Crow

oil on canvas 91x76 cm

I began composing this last autumn and started work on the canvas this January, but I really don’t know why it has taken so long and been so unnecessarily difficult to complete. Right up to the end it has seemed to fight back hard, and I’ve had to make many adjustments, corrections, and inventions to make it work. Still, it only gets painted once, and I think it’s worth getting it as right as I can.

This is a strongly narrative painting based on something I saw in my childhood. It shows two moments a couple of minutes apart; three of the figures on the left are repeated on the right. The location is literally just up the road from a previous painting – the far tree behind the main group on the left is the main tree in Wreck No.12, and both pieces share the sunlit vista on the left.

This painting has also had an extraordinarily long incubation period. I found this location in summer 2011, but had no idea what to use it for. Then, last autumn, I realised that it was the setting for an idea that I’d first tried out in 1981, but which I’d not been able to take forward. I dug out those drawings from my pile of sketchbooks, and set about reworking them into this setting.

The figures on the right were quite troublesome. They had to be small and unfocussed - too much detail would have drawn the eye – and, as what I think they are doing is shameful, I wanted then half-hidden. They had to be arranged so that their actions could be read, but partly obscured by the trees.

The foreground group was carefully composed using images sourced from both the Interweb and from my own childhood photos. The placing was crucial; particularly where the crow sits in relation to the palest tree. I wanted the crow to seem just slightly separate from the group holding it, and that vertical line does just that. I had roughly sketched this group out on paper, but the precise composing was done with photoshop layers, one for each figure, over the background image. I just moved them about, and back and forward, and adjusted them into the setting until they worked as I wanted them to. Before you ask – no, I’m not there.

Happily, there is clear evidence in the middle and right foreground of last month’s study of leaves, though some appear less beech than rhododendron.

Technically there’s nothing new here, though I did finally resort to buying Cadmium yellows for making the thin greens of indirect light in the central grassy area. These pigments are phenomenally powerful (and at £18 a tube phenomenally expensive). They do the job though, so respect due…

The original, autobiographical, incident happened in the mid 1960s, when I was a sensitive little boy of about nine or ten. I was at a boarding school that was enclosed by woods, and there were always a lot of rooks and crows about. One beautiful late summer afternoon I was just pottering about outside and a group of older boys approached, to pass me, going away from the school towards a shallower line of trees beside the cricket pitch. The lead boy was carefully carrying a crow, and as I was smaller, I was very close to it. A leg hung down and its beak was open, and it blinked with a milky eyelid.

‘Where are you going with that?’ I said

‘It’s injured, so we’re going to kill it’

I didn’t understand. I started to cry, so they pushed me to one side and kept me at a distance while the three biggest boys took the crow into the trees, laid it on the ground, and beat it to death with sticks. And I was horrified, and I screamed and screamed.

Thinking about it now I’m still very sad. I think that, even at the time, I was aware of why they were killing this crow. Not - as they had lightly convinced themselves - out of pity to save its suffering, but out of curiosity and cruelty, to find out what it was like. 

And fifty years on I still remember it, and how the light was flooding through the trees.

Leafy Beech Studies

watercolour in sketchbook 18”x14”

These are studies made specifically for a long Work in Progress

I’ve been Progressing on this Work on-and-off since January, but for one reason or another I haven’t been able to engage with it fully till the last couple of months. I’ve spent the whole of June grappling with it exclusively – changing elements around and gradually defining the spaces and masses. So many basic things had to be corrected from the start – the avenue spacing on the right had to be altered, as the children amongst them started off too big and had to be resized, but still be visible behind the tree trunks. The right foreground didn’t read well and had to be reworked. It was carnage…

Well, the other week I had another Little Local Difficulty to solve - differentiating the near top foliage against the treetops on the right, and my reference images weren’t helping much. I had to invent something, and had no idea how beech leaves worked, so it was a case of finding some reference materials, and drawing them.

It’s an odd thing, and I’m sure Leonardo da Vinci would agree with me, but the process of drawing is really very good for understanding how things work. Active observation forces you to analyse the subject - as in ‘How do I know that bit is round and goes behind that other thing?’ - because you know you’re going to have to recreate it.

Anyway, there I was, having to extemporise on a theme of beech tree leaves. I found some clear references and simply spent an afternoon drawing them in my sketchbook, and got enough understanding of their visual character to win that little skirmish. The sketches aren’t particularly good, but it’s more about the process than the result.

And is this month’s post a bit of padding due to my not having finished anything else his month? No, no. Not a bit of it.

No. Nope. Non. Absolument non, no. Of course not, perish the thought…

Cloud Studies

watercolours 16.5cm wide

Quick sky watercolours from the window. They were done on unstretched paper (200gm Bockingford if you must know) so were a bit wrinkly, and I finally got round to flattening them last week.

Four pigments used here – Ultramarine and Prussian blues, Paynes Grey, and a touch of Sepia – five if you count the Titanium White gouache. So that’s five pigments then.

It’s very fast work. Basically, I’ll have a very, very good look at the cloud forms, noting shapes, tones, and colours, and if possible understanding why they are so. Dampen the paper, whack on a blended wash of the two blues, wipe off the fuzzy altocumulus with some paper towel, take off more of the cumulus with more paper towel and a brush mop then indicate (mop brush) what the cumulus were like when you last saw them, if you can remember that far back (when the clouds were very different from how they are now, the blighters) with Paynes Grey. Make the cumulus shadows a bit more like cumulus shadows, which were a bit warmer, by adding a touch of sepia, and play around with the washes while the rapidly fading memory gets replaced by the now totally new forms in the sky. Guessing wildly, firm up with a bit of opaque white and watch as its brilliance fades to a disappointing light grey as it dries.

Wipe brow with a paper towel without blue on it, and retire for a cup of tea.

Repeat process when yet more clouds appear…

Landscape with Tom Mix

oil on canvas 61x51cm

Howdy partners! 

Just for a change, here’s a light-hearted piece - a quick-draw Wild West Cowboy up in the Wild Northwest of Scotland. 

I saw the image of Tom Mix as a little black and white inset in a newspaper article about the culture and myths of the American cowboy. He was the original cowboy film star, pre talkies, and was the template on which all those who came after were based. 

The landscape of the Northwest is quite unlike that of the rest of Scotland; the mountains (this is Ben Loyal as it happens) erupt out of very harsh country and if you’re VERY suggestible it has a look of ‘Arizona’ to it, but with midges. The painting is more about the landscape than anything else - the figure is really just providing an excuse, a visual McGuffin.

I had a bit of trouble with the composition of the landforms immediately behind the figure. Initially the grassy slope slid off the side of the painting, so I imported a rock outcrop to secure it. The ridge on the left originally went straight across diagonally, and again slid straight out the side, so I had to lower it and invent a right side to the valley make the forms stable. This ended up revealing a lot more of the base of the mountain, which was a bonus. The subtle colour shifts in the sky could have been very problematic, but I ended up ‘printing’ the later paint/glazes on with a dabber. This is sort of like the pads renaissance or wood-block printers used to ink their type blocks, but more low-tech and disposable. It helps in very fine tonal control and makes for a fairly even surface, with the added bonus of not leaving a residue of cat hair (see last month’s post).

Now, I have some news. I have been offered (and have accepted) a solo show at the Union Gallery, in Edinburgh, in March next year. So, compadres, if you’d like to eyeball Tom Mix (and more), then y’all and your posse set a trail to Central Edinboro, and mosey on down to the Union – more details as and when I get ’em..

Which means I have a lot of work to do

Gi-it ‘em up, an’ mo-ove ‘em out… 

Blue Lake

oil on canvas 61x46cm

There was a little bit of serendipity involved in putting this together. 

The lake is in north-west Sweden - just west of Arjeplog along route 95. I found this view on google maps early last summer, but collected the details and finalised the composition only after seeing the figure, in September. 

She was from a photo in a newspaper article about the New Orleans flood. Her image/posture was exactly what the piece had been waiting for, and it was snipped and scanned in a matter of minutes. The sky used various photos and a live watercolour as a starting point, and developed from there. The foreground was adapted, and the red trees multiplied, from the original source, and the nearest bits of shore in the corner are from another location along the lake.

This is where the serendipity comes in. I started painting in October, and after a day or so I wanted to check something else. I found the spot again, but was horrified to find that Google Maps had re-photographed that stretch of road. It was now an overcast windy day, and completely un-usable. The timing of finding the figure and gathering the information had been crucial, though I didn’t realise it at the time. Very lucky.

I didn’t have any music lined up for this originally but when I re-started after a bit of a gap, I was listening to John Martyn’s 1977 ‘One World’ album quite a lot. The track One World began to work very well as a mood-setter, though Max Richter’s album Infra seemed fairly resonant as well.

So here’s a lake with a figure in it, and there’s a tension there. My own feeling is that this is a person who is full of despair, despite the beauty and serenity all around her. 

On a lighter note, I’d just like to point something out about the brushwork. A lot of the paint is stroked, blended, and stippled when wet – using fan, and face powder brushes, and soft mops (some of which are my shellac polishing mops from restoration days). These normally stand in a jar alongside the other brushes, and our two cats have found it increasingly pleasant to rub their necks against them. I will frequently pick one of these brushes up and find that instead of delicately manipulating the paint, I have smeared a layer of soft, fine cat hair into it. This is extremely fiddly and difficult to remove. The effect is plainly visible in the central cloud area, which is unfortunate.

They are now kept in a closed box (the brushes, that is…)

Window Work

watercolour 8-12cm tall

It’s been a year since I’ve posted figure sketches so here’s the best of the last few months’ output.

I’ve never really mentioned the brushes I use for these, so I will now. They are oriental ‘calligraphy’ brushes, which I first discovered as a student and have continued to use for drawing and general watercolour ever since. The hair bundle is long, and tapers directly from the base, providing a large paint reservoir and a wide range of marks – very handy for rapid drawing.

They come in a variety of sizes, and blends of different hair are used – pony, goat, and weasel are some I’ve come across, though the makers use many types. Prices vary depending on the skill and complexity of construction, and I tend to go for the general purpose cheaper kinds. Goat hair is extremely soft and fragile but is very responsive, weasel hair has a stiffer touch and can be a little easier to use if you’re a bit ‘off’. When you get a new brush, the business end is likely to be rigid; the makers apply a weak gum to the hair to protect it. Just swizzle the brush in some water and this will loosen and dissolve in a couple of minutes. When finished with it, preserve the point by licking it sharp - the point is the whole point after all…

Now, an interesting snippet. if you go looking for these on the Interweb, you’ll find Wolf Hair brushes. These are not actually from the Wolf (Canis lupus); their hair is more like bristle and would be more use to buff your shoes with. Wolf Hair is from the tail of the weasel. Apparently the same Chinese character is used for both wolf and weasel, but the weasel is described as the Yellow Tail Wolf (or Mouse Wolf as I originally heard it) and the mistranslation has stuck.

Finally, if you’re in Edinburgh in March, pop into the SSA Open Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy building – the ‘Parthenon’ on Princes Street at the Mound. It’s free, and is a selected show of the best current artwork in Scotland.

And you can see White Calf and Copse in person…

Sky Study

watercolour and gouache 17x11cm

I was looking out the window after New Year and I saw this late afternoon variety of cloud forms (love those mottled altocumulus) - a rarity this time of year. ‘Sunny’ Scotland still has very short dark days just now, covered by blanket stratus or dull stratocumulus.

There are some very nice soft effects in this little sketch. The gouache helps, but the main difference to previous water sketches is the paper – Bockingford. The paint lifts off it very easily, enabling soft edges without unnecessary disturbance or tearing of the surface, and it’s very, very helpful to work with – especially with this subject matter.

That’s all there is to say about this piece, really. As usual, I’m piling into other complex oil pieces, but more about them as and when they’re completed. So that’s it for now…

…except, of course, that I’ve re-formatted the blog. I’d been getting rather fed up with all the blinding white, especially as it goes against a bee I have in my bonnet concerning White Walls in Galleries*. The grey, hopefully, will be a lot kinder to the images. It’s early days yet, and I still have to do a bit of tweaking concerning links to larger images – which I think are quite important – so the peripherals may change from time to time.

The title’s changed as well. It seems to me now fairly self-evident that I am indeed doing it properly, and any back-story, if that’s what there may be, is now irrelevant.

So, as they say, New Year – New Formatting for the Blog/Blog-reader Display Interface…

*The light tones in a painting are always less light than the surface they are displayed on, and lighter colours appear duller and more lacklustre because they are drowned out by the base white of the gallery walls.

Madam, Box Hill

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This comes out of the trip to Box Hill we made last November with my brother, and is, loosely, a companion piece of Valley, Box Hill.

Its working title was ‘3 Colbys’, as it was originally composed with three figures. There was going to be another, younger, figure - dressed in red and black – at the foot of the path going away up the down, but eventually I decided against that. To compensate for this empty space, I worked very hard to emphasise, and beautify, the form of the receding slope. I could have placed the main tree more centrally but I wanted some instability in the composition to unsettle the viewer. I think I’ve achieved that, but I’m not entirely convinced that this particular left/right balance of foreground (mass, figures, high contrast, focus) and distance (space, low contrast, blurring) works well over a long time.

The figure in the tree appeared accidentally. Nowadays I usually arrange and test compositions with photoshop; I’m referencing from photos anyway, and shifting and introducing new elements is quicker and more accurate than scouring away at sketches with pencil on paper. Anyway, for some reason I was pasting in another cut-out of the figure, and photoshop placed it in mid-air next to the tree. I flipped it and stood it in the branches. It was a little upsetting, but I could see that something potent was going on. I worked in a third figure and had a life/death progression going on, if a rather heavy-handed one. I prefer being a bit more subtle, so I went ahead with just two figures, adapting an image of Madam with her red scarf. Inserting the third figure was always an option, eventually unused.

For me this is an intensely moving image of Madam, which initially felt very difficult and scary to paint, and at one point I had to put it aside. I found some resonance of the process in Strange Glue, which touches briefly on the subject of creative demons. Years – decades – ago, I found a lot of creativity in ‘angst’ but I now find it difficult, and unhealthy, to work in that state for long. I can accept the genesis and development of an emotive idea, but it’s wiser for me now to do the actual work in a more collected state of mind. More space to think and solve the painting problems - Erik Satie: Ogives. Painting is an exhausting enough process without harrowing yourself as well.

Finally, a short anecdote. Madam was brought up in central Boston, Massachusetts, and she spent a lot of time playing in the Boston Public Gardens. On our visit there a few years ago, she found her favourite tree and (yes, she was still able to) climbed up into it. Just then a Park Policeman materialised, all mirrored shades and sidearm.

- ‘Get out of the tree Ma’am’.

I pointed out amicably that this was her favourite tree when she was a little girl. He remained unmoved.

- ‘Get out of the tree Ma’am’.

So, as she was able to, she did.

Wreck No.12

oil on canvas 61x51cm

I think this is the closest I’ve come so far to creating The Classical Landscape with a Sting. The feel here is Arcadian, and I think that looking closer I’d be expecting to see a mythological scene of nymphs and fauns. Well, I’d be disappointed. There’s just a rather nasty-looking tank wreck in the shadows.

Et in Arcadia Ego.

The working title (wreck numbers get confusing) was ‘Devon Claude’ - it’s Claude Lorrainesque and it’s in Devon. I’ve had this location in mind for a while but couldn’t work out the necessary compositional tweaks until now. It’s on the direct road from Sidford to Ottery St Mary, where it tips over the ridge, and is copped from Google maps. I really must go there sometime because that whole area looks very pretty indeed.

Back to the piece. It has a fuzzy look about it, which may be due to using Stand Oil in some of the paint. If you don’t know it, this is a very viscous form of linseed oil – it’s like honey - which makes the paint film transparent, even, and very flowing. I’ve been loth to use it because it takes ages to dry, but adding a couple of drops of my new friend Cobalt Driers makes it a viable ingredient when mixing thin veils and glazes. Which was useful here.

The wreck itself was not directly referenced. I wanted malevolence rather than pathos, and channelled my arachnophobe side to create suggestive shapes of wrenched metal. At the same time I’ve managed to conjure up credible shapes that rhyme with the pale beech trunk and the side-lit foxgloves (willowherb?). Hopefully I’ve misdirected you enough so that at first glance there is nothing amiss.

I think that’s all the Wreck Series’ driving elements included - landscape, sky, lushness, and beauty; surprise, pain, and fear – and, while I can see where I haven’t solved all the problems, the painting’s not bad, if a little on the small side. Bits I’m quite pleased with? The sky/cirrus on the left (delicate paint manipulation and shifting blues), and - if it displays OK on your monitor - the foliage in the bottom right corner (very narrow tonal and colour ranges, but the mass, texture, and indirect light come across quite well).

Just in case you’re wondering, working with spider shapes was not cathartic. Really still not that keen on ‘em...

Autumn

watercolour 16.5x18.5cm

I went for a jaunt yesterday up to the Hermitage – a wooded valley just below Blackford Hill – to catch up with the autumn colour. I was actually mildly annoyed because I had gone up to Perthshire the day before and hadn’t taken my camera. The colours were very interesting, and I was kicking myself watching the light change along Strathearn as the sun went down.

Anyway, I took some snaps that I could maybe use for reference later; and bish bosh, here we are, painted from the laptop in the comfort of home. 

It’s an astonishingly complicated subject. A tree or two has been edited out in an effort to simplify, but I really haven’t helped myself by using blobby watercolour, and excluding the use of acrylic or gouache whites.

Actually, I was mildly annoyed at myself again, for not taking my more robust grippy walking shoes. I just didn’t trust my cycling plimsolls along the steep bits and thought I’d better to stay on the prepared path rather than twist something I might need to get home with.

No doubt there is an Old Chinese Proverb about preparing for a journey, but I haven’t heard it yet…

White Calf

oil on papered canvas 25x31cm

This started off as an exercise in trying to simplify the trees in a wood, and I added the white calf to provide a bit of tension – I liked the paleness in the gloom.

The simplification really was quite simple – draw the trees in turn from the foreground to the distance until the space gets too cluttered, and grade the focus. Make it sharper in front and blurrier towards the back.

The calf went quite well, with one minor hiccough. I wanted the light on it to be greenish, but that made it look a bit radioactive, and once I’d thought that, I couldn’t unthink it. I solved this by conjuring up the thin white light (zinc white + drier) coming from the front. This emphasized the rhyme between the legs and the dark upward forks of the trees, so that was me quite happy.

Once the painting was finished, looking at the palette made me realise how far I’ve come in handling greens. Most of them here are very soft, and were made with various blue/yellow mixes – e.g. Ultramarine, Prussian, and Chrome hue, Yellow Ochre etc – and modified with touches of violet or burnt umber. The only ‘tube’ greens I’ve used are Chrome green (it’s fairly gentle and the opacity is great for making corrections), and Winsor & Newton’s Olive Green (a mix of Lampblack and transparent Isoindolinone yellow pigment) - very useful indeed as a shader and mixed here with Ultramarine Violet to make a soft black.

I should point out that there is no Pthalo green here at all. There are all sorts of tube greens sold out there - Permanent, Emerald, Prussian, Winsor, even the authentic-sounding Hooker’s and Sap – and most of them are phthalocyanine based. No doubt they are useful for something (?), but within a subtle palette they’re the Assyrian coming down like the wolf on the fold. And afterwards, you’ll find they’ve stained your brushes.

So, a delicate little picture, with a White Calf in a wood. Don’t get lost…

Cloud Sketches

watercolour 12.5x9.5cm

At about five o’ clock yesterday I saw these big cumulus clouds building up and couldn’t resist a quick sketch.

They’re both done in monochrome Payne’s Grey, and the first, darker, one was outlined (extremely) briefly in pencil before starting the wet stuff.

The lighter one was outlined with very slightly tinted water and then I broke the surface tension/hard edge selectively before introducing stronger paint. This encouraged flow into the damp areas to indicate the ‘mistier’ parts of the cloud’s outline – which the darker one lacks. As I worked the washes – keeping them pale, I (whoops) scraped off the top layer of damp paper and got a whole new layer of hard bright white which mimicked the cloud texture.

Oh Happy Accident…

Mariane’s View

oil on papered canvas 31x25cm

A commission…

A friend of mine’s wife, Mrs R, used to see this every morning on her walk to work. It’s from the road between Easter Craiglockhart and Wester Craiglockhart Hills, and on a good morning you can see Berwick Law - the distant triangular peak framed by Arthur’s Seat and Blackford Hill. She doesn’t do that any more but remembers this view, so Mr R asked me to do a painting of it.

I wanted to emphasize the peace and calm, with a nod towards the atmospherics of Claude Lorrain . Mr R specifically wanted an indication of the steeples and roofs of West Edinburgh, and these tied in quite nicely with the chimneys of the power station along the coast, though I did remove the rather intrusive clubhouse. Shifting Arthur’s Seat and Berwick Law slightly made the horizon more balanced, and I uprooted and transplanted some of the trees.

Painting-wise, I’m very pleased with the ‘scoop’ of the fairway and how it curves around the hillside – quite tricky. Lucky that the groundsman’s mowing lines were so crisp or it would have been very difficult indeed to describe. 

I’m quite chuffed with the sky too, and the oil drier/siccative really came into its own here. I wanted to paint it with tinted ‘veils’ using the most transparent white, Zinc White. It lends itself to subtle aerie floatiness, but it is a dreadfully long drier – even without adding any extra oil (walnut, Waitrose own brand). With a drop of driers though, thin layers were firm enough to stay put after a couple of days. Which was astonishingly fast.

So, job done and there it is, and all without a single golf metaphor. 

Oh all right then… The opening drive was strong, but landed in an awkward bit of rough, necessitating slight re-composition of the hill and sky on the left. After that I didn’t get caught up in any bunkers, and kept my nerve for the final putt. 

Par for the course, really… 

Bad Valley

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This is a pure landscape painting - the landforms and sky being the subject – with no symbolist or metaphorical insertions.

Well, almost. It’s actually a mash-up of two contrasting nasty/nice elements. The valley is dark, winter, and concave, the hillside light, summer, and convex. The idea is that the viewer feels attracted towards the breezy optimism of the sunny upland. Alternatively, I suppose, you could just stay in the valley if you’re feeling a touch melancholic gothic. 

The grassland, near Cerne Abbas in Dorset, was sourced from google Earth, but I found the dark valley myself. It’s not far outside Edinburgh, between Temple and Middleton. There’s a small grassed-over Victorian lime-burning site, and an earth dam blocks the valley. The stream flows sluggishly into the base of the dam through a small stone-lined entrance – which looks very odd. The downstream valley is full of trees, but the upstream basin, seen in the painting, is a silted-up bog with uncertain drainage – I sank in over my ankles when I tried to walk on what I thought was a firm bit. It has a very sinister atmosphere…

However, it was very interesting to paint, though the join between the valley and fields needed careful judgement so as not to be too jarring. I enjoyed doing the sky too, especially the more distant clouds nearer the horizon. I’ve finally got round to using oil siccative (cobalt driers). A drop or two makes thin oily paint dry enough to work on in a couple of days, if not the next day. This has made a vast improvement in drying time over my previous oily paint technique. Which is a Good Thing.

Talking of aspiring towards to the sunny uplands and embracing improvement, I didn’t make much use of opaque black in this one. The very darkest tones were made with transparent layers of tinted ivory black (burnt bone, not really ivory in case you’re wondering) – much more transparent and much more effective.

Feels good to be learning. Onwards and Upwards…

Wreck No.11

oil on canvas 91x91cm

This is the last of the three-foot square oil paintings for a while. They take too long and I need to get more pieces churned out faster. We’re also rapidly running out of large shelf and wall space.

It’s quite a good painting though, with a very worked surface. The setting was taken, cows included, from a Google Earth image, and the trees on the horizon were relocated from neighbouring views. There were originally four cows in the group, but I disappeared one to open a space and help the movement away from the centre.

The wreck is entirely invented as it had to be made to fit the ditch. The idea is that the viewer enjoys the more attractive elements of the composition before becoming fully aware of the tank, and though it’s deliberately hard to decipher, it’s definitely ugly and nasty.

The light is very dramatic, and to make the sky seem as bright as possible the land elements are quite dark and have a very narrow tonal range. This made depicting the form of the ground quite difficult, but I think I’ve managed it fairly well. It was tricky to photograph, but the result is good enough to get a sense of what the painting is about.

I can be quite a harsh critic, but I am always harshest about my own work. So... the areas I’d prefer you to gloss over quickly? – The sky to the right of the tree (forced and possibly a touch too violet), some of the foliage in the trees (lacklustre), and the lumpen drawing of the two inner cows.

Areas that I’m quite chuffed with? The more luminous parts of the sky, the simplification of the bushes, and the very slight changes of tone and colour that take you over the undulations from foreground to distance...

...but my favourite bit is the subtle lighting where the cow on the right emerges from the shadow.

Even for me, that really does make all the grief worthwhile.