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

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…