Pobedino

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second of the four 'Small Scale' paintings to be posted. The location is near a village called Pobedino - in the Russian Kaliningrad enclave, just to the east of the Russo-Lithuanian border - and is all about the sky. Of course.

It's done to the usual basic drawing, acrylic wash, then oil paint system, but this time with a small tweak - I used a pale blue Caran d'ache crayon for marking out the clouds. Any crayon that is visible through the oil layers blends in a lot better than a pencil mark would, and will be embedded within the paint a lot more securely than graphite. I'd be loathe to advocate painting on top of thick blocks of crayon, but I'm fairly happy with light lines of it. Caran d'ache comes off the priming with an eraser a lot easier too – with none of graphite's greasy streaking – and if necessary it can wiped off with water.

I've always been uncomfortable about using pencil for the initial drawing and placing. A couple of my painting tutors at college had discouraged it as they were of the opinion that the graphite would seep upwards through the oil paint to appear on the surface many years later. The reason that I'm reluctant to use it is because it is a very weak and slippery material, and anything laid onto it is liable to be very easily peeled off later. When we use pencil to draw on paper and smudge it for effect, we're making very good use of graphite's loose structure, but it's usually a wise move to spray a fixative onto heavy soft pencil to 'lock' it.

Not that graphite is totally 'The Devil's Artstick' – as I've already said it's a fantastic drawing material - it's also an excellent dry lubricant, and is widely used for smoothing stiff locks and keys. Nuts & bolts, and screws, also turn better with a scrape of pencil lead, and I've sorted many a tricky zip by running an HB up and down it. In past workshop days, I used to rub a block of graphite along my wood lathe bed to ensure a smoothly gliding tailstock without it gumming up with oily dust and shavings.

I'm quite happy with this painting, despite a little mini-crisis of confidence about the cloud tones (I went with light and atmospheric rather than dark and heavy), and I'm very pleased with the soft blue I mixed for the sky layers and thin line of far horizon (Ultamarine, Zinc White, some Ultramarine Violet, and a touch of Burnt Umber, if you must know). An honourable mention has to go to the little stray puff of cumulus to the upper left – it's the best piece of cloud painting there. It was done with the least amount of effort per square inch, and I still have absolutely no idea how that comes about.

Just to end, a bit of sad news. One of our tutors from Edinburgh College of Art days – David 'Dai' Evans - died a few weeks ago. He was much-liked and respected by his students, interested in what we did, and who we were (not always the case with other tutors), and always helpful. Dai was a highly skilled and interesting painter & draughtsman whose final style was about simplicity and subtlety.

Madam bought me a 'Small Scale' painting of his a couple of years ago - a beautiful little cup and saucer still life. It's a delightful little painting, and each time I look at it, it gets better and better.

 

Bright Cumulus - Denmark

 

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first in a series of four little pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's annual 'In a Small Scale' show in the run-up to Christmas. This was the first to be composed and started, and is the first to be finished. 

Right. There is some music for this one. It's the first two pieces – 'Spring 0' and 'Spring 1' - from 'Recomposed'*, Max Richter's take on Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'. The painting is more connected with the atmosphere and thrill of 'Spring 0', but the very recogniseable 'Spring 1' kicks in fairly quickly, and really, it's too good to leave out. 

This piece is all about the light - the incandescent clouds (cumulus humilis again) floating in the glare over the pale landscape. There's been a little rearranging of the fields and disappearance of farms and buildings, and the horizon has been made to seem further away than in the google streetview source. 

As usual, the landscape forms were placed in light pencil, quickly filled with black acrylic washes, then developed fully with oil layers. The sky was done entirely in thin oil paint. 

I had hoped that perhaps this one might paint itself, but I struck a problem as soon as I laid in the first sky layer. I'd think I'd been a little too casual with my priming, and the first blue tint was patchy and uneven. Subsequent layers sorted that immediate problem out, but that meant that my 'watercolour paper white' base had gone, which was a disappointment. My acrylic washes were too dark as well - I shouldn't have used Black. Raw Umber – which I've used before - would have been much warmer and lighter, and more helpful. The deadening base worked directly against building up the landscape luminosity - the semi-transparent light colours of the fields and trees were immediately 'cooled' by the dark grey underlayer and then need to be 'warmed', which was both annoying and unnecessary. However, I'm very pleased I managed to make the clouds quite bright without clumpy great clods of white – by using a series of thin layers with firm and blurred edges. 

The whole thing did take longer than it needed to, and isn't quite the sizzling study in light that I had in my head, but it's not a bad result, though, and the music's lovely... 

* A complete re-imagining of Vivaldi's well-known work. The more original elements are played and recorded by a string orchestra, and there's then a section of electronica which draws heavily on the 'birdsong' elements and sampling. Finally there are a few even looser re-mixes. Worth a listen if you can. 

Winter Sunlit Cumulus

 

oil on card 33x20cm 

This dramatic late afternoon winter sky is sourced from a set of photos I took on Bruntsfield Links, looking north at Edinburgh Castle and the old Royal Infirmary buildings (which have all been photoshopped out). The landscape source is another view of the location used in 'Passing', turned left to right with a treeline added on the left and the feature trees removed. I just needed something interesting but not too dramatic to anchor the sky to, and picked this out from the volumes of landscape images clogging up my computer. 

Having finished the painting, it looks like a snowy landscape. The sky is deep winter – it was January – but in the landscape the trees are in full leaf. I altered the landscape colour to match the sky, and it's just 'accidentally' ended up looking wintery. I quite like the fictitious snowy mauve though. 

As is usual now, the landscape features were pencilled in, forms and tones built up with monochrome acrylic washes, then transparent and semi-transparent oil layers laid on. There's no pencil or acrylic underdrawing in the sky – the fairly accurately placed landscape features acting as a 'ruler' against which to place the cloud forms horizontally.

I'm more usually trying to find the light in a painting, but this is really more about the supporting darks, and it's a bit of a change of palette. I took a long time arriving at the right tonality, possibly because I was working the earlier stages from a lightened version of the composition so as to see the ground details more clearly. It didn't exactly help that the end-stage pink glazes took a little too long - they were made up with Indian Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, and a touch of Zinc White. These are some of the slowest pigments I have, and I neglected to add extra driers to the mix, so they took ages to dry. Cracking colour though - the Alizarin/Yellow was a combination I used a lot in my Early Phase of painting in the 70's and 80s.

As it happens, combining Yellow and Alizarin Crimson was one of the major building blocks I was given at school – I was trying to paint a fiery phoenix for some reason, and when I added white to my school-grade crimson poster-paint to make it lighter it went an uninspiring cool pink. I must have looked rather obviously at a loss, and my Art teacher, Mr Knight, popped up at my shoulder out of nowhere and suggested I ditch the white, and lighten the dark red with some yellow instead – and a very important door opened in my head.

Which is what education is all about I suppose...

Three Altocumulus

oil on card 30x22cm

The starting point for this little painting was another photo of trees snapped from a train window, possibly in West Lothian somewhere, but definitely in early May a few years ago. The sky was clear, but the clouds were clipped from a more recent photo taken out of the front window. I quite liked the combination of the turbulent dark foliage below and the stable trio of altocumulus clouds above.

Technically, I went a bit round the houses with this one. The trees and ground were pencilled lightly onto the priming, then the landscape toned in with thin black fluid acrylic. The watery acrylic provided quite a lot of useful foliage texture itself, but I took that further with fingers and thumbs into the blobs and washes. I started the oil layers with thin, even glazes - blue in the sky, and a transparent yellow-green over the landscape – the black acrylic showing through quite plainly. It was then all about pumping light into the sky, and dulling down that acid green - while making the most of the tonal drawing and texture coming through the layers. Obviously, towards the last sessions there was precious little of the finer under-texture showing through the more worked darker areas, but it does still show - with some faint pencil too - in the more lightly developed areas like the right treetops against the sky.

There was a bit of trouble with the near foliage in the lower right corner – it became too detailed and there was so much contrast within those tiny marks that I had to go over them with a thin grey to knock them back and stop them popping. There's also a bit too much cat hair in the sky for my liking as well. I try to minimise the paint-to-hair ratio by covering up the brushes when nopt in use, and making a point of not stroking the cats prior to applying glazes, but I think this problem really is at the periphery of my zone of control. On the good side though, I do like the skyline on this one, where the the trees are faded and bleached out under the bright light. I'm quite chuffed with the restraint of the brighter atmosphere at the horizon – it would have been very easy to overdo it.

To sum up, this one went quite well, and I quite enjoyed doing it. Hopefully I won't have to push future paintings to an extreme state and then rescue them, but that was actually quite an interesting round trip. I'm feeling keener about painting after a rather unmotivated spell, and Covid lockdown's gradually easing in Scotland so (fingers crossed) I'm looking forward to gadding about to see a few galleries soon. 

Oh, and my knee's just about back to normal too...

Window Work: Covid Lockdown - June 2020

watercolour

Window Work again, in unusual circumstances though. During the early part of lockdown there wasn't much activity going on outside in the street at all, just a few intrepid souls walking nervously down the street, widely avoiding other nervous walkers - but there really were a lot of seagulls.

As usual, these little sketches are in Payne's Grey watercolour, all done with a smallish Oriental brush, and I've had some fun arranging them for the final image. 

There's been some disruption to the easel work this month (nothing to do with covid). My regular work pattern was interrupted by preparing and priming some more panels, knackering my back (once) and a knee (twice), and by having to buy a new camera. The previous 'good' camera ceased functioning not long after posting last month's blogpost, and familiarising myself with the new one has necessitated a certain amount of urgent research and finding out which button does what, and why. The daily routine's back to normal now, though. Or soon will be. 

There's not much more I can say about these little drawings, except that remembering what birds look like when they're flashing through the sky can be very demanding. This selection is the best of a (very) bad hit rate over the last few months, but the few passers-by and the mask - in contrast to the raucous vigour of the local wildlife - sort of reflect how this spring has been.

Mind you, reticence has never really been a problem for the Common Gull...

Dog - Altishevo

oil on panel 60x50cm

Some paintings sweetly acquiesce to their creation. They dance with the painter, and guide and suggest where we should go. These are enjoyable experiences, and are remembered fondly. 

Not this one though. This one was a bad-tempered brawl from start to finish. If it had a soundtrack, it would be the grinding and gnashing of teeth.

The starting point for this painting is near Altishevo, a small town near Kazan. What struck me was the light, and the path between the tree masses. I thought it a very beautiful and potent setting – if a little complicated.

The eventual premise of this middle-sized piece ended up being similar to that of another painting from a few years ago – 'Moment'. They both feature a dog sensing something in the woods. I've re-used the same dog photo that I found for Moment - it's been flipped horizontally, has reverted to its original colour, and now has another dog's head, but it is essentially the same 'model'.

I think this painting and I got off to a Bad Start right from the beginning. I tried to save time by not drawing & placing everything as thoroughly as I maybe should have, and was too hesitant and timid in trying to build up the surface. I didn't arrive at workable realistic tones soon enough, and I was using too-big brushes for too long – so nothing got defined properly until some time later on, by which point I had already got mightily fed up and frustrated with it. There was confusion right to the very end about where and when to use opaque or transparent pigments and soft or hard edges; the second-last session was spent softening out a whole lot of distracting hard edges in the left trees (fine stippling with a small soft brush and sticky mixes of paint & stand oil, with added driers).

I was aware that I was having trouble simplifying the general complexity of the trees, but I also knew that, behind that, the painting lacked 'kick'. About a third-way through I realised that it was crying out for something else - a dog and/or a figure, and perhaps getting that decided a lot sooner would have helped with everything. Ninety per cent of this piece was plain hard slog, and very unrewarding to do. I'd love to blame that on the Covid Lockdown, but deep down I know full-well this difficulty was really due to me and my lack of concentration. 

While painting this was not a pleasant experience, that doesn't mean there aren't any good bits of work within it. The sky works well - and was the most efficient piece of painting. The far sunlit birches look as though they might have been quickly done too, but if fact I had about three goes at getting them to how I wanted them. In fact the whole central section – the far birches, the path through, and the red larch(?) are good bits of paint. Likewise the fir and the tree to the right are individually quite interesting. The dog's not bad either, apart from a couple of its legs, and I'm glad I decided to apply the risky blue glaze that finally pacified the whole ground area.

Years ago, my Dad - every now and again - would bemoan my tendency to over-complicate things. I actually do think my work benefits a lot from the crafty technical stuff, but in this case, he is absolutely spot on. 

Pretty sure he'd still have loved the finished painting though...

Ochils, Wheatfield, and Humilis

oil on card 32x20cm

Firstly, there's some music associated with this. I was having a lot of trouble with the initial painting stages, then at about the fifth session (of nine) I had 'Memoryhouse' on while working, and everything seemed to settle out (although the rain's got nothing to do with the painting).

The source for this little painting was another, not very recent, snap from a train – taken three-and-a-half minutes east out of Stirling station, and looking North across the Forth towards the Ochil Hills. I've edited out a lot of electricity pylons and a mushroom farm, and have completely eradicated the town of Fallin. You can see the railway line and a general view here, though the weather's not quite as nice.

Compositionally, this one started off being all about the dark central trees and the perspective rush of the yellow field and its green 'scar', but as the painting developed I became more interested in the sky and the hills. During the photoshop compositional phase, the hills were reduced in size so as not to loom - as they appeared to when the photo was cropped – but they grew in importance as the painting progressed. The problems of the later stages of the work - as the balance between the sky & distance and the near fields & trees changed - were all about how to make the foreground solidly convincing, while at the same time not distracting from the really satisfying paint of the distance & sky.

Technique-wise, I'd decided to paint this in thicker paint than usual – with no acrylic underdrawing or tonal stuff. Not sure why, perhaps just to see if I could still do it. Well, that fell at the first hurdle. After very lightly placing the main elements in pencil, and plonking in the distant darker trees, I couldn't see how I was going to get the 'aerieness' of the sky and hills in thicker opaque paint. I did manage to do the mid-distance and foreground relatively thickly (for me), and I even used striated brushwork to help with the yellow wheatfield – and this may have helped a little when it came to the subsequent thinner layers. The hills were built very simply – first the blue-grey rocky bits, then the lighter grey-green bits to fill in and cover the white priming. Finally, they had a couple of thin blue-grey scumbles evenly stippled over them, which were gently finessed off with a very soft dry brush where I wanted the nearer slopes to be clearer.

All in all it was a bit of a grind though, and I'm not at all sure that I was seeing the two foreground fields properly or understanding how they worked. But there we are.

The best bits in this one? As usual, they were the bits that were painted without fuss or strain, and in this little painting that's the sky & hills. I'm very pleased, though I say it myself, with the colour and texure of the sky; I find it very satisfying and peaceful – definitely a Good Thing in these fraught and uncertain times. 

I'm also very chuffed with the tonal restraint in the clouds. They are Cumulus Humilis, and I think they deserve to be in the title.

North of Muthill

oil on card 30x20cm

The source for this little painting was a photo I took a while ago from the bus travelling south on the A822 from Crieff, just approaching Muthill ('Mew-thill', not 'Mutt Hill'). It's difficult to say where exactly along the road the photo was taken, as the view (front seat at the top of course) was way above that of the google imaging car. This is my best guess though.

There's no meaningful music for this painting, though I did happen to be listening to these Bach Preludes and Fugues a lot while working. (Great for helping with concentration while painting, and for any stress reduction you might be in need of just now)

As ever, my snap was merely the starting point for the whole composition/painting process. It was flipped left to right, the distances exaggerrated, and a whole mass of trees on the left were vapourised to expose the uninterrupted skyline. The heavy cloud on the left was shifted in slightly, and the right foreground bent up a bit to stop the whole thing sliding away off the corner.

On the technical side, I had a little experiment in colour zoning and underpainting. 

(This bit may get a little dry – might be easier to go the 'Works in Progress 2019' page, flick through the sequence, and maybe have look at the 'info' panel there)

I wanted there to be three 'keys' of colour – landscape, blue sky, and white sky. I needed the terrain, trees, etc to be dark and muted, so they were quite finely developed with black fluid acrylic washes – to kill off the white primer and get my drawing details fixed. The sky was to be generally as light and clear as possible, but with a blue area to the left and a white/grey area to the right. So, after placng the cloud forms in faint grey oil (Paynes Grey/Zinc White), the left area had a thin, transparent, Ultramarine/Prussian Blue/Zinc White glaze. Meanwhile the forms on the right were built with the grey glaze over the white primer. These three colour 'keys' – black, blue, and white - showed through and affected subsequent semi-opaque and transparent layers of development. 

I'm very pleased with this little painting. The clarity of the blue works very well against the dull landscape colours, especially when it's looked-at in clear blue-sky daylight, and I think the sectored underpainting and base colour strategy has been very successful. I'm also quite chuffed with the efficiency of the landscape; the marks are actually fairly rough close-up, but work very well at this scale. Madam likes the tiny grey cloud in the central blue area, and I really like the changing quality of the light and colour along the horizon – in particular the blue haze behind the main tree as it fades into the grey on the right.

There was a small accident the day after I'd finished it though, and it brought me to a blind and cursing rage when it happened, but which I now think I may get away with. I had bought some big 8'x4' sheets of hardboard which had to be cut down a little for stacking. I'm crammed for workspace, so I'd moved this little gem out of the way to a much higher position on the easel. So having done my first cutting, I picked up the big sheet, raised it to carry it back into the hall, and it flopped (oh foolish thoughtless me) and a corner of it just touched – stroked - the surface of the painting. It's left a very shallow trace, almost imperceptable but for the track being matt and the surrounding surface more glossy. It's very difficult to tell just now whether there is any real damage to the tone and colour. I have decided to let the picture cure thoroughly, and then judge in a few months whether a retouch is needed. The paint surface still has more settling down to do, and then, hopefully, an overall satin varnish might lessen the visibilty of the surface damage and unify it enough to be virtually invisible. 

I know not to push my luck though - the hardboard skimmed the two more substantially painted clouds, and lifted away from the surface just as it passed over the patch of clear blue sky between them. The lightest touch there would surely have scored through to the white, and entirely ruined the painting

We'll see, but I think I may just take that fluke of serendipity, and accept it as a win...

Post Script October 2021 – I examined the surface closely again pre-varnish, and decided it didn't need any attention. It's varnished now, and looks great

Window Work – February 2020

watercolour and pencil

I don't have any finished pieces ready this month, so here's the grand standby, Window Work – my regular rapid drawing exercises of people in the street outside.

The last Window Work blog was way back in August last year, and you might expect, as I did, that I'd have had a lot of sketches to choose from. Unfortunately, I was horrified to find that my drawing had been so bad over the rest of the year that there was nothing worth posting. Perhaps I'd just been going through the motions and not really concentrating on looking. Anyway, why ever that was, these are all from the last two months, which have produced not a bad hit-rate, and a few quite effective sketches.

These are watercolour (the usual Paynes Grey) and a pencil sketch. In the latter, the loose vagueness of line works quite well to suggest that particular figure's shambling gait. 

Using watercolour, for some time I've had a little mini-crisis about what brushes to use for these exercises. I went out and bought a couple of small proper sables, which I found far too 'blobby' and difficult to control at speed, and then I had a go with some (much cheaper!) synthetics, a couple of which are quite good – they are slightly stiffer than sable and produce a very reliable and constant line. However, they don't hold and retain much paint, so when scribbling a figure and starting at the head and shoulders, I have to re-charge the brush by the time I get to the legs - see how, in the girl at the top right, the legs are a lighter tone than the upper body; the brush is almost drained. Because they don't load heavily, they're not particularly great for areas of tone either. They're fine for solid and dependable marks, though, if you've enough time, as in the upper centre-right sketch of the girl with boots and a bag.

So I went back to using Oriental brushes. I'd discovered these decades ago at college, and used them for both larger and smaller scale watercolours – and doing fast sketch-work. They have a wide but light bamboo handle, and come in combinations of different hairs. Characteristically, the hair bundle has a large belly, which holds a lot of paint, and tapers down to a very fine point (I'm sure I've written about them before). Anyway, they require a little more daring to use effectively, and care has to be taken with preparing the 'point', especially at this tiny scale, but I think most people would agree that the four figures done with my favourite Oriental brush are far more dynamic and interesting than the upper-right pair, and, like the pencil sketch, they actually do tell a truth about the subjects. I find the widely available pure white - very, very, soft - goat hair brushes quite demanding, but I have some which are made with a slightly firmer mix which seems to suit me. 

So, that's going quite well just now, and, hopefully I'll have some actual 'finished' paintings to post over the next few months. Probably of clouds.

(Note to self: Whatever brush, or paint, or pencil, is my current favourite – the really important process when drawing is Eye – Brain – Hand. In that order)

Poplars – Bridge of Allan

oil on card 30x18cm

This is a little sky painting, as usual on primed card. The source is a snap taken as my train dashed past the industrial estate in Bridge of Allan on the way back to Edinburgh – from some time ago now.

The composition is all about the flat ranks of taller trees against the horizontal cloud forms, and the dark landscape against the luminous sky. I didn't want the factory buildings (United Closures & Plastics Ltd), so I hid them behind a line of gorse and grass imported from Easter Craiglockhart Hill up the road in Edinburgh - one of the obvious advantages of using Photoshop as a compositional tool. I took the chance to make the ground level echo the slant in the clouds. The sky is very mixed - drawn-out lenticulars against the much more massive Cumulonimbus. I like the difference between these giant clouds' slightly warm 'tarry' light lower reaches (a simple thin Raw Umber glaze prior to all the blue murk below the clouds) and the clear cool light towards the tops. It's quite windy, and while I normally prefer any apparent motion to flow from left to right – as we in the west normally read – in this piece the wind is blowing from right to left. Which seems fine.

I'm pretty sure the windbreak screens in the centre and right are Poplar trees, possibly Lombardy Poplars, but possibly not. I shall have to ask my arboriculturist pals, and if they tell me I'm wrong I'll have to change the title.

A lot of the cloud seems very out of focus, which is quite good in a way, except that what I like about lenticular clouds – lense-shaped 'lentics' – is their apparent firmness and definition, and I've maybe missed out on the compositional 'bite' of the group of small lentics at left of centre. This lack of definition works for the giant Cumulonimbus though, but at some point I might actually do some lentics that really do say 'lentics'.

Technique-wise, I got going a bit faster on this – the first session started with basic masses placed with light 3H pencil, some quick tonal indications in thin fluid acrylic, and finished with the first thin oil layer in the sky and distance. From then on it was oil layers over a further nine sessions.

There's some interesting colour stuff going on in this piece. I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the distant blue was between the silhouetted tree masses, and a mysterious violet-ish colour (a Good Thing, though maybe not apparent in the image) has appeared where that distant Ultramarine horizon moves behind them. I'm really not sure what has caused it, maybe it's something to do with the Burnt Umber in the blacks against the Raw Umber in the sky, but I'm guessing here. I'm quite pleased with the texure of the foreground grasses as well – there's some quite nice 'glaze, then scrape away the lights, then glaze again etc' routine going on there which is very effective at this scale.

It feels 'better' to be back to painting for its own sake (I draw the line at saying 'relaxing', as painting is definitely NOT relaxing), without hurrying for an exhibition or closing date. As it happens, I thought I'd finished it after the ninth session, and if I'd been pushed for time, I probably would've left it at that. But, looking at it after a weekend – and after a little humming and hawing, and conducting a risk assessment consultation with Madam - I spent half-an-hour adding some thin blurry layers – blue-grey on the windbreaks, and plain grey on the left cherry tree. This shifted all the trees back from the actual surface and into the rest of the painting, and confirmed the cherry tree to be slightly closer than the others

Madam said that it really did make a difference, which is nice. I think she knew I was going to do it anyway, whatever she said. Which, I think, is probably quite true...

Mohkkejavri

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the last of the four Small Scale pieces done for the Open Eye gallery – finished on time for the end of November, but un-blogged due to my not having anything else finished to post about. I did have a mood-setter for this - the track 'One World' from John Martyn's album of the same name. Apart from his voice, it's quite a sparse and cold sound that seems to match the landscape.

The source image is taken – google Streetview of course – from the wilds of Finnmark, the most northern part of Norway. I'm pretty sure that 'Mohkkejavri' is this lake's name, but there seem to be four or five other lakes called that too, and I suspect that it may be just Finnish, or Sami, for 'Little lake' or something. The composition is a fairly straight transfer from the source, though the the foreground has had some water shifted in from along the road so that the bank is visible all the way to the right corner, and a couple of trees have been edited out. It's really all about the golden colour against the blue, and the clear low light.

As usual, the masses and forms were lightly pencilled in, then reinforced with quick-drying fluid acrylic underpainting, in Ultramarine this time. Once that first stage looked secure, the more natural colours and tones were built up in (mostly) transparent oil and varnish layers. The slightly exaggerrated orange colour is a mixture of modern transparent 'Indian Yellow' and a very fine-particled oxide red (on his company's website, Michael Harding's comments about this pigment include an amusing anecdote involving the painter Frank Auerbach). To maximise the effect of the glazing, once this piece was done I finished it with a light coat of straight gloss picture varnish to lush out the surface and make the light bounce back through the paint layers like stained glass.

I suspect this little painting could have been a bit better if I hadn't had to hurry the last stages due to the possibility of jury service (I actually did get selected and had to spend four days attending the court) but I was pleased with how the water turned out, especially the near channel. I had a couple of false starts with it – involving way too much toxic Pthalo Blue – but I managed to re-assert a sensible base colour, and then built up the depth with Ultramarine, and a final Burnt Umber and Ivory Black layer for the warm dark darks. I think the scratched-out and re-glazed near foliage is very effective, especially on the right foreground bank, and I have to admit that I'm very pleased with the single stretched-out cloud.

Well, that's all the arty excitement over for 2019. I've finally got a couple of 'normal' paintings under way, with a few more planned and ready to start once the panels are made and surfaces prepared. With a bit of luck the first one on the go, a small sky painting, should be ready early in the New Year, and that should be me back in a regular rhythm – hopefully fairly uninterrupted – for the rest of the year.

Hope you all had a good Xmas holiday, and here's wishing everybody a happy, and above all healthy, 2020

Les Fourquettes

oil on card 21x15cm

The third of the four small scale pieces. The source landscape is in France, so here is some small scale French piano I listened to while working on it - Erik Satie of course, Gnossiennes No.5. The location is near a cluster of small villages in Normandy which seems be called 'Les Fourquettes'.

This is a fairly straightforward little painting, mostly about the colour and light. It's not my usual Ultramarine/Prussian Blue colour of sky here, it's more of a greyish/lilac-ish mix using Ultramarine/Ultramarine Violet. I've slightly exaggerrated the source's 'violetness' a bit – and I suspect that the automated 'streetview' colour is more an accidental artifact and less the actual sky colour at the time – but I think it works though. My general foliage and grass colour was way too blue just before finishing, so I applied a thin Cadmium Yellow and Raw Sienna glaze (in thinned Stand Oil) touched on lightly over it. That did the trick, and also brought out some of the red-browns. I'm quite pleased with the colour on this painting, and I like the light, fuzzy, final white layer over the nearer clouds – it makes them seem brighter than they perhaps really are

As you'll have gathered, the source image is a Google streetview screenshot, from about ten years ago. When I set it up in photoshop for the required 21x15cm, I realised that the composition needed tweaking. Usually it's fairly straightforward to go back to the original location and see what can be pulled in or shifted across to solve any problems. Unfortunately, the only clues to where the original location was were the previous and following screenshots and the road number – D87. The previous screenshot (taken shortly before) was from the D126, so, having finally found the correct D87 (there's another one in the south-east France) I concentrated on where those two roads are close. After following them, and looking down on several spots that looked promising, I engaged Streetview and saw some trees that looked familiar – the stand on the left. I'd found the place! The weather and season were not the same, but luckily Google stores images from previous streetview runs, and I was able to 'go back in time' for the images I wanted. I shifted the clouds around a bit, and pulled in the trees on the right to get a better balance. So all that palaver was very much worth it, and quite rewarding.

So that's all four of the set finished, photographed, and delivered to the gallery in reasonably good time – at least the first three were – and are now up on the walls for the 'On a Small Scale' exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. I haven't started the write-up of the last one yet, but it should follow on fairly soon, later this month.

West of Lochty

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second of the four Small Scale pieces. The source is a photograph snapped through the windscreen, from the passenger seat, going westwards along the A85, just west of Lochty – about here. It's a setting I've noticed while flashing past many times, and I'm glad that I finally did something about it. This painting has a very grey and limited palette, but then Perthshire's sometimes like that.

I'd always liked this group of trees, and the slight hump in the land. So it's a pity that I had to 'evolve' them all about to make them work. I disappeared three trees altogether and expanded the more distant tree blocks coming in from the left and right. I discovered fairly soon after starting that I wasn't at all happy with the large cumulus mases either, so they got an ad hoc tweaking as well. All for the best I suppose, but that meant that - because of the various tree-fellings and subsequent overpainted corrections - this piece took a lot longer than it should have. 

Not much to say about the technique here except that I used some very careful application of methylated spirit to soften and remove the unwanted trees. Meths will destroy both dried oil and acrylic paint, so you have to be very careful not to let it sit on the surface for a moment longer than necessary. Too long and you may find that you're through your (acrylic) priming and looking at your base canvas/panel/card, and that's really not going to help with anything

It seems to have all worked out in the end, though, but I still prefer to get my compositions solved and in order before I start laying actual paint. It's a little wild in places – I wanted the ragged grey low fractus clouds to have been somehow a little more 'aerie' and insubstantial - but Madam quite likes the dynamism and energy, and I have to admit that she has a point.

Wow. Me, living on the edge. Who'd have thought...

Smotrova Buda

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first of four postcard-sized pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's pre-Xmas 'On a Small Scale' show. The other three are lagging slightly behind, but will duly turn up over the next few posts. Re-starting at the easel after even a couple of month's break needed some aural kick-starting to blow away the accumulated cobwebs, quicken the senses, and get me keen at the easel. Something like, for instance, 'Bling (Confession of a King)'.

The source location for this piece is near a small Russian village called Smotrova Buda – in the area between Belarus and Ukraine. It's actually nearer to some even smaller villages called 'May' and 'Bee', but as this is an early autumn scene, I went for the less confusing title. 'Smotrova' sounds like it has something to do with looking or seeing (a lookout point?), but my Russian's really not quite good enough to make a meaningful translation. 

Compositionally, it's all about the clouds of course, and the low evening light; and the receding open ground encourages the eye to realise the scale. The painting is more or less a straight transcription of the source image.

It's mostly painted in quite thin transparent paint – possible a little too thin, as some of the pencil underdrawing is a little too visible through the layers for my liking, and I wish that I'd been a bit lighter with my initial marking out. It's not bad though, and there is a nice 'aeriness' to the sky which in some areas could pass for watercolour.

Now, you may - or may not - have noticed, but I didn't produce a September blog post. I simply didn't have anything worth putting up. I'd ground to a complete halt artywise preparing for, and being part of, September's show at the Open Eye Gallery, and I didn't even produce any half-decent Window Work over that time. I definitely felt a bit wrung out by being, literally, 'on show'. Being the focus of attention is generally not my natural thing – I was perfectly suited as an antique restorer, where a successful job meant that the restored piece should look as though it had never been anywhere near a restorer.

As it happens I thought that the exhibition went not too badly. I had some sales – five of the bigger pieces, and six(or was it seven?) of the smaller 'sky' ones. Many good things were said (at least within my earshot), and I think most people understood what I was getting at. I do know that most of the folk who actually bought pieces did so after having had conversations with myself about the imagery, and that they 'got' them. I think the gallery were very happy with how it went, and so am I. Which is the way it should be.

Well that's done now, so I'm back on the conveyor belt again. Gently at first, with this quartet of very small paintings, then back to normal.

And that includes upping my Window Work efforts from not even half-decent to, hopefully, fairly presentable...

Window Work – August 2019

watercolour

Since finishing last month's 'The Picnic of Mephistopheles', I've been getting organised for my Big Show – more of which below. As a result, there's been very, very, little artwork done in the last month. So here's some Window Work for the August post.

As usual, they're very small rapid sketches in Payne's Grey watercolour, done looking out the window at people passing by. These ones are fine as far as they go, though I have to confess that due to the break-up of my regular routine, I've not been as concentrated or regular in this drawing exercise as normal. Luckily, though, from quite a low hit-rate, I've come up with a few worth posting.

I've been chopping and changing the brushes I use for these recently. I was using a brand of cheap synthetic (see the cyclist) which was quite good; the hairs are quite stiff and I like the feel of the handle, but their big drawback is that they just don't hold an awful lot of paint, and needed recharged very quickly. I then had a go with an oriental brush (girl on left). I used to use these all the time for watercolour - they hold huge amounts of paint and allow you combine both large wide shapes and fine sharp ones in single strokes. This one, though, had quite a lot of very soft goat hair, and very little stiff hair (whatever that was, might be ferret or stoat), and I found it very difficult to keep to a fine point (not always the case – depends on the individual brush). I then started using a sable which I have, but had rarely used (no example). This held a lot of paint for its size – much more than the synthetic. Its marks tended to be very rounded though, not as precise as I'd have wanted, and it had a weird bulky handle. I finally went out and bought another sable the same size, but with a normal light handle and an extra long, fine point. Now that really did feel good (bloke with shades, and schoolgirl) – it holds enough paint, is comfortable to hold, and easily makes light, fine, fast marks. Which is nice.

Now, the news bulletin bit. The show I mentioned at the top is at the Open Eye Gallery – the one on the corner of Dundas Street and Abercromby Place. There's no title for the exhibition, just 'Keith Epps'. I did think about 'Indifferent Skies' for a few hours, but the next morning realised that that maybe wasn't a very good idea. 

I think there are thirty paintings altogether – fourteen larger canvas or panel pieces, and sixteen of the smaller 'sky' paintings on card - and can all (currently) be viewed on the Gallery's website. It's open to all from 7th September, so if you happen to be in Edinburgh, pop along - it'll be up until 30th September.

I'm not too nervous – not just now anyway. I will no doubt be dropping in and out of the gallery for a while (unless they get fed up with me!), but after that it will be very nice to get back to normal and resume my painting routine, hopefully fairly soon. The next set of work is planned, and the surfaces prepared. Palettes are clear, brushes cleaned, and the composed image files and sources have been transferred to the studio laptop. 

Feels good...