Passing

oil on panel 90x70 cm

When I looked up the date I actually started this painting, I was very surprised to find that it was the first week of February – I thought I'd been working on it a lot longer. In fact, I started composing it last summer, but for various reasons I didn't begin the actual painting till earlier this year. It's seemed to have been a very intense, and very complex painting to do, and it's a relief to see it's done now. I don't know why, but it does now seem to be the case that some time has to elapse between my finishing a painting, and my being able to judge whether it's been a success or not, so I really can't tell just now how it's turned out. I'm still not really sure about the title. I'll know in a few weeks – but here it is.

I wouldn't say that this painting had specific mood-settering, 'zoning-in' music – if I felt particularly lethargic I'd just shuffle a batch 60s, 70s, or 80s pop - but if I wanted a settled, restful atmosphere to work in, I'd probably reach for the Max Richter. His hypnotically minimalist 'Sleep' provided that for many work sessions. Most 'Sleep' youtube extracts are too long and bad quality, but here's a gentle 9-minute live version of one of the themes.

The landscape source is in western Russia, near the village of Belenikhino, and I found it while looking at the Prokhorovka Tank Memorial and the surrounding countryside on Google Streetview. There was a huge tank battle in that area in 1943, but I should stress that the location is not specifically relevant to this painting, and is coincidental.

I liked the arrangement of the masses and open spaces, and the bright, diffuse light. The sky in the source was difficult to work with (though there is a beautiful cumulus round to the left), so I imported a similar one – with just a bit more sparkle and blue - from some photos I took in France some years ago. 

I was baffled by the diffuse jumble of fuzzy grasses and shrubs, and at first I simply had no idea how to depict them. To some extent I made forms out of accidental marks because I had a lot of trouble finding the structures in the sources - and used the streetview images on each side of the original for more information about the masses and spaces. Once the figure was settled in, I realised that there needed to be a finer texture and some delicacy around it, so I planted some daisies and grass that I'd sourced for a painting a couple of years ago. It improved the whole painting a lot, I think, both in terms of marks and texture, and as a more sympathetic bed for the figure.

Technically, this is quite an interesting piece. It's on hardboard panel, with white acrylic priming, gridded, and initially set out with light pencil. The forms and tones were developed with fast-drying thin monochrome acrylic paint – effectively an extension of the white priming. For some bizarre reason I used Violet Brown – which I realised was a mistake by the second session, but felt I had to carry on for the colour continuity, though I did switch to Raw Umber for the figure. My first task for the second phase – building up the surfaces with 'true' colour in oil paint – was to start killing off the violet with broad yellowy-green transparent oil washes. Which was annoying.

If the right under-colour is used this could be a very fast method of establishing drawing and tones, since the drawing shows through the thin oil paint. Substance and weight, and corrections where needed, can be built with opaque paint which can itself be glazed over if required. Indeed, where I had to re-stated light-toned forms – e.g. in the foreground plants - they were painted in white, then glazed with transparent pigments with added Stand Oil and Damar varnish. This may seem quite a roundabout method – and the white seems very anomalous and alien before the colour goes on - but the result is quite a rich surface with a very luminous, almost crystalline, effect. (Which may not be evident from the screen image)

Would I paint with this technique again? Yes, absolutely, and it's worth finding out which paints and pigments are transparent, and which are opaque. Done correctly, it should be a huge time-saver, and next time I'll be using something like Payne's Grey or Raw Umber.

The most efficient painting here was in the sky. Most of it was done with very little paint in about one hour (the whites and light tones are the untouched priming and a mere staining coat of paint) and the darker soft greys are a semi-opaque layer stippled on and faded with my new badger blenders, and cloth dabber pads. That would have been the sky done and dusted had I not decided to lower parts of the far tree-line, which meant very careful tone and colour matching when overpainting the unwanted (quite dark) ex-treetops.

The figure, which I've tried to re-direct the viewer away from, was in a photograph I found on the web. I had always known that there would be someone tucked in at the edge of the grass, and I had been about to start the painting when the nagging doubt about my very first figure made me stop, and look for another. I thought my second one, facing away, was again good to go, but at the last moment I felt that I could do better, and again halted, and did yet more picture searches. As soon as this image, a dead Finnish soldier, came up on my screen, I knew that it was exactly what I was looking for. The face was fully visible, and there was a hurt, drawn-in, fragility in the body. I angled him so that his head was lower than his hip, and his shape rhymed more with the bushes, and he was just right. As usual, I found it very difficult to draw or paint a prone figure, so I cheated slightly by turning the source image and the panel 90 degrees, and worked the figure as if upright.

I took a lot of time to get the face right, touching in small developments and corrections, letting my eyes rest, then refining the image over several sessions. It was a painful subject to paint, and I freely admit that the figure is steeped in my mother's death last year - and there is something of her last breath in the lower lip.

As I said above, it's been a very complex painting to do. I'm glad I took the time and didn't hurry it. 

That's it done now, and I'll move along, and get on with the next one

Footballers

pencil

I have a larger painting carefully approaching the final turn, and I don't want to hurry it just to meet a blog post deadline, so this month's post was going to be either a wee watercolour or a few more figures. The figures won.

Some may have noticed that the World Cup 2018 is currently running its course. I've never really played the game myself for two reasons; a) I was sent to rugby-playing schools (which I loathed), and b) When I did finally find myself being in a football-playing school playground I was rubbish at it and was always stuck in goal (where I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing). However I got very interested when we started doing the Fantasy Footy at work, and began watching Match of the Day just to be less of an ignoramus. Turns out that it's a lovely game with genuine beauty, indeed Madam gets very involved in a good match, and delights in a classy move when she sees it. This late appreciation has occasionally paid off, and I'm very happy to put on the record that my team – the Prussian Blues – won our little 'Crapleague' this last season – against some clever late plays from Young Mr Richardson's Xhaka Flocka Flames.

The World Cup is an excellent excuse for sitting in front of the telly pretending you're doing something, and I've taken full advantage of that opportunity. Sometimes, though, the guilt breaks through and I feel that I should be doing something a bit more constructive. When this occurs I pick up a pencil and doodle away the dull periods of play. These are some of the more presentable results. 

It's actually a very difficult extreme drawing exercise – I find it so anyway – as the action moves very fast (usually), and the camera cuts tend to be rapid. There are dozens of cameras covering every angle of play, and the directors frequently shift from the more static wide shots to close action shots for replays. Some of these are in slow motion, which is fine for the Video Assisted Referees to spot the Bad Boys at work, but I - perhaps rather sniffily - regard sketching through slo-mo as cheating. These drawings (loose squiggles really) have to be done very rapidly indeed, before the visual memory fades, so they are mostly tiny – for instance, the (Brazilian) figure sidefooting the ball, and the stick figure chasing the ball are 4cm and 2cm high respectively.

Anyway, here's a few marks saying 'footballers', normal service will be resumed shortly...

Window Work – May 2018

pencil, and watercolour

It's been a while, and as nothing I'm working on is going to be finished anytime before June, here's some Window Work. Some were done over the winter, but the most recent – the stripey lady with the pram - is from a couple of days ago, and what I'm noticing about the pencil sketches is that they're much looser and wispier – but still able to give a sense of weight and stance. 

A few of them depict several figures or couples. The four little sketches of the lady digging snow was done over 20 minutes or so as she cleared the pavement across the road. In the one with three figures, it looks as though the old couple are being looked at by the young woman, but actually they just happened to be the next subjects to appear in that session, so this is a false narrative. They make an interesting group on the paper though.

I find drawing couples very tricky. It's obvious why – I'm trying to draw two people in the time I normally get to draw one, so the visual memory is tested quite hard. Not so tough doing pairs of older folk, or couples approaching with a pram (which hides the legs very effectively), but they still have to make sense and link together as a unit.

I have to admit that the the monochrome watercolour wasn't done sitting at the front room window in Edinburgh, but while having coffee and apple pie with Madam at the Blue Teahouse in the Vondelpark. We popped across to Amsterdam for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and visited Van Beek's art shop just along from the Rijksmuseum. We'd bought some watercolours there - one of which was a tube of Daniel Smith 'Indigo' - and I thought I'd try that out while Madam was experimenting with the others. It's quite an interesting purply blue-black – a blend of Lamp Black and Indanthrone Blue pigments - quite unlike the greenish Winsor & Newton 'Indigo', which is a mix of Lamp Black, Quinacridone Violet, and Pthalo Blue. I don't there's any great merit in this sketch, and I really wasn't concentrating very hard, but I thought I'd include it as a bit of fun, and for the interesting colour. On the subject of interesting colour, the Vondelpark now has an established population of bright green feral parakeets. Local Amsterdammers are quite charmed by them just now, but I fear that they (the parakeets) may take over completely in the way they have in South-West London around Richmond Park. Which is not a particularly good way.

Just in passing, while we were in Holland, and it being quite possibly being the last time we were going through the EU citizens channel, we asked a few folk – at the hotel, in the local restaurant and coffee place on the corner (we really didn't stray far!) - what they thought about the United Kingdom's leaving of the European Union. It wasn't a huge presence on their radars it has to be said – one girl didn't know what Brexit was or that UK was leaving – but once coaxed a little, they opened up and pointed out to us what a profoundly stupid thing it was to choose to do. With which Madam and I both agreed. It was a nice little trip though. We didn't feel the need to 'do stuff', and spent most of the time within a few hundred yards of the hotel – which was admittedly on the edge of the park. We did visit the Rijksmuseum (twice) , but we baulked slightly at spending a whole day there, so just had a coffee and a rummage through the gift shop, and then went back for a pee after Van Beek's and a shady sit-down next to a canal. It was just that sort of a trip.

Oh, and there's a sketch of a dog. With a lead but no owner attached to it...

Blue Cumulus

oil on card 36x18 cm

Music first. Facing the blank surface on the easel, for some reason I put on Brian Eno's 'Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtrack', and the first track – 'Under Stars' - seemed to suit the mood.

It's another cloud from a train, in the 2:1 ratio again – which I'm finding very interesting. The main cumulus and landscape is virtually a transcription of the photo, but some cloud masses have been edited out so as to have a band of clear sky, and I've exaggerated the blueness of the the 'aerie' elements. It didn't go all that well though; at one point I wiped off a whole day's bad painting – bad because I wasn't really concentrating on what I was doing. Anyway, it's done now.

The clouds were definitely resisting - though I think the landscape went OK – but there were several necessary interruptions to the routine at home. My computer had started cutting out with no warning - luckily I didn't lose any work – so I really had to get a new one organised. Finding my way around a new Windows system, working out exactly where all my old files were, reinstalling programmes, then setting everything up so I could work on it, all took a bit of time. A vexing, but necessary process, and hopefully I won't have to repeat it for some time.

A bit of Technical stuff now. I used Winsor and Newton's 'Transparent White' for most of the whites in this, as a try-out. I'd bought a tube recently and had painted comparison samples of all the whites I have onto some black plastic card. This Transparent White actually appeared blue when the paint was thinned out against the black – which the Zinc White didn't - so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I also tried out Michael Harding's 'King's Blue Deep' for the blue sky. It's a mix of Ultramarine, and Titanium and Zinc Whites, but it's very intense and I can see me using it again. 

Best bits of painting? They would be the hill on the horizon to the right, and the murk underneath the main cumulus.

The music linked to (above) was the soundtrack to a film I saw decades ago on my old black and white telly. It was a 1989 documentary by Al Reinart - 'For all Mankind'. The Amazon info text explains it best -

“During the Apollo lunar missions from 1968 to 1972, those on-board were given 16mm cameras and told to film anything and everything they could, in space, in orbit, and on the surface of the moon itself. Two decades later, film-maker Al Reinert went into the NASA vaults to create this extraordinary compendium of their journeys and experiences.”

It can be yours for less than a tenner, and my copy's in the post as I write. Eno's soundtrack is available separately, but some of the tracks can be heard via Youtube (at time of posting). One in particular - 'An Ending (Ascent)' - has been used a lot for BBC and other productions, and is definitely worth a listen.

There we go then. On to the next one...

Ragged Cumulus – August 2017

oil on card 36x18cm

A view of West Lothian out of the train window, from last summer. The weather was quite changeable and it was an interesting cloud day, so I daresay there’ll be another sky piece from that day’s trip at some point.

The final source was straight from a photo, but my original ‘vision’ had a lot more sky and land. I was interested in the clouds, obviously, but was also drawn to the late summer contrast of dark August foliage and pale yellow fields. There was a visual rhyme linking the ragged cumulus updraughts and windblown fir trees on the skyline, and to make this plain I had to zoom well into the original image. I had a rethink just before applying paint and zoomed in even further, cutting out a lot of sky and foreground. Not long in, I realised that this reframe made the ground distances uncomfortably compressed, so I abandoned the ‘ragged rhyme’ idea, and shifted the higher ground back half a mile - smoothing the skyline and giving the cloud forms some space.

Technical stuff? Nothing really, except that for the final lights in the clouds I used Michael Harding’s Warm White Lead Alternative – a slightly warmer white (the label on the tube is a bit of giveaway) - with added Walnut Oil. In my enthusiasm for Stand Oil, I sometimes overlook the smoothness and mobility of Walnut – it was very effective for soft effects on clouds before, and it still is. 

This little piece took far too long to paint. I was too hesitant in the initial stages, and then had to wipe off an annoying large tree in the lower right corner – accidentally providing the far cloudbank - then did all that re-working of the hill. Worth it though.

However, it was interesting using the wide 2:1 double square proportions. Madam and I had seen an exhibition of Charles-François Daubigny landscapes in the National Gallery of Scotland a couple of years ago, and saw that he often used 2:1 canvasses. Daubigny was painting just before Monet – his paintwork was a lot looser than the established academic painters, and he liked to paint in the open air. To facilitate this he had a boat converted into a floating studio, in which he travelled - and painted - the canals and rivers of Northern France. Monet followed Daubigny’s example both in the further loosening of his paintwork, the Plein Air thing, and indeed building - and painting in - a studio boat, though I don’t think he painted double squares much. Nevertheless, it’s a panoramic ratio and suits expansive landscapes very well.

And you don’t necessarily need a studio boat to use it…

Low Sun - February

watercolour 15x10cm

It’s February, and I find I’ve nothing ready-to-post except Window Work. Most of the window work stuff is of figures – pencil nowadays - but this one’s a quick tiny watercolour of the sun going down behind the buildings up the road.

Before continuing, I should draw your attention to the new ‘Works in Progress 2018–’ link near the top of the list of links to the right. It’s hosted on Google Photos, but should be viewable publicly. It’s the same format as the previous ‘Works in Progress’ in that it shows the progress stages and layers of each painting. Once opened - if you click the ‘info’ symbol - there’s text detailing the pigments, mediums, and brushes used for each session (mostly). It’s done primarily for my own benefit, as an online record of what I’ve used for a particular passage of painting or effect for when I’ve forgotten later, but it’s open for anyone to see if they’re interested. The previous ‘Works in Progress’ has about four years’ worth on it and was starting get a bit unwieldy to update. Both ‘W.I.Ps' are under the heading ‘Evolution’ on the right of the blog page – where there’s also another link to ‘Much, much Older Paintings'. These are from the 1970s and 80s, and I may post better photos, or put up more paintings or drawings from days gone by, if and when I feel like it. Very, very few people have actually seen these, and some of them do have some merit, even if they seem a bit raw. All quite different from the current work. OK, back to the post proper now.

Madam and I had not long done our usual pilgrimage to see the Turner watercolours at the National Gallery of Scotland (they are displayed every January, when the light levels are lowest) and that always gives me a little kick in the direction of watercolour. So…

This little sketch was done at about 4pm on the 6th of February, and was the first little ‘Sun Sketch’ of the year. The street we live on runs about SW/NE, and we have bit of a bay window jutting out that looks all the way up the road. We get direct mid-afternoon to evening sunshine for most of the year, but the sun dips behind the far roofs in November and doesn’t make it above them for a while. It returns in the first week of February, and as that time approaches the streetlamps’ shadows are stretched almost parallel to the kerbs and building fronts, and pedestrians drag long 30metre shadows behind them. It’s a great moment when the first strip of sunlight finally edges into the front room and blazes onto the interior wall. It’s a sign that winter’s being shown the door, and there are cheers and hugs all round – even the cats sit on the window table and stretch up to catch the light.

Anyway, when the sun came in over my shoulder I just stopped the easel work and sat down with a little watercolour block pad and sloshed away. I let it dry overnight, and then scratched out the whites of the sun and the cloud streaks above it. 

I was fresh from seeing Turner's watercolours, after all…

Trees – Litovsk

oil on canvas 61x51cm

This is sourced from yet another google streetview trawl through Russia, this time from outside Litovsk, a village not far from the Belarus and Ukrainian borders. The late afternoon light was very important, but also the way the central tree masses recede in a line along the direction of light. There’s been a little editing of the shadow line at the left and right edges, and I’ve got rid of the small stream between the front bushes, but otherwise the main elements of the source image remain unchanged. 

Very early on I found some mood-setter music for this - ‘He shall feed his flock like a shepherd’, from Handel’s Messiah. I was just at the organizing stage, and we were watching the film ‘Manchester by the Sea’ on the telly, when this music came on. I glanced across at the painting on the easel - and it just fitted. It’s possibly more suited to pastoral rolling grassland and big skies, but - what can I say – it just felt right. There’s no link to the film soundtrack’s recording by Musica Sacra, but the one above will certainly do (nicely paced, and sung by a countertenor and very nice soprano voice).

There is a figure here, in the shadow, who could be sleeping. But it’s from a sequence of photographs taken during and after a reprisal massacre by Czech partisans in May 1945. There was going to be a whole row of them, but I decided against it.

I started work on this last May, but was interrupted by the necessity to finish ‘Ghosts’, the Open Eye set, and family events. I took an awfully long time to establish all the elements – even for me – and got very bogged down (especially in the front right bushes). Having said that, I’m sure that the painting has benefited from being put by, as I think I had lost sight of what I was trying to do. Resuming after New Year, I came to it with a fresh eye, and was able to see that the colour needed a boost, which I did fairly simply with glazing and thin transparent yellows. I did use more thick Stand Oil in these latter mixes, but I pulled back from the amounts I was using for the last small landscapes.

For these last top yellows I used a colour I’d picked up a couple of years ago for some reason, but had never used - ‘Stil de Grain’, from Talens. It used to be made from buckthorn berries (under various names including Dutch and English Pink) but the modern version is pure Isoindoline. It resembles Raw Sienna straight from the tube, but when thinned it’s a surprisingly warm, very transparent yellow, not quite as fiery as Indian Yellow. 

Again, it’s nice to say where work is on public view, and I’ve got two pieces selected for this year’s SSA Open exhibition. It’s on at the RSA building at Princes Street/The Mound, and will run from 29th January until 8th March. It’s free to go in, so if you find yourself in Edinburgh with some time to spare, you could do a lot worse than wandering through the SSA/VAS show and seeing what’s going on in Scottish Art just now.

And the bit of painting I like most in this piece? – The front-lit ground and trees on the right, from behind the dry brown foliage in the foreground to the skyline. As usual, I did the most effective painting without really thinking about it and with not a lot of subsequent correction.

I really do wish that didn’t keep happening…

Evening – Alatyr

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the last of the four small pieces for the Open Eye ‘On a Small Scale’ show. It’s a quiet, early evening scene in a small town in Russia – Alatyr, about halfway between Moscow and the Ural mountains. It was composed as a larger scale painting with a figure - omitted in this one because it’s so very small - which I will no doubt get around to sometime.

I liked the light and the tree masses. It’s from google streetview of course, but not a direct transcription of a single screenshot. The far trees have been shifted leftwards a bit to get the interesting bits in, and I moved the large foreground tree slightly in from the left edge so that it didn’t feel cramped. I’ve also adapted some of the colours by playing up the red and orange top glazes.

I changed my painting technique slightly for this piece. I did the initial setting-out in light pencil because the subject matter was quite complex, and I needed to be as efficient as possible because of time pressure. (Recapping on last month’s ‘Body – Monfréville’, I forgot to mention that I used pencil to indicate the main forms. it was very important to get the curves of the riverbank correct, and that was the easiest and most accurate way to achieve that at 21x15cm.)

After the initial placing, I filled in foliage textures and ground forms with fast-drying thin acrylic ‘grisaille’ layers of Violet Brown Oxide. Once I was happy with that, I progressed with thin semi-opaque oil layers and finished off with glazes. There was no softening or blurring with the fan brush, except in the sky’s two oil paint layers on the white priming. This approach saved a lot of time in the initial stages, and is worth using again in the future. I was very pleased with the violet brown underpainting, and kept seeing it everywhere in real life. I think its oil equivalent is Winsor & Newton’s Mars Violet, and will treat myself to a tube of it for Xmas. 

This piece was actually finished in November, but I cynically delayed posting it because I knew I’d got nothing else ready for December. Even though I’m quietly ‘normalising’ after the Events of last month, I‘ve decided not to resume painting until January. I have some official paperwork to follow up, and then there’s Xmas and New Year. There is a work in progress - which ground to a halt in September - on the easel, so I can get on with that if I feel absolutely desperate, but I don’t think it’s worth starting anything major before January. It’s been very interesting and stimulating to produce this little set of four though, and I feel that I’ve learned a useful chunk about how to use my materials (and how not to use them).

It’s always nice to have something on show, and I’m pleased tell you that ’Ghosts’ is currently on the wall at the Union Gallery until 31 January. 

And the Open Eye show? Well, we didn’t go to the preview on the Friday evening, but on Saturday morning Madam and I wandered down to the gallery after a late breakfast. All four pieces were up on the walls, and all four had sold. I was quite surprised - she wasn’t though.

Quietly chuffed…

Body – Monfréville

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the third of the set of four postcard pieces, and has some music to go with it – Gnossienes No.1, by Eric Satie. It’s what I was listening to while painting this and it fitted perfectly. It’s played painfully slowly, but I find it compelling.

Before I go further I should perhaps temper the enthusiastic promotion of thicker Stand Oil paint mixtures in the previous post. Having completed this piece I had some unexpected trouble when I sprayed it with a temporary light retouch varnish to even up the finish a bit. Alarmingly, the glossy ‘oiliest’ bits became even glossier, and the varnish cissed and bobbled on the more matt parts, which was precisely the opposite of my intent. A second spray coat did the same, and I had to brush the still-wet varnish with a hog brush till it got tacky, while desperately hoping that the paint beneath was dry enough not to smear. Luckily, it was firm enough and I ended up with a broadly even surface. Phew. Next time I think I’ll let the paint dry a bit longer before the retouch spray. Or just not use the retouch spray. 

As you can tell from the Google Streetview source, there’s been a bit of compositional editing here. The left bank sits at a different angle from the main source – it’s imported from the next image to the left and fits the corner much better. Likewise the unwanted road on the right bank has been replaced with grass areas from just past the bridge on the right. 

I like this landscape very much. It’s a patch of marshy land in Normandy, and I put it in my ‘Ideas’ folder about four years ago. The light is northern and grey, but the scene is calm and serene. I was well into the second work session, though, when the painting started demanding a Bad Thing. I knew it would have to be in the near grass on the right, and I knew it was going to be a dead body. It’s a man, and he’s dressed in black, and you do have to look closely to find him as he is so tiny. The daylight around that time was particularly dark and overcast, and I had to rely on lights and a magnifying glass to see what I was doing. As ever, the whole painting changes once he’s seen, and makes it more complete and thought-provoking, and I may paint a larger version at some point.

I’ll not say anything about the final picture yet (that’ll have a blog post all to itself at some point, perhaps in December). All four postcard pieces have been completed, and were dropped off at the Open Eye Gallery for their annual ‘On a Small Scale’ show yesterday (exciting for me as it’s my first invite to participate there). They will form part of the big blocks of work at some point, but the display changes as the stock sells and gets replaced, so I can’t be certain when they will be on the walls. The show is open from Saturday 25th November till 23rd December, so if you’re in Edinburgh, go and have a look - there’s a lot of very good, very small work by a wide variety of painters on show.

Production of ‘Monfréville’, and the fourth one, began after the first two paintings of the series were well on the way. I’m not sure whether the increasingly fraught events since early October have affected it except possibly to have made me seek the calm in it. It was completed on the morning 25th October. In the afternoon Madam and I went down the road for my mother’s arrival at her nursing home in Edinburgh. She was there for ten days, and we visited every (except one) day, and then she died. 

Madam and I were both there, and it was peaceful. 

Smoke – Chelyabinsk

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second in the small postcard-sized series, and is taken from a couple of Google streetview screenshots looking west towards Chelyabinsk. My original view had the interesting sky, but the landscape was dismal. Luckily, just up the road there was this patch of grass and trees where there was a large bonfire, and I latched onto the play between the ground smoke and the vaporous sky. 

It went alright I think, but I would like to have dwelt a bit more on the cloud edge just above where it gets hidden by the rain - at such a small size, some subtleties really do have to go undeveloped. However, there’s great potential for re-working all four of the set at a bigger scale, and there’s a lot to be said for discovering and solving the problems of a piece by painting a smaller version first.

I’ve exaggerated the atmospheric pink under the rain cloud. It’s a very thin mix of Burnt Sienna and Alizarin Crimson in a Stand oil and Damar Varnish medium. I’ve used quite a dense Stand Oil mix in the latter stages of the sky in this one. Instead of my regular 1:7 Stand Oil:Turpentine (+mandatory driers) medium, I’ve used a 1:3, but with a lot more driers. 

If you’re not aware of it, Stand Oil is plain linseed oil that’s undergone heating in a sealed container, which changes it into a very different beast. As bought, it’s the colour and consistency of honey, and I sometimes thin it a bit with Turpentine to facilitate measuring when making up mediums. Without driers/siccatives it takes ages to dry, but it forms a very hard, non-darkening surface. Its most attractive property, though, is its handling. Paint with added Stand Oil feels very mobile and sensitive under the brush. It brings out the best in transparent pigments, and works well in glazes. Used very weakly – with a lot of turpentine (and driers of course) - it begins to ‘tack’ quite quickly as the turpentine evaporates, especially when supplemented with a resin varnish. With a stronger mix, the paint it’s been added to can be manipulated for some time – even a very thin layer – and is very useful for ‘soft’ looking graduated fades. As I say, I’ve never really got round to using particularly strong mixes before, maybe due to a reluctance to use driers. However, since my enforced abandonment of Lead White, I’ve been using driers a lot with the very long-drying Zinc White, so it’s no extra leap to put them to use with Stand Oil. Anyway, it’s worth a play with, and if it’s good enough for Jan van Eyck, well…

Some melancholy news. In the previous post I mused – at some length - on the new bus timetable for my regular family trip up to Perthshire. Sadly, due to my mother’s necessary relocation to Edinburgh, they will be no more. I’ve been going up there at regular intervals now for the best part of twenty-five years. The changing landscape has been a spectacular and inspirational by-product of my filial duties, and I shall miss it. Last Friday’s trip to collect her things was a magnificent circuit – over the new bridge, up through Fife to Perth, along Strathearn to Crieff, then south past Dunblane, Stirling, and back to Edinburgh. 

It was a lovely clear day too.

July Cumulus – Perthshire

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first finisher in a series of four very small postcard-sized submissions to a show in an Edinburgh gallery for the run-up to Christmas. The other three are still in development, but will be coming up soon, and I’ll post about any inclusions in the show if or when they get in. Naturally, if none are accepted, this’ll be the last you’ll ever hear of it. 

The painting is from a photo I took from the top deck of the No.47 bus – front seat of course - just north of Braco, and is more or less a transcription of the photo image. I’ve squeezed a dull section out of the centre so as to include the light areas at the lower right - behind the cloud base – and I’ve moved the top right patch of blue down so that it fits more comfortably. It’s all about the cloud really, which probably means that the supporting trees and ground are actually better painting. 

Technically, there’s not much new to say about this – it’s the fairly usual opaque and transparent layers. I did buy a new colour of paint for it though. We were in the art shop – Greyfriars in Dundas Street – and while Madam was buying some stuff (masking tape and a light portfolio), I had a browse at the Michael Harding oil paint display. I was just wondering vaguely what I’d forgotten to see what paint I needed before leaving the house, and I spotted a tube of Neutral Grey – which I’d never seen before. I hadn’t begun this painting yet, and thought that a standard grey might be useful. It’s a blend of Titanium White, Ivory Black, and with a touch of Burnt Umber. Thick, it’s quite neutral, and thin, over the white priming, it’s definitely quite a tarry brown. Interesting, and I’m sure it’ll be a useful addition.

You may, or may not, have noticed that I didn’t produce a blog post for September. While I know that I’m very, very lucky to be in a position where I can indulge myself in this arty stuff, I can still, very occasionally, become a bit blocked, disenchanted, and unmotivated about the whole painting thing. I went through one of those why-the-flip-am-I-actually-bothering-to-do-this phases. It’s past, I think, but my motivation and inspiration for the whole Easel Thing went completely out the window for some time. Oddly enough, I was diverted by having to fix a painting that had been damaged. It was just a few scratches but I found it interesting to do, and the process harked back to some of the fine colouring I’d had to do during the furniture restoration days. There was no risk associated with it because it was my own work and I had the Work in Progress notes (see link in the column to the right) detailing what pigments I’d used in the surface build-up. And, no, I’m not going to do that for anyone else.

So, while, paint-wise, I myself am hopefully back to normal, that’s more that can be said for the No.47. It seems that the bus company in their wisdom are re-jigging the timetable next month. The No.47 – Crieff to Stirling - will be no more. Never fear, though, it’s being replaced by the No.15a - which currently goes from Perth to Comrie (or St Fillans). It’s a mixed prospect; I’m told the new bus will have slightly different departure times but should be twice the frequency (hourly), so that should be an overall improvement. I am puzzled though, as to why the No.15a has been reassigned to the No.47 route, and the No.47 itself put out to grass. 

Perplexing though this may be, I’m convinced that no great good can come of dwelling on The Perthshire Bus Situation overmuch - best just get on with the artywork…

Ghosts

oil on canvas 100x80cm

Before we begin, get the speakers on and the music track clicked. Hear the piano? Off we go…

Some of you will recognise that this is Kate Bush singing ‘Wuthering Heights’. For those too young or forgetful, this was her debut hit single, which featured memorably on Top of Tops in 1978. You’ll probably be aware that the song is based around Emily Bronte’s novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ – the Heathcliff and Cathy story. 

Some paintings seem to paint themselves, this one didn’t for some reason. Not only is it larger than usual, but it’s quite heavy due to the much thicker stretchers needed, and I pulled my back quite seriously one day while raising it awkwardly on the easel. The blue sky and upper clouds were washed off and repainted once, then overpainted three or four times during the campaign to achieve the right colour and wispiness. The hardness and cragginess of the rock cliffs were built up – counter-intuitively perhaps - with thin veils of opaque/transparent paint, so they took a long time. The cumulus masses on the left kept developing unwanted hard edges, and the colourful young lady (inserted last, after the sky was completed) got very stroppy and refused to be convincing in all the important criteria – stance, colour, tone, solidity, and recognisability. 

Which was annoying, as she is obviously the primary attraction, seeing as how she’s dancing around in a bright red dress against the sky at the edge of a cliff. The grass, happily, took pity on me, and its painting went fairly effortlessly.

Arriving at the right image source for the rocks was a lengthy process too. Initially I was trying to work with composites of Buckstones Edge, but I just couldn’t get a workable skyline shape. (I think it might have been the chance discovery of these rocks that sparked the whole idea) At one point I was desperate enough to consider looking at Salisbury Crags up the road. Luckily it was raining, so I did one more picture search and discovered the Almscliffe Crag. This outcrop was everything I was looking for, and it has a wonderful shallow concave cliff face. As a bonus, it’s a proper Yorkshire feature, which is nice. I’ve flipped the crags left-to-right and altered the scale – they’re actually a lot more massive than suggested here – but the lighting on the source image was perfect for the bright sky I’d already chosen, so I just bluffed the scale. The vital green counter-curve of sunlit ground was a serendipitous contrast with the dead, hard rock.

On the left there’s a bundle of smaller cumulus clouds, and this is where the piece’s title makes sense. If you haven’t spotted them already, there are a couple of transparent figures there, looking up with interest at the young singer. They are, of course, the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff. They’re taken from a couple of stills from William Wyler’s Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon film version. I didn’t want them to be immediately visible so I’ve camouflaged them a bit by putting them against a more contrasting cloud background. Possibly too invisible, but we’ll see.

My scenario is that young Kate is belting out her piece at the very crags where the young lovers used to meet – where the novel suggests their shades were last spotted - and that Heathcliff and Cathy are still there. Though the singer is telling their story, she is oblivious to their presence.

Boiled down, it’s an image about the continuing presence of the dead, and, perhaps, a comforting notion that they can be approving of the living.

I’m aware that the narrative isn’t obvious, and that it will probably become impenetrable within a couple of decades. The viewer has to know all four of the elements - the singer, the song, the novel, and its storyline – which will become a rarer and rarer occurrence as time grinds on, and the recognition factor might be stronger if the title was ‘The Ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy’. Hmm. Purely as an image though, without the pop and literary references, I still think it has legs, and it does have some interesting bits of painting in it (the rocks and grass if you hadn’t noticed, and I’m also quite pleased with the mix of reds in the dress)

Anyway, it’s done now, and I’m going to have a bit of a rest before starting on to the next piece.

Which, with a bit of luck, will go a bit easier…

More Figures and a Seagull

pencil

Yet another pencil window work I’m afraid, which is an admission of two things: 

a) That I still haven’t finished the painting I wanted to get finished. I did think that I’d manage to get it done by the end of July and be able to post it on the blog this month, but the final - most important element - is proving to be difficult and elusive, stubbornly refuses to convince, and to compound its general recalcitrance is refusing to dry as fast as I would like it to. Every morning, I check my side-sample, and every morning my fingertips feel the slight tackiness – reducing a bit, day by day – that signals ‘Unsafe paint surface, liable to lift with the slightest agitation. You labour here at your peril’. Very frustrating, but at least I have taken the decision not to over-hurry it – the painting, after all, does only get made once.

b) That I’m really enjoying doing these little life sketches in pencil. 

They are tiny – most full-length figures are no more than 2-3 inches, so they’re much more about drawing from the wrist than from the shoulder. This month I’ve diversified slightly away from the random figures that wander into view, and have been attempting to draw the birds that flit past – mostly seagulls and pigeons. It’s a funny thing, but while I can recognise a gull in flight instantaneously – even from quite far away off – analysing quite why that is, and then recreating it with marks on paper is quite a different thing. And they move so fast – they make the movement of humans and clouds seem positively glacial in comparison.

By the way, two more things: 

c) That’s not John Cooper Clarke there, just a passing Goth. 

d) I am aware that there is no such species as ‘Seagull’. In Edinburgh, on the North Sea coast, we are treated to several specific species such as Herring Gull, Lesser & Greater Black-Blacked Gulls, Black-Headed Gull, and Common Gull. I am at present not confident of identifying these species accurately, so I am, of course, using the term as a generic.

And finally: 

e) Enjoy the poem…

The Humble Pencil

pencil

I’ve been painfully aware that my rapid Watercolour Window Work exercises have become stale and much less rewarding over the last few months. Short of actually concentrating and working bit harder, which is difficult, I’ve taken the easier solution and changed my tools – hence the switch to pencil.

Actually, it’s been a very pleasant return. What’s not to like – it’s correctable when necessary, it’s dry, and unlike a wet brush doesn’t have ‘apparatus’ or the need to be re-charged with wash. The range of marks, and colour of course, is more restricted than the watercolour, but the pencil does have immediacy and speed that the watercolour can’t match, and that’s what these little live sketches are all about.

They’re still about the same size as the watercolour figures, but can be a touch smaller (the smaller the faster, as in the one of the bloke on the bike - which is about 4cm from helmet to tyre – and which simply would’ve been an indeterminate blob in watercolour).

The paper is still the A4 copy paper, and the graphite is the narrow 4B in my Staedtler clutch pencil, which keeps everything nice and clean, and probably favours my more linear style. I was never particularly fond of grinding away with a 6B – I always seemed to end up with most of it on my face – but it might be interesting to look one out that’s not broken-all-the-way-through and give it a whirl. I’ll see what happens.

I think it’s maybe quite odd that I’ve walked away from the pencil over the years. I think I stopped using one regularly for figure drawing at College when I began favouring Conte crayon for the hours and hours of studio work we had to do. Art Colleges were pretty strong on studio drawing then, and Monday was ‘Figure Drawing’ day. All day. If I remember correctly (and there may be some doubt about that) we started at 9.30 till maybe 12, then carried on after an hour’s lunch till 4pm, and that was, more often than not, a Single Pose. After a break for a cuppa, we’d have another session from 4.30 till 6.30 – with a different model, and maybe broken into two poses – just to finish off the day. It did actually pay off, because there was quite a high level of draughtsmanship amongst the students at the time, and I found that I was getting quite good results with the fine bistre, sanguine, and white Conte hard ‘pastel’ sticks (I loathed the dead black ones – completely lifeless). After College, if I was doing ‘window work’ or fast sketching off the telly, or landscape (which I did very, very, rarely indeed) I would most likely use watercolour (usually Indigo). When I started Artypainting again in 2007 one of the first things I discovered was that I had lost all the facility in my drawing, so I went off to Life Drawing classes, and what drawing medium did I use to get back into it? Yup, my trusty Conte crayons. I’ve used pencil for working ideas out, of course, but never for ‘serious’ work since, ooh, probably, the late 1970’s. 

Which is a long time ago. About when this was playing every night on the juke box in Clarks Bar – where the art students’ drank, across the road from the college at the top corner of Lady Lawson Street. Not to be confused or mistaken for the other Clarks Bar (no connection) in Dundas Street. ‘Our’ Clarks Bar was also across the road from the Fire Station, so it had a quite strange atmosphere – the front bar had the fireman, who were fairly burly down-to-earth guys, very good at darts, while in the back lounge were all these young, arty long-haired, earnestly questing, collarless shirt wearing, hedonistic ‘finding themselves’ types who couldn’t handle their drink very well, who dominated the juke box. For some reason it changed its name to ‘Tap o’ Lauriston’ in the early 80’s and became quite the trendy hotspot for New Romantics and synthesizer bands, party contacts etc, until it suddenly all changed. One Saturday evening myself and Mr Walsh trotted along there looking for a good time, and the place was empty – both bars. We asked the barman (his first night) why, and he said that he wasn’t sure, but that someone had been murdered there a few days before. Well, more than a little shocked, we finished our drinks, and like everyone else had before us, moved on, never to return. The bar closed shortly after that, then the block was demolished, and a Novotel now occupies that space, blandly unaware of its colourful predecessor. 

Hmm. Well, there’s an anecdote you maybe didn’t expect to hear. I only posted a Window Work because I haven’t managed to finish anything this month, and I didn’t imagine for a minute that I’d be diving so deeply into the Waters of Nostalgia. Powerful stuff, that graphite.

To the humble pencil then, unjustly overlooked…

Wheatfield – late August

oil on card 30x20cm

Another view from the train - late afternoon, last August. It’s a combination of two photos taken ten minutes apart; one had a bright wheatfield with a dull sky, the other of a very interesting sky with a dull landscape. (Interesting, for me, to see how dramatically the sky changed between the two photos.) The central cloud form appears to be a low cumulus trying hard to become a multi-layered lenticular*, and, sadly, not quite making it. 

The viewpoint is high because the train has just crossed the River Almond – which curves away northwards through the line of trees on the right. This is just west of the industrial estate that is Newbridge, and about 500metres from the end of the airport runway. I’ve edited all of that out, so the setting isn’t actually as rural a scene as I’m letting on. 

Overall, the light is the thing. I’ve made an extra effort with the sky, and thought a bit about maximising the clarity of the colour. It’s a combination of Utramarine and Winsor Blue (a redder shade of Pthalocyanine Blue), and Zinc White. The thinking behind those specific pigments is that the touch of Pthalo give a pungency to the Ultramarine, while the Zinc allows the maximum saturation at lighter tones. For the blend/fade I reverted to the cloth ‘dabber’ pad, which seems to produce a smoother texture at this (small) scale than my usual soft stippling brushes. The clouds had been roughly indicated at the setting-out stage, but I didn’t bother about preserving their outlines too rigidly, as I planned to draw them properly once I was satisfied with the background ‘blueness’. The first greys in the clouds were calibrated to be about the same tones as the sky to increase the blue, and were worked darker and lighter quite carefully.

Just in passing: Grey is a very useful colour for boosting adjacent colours. I first really appreciated this phenomenon when doing the antique furniture – you could make the polished wood of a glazed bookcase positively buzz if the interior was a matted mid-grey.

That’s it really, quite chuffed though…

*Commonly, and descriptively, known as a ‘Pile d’assiettes’