Morning - Kopachevo

oil on card 21x15cm

The last of the Small Scales 'postcard' pieces for this year. There's a brief shimmering track which fits it quite well – 'Takk', from Sigur Ros.

I found this location a few years ago, but couldn't find a way to make it work. It's in north east Croatia, looking onto the flood plain near the confluence of the rivers Danube and Drava, and just up the road from the small village of Kopachevo (Kopačevo). It's a bright and breezy morning in October, and the leaves will be turning very soon.

It's not about the sky for a change – though the cirrus does add energy – but much more about the tree masses and open areas. I probably would have organised something using this image source a while ago, but wasn't happy with the area on the right; I felt the glimpse of the lake there somehow weakened the open 'heath' to the left. It was solved very simply though – by importing some trees from the next patch of woodland along to the left, and flipping them horizontally to make the light fit. That happy accident gave me the small 'V'-shaped tree in the foreground and the atmospheric curtain of trees behind it.

A bit of technical stuff. Along with the other two previous pieces, this is primed in grey, dot-gridded in gouache, and the composition drawn straight in with thinnish oil paint - using fairly opaque pigments initially, then thinner more transparent modifying layers. Running out of time, I employed more-than-I-usually-would cobalt driers in the latter stages (especially in the yellows), but these layers are so thin that I'm not that bothered about potential future surface damage. (I would be with thick paint, but certainly not here)

It turns out that this randomly found location - Kopački Rit - is actually an important European wetland, and is a designated nature park. I was interested in the reddish ground vegetation, and it turns out that these are the areas that are regularly flooded. This can be seen here – the same place at a different date. The waters can be seen more broadly from this drone view - Kopachevo village is straight ahead, where the smoke is rising from. However, if you rotate the streetview in the opposite direction - northwards - the 'red grass' in the painting is under the inlet just as the bend in the road straightens.

This beautiful setting has quite a lot of potential for development into a larger and more complex piece. I've a bit of catching up to do with works already in progress, but with all things being well I should be starting on this within a few months.

 

Tree - near Orenburg

oil on card 21x15 cm

This is the second of the batch of this year's Small Scale pieces. There is a track to go with it – a short piece from Max Richter's Infra. It's got a sweep which matches the location - The Russian steppe grasslands. This specific spot is near Orenburg, a city about 100km west of the southernmost tip of the Ural mountains, and about the same distance north of the Kazakhstan border.

It's mostly about the sky, but the tree is very important. I flipped it from leaning into the slant of the cloud banks – as it does in the source - to leaning to the left away from them, as if in reaction. The 'curl' of its right side was formed accidentally during the flipping process and adds a tasty bit of character. Having done that, when the whole photoshop assembly was reversed left/right when checking the composition, it seemed as though the tree was shouting at the sky. Flipped back, as painted, the tree seemed more relaxed, and in awe of the sky – or at least enjoying the spectacle. Which is what I was seeing.

This batch of Small Scales are all done with the same grey priming and straight-to-oil-paint system, but there's a lot more scratching of the wet paint to indicate the foreground grasses in this one. I've exaggerated the pinkness of the grass slightly, and the lower sky to the right of the tree has a blue haze which perhaps doesn't show so well in this photograph. It might be easy to miss in a gallery of loudly competing images, but I think the simplicity of the composition allows the very limited colour scheme to bloom, which I quite like.

A little snippet of background information, just so you know. The Eurasian Steppe – which stretches almost unbroken from Eastern Europe to China - is subdivided into various types. The area here is part of the Pontic/Caspian Steppe (the Black Sea being the Roman 'Pontus Euxinus'); the land of horse-cultured nomadic peoples like the Scythians, Goths, Kazakhs (Cossacks) and Huns, who were in turn overrun (or overridden by?) the Mongols from the Gobi-Manchurian Steppe even further east.

The whole show – some hundreds of pieces – is online now at On a Small Scale Online and is always worth a look.

(My 'Cumulus – Lendum' seems to have disappeared though. Hopefully sold)

 

Cumulus - Lendum

oil on card 21x15 cm

A little piece – the first since the summer – and moving back into the swing of things.

This one's based on a google streetview source near Lendum, in northern Denmark. There's no specific music associated with this, but I did listen to a lot of J.S. Bach's 48 preludes and Fugues, and this is but one...

It's all about the cloud and the clear blue sky, of course. I played around with the source image quite a lot - flipping the composition from left to right, then isolating the landscape and flipping that against the sky, which worked a bit better. I tweaked with the skyline and some of the tree groups, and got an arrangement I was happy enough to go ahead with. It's been very pleasant working on a fairly simple composition for a change, and without overly committing myself, I think it's a strong enough idea to make into a bigger piece sometime.

A brief delve into the technical side here. The priming was grey for a change, dot gridded with gouache, and the compositional elements placed and outlined with thin oil paint. Any visible grid dots were then washed off with water (much easier and quicker than rubbing a pencil grid away) and the painting was filled in with fairly opaque oil paint. Forms etc were subsequently developed with thinner transparent glazes and scumbles. The clarity of the blue was quite important – I used Michael Harding's King's Blue, with a touch of Winsor & Newton Pthalo Blue (Red shade) – just enough to knock the Ultramarine's violet tendency down a bit and add a bit of intensity. The King's Blue I'm using is an older tube, and is a factory mix of Ultramarine, Titanium White, and Zinc White. Harding withdrew all Zinc White from his paint mixes a few years ago though; a research paper had demonstrated that thick layers of Zinc White oil paint were prone to breaking up. Personally, I can't see any reason on Earth why anyone would use Zinc White in thick layers as it is such a semi-opaque pigment and one of the longest-drying oil pigments available, but there we are.

This is the first to finish of a few postcard-sized pieces being done for the annual Open Eye gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show. The timing of their invitation could not have been better; I had been attending a chiropractor for about a month and was just beginning to feel the benefits. To cut quite a long and rather painful story short, since early Spring my back pain and accompanying sciatica had ruled out most artwork and had latterly made easel work – standing or sitting - impossible. I began this treatment – basically corrective spinal adjustments, stretches & exercises, and rigorous attendance to posture (crossing legs at the knee is Verboten!) – in August, and that work is now starting to kick in. I, and my knees, can still be a bit weak and creaky about town, but the lumbar improvement so far is certainly making life for me (and Madam) a Whole Lot Better.

Which is nice...

 

Dog - After the Rain

oil on panel 51x61cm

There is some music for this painting, but because it was worked on and altered over a long period – in spasms, for way over a year – it is difficult to pick out anything that specifically sets a single overall mood. If I remember correctly I started off with Handel's 'He shall feed his flock like a shepherd', then went through the gamut of Shostakovich/Bach Preludes and Fugues, Richter, Radiohead etc, interspersed with a vast multitude of random pop singles (e.g. Fire Brigade).

I was always struggling to get energised, but in the very final stages of this marathon I ended up with the William Lawes six-part 'In Nomine' (which I hope is now playing). It's a wonderful piece from when I first became interested in Early Music in the 1980s. It was recorded in 1971 - at the very beginning of the Early Music revival - by Gustav Leonhardt, and uses 20th century violins, violas, and cellos instead of gut-strung viols. Despite this heresy(!) the players produce a sublime passage near the middle where only a few parts twine and weave around the high long-note melody ('cantus firmus') of the 'In Nomine' form. The Handel still works though.

Back to the painting. Originally working-titled 'Sheep Tree', the source image is an old snap from a bus – just a view yards away from here. The landscape is the fine arcadian parkland of Culdees Castle Estate, in Strathearn. Interesting to see that there is actually a group of sheep resting beneath the main tree.

I should say that this was composed and begun in a state of resistance – by which I mean that last year I went through quite a bad period of negativity about painting, but still felt obliged to at least attempt some work. In the original composition there were three sheep in the foreground, with a naked figure lying beneath the tree. The sky had horizontal bands of pale blue and light grey cloud, with a bit of lighter, more ragged cloud, towards the top. My back had begun giving me problems, and my initial work was fairly cursory in a 'whatever it is you're doing get it done quick so I can sit down please!' sort of way. Some of the hurried early work wasn't smoothed enough and caused some lasting effects on the surface. For some reason I experienced difficulty gauging the tones in my source and replicating them on the painting – even attempting to work with a photographer's grey card to get them right (it turned out that I wasn't far off in the first place, but I suppose that is a measure of my self-doubt at that point).

I placed clothed figures and a dog beneath the tree. An improvement on the rather meaningless single naked figure. That altered the premise of the painting, and made it far more relevant. The foreground spaces weren't reading properly, so I repainted all the sheep a little smaller. That didn't help, so I painted out all the sheep. This made the whole thing far too empty, and the space still didn't read properly.

At this point, even after another long lull, I was seriously weighing up whether to abandon this piece, and rub it down and re-prime it ready for a new project.

After testing out new remedies on photoshop, I decided to carry on but drastically change some elements. I introduced the two wedges of rough foreground grass (from the setting for the other sheep-based composition which didn't work). I made the sky a grey overcast, with the slanting band of light, and exaggerated the 'upper glow' from the original source a little. All this helped massively, but the broad brush painting of the opaque sky paint meant the redrawing of all the tree outlines, yet again. Which was tough. It was also inspiring though, as that loose grey paint made me think about the effect the back lighting was having on the far line of trees – their dark silhouettes had become fuzzed and desaturated. Developing this idea, I made their upper foliage faded and grey, and introduced more colour and contrast towards the ground, where the colours and tones were normal and natural. I rather liked this effect – it empowered the backlight - but it presented me with a challenge when applying that system to the main tree. Here, the very top foliage is a very light grey, and could be considered a bit unnatural, but I think – and hope - that I've got away with it.

A quick run-down of technical stuff. From my notes: 'Spot-gridded and elements placed and drawn with crayon. Forms and tones developed with thin Raw Umber fluid acrylic. Then oil paint.' As I said above, I had to re-draw the trees multiple times - so, so, tedious. On the plus side, though, all that correcting and repainting has produced quite a nice surface, albeit with many more layers of embedded dust and cat hair than I'm comfortable with.

I'm pleased with the new flat diagonals and wedges in the foreground and sky, though - they bring a gentle dynamism to what was originally a very static composition. Generally, I love stable horizontals; they are very satisfying in a 'landscape' or square format. Unfortunately, in this 'portrait' format too many became dull and unhelpful.

All in all, there are some interesting bits of painting in this (and the odd unresolvable patch I'm just letting go), but - because of the rather 'fire-fighting' nature of the compositional rescue - it maybe lacks the 'wholeness' which good paintings usually have. I'm glad I rescued it, but it was a real struggle and took far, far, too long to produce.

Lastly, I feel I should make it known that the group of figures beneath the central tree is a composite, using photographs of some of the atrocities discovered at Bucha, north-west of Kiev, as Russian soldiers retreated in April last year. Including the dog.

 

Outcrop

oil on card 20x15 cm

A finished piece! A very small preparatory work for a larger painting, hopefully to be started later this year.

There is some music to go with it – this Prelude was playing as I was making the finishing touches, and it felt very comfortable (maybe not so much the more frenetic Fugue that follows on from it, even though it does land beautifully).

The source was this very dramatic setting I came across while idly random-browsing on google street view. It's on the piratically named 'Carcass Island', in the Falklands. It was a wonderful raw subject, but to better describe the space between the outcrop and the viewer, I felt I had to make some alterations: I imported some of the rocks on the left of the painting (from the same area), and introduced the foreground rocks (from Norway). The distant mountains and lower clouds are a left/right switched view looking far across Loch Lomond westwards from Ben Lomond. I've now forgotten where the upper sky and stylised Cumulonimbus are sourced from.

This piece is a preliminary exercise to familiarise myself with and explore the complexities of the subject matter, and if problems arose it would be easier to sort them out nice and early at this smaller scale. As it happened, there was enough play in the sky to depart from my photoshop construction from the very start.

I took my time placing the shapes and rock details – first in water soluble graphite (I still find it useful, but very waxy) then reinforced and toned them in with a thin neutral mix of Ultramarine and Burnt Umber oil paint. The rest was done with tints and veils of transparent and semi-opaque oil to bring out the grasses, and the warms and cools within the rocks.

It went all right, but I couldn't help thinking back a few years to an exhibition of the work – and especially the enormous light-soaked watercolours - of Giovanni Battista Lusieri. His depictions of rocks (with watercolour) were phenomenal, and I'm thinking that I could certainly do with a bit of that when I eventually get around to the larger version of this little piece.

 

Window Work – January 2023

6B graphite

I thought, for a change, that I'd dig out one of my larger, lumpier, drawing tools. These little sketches are all done with thick 6B graphite – 5.6mm leads in a chunky holder. This particular clutch leadholder is plastic, so not as heavy as some of the metal ones, but still feels very different from a pencil.

I had felt that I was getting in a bit of a rut with the Window Work and not concentrating properly on what I was doing, and I was open to approaching things a little differently. The catalyst for change was a gallery visit last month which featured work by Alberto Morocco. He was a highly respected Scottish painter, of the older generation that taught me at college, but I hadn't gone to the gallery specifically to see his work.

What struck me about the show was that it had a lot of functional drawing – there were sketches of musicians, obviously done in situ, and paintings that utilised them. Other drawings included written colour notes, in casual preparation for a potential painting at some later date. There were sketches of everyday things and people - fast, lean, and incomplete, but packed with relevant information. I was mesmerised by one of a donkey. It was in brown Conté crayon, a medium I'd used a lot at one point, and was just a few weighted lines - some doubled over in correction - and fingered smudges to suggest the roundness and weight of the belly. It couldn't have taken more than five or ten minutes, but was a good distillation of what a donkey is.

The experience brought me back very sharply to how I used to work – right down to the colour notes thing – and the casual everyday necessity of looking and drawing in order to find out how the forms of an object work. I was reminded of the distant early paintings I had done purely from sketches and colour notes (still got some – I should really photograph them sometime). I carried my drawing habit into the furniture workshop, and still have some of the job assessment drawings I would do when addressing what had to be repaired. This one is an Irish Chicken Coop Dresser. As usual with pine Irish Dressers chunks of cornice were missing, the bottom was entirely rotted off, and a lot of the glue dissolved after an overnight soak in the caustic tank to strip a couple of centuries-worth of paint off. (I also see from the notes that I was actually starting work at 9.30am, when I should really have been starting at 9am sharp. Oops...) A lot of this activity was swept away by the arrival of cheap digital photography, of course. The sheer convenience of capturing an accurate image in the blink of a shutter was always going to beat the effort of actually drawing for a few minutes.

Anyway, the upshot has been that over the last month or so I've renewed my keenness for Window Work. I increased my sessions from a very reluctant 20/25 minutes (during which I could barely sit still) to around 40/45 minutes and up to an hour - concentrating much harder on the 'looking' while allowing myself a bit more looseness in the mark-making (I quite enjoyed using the angled hatching to help the impression of form). In particular, I've been looking more closely at gait, and trying to work out what's going on with non-stationary legs. Really easy to do with a camera, obviously, but then you end up with a frozen image, which perhaps doesn't increase any understanding of the movements involved.

Which is sort of the whole point of the exercise...