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...
