Mohkkejavri

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the last of the four Small Scale pieces done for the Open Eye gallery – finished on time for the end of November, but un-blogged due to my not having anything else finished to post about. I did have a mood-setter for this - the track 'One World' from John Martyn's album of the same name. Apart from his voice, it's quite a sparse and cold sound that seems to match the landscape.

The source image is taken – google Streetview of course – from the wilds of Finnmark, the most northern part of Norway. I'm pretty sure that 'Mohkkejavri' is this lake's name, but there seem to be four or five other lakes called that too, and I suspect that it may be just Finnish, or Sami, for 'Little lake' or something. The composition is a fairly straight transfer from the source, though the the foreground has had some water shifted in from along the road so that the bank is visible all the way to the right corner, and a couple of trees have been edited out. It's really all about the golden colour against the blue, and the clear low light.

As usual, the masses and forms were lightly pencilled in, then reinforced with quick-drying fluid acrylic underpainting, in Ultramarine this time. Once that first stage looked secure, the more natural colours and tones were built up in (mostly) transparent oil and varnish layers. The slightly exaggerrated orange colour is a mixture of modern transparent 'Indian Yellow' and a very fine-particled oxide red (on his company's website, Michael Harding's comments about this pigment include an amusing anecdote involving the painter Frank Auerbach). To maximise the effect of the glazing, once this piece was done I finished it with a light coat of straight gloss picture varnish to lush out the surface and make the light bounce back through the paint layers like stained glass.

I suspect this little painting could have been a bit better if I hadn't had to hurry the last stages due to the possibility of jury service (I actually did get selected and had to spend four days attending the court) but I was pleased with how the water turned out, especially the near channel. I had a couple of false starts with it – involving way too much toxic Pthalo Blue – but I managed to re-assert a sensible base colour, and then built up the depth with Ultramarine, and a final Burnt Umber and Ivory Black layer for the warm dark darks. I think the scratched-out and re-glazed near foliage is very effective, especially on the right foreground bank, and I have to admit that I'm very pleased with the single stretched-out cloud.

Well, that's all the arty excitement over for 2019. I've finally got a couple of 'normal' paintings under way, with a few more planned and ready to start once the panels are made and surfaces prepared. With a bit of luck the first one on the go, a small sky painting, should be ready early in the New Year, and that should be me back in a regular rhythm – hopefully fairly uninterrupted – for the rest of the year.

Hope you all had a good Xmas holiday, and here's wishing everybody a happy, and above all healthy, 2020

Les Fourquettes

oil on card 21x15cm

The third of the four small scale pieces. The source landscape is in France, so here is some small scale French piano I listened to while working on it - Erik Satie of course, Gnossiennes No.5. The location is near a cluster of small villages in Normandy which seems be called 'Les Fourquettes'.

This is a fairly straightforward little painting, mostly about the colour and light. It's not my usual Ultramarine/Prussian Blue colour of sky here, it's more of a greyish/lilac-ish mix using Ultramarine/Ultramarine Violet. I've slightly exaggerrated the source's 'violetness' a bit – and I suspect that the automated 'streetview' colour is more an accidental artifact and less the actual sky colour at the time – but I think it works though. My general foliage and grass colour was way too blue just before finishing, so I applied a thin Cadmium Yellow and Raw Sienna glaze (in thinned Stand Oil) touched on lightly over it. That did the trick, and also brought out some of the red-browns. I'm quite pleased with the colour on this painting, and I like the light, fuzzy, final white layer over the nearer clouds – it makes them seem brighter than they perhaps really are

As you'll have gathered, the source image is a Google streetview screenshot, from about ten years ago. When I set it up in photoshop for the required 21x15cm, I realised that the composition needed tweaking. Usually it's fairly straightforward to go back to the original location and see what can be pulled in or shifted across to solve any problems. Unfortunately, the only clues to where the original location was were the previous and following screenshots and the road number – D87. The previous screenshot (taken shortly before) was from the D126, so, having finally found the correct D87 (there's another one in the south-east France) I concentrated on where those two roads are close. After following them, and looking down on several spots that looked promising, I engaged Streetview and saw some trees that looked familiar – the stand on the left. I'd found the place! The weather and season were not the same, but luckily Google stores images from previous streetview runs, and I was able to 'go back in time' for the images I wanted. I shifted the clouds around a bit, and pulled in the trees on the right to get a better balance. So all that palaver was very much worth it, and quite rewarding.

So that's all four of the set finished, photographed, and delivered to the gallery in reasonably good time – at least the first three were – and are now up on the walls for the 'On a Small Scale' exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. I haven't started the write-up of the last one yet, but it should follow on fairly soon, later this month.