Moment

oil on canvas 51x51cm

Here’s another woodland scene, this time featuring a man and a black dog. It’s taken long enough, and perhaps slightly misses the painting I had in my head, but there’s really nothing more I can do with it.

It’s meant to be about that moment of uncertainty when you hear something unseen and don’t know what it is. In that context, the viewer is aligned with the figures – we are watching them reacting to something in the murky area at the centre.

The setting is an adaption from a google streetview location in Hampshire. The open area was originally wider, and I moved the right trees inwards to make it a bit more claustrophobic – which caused a few problems where the two sides of foliage overlapped in the upper space. I also removed some of the more intrusive branches from the left to unclutter that central zone. Structurally, it’s very similar to Crow (July 2013); there is an open central area, a nearer block of lighter trees on the left and a darker row on the right leading back to a sunlit clump of trees. There’s even a sightline going back on the left, and in both paintings the light shines in through the trees on the right. I only noticed the similarity when I was about a third the way in, and honestly don’t know whether this is a Good or a Bad Thing.

During the initial stages of composition there were just two men; one on the right - as now - and another by the trees on the left. This began to look a bit shifty, so I removed one man and gave the other one a dog. This change, where the animal is suddenly very alert while the human peers into the gloom, introduces more acute senses, and is a bit more potent.

The dog is a pointer* - found on the interweb and originally white – and was exactly the pose I wanted. The man was taken from a BBC TV News report. He’s from Sloviansk, Eastern Ukraine, and was part of a crowd of men watching something going on from afar – again, exactly the pose I wanted

Technically, the initial progress was quite fast. I omitted the charcoal drawing step and went straight to drawing the elements into the grid with oil paint – quite finely in the case of the dog and man, and the left tree trunks. It was fast and efficient, and I think I’ll carry on doing this regularly. Another development is that I find myself using linseed Stand oil more. If you don’t know it, it’s a stiffly viscous substance – like thick honey – and takes an era to dry. To make it more manageable I dilute a batch of it 50/50 with turpentine. This makes it easy to use as a measured ingredient in damar resin and walnut oil mixtures (not forgetting to add the required drops of cobalt driers!). Recently though, I’ve been using it without damar - further thinned down and with different amounts of driers added (still experimenting). I’ve found that as the turpentine evaporates, the oil content tends to stick to itself, and can be controlled quite finely. It can produce a softness I find very pleasant to work with, and, once cured, is very tough. Which is always nice to know.

Now, thinking aloud, I’m getting concerned at how long these pieces are taking to complete, and how the regularity of my monthly blog posts has collapsed recently. This may be subjective, but it seems to me as if I’m only painting long novels, and I feel the need to be producing short stories and essays as well. I’m going to start breaking up my work habit with smaller, faster pieces, on easy-to-prepare card or panel - and just get some churn going.

Subjects? Well, who knows, but seeing as how the sky is always there and always changing and clouds are constantly fascinating and just an up-look away, and I have thousands of photos of them idly cluttering up my computer… 

* To the disdain of my Spanielist friends

August Window Work

watercolour

After a period of relative inactivity on the rapid drawing front, I’ve had a bit of a burst during August, with quite a high success rate as well.

I’d got into the (bad) habit of not looking properly, so I made sure that I had my initial good look for an extra 3-5 seconds before making the first marks.

I’ve been using a Pentel Aquash waterbrush – it’s a watercolour sketching brush which has a reservoir of water in the handle. If you need a bit of water, you just squeeze and there’s a flow through the hair. It saves a bit of time, which is very valuable in these exercises. Some people fill them with a ready-mixed wash - a good idea which I haven’t tried yet. The hair is an artificial fibre, but it feels OK and the point is pleasantly flexible and responsive.

I’ve selected five sketches, but I could have included at least three more. They’re the usual size, between 10-5cm high, and in my regular Payne’s Grey. There’s a bit more dynamism in these ones – I’m quite chuffed with the twisting man. It’s the whole figure and I really didn’t have long, and I think I’ve got ‘im. The mother and baby is a partial figure, and the marks are a little bit style-over-substance, but I quite like it. I think the best one is the central man – he was just a guy going up the road, but he’s got a touch of the classical about him, and he did actually have that poise and balance. 

Nice to know that when I do get down and concentrate I’ve still got it.

Well, some of the time…

Runner

oil on canvas 61x51cm

Just for a change, here’s a painting that doesn’t rely on greens. It’s adapted from a found google view from way up in Northern Norway, where the landscape seems entirely composed of swathes of dwarf birch.

It’s finished now - with quite a nice surface - but, its production has been a good example of why working an ill-thought-through idea, and grinding it out without really knowing where it’s going, is not always Good Practice. The initial thinking was all about the colour and the raking light, and in the (too brief) compositional stage I added a running figure, and it all seemed like A Good Idea At The Time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t concentrate enough on my drawing at the very start (February!), which meant that I was constantly playing catch-up and correcting the forms from the word go – except for the distant trees, which were actually painted quite efficiently. After a while, I realised that the elements of my original source weren’t adding up very well. I had wanted a very positive, fresh atmosphere, but then I became aware that half of my foreground birches were dead, leafless, and skeletal – and had to be changed pronto. Unfortunately I replaced them badly from various sources, and finally ended up composing clumps of trees from some (summery green) birch trees in the park, and the pair across the road that I see every single day.

I had realised fairly early that the scale of the figure – the Runner - was problematic; because the trees were dwarf birches (and not drawn well enough to indicate that), the figure was reading as a giant, so there had to be yet more coming and going on that. His back was meant to be lit by the low sunlight, but the resulting shape was a very awkward diagonal, so I hid him in deep shadow and blurred him to a mere suggestion.

Despite all my hand-wringing and grief, there are actually some very nice bits of painting here. The ground is done quite well, especially the shadowed dip on the right that leads back to the little valley in the mid distance. I’m quite chuffed with the clear blue sky too – quite a mobile walnut/stand oil mix, applied and blended with a cloth-covered dabber. I wasn’t planning to have any clouds (I know… heresy) but the minor additions left and right do imply a further distance over the last line of trees. So that was good.

Summing this piece up positively, it has been very pleasant to work in yellows and reds again. I have another idea along the same lines primed and ready to go - much, much, much more considered this time – and working through this piece has probably been very valuable in organising and working that up.

And at last - having eased this out of my system - I can move forward, and concentrate on the more interesting stuff…

Shower

oil on canvas 61x51cm

Not much to say about this except that I thought it started off quite easily, and then suddenly it became quite fraught, and then ended up solving itself. Which sometimes happens.

The landscape is about 50km north of Moscow – there’s quite a lot of western Russia now covered by google Streetview. It’s not absolutely flat, but is endlessly undulating very slightly - and the weather is visible from a long, long way away. I like the plainness combined with the huge clouds. The bushes and grass in the foreground offered a variety of texture on which to deploy some different paintwork. The sky is mainly mottled and blended (with my new badger mottler) while the foreground, containing a figure, is mostly as it left the brush.

The large open area was originally pale dry grass, with small patches of green, and didn’t seem compatible with the showers passing over, so I just transposed it to a much lusher green - Prussian blue with Chrome yellow if you must know. It came across as very two dimensional at first, so I blurred the slight light/shade variations progressively towards the far trees to help the eye with the distance, which helped.

It’s all about the clouds though. If you’ve been following the Works in Progress page (perhaps wondering what I’ve been doing for the last two months?) you’ll have seen how they’ve developed. I was planning to have this piece finished by the end of June, but it seemed to me that while the sky was, well, passable, it lacked the impact necessary to distract the eye from the figure, which is the whole point. As recently as two weeks ago, I pulled the left bank of cumulus forward slightly, and it happened to make a rhyme with the shape of the bushes. It looks as though it had been structured from the beginning, but was actually a last ditch effort to make the cloud-banks look interesting. It’s a very Baroque device, but it still works. Now, the sky has the required energy, and a jolly good thing too.

There is a bit of music for this. The painting started off powered by Ralph Vaughan Williams, but really only crystallised after listening to ‘Infra’ again. Having this sort of music on while working still seems to open me up to new ideas when going through painting problems (if that makes any sense at all). Which can be both pleasant and useful.

So, as you may have gathered, I’ve gone a little bit round the houses on this one. This will always happen in painting, - and perhaps I hadn’t quite shaken off my post-exhibition inhibition – but I’m glad that I took the trouble to re-tune the sky. I’m quite pleased with how it’s ended up, but with one small caveat -

It should have been bigger…

Window Work

watercolour

Having crashed through April and May without producing any finished work (though plenty of Works In Progress*), this month’s image is that reliable stand-by, Window Work. I quite like the one of the girl walking the dog.

The body of the post, though, is me reflecting on my recent – my first - solo exhibition. Now, at the time of writing, it’s almost two months since the show at the Union Gallery closed, and I’m becoming normal again, thank heavens, and far enough away to see just how abnormal that whole experience was. 

The most obvious thing that I can see now is just how tense I had become. There were enough paintings ready that I didn’t have to worry, and I was able to function perfectly well with the gallery – doing my bit with the images, information, and my end of the publicity. However, away from those tasks, there was an imperceptibly slow but steady increase in tension that probably really got going in December, and just got tighter and tighter approaching the opening. Latterly – in February – I found that my shoulders snarled up and became rock solid at the smallest thing, and I was uncharacteristically irritated and aggressive. On at least two occasions I used the most unforgiveable language at people for not shutting café doors. Etc. It was extraordinarily unpleasant behaviour. That tension dropped off rapidly during the show, then simply disappeared, which was a great relief.

In the final approach to the show, the gallery kindly flagged up a couple of things about how I, a very inexperienced exhibitor, might be affected by the exhibition.

Firstly - seeing the show hung on the walls can be a bit traumatic. For me, it was not so much an emotional response as a confirmation that they looked good together, and only found myself a little affected later at home. 

Secondly – after a show there is often a feeling of anticlimax and deflation. Madam and I cunningly sidestepped this by jetting out for three days in Amsterdam the day after the exhibition closed. Actually I was quite relieved that the whole thing was over, and I don’t think that I’ve suffered overmuch from anticlimax at all.

The most unforeseen thing that happened was my sudden bout of profound and visceral sadness – a short physical grief – just before we left to go to the Preview. I can best describe it as a Gethsemane moment – an intense episode of dread, doubt, and loss. I’m not at all sure what that was about, but it was as shocking as it was surprising. Well, I’m not naturally gregarious, but I did manage to gather myself, and went, and all I can remember is my glass of orange juice and that I had scores of fractured conversations. It took me two days to recover enough to come out the house.

As the show progressed, more and more red ‘sold’ stickers appeared, and again I had quite some strange reactions. I might have been expected to show some enthusiasm for sales, but actually I felt quite melancholy at being separated from my lovely paintings. Happily, some have gone to where I know for certain that they will be appreciated and looked after, and I have a chance to see them again. Some, though, have departed into alien orbits, and I am quite sad at the thought of never seeing them again.

Anyway, it’s an important thing to have done, and no doubt I will be able to handle any similar future occasions better, but I am glad it’s over. I’m happy to have returned to my usual routine (which may or may not be affected by the World Cup), now have a large re-supply of paint, and will soon be adapting to my new easel.

Oh, and the Numbers? Out the twenty-four pieces hung, thirteen were sold, and the show was considered by all as a Great Success.

Which is nice…

*Works In Progress - the same link as in the ‘Links’ column on the right near the top – I’m just making it easier for you. (It’s actually quite interesting)

Lava

oil on panel 31x25cm

You may or may not have noticed that there wasn’t a post for February. I was quite busy doing my bit for the solo show - contacting folk, editing copies of the blog posts for print, and generally becoming so unrelaxed that I found it difficult to concentrate when doing arty work. So I’m sorry about that. However, it didn’t keep me from my unrelenting searches for inspiration through the google streetview, and I came across these extraordinary tracks across a lava field in the Galapagos Islands.

The crust has been violently twisted and torn by cooling and the pressures of the molten stuff from underneath. In places, lava has welled up through the recent scab and puddled across the rock before setting again. The whole surface is very new, so it’s un-eroded and razor sharp at the fissures. There is very little plant life – some pioneering species are slowly gaining a foothold – and it is a bleak, hellish, but fascinating landscape. Just for the contrast I’ve placed it below a soft, tranquil sky.

The painting is quite small, and I thought I’d experiment a little with its structure. Having indicated the main shadows, I tried explaining the forms in a dark red, thin stand-oil mix (plus driers!) applied with a smallish hog-hair brush. The substrate is smooth panel, so the brushwork appeared quite streaky when dragged, and gritty when dabbed, and I chose not to blend it. This ‘shorthand’ helped a lot in defining the forms, the complexity of which were rapidly becoming apparent.

So far so good. However, the priming was my usual mid-grey, and when I began placing the lighter tones a lot of this very informative red/brown texture got buried, which I didn’t particularly want. I think that I maybe did this the wrong way round, and it might have been more interesting to put my lights in before streaking and dabbing the texturing reds in on top - who knows.

As it happens, though, the subject does reflect my rather emotionally turbulent February and March, what with the solo show and all. I’ll just say for now that it seems to be going fine so far, and no doubt I’ll have more to say later - once it’s over - and everything’s back to normal again.

Looking good, though…

Dark Arcadia

oil on papered canvas 31x25cm

This piece combines two very contrasting images.

Firstly, Thomas Eakins’ Arcadia. This depicts the Arcadian idyll – a simpler Golden Age inhabited by Innocents who spend their days tootling on their pipes and generally lounging around without a care in the world.

The second is a figure from Holocaust murders near Sniatyn, in Ukraine. There was an article about this photograph in my newspaper one morning, about ten years ago, and it bubbled up again after seeing the Eakins.

In subverting the Eakins, I had to make a decision whether to imitate his style, or just the composition. I decided to try for an imitation, but I provided some of my own background features – that made me feel a little more ‘independent’, and I strongly suspect that the original is unfinished. These apart, the general forms and illumination of the background are as near the original as I could get. It was very interesting to realise that Eakins was quite cavalier about putting his background together. He’s actually combined two separate scenes, and each is lit from a different direction. The paintwork here is a departure from my usual treatment; I’ve used a thin Stand Oil mix, but instead of blending the marks, I’ve been very loose (for me) and left a lot of texture straight from the brush. 

The meat, though, is in the figures. The man is a straight swap with the standing boy, and the two supine figures have their original legs with new upper bodies. The far one is invented, the near one extracted from yet another Holocaust scene. Proportional to the canvas size, they are larger than I normally paint. They went quite smoothly except for the standing figure’s legs – I had to redraw them, and that took some of the spontaneity of the looser treatment away.

I became very nervous at this point – too much work on the legs would draw unwanted attention – but I think I managed it. That done, I had to decide if, or how much, to lighten the torso as well. I took the plunge yesterday, after letting the surface settle over the weekend. Very delicate, risky, heart-in-mouth painting. I’m glad I did it though, as it makes the standing figure so much more vulnerable, and it started to suggest Gethsemane, which, come to think of it, also touches on the same subject.

This is, probably, the last finished piece before the show goes up at the Union Gallery (the butterfly larvae are already stirring in my stomach), and in a way, is a bit of a keystone for it. I’m saying nothing new here, just aiming to whisper in the viewer’s ear that even in the most beautiful place, in which hurt cannot occur, it does - and will. 

Et in Arcadia Ego

Riverbank

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This is based on some photographs of the river Authie that I took in France, in May last year. We had a picnic nearby. There was a field with white cows and I crossed the little bridge to look at them, and this the view along the riverbank.

Compositionally this is fairly orthodox - motion from left to right, and from near to far. The diagonal from the bottom left corner takes the eye back to the far light, and moves you across the painting. 

The foliage on the trees caused me a lot of bother, mainly because I wasn’t thinking. I had an idea about making different types of marks as the forms come forward – which does work – but I completely forgot past lessons learnt (the ones about simplifying from near to far). As a result, I allowed the foliage to become far too complicated and it became a bit of a nightmare. I am quite glad that I didn’t overdo the shadows and kept the tones light, as I wanted the light to bounce around a bit.

The two calves were additions, and were sourced from some of the many beautiful Vaches Blanches that we’d seen earlier. The one in shadow is a complete re-work and I’m quite chuffed with how it’s turned out. The figure was invented, and I made three different-sized versions before choosing the one that was just right.

When I was struggling and not knowing how to make the painting work, I played quiet, calm music to settle myself down. This was particularly effective; it’s one of Alexander Scriabin’s Preludes, Op.16 - No.3 in G flat major . It sets the mood of peace and calm that I’m trying to achieve here - which I needed to establish so that I can subvert it. I think I’ve managed that here, but that’s the idea, in case you were wondering.

You may also be wondering about precisely when my solo show is. I mentioned it some months ago, and arrangements are now firm. It will preview on Thursday evening 6th March 2014, and will be on from Friday 7th until (no joke) 1st April. It’ll be at the Union Gallery in Broughton Street, Edinburgh, and has a title – Dark Arcadias.

Not many pictures of fluffy kittens then…

Window Work

watercolour 2 x A4

The end of November finds me nowhere near any finished pieces after a highly productive October. As ever, however, there is always the Window Work.

Previous Window Work posts have always featured individual drawings extracted from the A4 sheets, but as my success rate per sheet seems to be improving, I thought I’d show you what they look like unedited. Each A4 is probably about 30 minute’s worth, usually - but not always – as a warming-up exercise before the easel stuff.

There are a couple of obvious duds here – the mother and schoolgirl on the left, and the incomplete ones on the right. Either I got them wrong from the start, or time or memory ran out. There are a few good ones though, like the hoody boy and blond girl, who do have the weight and poise of their subjects. Payne’s Grey is still my preferred colour for these monochromes (years ago I used Indigo), but I’ll very occasionally combine it with other colours – in this case Sepia, and a touch of Prussian Blue in the lower left.

It’s all about practice though, and the important business of maintaining - and if possible improving – looking and drawing skills. The current oil pieces seem to be including more figures, and they would probably be much more of a challenge without these (almost) daily exercises.

And, yes, I’m well into the three hundreds now - and counting…

Sun Study with Fallen Icarus

oil on panel 24x18cm

I was in a gallery recently and noticed that, in one landscape, the painter had included the Sun. It struck me that all the light in my own work was indirect, and that I hadn’t really tackled how to depict the Sun full on.

I looked at how other painters had done it and did some watercolour sketches while glancing extremely briefly sunwards.

I found an interesting sunlit view to experiment with (Iceland) – and the study was going fine, but it seemed incomplete. I woke up at 5am one day with the answer – Icarus. During my Non-Painting Interval, images of Icarus had bubbled up occasionally, enough to actually note them down, so I’m quite glad that he’s made a much-delayed appearance. It’s a very small panel, and went quite well, though the light around the Sun is a little too greenish – which I’ll solve elsewhere.

There is another, much more interesting and thought-provoking, very beautiful and very moving painting that features Icarus, by Pieter Brueghel. This Flemish painter has been a favourite of mine since my early teens, and, though commonly considered a ‘pretty’ painter, his work is often very dark under closer scrutiny. 

In ‘Children’s Games’ for instance, the perspective lines will direct you to an execution. This was painted in 1560, during the Reformation, when heretics were regularly burnt. The soldiers in ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ are Spanish. At the time, there was a Flemish Protestant revolt, which was brutally suppressed by the Catholic overlord Philip II of Spain. The figure in black in the centre is the Duke of Alba - the Spanish commander. Brueghel himself considered his own private drawings and sketches so dangerous that on his deathbed, he instructed his wife to burn them.

Before I, reluctantly, leave Brueghel behind, I’ll just include W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ -

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on

Road

oil on canvas 90x60 cm

A while ago I did a whole load of landscape composition exercises. I cut a little card window with which I drew 2-inch rectangles in the sketchbook, and then viewed the computer screen through it while browsing through google streetview. I did loads of quick little watercolours, just sitting down listening to music, finding compositions and working them out. It’s actually quite a good exercise on a dark rainy day.

As it happens, as I was doing this particular view, near Cherbourg, I became aware that this track was playing. It worked well with the road winding away and the rather melancholy dark trees. I left the idea alone for a while, and waited for something to gel for this setting.

Some time later I was searching for pictures of destroyed tanks, and found myself on a Ukrainian militaria site. I was going through all this ghastly stuff, when I came across a post with three or four pictures of some very well-to-do 1940’s people standing in a road, then some lying down face–down beside it in an orderly row. My Russian isn’t that good, but I knew enough. They were Sudeten German civilians, rounded up in Prague a couple of days after the war’s end by the local Czech resistance, marched to a suburb called Borislavka, and just shot.

It didn’t take much to put the two ideas together – the horrific within the beautiful. The figures were worked out in last month’s pencil drawing, and the landscape tweaked. It had to have quite a lot of foreground reworking, juggling of trees, and a completely new sky (at least twice on the canvas). 

I wanted the eye to move from the distance to foreground – along the road the figures had walked - and be stopped at the trees. I tried flipping it so that the trees were on the left, but then it read, to me, as though the figures were the starting point, and that the image was about the absence of the perpetrators, who had walked away down the road. I think this may be something to do with the Western writing system – we naturally read from left to right, and that implies a sequence of events. I’m not sure if this is a strict visual rule, but it works for me in this case.

Technically I’m quite pleased with how this has gone. I am aware of how dark (physically) my paintings are getting, so I set quite a light - for me - ‘darkest tone’, which has been quite successful. I kept the forms fairly broad and resisted the temptation to use smaller brushes until absolutely necessary. It was very difficult doing the figures, as they are very small indeed. They still have to read as figures without the tiny delicate marks catching the eye and dragging it in too quickly.

It works though, and has definitely been worth the effort to get it right.


Edit, 7th August 2019: Cleaned a little of the shadow away from the figures. Wiped on a mixture of meths and white spirit, and agitated lightly with a soft brush. Action then stopped with white spirit. 
They are - rightly - a bit more visible now. 

Cloud Study

watercolour 19x13.5cm

As the sun sets earlier and earlier in the afternoon, I’ve been sitting sketching the sky again. This one’s done on budget 300gm paper – the surface starts to break up with heavier handling when it’s soaked – so I was extra careful about doing any wet manipulation or scraping. I actually fanned the surface dry between stages, and this seems to be the way forward with this technique - certainly with this particular paper, of which I have rather a lot. It does mean, though, that you have to remember very strongly what the original vision was.

Most of the cloud is done with ivory black, with little hints of Payne’s grey. The warm sunlit areas were washed very lightly with Burnt Sienna into Indian Yellow after light dry scraping to bring back the paper whiteness. If you look at the bottom corners of the blank border you can just make out where a run of wash seeped beneath the masking tape surround. I managed to scrape most of that off too, so that worked out quite well.

The blade I used for this delicate operation was my trusty Swiss Army Knife, which I’ve had about me since 1980. I lost it recently, but found it again - ten minutes after the new one arrived. So that worked out quite well too…

Banana Skins

watercolour 10x14.5cm

Just for a much-needed change, here’s a reference drawing done from life. Yes, it’s a banana skin, or rather three of them.

Quite a quick small watercolour, this took just a few hours earlier today. Purely transparent layers with no added gouache, it’s a bit clumsy and probably overworked, but some bits work quite well. 

I find the way the skins distort as they dry and harden very interesting. A group - or bunch - of them becomes almost unrecognisable, and quite suggestive of other non-banana forms

Quite a long way from the classic comedy prop…

Row of Figures - Study

pencil 30x12cm

This is a line of figures which are crucial to an ongoing Work in Progress. I’ll leave the genesis of that piece until it’s finished.

I had to source images for a line of bodies seen from a certain angle, and I have spent some time over the last few days sifting through pictures of European atrocities. There were a lot of them, and I found it quite difficult. 

I isolated enough suitable figures for the space I needed to fill, and drew them together to form the line. Some of these photos were quite fuzzy and ill-defined, and the drawing process helped in understanding the forms, and in arranging how the individuals lay beside each other. They are now in place on the canvas, and will be ‘settled in’ as the piece progresses.

Just so that you know, they are - from left to right – a Bosnian woman, a Lithuanian jew, a Russian P.o.W, a Sudeten German lady, and an elderly Serbian woman.

Cave

oil on canvas 61x51cm

Earlier this summer Madam and I spent a few days in the far northwest, and this piece is a response to that. The vista of headlands and mountains - Quinag, Canisp, and Suilven - is the view from our B&B at Badcall Bay. The foreground – slightly shoehorned into place - is from Loch Laxford, just up the coast past Scourie.

During the organising stage, this piece tentatively featured a wreck, and then a figure. I couldn’t make those ideas work and began to get a bit anxious about where it was going, but plugged on painting the landscape nevertheless. 

Then, some accidental creativity happened. In my foreground source the outcrop is plain rock, but I was a bit heavy-handed in painting some shadows, and realised that a cave – a little bit dark and scary - was just right. There was a concentration of pink veins in the rock there*, and I simply exaggerated this and introduced a more visceral crimson as I carved my way into the cliff-face.

There is quite an interesting technical feature here. The ‘rock’ paint is thinned only with turpentine, and left unblended. This makes the strokes very sharp, especially when cut back with a ‘wet’ sharp-edged brush. I built up the rock forms with these marks in monochrome, and coloured them with oil/varnish glazes.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice a round mark in the top left corner. This is the result of a repair patch on the back of the canvas, due to a slight tear. I wasn’t sure how this would end up looking, and my Plan B was to camouflage it as a faint full moon (which would have worked). 

I think it looks all right, though, so I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it… 

* Lewisian Gneiss if you must know, some of the oldest rock in the world