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...
