oil on panel 60x50cm
Some paintings sweetly acquiesce to their creation. They dance with the painter, and guide and suggest where we should go. These are enjoyable experiences, and are remembered fondly.
Not this one though. This one was a bad-tempered brawl from start to finish. If it had a soundtrack, it would be the grinding and gnashing of teeth.
The starting point for this painting is near Altishevo, a small town near Kazan. What struck me was the light, and the path between the tree masses. I thought it a very beautiful and potent setting – if a little complicated.
The eventual premise of this middle-sized piece ended up being similar to that of another painting from a few years ago – 'Moment'. They both feature a dog sensing something in the woods. I've re-used the same dog photo that I found for Moment - it's been flipped horizontally, has reverted to its original colour, and now has another dog's head, but it is essentially the same 'model'.
I think this painting and I got off to a Bad Start right from the beginning. I tried to save time by not drawing & placing everything as thoroughly as I maybe should have, and was too hesitant and timid in trying to build up the surface. I didn't arrive at workable realistic tones soon enough, and I was using too-big brushes for too long – so nothing got defined properly until some time later on, by which point I had already got mightily fed up and frustrated with it. There was confusion right to the very end about where and when to use opaque or transparent pigments and soft or hard edges; the second-last session was spent softening out a whole lot of distracting hard edges in the left trees (fine stippling with a small soft brush and sticky mixes of paint & stand oil, with added driers).
I was aware that I was having trouble simplifying the general complexity of the trees, but I also knew that, behind that, the painting lacked 'kick'. About a third-way through I realised that it was crying out for something else - a dog and/or a figure, and perhaps getting that decided a lot sooner would have helped with everything. Ninety per cent of this piece was plain hard slog, and very unrewarding to do. I'd love to blame that on the Covid Lockdown, but deep down I know full-well this difficulty was really due to me and my lack of concentration.
While painting this was not a pleasant experience, that doesn't mean there aren't any good bits of work within it. The sky works well - and was the most efficient piece of painting. The far sunlit birches look as though they might have been quickly done too, but if fact I had about three goes at getting them to how I wanted them. In fact the whole central section – the far birches, the path through, and the red larch(?) are good bits of paint. Likewise the fir and the tree to the right are individually quite interesting. The dog's not bad either, apart from a couple of its legs, and I'm glad I decided to apply the risky blue glaze that finally pacified the whole ground area.
Years ago, my Dad - every now and again - would bemoan my tendency to over-complicate things. I actually do think my work benefits a lot from the crafty technical stuff, but in this case, he is absolutely spot on.
Pretty sure he'd still have loved the finished painting though...
