Ruigendijk

oil on card 32x20cm

There is some music for this - it's Glenn Gould playing JS Bach's Goldberg Variations. I hadn't played it for a while, but I put it on while laying down the initial placings. I listened to it a few more times during subsequent work sessions, and my last touches on this painting were placed just as the final Aria repeat finished. Which was very affecting.

The source images for this little painting – via google streetview – are from a short stretch of road called Ruigendijk on the island of Texel, off the Netherlands coast. I'd played around with this sky and location years ago, but this time finally got around to making something worthwhile. The sky is virtually unchanged – just the small top right cumulus shifted left a bit - but the landscape uses features from several viewpoints, copied and pasted, flipped and stitched, and generally juggled about to make something that works.

This is definitely a painting of two halves. In the sky, the paint is soft, and finely faded and blurred. On the landscape it's much more energetic (for me!), and the brush marks, streaks, and scratches are largely left alone to do their thing - I think I was trying to convey the energy of the wind coming in across the North Sea. While this one didn't quite paint itself, it was very compliant indeed, and I think I'm quite pleased with how it went.

A little more about the Goldberg variations. They were commissioned by an insomniac Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, and were written for his harpsichordist – Goldberg - to play when the gentleman couldn't sleep. The whole story is best read here. I have to say that they suit the piano a lot more than their original instrument. I'm sure that Herr Bach would have used the piano had he been able, but unfortunately he had yet to see and play one. Glenn Gould recorded these variations twice – in 1955 and 1981. This is the second, magnificent, 1981 recording. If you can hear humming, it's Gould himself – he had a compulsion to hum along, and no engineer was successful in blocking that out. It's about fifty or so minutes long, and is basically thirty very different treatments of the opening theme. It's worth listening to in full at some point, though preferably not on scratchy vinyl interrupted by the odd youtube advert. I'm pretty sure this recording is on Spotify and Amazon etc.

Finally, exhibition news. The last panel painting has just been finished, so now it's make sure, or rather hope, that everything's dry enough to varnish a week or so before they leave the house for the gallery. The exhibition goes 'public' on Saturday the 30th October, till the close of Saturday 20th November. It's already up on the 'Exhibitions' page now – with fellow landscapist Tom Mabon. There won't be a formal all-comers Preview – with wine and much back-slapping (or should that be the other way around?) - but I'll try to make a point of being about the gallery on the Saturday, or in the 'New Town Fox' eatery across the road - nice cake there if I remember rightly. Again, the show will be at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, and here's their website with all the details you might need.

Oh, and if you're coming along, remember to bring a face covering...

 

Zaytsevo

oil on card 30x20cm

That's the first of the last three pieces for the fast-approaching exhibition done. It was finished last week as it happens, but as blog posts are second priority at the moment I've left writing it till just now while the surfaces on the other two are settling.

The source image for this piece is of, course, from google streetview. It's just outside Zaytsevo - a tiny village at the end of a bus route - in western Russia. There has been much alteration and divergence away from the original source. I've levelled the valley, removed the road, shuffled the trees around, and given the landscape a completely different sky. What looks here like a solid clump of trees is in fact the front end of quite an elongated wood. I suspect that there's a spring in the middle there somewhere, possibly even a small pond. Further away in the distance, there are pale circles in the ground which I first assumed were exposed soil or sand. Surprisingly, they're actually round patches of a different grass. I can't imagine how that came about.

I'm very happy with the blue of the sky in this one – a first thin layer of Ultramarine and Prussian Blue, then a faded layer of Ultramarine with a touch of Paynes Grey towards the top. I'm still a bit hesitant about cirrus clouds, I should probably try to be a bit more relaxed about them, and enjoy them more. Cirrus clouds remind me of some of the marks made by professional decorators when graining and marbling. I did quite a bit of that when in the antique trade – making sometimes quite sweeping marks with ragged brushes and torn cardboard edges. The really good stuff is done using goose or swan feathers, but I never got the hang of that.

I was quite good at painting rosewood and satinwood though – just as well, because as the Edinburgh New Town developed, a lot of Georgian and Regency furnishings suddenly had to be built to fill it, and, centuries later, I had to fix and refinish quite a lot of them. Not everyone then could afford actual rosewood or satinwood (the trendiest timbers of the period), so the doors, panels, and chairs etc were made of pine, beech, or birch, then painted to resemble the classy stuff. Grained and painted furniture became quite a trendy thing across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and again in the 1980's (luckily for me). When the Director of the Scottish National Gallery re-fitted the Gallery with antique furniture he bought a fair few pieces from a dealer I did a lot of work for, and some of those console tables and chairs in there were restored and finished by yours truly.

That little tangent apart, this piece generally went quite well but had a rather frantic last session – a final blue tint glaze over the foreground went on too heavily, and I had to frantically take it off with paper towel and clean soft brushes. Luckily, I got most of it off while not removing too much of the lower layers. Phew...

Right, exhibition update. The show opens to the public on Saturday 30th October till Saturday 20th November. I'm not up on the gallery future show list yet, but best keep an eye on the Open Eye Gallery website for developments. More news next blogpost...