Cumulonimbus - Okop

oil on card 21x15cm

A dramatic piece of weather in South West Russia, near a village called Okop. I can't find any information about Okop at all, but it looks like a generally well-maintained enough little village with a bus stop at one end, and some pleasantly traditional woodwork on some of the houses. Again, no subversion here.

No sound tracks either, not even the soughing of the wind in the grass. Which I hope you're imagining now.

Compositionally this is virtually a transcription of the original google streetview image source. A wood has been disappeared from the right, and this helped bring out the proximity tension between the cloud's 'snout' and underside, and the silhouetted wood beneath it.

I was in a hurry to get this started, and while rummaging around in my bag of card offcuts in the hope of finding something already primed, I came across a forgotten piece that I'd primed in blue. It must have been from about a decade ago, when I went through a (very) short phase of live cloud window sketching in oil paint. Finding that saved me a lot of time preparing a surface, and it was blue! (Probably Prussian Blue and Flake White) Lucky me!

The paintwork in this piece was kept loose and done fairly efficiently, despite my being a bit conflicted about how to handle the cirrusy bits and the secondary clouds. It's probably ended up a bit more pink in the upper left than I intended - a last-minute desire to make the icy plume emerging from the big cloud a bit more interesting, but I think the exaggerated pink underneath the base and the small clouds to the right is quite rewarding. I'm pleased with the softness of the cumulus, and the glare of the denser white highlights, so let's maybe concentrate on those, if you don't mind.

I'm not at all sure that an actual meteorologist would class this as an actual Cumulonimbus. They – the clouds - are usually towering, giant heaps violently powering up through the atmosphere until their heads flatten and spread out against a freezing layer. This one appears to be freezing – indicated by the cirrus plume – quite low, even within the cumulus itself. It's also very long and narrow – the painting's viewpoint is looking along it. From an alternative view further down the road to the Southeast it appears much more glorious in its full length, with a rainbow giving a bit more scale, and it is made plain just how powerful the wind must be in the upper levels to be ripping the cirrus away from the cumulus like that.

I'll have to leave it a couple of weeks to cure a bit more before varnishing etc, then it'll be handed in to the gallery. This is the last of this year's Small Scales for the Open Eye Gallery, where the show is on-line only. It previews for those with a password on 21st November, and opens on the 22nd for the ordinaires.

It's been nice working on the very small stuff for a while, but it'll be good to get back to working on slightly larger pieces that I don't need to check with a magnifying glass for a change. Maybe due for another eye test and new specs come the new year...

 

Birch - Kuliki

 

oil on card 21x15 cm

This is the penultimate of my contributions to the upcoming Small Scales show at the Open Eye gallery. Going well so far.

There is some music for this - a cool ambient track from Radiohead's 'Kid A'. It was playing as I was touching in the final hints of glaze, and it fitted very nicely with that moment. However, I went through a kick of playing the then youthful Radiohead's first ever album - 'Pablo Honey' - round about this time, so these paintings are quite strongly linked with the angsty screaming abdabs of 'You' and the strident vulnerability of 'I can't' and 'Lurgee'. An underrated album? Dunno. It is very raw, but I certainly couldn't get enough of it over the last few weeks.

The primary image source is in S.W Russia, near a wood (that may have once been a tiny settlement or farm) called Kuliki, and it presented itself as a very arresting random find on google streetview. As far as I can tell, Kuliki – Кулики - is a generic term for 'Wading birds', like we say 'Hawks' or 'Ducks' without being too specific. The term includes Curlews, more associated in Britain with open fields and moors, and which have a very distinct and haunting call.

Compositionally it's all about wide open space, long shadows, and The Light on The Birch Tree. The road going straight down the middle in the source location didn't work for me though. Luckily - and with the magic of google streetview - by following the road north and finding another heading east I found a whole lot more wide open space and a new variety of foregrounds - all with the right shadows and streaky lights with which to recompose over the road. I also elongated the birch tree a little to fill more of the sky above it – which I think works better.

Not much to say about the technicals here – just a pretty straightforward gouache dot grid on grey priming, then straight on with placing objects and areas (dark tones and cloud lights first) in oil paint. The sky colour evolved very pleasingly – this was my chance try out my new Isaro Deep Blue, with a second layer of Ultramarine/Ivory Black/Zinc White padded on very sparingly towards the top. This very powerful blue is a factory blend of Ultramarine/Pthalo Blue/Zinc White which is just about smack on what I'm usually aiming for to work a bright, clear blue sky – with the magical property of appearing slightly greener as it thins. Just like the real thing (mostly/often/sometimes) does towards the horizon. It's not cheap, but then I'm only really ever going to use it quite thinly.

I made a bit of an effort to make this a 'small painting', as opposed to a 'miniature', by consciously being a bit looser and trying not to get pulled into too much fine detail. 'Letting the paint do the work' – as Mr Knight (my school Art teacher) used to say. I think I mostly succeeded, but it was difficult not to get caught up and drawn into the sunlit top of the birch.

Quite chuffed with this wee piece. I think it's an engagingly pleasant little landscape which I was very lucky to come across. There's no subversive element here; at this scale, that's very difficult, especially as I didn't want to get too 'dragged in' to superfine detail.

I hope the images I have made of it are accurate enough. It'll probably be varnished and off to the gallery within a few weeks, and I (and certainly Madam) will miss it if it doesn't come back.

Black Tree

oil on card 21x15 cm

It's Small Scale time again – I've started a bit earlier this year just in time for the Open Eye Gallery invitation.

There is a track to go with this – 'Song', from Max Richter's 'Songs from Before'. I went back to listening to Richter's early stuff again for this piece – for me, it's much more 'small scale' and calming than his later output.

The source for this little painting is from a google streetview image recorded in July 2021. I found it about a year later, but hadn't done anything with it until now. The camera is looking north on a windy morning in Southeastern Ukraine.

In the original image the two trees are closer – nearly touching – but I felt that was a bit too Sistine Chapel, so shifted them apart a little. The bleeding of the blue sky into the small tree was an attractive artefact of the photograph, so it stayed - it felt as though the wind was somehow driving the blue across the trees. My original bands of soil and yellowed grass in the field were reappraised, and then overpainted – the plain green maybe lets everything else breathe a bit more.

I spent far too long trying to get the fine colours and tones of the sky right in the opening sessions. So much so that I got fed up with it, and let it go in order to move on and develop the landscape. This may not have seemed a sensible thing to do at the time, but as it turned out, that was quite a good move.

The drawing of the small tree was tricky – the leaves had to be fairly precise and defined but light and quick enough to convey the force of the wind. A little wipe of the brush on a smear of walnut oil helped a lot with paint's 'quickness' and mobility.

Having finished the landscape and foreground, I was still dissatisfied with the sky – it was far too dull and chalky. I was forced to return to it, but by this time a final glaze was really the only option. Doing a bit of thinking, I dug out an experiment that I'd performed years ago - smearing samples of all my whites at the time onto a piece of black plastic to see how they worked against a dark background. Interestingly, the Winsor & Newton Transparent Titanium White (never really used) thinned out to a definite blue - an optical effect to do with the fineness of the pigment particles apparently. Using that as my white, with Ultramarine and Pthalo Blue (red shade), the resulting scumble glaze is very intense, more so to my eyes than if I'd used Zinc White (which went grey in the test). It was finely 'printed' onto the surface with a small cloth pad – which allows very fine gradations - and wiped off and/or touched onto the trees with a small brush. In case you're still wondering, I used a heavy Stand Oil / Damar varnish medium again, but with a lot less driers this time.

Anyway, that 'transparent' white now seems to be unavailable on Winsor et Newton, but it appears that Herr Schmincke makes something similar that looks the business. A 'Hurrah' for Schmincke, then, but muted and qualified as I haven't tested it yet.

Looking back, this took far too long, and there was a danger of it ending up a detailed miniature, rather than a small painting. I wish I'd done the field a little more carefully, but it'll do, and the next time I use masking tape along a horizon I'll make sure I level the resulting ridge of paint (it runs across the left tree and is more disruptive than I'm happy with). Got it all done though, and the final glaze sorted out the sky and pulled it all together like the cavalry galloping in to the rescue. (Cue bugle)

I didn't notice it at the time, but the location is not far out along the road running westward from Mariupol. It is the main highway along the coast linking Eastern Ukraine with the Crimea, and is of course now under Russian occupation. It has been a battlefield in the past couple of years – the google Satellite view images, dated 2024, show shell craters and tank tracks in the field beyond the trees. Staying in the google 'bird's eye', and following the road eastwards into and through the devastated city, you eventually reach the bombed and shelled theatre in the centre. There, on the square in front of it, it's possible to see where the people sheltering inside the theatre during the battle wrote the word 'ДЕТИ' (deti – children) to prevent attacks.

The road is named Проспект Миру - Prospekt Miru. It means 'Avenue of Peace '.

And there's really nothing more anyone can say about that.

 

Åsted

oil on card 30x18cm

I found this setting near a village called Åsted, in Northern Denmark. The google streetview source is from a road named Ravnsholtvej - Raven's Wood Road (if the Old Danish meaning of 'Holt' is applied).

'Åsted' (the 'Å' is pronounced like the 'oa' in 'toast - so 'Oasted') means 'a place where something real or imaginary happened' and the word applies directly to 'crime scene'. So this setting could easily be imagined to have had quite dark origins, and most of us have seen enough Scandi Noir to know what that means.

Compositionally, I was very struck by the 'surge' of the ground forms, with the trees erupting from the cleft. Mirrored right to left the rising ground seemed like a wave about to break, but it's more settled this way round, and more about the wind. I've lowered the rise to the right and 'disappeared' the houses on the left, and entirely invented the dark grey sky. The green of the grass was striking too, and the dull sky and foliage hopefully makes it more luminous.

This piece was started fairly briskly. The elements were placed in thinnish dull green oil paint using a white paint dot grid, on Michael Harding's grey acrylic primer (very dense - you only need a couple of coats, and other colours are available). Once the main forms were placed accurately enough, the gouache dots were easily washed off with water, and the painting developed as usual. I wanted to intensify the colour, especially in the grass, so I used a strong Stand oil and Damar varnish medium (plus driers of course), which was much less diluted with Turpentine than normal. There wasn't too much softening and blurring either, except in the sky. The marks are mostly a lot more solid and thicker than usual, but I'm not sure that I'll stick with such a strong mixture in the future. Or if I do use it again, it'll be with less driers; that should make the paint a bit less instantly stiff and more easily 'blurrable'. The final glazes over the trees, and the ironing out of their final darks, were in a much weaker and lighter Stand/Damar mix and softened accordingly. Lesson learnt.

Early on, at the photoshop compositional stage, a far-away memory from boarding school came to mind. I remember being maybe about ten, and at a melancholy late summer Sunday teatime. It would have been not long into the term, weekend free-time over, and with the prospect of a full week of lessons to come. The dining room windows faced eastwards, and while the sky was the dark, solid, grey of the picture above, the trees outside were brightly lit against it by the low sun to the west. A weather front must have passed as I was looking out, as the trees – dark, late summer sycamores - were suddenly caught up by the wind, the undersides of their leaves pale and shimmering against the grey sky. It was stunning.

Getting back to this little painting about some trees in Denmark, that memory certainly gave me the dark sky, and hopefully I've transferred a sense of that rush of the wind.

It would be nice to report that this piece painted itself. It didn't (be nice if one did for a change!), but apart from a struggle to untangle the forms in the middle of the wood it went fairly well. I find it quite potent and sinister, and the nominally implied presence of past ravens and murder is Nordic enough, I think, to not include actual evidence.

 

Seven Trees

oil on card 35x22 cm

I haven't the faintest idea what music I was listening to when starting this piece, but I was very conscious that Radiohead's 'No Surprises' was playing as I touched in the last few additions underneath the left-hand clump of trees.

The initial source for this smallish painting is a Google Streetview image in Richmond Park, London.

Just for change it's more about the near group of trees and their shadows rather than the sky. It's late summer, so the foliage is very dark, and the grass is dry and yellow with drought, which sets up up an interesting tonal situation. The central tree's trunk has ben narrowed slightly, as I couldn't make the source's original huge girth credible. I suspect it's a very old tree indeed – the others are young clumps of three – and has probably had some thinning out work done to preserve its crown and to keep it from breaking up. What struck me about these trees, along with their dark tone and symmetry, was the flat uniform bottom edges. Richmond Park is stocked with deer – a reminder of its original status as a royal hunting park. Most, if not all of the trees in the park have the same level bottom edge - the maximum height to which the deer can reach.

The original sky wasn't that interesting, so the final source image was a construct of bits of streetview from up the road in Richmond Park, and some clouds I had snapped from up the road in Edinburgh last year. The original patches of blue sky behind the the cumulus were very much desaturated to monochrome - fake altostratus, maybe? - but the slight blues and pinks of the distance were very much retained, and, in hindsight, should maybe have been exaggerated a little.

This piece was begun ages ago, with tight drawing and rather weak, indecisive paint washes. Restarting it in January with thicker, more opaque, paint brought a bit more solidity and purpose, so I'm quite happy with that, even though it took far too many sessions to do. The sky and ground are treated completely differently; the sky has loose and slippery walnut oil (plus cobalt driers!) as a medium – with M. Graham's Titanium White in Walnut oil – while the ground and trees have a stickier Stand Oil/Damar varnish medium. This gives the sky and clouds a softness that the ground doesn't require. (I do quite like the softness of the sky paint and its undramatically narrow tone range)

The title 'Seven Trees' is fairly generic, but I think that you can see – especially from looking closely at the source link – that the subjects are Oak trees. However, to title the painting 'Seven Oaks' would be to mislead the viewer into thinking that this was Sevenoaks, in Kent. Which it most definitely is not.

What you can't see here, no matter how closely you look, are the myriads of Ring-necked Parakeets that have made Richmond Park and South West London their home. There is an abundance of theories on how they got there, but however that happened they are now firmly resident and are spreading northwards, and even – according to this article – (gulp) to Edinburgh. I haven't seen any yet, but I did see a buzzard wheeling above our neighbourhood just last week.

Maybe it was keeping a keen eye out for parakeets...