Another strange mixture

Last week I was talking about a strange confluence of events and this one has proved to be in a similar vein. Sheila and I took the opportunity to go to our caravan in the Lake District for a few days - beautiful, then on Sunday we joined the rest of the family for another baptism - our granson Oliver Joseph. In between times a lorry attempted to total me and reduced the car to something less than it had been. All in all the opportunity to paint has been somewhat lacking, but I have managed a little.

The first piece was something I did late last year after watching a DVD by E. John Robinson and I heard last week that he had passed away so I place it here as a small thankyou for the stimulus he gave me to look at the sea with a clearer vision.






Wave Study - Oil on canvas board 12" x 10"

Tuesday night is life class and after posting an oil last time I decided to listen to the exhortation of WC contributors and spend some time concentrating on drawing and this piece resulted from our last session. I found the pose extremely difficult to draw. Lots of problems with perspective and proportions. The page shows evidence of the many restatements required to get the drawing to its current state. I need to work even harder at this.




Hannah - Graphite stick on paper (touch of watercolour) 20" x 15"



An occasional indulgence of mine is to open a book that I treasure. It is a bound book of watercolour paper that I reserve for images drawn from a holiday that we took in Venice. I have the Venice tourist's compulsory cache of photographs from that glorious week and I use them from time to time to inspire a watercolour sketch. This one is from last week.



Venice - Watercolour 12" x 10"

Hopefully, this next week will yield something more substantial in terms of painting as I am travelling down to Norfolk to attend a two day workshop with Martin Kinnear who I'm sure will give me plenty of guidance in terms of the next stages in my development. I'm looking forward to reporting on it next time I sit in front of the computer.

Mixed Week

The last week has been a strange one. Two funerals and a baptism. Lots of people from family, school days, college days and working life as well as good friends picked up along the way. A mind seething with memories, events and expectations. Maybe the emotional roller coaster has had an impact on the picture making. The main work of the week was the painting of St. Mary's Island but not the only art in my life. Tuesday is life class and the last one was problematic. I started my laying a ground that was a greeny blue for no reason that I can remember, planning in a haze. Having knocked in my drawing I began to mix some flesh tones and applied a stroke or two of my usual mix and stepped back. It was not going to do. Then began a search for colours that didn't offend my eye too much when placed in combination. The resultant melange is shown below.
I've posted this in the Wet Canvas Figure forum and been inundated with quality detailed advice that is going to take me some time to process. I'll maybe get back literally to the drawing board and hone the draughtsmanship before launching into colour again. Nevertheless there are some interesting value and colour relationships in the picture from which I can learn. The model does show one of the difficulties that we have in the current working space, that being the range of different light sources meaning that it is difficult to avoid placing highlight and shadow in the expected places.




Fiona - Oil on canvas board 12" x 10"


After the palette adventures at life class there was a goodly range of paint left on my board so I decided to use it in a quick still life exercise - the result is below. Forty five minutes entertainment that distracted me and sent me to bed feeling better than I had all day.



Still Life - Oil on canvas board 10" x 8"

Work In Progress - Clearing Storm, St. Mary's Island

This post is breaking away from the thread that I've been following, outlining the journey I have been on with my painting. This piece has been on my easel this week and I am at the stage where I need a little input from another pair of eyes. I've posted it on WC but as yet only elicited one comment. My own feeling is that the sky needs a little finishing with the addition of some crepuscular rays to provide some highlighting on the lighthouse. The sea needs some work as does the rocky foreshore. My biggest dilemma is whether or not to include the stretch of beach that was visible when I did my original sketches or run the sea up to the rocks. At the moment the halo of sand doesn't work so changes are necessary.

Oil on Canvas board 20" x 16"

The Heart of It

Now that I was getting a little experience I began to think about what it was I wanted to make the core of my work. In one respect it was not a difficult question to answer. I have always loved the outdoors and many of the pursuits that I've followed have been in the country or on the coast. This made it easy to decide that whatever else I did, working en plein air would be at the heart of it and that a core of that would be spending some time along the wonderful NE coast which is where I live. Within a few miles of home there are some fascinating sea stacks left by cliff erosion and they make interesting subject material. The following images are all 12" x 10" Oil sketches that were completed on site within seven miles from home.





Whitburn Rocks



Lizard Point

Souter

The Next Big One

Taking to heart some of the lessons learned by posting work on Wet Canvas, I thought it a good idea to post a piece as a Work In Progress hoping to get advice on some of the more subtle ideas that contributors have about acceptable work. The first image is the one that I posted. It is a view taken on a trip along the Madison River in Montana. The purpose of the trip was catching trout and what a day it was, brown trout, rainbow trout and whitefish rising to the fly all day. However, back to painting. I thought the piece was nearing completion and already had some ideas about work that needed to be done. The response on WC was really helpful and lots of the adjustments suggested were indeed more subtle than major surgery.



The second image shows the painting after adjustments and they do make a difference. Notice the differerence in the collar of cloud around the mountain, value changes in the mid ground and more work in the foreground. The clouds now look a little more like clouds rather than the balls of cotton wool on the first picture. This exercise certainly emphasised for me the benefit of other eyes viewing our work. It always prompts further thought on our part. Learning occurs.




Madison View - Oil on canvas board 20" x 16"

Going Larger

Bamburgh Dawn - Oil on Canvas Board 20" x 16"


Heading for the holiday season with the inevitable change in diet to high fat, cholesterol, salt, additives, protein, chocolate, wine, whisky and grandchildren's leftovers. The title of this post is not meant to reflect the annual binge but a shift to try and incorporate some of what I had been learning into a larger piece.

Sheila, my wife, has a love for a photograph that I took on one of our many trips to the Northumberland coast. The photograph is of the sun rising near Bamburgh Castle and the challenge I set myself was to try to produce some of the feeling of the photograph in paint. The result is the picture above.

Total Immersion

The time had come to put myself in front of some real painting so I headed for London to spend three days 'doing' the galleries, but not in the usual cursory way. The particular galleries and indeed paintings were planned before going. I was delighted to have guidance for the trip from Martin Kinnear.

On the first day I spent the day doing the special Rothko and Bacon exhibitions, both of which blew me away and left me with intense feelings about some of the more negative aspects of the human condition. However, both exhibit wonderful mastery of the medium. Rothko - glowing glimpses of colour that are not immediate. Even his black compositions take on a colourful life of their own as you view them. Bacon - with meticulous preparation of grounds, thin stains of colour on unprimed canvas on which he builds effects with various densities of pain, followed by the tension and violence that his drawing and brushwork evoke. Whilst this work would not represent styles that I would wish to emulate, the beautiful application of paint, colour control and glazing certainly would be. Both exhibit that quality that seems to elude most of us, the ability to create fascinating brushstrokes full of texture, colour and light.

Second day - to the National Gallery and a langorous journey along a path suggested by Martin. On arrival I noticed that there was a special exhibition of Sisley paintings so I made a small diversion to investigate. What I found was inspirational for plein air working. Bold brushstrokes, impressionistic highlighting of colour, strong underpainting - lots of food for thought there for me.

On to my intended starting point. The wonderful arrangement of canvases, specified by Turner in his will. Two of his flanking one of Claude's - Bliss. Turner and his sun and vapour, layer upon layer of delicate colour in his sky. Claude, contre jour in differing glows that infuse the rest of the painting with light coloured in pink, yellow, red and orange. It would be possible to spend most of a day with this glorious trio. Dragging myself away to luxuriate in more Claude - feel the glow.

Then off to the Dutch, that I have woefully neglected in the past, Cuyp, Dubbels, Hobbema, Van Goyen, Van Ruysdael, Van Ruisdael and Van der Poel. Skies that go on for ever. The impact that their wonderful landscapes have had on generations of painters is clearly evident when one places them into historical context. For me the two most impressive are Meindert Hobbema ....

and Jacob van Ruisdael.

A weary walk to the hotel and dinner punctuated by a continuous parade of mental images inspired by the day's viewing.

Last day and another store of visual treats. To Tate Britain for Turner, light, and more light as well as an enjoyable colour experiment exhibit. The exhibit gives a great insight into Turner's technique and the colour theory that informed it. On leaving I had a much clearer understanding of the reasoning behind things I had heard and read about complementary colour and shadow colour. Then on to the list of English notables, Constable and others. I couldn't resist an interesting diversion to enjoy the Pre Raphaelites, a bit of a weakness of mine. A piece of Millais eye candy to close this post. One guy I picked up on that hadn't crossed the radar before was Francis Danby - one picture of a Norwegian fjord that had a big impact on me, mostly because of the beautiful highlights on cloud and rocks with lovely detailed shadows.

Time to go home. Spent a fortune on books, wore out my knackered knees and got on the train exhausted but content that I had had a deep immersion in some of the finest picture making that was available in our country.

November paintings

Brushes in hand and easel at the ready, along with a litany of advice, tips and things to think about I headed out into the wide world and produced my next oils en plein air. Again a mixture of aspects that I found pleasing and things that were little short of embarrassing. The first image is my first attempt at limiting my palette - raw sienna, burnt sienna, paynes grey and white and I almost succeeded in the self discipline until the very final stage when I cheated a little with a touch of cad yellow to warm some of the green. The limited palette approach is advocated in many of the books that I've been reading and certainly makes you think. I resolved to adopt a version of this approach in an attempt to develop my sensitivity to colours and their production on the canvas.




Little stream - Plein Air Oil Sketch, canvas board 12" x 10"


Another trip out along the coast to a well known landmark, the St. Mary's Island Lighthouse resulted in the next painting. As my friends in Wet Canvas tell me I don't pick easy subjects and there are distinct signs of my lack of mastery in all of these images, but there are also signs of heeding some of the lessons picked up along the way. Complex scenes like this, with conditions changing as the incoming tide alters the scene before you, make it difficult to be accurate in drawing and I will return to this site and select a viewpoint that will ease some of those problems and hopefully improve the perspective.


St. Mary's Island - Plein Air Oil Sketch, canvas board 12" x 10"


Even though splashing oil was becoming my disease, the watercolour kit usually accompanies me on trips out. A last visit of the year to the Lake District gave me the opportunity to produce a painting of one of our favourite watering holes.



The Swan at Grasmere - Watercolour 14" x 10"


Various other exercises filled my other painting hours and the painting below is taken from a photograph that I had taken on a holiday in the US during the previous year.



Yellowstone - Oil, canvas board 12" x 10"

All of the outings and exercises were building up experience and posting the paintings on Wet Canvas began to get me both encouragement and invaluable advice. I would put that advice to use in attempting a larger piece of work. It was also about time for me to spend some time in front of some real art and I began planning a number of visits to see the best that the country has to offer in the wonderful galleries that are scattered around. They will be the subject of my next post.