Low Blue - Huntingtower

 

oil on card 21x15cm

I needed a fast, uncomplicated small composition for one of my Open Eye Small Scales (21x15cm), and this really fitted the bill. It's a composite of a couple of snaps taken a minute or so apart along the A85 westwards from Perth – the sky and right trees from east of West Huntingtower, and the left trees and landscape from west of West Huntingtower (a small village near Huntingtower Castle).

I don't actually remember the composing bit, but I think I threw the two sources together fairly rapidly and quite possibly late at night. I seem to have mistakenly deleted the series of composition files made putting it together – which is annoying.

This is the first painting I've done in a while using a grey primer. It seemed a very good idea as the piece had to be done very fast, and was going to be quite dark overall anyway. I had seen that Michael Harding had introduced a new grey acrylic primer so, this was an opportunity to try it out. After the initial setting out and quite a cursory fluid acrylic development stage, a lot of the oil paint was opaque right from the start. The initial landscape mixes were Oxide of Chrome Green, Mars Black, and Unbleached Titanium Dioxide – all very opaque pigments. Likewise the sky was built with Titanium White onto the grey priming, with tints of blue and modifying thinner patches of whites and dark greys. The low blue band was a few finely-stippled and increasingly dense layers of semi-transparent, Damar varnish heavy, Ultramarine and Zinc White mix.

The grey primer was a pleasant change. It's very densely pigmented, covers easily, and is sold as being very non-absorbent – so that oil colours won't go flat when drying (I didn't notice any difference to be honest). What's very interesting is that instead of using chalk for its filler it uses marble dust, so it has a very fine but quite definite 'tooth' to it. Not that that was a particular plus for me – I like a smooth, nearly polished surface – but it's interesting to notice it.

If you think you've heard the name 'Huntingtower' before, it may be because it's the title of a novel by John Buchan. I can't say I've ever read the book, but I did hear a very enthusiastic BBC radio drama adaption years ago, which might even have been in stereo.

There's really not that much more to say about this one except that it was quite efficiently done, and that I took a great deal of pleasure in exaggerating the Low Blue band above the skyline.

That's two Small Scales now in the Open Eye. The online-only show has been up on the website for a while now - nearly three hundred at a time – and I expect mine will join the rotation shortly. Once my third one is finally finished and delivered, I'm going to take a break for a few weeks, or more, to recharge my drained-out ArtyBatteries.

Meanwhile have a good Festive Holiday and New Year. I hope we all have better times and fewer worries in 2022, and that the Greek Alphabet remains as obscure as it always has been for most non-classicists.

French Mist

 

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first of my three contributions to the annual Open Eye Gallery Christmas Small Scale show – all pieces being 21x15cm. It's a composite of two locations, not very far apart, in the Pas de Calais. The sky and the central wood are from near Longuevillette, and the more distant features are from further up the road. The landscape is very typical of the area, but I wanted to fix it unmistakeably in France, so – short of erecting a flagpole and raising a tricolore – I plonked a yellow Citroën 2CV in the field.

Technique-wise – the sky involved much atmospheric stippling (with a thinned Stand Oil medium), and a lot of fine fading on-and-off with a small cloth-covered pad. The tiny car was, while not a nightmare, quite tricky to do - needing close work with a fine pointy brush and magnifying glass – but I think I've got away with it.

I'm absolutely not a car buff, the 2CV – or 'deux chevaux' – is instantly recognisable, even to me. It's a classic, akin to the Volkswagen beetle, and mass produced at about the same time. Like the VW Beetle, it was designed as an affordable popular car for the masses. However, as France is a largely rural country the 2CV was designed primarily for getting farmers and their produce reliably to markets along country roads and rough tracks. One design criterion was that drivers should be 'able to transport eggs across a freshly ploughed field without breakage'. The car was produced for over forty years from many different factories – including one in Slough, England. Indeed, the Royal Navy bought some for the Marine Commandos – the 2CV being light enough for helicopter transport and robust enough to cope with jungle tracks (I'm assuming during the 1950's Malayan Emergency). Which surprised me.

I had meant to draw a line under the Open Eye show quite firmly this month. That exhibition, with nineteen pieces in total, is done now (two of the small sky paintings sold. Which is nice, but could've been better) but such was the unusually low footfall that the gallery are giving the November painters (Tom Mabon, Paul Barnes, and myself) a combined extension in the back room for December. There will be fewer paintings each, but I'm certainly not complaining.

There was also an unexpected addition to the show in the form of a poem, written by Morna Burdon. She's an actor, writer, poet, and director, who is also one of our upstairs neighbours. I'd invited her along on the first Saturday, and she wrote this poem about the work and being in the gallery that afternoon. I thought it was marvellous. Here it is, titled and signed, and spaced as in the original -

A response to the exhibition by artist Keith Epps – Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh 30th October 2021. 

White

Clouds

Palette blue skies

perfect

distractions

Idyllic geese

A dog alert and innocent

Arles-like fields of hay

Gentle moss green trees

A dead child

No time to catch breath

To turn away

Upper body casually displayed

Disturbed

dismayed

At this calamity

On to the warm calm of gentle yellow fields

What harm could....

But then it does

There

         There

And there again

We

They

We

They

Stand

Speak

Laugh

Enjoy

Incline

Examine the cost

Drink blood red wine

Within pure white walls

Soldiers trudge

Contentedly away

From rape and pillage and death

A parcel

Wrapped in crushed brown paper

Tied with light beige 

String

Secures a happy exchange

Lips red

And smiling

And pleased

The clouds darken

The child's body flops once more

From beneath the protective shadow of the guilt-filled hedge.

Outside, the sun shines 

                                                                                          MORNA BURDON, NOVEMBER 2021

The gallery thought it was wonderful, and had it printed out and put on the wall. The 'child's body' refers to the figure in 'Landscape with Shadows' (which was added to bulk the show out). She really gets what the paintings are about, and I think the poem greatly added to the room.

Which has taken us a long way away from a car in a misty field in Northern France.

Herd – West Lothian

oil on panel 75x45cm

This is the final painting for the Open Eye Show. It's another view from a train, of Binns Hill - just East of Linlithgow.

The sky is broadly as in my original photo, but the landscape has been flipped left to right - enabling an upward sweep across the panel. A dark cloud moving in from the left was painted out, and the wooded rise on the right is invented. The dark cloud was replaced (I couldn't get away from it looking like a pointing hand – which looked ridiculous) with some vague altocumulus clouds from elsewhere and the second rise is a selective cut-and-paste from the left hill, woods and all. The landmark tower has been disappeared.

The cows were in the original source photo too, but they have been multiplied, shifted, and rearranged in order to gather interest towards the left, and fade interest towards the right. The tiny figures behind the wall are taken from photos of American gangland murders – difficult to source and select, but a lot easier than wading through swathes of atrocity images.

My initial intention was to construct the sky with transparent layers on the white priming, while the landscape features were to be drawn in black fluid acrylic, then semi-obscured by a mid-grey layer which would kill off the white priming. That plan went off-course fairly quickly. While the landscape plan worked – quite well, actually - the sky went very thick and very murky very quickly, and I lost control of the cloud forms. This necessitated an even, semi-transparent, white layer over the entire sky, and a rebuilding of the cloud forms in grey monochrome, with final blue tinting overlays. The whole thing, frankly, turned into both a bit of a slog, and a race to get the damned thing finished in time to be dry enough for the show.

I think it's turned out all right though, and there's a nice soft glow to the sky, but a special mention has to go to the cows. There are sixteen full cows here – seventeen if you count the half-obscured one fifth from the left. Drawing cows that look like cows – and not like horses or pigs – is tricky at this scale, and I think I've done quite well here.

This painting was actually finished on the 27th September but I've deliberately delayed posting this blogpost in order to include some post-production, pre-delivery stuff. The most important of which was the varnishing.

This was somewhat fraught due to the fact that my preferred finish turned out to be unobtainable in the uk. All Winsor & Newton's production is done in France now, so I presume there's a container full of W et N's Professional Satin Varnish Spray just sitting in a lorry park somewhere. I managed to stumble – in rising cold panic – through a series of sprayed and brushed-on gloss varnishes, finishing with a couple of light modifying layers of an unknown brand satin spray. The finishes aren't too bad I think, with only a minimum of cat hair in the brushed-on layer, and you would never know that I had managed to scratch (stray fingernail), and then fix, two of the paintings in the process. Not saying which ones.

Pre-show tension is a strange phenomenon, and this time it manifested itself in my being locked into two random previously-unknown songs - Richard Thompson's 'I misunderstood', heard on the radio, and Brandi Carlile's 'The Story' off the telly. I simply couldn't get them out of my head – especially the latter, which I actually dreamt about after the first hearing. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened – prior to the show two years ago I had a trapped song fragment going around my brain. I hadn't a clue as to what it was or where it had come from – I still don't - it just filled my head. At least I could identify these two, and they were actually pretty good. Which was some relief, and make of that what you will.

Anyway, all the paintings ended up safely wrapped (only just - the very last bit of my roll of bubblepack, right down to the cardboard core, was exactly enough for the last two small pieces!), and we carefully taxied them down to the gallery. The day after that my watch stopped, the battery run down. Phew.

So, as if any regular readers needed reminding, the show is at the Open Eye Gallery, on the corner of Abercrombie Place and Dundas Street, Edinburgh, until 4pm Saturday 20th November, and is on-line here. Those wanting to visit should be aware that numbers within the gallery are currently restricted to between eight and fifteen, and face masks must be worn.

Madam and I just back from having a sneaky look today. They've done a smashing job hanging it, the show looks great, and it's been boosted with just a couple paintings from the last show. Which is fine, they deserve a second shot

If you're coming along, my show is in the room on the right as you go in, but make sure you take in Tom Mabon and Paul Barnes' work while you're there.

 

Ruigendijk

oil on card 32x20cm

There is some music for this - it's Glenn Gould playing JS Bach's Goldberg Variations. I hadn't played it for a while, but I put it on while laying down the initial placings. I listened to it a few more times during subsequent work sessions, and my last touches on this painting were placed just as the final Aria repeat finished. Which was very affecting.

The source images for this little painting – via google streetview – are from a short stretch of road called Ruigendijk on the island of Texel, off the Netherlands coast. I'd played around with this sky and location years ago, but this time finally got around to making something worthwhile. The sky is virtually unchanged – just the small top right cumulus shifted left a bit - but the landscape uses features from several viewpoints, copied and pasted, flipped and stitched, and generally juggled about to make something that works.

This is definitely a painting of two halves. In the sky, the paint is soft, and finely faded and blurred. On the landscape it's much more energetic (for me!), and the brush marks, streaks, and scratches are largely left alone to do their thing - I think I was trying to convey the energy of the wind coming in across the North Sea. While this one didn't quite paint itself, it was very compliant indeed, and I think I'm quite pleased with how it went.

A little more about the Goldberg variations. They were commissioned by an insomniac Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, and were written for his harpsichordist – Goldberg - to play when the gentleman couldn't sleep. The whole story is best read here. I have to say that they suit the piano a lot more than their original instrument. I'm sure that Herr Bach would have used the piano had he been able, but unfortunately he had yet to see and play one. Glenn Gould recorded these variations twice – in 1955 and 1981. This is the second, magnificent, 1981 recording. If you can hear humming, it's Gould himself – he had a compulsion to hum along, and no engineer was successful in blocking that out. It's about fifty or so minutes long, and is basically thirty very different treatments of the opening theme. It's worth listening to in full at some point, though preferably not on scratchy vinyl interrupted by the odd youtube advert. I'm pretty sure this recording is on Spotify and Amazon etc.

Finally, exhibition news. The last panel painting has just been finished, so now it's make sure, or rather hope, that everything's dry enough to varnish a week or so before they leave the house for the gallery. The exhibition goes 'public' on Saturday the 30th October, till the close of Saturday 20th November. It's already up on the 'Exhibitions' page now – with fellow landscapist Tom Mabon. There won't be a formal all-comers Preview – with wine and much back-slapping (or should that be the other way around?) - but I'll try to make a point of being about the gallery on the Saturday, or in the 'New Town Fox' eatery across the road - nice cake there if I remember rightly. Again, the show will be at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, and here's their website with all the details you might need.

Oh, and if you're coming along, remember to bring a face covering...

 

Zaytsevo

oil on card 30x20cm

That's the first of the last three pieces for the fast-approaching exhibition done. It was finished last week as it happens, but as blog posts are second priority at the moment I've left writing it till just now while the surfaces on the other two are settling.

The source image for this piece is of, course, from google streetview. It's just outside Zaytsevo - a tiny village at the end of a bus route - in western Russia. There has been much alteration and divergence away from the original source. I've levelled the valley, removed the road, shuffled the trees around, and given the landscape a completely different sky. What looks here like a solid clump of trees is in fact the front end of quite an elongated wood. I suspect that there's a spring in the middle there somewhere, possibly even a small pond. Further away in the distance, there are pale circles in the ground which I first assumed were exposed soil or sand. Surprisingly, they're actually round patches of a different grass. I can't imagine how that came about.

I'm very happy with the blue of the sky in this one – a first thin layer of Ultramarine and Prussian Blue, then a faded layer of Ultramarine with a touch of Paynes Grey towards the top. I'm still a bit hesitant about cirrus clouds, I should probably try to be a bit more relaxed about them, and enjoy them more. Cirrus clouds remind me of some of the marks made by professional decorators when graining and marbling. I did quite a bit of that when in the antique trade – making sometimes quite sweeping marks with ragged brushes and torn cardboard edges. The really good stuff is done using goose or swan feathers, but I never got the hang of that.

I was quite good at painting rosewood and satinwood though – just as well, because as the Edinburgh New Town developed, a lot of Georgian and Regency furnishings suddenly had to be built to fill it, and, centuries later, I had to fix and refinish quite a lot of them. Not everyone then could afford actual rosewood or satinwood (the trendiest timbers of the period), so the doors, panels, and chairs etc were made of pine, beech, or birch, then painted to resemble the classy stuff. Grained and painted furniture became quite a trendy thing across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and again in the 1980's (luckily for me). When the Director of the Scottish National Gallery re-fitted the Gallery with antique furniture he bought a fair few pieces from a dealer I did a lot of work for, and some of those console tables and chairs in there were restored and finished by yours truly.

That little tangent apart, this piece generally went quite well but had a rather frantic last session – a final blue tint glaze over the foreground went on too heavily, and I had to frantically take it off with paper towel and clean soft brushes. Luckily, I got most of it off while not removing too much of the lower layers. Phew...

Right, exhibition update. The show opens to the public on Saturday 30th October till Saturday 20th November. I'm not up on the gallery future show list yet, but best keep an eye on the Open Eye Gallery website for developments. More news next blogpost...

 

Window Work – August 2021

 

watercolour and pencil

Window Work again I'm afraid, though for a good reason. More about that further down

Meanwhile, here we are with some live fast drawings. Despite my dip in success rate recently, I think a couple of these are quite good. I particulary like the pencil sketch of the old chap under the umbrella and his hatched tonal indications. I quite like the sheer economy of the marks in the very foreshortened person seen from above – there's just enough to let you know what's going on.

I'm breaking my pattern of work for the next couple of months. Instead of working towards having a finished piece each month, I'm aiming to have the three I'm currently working on finished by the beginning, or middle at the latest, of October. The reason is that I've got a show opening at the end of October for November - at the Open Eye Gallery, in Dundas Street in Edinburgh. That's the same gallery where the last one was in September 2019. I don't want to rush these three at this point – it would be much wiser to get them done well together, rather than finished serially just for the sake of a self-imposed arbitrary timetable.

I'll give out more details about the show in the next blogpost. It looks like the Covid is on the prowl again in Scotland just now, and there is a possibility (remote as I write, but these things can change quickly) that some restrictions could be re-imposed, and that could impact on how to visit the gallery to see the show.

Fingers crossed for a live – and unrestricted – exhibition...

Plantations - Gala Water

oil on card 31x20cm

There's a music track to go with this - Return 2 (song). It's quite a repetitive trancey piece, but if you get it going just now I'll come back to the why later. Meantime, this painting's image source was a photo I took a few years ago while on the Borders Railway, which runs alongside the main road through the Gala Water valley to Galashiels. The precise viewpoint is not far south of the Heriot A7/B709 junction, a few miles into the Southern Uplands, almost here.

The initial composition was put together very fast, which led to several problems I should have worked out before starting. It was originally all about the interesting shapes of the fir plantations within the valley, but I misinterpreted my single photograph, and began pursueing a series of rather panicky solutions in trying to fix it. Helpfully, there were some streetview sources very close to where the original photo was taken, which presented more information and some new options. Deciding not to slice a couple of centimetres off the bottom edge of the picture, I shifted the foreground grass-line and shrubs up a centimetre or so to flatten the problematic middle distance area in front of the trees and the valley. I had by now lost control of the tones and was become a little desperate. After a good long sit-down and think, my decisive remedy was to darken the entire landscape with a neutral Ultramarine/Raw Umber glaze, and it was at this point (I was playing some of Richter's hypnotic epic 'Sleep') that 'Return 2' began. As the landscape fell under shadow, the sky above it began to glow and open up; the blue became more intense, the clouds became animated, and the unhappy painting began to breathe easier and nodded me towards an alternative conclusion. The sky – that just happened to be there at the time – presented itself as the interesting thing, and the new overall darker tone let me get away with a much more two-dimensional landscape. Bacon gratefully saved, or at least not gone to waste. (And having said all that, there's some quite effective scratched paint in the foreground grass line)

Thinking about it now from the safety of having finished it, if I was to do this piece again (I won't), I would probably have kept the same proportions, but would have stretched the landscape down to deepen the 'bowl' of the valley, and steepen the curve of the wood that describes it; an easy thing to do in photoshop. That may have made the near grass line (with its quite effective scratched paintwork) and shrubs unnecessary. Maybe not, but at least I would've tried it out first before committing to it. I might even have realised how potent the sky was right at the beginning.

As my art teacher at school, Mr Knight, told me several times - 'Work an idea out to destruction or until it doesn't work, then do what worked just before that'.

Hmm. Flippin' know-it-all art teachers. Never there when you need them.

Now, some interesting stuff. The Borders Railway runs from Edinburgh to Galashiels, with a slightly anti-climactic terminus at Tweedbank. It was one of the swathe of railway lines culled in the late 1960s, but was rebuilt by the Scottish Government after a long campaign. When it opened in 2015 its popularity was found to have been somewhat underestimated – it is single track for a lot of its length and is usually quite full. It's also a pity that it didn't quite make it the two miles further to Melrose - an already developed tourist town with a fine abbey (ruins, unfortunately, like the other Border Abbeys, but that's another story). Once you're out of the Lothian ex-mining towns – Newtongrange, Gorebridge – the line rises into the hills proper, where it's flanked by medieval castles. The train crosses and re-crosses the river and road going south, the turns and valley sides getting tighter and steeper as the line approaches Galashiels. There are, apparently, plans to extend the line to Melrose proper, and eventually to Hawick, and thence to join the main West Coast line at Carlisle. Something very much to look forward to.

I just hope they work it all out properly before building it...

 

Six Geese – Krasny

oil on panel 91x61cm

There is most definitely music to go with this - a short but exquisite little piano prelude by Scriabin.

The location of the source image for the painting is a small village strung-out over a mile or so called Krasny, about 35 miles south-west of Rostov-on-Don, in Southern Russia. It's a calm and serene evening in September, and the geese are wandering back in from the fields. The main village is further along the road towards the sun, where other flocks of geese have gathered and some family's cow is wandering about. It's quite the Arcadian rural idyll. The painting is, of course, about the contrast between a beautiful setting and a nastiness within it.

Compositionally, it's fairly simple, and is little changed from the source image. I've replaced the telephone pole with a figure, and have juggled the geese a bit (one was a hen facing the wrong way, and that would never do!). Otherwise it's a straight transcription of the source. The light was a big attraction: the low sunlight is just catching the trees, and the geese are walking directly into it. It's a very useful device to channel the eye's sweep across the picture, and I quite like the geese being at the intersection of the crop marks and the direction of light.

Hopefully the eye explores the landscape and birds before it settles on the figure. I've tried to blurr him a bit into the grass and shadow, except where he has a hard edge against some lighter grass beyond. The figure is based on a posed photo I took of myself. I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable conducting google image searches for bodies - it's a miserable thing to be doing. The human elements are very important when I include them in a painting, and if it's possible for me to model them myself, I'd much prefer to do that where I can.

As usual this piece was built up with oil layers – mostly fairly transparent – over thin monochrome acrylic drawing, so the final tones were 'arrived at' rather than fixed at the beginning. Apart from in the sky, any paleness in colour is most likely due to the white primer shining through the paint, as in watercolour. The sky fades were done with several wet-on-dry layers, as opposed to a single blended wet-into-wet layer. The pale yellow and pink layers being applied in turn onto the blue with a wide mottler brush, then beaten and faded upwards with my 75mm Big Badger Blender Brush. I have my eye on an even bigger 100mm one, which should make larger and softer fades like these a lot easier and smoother.

Apart from a bad lapse of judgement with a furious orange glaze (Indian Yellow and Transparent Oxide Red) over the central field which caused severe palpitations when I saw it the next morning, the painting of this piece went fairly smoothly.

Despite the composition being relatively simple, there are some bits of painting that I'm quite chuffed with – the sky transitions, the light through the near edge of the wood and the landscape beyond, and the controlled curve of the wood coming over and down the left ridge. There are some effective bits of transparent paint where the grass is backlit – notably just above and to the left of the figure. They are a nice contrast to the more opaque bits of paint on the left where the Sun catches the slope, and the crops around the geese.

Returning, finally, to the village, and its name. Krasny красный – is a very interesting word in the Russian language. It means 'red', but has other very positive associations. It is the root of красивый 'beautiful', and прекрасный – 'wonderful'. A beautiful girl is a красавица. It's also used in describing the special corner – krasny ugol красный угол – where holy icons are traditionally placed. Not that much of a surprise, then, that the 1917 Revolution became so deeply rooted in Russia when its imagery was all about 'Red'.

I noted earlier how quiet and idyllic the scene is. Now, if you go back to the source image in streetview, and turn your viewpoint around to look behind you, you can meet some of the villagers...

 

Luminous Cumulonimbus

 

oil on card 30x20cm

The main subject here is, of course, the sky. It's sourced from a photograph taken a few years ago, looking north from the National Museum of Scotland's rooftop terrace. There were waves of heavy Cumulonimbus shower clouds passing over all day, and it was worth shifting myself to a good vantage point to get some useful reference images.

Most of them were more bulky than towering, and had extraordinarily soft and 'hairy' cirrus upper levels. There were also clusters of smaller cumulus forming at their bases - which is unusual – and the one in the painting had an intense white light bouncing out of its core. I didn't want to include the city skyline, though, so I needed to find an alternative landscape. A particular vista looking north in Perthshire came to mind, and - being too lazy to find that set of photos – I took the dramatic version on offer at google streetview and ran with it.

Inspired by the streetview image, I planned and carried out an interesting experiment. After the usual thin acrylic underdrawing, I put an Indian Yellow oil paint wash onto the sunlit foreground – a transparent 'stain' over the acrylic and the primer. The idea was that this would show through subsequent layers, and mark a difference between the sunlit/non-sunlit areas. Unfortunately, I then had to put a lot of effort into dulling that yellow foreground down as it was pulling the eye away from the clouds. It was an interesting experiment, though, and while maybe not the best idea for this painting, might well prove a useful technique for something more suitable.

That wasn't the only thing that went wrong (sometimes a painting will paint itself, and sometimes they resist. This one was definitely one of the latter). When cleaning off some excess blue on the clouds – a pretty straightforward action on a firm surface - some of the cloudwork got cleaned off too, right down to the primer. I had to build up the surface again, which was very annoying, and so was definitely a Bad Thing, and meant that the painting took longer than it should've done.

Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and that delay meant that my order for M.Graham's Titanium White arrived just in time for me to use it for the final highlights. Unlike most paint producers, who grind their pigments in linseed oil, this American company grinds all of their colours in walnut oil. I generally find Titanium Whites rather greasy and unappealling, but the walnut oil gives this one a lovely soft and mobile feel. It may dry a bit more slowly than the linseed stuff, but there are mediums and driers which can accelerate the drying/curing process if necessary, and this walnut-based white won't yellow as much as a linseed one. This could be quite a good find, and it's not a daft price either.

It's May now, getting on for proper summer, and - fingers crossed very firmly - it looks like the Covid emergency might be slackening off here. Madam and I have both had two jabs, and are in our post-vaccination resistance-building period. The Museum is open again for pre-booked timed slots, and with a bit of luck it'll soon be OK to turn up and ascend to the NMS rooftop terrace spontaneously, without having to pre-arrange a visit.

As I say, fingers crossed...

Window Work - April 2021

watercolour and pencil

There's nothing finished in time for the end of the month, so I'm resorting to Window Work for this month's post.

The last 'Window Work' stop-gap was back in June last year, so I'm not that unhappy about the regularity of production of the easel pieces. The quality of the window sketches had dropped a bit in the meantime, improving slightly over the last couple of months with a return to using mostly pencil. As ever, the sketches presented are by far and away the very best examples - most of the rest are, shall we say, 'not so good'.

As ever, the subjects are just passers-by as observed while sitting (with a cup of tea and a 30-minute radio programme) looking up the road through the window. The postman – on the far right – is a regular subject, but he shifts very fast indeed. The dogs are difficult because I have no great familiarity with their forms, and I need a lot of 'seeing' to get an idea of how they work.

Of these drawings, I quite like the efficiency of the grumpy girl on the left - there's a feeling of her weight and 'slump' - but my favourite of this selection is the light and jittery pencil sketch of the girl with her dog. It's very energetic, with just enough information to let us 'join the dots' about what's happening.

Meanwhile the easel work grinds on, and I'll hopefully have some more complex pieces to present in May and the coming months.

I should just like to point out that our regular postie has never - to my knowledge - had any problems with dogs. Not on this street anyway...

 

Thorney Hill – East of Auchterarder

 

oil on card 30x20cm

Another sky painting, the source image for which was a forgotten snap taken a few years ago. We'd driven up to Auchterarder to see a friend's exhibition, and decided to come back the pretty way through the Ochil Hills. We had stopped to snap some clouds to the north-east, but turning to get back in the car I saw this view and a much, much, more interesting sky. Thorney Hill is the small hill to the right-of-centre.

I've disappeared the central farm, lowered the wooded hill and slopes on the left, and covered the road with some fields and lines of bushes from somewhere else (not sure where).

After the drawing and acrylic wash stages, the paintwork - very thin - is mostly stippled directly on to the surface, or brushed on, then stippled out with very soft nylon brushes. The reason for that is some Bad Priming; I'd carelessly left some quite large vertical brushmarks in it. They're not exactly trenches, but they were deep enough to gather too much paint when blending laterally with a fan brush. The perpendicular stippling lays the paint more evenly in these 'gullies'. What 'streaking' there is in the clouds is more visible in the photo image, but in real life the sky is quite pleasantly ill-defined and 'gauzey' (honest!). I think it's turned out OK.

I've not much more to add about the painting itself, but I wish I had known at the time of putting this one together what else there was in the landscape. Just the other week I was following an internet rabbit-hole about brochs. These are large dry-stone built Iron Age towers – largely ruined and dismantled – with chambered walls, which I had thought were limited to the very north of Scotland. I was surprised to find that their distribution was a lot wider and a lot further south than that, and the remains of one is on top of a hill just off the left edge of the picture - called Castle Craig. I'm fairly sure that I would have made something of it if I'd known it was there, but even knowing that it's there is a bit of a thrill.

I also wish I'd known that there are a couple more in the Lammermuir Hills, within cycling range of Edinburgh, and a well-researched broch complex (Edin's Hall Broch) just a few miles north of Duns, in the Borders.

Pretty sure that I'd be planning to go and have a look if my knees were still trustworthy, but again, just knowing they're there is a bit of a thrill.

Lantabat - Summer 2020

oil on panel 61x51cm

There is some music to go with this - Radiohead's 'Daydreaming', from ' A Moon-shaped Pool'. It gives me the impression of the bright light I was aiming for in the painting, but with some pain at the centre.

The source image – found while roaming through Google Streetview - is in Southern France, near a town called Lantabat in the Pyrenean foothills.

The composition is virtually unchanged from the source, though the darker tones have been lightened. In retrospect I wish that I hadn't just accepted the upper clouds – they were almost entirely burnt-out to white, so I had to extrapolate their 'stringyness' and internal workings after studying loads of photos I took of similar cloud forms in the park up the road.

Technique-wise, everything was set in place with pencil, then the forms were developed with thin acrylic before moving onto oil layers – some of this acrylic underdrawing is still usefully showing through in the central tree group's foliage. There's quite a bit of the 'White Highlights + Glazes' technique in the ferns and foreground going into the shadows, and in the central tree group and the backlit vegetation beneath it. The figure was basically painted in monochrome, then coloured – some of it quite subtley – with transparent layers and veils (the figure is me, by the way, but not a self-portrait. I couldn't find any figures in photos or on the internet that fitted, so I had to model for myself while Madam clicked the shutter).

The middle and far landscape elements really painted themselves (nice stuff at the left going back to the horizon), but I struggled with the sky. I felt that it had to be settled and finished before developing the near central trees, which, frankly, were a waking nightmare of trying to work out what was going on and how they worked. That exercise – quite late on the painting - nicely demonstrated the perils of trying to describe three-dimensional objects from a less-than-perfect two-dimensional source.

Taking the piece as a whole, there's a healthy variation of marks here – all fairly thin paint of course, but exploring a textural range from softly blurred and faded to sharp-edged and textural. I like the overall light, and am quite chuffed with the painting of the figure – it conveys a lot with very little information.

A painting can be about more than just marks though. This is a (hopefully) beautiful landscape with a dark thing in it, but I think it's also about looking how a 'low' – a feeling of depression or negativity – can isolate a person from their surroundings. Last year's summer – dominated by the Covid pandemic - was all about uncertainty and isolation, and I don't think it's a surpise that a little of that has seeped into this painting. The figure is deliberately open to interpretation – he could be asleep, ill, dead, or just hiding himself away, and there's no narrative present to guide the viewer. Personally, I think the figure is turned in on himself, huddled away from the light, and limp, and passive. It makes me think of someone who is experiencing despair, and a lack of hope.

I confess that I did get into a bit of a 'low' towards the end of last year. I found it very difficult to work and summon up any interest in getting ideas sorted. Having to get work finished for this blog was really the thing that got me to the easel, and I can't pretend that working at this and other pieces hasn't been a slog. So, I'm very relieved that this has turned out well. I think Madam is as well – she wants to keep it, and doesn't want it to be sold.

And finally, for anyone following the Great Shishkin/Levitan debate – and who isn't in these febrile times – I think this painting's treatment of foliage and landscape tends towards the more detailed Ivan Shishkin camp, though I think I could have done with more of Izaac Levitan's seemingly effortless simplification of forms, especially in that damned, and double-damned, foliage.

On to the next one then - more on Mr Levitan's side of the road with a bit of luck...

 

Three Islands - Cumulus

oil on card 30x25cm

This is the first piece finished this year, sourced from a photo I took from Blackford Hill, looking northwards across the Firth of Forth to Fife.

There is a very short, light, ambient track to go with it – Max Richter's 'Time Piece'. It floats in the way I wanted the big cumulus to.

This little painting is all about that big cloud, of course, with only very basic compositional input from the earthbound elements. The water, a much wider expanse than in real life, was photoshopped in from another photo during the composition stage – superimposed over the unwanted bits of Edinburgh that were in the Blackford Hill picture.

Technique-wise, it's worth noting that the blue in the sky and the distant haze is straight Indanthrene Blue with Zinc White. This pigment is known under various names, e.g. 'Anthraquinone' and 'Delft' blues, but its pigment code is always PB60. I've seen it referred to as 'Indie Blue', so that'll do for me. I actually bought this tube a few years ago, but hadn't really bothered with it until now. It's a very transparent pigment – great for glazes – and on the palette is as dark as Prussian Blue, but it doesn't have that pigment's strange blackness. To my eyes it's slightly less violet than Ultramarine and doesn't have the malevolent aggression of Pthalo, so it turned out just right for the pure blue of this sky. Its one drawback is that it's a series four colour, so on the pricey side, but a little does seem to go a long way.

While I'm still talking technical, I feel I have to roll back a bit on my previous enthusiastic advocacy for caran d'ache crayons in underdrawing. In this piece they were fine for placing the cloud forms – where the next layer was oil - but when I laid the thin acrylic washes over the very water-soluble crayon of the landscape, the underdrawing simply dissolved. And very efficiently too. So while I'll continue to use caran d'ache for marking out skies, it's back to the light pencil under acrylic washes for now. Sorry about that.

There are three of the many Forth islands in the picture. They're not particularly obvious, which is partly why they're in the title, so you might have to look for them. The nearest is Inchmickery. To the right of that is a lump of rock called Car Craig, and to the left, closer to the far shore, is the largest – Inchcolm. The Firth of Forth is not usually known as a theatre of war, but all of the larger islands were fortified quite heavily as part of the Rosyth naval base defences – and their anti-aircraft batteries were fired during the first air raid on Britain in 1939 (a train was crossing the Forth Rail Bridge at the time, which must have been terrifying for the passengers). Inchcolm – 'Innis Choluim', Columba's Island - is the most developed. It's a strange combination of abandoned anti-aircraft defences, and the medieval religious buildings at the sheltered bay. The island became a monastic and religious centre in the 9th century and Inchcolm Abbey itself was founded in the 13th century. It is now no longer in use and mostly a ruin, the Scottish Reformation accomplishing what multiple English raids failed to do. There are regular tourist boat trips there out of S. Queensferry. The boats' route goes by an island where there are hundreds of puffins, passes over Mortimer's Deep – a very deep channel between Inchcolm and Aberdour - and as the boat returns to the south shore of the Forth, you'll get your second chance to gawp at the two magnificent Road Bridges while staring up at the Rail Bridge as you pass under it.

And if you've of heard of Aberdour, but are not quite sure why, it may be that you heard from the final verse of 'Sir Patrick Spens'...

'Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
Tis fiftie fathom deip,

And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,

The Scots lords at his feit.

(Anon)