Sun – Oleshky Sands

 

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the third of the 21x15cm pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show.

One evening a couple of months ago, I was looking at the satellite view of Southern Ukraine - an area of some intense news focus just now. I was intrigued by a huge pale anomaly on the south bank of the Dnipro River, just across from Kherson. Looking closer, and seeing the images available on streetview, I found this miraculous landscape – the Oleshky Sands. It's a sandy 'desert' - the dunes held together with scattered patches of rough grass, and peppered with clusters of random pine and birch. The local 'experts' have produced some very good quality panoramas for streetview, with some interesting skies as a bonus. Not surprisingly, it's a National Park, but - sadly - currently an occupied military zone.

The composition is all about the soft light, and the soft sand. The horizon from the original source image was levelled, the centre raised a bit, and the further landscape at the edges much reduced and simplified. The finished painting probably ended up missing the overall 'violetness' of the sky, but I did have a bit of fun playing with its underlying warm and cool undertones.

Technically, this was pretty straightforward. However, being fed-up indenting soft card surfaces when using crayon, the initial placings were done with a water-soluble graphite pencil. As I've just indicated, the sky is constructed with lots of thin layers. These are not true transparent glazes, but coloured 'veils' using semi-transparent Zinc White. The landscape was painted with mostly opaque pigments (e.g. Unbleached Titanium Dioxide – a usefully dull and opaque greyish beige), and the main sandy forms worked largely wet-into-wet. This was possibly an attempt to say something about the difference between solid earth and thin air by using contrasting paint qualities. Hmm. I have perhaps made the dune tufts too hard, and the atmospherics a little too fuzzy, but there we go.

I should expand more on the Small Scales show. It's basically a wide variety of top-notch painters' work on sale at reasonable prices. The show is exclusively online. My two recent pieces are up just now, and the gallery has added a couple of my unsold ones from past years. This painting - running very late – has been varnished and is in the gallery now, and may possibly be online by the end of this week - but the fourth of the pieces may not be finished in time to be included. I'm treating it as a work-out for a larger painting anyway, so nothing's lost.

Getting back to the graphite pencil, though. I'd seen some work where another painter had used water washes of graphite, and was puzzled, because in my experience graphite and water don't mix. Literally a couple of days later I was chatting with an old mate from college – an art teacher – who gently broke the news to me that water-soluble graphite pencils had been around for quite a long time actually. Which made me feel a bit silly. To cap it all, though, water-soluble graphite, on the primer anyway, seems to wash off with thinned oil paint as readily as it does with water. Which is not so good.

Hoping for better luck with my next technical breakthrough, whatever that's going to be...

Mislaid Landscape

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second postcard-sized picture for the Open Eye Gallery 'Small Scale' show. There's some music associated with painting it, though not as a mood-setter. While working on the last stages I was listening to Radiohead's first album, 'Pablo Honey', and this happens to be the first track. Very refreshing. The whole album – which includes their breakthrough single 'Creep' - is quite raw in comparison to what they went on to produce, but you can hear where they're going.

The original source image was a screenshot grabbed from google streetview. Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea where this landscape is. This is annoying, a) because I wanted to use more information from the surroundings when composing the picture, and b) to source more material with that light and landscape. The screenshot was taken when I was under the mistaken impression that the global coordinates were still being displayed (a practice discontinued some time ago). I now make sure that I have a record of a landscape's location and time, and that I can find it again. This one's got to be European, but whether it's Western Russia, France, Poland, Sweden, or Lithuania, is beyond me.

(My current method of recording a location: Once in streetview, go to the little info box in the top left corner. Click the 'three dots', then click 'Share or embed image'. Either copy that on-screen link or take another screenshot of it).

What I liked about this setting was the saturation and freshness of the colour and light, and the way that while the shorter trees of the group were still, the tall birch was being made ragged by quite a strong and very local gust of wind. This tree also seems to lean into the wind, which is even more interesting. The only compositional tweaking is some cropping of the source image, and some repeated and reversed copy-and-pasting of some of the original foreground grass, to hide some road surface in the bottom right corner.

Colour-wise, I've used a fair bit of Cadmium Lemon in the greens to boost their intensity – a step up for me as my palette is usually fairly muted. In terms of paint handling, there's quite a lot of scratching into the wet paint in the foreground grass, and – except in the clouds - I refrained from mass blurring and softening with fan brushes. Until the last session, that is, where I had to correct some jarring and misjudged final darks in the trees, and blurred the lighter opaque greens over these hard-edged miss-steps. I wish now that I'd softened some of the red-browns of the trunks and branches – transparent glazes over the plain white bark - but there you go.

This little painting probably took too long and may still be too rough, but I did learn something about widening my range of marks. Whether that gets carried forward is another matter, but all-in-all this was a useful piece to have got done. And despite being a little angsty about the trees, I'm actually quite pleased with the softness of the sky. It feels very calm.

Which is nice...

 

Sky - Lipovka

oil on card 21x15 cm

This is small postcard-sized piece, the first finished of my contributions to the Open Eye Gallery's annual Small Scale show. And I'm pleased to say that its painting went quite well.

There's no particular music associated with this, though I did do a lot of catching up with Melvin Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme from BBC Radio 4. (There is so much of interest to listen to there – explore the Archive, you won't regret it) Having said that, during the final easel session – when I was hunting the painting down, and where everything fell into place – I listened to Reinbert de Leeuw's recordings of Erik Satie's piano pieces (like this one). Which connected rather pleasantly.

The source image was a fairly random but lucky find when free-roaming through google streetview one evening. It's a view from a Russian motorway – the M-4 - just north of the Lipovka turn-off.

Compositionally it's all about the sky (of course). The supporting landscape was flipped left/right and a little reworked, the distant hills have been enlarged, and I've shifted one of the cumulus to the right a bit. I'd taken the original screen shot probably about seven or eight years ago, and - failing to do anything with it - carried it forward year by year in my 'Cloud Studies' folder. When I finally got round to developing it and needing more info about the wider context, I found – to my horror – that I had no idea where this was. I had to go back to my original screengrab files and look for clues there. I found that I had, luckily, taken another screen shot some minutes down the road, which included a map view with a place name. As this is the only motorway in that locality, I simply tracked up and down it till I'd found the original location AND the right date. Streetview has now gathered so many shots of locations at different times, and on both sides of the roads, that it can be a bit of a jigsaw now, and the available source dates can change within yards. It is a fantastic resource, but it can be annoying when trying to trace a particular view on a specific date. I did find it though – eventually - and such was my rejoicing that I was close to making the title 'The Prodigal Sky – Lipovka'.

There's nothing unusual technique-wise here – spot grids, basic crayon drawing developed lightly with Paynes Grey fluid acrylic, then oil layers. Annoyingly, the spot grid crayon had rather pressed the card and made little indentations. They're not particularly deep, but could have gathered concentrations of paint where not wanted, so I may have to re-think using crayon on the relatively soft card surfaces.

All in all, I'm pleased that I finally got to grips with this image, and I think I've made a good enough stab at the higher altocumulus masses. Madam said that the lower cumulus clouds really do seem to hang in the space. Which was nice.

I should just say: The date of the source image is June 2013, and all is well. It is the main arterial road from the Moscow area to Rostov on Don, and eastern Ukraine. I have no doubt that the traffic on it just now – night and day, in both directions - is grim, deadly, and tragic. This present will become the past. And whatever sky is there today will be replaced by another one tomorrow, and constantly be wonderful.

 

Overcast – South Queensferry

oil on card 30x20cm

There is some music to go with this. Energising by playing pop and rock singles wasn't working, so I returned to back-to-back Richter for a change, and 'Infra' and 'Three Worlds: Woolf Works' got me back in the right zone. 'Infra 1' heralds the whole album's general swell and relax, which seemed to work with the soft lens shapes in the cloud, and the rest of the music got the steady brain rhythms and concentration going – which always helps.

The source image is another (quite old now) snap from a train window, looking west. The location is between the two converging railways lines just south of South Queensferry – the other track is behind the lower line of trees across the field. At the time, the Winchburgh tunnel was being worked on, and my usual train had to be diverted north towards South Queensferry, where it waited for 5/10 minutes before rolling back south on the other line to rejoin the main railway further on. The two tracks enclose an isolated pastoral enclave; a small triangle of lush grass and reeded ponds bordered by industrial units, a chemical store, and motorways. There were usually sheep there, munching away, un-phased by the modern world swirling around them (The M90 is just behind the ragged tree-line in the centre – I've 'disappeared' its tall lamp posts and gantries). This shows where the train was when I took the photo.

I was actually searching for another landscape source I have; a similar foreground of shrubs under a much more dramatic sky, but I came across this forgotten photo first and just went with it. (I'll find the other one at some point and work it up).

The sky here, in this source, was quite dull and overcast, and not even dramatically dark. I kept it that way, and it was interesting making something interesting out of something quite bland and ordinary. The painting is almost a straight lift from the source, the only changes – other than removing the lamp posts - being some shifting of the bushes and a levelling of one end of the field.

Technique-wise, I decided to break with the last few years' usual tight grid placing. The careful pencil/crayon, and acrylic under-drawing went out the window too. I placed the initial picture elements in thin oil paint without a grid of any kind (a sliding card strip proportional method I used to use which I promise I'll explain at some point, but please, not now). I have to say it felt quite good and safe at this size, though for me, painting anything any bigger would really require a safer grid of some sort. Anyway, while this piece didn't quite paint itself, it didn't resist too much and I allowed myself quite a lot of freedom to play with the paint and to take my time over it, so it was actually quite enjoyable to do. Having said that, I did manage to wipe away half an afternoon's work by mistake (it wasn't as dry as I'd thought it was, obvs), but it didn't really matter, and the shrubs look better for the extra work anyway.

I should also mention that I returned to my Fake Flake White for this one. I'm sure I've covered it before but it's worth a repeat mention – if just to remind myself not to forget it again. I was checking through photos of past palettes, (yes, I photograph my finished palettes, with all the colours noted. Sorry about that, but it's quite useful sometimes) and it seems that for some unexplained reason I simply just stopped using the Fake Flake towards the end of 2019. It does actually feel a lot like Ye Olde Lead White, though, and isn't completely out the park price-wise. I've also been using some new synthetic hog brushes, and the pointed rounds are astonishing. They retain their shape beautifully, have a very responsive point, and are very pleasantly springy. It'll be interesting to see how they wear.

Still on the technical stuff, I'm quite pleased with the sky. It's done almost completely with Fake Flake White and Ivory Black, with Walnut oil added. The Walnut oil makes the paint very mobile and quick - very suitable for horizontal stroke blending - as opposed to stipple blending - for which I find a sticky Stand oil mix more suitable. The greys were applied with my new synthetic round hog in soft linear, almost hatched strokes, then blended together with soft fan brushes. I built up the sky gradually over several sessions to get restrained tones and a very soft and gentle surface. Admittedly, that surface did gather a bit of cat hair on the way - it's unavoidable in this house - but nothing too major.

Summing this one up, I'm happy with the painting, but the process itself felt quite good for a change, and was a boost to the confidence - possibly what I was looking for at the beginning of the year. The shift in attitude, technique, and to some extent materials, was definitely a positive one.

Oh, and I've got a new bike as well. Which is nice...

 

Sheep Studies

pencil

These are a few sketches of sheep, though more accurately they are studies.

Why sheep? Well I've got a couple of things on the go just now which, coincidentally, feature sheep. Not having ever drawn a sheep in earnest, I found that I hadn't a clue what makes a sheep look specifically like a sheep – as opposed to a goat, a cow, a dog, or a very small woolly horse. Of course, I've got my sources for the paintings, but I felt I needed to know more about their general characteristics.

Why studies? It's one thing to recognise something, but another thing entirely to reconstruct it so as to read back correctly. The eye has to find out and inquire what makes the subject recognisable, and the best process for that is drawing it.

Not having convenient live references nearby - there haven't been sheep on nearby Arthur's Seat (just a mile away) since 1977 - a quick google image search supplied flocks of them to choose from. As expected, the initial results were pretty ropey, but I was encouraged to see that the effort was rewarded. The lower, later sketches are – if not quite the full Rosa Bonheur – indisputably of sheep

And, no, I wasn't counting them...

 

Three Crows

oil on panel 31x25cm

There is a music track associated with this – it's 'Opening' by Philip Glass. I played it as I was starting the oil layers, and its cold relentlessness seemed to fit the mood.

I snapped the source landscape for this piece a while ago from the Crieff bus, but it hadn't sparked anything worth following up until I was looking for ideas in late February - around the time of the invasion in Ukraine. Seeing it again while flicking through old photos, both the movement sweeping across the landscape and the Gothic crow shapes in the trees made themselves apparent, and suggested a dreadful wind. I leant all the trees to the right to show that, and introduced the trio of crows on the left. In the trees, the beak shapes were switching about during the painting process - sometimes one, sometimes more, like infant birds screeching in the nest. It's a very odd experience when a shuffling of factors brings sudden relevance and recognition to the previously passed-over and disregarded.

This is on a panel prepared some eight years ago which, luckily, I had forgotten about. 'Luckily' because I hadn't organised any surfaces to paint on during my down-time, and had felt work coming on again. It has a grey oil primer – near exactly the colour and tone of the distant low clouds, which have just the barest touch of paint on them. This ruled out any acrylic under-drawing, so objects were placed with crayon then developed directly with oil paint. I also used a different oil medium mix - Stand Oil with an increased proportion of Damar Varnish. It's very sticky, and quite unsuitable for painting large areas evenly, but it's very nice to work with on a small scale.

For some reason I found it very difficult to arrive at the final tonality of the near grass and especially the 'real' crows. They are quite finely drawn (aided by a magnifying glass) and were at one point almost jet black. Their combination of sharp, focussed marks and black tones hooked the eye so quickly that I dulled them down - I now much prefer them almost hidden in the weeds. They're quite rewarding once you see them, but the down-side is that I fear the casual viewer will just stroll by the painting without bothering to look too closely. However, I'm not sure that I'm prepared, at this point, to do anything about that.

On the positive side, I enjoyed doing the sky, and didn't feel too constrained to adhere rigidly to the source material. It's rather bleak and chilly but has some luminosity, in contrast to the umbrous and murky landscape.

Which pangs my heart given the painting's genesis.

 

Window Work - April 2022

 

watercolour

The blog returns after a spell away for rest and recuperation. My work book logs it as a single page saying 'Break – Time Off – Art-free Zone' between Xmas and the last week of February.

When I did return to planet Artwork it was aboard the good ship Window Work (of course) but I was horrified to discover that my drawing muscles had withered somewhat. My touch was clumsy and slow, and I was way, way, out of practice at looking. After much unrewarding labour at the window, I think I've got some of that fitness back, and now, occasionally, my fast sketches aren't too bad. I quite like the linear efficiency of the 'backpack girl' at the upper right, and the liquid blobs of the gulls.

That apart, the normal routine has resumed. Compositions have been worked out, panels have been made and primed, and two easel pieces are currently on the go, with a third awaiting its turn. I did have a slight setback though, as just having finished the panels, I had quite a severe 'tweak' of the back. This made standing at the easel difficult for a few weeks, and for a while I was restricted to – window work! However, it's well on the mend now, which is really rather nice.

Finally, out in the wider world, I have a painting (Herd – West Lothian) currently selected and hanging in the RSA Open show - in the 'Greek' building on the corner of The Mound and Princes Street, in Edinburgh. It's downstairs in the Lower Gallery, and, along with the entire contents of the show, is online as well.

Nice to be back...

Oryol

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the very last piece from 2021 – completed for the still ongoing 15x21cm Small Scale show.

There is a piece of music to go with it – JS Bach's Prelude and Fugue: No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846, but really more the fugue (starting at 1:58). The prelude is fairly simple and straightforward, like my initial idea of how this piece would go, but the fugue then plunges into a delicate maelstrom of complication, as the actual painting rather unexpectedly did.

This tiny landscape and sky is sourced directly from google streetview - the land forms broadly unaltered, while the sky was opened up a bit with a little photoshop fisheye distortion. This setting - near Oryol, in Western Russia - had originally been reserved for a larger painting with a figure, but I decided to use it as a small scale piece to save me the time of sourcing and working something out from scratch. Half-way through painting it I suddenly realised that there should have been an eagle up in the sky – probably in the upper left - as 'Oryol' (Орёл) is Russian for 'Eagle', and that would have completed the pun. Impossible at this scale though. Maybe another time.

Technically this followed my current standard initial procedure – crayon for spot-gridding and landscape placing, then thin fluid acrylic for landscape tonal grisaille. The main sky forms were placed in thin oil, and the whole built up with oil layers. I probably could have developed the opaque/transparent work in the sky a lot more, but I felt very much under time constraints to get this finished. As it is, it's more like a watercolour than an oil painting – which is fine – but I feel that this had the potential to be a more interesting piece.

To add to the already quite high tension, I completely mucked up the varnishing, resulting in a thick wrinkled splodge along the left centre of the sky. So it all had to come off. The final paint touches had only been left a week to cure (a perilously short time), and I was terrified that the varnish's white spirit solvent would take some of the paint off too. A clean white muslin cloth was laid flat over the surface, evenly sprayed with white spirit, then overlaid with a sheet of thin white bin liner. After about ten minutes the varnish re-liquified (as it's designed to), and the cloth was carefully peeled off. That brought a lot of dissolved varnish with it, and, miraculously, the paint was undisturbed. The remaining wet varnish was removed lightly with rolled cotton wool swabs (like real picture restorers do on the telly) and small muslin cloth pads, all with no sign at all of any colour coming off. A couple of subsequent (very light!) sprays of varnish next day went on perfectly, with no beading or irregularities at all. Phew.

Incidently, a more basic plastic sheet & solvent technique – a methylated spirit soak under a black bin bag, then wiping off the old paint with paper towel or ultrafine steel wool – is excellent for cleaning used palettes. Meths softens both dried oil and acrylic paint, and this method saves a lot of dry scraping, though I'm not sure how this works with Alkyd resin based products or mediums. (I've been wanting to shoehorn this little nugget into a post for ages.)

All that tension with the varnish apart, I did enjoy the freedom I allowed myself in the sky. It might be rewarding to develop ('indulge in'?) that a bit more. We shall see.

However, I will be taking my time about getting back to the artwork. I'll be aiming - as far as possible - to be driven by creativity rather than time-table, and I'm not planning on having anything done this January. This first post of the new year is carried over from last December purely for the sake of a bit of continuity.

Which reminds me – I hope that 2022 is a more positive and 'straightforward' year than the last two have been. Not just for me, but for everyone out there, whatever you're doing...