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.
