Fight

oil on canvas 81x51cm

Finished at last, this month’s post is a very obvious sunset, based on my own photos taken locally. It’s the Meadows, in Edinburgh, looking south at Marchmont and Bruntsfield. I’ve flipped it left to right, so the Barclay Church at Tollcross is just out of sight on the left, and I’ve taken some liberties with the far trees and ornamental cherry avenues. There’s also a soundtrack for it, should you feel the need.

…Small digression - I’ve more good news. For the first time, I’ve had two pieces hung in this year’s RSA Open. They’re Oldies – Wreck No.1 and Bad Valley - but Goldies. So, if you happen to be around Edinburgh before August 30th, you can pop into the Royal Scottish Academy building – lower gallery of course - and see them (and loads of other stuff) for free…

Back to the main subject: It’s an OK painting, but definitely not as good as some I’ve done recently though, and it had a bit of An Accident. Anyway, have a closer look – its title is ‘Fight’ for a reason. I found the two blokes fighting on google - they were originally on a beach, and were rather stupid and funny. Then I realised that if they were darkened, their combined shape suggested something quite ugly and arachnid. The idea had – if you don’t mind – legs, and I could misdirect the eye away from their silhouette on the dark grass with the big technicolour sunset.

The Accident: Progress was fairly straightforward until my bike got a puncture. After fixing it, I was flipping my bike back upright (Works in Progress are hung in the hall, above the radiator) and carelessly scraped the handlebar down a couple of inches of the smooth, flat surface, which caused an extremely annoying ridge. At one point I was considering cutting the whole left side away to get rid of it. Which would have been a shame as I really liked the fade from the hot ‘Sun’ to the much cooler left edge. A patch on the back helped a little, but the flaw was in a deliberately featureless area, and would interfere with the blurred and stroked surface I had planned. The solution I came up with – not entirely successful, but which did help to disguise the surface damage – was to use small, thick, unsoftened strokes of paint for all the foreground grass – not the texture I wanted. Anyway, it’s done now.

The paintwork that I am pleased with, though, is the layering of glazes, plus the odd thin white layer, around the Sun. They’re a heavier mix than normal – based on the usual Stand oil, but with slightly more Damar resin and less turpentine. Particularly pleased with the hot ‘peachy’ areas, which use incandescent mixes of Indian Yellow, Transparent Oxide Red, and Alizarin Crimson. To be honest I’ve gone a bit over-the-top with the hot stuff in the sky at the expense of the cool blues, and I promise that I‘ll be a bit more discriminating about where and when to cut loose with them in the future. 

There may be a more subliminal reason why this painting has ended up being so very lurid and overcooked. Perhaps I’ve been over-affected by recent events, both at home and abroad. In the previous post, I alluded to a Big Moment, and that perhaps the UK was in for yet more stormy political weather. Well, I wasn’t wrong; the EU referendum went Leave’s way, so the whole United Kingdom is now heading out of the European Union. This caused the then Prime Minister (‘I’m not a quitter’ – the day before the vote) to announce his resignation the day after it, and the main opposition party to disembowel itself publicly for some inexplicable reason. There was carnage on the successful ‘Leave’ side as its main proponents either resigned or were savaged by each other in their attempts to be the governing party leader, and we now have a new Prime Minister who has slaughtered* the previous PM’s cabinet and set the remaining ‘Leavers’ on course to carry the electorate’s wishes through. So out we’ll go, much to the bemusement of the rest of the civilized world. 

So, if I can sum up how my own perception of the imagery in the painting evolved – and I do hope you’re enjoying the soundtrack – we have at first glance an exaggerated sunset. Which is nice, if a little clichéd, until you see the two blokes intent on destroying each other. It doesn’t stop there, oh no, because I have to admit that as I worked on the figures, the distant ‘flash’ on the horizon became more threatening, and deadly. And I think we all know what that’s about.

Done now. Back to normal. It’s just a nice sunset, and a nice park, in which two blokes are having a fight, OK?

Now, lest I get too political and flag-wavy in what is essentially a blog about making marks with coloured pastes, let me re-set my composure and equilibrium and just say that -

a) I feel that it’s not all over yet, and every cloud has a silver lining

b) We’re doomed, I tell ye, we’re doo-oomed…

*Not literally of course

Window Work, an Interlude

watercolour

So, Window Work drawings again. 

I’m having a bit of a pause, a rest from full-on easel work just now. For a start, the last post, from way back in April, was such a gob-smacker of a painting (and I don’t mind saying that myself) that I wanted it to be the top-title blog post for a while. Secondly, Madam is having a few weeks off, so I’m taking it easy too. Thirdly, there’s a lot of Events going on at the moment, which sap the concentration; namely, the European footy cup, a dirty great big Referendum on whether UK should leave the European Union, and some of my paintings are in the inaugural show of the newly relocated Union Gallery – about which, more directly below. That’s not to say I haven’t been doing any work at all over the last couple of months, it’s just that it’s not been very intense work. It’s not very finished either, hence the Window Work post, but you can see it in progress through the Work in Progress link if that’s any consolation. If you have the ‘Info’, or ‘Captions’, or image text showing you’ll be able to read all sorts of technical stuff (the notes are for my own benefit really, so that I don’t forget what I’ve used, but I honestly don’t mind anyone else seeing them). Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Now, some gallery promotion/publicity details… 

If you’re in Edinburgh at all over the next month or so, I’d urge you to go and see the above-mentioned new Union Gallery. It used to be in Broughton Street, but is now in a much larger and grander premises at 4 Drumsheugh Place, in the West End, Edinburgh. The ‘Reunion’ show opened at the very end of May, and will be on until the end of July, so there’s still lots of time – but not too much – to go along and have a look at the very varied work on show, and who knows, maybe buy something.

There, now you know…

I suppose I should really be telling you about the drawings above. As you may be aware, I do them as exercises, and they tend to have phases of being in bad or good form. These ones mark a small swing towards a period of better form (I hope) and have been done during the final phase of a very shrill campaign about Britain’s future. The vote itself - whether to Remain in the European Union or Leave it - is taking place today, so I’m writing without knowing the result. The pre-vote polling is absolutely balanced at 50/50, but today, while the actual voting is taking place, there is a ban on campaigning throughout the media. The resulting ‘normality’ is pleasantly calm – though it may prove to be more like the eye of a hurricane. Nevertheless, I’m enjoying this little Interlude while it lasts.

Anyway, back to the drawings. The lady on the left is included purely because of the economy of line, and I quite like the untidiness of the ‘tonal’ girl on the right – she was actually like that – and I think her knees and face come across very well. Of the four drawings I like the larger image best; it’s a very interesting angular ‘pose’ and it was one of those sketches that seemed to draw itself, which is nice experience. What they have in common - like most people in UK over the last few days – is that they are conscious of an imminent Big Moment in which they’re about to participate. 

And the wee dog? He hasn’t a care in the world… 

Landscape with Shadows

oil on canvas 90x70cm

This was actually started way back in April 2014, and was worked on in four or five blocks of time over the last two years.

There is some sound to go with it, but because of the extended production period I’ve listened to all sorts of music and radio during that time, and there’s nothing that I can really call a constant. When I’m working I’m sometimes listening to drama or speech stuff, and sometimes I need to be energised with a bit of rock or pop - mostly oldies – though that doesn’t always result in better painting. Usually, I’m looking for something that will tick over and produce an introvert mood, but stimulating enough that I can find resonances between what I’m hearing and what I’m trying to produce. Two pieces that did that during this painting’s final approach recently were the aptly titled ‘Falling Shadow’, and the more haunting ‘Path 5 (delta)’ – both by Max Richter

The finished composition is a combination of two very different sources. The landscape setting is an anonymous roadside in Russia, from google streetview. It’s nothing special, just some country about 80 miles northwest of Moscow, but I liked the light, and the arrangement of the trees and bushes. The figure is from a US army film* documenting the WWII ceasefire in Czechoslovakia. The cameraman was filming the German soldiers coming over to the Americans, but he happened across a group who had been set upon by Czech partisans. Some had been beaten – and are clearly terrified - but others were killed, one of whom is a beautiful young boy. 

The catalyst that linked these two images is Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with The Fall of Icarus’, at which I was having a good look at the time. In that painting, if you look closely behind the tree on the left you’ll see that Breughel has placed what could be a body under the hedge. Copying Mr Breughel, I simply took the German boy and placed him under my found bushes. I swapped my source sky and background for a more open view from along the road, then flipped it all left to right so that the figure was in the lower right-hand corner.

The shadows cast onto the ground and bushes are from trees directly behind the viewer, and I liked the dappled foreground against the full-lit distance - and the dappled lighting helped make the boy less obvious. I had a lot of trouble trying to work out the structure of the trees and bushes from the source, but I think I’ve got away with it. But it’s all about the light bouncing around anyway, and I was careful not to go too dark, and kept the whole scene bright.

I’m weaning myself off Lead White (sigh), but as I had started with it, I kept on the palette throughout. Which was very pleasant. It was very necessary too; for some reason the surface developed a long surface ridge right in the middle of the sky. It was an area I wanted to keep absolutely free of cloud – which could have helped disguise the anomaly – so I had what I euphemistically called ‘a problem’. I filled both sides of the ridge with stiff tinted Lead White, and left it to dry thoroughly – for several months. I rubbed that down, then did it again. Finally, the surface was smooth enough to proceed, so I finely matched in the colour then overpainted the repair together with the rest of the sky. I used the Lead White because I knew that it would dry right through very evenly, and that it was the same substance as the rest of the painting. I could have used a rapid-drying epoxy filler, but I feared that after a few years of the canvas expanding and contracting it would simply detach and fall off. Time will tell of course, but under normal conditions, now, you really can’t see that there’s been a repair. Which is a Good Thing, and would have been more tricky with slower-drying and weaker Titanium White. So there.

As usual I’ve used layers of fairly thin paint (no specific reason; I just prefer thin paint) but was getting in a state about the warmer pales over darks going cool in colour. I finally gave up laying thin cadmium oranges over the shadows in order to get dull brown, and simply drew with ‘generic’ pales – yellow ochre or something like – then glazed over with Burnt Sienna or Umber. A little trick which really has proved very useful since.

There is, of course, yet another layer of resonance for me within the painting. My grandmother – Nana – had a framed print above the piano in her front room in Streatham, in London. It was of a young boy lying on his back in the sun, and I was fascinated by it. That print will have long disappeared by now, but I discovered five decades later that it was of Franz von Lenbach’s ‘A Shepherd Boy’. It may be that part of the reason that I was so struck by the boy in the film was that he is so similar to that long-remembered figure, even down to his red jersey. 

Though, one has his whole life ahead of him - and the other has not.

US army film* The figure appears at 6.16mins. Please bear in mind before viewing that this is raw, uncensored footage. The boy appears at 6.16mins

Window Work

watercolour

Celebrating the 600th A4 Window Work sheet!

As you may already know, these are my exercise pieces – drawing people, or the occasional sky, out of the window for about 30mins most working mornings. I usually get about eight or nine figures to each A4 sheet, so that gives you an idea of their size. Much more often than not, they’re not very good at all (this morning’s were awful so these are a selection of the best from the last few weeks) but sometimes they’re quite ‘true’. 

I’m lucky to live where there’s a window looking along the road, and it’s very pleasant to sit - mug of tea and brush at the ready, on the alert for slow-moving old ladies or strange gaits - while listening to old BBC radio comedies like ‘Old Harry’s Game’ or ‘Ed Reardon’s Week’ for when nothing’s happening.

So, that’ll be me starting on the next hundred tomorrow morning.

And just as you thought you were getting away with no links to a music track…

Laika in Bliss

oil on canvas 66x51cm

If this piece looks familiar that’s because it’s a development of the watercolour posted a couple of months ago. I’ve simply added some ground forms - adapted from photos of Bruntsfield Links I took specifically for this project (I rushed up there with the camera when I realised that the light was just as I wanted it). I’d long been planning a piece about Laika, but having seen the potential of this sky for ‘heavenliness’ I dumped my previous idea in favour of this one.

There is a mood setter for this – Max Richter’s ‘Maria the Poet (1913)’. Even though the words are in Russian, the syllables are beguiling, and as a piece of music it’s the overall effect that matters. There is a recent translation, but I can’t tell whether it’s a good one as, sadly, my Russian simply isn’t up to it.

Technically, this painting is quite interesting. For a start, it was completed fairly quickly - I avoided being dragged into unnecessary detail, and treated the trees quite freely.

There is good, efficient use of glazing here as well, especially in the trees. They were laid in with a neutral Paynes Grey/Burnt Umber mix, lighter tones being either the grey primer showing through, or additions in a similar grey. For the leaf colour I glazed them over with semi-transparent Yellow – giving me a basic transparent green which was further tweaked with darks and yellows. This varnishy yellow glaze gave me singing highlights in the grass too, reinforcing the effect of sunlight.

The sky, as usual, was built up with veils of thin paint, but I added dabs of very thin Lemon Yellow glaze around the edge of the Sun and the cloudlet below it, and a wider thin Magenta glaze spreading and diminishing outwards. I faded a thin Zinc White glaze over them at the Sun itself, but there remains a hint of iridescence, which gives a strange hallucinatory light – much more subtle than straight white light. (I’ve nearly half-blinded myself when trying to work out how the Sun appears to affect the atmosphere immediately around it. Not a good idea, and I think I have enough clues for now not to be doing that for a while). 

I painted the setting with only a vague idea of how I would introduce Laika. I’ve always been a bit distraught at the thought of that little Russian dog. 

If you haven’t heard of her, she was the first dog in space; sent into orbit by the USSR space programme, back in 1957. They needed a small dog, and she just happened to be the stray they chose. The problem was that there was no way she was ever coming back, and so she died up there in her tiny capsule, and that thought has upset me – with no lessening - ever since I became aware of the story as a child.

I knew she would be placed in that important bottom right corner, but how would she be? Active? Passive? If she was active what was she doing? As a pack animal, would she be happiest in a pack of heavenly dogs. At one point I taped some cellophane onto the surface and painted Laika trotting in from the right towards a group of four or five other dogs snuffling around on the left (very difficult painting tiny, tiny dogs that look like dogs). The scene was charming, but it just looked like some dogs having fun in a park. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it lacked the intensity I was after.

After a lot of deliberation, I decided that there would be no context for loneliness, or play, or any of those earthbound concepts in Heaven. I looked through my ‘happy dog’ sources and settled on a photo of the small dog that I saw while up at Bruntsfield (serendipitous or what…) and used that as the model.

So, if you look at the bottom right hand corner you‘ll see a tiny Laika – black ears just recognisable at 2cm tall - attentive but alone, sitting up, and gazing at the Sun. Here - in my mind - she needs nothing, but exists in peace and safety, forgetting all, at one with everything, bathing in the Lux Perpetua.

Laika in Bliss…

Day’s Work Done

oil on canvas 66x51cm

It’s a very pleasant feeling when a problem painting is resolved; the shoulders loosen and drop, and there’s a general feeling of ‘and relax…’ Or, as in this case, ‘phew, done…’ 

Before anything else, I should give a nod to the mood-setter. I was half-listening to random singles while setting out the figures, then ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ came on, and it put me straight inside their heads. The sheer rawness is the thing, and I’m afraid the neighbours may have suffered a little when I started each session. The painting’s title indicates that this is evening, and that the young men are returning from doing what callous young men in militias do. In my head, they are the perpetrators from ’Road’, though I should stress that the two paintings were not designed to be linked.

The landscape source, google streetview again, is in Slovenia. I’d spotted a similar steep wooded area just along the road, but was having trouble making it work. Gravity pulled the wooded slope straight off the bottom right-hand corner, but with the blue sky and rock outcrop the composition became stable. I’m hoping that the figures won’t be found immediately, and I’ve tried to distract the eye with the blues, yellows, and fiddly bits of leaves and plants.

Even though the tonal range spans murky black to bright white, it is a very dark painting. I think the trees against the blue areas have worked particularly well, though I’m a bit disappointed by the foliage texture in front of the white cloud. I’m also not totally sure how the viewer will interpret the bright yellows. If you want to do it the hard way and work them out for yourself, ignore the footnote* containing the subtlest of hints underneath. 

On the technical side, there’s quite a lot of ‘Glazing’ going on here. Glazes are thin transparent layers of paint in a mixture of oil and a simple varnish – I use Damar resin dissolved in turpentine. The idea is that the glazing layer acts like stained glass – the layer below is visible through a veil of colour. This is very evident in the two figures on the right – the colours are simply washed over the monochrome drawing underneath. The more transparent your pigments are, the more effective your glazes will be. Some pigments, e.g. Yellow Ochre, Venetian Red, and the Cadmiums, are completely opaque and are not so useful in this context, so you have to choose your paints carefully. The sky is straight Ultramarine, and is stippled fairly loosely over the trees and foliage in front of it. The opaque bright yellows are intensified by a couple of layers of Indian Yellow and Transparent Red Oxide (from Michael Harding paints) – a very rich combination, which also contributed to the reddish ground colour. I boosted the Damar varnish proportion of my usual medium for these layers, and am quite pleased how that turned out. Interestingly, the original Indian Yellow pigment was made in India by feeding cattle exclusively with mango leaves, then processing the resultant urine. In more recent times it was considered cruel, and the practice was discontinued. Modern ‘Indian Yellow’ pigments are made from a variety of chemical dyes. Which I suppose is a Good Thing.

Well, I’m very glad that’s finished and I can give Nirvana a rest. I bet the neighbours are too…

* OK, I apologise for not doing them better, but the yellow patches are sunlit trees seen through the shadowed foliage of the trees in front. I’ve exaggerated the colour to distract the eye from the figures. Not particularly realistic maybe, but you must admit they’ve got a nice glow about them.

Sky Study – Dunblane

watercolour 24x12cm

The two oil pieces are still on the go, so I dashed out a quick little watercolour exercise yesterday afternoon to catch the end of the month.

This particular little Sky Study is from a snap taken at Dunblane station last year, and features some very nice patches of backlit Altocumulus. My usual train gets in at about midday, so the Sun is as high as it’s going to get for September.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked up a watercolour, so I was a bit hesitant in starting. I’ve mucked up the masked border - hence the bleeding edges – which I’m a little annoyed about. I’m thinking that I didn’t press the bleeding masking tape down bleeding firmly enough. The sky went quite well though; the blue element is the Indanthrene Blue I bought last year - unlike Ultramarine it doesn’t granulate in watercolour. I tried scraping the paper under the Sun for pure whiteness, but as it’s only 200gm paper there’s only so much of that you can do, so I thought better of it and used white acrylic ink for the re-lightened bits. Looking close-up at the clouds, the acrylic marks are a bit hard, but the Sun and the soft atmospheric shine have come across quite well. From a reasonable distance it’s OK, and I think it might be worth having a look at the source photos again and maybe developing this into a larger oil piece. 

There was no music on, but I did listen to Richard Herring’s Stephen Fry interview podcast while working. Herring deploys his usual juvenile bonhomie and coaxes some good stories and repartee out of Fry. You can stream it or download the MP3 for later. A pre-listen heads-up: It does contain a lot of very bad language - still very funny though, and some of it’s in the best possible taste. There is a whole series of these conversations – ninety-six at the time of writing – with other comedians and writers, from relatively obscure ones to the likes of David Mitchell, Eddie Izzard, Phil Jupitus, and Dara O’Brien.

This was my third day of working with my new glasses. Up till now I’ve been wearing varifocals, which are fine but have a fairly narrow field of useful vision. I’ve now got a pair of bi-focals - inspired by seeing Peter Blake wearing them in a TV interview. Their focal lengths are much more defined – just near and far - but present a much wider field of vision without the need to move my head from side to side. They are great for working at the easel and the window work, and in general it’s a bit like taking the blinkers off. Which is nice.

And yes, I did go to Specsavers*…

* Specsavers is a popular high-street chain of opticians, well-known in Britain for their amusing adverts. Other opticians are also widely available, but have less memorable catchphrases.

Midday, late November

oil on card 30x18.5cm

Another year, another Cloud Study - and just in time. It’s more or less based on a photo snapped out of the train window on one of my usual jaunts to Perthshire. It’s midday (11.58am to be precise) on the 24th November and the Sun is at its zenith – so quite low.

(Before I forget, a quick news bulletin. I have two pieces - Bad Valley and Runner - showing in the SSA at the moment. That’s the Society of Scottish Artists Open show at the RSA Gallery on the Mound/Princes Street in Edinburgh. It’s free, and is open till 18th January 2016. 236 artworks were chosen from a total of 1254 entries, so quite chuffed. Back to the blog…)

It’s all about the clouds really. I thought there was a bit of structure going on where the three nearer, stringy clouds were floating in front of the larger, more diffuse masses behind. I didn’t pay any attention to the passing landscape at all – I was just waiting for the next gap in the trees to catch the sky through. I’ve used the ground and trees the photo gave me as a starting point, and treated them quite loosely. 

Technically, I’ve done the sky like a watercolour – it’s mostly straight oily glazes (with a little white in them) stippled with a soft brush onto the white priming. The cloud shapes and edges were refined where necessary by wiping the priming layer clear with oily paper towel or brush - as if I was wiping wet watercolour wash off wet paper. The paint was then carefully stroked and softened even more with a soft fan brush. The ground forms are lean turpentiney paint applied with hog brushes onto the oil-wiped smooth priming. The ragged marks were left crunchy. They were built up a bit subsequently, with slightly more opaque paint, but not too much. I quite like how the paint quality of the Sky/Earth elements is different, and this seems to be quite an efficient way of painting – certainly at this tiny size.

I did feel that a figure was necessary though, and went as far as sourcing a waving* young woman, and working her into the photoshop composition. However, on this size of work, she would have been tiny – about 1cm high including her waving arm – and completely impractical to paint. Just so you know, she would have been standing in front of the nearest bushes on the left, below the gap between the between the two higher birch trees. 

So, that’s all for 2015. It’s been a bit fractured what with one thing and another, but I do feel that I’m making progress, especially on the technical side. All things being well, I’d like next year’s work to be a bit more efficient, and I’ll see how that goes. There is One Thing that I know I should be doing though, and that’s much more Drawing. Of anything, anywhere, just drawing. And I think that probably applies to most of us.

Anyway, 2015’s just about over - have a good 2016…

* When I was very young, in London, we always used to wave at the trains, and the drivers and passengers would often wave back. It was rather nice. A waving figure seemed apt seeing as how this is a view from the 11.09 from Haymarket to Dunblane

Window Work

watercolour

November has passed surprisingly quickly, so I’ve resorted to posting a selection of Window Work this month (it’s been a while – the last time was August 2014). I’ve quite a complicated painting on the easel at the moment, and I’m loathe to rush it just to beat a self-imposed deadline, so here we are with the regular blog stand-by.

As usual, they’re all in Paynes Grey watercolour on 90gm A4 office paper, and are the result of my usual half-hour exercise in the morning - sitting at the window overlooking the street below and sketching who or what comes along. 

I can’t remember exactly when these were done, but I’m guessing that we’re talking from late August/September 2015 onwards. The two Manly Men were actually done within five minutes of each other – so either the chap with shorts was a hardy soul, or the other burlier one was really a buttoned-up namby-pamby. The sketch of the healthy, striding girl shows some nice movement, though her left leg has come out a bit stiff – which is a shame - and the smoker is made with some fairly fast lines and very little tone washing. The cyclist obviously took a little longer than the others. The paper has had time to dry a bit because I can see that I’ve done that scraping thing to expose clean paper for the strongest highlights.

That’s it really. Looking forward Big-Time to finishing the current larger painting, then moving on to the line of projects composed and ready for launch.

Meanwhile there’s always the Window Work - currently on sheet 582.

And counting…

Steppe

oil on canvas 65x65cm

Sorry.

No, not really. I’ve never been particularly enthused by the traditional Xmas. Madam and I have a theme every year; Roman, Revolutionary, whatever, and we had a very committed and successful Punk Xmas not long ago. So, no, not sorry.

This piece’s genesis occurred in 1979 - contemplating the approach of the Season of Goodwill - and I can clearly identify the three elements that came together to form it. First, The Clash’s ‘Give 'Em Enough Rope’ had come out the year before, so the record cover was everywhere. Then, I’d seen ‘The Tin Drum’ earlier that year – near the end there’s a shot of an Asian Russian soldier, whose impassive face made an impact. Thirdly, I’d just seen Tarkovsky’s ‘Andrei Rublev*’ - which depicts a Tartar raid - on the telly. Stir those into this young man’s angsty disdain of King’s College Carols, Santa, and ‘I-i-i-i-i-i-t’s Chri-i-i-i-i-i-s-s-s-ma-a-a-a-s-s-s’, and the Mongol/Santa scenario was inevitable. 

It’s a very strong image - my flatmate of the time still thinks it’s hilarious - and I thought it would be a waste if I never developed it (I did cut a wood block for the following year’s Xmas cards but never got round to printing them properly). In the original sketch the Mongol horseman is poking Santa with a spear. I had trouble getting decent sources for this, but found a good photo of a mounted Mongol archer with a shield - which hid his midriff and hips – whose horse was heavily armoured. This bypassed a lot of equine anatomy problems (some way to go on this). The arrows also gave me little linear shapes which are quite useful, so that was handy.

Compositionally it’s the opposite of what I’m usually trying to do. The Bad Thing immediately dominates the painting, and the viewer only comes to appreciate the setting – if at all - as an afterthought. I’m actually quite pleased with the landscape here – there’s very little interruption of the flat snowy grass from the foreground to the far horizon, and altering the texture evenly to describe that distance was quite tricky. The grey overcast sky and hills were done with grey underpainting, and most of the colour there comes from glazes applied in the very late stages. I’m quite pleased with the Tartar’s posture, and in his facial expression too - it’s just about what I was aiming for. The gore is meant to be shocking, and the paint is rough, quick, and straight off the brush - contrasting with the controlled, stroked surface elsewhere. Colourwise, I used Paynes Grey and Raw Umber for general darks – the cool greeny/greys have worked quite well here. The featureless ‘steppe’ is actually tundra – snatched from the Dalton Highway in Alaska - but the hills are from near Chernogorsk, deep in the Central Asian Steppe. Screenshotted from Google Streetview of course.

There’s no particular music I was listening to when painting this, but if I was feeling very po-faced and serious I’d link to Sinatra’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Xmas’. The trouble with that is that Carl Foreman used it as an ironic musical backdrop for the execution scene of an American deserter in ‘The Victors’, and to be honest it was pushing it a bit even then. However, I’m not being po-faced and serious.

So there you go. You probably shouldn’t show this to young children, and yes, I do know that it’s only October…

*A short season that also featured ‘Mirror’ and ‘Stalker’. It was a revelation - I didn’t know films could be like that…

Parting

oil on card 30x20cm

Another Sky Study. Last January, late afternoon, we were speeding southwards along the A9 again - Madam at the wheel - and the sun had just dipped behind a line of Cumulus. I whipped out my camera and managed to get enough material to put this little composition together. 

Before I continue, there most definitely is a track to go with this – ‘Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)’. It’s from ‘from Sleep’ – the short CD version of Max Richter’s 8-hour piece ‘Sleep’ – which dropped through the letterbox just as I was starting the composition stage. It’s designed to be hypnotic, and it’s quite long, so do try to stay awake…

As I was saying, this is put together from a few snaps. Most of them had unwanted vehicles and buildings in the frame, so I cobbled some of the most suitable ground forms together and conjured up some distance to help the eye recede.

It’s all about the sky of course, and as the colours were so subtle I thought I’d try a true transparent glazing method on it. I initially painted the sky in tones of grey and mauve, painting the backlit glows in white. Once that seemed about right and the land painting was done – normal greens etc - I mixed up the required glazing colours in oils and varnish (arty Damar, not Ronseal) and stippled and blended them on. Sounds simple. Yes, but not when you suddenly decide you need to add a bit of semi-transparent Orange to warm a glaze up and you can’t find it and your glaze mixture is shifting rapidly away from being thin and mobile. Just as well I had the calm music on. Anyway, all’s well that ends up not a complete mess.

I should explain the title. While finishing the ground forms, I had that nagging feeling again that the painting was missing a human element. I couldn’t let it go, so without thinking too much about it I put a figure in the bottom right corner, a little cut-off matchstick person. It seemed to be walking off the painting, away from something. I put another one in, walking the other way, and it seemed such a powerful, melancholy scene that I kept it.

I’m not sure that I would glaze the sky the same way again - I think I would use these transparent layers only as modifiers or colour reinforcers – though they were very effective in the upper ‘passive’ areas of the sky. But, there were subtleties of rose pink in some almost invisible higher clouds that would’ve benefited from thin opaque layers, and I think the incandescent cloud edges could’ve been more forceful with multi-layered opaque/transparent effects. 

It’s a small experimental piece though, so I’ll just absorb that experience, learn, and move on.

Like the little figures, walking away…

Sea Cumulus

oil on card 25x20cm

My energies this August have really been taken up by trips to Perthshire on family tasks, and I was thinking that I’d have to resort to that old blog stand-by - Window Work. Luckily, I’ve had just enough time to bash out a Sky Study before the end of the month.

It’s based on four or five photos snapped from the train on the way back from Perth the other week. If you sit on the left side of the carriage going south you’ll get grand views across the Firth of Forth after Kirkcaldy, and while crossing the Rail Bridge – I think this view is between Burntisland and Kinghorn. Obviously, if you’re travelling north, you might want to sit on the right-hand side.

It’s all about the Big Cumulus on the right, of course, supported by the lower sunlit clouds on the left. There are some quite interesting things going on in that lower left-hand corner though. In isolation, there’s a nice play between those low bright clouds, the nick in the hill-line, the pale field, and the figure. Within the whole rectangle though, they form a ragged arc around the island on the right, which I quite like. That wasn’t meant originally, but I took it into consideration when I was placing the figure (which also wasn’t meant originally, but I couldn’t let it lie).

So, no bells, whistles, or links to exotic websites this time, just a nice little painting. With a figure on a beach…

Stone

oil on canvas 61x50cm

The title subject, the Stone, is an odd, small boulder at the summit clearing of Easter Craiglockhart Hill. There are no figures or hidden things to be looking for here.

Those following the Works in Progress will see that it’s been a relatively efficient painting – only fourteen separate sessions(!) – and I was able to get some momentum going with it. The only change of direction was with the replacement ash tree, and that was definitely worth it.

The composition used elements from several photos I’d taken in June. If you were to stand at that viewpoint on the hill, you’d recognise Caerketton Hill (though it would appear a lot smaller) but not the ash tree – that’s at Bruntsfield Links, on the corner next to Barclay Church. The clouds were collected from the Roof Terrace at the National Museum of Scotland - always a good Cloud-Spotting spot.

For some reason I was playing the two Radiohead ‘odd’ albums – Kid A and Amnesiac - over the last month, so working on ‘Stone’ was heavily associated with them. Memorable track? I’ll go for ‘Pyramid Song’.

There’s quite a variety of paint marks (for me) in this. At one end of the spectrum, the stone is as about as impasto as I’m likely to get, and the grass has a lot of scratched-out glaze. At the other end, the sky is all thin layers, softly blended. While we’re talking technical, I’ll point out that the paint mixes of the ground forms were made with Michael Harding’s Unbleached Titanium White . This is a warm light grey – quite opaque, but without the hard in-your-faceness of regular Titanium White. I enjoyed using it, and, unlike the ‘bleached’ version, it has the added bonus of being a naturally fast dryer.

Compositionally, there’s the obvious Cloud/Tree device (done to death by Baroquist Landscapeurs, so I was a bit leery of using it), but there are also some nice V-shape rhymes between the sky and the stone. The stone itself is the key, and I’ve tried to make it less obvious than it really is – so that, with a bit of luck, you don’t see it immediately and have to work a bit to interpret it. I’m no geologist, but it seems to be rather anomalous. It doesn’t look like the craggy stuff that’s exposed on the bits of cliff around Craiglockhart, and I’ve no idea how it got to where it is now. It seems to have natural cavities and pock marks, and I’m wondering whether it’s volcanic. Whatever its origins, it looks rather weird, and suggests some sort of ancient antediluvian relic. 

I’ve played this up a bit of course – the strange dark thing in the landscape. 

Sorry, I’m afraid I couldn’t resist …

Baptist

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This has been a long time in the making, and the flow has been constantly interrupted by events. As a result, it may be a little fractured and overworked, but here it is.

There’s no specific piece of music associated with this, though while it was being painted I re-discovered J.S. Bach’s 48 Preludes & Fugues - this is the one which accompanied the last three dabs of paint, so let’s have that.

If the landscape looks vaguely familiar it could be because it’s looking North from the same bridge where you look South at January’s ‘Down to the river’. That’s the starting point anyway; the far water and foreground riverbanks have been imported from elsewhere.

The water invited a wading figure, and I had the idea of a cleansing, or baptism. I was lucky enough to have seen the 2005 Caravaggio ‘Final Years’ exhibition, and had been very moved by his take on Salome and John the Baptist . It seemed to me that the most thoughtful figure was the executioner, and I thought that I might echo that idea here. The title (I hope) misdirects, and initially suggests the figure in the water. In fact, the Baptist is in the right corner. I’m asking what the central figure might be thinking while washing himself after his task. Offering the viewer a narrative to follow is always a bit risky, and may or may not work. That apart, though, this is about ghastly and tragic things happening in beautiful surroundings - which I still find very hard, but very stimulating.

On a technical note, I think it’s worth mentioning that this is my first ‘extended’ painting done without using Lead White. Instead of the bulky, fast-drying Flake White I’ve used since I began oil painting in the 1970’s, I’ve made do with mixes of Titanium and Zinc Whites throughout. I’m still very sad and angry that such a useful - once universal - painting material is no longer generally available, but it makes sense to adapt to the change. I’ll persevere with the new system, and, lest I become tedious, say no more about it here. 

I’m actually quite chuffed with some of the painting in this. I’ve tried to describe the distance across the water using changes in focus - the far trees are blurred and the nearer foliage and plants more sharply textured, especially the reeds and water grass. I think it works. This grassy texture is produced by applying the paint then streaking it, or scraping it off, with a curled edge of paper or tightly folded corner of paper towel, touched with oil. It’s by no means a New Way of Painting (there aren’t any), but it was a technique I tried out on those smaller, quicker landscapes I’ve been doing recently on card. I find it works best if the dry surface is first wiped with oil* (I use a Walnut Oil/Turpentine mix) - not too much it – before the new paint layer is applied (Walnut is a very thin and slidey drying oil, and doesn’t yellow). This ‘lubricates’ the dry surface, and makes the wet paint very responsive to light strokes and subsequent manipulations, whether you’re scraping paint, cutting back an edge, or just generally softening the marks. 

Lecture over. Enjoy the Bach** 

*This wet layer of oil or medium is known as a ‘couch’. I’m not sure why.

** Nice, but a bit on the long side. If it’s too much, don’t be down. Here’s something that’ll move you on

Downs Prep Sketch

oil on card 33x16.5cm

This little exercise is about solving a problem in preparation for a larger painting. Three landscapes have been cobbled together here quite passably, but I was totally unconvinced by the extreme foreground. For reasons which (hopefully) will become apparent in due course, I needed to know how I would describe the ground about 3ft away fairly clearly, and then take the eye back down the path, through the valley, and into the wider landscape and beyond.

Being just a little work-out sketch, I haven’t gone to town on the paint surface/layers thing, so it’s mostly fairly raw. I shifted a few of the bushes in the valley around to describe the form of the rising path more easily, but that was pretty straightforward.

The extreme foreground was the persistent nagging problem. What I needed was a close-up source photo looking 50 metres straight down a chalk downland path between gently rising sides of lush green grass. Getting nowhere, I gave up combing the Interweb, and as a last resort, stomped off up Blackford Hill yesterday with my camera. Which was a good idea, as I got some reference photos which, happily, have provided enough detail to construct what I wanted. So, I’ve just finished this little sketch after lunch today, relieved to have solved my original problem, and confident that when I do start the Big One – with sky and stuff – my sources are strong enough.

No doubt a botanist might notice the discrepancy in the flora, but frankly I’m not that good a painter. Anyway, that certainly wasn’t my primary concern while lining up my shots of paths and grasses - lying prone on a damp bit of Edinburgh, half-under a gorse bush, trying to avoid the rabbit pellets and the scent of fox wee…