oil on card 30x20cm
This piece has quite a simple composition – a very firm flat landscape, interrupted only by the clumps of trees, receding back to the horizon and distant hills. The source location is a few miles north-west of Manzanares, on the La Mancha Plain, a very hot, flat area in central Spain. The painting only really deviates from the source in that some trees have been reduced or disappeared, and all the power lines eradicated. The far hills have been shifted around from the right of the viewer. This very simple composition lets the eye take in and enjoy the sky and cloud forms – calmed down a touch - which is, of course, what it's all about.
Technique-wise it follows the current construction sequence of pencil, light monochrome acrylic, then oil paint. The oil paint for the land was placed fairly simply in opaque pigments, but the blue sky was all in transparent Ultramarine/Prussian Blue/Zinc White, with a touch of Paynes Grey in the upper sky - letting the white priming shine through - and thinned out towards the horizon. The clouds were made using several layers of very thin Schminke Fake Flake white. At one point I laid the same blue glaze – a bit thinner - over the whole sky to tint the clouds and the clear blue 'dome' a bit more evenly blue. Later that evening, under night-time artificial light, it looked almost turquoise, and I endured an agony of indecision about whether to wash the new paint off and lay on a slightly more violet glaze. Luckily, under good daylight of the next morning, the sky appeared just 'violet' enough to not need further work. I'm glad I restrained myself from that potentially disastrous over-correction, and I think the clarity of the paint in the sky works very well against that of the opaque terrain.
The clouds are the main thing though. The weather seems to be quite blowy in the source; the altocumulus are quite ragged, and they have wispy trails drawn back down below them. These are called 'virga' – the Latin for 'streaks' - and are inverted plumes of rain, snow, or ice falling from the cloud above. They are very commonly seen falling to the ground beneath a low cumulus shower cloud, but sometimes they can be observed higher in the atmosphere falling from altocumulus clouds, but evaporating before reaching the earth. In still air these are spectacular. A few years back I saw lines and lines of calm, flat, altocumulus clouds receding into the distance, each with a vertical trail beneath. They looked like stately armadas of jellyfish floating through the sky. I took a few snaps at the time, sent them off to the nascent Cloud Appreciation Society, who published them (name-credited) in the first edition of the 'Cloudspotter's Guide' – of which I am immensely proud.
I could go on about that for quite a while, but I shall close by simply noting that the source picture is indisputable documentary evidence that, while it does definitely Rain in Spain, it doesn't necessarily get to actually Fall onto the Plain...
