Trees - Yunost

oil on card 15x21 cm

The source for this little landscape – on google streetview – is about three-quarters the way between Moscow and Kazan. You might know Kazan from Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible (pt I)' – where Ivan announces the Grand Duchy of Muskovy's expansion eastwards to Kazan ('Za Kazan!'). It's a very strange film – archaic in style. It comes across more as something from the silent era, like 'Nosferatu', but was actually filmed in 1943/44 and is directly contemporary with Hollywood's 'Double Indemnity' and Olivier's 'Henry V'.

This is a postcard-sized piece, for the annual Open Eye Small Scales event (open soon). Unusually, this one is in 'Portrait' mode, and I had to stretch the central dark tree upwards to fill the upper space, and import some trees and ground from nearby to balance the right and left of the painting, and to cover the original road of the source. The painting started off very well – the objects fitting neatly onto the placing grid very conveniently, without needing much in the way of estimation between the intersections (where there is always scope for errors to be made).

The central 'autumnal' tree began to misbehave fairly soon though, and was referred to in my progress notes once or twice as 'the problem tree'. I struggled to find the required tones and colours, and as a result its paint quality – more uneven, thicker, and glossier - is quite different to the rest of the painting. The figure in the shadows could well be me just giving up in exhausted frustration.

That tree's malevolence extended to shifting its tone and colour depending on what light was on it – blue sky, grey sky, warm and cool interior lights, it was sometimes too dark, too light, too red, too dull – and occasionally, mischievously, manifesting itself as 'just right'. It seems to mock me even now that it's 'finished'. It will be interesting to see how those colours appear when they are finally trapped under varnish in a couple of weeks. I wonder whether the other trees in the painting, the docile firs and birches – obediently posing sunlit and shadowed - are quietly a little scared of their unruly and disruptive colleague.

All that apart, I did enjoy experimenting with pigments in attempting to solve those problems. I laid mixed various yellows and red/browns on some black plastic card to find the most effective thin mixes (on a dark background) for the leaves. Turner's Yellow and Transparent Oxide Brown – both Michael Harding colours - came out on top for that. The T.O.B. was not as fiercely red as the Transparent Oxide Red, while not being as 'black' as straight Burnt Umber, and the Turner's Yellow was a good semi-opaque yellow, and milder than the Cadmium. Useful, and I do wish I'd known that earlier.

To sum this one up – a mildly interesting source, an easy and steady start and middle, then a hard-cased bunker resisting right to the end.

Anyway. Done now...

 

Window Work – September 2025

watercolour

It's been a while since I've posted some Window Work. There's a very good reason for that – I went completely off the boil. I did catch myself up a couple of months ago, though, and have since hauled myself back to a reasonable standard of rapid drawing.

There's a lot more engagement with this batch – it always helps when the folk innocently walking down the street have something notable about them. In this case I was lucky to get a few folk with interesting attitudes – the shivery girl on the left, the heaving mother next to her, and the self-absorbed bloke with his phone. The cyclist was done the fastest, and I think the drawing conveys that energy. The disembodied arm is included because I think it's quite a good drawing of that particular arm – no more, no less.

As ever I've stuck to my Paynes Grey watercolour, 100gm A4 copy paper, but I've come back – via various Oriental brushes, cheap synthetics, and pricey sables – to the Pentel Aquash water brush (broad). I originally bought them for their portability, but I love the quality of the hair. It's very resilient nylon – springy, and nicely responsive. The one I'm using just now has a very fine point indeed, but can still store a useful enough amount of paint. They are designed to hold a reservoir of water or wash in the handle, but I don't utilise that feature – except to put a bit of weight into the brush.

I started by saying that I'd gone off the boil with the Window Works series. It's difficult to know for certain why that was. Over the last couple of years I often went a week or so before forcing myself to sit at the window, and when I did make myself draw the results were dreadful. It's certainly true that my encroaching physical wear and tear didn't help, but then (and whisper it...) boredom may have played a part – a very hard thing to admit. I hope that that very negative phase is passing - after all, I've been doing these in one form or another on and off for fifty years (where I had a street window), and since returning seriously to the window work nearly twenty years ago I've logged over a thousand A4 sheets. I think I should maybe forgive myself the odd lapse now and then.

Anyway, back on track for now, and I wonder whether it could be possible that my daily physiotherapy may be having a positive effect on more than just my worn back and cartilage-lite knees?

It is, though, very annoying indeed to have to clear the eye-brain-hand pathway and build up the drawing muscle. Yet again.

 

Cumulus – Ponizovka

oil on card 30x24cm

New painting! There is a pared-down four-minute track to go with this – and an eight-minute version for those craving more. They're from Mr Richter's new batch of pieces titled – aptly - 'In a Landscape'.

I came across the source location by chance (google streetview, of course). It's near a village called Pozinovka, in Oryol province, in Western Russia.

My first sight was this – a gobsmackingly beautiful cloud - but I couldn't make the large wood beneath it work, so I went further up the road and found this alternative landscape which supported rather than competed with the cloud. I've taken liberties with the ground; I let the far wood disappear into the haze, slanted the foreground line of grass and flowers, and exaggerated a loose diagonal of bushes etc in the middle distance so that the eye is led back to the horizon comfortably. It's difficult to deduce logically where the main cloud (a cumulus mediocris to be precise) sits in space as there is no shadow, but my feeling is that it hangs above the green area between the midway diagonal and the far wood. I quite like the largely obscured line of distant cumulus, but if I was doing this again I probably wouldn't have included the undeveloped high altocumulus in the upper corners.

Technical stuff? Luckily, before I'd finished the grass, I remembered my untried tube of Turner's Yellow. Verdict? It's a good, opaque mid-yellow – not quite as vibrant as the full Cadmium, but half the price and very good as an opaque mixing yellow. Up in the sky, I made a wrong decision doing the top cloud whites. I chose a Stand oil medium, and the paint surface clogged too quickly and became 'heavy', not the 'aerie' effect I wanted. I had to go over it again with very light greys in Walnut oil, which I should have used in the first place. This was much better, and made the shine and glare along the top edges more effective. There's also too much cat hair and inexplicable black specks in the surface. The cats are moulting ferociously just now – I get that – but I've no idea where the black specs come from. I shall investigate.

As ever, it's the painting done with the least effort that's the most effective, and I am quite chuffed with the landscape paintwork in this one. The flowers in the near foreground are simple marks made in the first setting-out of the ground – wee scrapes through the paint with a shaped ice lolly stick. They were just enough to suggest 'flowers' and ease the eye's movement away from the foreground to the mid and far distance.

I've found lolly sticks to be quite useful – I bought them in a bundle from the local hobby shop. I shape them like a butter-knife blade, and can scratch or scribe a variety of marks into the wet paint. I also use them to dip and drip mediums from my jars of mixes onto the palette or paints – the liquid will drip more controllably from the point than from a dipped brush.

Now, there's been a bit of an obvious hiatus in the artwork over winter and spring. This was mainly the result of a short but nasty series of back tweaks (a bit of a setback in my ongoing treatment), a bad knee twist, and the unwelcome manifestation of wear-and-tear in my right shoulder. All a bit of a damper. Evidently, things are easing and I'm able to get on with work - though for shorter hours - and am back to regular drawing again. So, moving forward (as they say), I'll be back to working on a long-term piece, and attending to new paintings already planned. And indeed those not even thought of yet.

It's very nice having summer here again, and being back at the easel...