6th of February, and was the first little ‘Sun Sketch’ of the year. The street we live on runs about SW/NE, and we have bit of a bay window jutting out that looks all the way up the road. We get direct mid-afternoon to evening sunshine for most of the year, but the sun dips behind the far roofs in November and doesn’t make it above them for a while. It returns in the first week of February, and as that time approaches the streetlamps’ shadows are stretched almost parallel to the kerbs and building fronts, and pedestrians drag long 30metre shadows behind them. It’s a great moment when the first strip of sunlight finally edges into the front room and blazes onto the interior wall. It’s a sign that winter’s being shown the door, and there are cheers and hugs all round – even the cats sit on the window table and stretch up to catch the light.

Anyway, when the sun came in over my shoulder I just stopped the easel work and sat down with a little watercolour block pad and sloshed away. I let it dry overnight, and then scratched out the whites of the sun and the cloud streaks above it. 

I was fresh from seeing Turner's watercolours, after all…

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Trees – Litovsk

oil on canvas 61x51cm

This is sourced from yet another google streetview trawl through Russia, this time from outside Litovsk, a village not far from the Belarus and Ukrainian borders. The late afternoon light was very important, but also the way the central tree masses recede in a line along the direction of light. There’s been a little editing of the shadow line at the left and right edges, and I’ve got rid of the small stream between the front bushes, but otherwise the main elements of the source image remain unchanged. 

Very early on I found some mood-setter music for this - ‘He shall feed his flock like a shepherd’, from Handel’s Messiah. I was just at the organizing stage, and we were watching the film ‘Manchester by the Sea’ on the telly, when this music came on. I glanced across at the painting on the easel - and it just fitted. It’s possibly more suited to pastoral rolling grassland and big skies, but - what can I say – it just felt right. There’s no link to the film soundtrack’s recording by Musica Sacra, but the one above will certainly do (nicely paced, and sung by a countertenor and very nice soprano voice).

There is a figure here, in the shadow, who could be sleeping. But it’s from a sequence of photographs taken during and after a reprisal massacre by Czech partisans in May 1945. There was going to be a whole row of them, but I decided against it.

I started work on this last May, but was interrupted by the necessity to finish ‘Ghosts’, the Open Eye set, and family events. I took an awfully long time to establish all the elements – even for me – and got very bogged down (especially in the front right bushes). Having said that, I’m sure that the painting has benefited from being put by, as I think I had lost sight of what I was trying to do. Resuming after New Year, I came to it with a fresh eye, and was able to see that the colour needed a boost, which I did fairly simply with glazing and thin transparent yellows. I did use more thick Stand Oil in these latter mixes, but I pulled back from the amounts I was using for the last small landscapes.

For these last top yellows I used a colour I’d picked up a couple of years ago for some reason, but had never used - ‘Stil de Grain’, from Talens. It used to be made from buckthorn berries (under various names including Dutch and English Pink) but the modern version is pure Isoindoline. It resembles Raw Sienna straight from the tube, but when thinned it’s a surprisingly warm, very transparent yellow, not quite as fiery as Indian Yellow. 

Again, it’s nice to say where work is on public view, and I’ve got two pieces selected for this year’s SSA Open exhibition. It’s on at the RSA building at Princes Street/The Mound, and will run from 29th January until 8th March. It’s free to go in, so if you find yourself in Edinburgh with some time to spare, you could do a lot worse than wandering through the SSA/VAS show and seeing what’s going on in Scottish Art just now.

And the bit of painting I like most in this piece? – The front-lit ground and trees on the right, from behind the dry brown foliage in the foreground to the skyline. As usual, I did the most effective painting without really thinking about it and with not a lot of subsequent correction.

I really do wish that didn’t keep happening…