Overcast – South Queensferry

oil on card 30x20cm

There is some music to go with this. Energising by playing pop and rock singles wasn't working, so I returned to back-to-back Richter for a change, and 'Infra' and 'Three Worlds: Woolf Works' got me back in the right zone. 'Infra 1' heralds the whole album's general swell and relax, which seemed to work with the soft lens shapes in the cloud, and the rest of the music got the steady brain rhythms and concentration going – which always helps.

The source image is another (quite old now) snap from a train window, looking west. The location is between the two converging railways lines just south of South Queensferry – the other track is behind the lower line of trees across the field. At the time, the Winchburgh tunnel was being worked on, and my usual train had to be diverted north towards South Queensferry, where it waited for 5/10 minutes before rolling back south on the other line to rejoin the main railway further on. The two tracks enclose an isolated pastoral enclave; a small triangle of lush grass and reeded ponds bordered by industrial units, a chemical store, and motorways. There were usually sheep there, munching away, un-phased by the modern world swirling around them (The M90 is just behind the ragged tree-line in the centre – I've 'disappeared' its tall lamp posts and gantries). This shows where the train was when I took the photo.

I was actually searching for another landscape source I have; a similar foreground of shrubs under a much more dramatic sky, but I came across this forgotten photo first and just went with it. (I'll find the other one at some point and work it up).

The sky here, in this source, was quite dull and overcast, and not even dramatically dark. I kept it that way, and it was interesting making something interesting out of something quite bland and ordinary. The painting is almost a straight lift from the source, the only changes – other than removing the lamp posts - being some shifting of the bushes and a levelling of one end of the field.

Technique-wise, I decided to break with the last few years' usual tight grid placing. The careful pencil/crayon, and acrylic under-drawing went out the window too. I placed the initial picture elements in thin oil paint without a grid of any kind (a sliding card strip proportional method I used to use which I promise I'll explain at some point, but please, not now). I have to say it felt quite good and safe at this size, though for me, painting anything any bigger would really require a safer grid of some sort. Anyway, while this piece didn't quite paint itself, it didn't resist too much and I allowed myself quite a lot of freedom to play with the paint and to take my time over it, so it was actually quite enjoyable to do. Having said that, I did manage to wipe away half an afternoon's work by mistake (it wasn't as dry as I'd thought it was, obvs), but it didn't really matter, and the shrubs look better for the extra work anyway.

I should also mention that I returned to my Fake Flake White for this one. I'm sure I've covered it before but it's worth a repeat mention – if just to remind myself not to forget it again. I was checking through photos of past palettes, (yes, I photograph my finished palettes, with all the colours noted. Sorry about that, but it's quite useful sometimes) and it seems that for some unexplained reason I simply just stopped using the Fake Flake towards the end of 2019. It does actually feel a lot like Ye Olde Lead White, though, and isn't completely out the park price-wise. I've also been using some new synthetic hog brushes, and the pointed rounds are astonishing. They retain their shape beautifully, have a very responsive point, and are very pleasantly springy. It'll be interesting to see how they wear.

Still on the technical stuff, I'm quite pleased with the sky. It's done almost completely with Fake Flake White and Ivory Black, with Walnut oil added. The Walnut oil makes the paint very mobile and quick - very suitable for horizontal stroke blending - as opposed to stipple blending - for which I find a sticky Stand oil mix more suitable. The greys were applied with my new synthetic round hog in soft linear, almost hatched strokes, then blended together with soft fan brushes. I built up the sky gradually over several sessions to get restrained tones and a very soft and gentle surface. Admittedly, that surface did gather a bit of cat hair on the way - it's unavoidable in this house - but nothing too major.

Summing this one up, I'm happy with the painting, but the process itself felt quite good for a change, and was a boost to the confidence - possibly what I was looking for at the beginning of the year. The shift in attitude, technique, and to some extent materials, was definitely a positive one.

Oh, and I've got a new bike as well. Which is nice...

 

Sheep Studies

pencil

These are a few sketches of sheep, though more accurately they are studies.

Why sheep? Well I've got a couple of things on the go just now which, coincidentally, feature sheep. Not having ever drawn a sheep in earnest, I found that I hadn't a clue what makes a sheep look specifically like a sheep – as opposed to a goat, a cow, a dog, or a very small woolly horse. Of course, I've got my sources for the paintings, but I felt I needed to know more about their general characteristics.

Why studies? It's one thing to recognise something, but another thing entirely to reconstruct it so as to read back correctly. The eye has to find out and inquire what makes the subject recognisable, and the best process for that is drawing it.

Not having convenient live references nearby - there haven't been sheep on nearby Arthur's Seat (just a mile away) since 1977 - a quick google image search supplied flocks of them to choose from. As expected, the initial results were pretty ropey, but I was encouraged to see that the effort was rewarded. The lower, later sketches are – if not quite the full Rosa Bonheur – indisputably of sheep

And, no, I wasn't counting them...

 

Three Crows

oil on panel 31x25cm

There is a music track associated with this – it's 'Opening' by Philip Glass. I played it as I was starting the oil layers, and its cold relentlessness seemed to fit the mood.

I snapped the source landscape for this piece a while ago from the Crieff bus, but it hadn't sparked anything worth following up until I was looking for ideas in late February - around the time of the invasion in Ukraine. Seeing it again while flicking through old photos, both the movement sweeping across the landscape and the Gothic crow shapes in the trees made themselves apparent, and suggested a dreadful wind. I leant all the trees to the right to show that, and introduced the trio of crows on the left. In the trees, the beak shapes were switching about during the painting process - sometimes one, sometimes more, like infant birds screeching in the nest. It's a very odd experience when a shuffling of factors brings sudden relevance and recognition to the previously passed-over and disregarded.

This is on a panel prepared some eight years ago which, luckily, I had forgotten about. 'Luckily' because I hadn't organised any surfaces to paint on during my down-time, and had felt work coming on again. It has a grey oil primer – near exactly the colour and tone of the distant low clouds, which have just the barest touch of paint on them. This ruled out any acrylic under-drawing, so objects were placed with crayon then developed directly with oil paint. I also used a different oil medium mix - Stand Oil with an increased proportion of Damar Varnish. It's very sticky, and quite unsuitable for painting large areas evenly, but it's very nice to work with on a small scale.

For some reason I found it very difficult to arrive at the final tonality of the near grass and especially the 'real' crows. They are quite finely drawn (aided by a magnifying glass) and were at one point almost jet black. Their combination of sharp, focussed marks and black tones hooked the eye so quickly that I dulled them down - I now much prefer them almost hidden in the weeds. They're quite rewarding once you see them, but the down-side is that I fear the casual viewer will just stroll by the painting without bothering to look too closely. However, I'm not sure that I'm prepared, at this point, to do anything about that.

On the positive side, I enjoyed doing the sky, and didn't feel too constrained to adhere rigidly to the source material. It's rather bleak and chilly but has some luminosity, in contrast to the umbrous and murky landscape.

Which pangs my heart given the painting's genesis.

 

Window Work - April 2022

 

watercolour

The blog returns after a spell away for rest and recuperation. My work book logs it as a single page saying 'Break – Time Off – Art-free Zone' between Xmas and the last week of February.

When I did return to planet Artwork it was aboard the good ship Window Work (of course) but I was horrified to discover that my drawing muscles had withered somewhat. My touch was clumsy and slow, and I was way, way, out of practice at looking. After much unrewarding labour at the window, I think I've got some of that fitness back, and now, occasionally, my fast sketches aren't too bad. I quite like the linear efficiency of the 'backpack girl' at the upper right, and the liquid blobs of the gulls.

That apart, the normal routine has resumed. Compositions have been worked out, panels have been made and primed, and two easel pieces are currently on the go, with a third awaiting its turn. I did have a slight setback though, as just having finished the panels, I had quite a severe 'tweak' of the back. This made standing at the easel difficult for a few weeks, and for a while I was restricted to – window work! However, it's well on the mend now, which is really rather nice.

Finally, out in the wider world, I have a painting (Herd – West Lothian) currently selected and hanging in the RSA Open show - in the 'Greek' building on the corner of The Mound and Princes Street, in Edinburgh. It's downstairs in the Lower Gallery, and, along with the entire contents of the show, is online as well.

Nice to be back...

Oryol

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the very last piece from 2021 – completed for the still ongoing 15x21cm Small Scale show.

There is a piece of music to go with it – JS Bach's Prelude and Fugue: No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846, but really more the fugue (starting at 1:58). The prelude is fairly simple and straightforward, like my initial idea of how this piece would go, but the fugue then plunges into a delicate maelstrom of complication, as the actual painting rather unexpectedly did.

This tiny landscape and sky is sourced directly from google streetview - the land forms broadly unaltered, while the sky was opened up a bit with a little photoshop fisheye distortion. This setting - near Oryol, in Western Russia - had originally been reserved for a larger painting with a figure, but I decided to use it as a small scale piece to save me the time of sourcing and working something out from scratch. Half-way through painting it I suddenly realised that there should have been an eagle up in the sky – probably in the upper left - as 'Oryol' (Орёл) is Russian for 'Eagle', and that would have completed the pun. Impossible at this scale though. Maybe another time.

Technically this followed my current standard initial procedure – crayon for spot-gridding and landscape placing, then thin fluid acrylic for landscape tonal grisaille. The main sky forms were placed in thin oil, and the whole built up with oil layers. I probably could have developed the opaque/transparent work in the sky a lot more, but I felt very much under time constraints to get this finished. As it is, it's more like a watercolour than an oil painting – which is fine – but I feel that this had the potential to be a more interesting piece.

To add to the already quite high tension, I completely mucked up the varnishing, resulting in a thick wrinkled splodge along the left centre of the sky. So it all had to come off. The final paint touches had only been left a week to cure (a perilously short time), and I was terrified that the varnish's white spirit solvent would take some of the paint off too. A clean white muslin cloth was laid flat over the surface, evenly sprayed with white spirit, then overlaid with a sheet of thin white bin liner. After about ten minutes the varnish re-liquified (as it's designed to), and the cloth was carefully peeled off. That brought a lot of dissolved varnish with it, and, miraculously, the paint was undisturbed. The remaining wet varnish was removed lightly with rolled cotton wool swabs (like real picture restorers do on the telly) and small muslin cloth pads, all with no sign at all of any colour coming off. A couple of subsequent (very light!) sprays of varnish next day went on perfectly, with no beading or irregularities at all. Phew.

Incidently, a more basic plastic sheet & solvent technique – a methylated spirit soak under a black bin bag, then wiping off the old paint with paper towel or ultrafine steel wool – is excellent for cleaning used palettes. Meths softens both dried oil and acrylic paint, and this method saves a lot of dry scraping, though I'm not sure how this works with Alkyd resin based products or mediums. (I've been wanting to shoehorn this little nugget into a post for ages.)

All that tension with the varnish apart, I did enjoy the freedom I allowed myself in the sky. It might be rewarding to develop ('indulge in'?) that a bit more. We shall see.

However, I will be taking my time about getting back to the artwork. I'll be aiming - as far as possible - to be driven by creativity rather than time-table, and I'm not planning on having anything done this January. This first post of the new year is carried over from last December purely for the sake of a bit of continuity.

Which reminds me – I hope that 2022 is a more positive and 'straightforward' year than the last two have been. Not just for me, but for everyone out there, whatever you're doing...

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...