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...