Thorney Hill – East of Auchterarder

 

oil on card 30x20cm

Another sky painting, the source image for which was a forgotten snap taken a few years ago. We'd driven up to Auchterarder to see a friend's exhibition, and decided to come back the pretty way through the Ochil Hills. We had stopped to snap some clouds to the north-east, but turning to get back in the car I saw this view and a much, much, more interesting sky. Thorney Hill is the small hill to the right-of-centre.

I've disappeared the central farm, lowered the wooded hill and slopes on the left, and covered the road with some fields and lines of bushes from somewhere else (not sure where).

After the drawing and acrylic wash stages, the paintwork - very thin - is mostly stippled directly on to the surface, or brushed on, then stippled out with very soft nylon brushes. The reason for that is some Bad Priming; I'd carelessly left some quite large vertical brushmarks in it. They're not exactly trenches, but they were deep enough to gather too much paint when blending laterally with a fan brush. The perpendicular stippling lays the paint more evenly in these 'gullies'. What 'streaking' there is in the clouds is more visible in the photo image, but in real life the sky is quite pleasantly ill-defined and 'gauzey' (honest!). I think it's turned out OK.

I've not much more to add about the painting itself, but I wish I had known at the time of putting this one together what else there was in the landscape. Just the other week I was following an internet rabbit-hole about brochs. These are large dry-stone built Iron Age towers – largely ruined and dismantled – with chambered walls, which I had thought were limited to the very north of Scotland. I was surprised to find that their distribution was a lot wider and a lot further south than that, and the remains of one is on top of a hill just off the left edge of the picture - called Castle Craig. I'm fairly sure that I would have made something of it if I'd known it was there, but even knowing that it's there is a bit of a thrill.

I also wish I'd known that there are a couple more in the Lammermuir Hills, within cycling range of Edinburgh, and a well-researched broch complex (Edin's Hall Broch) just a few miles north of Duns, in the Borders.

Pretty sure that I'd be planning to go and have a look if my knees were still trustworthy, but again, just knowing they're there is a bit of a thrill.

Lantabat - Summer 2020

oil on panel 61x51cm

There is some music to go with this - Radiohead's 'Daydreaming', from ' A Moon-shaped Pool'. It gives me the impression of the bright light I was aiming for in the painting, but with some pain at the centre.

The source image – found while roaming through Google Streetview - is in Southern France, near a town called Lantabat in the Pyrenean foothills.

The composition is virtually unchanged from the source, though the darker tones have been lightened. In retrospect I wish that I hadn't just accepted the upper clouds – they were almost entirely burnt-out to white, so I had to extrapolate their 'stringyness' and internal workings after studying loads of photos I took of similar cloud forms in the park up the road.

Technique-wise, everything was set in place with pencil, then the forms were developed with thin acrylic before moving onto oil layers – some of this acrylic underdrawing is still usefully showing through in the central tree group's foliage. There's quite a bit of the 'White Highlights + Glazes' technique in the ferns and foreground going into the shadows, and in the central tree group and the backlit vegetation beneath it. The figure was basically painted in monochrome, then coloured – some of it quite subtley – with transparent layers and veils (the figure is me, by the way, but not a self-portrait. I couldn't find any figures in photos or on the internet that fitted, so I had to model for myself while Madam clicked the shutter).

The middle and far landscape elements really painted themselves (nice stuff at the left going back to the horizon), but I struggled with the sky. I felt that it had to be settled and finished before developing the near central trees, which, frankly, were a waking nightmare of trying to work out what was going on and how they worked. That exercise – quite late on the painting - nicely demonstrated the perils of trying to describe three-dimensional objects from a less-than-perfect two-dimensional source.

Taking the piece as a whole, there's a healthy variation of marks here – all fairly thin paint of course, but exploring a textural range from softly blurred and faded to sharp-edged and textural. I like the overall light, and am quite chuffed with the painting of the figure – it conveys a lot with very little information.

A painting can be about more than just marks though. This is a (hopefully) beautiful landscape with a dark thing in it, but I think it's also about looking how a 'low' – a feeling of depression or negativity – can isolate a person from their surroundings. Last year's summer – dominated by the Covid pandemic - was all about uncertainty and isolation, and I don't think it's a surpise that a little of that has seeped into this painting. The figure is deliberately open to interpretation – he could be asleep, ill, dead, or just hiding himself away, and there's no narrative present to guide the viewer. Personally, I think the figure is turned in on himself, huddled away from the light, and limp, and passive. It makes me think of someone who is experiencing despair, and a lack of hope.

I confess that I did get into a bit of a 'low' towards the end of last year. I found it very difficult to work and summon up any interest in getting ideas sorted. Having to get work finished for this blog was really the thing that got me to the easel, and I can't pretend that working at this and other pieces hasn't been a slog. So, I'm very relieved that this has turned out well. I think Madam is as well – she wants to keep it, and doesn't want it to be sold.

And finally, for anyone following the Great Shishkin/Levitan debate – and who isn't in these febrile times – I think this painting's treatment of foliage and landscape tends towards the more detailed Ivan Shishkin camp, though I think I could have done with more of Izaac Levitan's seemingly effortless simplification of forms, especially in that damned, and double-damned, foliage.

On to the next one then - more on Mr Levitan's side of the road with a bit of luck...