Bright Cumulus - Denmark

 

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first in a series of four little pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's annual 'In a Small Scale' show in the run-up to Christmas. This was the first to be composed and started, and is the first to be finished. 

Right. There is some music for this one. It's the first two pieces – 'Spring 0' and 'Spring 1' - from 'Recomposed'*, Max Richter's take on Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'. The painting is more connected with the atmosphere and thrill of 'Spring 0', but the very recogniseable 'Spring 1' kicks in fairly quickly, and really, it's too good to leave out. 

This piece is all about the light - the incandescent clouds (cumulus humilis again) floating in the glare over the pale landscape. There's been a little rearranging of the fields and disappearance of farms and buildings, and the horizon has been made to seem further away than in the google streetview source. 

As usual, the landscape forms were placed in light pencil, quickly filled with black acrylic washes, then developed fully with oil layers. The sky was done entirely in thin oil paint. 

I had hoped that perhaps this one might paint itself, but I struck a problem as soon as I laid in the first sky layer. I'd think I'd been a little too casual with my priming, and the first blue tint was patchy and uneven. Subsequent layers sorted that immediate problem out, but that meant that my 'watercolour paper white' base had gone, which was a disappointment. My acrylic washes were too dark as well - I shouldn't have used Black. Raw Umber – which I've used before - would have been much warmer and lighter, and more helpful. The deadening base worked directly against building up the landscape luminosity - the semi-transparent light colours of the fields and trees were immediately 'cooled' by the dark grey underlayer and then need to be 'warmed', which was both annoying and unnecessary. However, I'm very pleased I managed to make the clouds quite bright without clumpy great clods of white – by using a series of thin layers with firm and blurred edges. 

The whole thing did take longer than it needed to, and isn't quite the sizzling study in light that I had in my head, but it's not a bad result, though, and the music's lovely... 

* A complete re-imagining of Vivaldi's well-known work. The more original elements are played and recorded by a string orchestra, and there's then a section of electronica which draws heavily on the 'birdsong' elements and sampling. Finally there are a few even looser re-mixes. Worth a listen if you can.