It's Small Scale time again – I've started a bit earlier this year just in time for the Open Eye Gallery invitation.
There is a track to go with this – 'Song', from Max Richter's 'Songs from Before'. I went back to listening to Richter's early stuff again for this piece – for me, it's much more 'small scale' and calming than his later output.
The source for this little painting is from a google streetview image recorded in July 2021. I found it about a year later, but hadn't done anything with it until now. The camera is looking north on a windy morning in Southeastern Ukraine.
In the original image the two trees are closer – nearly touching – but I felt that was a bit too Sistine Chapel, so shifted them apart a little. The bleeding of the blue sky into the small tree was an attractive artefact of the photograph, so it stayed - it felt as though the wind was somehow driving the blue across the trees. My original bands of soil and yellowed grass in the field were reappraised, and then overpainted – the plain green maybe lets everything else breathe a bit more.
I spent far too long trying to get the fine colours and tones of the sky right in the opening sessions. So much so that I got fed up with it, and let it go in order to move on and develop the landscape. This may not have seemed a sensible thing to do at the time, but as it turned out, that was quite a good move.
The drawing of the small tree was tricky – the leaves had to be fairly precise and defined but light and quick enough to convey the force of the wind. A little wipe of the brush on a smear of walnut oil helped a lot with paint's 'quickness' and mobility.
Having finished the landscape and foreground, I was still dissatisfied with the sky – it was far too dull and chalky. I was forced to return to it, but by this time a final glaze was really the only option. Doing a bit of thinking, I dug out an experiment that I'd performed years ago - smearing samples of all my whites at the time onto a piece of black plastic to see how they worked against a dark background. Interestingly, the Winsor & Newton Transparent Titanium White (never really used) thinned out to a definite blue - an optical effect to do with the fineness of the pigment particles apparently. Using that as my white, with Ultramarine and Pthalo Blue (red shade), the resulting scumble glaze is very intense, more so to my eyes than if I'd used Zinc White (which went grey in the test). It was finely 'printed' onto the surface with a small cloth pad – which allows very fine gradations - and wiped off and/or touched onto the trees with a small brush. In case you're still wondering, I used a heavy Stand Oil / Damar varnish medium again, but with a lot less driers this time.
Anyway, that 'transparent' white now seems to be unavailable on Winsor et Newton, but it appears that Herr Schmincke makes something similar that looks the business. A 'Hurrah' for Schmincke, then, but muted and qualified as I haven't tested it yet.
Looking back, this took far too long, and there was a danger of it ending up a detailed miniature, rather than a small painting. I wish I'd done the field a little more carefully, but it'll do, and the next time I use masking tape along a horizon I'll make sure I level the resulting ridge of paint (it runs across the left tree and is more disruptive than I'm happy with). Got it all done though, and the final glaze sorted out the sky and pulled it all together like the cavalry galloping in to the rescue. (Cue bugle)
I didn't notice it at the time, but the location is not far out along the road running westward from Mariupol. It is the main highway along the coast linking Eastern Ukraine with the Crimea, and is of course now under Russian occupation. It has been a battlefield in the past couple of years – the google Satellite view images, dated 2024, show shell craters and tank tracks in the field beyond the trees. Staying in the google 'bird's eye', and following the road eastwards into and through the devastated city, you eventually reach the bombed and shelled theatre in the centre. There, on the square in front of it, it's possible to see where the people sheltering inside the theatre during the battle wrote the word 'ДЕТИ' (deti – children) to prevent attacks.
The road is named Проспект Миру - Prospekt Miru. It means 'Avenue of Peace '.
And there's really nothing more anyone can say about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment