Doing it properly this time…

Street Sketches

2012-01-27T11:23:00.004Z

watercolour - figures 8-12cm tall

It is with some alarm that I realise that I have let my rapid figure-drawing slip. These are the best of a recent batch done since That Festive Period, and they really don’t match up to those done a year ago. I’m taking far too long to take in the figures as a whole, which means that I end up seeing them from different angles as they march past the window, which plays merry hell especially when drawing the legs. Which is annoying.

However, the one of the girl, on the right, is quite interesting technically. I’d been mucking about trying to do Japanese style woodblock prints (no results yet that merit a post) and this involves using a sort of wallpaper paste. I used some of this in the watercolour and found that it has a soft, evening-out effect within the washes - the opposite of the blotchiness of the figure on the far left. Neither is good or bad, but it’s a useful effect on the copy paper I use for these sketches.

Sadly, paste doesn’t improve the process of looking. There’s only one way to do this, and that’s to do more drawings more often, and looking harder. So if I do that, everything will be alright again...

Actually, I’m not all that bothered this week as things in general are going pretty flipping well alright, seeing as how I’ve just had two pieces selected for the annual Scottish Artists’ societies’ exhibition in the RSA*. That’s two years running now – very exciting. July’s Wreck No.5 is upstairs in the VAS* section, and last month’s Wreck No.9 is in the smaller SSA* rooms downstairs.

The show is on from Saturday 4 February till Thursday 1 March, and is a tasty addition to the CV. It’s usually an interesting exhibition - if you’re in Edinburgh, pop along.

So, despite feeling a bit miffed* with my drawing, I’m well chuffed* about the other thing...

* Initials and vernaculars
RSA – Royal Scottish Academy. Top Gallery in Edinburgh
VAS – Visual Arts Scotland
SSA – Scottish Society of Artists
Miffed – Slightly disappointed
Chuffed – Quite happy and proud. Full of oneself, possibly unbearably so

Wreck No.9

2011-12-25T13:39:00.005Z

oil on papered canvas 31x25cm

Just like waiting for a bus, there are none for ages then three come along at once.

The whole point of this piece was to produce a quick, loosely-painted, straightforward, beautiful landscape that I could maybe punt through a commercial gallery for money. No High-brow Layers of Meaning, no Art, no Big Ideas about the Human Condition, just a Sellable Pretty Picture.

Well, that idea started off really well, and - without any squaring up or preliminary drawing at all - I had the basics freely bashed out in an afternoon. I came back a few days later to tweak some shadows and puff up the clouds, and then it happened.

There I was, humming away, so pleased with myself, and it suddenly struck me that the painting was crying out for a wreck. It was irresistible, so there we are. The landscape is just as beautiful, the sky as innocent, but there’s now a hint of mortality. Those high street galleries will just have to wait.

Having finished all the works in progress that’s me relaxing for the Year End. No doubt I’ll be doing little sketchy bits over the holiday period, but I’ll start wrestling with the next batch of planned work in January. And just so that you know, I AM aware that I have to work faster.

But that’s me done for the year, so Cheeers…

Wreck No.8

2011-12-19T14:50:00.003Z

oil on canvas 51x51cm

Hard on the heels of Wreck No.7, this piece is carrying on the idea first explored in Wreck No.6 in August – a section of damaged tank forming a ‘landscape’ beneath a sky. I’m still not convinced that the idea has legs, mainly because a landscape usually involves distance, and a wreck silhouette usually does not. We’ll see…

I was on the verge of abandoning this piece not long ago. I had doubts about my first cloud patterns and painted a very mixed, layered sky. Well, that lacked focus so I painted a great big rising cumulus in the middle, and that didn’t work either. Describing all the contortions I put that poor sky through would make very tedious reading, so suffice to say that I ended up utilising my original idea (the lower shining group) - but slightly smaller.

I think the tank element contrasts better than in Wreck No.6, and is a bit more suggestive of a dead thing. The damage is adapted from other images and not particularly exaggerated.

At the moment, the painting is hung in front of the bookcase next to Madam’s sofa. She has been lying looking up at it and seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.

Which is VERY flattering…

Wreck No.7

2011-12-16T13:01:00.003Z

oil on canvas 91x91cm

I was just idly browsing for interesting landscapes when I came across a field with white cows. They struck me as being very pastoral and mysterious, and suggest a distinctly ‘Arcadian’ context. The wreck was chosen very carefully from my now disturbingly large library of destroyed tank photos. It doesn’t sit but seems to lay on the ground, and where the superstructure tilts towards the grass, the angles are similar to the cows’ tucked-under forelegs - an interesting rhyme across contrasting subjects.

I’m sorry to say that painting this was mostly very frustrating: I misjudged the tones of the sky and grass right at the start, and it took several corrections to get them as I wanted. As the cows were outlined fairly carefully in the setting-out, repainting the grass around them each time was a major chore. The light was to be quite subtle and I had trouble gauging the tones for a dull but luminous sky. I was grateful that painting the tank was pretty straightforward, and I have already written about the problems drawing cows in the previous post.

However, painting the middle and far distance was pure joy. I loved unrolling the landscape, and at times it seemed to paint itself. Not that it matters, but the wheatfields and trees are from France, and the valley and hills are Strathearn in Perthshire.

Though it was finished over a week ago, I’ve been working on this since summer, and a lot of music has come through the speakers since then. There isn’t a specific mood-setter, but I was listening to Shostakovich’s 24 Piano Preludes and Fugues a lot. If you’re tempted, here’s Keith Jarret playing No16 in B flat minor . This is the first version I came across and it got me keen to hear others. I usually listen to Konstantin Scherbakov’s - on Naxos - which I think is slightly more delicate but less available to link to on a blog.

I don’t know why but I felt very sad after having finished this, even though it’s quite a good painting, and I had to go for a big walk up the road. Often, finishing a piece is like the culmination of a hunt – having stalked it I’m chasing the painting and it’s twisting and turning trying to get away, and I’m getting closer and closer and then with the last dab and smear, I’ve got it. Signed and dated, Painter Triumphans.

This time I’d thought that I’d be relieved to finish it, but as soon as I had, it felt as though I’d just lost something.

Cow

2011-11-27T17:41:00.002Z

pencil 10.25x6cm

Oh dear. The end of November is almost here without me having posted anything. My hours book (yes, hours book) tells me that I have been working slowly but solidly on two paintings. Admittedly, there have been small diversions - tiny landscape sketches, devising and constructing a lighting system, and a short trip to London (AFC Wimbledon 1- Swindon 1) and Wales - but what have I got to show for it?

One of the paintings (see Works in Progress) features twelve white cows. Now, it is over thirty years since I seriously attempted to draw any kind of ruminant, and I was experiencing no end of frustration trying to depict these animals convincingly. As the work developed, their forms, especially those further away, shifted through cow, sheep, and horse, and occasionally veered towards dog. Rather than spend another week creating mutant farmyard animals, I decided to study the beasts in question the best way I know how – by making many drawings of the damned things.

So, I find myself almost at the end of a long November looking to finish at least this piece before the disruption of the so-called festive season, and here is a drawing of a cow.

Watercolour Wreck

2011-10-18T18:40:00.003+01:00

watercolour 18.5x11cm

With the watercolour stuff still set out on the worktop, it was just a matter of time before I had go at seeing how the medium could tackle a tank wreck.

I wanted to paint it in complete transparency - where highlights needed to be reintroduced they had to be washed out, rather than slipped in with gouache or acrylic. Luckily I didn’t have to correct that much, and a bit of washing out helped in getting that bright horizon, where over-painting in opaque would have drawn undue attention to itself. I think that the general idea of opposite qualities (air/solid, soft/hard, gentle/harsh etc) still comes across – so I count this little exercise as a success.

(And so fast…)

Two Watercolours

2011-10-16T17:46:00.003+01:00

watercolour 28x17cm

watercolour 19x12cm

I am waiting for two very, very oily pieces to dry, so I thought I’d get some watercolour practice in. I’m always roaming through Google Streetview looking for useful references, and there are a few landscapes I’ve been meaning to explore further. These two weren’t painted from prints or photos, but directly from the computer screen.

The autumn view was done first. It’s in Northern France, about 1.16km along Rue Houvin, heading southwest from Neuvillette to Occoches. It’s a lovely little wooded valley and there are some very interesting looking white cattle further along. I find the red trees and horizontal light very dramatic, and I love the rolling forms of this whole area. It’s quite similar to parts of southern England - but not as built-up, and the scale of everything is much smaller.

I don’t think it’s a bad piece, but the marks are a bit clumsy and some of the shadow a little too harsh. If I were to do it again I’d leave out the single tree on the right; it blocks the interesting stuff further away, weakens the negative space, and is just a bit too obvious and twee.

The other watercolour, with wheat and woods, is in Denmark. It’s postcard-sized, and, realising the cloddiness of the other one, I tried to be more concise and accurate. The paper wasn’t very absorbent, and the hard edges have helped in describing the texture of the foliage – a happy accident I’m quite pleased with.

The location is by Bronderslevvej, the road heading southwest from Frederikshavn. The land there is all rolling golden wheat fields and dark clumps of trees, and is dotted with ancient burial mounds straight out of Johan Thomas Lundbye (nice clouds, Mr Lundbye).

I think that recently I’ve maybe got a bit bogged down with the bigger paintings. Oil paint is lovely, lovely stuff, but sometimes slogging away at the same idea for weeks on end can get a bit monotonous and unrewarding. Dogged persistence is an overrated attribute and I think a stimulating change of media is quite healthy, and overdue.

Watercolour is immediate and mercurial, and it’s quite satisfying to see a row of finished wee paintings cut and dried before teatime…

Duddingston Loch

2011-09-07T11:29:00.013+01:00

oil on papered canvas 31x25cm

A break from the usual grind, this is a commission from Madam. When she first came to Edinburgh in the early 1980’s she worked as a nanny with a family in Duddingston, who we still see. She often took the eldest, then about three, off to the loch to feed the ducks.

The wee girl got married earlier on this year, and Madam asked me to do a painting of Duddingston Loch as a wedding gift. We thought it would be an idea to suggest a look back to those days.

It sails close to the sentimental but I think the optimism and freshness of the sky blows that away, and the image works perfectly well without knowing the back-story. The canvas is quite small but there’s a wide variety of paint handling there – quite dry from a splayed out hoghair in the tree to smooth blended oily in the water and sky. It was a challenge doing the birds and figures so that the tiny, tiny marks were simultaneously unobtrusive and recognisable. I think they work quite well, especially the swans on the water and the geese under the tree.

There’s definitely a mood set-up track for this – Sigur Ros’ ‘Takk’. Click here Takk - Very shimmery and bright.

The painting’s not perfect but it’s gone as far as it’s going, so as soon as the paint is good and dry, we’ll go for tea at Duddingston and pass it over. Most important, Madam loves it, and is sure it’ll be appreciated.

And it made her cry.

Wreck No.6

2011-08-23T17:21:00.004+01:00

oil on canvas 51x51cm

I seem to remember that this series started with a destroyed tank and a beautiful sky, so this one is a bit ‘Back to Basics’.

The sky is fairly simple - cumulus on blue. The tank, and I’m not sure if this idea works or not, is meant to seem like a landscape. Hmm. Let's just say that I quite like the contrasting shapes and textures between the two subjects.

Technically this piece is a step forward. For starters, I used touches of Magenta throughout, so it has a strange overall colour. As well as that I put some stand oil in some of the glazes and dabbed, not stroked, them on. That solved my problem of how to make the fine tone/colour gradients in the sky and the soft blended ‘cloudiness’ of the nearer clouds. Prior to that I would have made up a lot of oily free-flowing paint and physically worked the colours together on the surface. The dabbing deposits a thin transparent-ish glaze vertically onto the surface with a brush or pad. Repeated semi-transparent layers can intensify colours, and I’m quite pleased with the blueness of the blue (mixes of Payne’s Grey, Ultramarine and Prussian Blues and Zinc White).

The hard metal was great fun to do. Wettish paint, dryish paint, thicker paint, thinner paint, opaque paint and transparent paint – basically I just made it up as I went along with a refreshing lack of theory and planning.

I mentioned the blue earlier. I am no longer at home to Pthalo blue (or its nasty cousin Pthalo Green). It has behaved in a consistently boisterous and unruly manner and no matter how I have tried to calm it down and make it feel settled, I feel that it has let the work down, has let me down, but most of all has let itself down. My new friend Prussian blue doesn’t upset the rest of the palette, mixes genially with yellows to make healthy greens, and doesn’t leave lurid stains all over my brushes…

Wreck No.5

2011-07-27T11:18:00.005+01:00

oil on canvas 91x91cm

Let me introduce this by writing what someone else thought about the painting at first sight.

A little while ago, when this was almost finished, an old pal came round to the house. As soon as he entered the room he started looking at the painting. I started explaining about the Wreck series, but he motioned me to silence and said that he would tell me his own reading of it.

He started by saying that it was a beautiful landscape, possibly Northern France or Germany, very pastoral. He spoke about the clouds, and then said that the tank looked like a beast. He liked the way the grass on the right blew into the crop field, and led you back to the wood. He stood and looked at it a bit more, then asked if he had got it right.

Well, he had. He’d ticked all the key elements. ‘Beautiful landscape’, ‘Pastoral’, ‘Beast’. He even got the French location right. As you can imagine, I was well pleased.

This painting seems to have taken ages to do. I think I started it in May, but then I had to stop for a week for a big priming session. Wreck No6 has been on the go at the same time, and Madam has had the few days off in the house. If you take that time away, then I suppose it’s been reasonably efficient, but everything still seems to take such a long time. There’s no specific music mood primer for this, but I did enjoy being reacquainted with Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ - that guitar solo from ‘Time’ still fair blows the cobwebs away.

Anyway, I’m glad that Bill understood that the piece wasn’t just militaria (i.e. a portrait of a tank in a field) but more like a slain dragon in a landscape, and when I explained the ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ tradition - the evidence of Death in a pastoral Idyll - it seemed to make sense to him.

As I hope it does to you…

Bright Stratocumulus

2011-07-21T20:24:00.004+01:00

pencil and crayon 21x21cm

I had a little brainwave when cloud sketching last week – don’t use watercolour.

I’ve had various crayons hanging about for ages and never really used them, but on this particular sunny afternoon last week it all fell into place. The drawing is on very some thin copy paper that I had handy, and luckily I didn’t have to be too robust.

I’m quite pleased with it – it has quite an energetic dash and gets the general brightness across. It’s not just all effect either, and I’m sure that there’s enough re-creatable information here to use as reference for other work.

In case you’re wondering, the number 156 is the sketch sheet number. All my A4 out-the-window sketches are numbered and kept in order.

This is the first time that I’ve ever referred to a page number, and now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure why I started.

It does sound like I’m very organised and know what I’m doing though…

Tiny Evening Sky

2011-07-13T15:28:00.006+01:00

watercolour 5.5x8.5cm

This tiny piece is the view out of the sitting room from where I sit on the sofa. It’s just past 10pm, and I know that because I painted it while listening to the News on TV on Monday night.

The latitude here in Edinburgh is about 55 degrees - the same as Moscow and the lower edge of Hudson’s Bay (though without the climatic inconveniencies). In this little sketch you’re looking northwards, and the sun has been below the horizon for about half an hour. In mid-winter, this would look very different as it is dark by 4.30pm.

At this time of year, nearly a month after Midsummer, the sun rises at 4.45am. For some reason, I very rarely see it…

Quick Sketch

2011-06-30T09:56:00.004+01:00

pencil 8x10cm

Unfortunately I haven’t actually finished anything grand this month (been busy though, see Work in Progress) so here’s something very small and very humble. It’s a tiny sketch done from the front seat at the top of a No10 bus while going along Princes Street. The cloud was the main thing, but as the bus kept having to stop – as they do - I had time to indicate a bit of Calton Hill (because it was there). N.B. It is inadvisable to make marks when the bus in motion – messy.

It was drawn in a plain notebook but I’ve taped the page into my large sketchbook, otherwise it would get lost/knackered/smudged etc, and I wouldn’t have had it to show.

The point is not that this is a particularly meaningful piece of ‘Art’, but that it was dashed off from life in a spare moment. Which is a Good Thing.

Wreck No.4

2011-05-30T10:54:00.009+01:00

oil on canvas 91x91cm

I was idly following a road in Finland using Google Streetview, and found this melancholy view of birches and spruce up north – it turned out to be Pallastunturi National Park.

After shifting a few trees, replacing the original bland stratocumulus, and adding a more distant horizon I felt I had an interesting piece to develop. The wrecked tank of the title is basically a StuG IV, I think, and I find its harsh angular presence within the serene natural setting very exciting.

While painting this I was listening a lot to Max Richter’s Infra (copy and paste http://soundcloud.com/max-richter/sets/infra/ into a new tab or window to listen) all of which seems to fit the mood, but ‘Infra 7’ - http://soundcloud.com/max-richter/infra-7/ - is a good aural illustration of the clear thin verticals and wide distant hills.

It felt good to be working on a 91cm/3ft square canvas again, in fact it was quite liberating. I’ve got Wreck No5 started on one already, and I’ll be priming up three more soon.

The only problem is where to put these things where our cats can’t get at them. Looks like I’ll have to clear out under the bed...

Cumulonimbus

2011-05-25T14:37:00.003+01:00

watercolour/gouache 14x10.5cm

Edinburgh had quite interesting gales and showers yesterday. Late morning I could see Big Clouds moving around, so I tore myself away from the easel (not difficult), gathered my watercolour gear and trekked up Blackford Hill.

It was too windy to stay at the top, but I found a sheltered hollow facing the Forth. I sat through a short hail shower, then unpacked my sketching stuff. After an hour of hesitant starts and ineffective splashing about of watercolour, I turned and looked south over the edge of the hollow. There, sailing slowly by, was this magnificent Cumulonimbus - with fleecy edges and dark streaks of altocumulus.

Working quickly, as if in slo-mo, the sky was laid in, cloud wiped off, highlights gouached, darker bits dibbled in – job done. I started to indicate the foreground, but before I could draw enough detail to scale it, another cumulonimbus that had crept up over the top of the hill opened up and I was caught in a withering hail of rain and, er, hail. With everything getting wet, I gave in, quickly packed my gear and retreated home.

Looking at this later, I saw that the wet green had taken the rain spots. The foreground is unfinished, and isn’t fixed in space, but I liked the rawness of the sketch, and that the rain had made a visible impact on it.

However, next time I go out sketching, I’ll maybe pick a day that’s slightly less elemental…

Ash Tree and Fireworks

2011-05-01T12:17:00.003+01:00

oil on canvas 31x25cm

A very quick painting for me, only about ten hours work.

The scene, from memory, is last year’s festival fireworks as Madam and I saw them from Montpelier. I worked the composition out later from reference photos in an ink and watercolour sketch, and meant to do the finished piece on a three foot canvas last year, but I bottled out when the time came. As it happened, when painting this version I couldn’t access the photos on my computer so had to work directly from the sketch, which was interesting.

It was quite a good subject to explore the layering of transparent blacks and whites, and treating the work more as play rather than ‘Art’ loosened me up quite a lot.

All in all, quite a good exercise, and, I still have a large-ish canvas primed and ready to go...

Evening Altocumulus

2011-04-26T15:24:00.003+01:00

watercolour and gouache 14x10.5cm

Last week we had some beautiful diffuse evening skies, and I thought I’d try out my new grey-tinted Bockingford heavy-duty watercolour paper. The shapes are bit all-over-the-place and the blue strip of sky is probably too dark, but this quickish sketch is a good reminder, to me, of how it was.

I have to say that I really don’t recommend drawing directly into the sun. Even if you’re able to discern the paper through the after-images flickering all over your retina, one’s judgement of colour and tonal values becomes quite alien and irregular (though that doesn’t excuse the sloppy drawing...).

Two Cloud Sketches

2011-03-29T16:39:00.001+01:00

watercolour/gouache 14x10cm approx

March has been spent concentrating on a bigger Wreck painting (see ‘Works in Progress’ to the right) but I’ve still found time for some cloud work.

I love doing these little sky sketches – especially now that the days are longer. It’s not so much about recording particular formations - photographs are more accurate, and sit still long enough to use as reference material - it’s more about becoming familiar with how light and clouds interact.

The top one was done in six/seven minutes and has turned out very ethereal. The lower is much more worked – I added to it from memory later on that evening. It’s not bad, but it maybe lacks the life of the first.

Looking at clouds gives me immense pleasure, but that only goes so far. Drawing demands a different kind of examination, and, like the rapid figure sketches, you have to take in, simplify, and reassemble a lot of information in a short time.

I suppose I imagine that if I draw them often enough I will become so familiar with their forms as they absorb and reflect light, ebb and flow, mutate as they rise and fall, condense and evaporate, darken and glow with changing densities, let alone as they scoot and shuffle across the sky, that I won’t need to rely quite so much on still reference photos.

That’ll be the day…

Wreck No.3

2011-02-27T13:00:00.004Z

oil on canvas 65x65cm

First of all, I have some good news.

I have had two pieces selected for the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) exhibition, in the Royal Scottish Academy building in Edinburgh this month - ‘Edith Stone’ and ‘Wreck No.2’, both recent. This annual event is a very prestigious show to be selected for; it shows the best contemporary stuff being produced, and only two hundred pieces were selected out of seven hundred submitted. It is confirmation that I have achieved a standard of work equal to when I last showed there – back in the early 1980s – and that the blind slog of the past few years has been worth it. So, you can imagine that this means a lot to me.

All I have to do now is build up The Body of Work, which means working even harder, and preferably less slowly. Finally got this one slogged out – through such interruptions as Xmas, hyperactive kittens, an interminable virus thing, and cold calls on the phone too numerous to mention.

Wreck No.3 takes the current series forward with a more complex landscape – a mash-up of the original photo, and landscape details sourced from Google Streetview. The sky is from various photos, and modified where composition demanded – specifically the darker diagonal shapes that funnel the eye down the right.

The tank is a Hetzer, an ambush gun, and the paint scheme is not exaggerated. I wanted to use its own camouflage to diffuse its very angular form so that the damage (the only bits using black) seems more shocking.

So, that’s done. Meanwhile I’ll have to see what’s in the In-tray - got to get on with that Body of Work…

Edith Stone

2010-12-29T15:10:00.005Z

oil on canvas 51x51cm

At last. That’s it. Done.

This started off as a simple exercise in making a portrait from a photograph. That was in December 2008. Ah, So Long Ago. I’ve been hacking away at this on and off ever since (see ‘Works in Progress’), and you may remember the painted cellophane post of March 2010. If I ever do this again - and I probably will - I really must make sure that I have adequate source material to work from, and not a fuzzy and confused original that was badly printed and a bit too small.

Anyway. The source image is from some interesting Sydney police photos of the 1920’s and 30’s, before the mug shot was formalised. I was struck by Edith Stone’s photo because of the light, and the intensity and complexity of her expression. She looks stupid and desperate, but also submissive, as if playing for sympathy, but there seems to be an underlying coldness and anger. There is no indication on the original plate what her crime was – she could be a petty thief, prostitute, bank robber, or murderer – take your pick.

Compositionally, the collar and bobbed hair were a gift and there are some nice rhyming shapes in the hair, jaw and neckline, but I struggled a bit with the backdrop. Finally, out of desperation, I filled it in with featureless opaque Mars Black, which set off the rich transparent coloured blacks in the hair quite nicely. To distinguish the silhouette of the hair a bit more, I used the rough green edge from the March 2010 cell painting, which adds a little more drama very effectively. The paint surface on the figure is very rich - not surprising considering that’s it’s been re-worked on and off for two years.

There is a mood-setter track to go with this – ‘When you were young’ from Sam’s Town, by the Killers. It’s oddly melancholy for such a high-energy track. Oh look, here it is…
http://soundcloud.com/mtltim/the-killers-when-you-were-young
…and the rest of the album works too, if you have it.

Hopefully this has been a successful exercise. It was tempting to write this off when I plainly couldn’t make it work, but I find it difficult to let these things go unresolved. I actually had it almost beaten a couple of times, but it had slightly wrong resonances, and in trying to pin it down I ended up knackering it. Learning all the time, of course, so nothing’s really wasted. I think this is the nearest I’m going to get to reflecting the initial stimulus, so -

’Bye Edith… it’s been emotional.

ITRI in Itri

2010-12-21T14:56:00.005Z

oil on canvas 57x42cm

Buon Giorno!

We have a lovely, very convenient, Italian Restaurant just down the road. A couple of years ago they were kind enough to offer me wall space for paintings, and I was embarrassed that I didn’t have any whose subject came remotely close to Italy, food, or Italian food.

Not long ago we found that it’s named the ‘ITRI Restaurant’ after chef Antonio’s hometown – Itri, about halfway between Rome and Naples. Through Google Streetview, I saw the distinctive castle at the town centre, and got the idea of mashing Edinburgh and Itri together using each other’s buildings and features. Via Civita Farnese has a good view of the castle, so I just transplanted the restaurant, with two of its satisfied customers, into a suitable block.

It’s the restaurant’s now, and the proud hosts Gennaro and Filippo put it straight up on the wall. They’re both very chuffed with it, and it was great to see them recognising all the elements.

By the way, if I haven’t mentioned it before, the restaurant is called the ITRI, and more information and menus can be found at http://www.itrirestaurant.co.uk/ - And, if you haven’t guessed already, that’s Madam and I waving at you from the tables outside, like we’ve just had Spaghetti Carbonara and a wee Limoncello.

Ciao! Arrivederci!

Snow

2010-12-08T17:17:00.005Z

watercolour 10-15cm high

The weather in Edinburgh has been unexpectedly wintry for the past fortnight. City centre temperatures have been as low as –10C, and the snow has accumulated and hardened along the roadsides. Edinburgh folk are simply not geared up for this, and we totter along the icy pavements slowly and uncertainly.

These are a couple of quick sketches out the window, of passers-by negotiating the tricky surfaces. I think their cautiously balanced gait comes across quite well.

We’re due for a thaw this weekend, but who knows what the weather will do later. I wouldn’t hold your breath for sketches of folk in shorts and Hawaiian shirts though…

Wreck No.2

2010-11-22T13:38:00.004Z

oil on canvas 51x51cm

The scene is a soft, still summer evening. The trees are flipped right to left, but the setting is recognizably Bruntsfield Links. The tank is a Panzer IV - obviously quite badly damaged, but resulting in interesting shapes.

Hopefully the grass, trees and sky read easily, but I’ve tried to make it so that you have to work a little to read the form of the tank - the marks are harder and cruder, and contrast with the blended forms behind and above.

I am yet again rather annoyed that, after slogging through these first two paintings, they’re too small. They were done on canvasses that I had ready, but at 20 inches square they maybe sell themselves short and lack impact. I’m pretty sure that it’s a confidence thing - the next lot will be bigger.

Having said that, I have to say that I’m really quite pleased with the evening light in this one…

Wreck No.1

2010-11-22T13:26:00.003Z

oil on canvas 51x51cm

I’ve started what could turn out to be an extended series of paintings of wrecked tanks under calm skies or in serene landscapes. I’m not entirely sure why - the idea sprang out of nowhere – but I think it’s worth exploring. I know that this theme combines two subjects that interest me - clouds and tanks – but I’m uncertain what underlying message this sends, if any.

It’s easy to say why the sky is interesting. It is ever-present and ever-changing. It is plainly beautiful, and though remote and impersonal, its variations of colour, light, and form clearly influence our psychological state.

Tanks are another thing entirely. They are heavy, loud, powerful, expensive, and dangerous. They promise so much power and invulnerability, but are just hard scrap when destroyed, and I find that transmutation fascinating.

The two elements in these paintings are absolute opposites on several levels - light/heavy, light/dark, hard/soft. Solid/ethereal, mobile/static, open/closed. One is made through fire and ore, the other of air and water (I could go on…), and this lends itself to exploring different ways of using paint.

A lot of the tank images came from the web. However, I am reluctant to depict a feature of some of these pictures - the ragged uniformed bundles scattered around the wreckage. No, too much. That would to say something that I don’t want to say, and, frankly, I don’t want to dream about them.

Right then, enough Prologue; let’s explore these particular pieces individually.

Wreck No.1 is the first in this series. It has a beautifully patterned sky - rafts of altocumulus translucidus perlucidus if you must know - which I always associate with calm (soft tinkly piano music for some reason). The tank is a Panzerkampfwagen V, commonly known as a ‘Panther’. All the hatches are open, so hopefully everybody got away.

I simply posed the tank, side-on, against the sky in a featureless landscape, trying to make the sky soft and blended, and the tank rougher and coarser.

The sky is done with quite oily paint, for its softness and ease of blending. Each layer took ages to dry, which became quite tedious.

The Artist and his Wife Promenade in the Park

2010-10-12T11:45:00.002+01:00

oil on canvas 84x62cm

Bruntsfield Links is criss-crossed by tree-lined paths and has several rises and hollows. In bright sunlight the dappled shadows fall on these in a very interesting way. Initially I wanted to compare that pattern of light and shade to a strongly dappled sky, but as I put the painting together, it became more about the light shining down onto the grass.

No figures were planned at first, but the painting began to feel a little empty, and it seemed a shame to make this lovely place and not have anyone enjoy it.

When adding them I was concerned that that the fine marks I needed to describe such a small pair of figures would be anomalous. Now, after knocking them back with a bit of fuzzy glare, I think the figures add rather than distract.

What did drive me up the wall was the large foreground tree. I just couldn’t make the volume convincing, and whatever I did it looked like a two-dimensional cut-out. I’m not entirely sure that it still doesn’t.

I can’t remember why, but I started listening to a lot of Max Richter while working on this. The resonant mood track for this painting is ‘Arbenita (11 Years)’ from ‘Memoryhouse’. (At time of writing it can be heard online at...

http://soundcloud.com/max-richter/11-arbenita-11-years-1-1-1, which is lucky, and also very generous of Mr Richter...)

Madam and I have a strong connection to the Links - it was where we first kissed - so it seems right and proper that it’s us two enjoying the nice sunny afternoon there.

Two Cloud Sketches

2010-09-07T10:23:00.003+01:00

watercolour/gouache 15x10cm

Now that our windows are scaffold-free, quick sky studies are a pleasant distraction from slogging away at the Works in Progress. A lot of them end up overworked and messy, but these two are quite lean and clear.

They are on grey A4 from the local stationers – cut into quarters and used unstretched. The grey allows the white gouache highlights to work much better; on white paper, they can appear slightly yellow.

Viewing images on the computer usually flatters them, but that’s not the case here. The play between transparency and opacity doesn’t really come across – seen ‘live’, they fizz a lot more.

Which is, after all, how it should really be.

Sycamore

2010-08-04T17:22:00.004+01:00

oil on canvas 51x41cm

I’ve been having a look at the different lights and translucencies through leaves and trees, and I wanted to explore what was going on when a tree is strongly lit directly full-on. This is quite a dramatic sycamore growing on Bruntsfield Links, just next to Bruntsfield Crescent.

Compositionally I think it works quite well – it’s fairly symmetrical, with the main subject dead centre and lit from straight behind the viewer. The open spaces between the clumps of leaves allow the silhouetting of the dark branches against the bright cloud (which wasn’t actually there but was pulled in from somewhere else).

Most of this was painted with the biggest brushes I could get away with (I’ve just bought a whole lot), and possibly I should have gone to the smaller sizes sooner. The brushwork is quite active, which I quite like, though maybe some of the leaf textures could have been done more convincingly with smaller, more considered, marks.

I’m not an expert in tree identification, and I say it is a ‘Sycamore’ (Acer Pseudoplatanus) because it matches the little pictures and description of a ‘Sycamore’ in my little Dorling-Kindersley ‘Trees’ book. My book also usefully adds, in a tiny footnote - ‘This species is known as a plane tree in Scotland but has no connection with the true planes (Platanus)’.

I don’t think a lot of people know that…

World Cup Sketches

2010-07-29T11:04:00.002+01:00

pen

You really do have to be fast when sketching the footie. They’re moving about quite a lot (mostly) and it comes down to memorising a flash image - which is good eyeball practice. I can’t remember which matches these figures are from, though the two on the left of the lower group are definitely second-round Ghanaian.

Obviously, there are no sketches of any England players here. Had I been drawing during their three matches I would no doubt have been able to produce fully finished portraits, such was the urgency with which they strolled about.

Serpent and Cherubim

2010-06-30T09:26:00.006+01:00

oil on canvas 78x107cm

This is the Grand Project for which all those drawings of trees, hands, and Anton Walbrook were made. At over a metre high, for me it’s quite a large-scale figure composition, and I’ve been working on it for a while. I finished it earlier this month, and still don’t really know whether I’ve been successful or not.

Some of the drawing isn’t bad, and I’m quite pleased with the composition. I like the way the guard stands in a narrow space that curves towards us from under the trees, and how the shapes of the armour, walls and visor rhyme with it. In this lower section the forms are all man-made. In the upper section they are organic, chaotic, scary, and are intruding into the organised space.

You can, of course, supply your own interpretation of what’s going on, but there is a specific narrative. The clues are there – my nephew got it with only a little prompting, so if you want to solve it without help, stop reading now.

First of all, there’s the title; does it refer to the figures, and where might you find those two together? Is the coldly detached, sinister man in the tree the Serpent or Cherubim, and why do you think that? Why is the armed guard wearing a (rather obvious) angel-wing lock emblem? Who or what is he guarding? What is going on between the figures and what are they thinking about each other – if at all? The answer is coming up next.

The painting is a response to the question ‘What happened next back at the Garden of Eden?’ and is a sequel to January’s ‘Expulsion – Marchmont’ (The armed guard features in both). Satan is still mooching around and his only diversion is the Cherubim at the gate, and he can’t do anything else but try to undermine and subvert him. My guess is that he’d start by giving him a cigarette, and lighting it. The painting shows the moment before the cigarette is lit.

I strongly urge you to look at this while listening to the Rolling Stones single ‘Gimme Shelter’. It has a potent atmosphere of menace and foreboding, and was my mood-setter while getting this done. Play it through and let your gaze rove all over the painting - you’ll probably end up at the cigarette/face/lighter area, but take your time.

The model I used for the angel’s face was Madam, who was very pleased to have her very own halo. She doesn’t smoke, but has a dark, unfulfilled desire for cigarettes, and was disturbingly exhilarated to be immortalised as just about to have one.

Scaffolding

2010-06-28T10:23:00.005+01:00

oil on card 28x20cm

So, just after stating to someone that I never wanted to do another painting featuring chimney-pots – I go and paint this.

As you see, our building is being worked on, and the view out of the front window has strange angular intersections. It’s an ill wind that blows no silver lining, and as not everyone gets the chance to experience a bird-in-a-cage’s-eye view, you may get some benefit from our experience.

Seriously, it is quite an interesting subject. I had to think quite carefully about the focus – was I trying to paint the pretty view through the scaffolding, or the scaffolding with the view as backdrop? As it’s turned out I think I’ve painted quite a balanced work, and the eye can settle on one without being distracted by the other.

The sky blues are quite luminous. I’m putting this down to the careful use of Pthalo and Prussian Blues, touched with Payne’s grey, and Zinc White – in a damar/walnut oil medium. This is quite a translucent mix, so glows quite nicely even though it’s on a grey primer.

Interesting little work, but I do wish the building guys would hurry up and finish…

Sketch - Night Sky

2010-05-11T13:52:00.002+01:00

watercolour and gouache 14.5x10.5cm

My watercolour and gouache gear was set up at the window already, as I’d spent most of the day sat there dashing off yet more very quick, very small cloud sketches (without particularly good results - the damned things simply will not keep still… the clouds that is). I slapped this out while waiting for the news on the telly.

I have to say that I’m not that hot with gouache; it changes SO much as it dries, and the Permanent White – well… it’s more like Here-today, gone-in-five-minutes White. The underneath stuff always seems to bleed through it, screwing up the tones. I’ll persevere, though; it’s a matter of using it, and finding what works and what doesn’t.

Like pure watercolour - which I do have a handle on – the more opaque gouache is particularly useful for instant work, but without having to think too much about preserving the surface white.

Theoretically…

Cumulus Clouds

2010-04-11T17:15:00.002+01:00

watercolour 20x19cm

A very quick sketch of some very puffy cumulus masses in bright sunlight. I liked the contrast between the lower cumulus and the straight bands of background cirrus.

Only one colour used here – Payne’s Grey – which IS actually as blue as it appears on this scan. The paper is heavy-ish A4 copy paper. It’s not absorbent at all, hence the pools and blobs, and had to be flattened later (successful).

You have to work a little bit to read the lower half, but I quite like its overall freshness and spontaneity.

Portrait Re-draw

2010-03-29T21:38:00.007+01:00

oil on cellophane

This is a cellophane correction sheet on two different backgrounds. I made it in a final attempt to get a likeness in a troublesome portrait. The clear cellophane was taped over the (dry) painting and the face safely redrawn and painted on it in oil paint, without disturbing what good stuff there was on the original surface. It’s a bit like using Photoshop layers. The cellophane is a huge improvement on using tracing paper for corrections, and for trying out and adding new elements to an established painting.

Once happy with the new likeness, I traced the face in ink lines on a new cell sheet, removed it from the painting, and pricked out the lines with a needle. I taped this pierced ‘cartoon’ (yes, that’s the technical term) back onto the painting, and lightly worked water-based gouache paint through the holes. When the cartoon was removed there was a map of the new, corrected image over the original, inaccurate work. I repainted that with oil, using the dots as guides, with the painted cell propped up nearby as a model. Any anomalous gouache dots were washed away with water. It’s actually quite simple. You can see what a difference this correction made by having a look at the ‘Works in Progress’ link to the right.

This sheet looked so fresh and alive, even though it has alignment marks all over it and was taped to a piece of cardboard, that I may get it properly framed up as a work in itself.

The really tricky bit was making the corrections. I had to make the image unfamiliar so that I wouldn’t be repeating the same old mistakes. The new image was created by studying both the painting/cell and my reference image in a mirror facing the easel, then turning round and applying the paint the right way round.

Now, that actually wasn’t simple…

Study - Anton Walbrook

2010-03-07T18:33:00.004Z

pencil 20x19cm

I needed a face I could reference for the painting. It had to be a mixture of sophisticated, remote, a bit strange, and also quite powerful. I quite liked the idea of a nineteen thirties/forties smoothie.

Anton Walbrook in Powell and Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ was perfect. He plays Lermontov, the manipulative impresario. Madam has the DVD, so I played it on the computer, took screenshots, and with a bit of tweaking, got the model I wanted.

The drawing took less than two hours, very fast for me, and I think it’s a good one. It actually looks like the subject, is full of information about form, and the marks are quite deft and confident. This is one of those occasional bits of work where you look at it the next day and think ‘Did I do that?’ (in a good way).

I find doing ‘portraits’ extremely difficult; you have to be very good to do it consistently, and it’s something I should practice more. In reproducing specific faces and expressions the variables are so many, and the tolerances so critical, that a likeness can easily slide into a similar person – in this case, Stewart Grainger or David Farrar.

This phenomenon is quite similar to the way that the theme tune for ‘the High Chaparral’ turns resolutely into ‘Telstar’.

I think this needs serious scientific research.

Studies for Painting

2010-02-23T17:41:00.003Z

pencil on A4 – photoshop montage

Over the past month I’ve been working exclusively on the current larger project, but doing quite a few more contributory studies. These are some of them. The individual scans haven’t been tweaked in size or contrast, though some have been cropped from A4 to avoid swathes of blank. Click on the picture to get a bigger image you can stick your nose into.

Through ‘Works in Progress’ (in ‘Related Links’ – to the right) you can see the main painting - two figures - and how it has developed so far. The ‘Slideshow’ button on that site is good for that. You may recognize where the studies have been copied, though not all have been used.

At the moment, painting this particular work feels a bit like writing a Large Novel, and quite a lot of problems still need to be solved. It doesn’t really help that I naturally seem to be a bit of a slow worker.

…as I’m sure my former customers and employers already know.

Tree Studies

2010-01-29T18:29:00.004Z

pencil on A4

I needed some reference material - weird-looking tree parts - for use in a current project. I had taken some photos of likely subjects, but as they never print out how you’d want, I thought I’d draw them from the computer screen.

Though laborious, there are two big advantages to working this way.

Firstly, it is easier to edit the information from the source. A photo of a tree contains so much information you’re never going to use – background, tiny branches etc, which just get in the way. Better to decide what you’re going to use or lose at this stage than later.

Secondly, you are better acquainted with the subject’s form – its mass and shape - when it comes to painting it on the canvas proper, having already examined and described it once before.

Contrast these drawings with the watercolour ‘Street Sketches’ from last month. Those look effective, but you would be hard put to reconstruct the forms from the information given. These drawings above are utilitarian; I have to put in all the information I think I’m going to need for reproduction in a larger painting.

Not that you can’t be creative. The upper drawing is a composite of two different trees (one wasn’t effective enough for purpose) and, to be honest, it would have taken longer to photoshop the two images together and not been as good.

Ah, yes - and Thirdly, it’s very good drawing practice.

Expulsion - Marchmont

2010-01-17T16:40:00.004Z

oil on canvas 84x69cm

Finally, at long last, it’s done. I’ve been working on this on and off since May 2009, and drip-feeding it into ‘Works in Progress’. At 84x69cm it felt ambitious but it was more than about time I stopped restricting myself to tiny pieces.

The location is recognisably Marchmont, Edinburgh, the chapel transposed from a block away. I think the painting works quite well as a decorative urban landscape, but there is also a strong underlying narrative.

At first glance it’s a slightly fantastical street scene of some trees behind a wall, and three figures. When you have figures in a painting, you can often construct a narrative, maybe even the one that you’re meant to. You just need to ask a few questions, like; where have the couple come from and where are they going? Why is there an armed guard on the gate? The couple could be Adam and Eve, so are there snake or god references anywhere? If we’re correct, they’ve just been thrown out of a pretty free and unrestricted place (by all accounts) into an uncomfortable world of hard edges and rules. Does that fit? If so, what are the characters’ states of mind?

Well, most of the clues are there somewhere: the gated wall, the snake-branched apple tree, a chapel. As the title indicates, this painting shows the expulsion from Eden, but set here and now. It’s a very traditional subject, usually as a good excuse to show nudey bodies, but it’s also one where you can explore big human emotions as well.

I was listening to all sorts of stuff while working on this, but especially ‘The Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus’. The track ‘Soldier’ resonated very strongly once the figures were in place.

There’s a lot of chlorophyll represented in this painting, and I’ve always been a bit nervous about greens. Chrome and Viridian are docile but expensive. Terre Verte is lovely but weak. That really only leaves (gulp) - Phthalocyanine. I’ve got its blue cousin house-trained, but those pthalo greens – they’re still out there… feral.

Street Sketches

2009-12-30T10:31:00.004Z

montage - figures between 5-16cm high

We live in a flat above an office, about fifteen feet up, and an angled window bay looks up the street. I often stand or sit there and draw people as they walk past. A lot of the sketches simply don’t work out, but these are some of the more successful ones. (Best viewed if you click the picture above – you’ll get a much, much bigger version).

I use whatever medium comes to hand. It just so happens that I have the watercolour gear up at the window just now and am trying to improve my technique with oriental brushes. These are great for drawing because you can go from a very fine mark to a great splodge in one stroke. The mass of hair holds a huge amount of paint, and you don’t have to keep replenishing the brush every few seconds.

The observable period of the passers-by is usually about 60 - 45 seconds, during which they will have changed aspect. Then you have a little bit of ‘memory time’ before forgetting things and inventing. I have the full palette of watercolour available, but it’s fastest to paint in monochrome - normally Payne’s Grey or Sepia - and if need be, write colour notes afterwards. The paper is ordinary A4 computer paper, and wrinkles very easily when wet, but it’s very cheap and convenient for these exercises. The paint quality, though, IS important, as lesser paints fade and pale disappointingly when dry, and the denser artist’s stuff always goes so much further.

I don’t know who any of these folk are, except one. I’m glad to say that Madam recognized herself as the figure in the bottom right corner.

(Coat, trousers, shoes – black. Scarf – red)

Pirate Xmas

2009-12-29T11:48:00.004Z

photoshop

Slight departure from the tangible here.

For the last decade or so, Madam and I have had themed Christmasses (Roman, Horror, Viking, Bollywood amongst others) and it’s my job to produce an e-post for friends and family announcing the theme. So, here’s this year’s Work of Photoshop for the Pirate Xmas we’ve just enjoyed; Madam, myself, and Viv the cat placed in N.C. Wyeth’s cover illustration for Treasure Island.

As far as the painting has been concerned recently, I’ve been catching up on the Big Wood painting in progress, preparing a couple of larger canvasses and a figure composition to do on one of them, and drawing people out the front window (I’ll post some of these soon - they’re quite interesting), till Xmas took over. Back to the grindstone of pigment and binder in the New Year, and wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous One.

Aaaarr

Beech Leaves

2009-11-17T13:47:00.002Z

oil on canvas 51x41cm

Quite a tough subject, and it took a few days longer than anticipated.

The different shapes and colours of this mass of leaves was a very interesting texture. I wasn’t sure if a pile of leaves on its own would have a strong enough structure, so I put them in a box. And then added the pair of manikins. After a few days, I realised that the leaves and box would have been fine without the figures, but by then it was too late to remove them. I suppose a narrative could be constructed around them, but they are an unnecessary element.

I used focus to describe the complex mass of leaves, and there is a big difference between the paint handling of the front leaves and those towards the rear. At the front they are quite sharply drawn, with thicker paint, and at the back the paint gets thinner and more blurred. If I’ve done it right, you should be able to cover one eye and experience depth and solidity.

It’s the first concentrated piece of work since August and I’m really happy to have done it, even though it was quite a hard slog. But then again, that’s what it’s all about.

Sketch of Three Trees

2009-10-20T10:06:00.003+01:00

17x21cm pencil

It’s not a great concentrated study, but the most important thing about this little sketch is the fact that I’ve done it. It’s the first proper work I’ve done since developing a deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism while visiting Madam’s family in USA at the end of August.

This is maybe not the place for the story of the diagnoses and trip back, let’s just say that I’m happy to be home, it’s safe now, and I’ll be taking a daily dose of warfarin for the next few months. When it was painful I had no concentration (I couldn’t get more than a four-letter answer on Countdown), and it is still too uncomfortable to work at an easel, even sitting down. I am meant to walk a mile or so every day, and have been looking about at the autumn changes, though nothing tangible has come from it.

Until last Friday that is, when I saw these trees up the road in Merchiston Park. I photographed them, then got out my trusty sketchbook and actually STOOD for twenty-five minutes to do a quick drawing, waggling my DVT leg and taking most of my weight on my good one. Really pleased that I’d actually done something, however raw.

I think the three separate trees make an interesting group, and I like the flat spiral movement rising around the trunks from the lower left to the top right. The front tree’s cut-off branch opens an abrupt space, and makes an incomplete rhyme with the visible branches of the other two trees, some of which are obscured and cut off by other forms. I like how the trees’ movement is complimented by the road and pavement. This rising and falling curve from left to right, towards the viewer, is reinforced in rectangles by the walls and hedges.

The drawing works reasonably well and I’m quite pleased with the directional pencil strokes differentiating each tree’s foliage. Although the sketch is simple, and very selective, the image has a lot of potential. To make a painting from it I would have to solve some background problems and decide what to do with the crucial right area. But that’s for a little later.

In closing, I would like to point out that ‘Countdown’ is a well-known mid-afternoon TV show broadcast on C4, in which a pair of very, very clever contestants form words from the nine random consonants and vowels picked by one of them.

Sycamore Leaf

2009-08-25T13:48:00.003+01:00

oil on card 17x20cm

Putting the old wipes from the last painting out into the bins, I looked down and saw this early dropper on the damp pavement. I really liked its grey-greens and pinks.

I tried out a walnut oil painting medium on this one. Walnut oil is far more mobile than linseed and is very responsive under the brush. Its downside is that it takes a little longer to dry, but this can be improved by mixing it with damar varnish. This medium will dry enough overnight to take a second layer, but retains its working qualities longer than a linseed medium, which gets very tacky surprisingly quickly. Altogether, this small painting took about eight hours – an afternoon to lay in the heavier stuff, and part of the following day to tighten up and modify with thinner layers.

The more I looked at the leaf, and my image of it, the more it appeared to have female aspects, both physically and on another level. I quite like the idea of the leaf having a rush of sensuality as it decomposes and breaks down into fertile elements for the next cycle, and of the ‘fig leaf’ suggesting what it’s meant to hide.

Block Plane

2009-08-20T10:04:00.003+01:00

oil on canvas 51x41cm

This is the same block plane as in last month’s ‘Three Watercolours’, but a lot bigger and using oil paint. Finished last Thursday.

The painted image is about three times the actual size of the subject and the set-up presented a few problems. The plane and the canvas were both just over 2ft away - I had to make tape footprints on the floor and stand in them so as to keep my point of view constant. Everything was so close that I was able to dispense with my glasses (multi-focal plus a slight astigmatism) and work without the distortions that they sometimes produce. I quite enjoyed that for a change, but it did mean that my nose was almost on the canvas, and some of my initial drawing went a bit astray. I spent a day and a half rectifying that, which was annoying.

The palette is very limited – all the greys of the plane were made with burnt and raw umbers with ultramarine, and I used a tiny bit of yellow ochre and burnt sienna in the wedge. I used flake white in most of the initial work, and the thicker paint, and slightly boosted it with titanium white in the odd highlight. For the soft translucent washes of the paper towel I used the more transparent zinc white. As an experiment, I painted the acrylic priming with a good quality French Grey satin finish alkyd, which produced a very nice tone and texture to paint on, and should be fine for several or more decades.

As usual I was listening to old comedy on BBC Radio7 while painting, but I had recently come across Michael Nyman’s ‘Fish Beach’ and started each session with it. During the period of painting this, Madam and I were watching the final couple of series of ‘Six Feet Under’ every evening, which was quite intense. Very melancholy stuff.

Overall I’m quite pleased with this one; the size is just about right, the strokes are neither over-fussy nor slapdash, and, I managed to write about it without once alluding to its progress as being Plane Sailing.

Three Watercolours

2009-07-11T14:18:00.010+01:00

watercolours 28x20cm

These slightly larger pieces were done over the last three days - the plant first, then the plane, and yesterday the sofa.

In the first one I was investigating the difference between the direct and translucent lights. Not bad, but the composition is a little indecisive on the right. The wee plane is a lovely object. It’s unique. The blade-securing mechanism broke very early on, and I made the wedge replacing it myself. I’ve had it for over thirty years and know it very well. The contrast of surfaces might suit an oil study some time. The red sofa is an ambitious attempt at a more complicated watercolour. I just managed to get it done before Madam returned from work; it’s where she usually sits for Tea and Telly. Some of the painting is a bit inconsistent - the table is dull and unconvincing - but I actually surprised myself with the painting of the cushions.

I think it was Gene Kelly who said that if it looks as though you’re working hard, you’re not working hard enough. I wish these were a little more clear and effortless (looking).

Cloud Study

2009-07-10T11:35:00.008+01:00

watercolour 20x12.5cm

Back to watercolour studies as a break from the oily paint. This is the sky developing over about fifteen – twenty minutes from our front window. Done last week.

I finally went out and bought a couple of pads of proper watercolour paper. It’s not particularly heavy at 90lbs, but at least it won’t go brown. This is done on a pad made into a block. What you do is compress the pad slightly and (with a water-resistant glue!) stick strips of paper around the edges, leaving one corner free, to make a sort of parcel. As the top sheet is always attached to the rest of the pad, the water crinkling is considerably lessened. Once your sketch is dry, slip a blade into the non-glued corner and slice it from the block. It’s worth doing, as ready-made blocks are twice the price of pads.

Payne’s grey is a gift for northern skies, with a little touch of Burnt umber for the more opaque lower cumulus.

Light and Shades

2009-06-26T11:16:00.005+01:00

oil on canvas 51x41cm

At last, a finished painting! I started composing this in April, and have been slogging at it, on and off, since the first week in May. The view is looking from York Place towards the Playhouse Theatre at the top of Leith Walk.

What I’m trying to deliver here are two themes in one painting. At first sight, the subject is a late afternoon cityscape in mid-winter. It’s about rich horizontal light and deep shadows, and only subsequently does the eye explore the figures in the lower half. While it works as a whole, we can still choose which facet to consider - the sunlit Upper storeys or the cold, miserable Underworld.

Figure composition was my big thing years ago, and this, a crowd of heads and shoulders, was quite a gentle re-entry into the genre. (At some point I’ll post up some of these older ones.) Technically, this painting is quite interesting. The crowd and gloomy lower area were first painted as in full daylight, and only when they were ‘finished’ was the bluish shadow overlaid. To separate the two aspects of the painting even more, the warm sunny areas were treated with a yellowish glaze of raw sienna. Great fun, and again, more like how I used to paint.

Having said that, though, I’m mildly annoyed that it’s on the smallish side. As soon as I had I finished ‘The Cutting’, I had realised (with some horror) that it should have been at least twice the size. I was eager to start work on this one, but my other current project (see Works in Progress) demanded the larger of the two suitable canvasses to hand. It does work at this size, but would have been better, bigger.

For those concerned with minutiae and have very good screen resolution, the fictitious show depicted as playing at the Playhouse is ‘ТОЛПА’ (tolpa), which adds a little to the whole as it is the Russian word for ‘a crowd, throng’.

As if you didn’t know that already.

Rapid Sketches

2009-05-19T20:15:00.004+01:00

This montage is a small selection from my pile of quick sketch sheets done sitting in front of the TV. The object is to improve rapid drawing.

I usually sit down with a pile of cut sheets of lining paper or a clipboard with a plain loose-leaf pad and rip through them using pencil, pen, or a single colour of watercolour/ink. It’s not Great Art, but amongst the miserable scribbles there can be some useful sketches, and it certainly expands your vocabulary (I think there’s an Ice Road Trucker or two in there somewhere).

Strictly speaking, these are not finished work, but seeing as how I’m working through a bit of a drought (horrible feeling), I haven’t finished anything recently.

Well, if it’s nothing else, it’s a fair attempt to justify sitting on my fat sofa watching telly.

Dried Leaves

2009-04-26T15:07:00.004+01:00

oil on card 31x22cm

Nature moves a lot faster than I paint. I had intended this to be a quick one-day painting, but got caught up in the complex dead leaves. I spent a whole second day on them, and by the time I got around to detailed painting of the green living leaves, they were completely different! A new leaf had sprung up and the others had moved round. I waited about a week till the growth cycle put them in similar positions, but missed it, and now all the foliage has shifted. Doh.

It would have been quite interesting to explore the contrast between the living and the dead matter further, but there’s enough about the green leaves and how everything sits in space to let it go now. So, it not being worth it, I think I’ll just leave it. Having said that, I’m quite pleased with how I’ve done the mass of hard, dry bits, and that’s got to be a Good Thing.

Next time, the green stuff gets done first.

The Cutting

2009-04-24T09:40:00.005+01:00

oil on canvas 41x51cm

This is a view I saw from the bridge at Braid Avenue. The isolated lookout was looking east along the track while the rest of his maintenance gang was working the rails to the west. The whole scene seemed about exposure to danger.

I have tried to increase the unsettled feeling by narrowing the cutting, emphasising the unstable ‘V’ at the centre of the composition, and making the trees loom over the empty track. Most of the shadows are deepened using transparent glazes.

This is quite a potent picture in which to explore levels of meaning. On the face of it, it’s just a bloke beside a railway line with some trees. There may or may not be a train due. Now, are the trees as stable as they should be? Could he be more in danger from them than the oncoming (or not) train? Let's go deeper, are the trees, the whole landscape, animate? Do they know something he doesn’t? Shouldn’t he leave? If we look closer, we could see one of the trees as looking a bit human. If we are familiar with the story of Daphne, we could read this little shriek of a tree as the nymph metamorphosed. But here she is abandoned and alone, and Arcadia has become cold and harsh. This is not how Paradise should be. What has our hero in the hard hat stumbled upon? Could this be a metaphor for our own times? For the Human Condition is General? You can take it as far as you can support it.

It not all Doom and Gloom though. I learnt a lot about paint handling, though the drawing could probably be bit better, and working within a very narrow tonal range. As it happens, over the time I was doing this I became reacquainted with Frank Zappa’s ‘One Size Fits All’, and couldn’t paint for a while for giggling after hearing Evelyn, the modified dog, ‘as she viewed the quivering fringe of a special doily’.

(‘Arf’, she said.)

Though you really had to be there.

Watercolour Sketches

2009-04-03T12:34:00.005+01:00

watercolour

This is a compilation of watercolour sketches done over the last couple of days. 1 and 2 on Wednesday, 3, 4, and 5 on Thursday (much sunnier Spring weather).

Number 1 was the first serious watercolour I’d done for years, and its mediocrity and cramped style are rather disappointing. It fails to convey either accurate information about the forms, or the sense of light and space which watercolour does best. It’s also on really rubbish paper. I did the fir tree immediately after the first effort, deciding to look harder, draw from the shoulder, and let the water do more of the work. The light in 3 was gagging for watercolour, I really didn’t have to work hard to see the limited palette and simplified forms. In 4 and 5 I was looking to use it for recording skies. 4 is in my sketchbook, hence the crinkles, and the rest are on cheap off-white lining paper. Quite a good exercise, and I’ll definitely be doing more, though I really should fork out for some proper paper.

Here I have to admit, again, to a grudging use of pthalo blue. I had to go to the shops for a pie late morning, and got a student grade tube of Intense Blue. Tried it out in 4, and, shock, realised it doesn’t granulate (like the blue in 3). It’s lovely to work with, as long as you keep it un-Intense and on a leash.

I think back with (slight and momentary) guilt to the 1970’s, and all those drawings I did of people’s houses with grainy, mottled ultramarine skies.

Cloud sketch

2009-03-28T17:40:00.007Z

oil on paper 21x12.5cm

I sat down by the kitchen window on Monday to sketch cloud forms as they flitted past. It’s impossible to paint a particular cloud, as they change so quickly and my memory isn’t photographic. This is just one exercise to get more acquainted with the vocabulary of clouds, so what you have here are shapes and tones painted over about an hour.

As it happens these are ragged stratocumulus late on a bright windy afternoon.

The paper has several coats of acrylic primer, with a little blue acrylic paint added. I’ve mixed up a whole batch of this, and have a few blank skies prepared already for when the sky gets extra interesting again. Although there’s no tone change in the blue background I think it’s a good system for sketching, though the initial wipe of turpentine/oil mix, for fluidity, means that the oil paint takes ages to dry. I’ve used titanium white, not my usual flake/lead white which would dry much quicker, even with the extra oil. For sheer whitening power it’s really the only choice for this type of work, especially on a coloured background. The two other colours used are Payne’s grey and ultramarine.

The blue tinting in the primer is pthalocyanine. Even in the weakened student product it is a ruinously powerful pigment, and can infect a whole palette if not carefully contained. In this case, it is safely quarantined in a base layer, in a different medium from my active paint, so hopefully nothing horrific is going to break out. In fact I think it does the job here quite well.

Two Life Drawings

2009-03-27T11:59:00.009Z

conte crayon

Two drawings from Tuesday. I had been getting a little frustrated with my linear style, and made a conscious decision to be loosen up a bit and use the conte crayon more tonally. This involves a bolder, less hesitant, smudge and erase technique, which seems to have made a difference.

In the leaning pose (twenty minutes) there’s light bouncing around all over the place. The dark areas behind the figure really free up the use of light and dark to describe how the light falls on the figure.

The upright pose (one hour) is maybe less immediate and more controlled. I probably should have made more of the ‘dark surround trick’, but then that may have scuppered the impact of the hair. Perhaps this should be cropped to just the head and shoulders. The drawing that is, not her hair.

An interesting thing about Conte crayon is that it was invented because the Napoleonic wars prevented imports of graphite from Britain. The main source of drawing quality graphite was a deposit in Cumbria, discovered in about 1500, and developed during Industrial Revolution. This explains why a lot of pencils – Derwent, Cumberland, Lakeland - have names associated with the Lake District, which had puzzled me for a time. The baked Conte crayon process was invented by a Monsieur Conte, in Paris. Quelle Surprise!

Blue Flash

2009-03-12T10:28:00.003Z

oil on card 23x17cm

Painted over last Thursday and Friday, and the grey background consolidated on Monday morning.

One of my plimsolls, a Dunlop Blue Flash, has been worn so long that it has come apart at the outside edge. This has revealed a pink plastic construction strip, which looks a bit like the gums in a cat or dog’s mouth. I like the difference between the clean fresh gum, the dense blue of the inside, and the dry, worn textures of the rest of the shoe.

This has turned out well, but on the first day, I got too zoned in on the laces, and when Madam saw it she thought it looked like a kid’s shoe. Solved it the next morning when I woke up and realised that I’d had a shift in scale between the eyelets and the rest of it, a bad thing. Children’s shoes use standard eyelets, and appear much larger, so I had to overpaint my (devastatingly-good-but-no-one–will-ever-know) rendering of giant eyelets. Serves me right for not concentrating.

I would like to point out that I have much better shoes to wear than this.

George Square

2009-03-11T14:26:00.003Z

oil 25x31cm

Finished yesterday, this is a view of the back of George Square from the Swedish Café on Middle Meadow Walk.

Reasonably happy with this, though I had a problem with some of the upper clouds. Solved it by A) Listening to some Philip Glass solo piano, and B) Abandoning the damar/oil medium, which got too sticky too quick, and resorting to a basic turps/oil mix for the blended area. It’s really tedious having to re-learn these things again.

So much for the technology, here’s the interesting stuff about the composition. The painting is about the stack extending from the hard, heavy mass of the buildings into empty space. So, I’ve made the painting very stable and bottom heavy. The canvas is upright to broadly echo the vertical stack, which stands alone against a plain untextured background.

I liked the idea of the window groups of three, two, and one. The single has the most complex shape, and is the most interesting in that it’s slightly open and right next to the stack. They are tweaked to sit on different levels so that, reading from the left, they form a shallow arc dipping then curling up to the chimney. This ‘curve’ is set against the rectangular nature of the building shapes and their textures. The movement is reinforced by the shapes of the trees and the sloping, then rising, forms of the two cumulus clouds behind. The whole thing was composed with photoshop, which lets me test compositional ideas from photographs very quickly.

I really enjoyed painting this, especially the stack. Which makes sense, seeing as how that was what grabbed my attention away from the hot chocolate and pastry in the first place.

Two Life Drawings

2009-03-04T09:57:00.007Z

conte crayon

Tuesday morning is Life Drawing morning, and I’m pleased enough with a couple of yesterday’s efforts to put them up.

Our model yesterday was great to draw, and gave us really interesting poses. Even better, she was able to keep them, especially the difficult ones.

The kneeling pose was on for half an hour, and it’s about mass and weight (as I suppose most figure drawing should be). I quite like the difference between working the load-bearing parts and slung belly, and the economical lines of her resting feet.

The standing figure was a warm-up pose. The model struck up this dancer’s position, with her arms out, and kept them like that for the full ten minutes. It was a quick drawing and I kept the chalk moving quite quickly and lightly, not erasing, but correcting with a second or third line. This, with the delicacy of the pose, has produced a very ethereal, animate drawing.

I am so glad that I was told about these sessions (WASPS at Patriothall 9.30am-12.00, £5). They start off with quick five or ten minute warm-up poses, followed by maybe a couple of longer ones. After a break for a cuppa and biscuits, there’s either two half-hour or one hour-long pose. It’s a community, not an educational, project, run by members, and the space is let from WASPS.

The awful thing about not drawing seriously for 15-20 (going on 30) years is that you just… go… off. It’s not so much the mechanical manipulation of the medium that dulls, it’s the mental skill of looking and examining. Prior to starting at WASPS last autumn, the last time I had drawn a model in a studio was in 1977, and I was appalled to find that I really didn’t know where or how to start. My first new drawings really weren’t very good, and were more about bluff and aesthetic effect than gathering and conveying information. Hopefully, the more I exercise my ‘Looking Muscle’ the more effective I’ll be, and once I’ve achieved fitness I must never, ever let that drop again.

…but it is very, very difficult.

Geranium

2009-03-03T13:50:00.004Z

oil on card 15x20cm

Quick direct painting, done in a day last week, and now dry enough to scan. I felt I had to give it another layer of the olive, or French, grey, as the first layer was way too thin. The texture was similar to that of the blue pot - far too busy and distracting - and the geranium was completely lost.

Incidentally, this is in our front room, where the walls are French grey (BS4800 code 10 B 21, available from all good decorating outlets). It’s a dull colour in itself but it boosts anything you put against it.

I think the strokes and marks are effective, but the composition itself is maybe a bit flawed; there’s too much going on the left, leaving an absence up in the top right corner. It would have been better to turn the plant so that it faced right, heading into the top corner. But then I didn’t think of that at the time.

What I do like about it is the difference between the light, green leaves and the crumbly dry dead ones, and really enjoyed painting that contrast.

Maranta

2009-02-23T17:52:00.003Z

pencil, about 18cm wide

Quick drawing of a plant done in the last hour after a painting day.

The healthy open leaves have come out not badly, but the light ran out before I had pinned down the dried out-shrivelled ones.

Quite a good exercise in tone and organic forms.

Portrait exercise - An Ex-Soldier

2009-02-20T10:11:00.004Z

oil on card 15x20cm

This is a quick one-day piece done last week from a photo in an Observer magazine. Now dry enough to scan.

It’s a bit of a breakthrough piece for me. I had decided to spend a far greater proportion of time on looking and checking before applying any paint, and as a result, my drawing here was much more accurate and informative.

It seems as though my ‘looking muscle’ is showing signs of its former fitness. Still a lot of hard work to do, but at least this little sketch was a bit of a reward on the way.

The subject is Duane Telfer, who served in the British Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he suffered a nervous breakdown after his friend and colleague was mortally wounded and died in front of him.

Window and Floccus

2009-02-19T14:34:00.004Z

oil on canvas 25 x 31cm SOLD

Some inner debate as to whether this is finished or not. The earthbound bits are blocked in quite heavily, while the airy elements are progressively applied in thin blended layers. Finally decided not to take the buildings any further.

This painting was always going to be about the clouds, with the odd angles of the window and roofs purely providing a heavy base.

Tank and Teapot

2009-02-01T13:22:00.003Z

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This painting was finished in December, so this is me catching up a bit.

I was getting a bit fed up with a palette of blues and buffs and wanted to get to grips with a good blaze of red. In this particular case a strong light red with a touch of alizarin crimson layered on with loads of medium. Very glossy, but very rich, and quite enjoyed doing it, though had a bit of trouble telling how the horizontal creases around the tank work.

The tank itself is a plastic model of a Panther tank I made years ago, with the camouflage lushed up a bit. The teapot is part of a full tea-set. It has an almond section, not round, reminiscent of the 15th century breastplates designed to deflect blows, in the same way that the sloping armour of this tank was designed to deflect anti-tank rounds. Incidentally, for those who care, the colour of the teapot is just about the same as ‘Panzer Grey’, the factory finish of German tanks up to about 1942. Which is a coincidence.

There is, of course, an overall similarity in the two shapes, with smaller echoes within them. Their functions, whether one reads the tank as a small model, or as a huge, noisy, dangerous machine, are entirely different.

Roofs - Gilmore Place

2009-01-30T19:29:00.017Z

oil on primed paper

oil on card

Two quick oil sketches out the window on Tuesday afternoon, tarted up and tidied a bit the next morning.

The darker one highlights the trouble I'm having with verticals just now, but I'm quite happy with the tonalities. Personally I blame my multi super-duper focals; even though they're quite weak they still distort a bit. Either that or I simply have to pay more attention to drawing.

These are actually small enough to scan. That saves such a lot of mucking about with the camera and making presentations from photos.

Observatory Road

2009-01-26T16:49:00.006Z

oil on canvas 56x36cm

Finished this morning.

Slightly recomposed view just about to turn down into Blackford Avenue.

Took a while to do - got my spaces slightly confused - and the tree edges COULD be little looser, still, there we go.

TREE - Grange Road

2009-01-25T11:18:00.000Z

oil on hardboard 23x20cm

First post, and hoping to keep this up.

So, this is a tree that struck me during summer.

I'll fill in the recent paintings AND some of the older ones as we go along, possibly accompanied by nice photos of clouds.