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...