Window Work - June 2026

watercolour

It's been a while since the last Window Work post, but I'm still hanging on doing them. Maybe not as intensely as before but it is still an ongoing practice.

There seems to be a lot of dogs in this one. There's no real reason for that – I don't think there's been an increase in the dog population or number of owners round here recently, but they've just come across as being a bit more exciting to 'catch' than people trudging up and down the street. They're (the humans as well) all in the usual Paynes Grey watercolour – I'm not sure that'll ever change – and I'm still using the Pentel Aquash I was using in the last 'Window Work' back in September last year.

It's always interesting when preparing these Window Work posts. There are sheets and sheets of these – all A4 copy paper (100gm Premium here) – and as a mass, these sketches blur into mostly not very good, a bit rubbish, and downright awful. Very few jump out as good or useful at the time. However, when the most promising are selected and assembled together – away from the herd – they can reinforce each other, and bring each other 'up' a bit. Which is interesting. Over the decades I must have spent thousands of hours doing these – beginning with sketchbook window drawings from the family home in the mid 1970's. After returning to painting (and drawing - difficult!) in the late 2000s, I picked up the habit again. At some point I started numbering these sheets, and the most recent of the drawings above are the bloke with the milk cartons and the lower right dog (sheets 1147 and 1146 respectively. Sheet 1148 is on the go but still to be filled (not looking great, by the way). Unfortunately, when I began numbering them (forgotten why) it never occurred to me to date them, so I can really only track time passing by what seasonal attire these myriads of unwitting models have on them while they pass by. It doesn't really matter though, as the whole exercise is about practice and keeping the Eye – Brain – Hand link greased.

Now, I have some news to share. I've just taken work down to the Open Eye gallery for a 'showcase' show; a smaller event rather than a big roomful of paintings. These are mostly small pieces (click here) done over the last few years that haven't been shown live on the wall before. The main event is a whole barrage of John Bellany's work, and there are ceramics by Pauline Cumming, and furniture by Tim Stead. I think it will be a very interesting ensemble, and it might be worth a look, and even a pop-in, if you happen to be in Edinburgh between 27th June and 18th July.

And having said all that and delivered my message, I'd like to say that I really quite like the very minimalist and blobby dog second from the lower left...

 

Snowy Wood - Saskatchewan

oil on card 21x15cm

I don't usually attempt snow landscapes, but this struck me as an unusual setting. It's an enclosed wood in the middle of the vast Canadian prairies - between Glenavon and Peebles, in Saskatchewan. Courtesy of Google Streetview (obvs).

The source image tells me this is October, and it was taken perhaps just after the first icy blast of winter howled down from the Arctic. There are still – barely – some autumn leaves on the trees, and the recent gale has flattened the grass and brought the first snow. There's no music track for this - but shiver if you like.

This was the first outing for my new projector. I'd come to dread the setting-out phase of a new painting. My compositions are usually very tightly composed and tested on the computer, and the transfer to the primed surface is often a dry, technical, and very lengthy process, before the fun bit of getting messily analogue. It would normally have taken the best part of two frustrating sessions, constantly correcting and re-correcting, to draw this out with the desired accuracy. With the projector mounted on my camera tripod behind me, I spent about an hour and a half experimenting and mucking about to get the projection properly lined up. It then took only about 45 minutes to place the main shapes, some details, and a few initial tonal indications. Before lunch. Wow.

Clumps of trees in this area usually shelter a farmstead, but as far as I can see this one just has an open byre and a couple of dilapidated sheds, and is populated by a mixed herd of cattle. It was the cows and their colours in the frosty landscape that initially interested me, and this group of trees was introduced very much as a backdrop to them. But sometimes the painting itself demands a change of direction.

Off to a flying start, I thought I was odds-on to finish quickly – in time for this piece to be ready for the Open Eye Small Scales show - but this started to go awry quite soon. I had placed two cattle near the centre – a brown Ayrshire and a black Frisian – and I very soon ran up against the difficulty of painting tiny mottled cows at this scale. My textures in the trees and ground were unconvincing, the paintwork was wan and shallow, and I wasn't achieving the complexity within the main clump of trees that I was aiming for.

I concluded that what I had done so far simply didn't work, and that it was neither good enough nor ready enough for public view. I decided to abandon my timetable, and to leave the painting alone to settle over Xmas, then play with it – and treat it as an experimental exercise. I also decided to recommence painting while seated instead of standing. Sitting at my small portable easel - in front of the Big Easel and under its lights - meant that I didn't have to put up with the tiredness and ache in my back, and that I didn't have to worry about my knees. Even better, I found that I could work no problem for hours on end. Which I have to say was so, so, comfortable.

Beginning this second pass, the first thing I did was to eradicate the awkward cows, and then concentrated on building the textures and layers in the trees. I simplified a lot of the goings-on in the main wood's interior, and thickened it with thin Mars Black mixes. The upper textures were mostly constructed with tiny looping marks made with very small brushes (I discovered a very nice small pointed round brush series which has quite a firm belly, but a very flexible tip). The snowy grass is very much built on the rather crudely scratched-out marks of the first phase, and in the absence of the now pointless cows the orangey browns of the dried grasses became more of a feature. Back on the computer, I toyed with placing a single dark red cow (a Lincoln) in the scene somewhere, but it seemed unnecessary at that point so didn't pursue it (the nice dark red in amongst the greys worked very well though).

With only a few things left to do, I came through one morning to find that the larger panel painting on the Big Easel had fallen off it, and was resting on a soft bag of un-taken-out rubbish. It was (miraculously - I'm not kidding) only very slightly marked, as was this piece - which the larger panel had somehow glanced on its way to the floor. The repair – touching out a narrow faint band of tiny pale scratches on the darks of the trees - took less than an hour, which was a great relief. Very lucky.

Even though this is a very small painting, I've got quite a lot out of it. The discarding of a bad idea and the subsequent adaptions, the relaxed working through of the textures - or not - of the paintwork (the very plain sky v the density of the main wood) were good positive decisions. Oh, and I discovered the trick of saving photoshop files so that they present on other systems as richly as they do while still in photoshop – which had bothered me a lot (File/Export/Saved for Web(Legacy), and check 'Convert to sRGB'). Really wish I known that a long time ago.

Altogether, this has been a successful, if eventful, little project - especially in realising along the way that where it is possible, it is so very much more comfortable and productive to paint sitting down.

And that sometimes, no cows in the wood are better than two.