Seven Trees

oil on card 35x22 cm

I haven't the faintest idea what music I was listening to when starting this piece, but I was very conscious that Radiohead's 'No Surprises' was playing as I touched in the last few additions underneath the left-hand clump of trees.

The initial source for this smallish painting is a Google Streetview image in Richmond Park, London.

Just for change it's more about the near group of trees and their shadows rather than the sky. It's late summer, so the foliage is very dark, and the grass is dry and yellow with drought, which sets up up an interesting tonal situation. The central tree's trunk has ben narrowed slightly, as I couldn't make the source's original huge girth credible. I suspect it's a very old tree indeed – the others are young clumps of three – and has probably had some thinning out work done to preserve its crown and to keep it from breaking up. What struck me about these trees, along with their dark tone and symmetry, was the flat uniform bottom edges. Richmond Park is stocked with deer – a reminder of its original status as a royal hunting park. Most, if not all of the trees in the park have the same level bottom edge - the maximum height to which the deer can reach.

The original sky wasn't that interesting, so the final source image was a construct of bits of streetview from up the road in Richmond Park, and some clouds I had snapped from up the road in Edinburgh last year. The original patches of blue sky behind the the cumulus were very much desaturated to monochrome - fake altostratus, maybe? - but the slight blues and pinks of the distance were very much retained, and, in hindsight, should maybe have been exaggerated a little.

This piece was begun ages ago, with tight drawing and rather weak, indecisive paint washes. Restarting it in January with thicker, more opaque, paint brought a bit more solidity and purpose, so I'm quite happy with that, even though it took far too many sessions to do. The sky and ground are treated completely differently; the sky has loose and slippery walnut oil (plus cobalt driers!) as a medium – with M. Graham's Titanium White in Walnut oil – while the ground and trees have a stickier Stand Oil/Damar varnish medium. This gives the sky and clouds a softness that the ground doesn't require. (I do quite like the softness of the sky paint and its undramatically narrow tone range)

The title 'Seven Trees' is fairly generic, but I think that you can see – especially from looking closely at the source link – that the subjects are Oak trees. However, to title the painting 'Seven Oaks' would be to mislead the viewer into thinking that this was Sevenoaks, in Kent. Which it most definitely is not.

What you can't see here, no matter how closely you look, are the myriads of Ring-necked Parakeets that have made Richmond Park and South West London their home. There is an abundance of theories on how they got there, but however that happened they are now firmly resident and are spreading northwards, and even – according to this article – (gulp) to Edinburgh. I haven't seen any yet, but I did see a buzzard wheeling above our neighbourhood just last week.

Maybe it was keeping a keen eye out for parakeets...

 

Morning - Kopachevo

oil on card 21x15cm

The last of the Small Scales 'postcard' pieces for this year. There's a brief shimmering track which fits it quite well – 'Takk', from Sigur Ros.

I found this location a few years ago, but couldn't find a way to make it work. It's in north east Croatia, looking onto the flood plain near the confluence of the rivers Danube and Drava, and just up the road from the small village of Kopachevo (Kopačevo). It's a bright and breezy morning in October, and the leaves will be turning very soon.

It's not about the sky for a change – though the cirrus does add energy – but much more about the tree masses and open areas. I probably would have organised something using this image source a while ago, but wasn't happy with the area on the right; I felt the glimpse of the lake there somehow weakened the open 'heath' to the left. It was solved very simply though – by importing some trees from the next patch of woodland along to the left, and flipping them horizontally to make the light fit. That happy accident gave me the small 'V'-shaped tree in the foreground and the atmospheric curtain of trees behind it.

A bit of technical stuff. Along with the other two previous pieces, this is primed in grey, dot-gridded in gouache, and the composition drawn straight in with thinnish oil paint - using fairly opaque pigments initially, then thinner more transparent modifying layers. Running out of time, I employed more-than-I-usually-would cobalt driers in the latter stages (especially in the yellows), but these layers are so thin that I'm not that bothered about potential future surface damage. (I would be with thick paint, but certainly not here)

It turns out that this randomly found location - Kopački Rit - is actually an important European wetland, and is a designated nature park. I was interested in the reddish ground vegetation, and it turns out that these are the areas that are regularly flooded. This can be seen here – the same place at a different date. The waters can be seen more broadly from this drone view - Kopachevo village is straight ahead, where the smoke is rising from. However, if you rotate the streetview in the opposite direction - northwards - the 'red grass' in the painting is under the inlet just as the bend in the road straightens.

This beautiful setting has quite a lot of potential for development into a larger and more complex piece. I've a bit of catching up to do with works already in progress, but with all things being well I should be starting on this within a few months.

 

Tree - near Orenburg

oil on card 21x15 cm

This is the second of the batch of this year's Small Scale pieces. There is a track to go with it – a short piece from Max Richter's Infra. It's got a sweep which matches the location - The Russian steppe grasslands. This specific spot is near Orenburg, a city about 100km west of the southernmost tip of the Ural mountains, and about the same distance north of the Kazakhstan border.

It's mostly about the sky, but the tree is very important. I flipped it from leaning into the slant of the cloud banks – as it does in the source - to leaning to the left away from them, as if in reaction. The 'curl' of its right side was formed accidentally during the flipping process and adds a tasty bit of character. Having done that, when the whole photoshop assembly was reversed left/right when checking the composition, it seemed as though the tree was shouting at the sky. Flipped back, as painted, the tree seemed more relaxed, and in awe of the sky – or at least enjoying the spectacle. Which is what I was seeing.

This batch of Small Scales are all done with the same grey priming and straight-to-oil-paint system, but there's a lot more scratching of the wet paint to indicate the foreground grasses in this one. I've exaggerated the pinkness of the grass slightly, and the lower sky to the right of the tree has a blue haze which perhaps doesn't show so well in this photograph. It might be easy to miss in a gallery of loudly competing images, but I think the simplicity of the composition allows the very limited colour scheme to bloom, which I quite like.

A little snippet of background information, just so you know. The Eurasian Steppe – which stretches almost unbroken from Eastern Europe to China - is subdivided into various types. The area here is part of the Pontic/Caspian Steppe (the Black Sea being the Roman 'Pontus Euxinus'); the land of horse-cultured nomadic peoples like the Scythians, Goths, Kazakhs (Cossacks) and Huns, who were in turn overrun (or overridden by?) the Mongols from the Gobi-Manchurian Steppe even further east.

The whole show – some hundreds of pieces – is online now at On a Small Scale Online and is always worth a look.

(My 'Cumulus – Lendum' seems to have disappeared though. Hopefully sold)

 

Cumulus - Lendum

oil on card 21x15 cm

A little piece – the first since the summer – and moving back into the swing of things.

This one's based on a google streetview source near Lendum, in northern Denmark. There's no specific music associated with this, but I did listen to a lot of J.S. Bach's 48 preludes and Fugues, and this is but one...

It's all about the cloud and the clear blue sky, of course. I played around with the source image quite a lot - flipping the composition from left to right, then isolating the landscape and flipping that against the sky, which worked a bit better. I tweaked with the skyline and some of the tree groups, and got an arrangement I was happy enough to go ahead with. It's been very pleasant working on a fairly simple composition for a change, and without overly committing myself, I think it's a strong enough idea to make into a bigger piece sometime.

A brief delve into the technical side here. The priming was grey for a change, dot gridded with gouache, and the compositional elements placed and outlined with thin oil paint. Any visible grid dots were then washed off with water (much easier and quicker than rubbing a pencil grid away) and the painting was filled in with fairly opaque oil paint. Forms etc were subsequently developed with thinner transparent glazes and scumbles. The clarity of the blue was quite important – I used Michael Harding's King's Blue, with a touch of Winsor & Newton Pthalo Blue (Red shade) – just enough to knock the Ultramarine's violet tendency down a bit and add a bit of intensity. The King's Blue I'm using is an older tube, and is a factory mix of Ultramarine, Titanium White, and Zinc White. Harding withdrew all Zinc White from his paint mixes a few years ago though; a research paper had demonstrated that thick layers of Zinc White oil paint were prone to breaking up. Personally, I can't see any reason on Earth why anyone would use Zinc White in thick layers as it is such a semi-opaque pigment and one of the longest-drying oil pigments available, but there we are.

This is the first to finish of a few postcard-sized pieces being done for the annual Open Eye gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show. The timing of their invitation could not have been better; I had been attending a chiropractor for about a month and was just beginning to feel the benefits. To cut quite a long and rather painful story short, since early Spring my back pain and accompanying sciatica had ruled out most artwork and had latterly made easel work – standing or sitting - impossible. I began this treatment – basically corrective spinal adjustments, stretches & exercises, and rigorous attendance to posture (crossing legs at the knee is Verboten!) – in August, and that work is now starting to kick in. I, and my knees, can still be a bit weak and creaky about town, but the lumbar improvement so far is certainly making life for me (and Madam) a Whole Lot Better.

Which is nice...

 

Dog - After the Rain

oil on panel 51x61cm

There is some music for this painting, but because it was worked on and altered over a long period – in spasms, for way over a year – it is difficult to pick out anything that specifically sets a single overall mood. If I remember correctly I started off with Handel's 'He shall feed his flock like a shepherd', then went through the gamut of Shostakovich/Bach Preludes and Fugues, Richter, Radiohead etc, interspersed with a vast multitude of random pop singles (e.g. Fire Brigade).

I was always struggling to get energised, but in the very final stages of this marathon I ended up with the William Lawes six-part 'In Nomine' (which I hope is now playing). It's a wonderful piece from when I first became interested in Early Music in the 1980s. It was recorded in 1971 - at the very beginning of the Early Music revival - by Gustav Leonhardt, and uses 20th century violins, violas, and cellos instead of gut-strung viols. Despite this heresy(!) the players produce a sublime passage near the middle where only a few parts twine and weave around the high long-note melody ('cantus firmus') of the 'In Nomine' form. The Handel still works though.

Back to the painting. Originally working-titled 'Sheep Tree', the source image is an old snap from a bus – just a view yards away from here. The landscape is the fine arcadian parkland of Culdees Castle Estate, in Strathearn. Interesting to see that there is actually a group of sheep resting beneath the main tree.

I should say that this was composed and begun in a state of resistance – by which I mean that last year I went through quite a bad period of negativity about painting, but still felt obliged to at least attempt some work. In the original composition there were three sheep in the foreground, with a naked figure lying beneath the tree. The sky had horizontal bands of pale blue and light grey cloud, with a bit of lighter, more ragged cloud, towards the top. My back had begun giving me problems, and my initial work was fairly cursory in a 'whatever it is you're doing get it done quick so I can sit down please!' sort of way. Some of the hurried early work wasn't smoothed enough and caused some lasting effects on the surface. For some reason I experienced difficulty gauging the tones in my source and replicating them on the painting – even attempting to work with a photographer's grey card to get them right (it turned out that I wasn't far off in the first place, but I suppose that is a measure of my self-doubt at that point).

I placed clothed figures and a dog beneath the tree. An improvement on the rather meaningless single naked figure. That altered the premise of the painting, and made it far more relevant. The foreground spaces weren't reading properly, so I repainted all the sheep a little smaller. That didn't help, so I painted out all the sheep. This made the whole thing far too empty, and the space still didn't read properly.

At this point, even after another long lull, I was seriously weighing up whether to abandon this piece, and rub it down and re-prime it ready for a new project.

After testing out new remedies on photoshop, I decided to carry on but drastically change some elements. I introduced the two wedges of rough foreground grass (from the setting for the other sheep-based composition which didn't work). I made the sky a grey overcast, with the slanting band of light, and exaggerated the 'upper glow' from the original source a little. All this helped massively, but the broad brush painting of the opaque sky paint meant the redrawing of all the tree outlines, yet again. Which was tough. It was also inspiring though, as that loose grey paint made me think about the effect the back lighting was having on the far line of trees – their dark silhouettes had become fuzzed and desaturated. Developing this idea, I made their upper foliage faded and grey, and introduced more colour and contrast towards the ground, where the colours and tones were normal and natural. I rather liked this effect – it empowered the backlight - but it presented me with a challenge when applying that system to the main tree. Here, the very top foliage is a very light grey, and could be considered a bit unnatural, but I think – and hope - that I've got away with it.

A quick run-down of technical stuff. From my notes: 'Spot-gridded and elements placed and drawn with crayon. Forms and tones developed with thin Raw Umber fluid acrylic. Then oil paint.' As I said above, I had to re-draw the trees multiple times - so, so, tedious. On the plus side, though, all that correcting and repainting has produced quite a nice surface, albeit with many more layers of embedded dust and cat hair than I'm comfortable with.

I'm pleased with the new flat diagonals and wedges in the foreground and sky, though - they bring a gentle dynamism to what was originally a very static composition. Generally, I love stable horizontals; they are very satisfying in a 'landscape' or square format. Unfortunately, in this 'portrait' format too many became dull and unhelpful.

All in all, there are some interesting bits of painting in this (and the odd unresolvable patch I'm just letting go), but - because of the rather 'fire-fighting' nature of the compositional rescue - it maybe lacks the 'wholeness' which good paintings usually have. I'm glad I rescued it, but it was a real struggle and took far, far, too long to produce.

Lastly, I feel I should make it known that the group of figures beneath the central tree is a composite, using photographs of some of the atrocities discovered at Bucha, north-west of Kiev, as Russian soldiers retreated in April last year. Including the dog.

 

Outcrop

oil on card 20x15 cm

A finished piece! A very small preparatory work for a larger painting, hopefully to be started later this year.

There is some music to go with it – this Prelude was playing as I was making the finishing touches, and it felt very comfortable (maybe not so much the more frenetic Fugue that follows on from it, even though it does land beautifully).

The source was this very dramatic setting I came across while idly random-browsing on google street view. It's on the piratically named 'Carcass Island', in the Falklands. It was a wonderful raw subject, but to better describe the space between the outcrop and the viewer, I felt I had to make some alterations: I imported some of the rocks on the left of the painting (from the same area), and introduced the foreground rocks (from Norway). The distant mountains and lower clouds are a left/right switched view looking far across Loch Lomond westwards from Ben Lomond. I've now forgotten where the upper sky and stylised Cumulonimbus are sourced from.

This piece is a preliminary exercise to familiarise myself with and explore the complexities of the subject matter, and if problems arose it would be easier to sort them out nice and early at this smaller scale. As it happened, there was enough play in the sky to depart from my photoshop construction from the very start.

I took my time placing the shapes and rock details – first in water soluble graphite (I still find it useful, but very waxy) then reinforced and toned them in with a thin neutral mix of Ultramarine and Burnt Umber oil paint. The rest was done with tints and veils of transparent and semi-opaque oil to bring out the grasses, and the warms and cools within the rocks.

It went all right, but I couldn't help thinking back a few years to an exhibition of the work – and especially the enormous light-soaked watercolours - of Giovanni Battista Lusieri. His depictions of rocks (with watercolour) were phenomenal, and I'm thinking that I could certainly do with a bit of that when I eventually get around to the larger version of this little piece.

 

Window Work – January 2023

6B graphite

I thought, for a change, that I'd dig out one of my larger, lumpier, drawing tools. These little sketches are all done with thick 6B graphite – 5.6mm leads in a chunky holder. This particular clutch leadholder is plastic, so not as heavy as some of the metal ones, but still feels very different from a pencil.

I had felt that I was getting in a bit of a rut with the Window Work and not concentrating properly on what I was doing, and I was open to approaching things a little differently. The catalyst for change was a gallery visit last month which featured work by Alberto Morocco. He was a highly respected Scottish painter, of the older generation that taught me at college, but I hadn't gone to the gallery specifically to see his work.

What struck me about the show was that it had a lot of functional drawing – there were sketches of musicians, obviously done in situ, and paintings that utilised them. Other drawings included written colour notes, in casual preparation for a potential painting at some later date. There were sketches of everyday things and people - fast, lean, and incomplete, but packed with relevant information. I was mesmerised by one of a donkey. It was in brown Conté crayon, a medium I'd used a lot at one point, and was just a few weighted lines - some doubled over in correction - and fingered smudges to suggest the roundness and weight of the belly. It couldn't have taken more than five or ten minutes, but was a good distillation of what a donkey is.

The experience brought me back very sharply to how I used to work – right down to the colour notes thing – and the casual everyday necessity of looking and drawing in order to find out how the forms of an object work. I was reminded of the distant early paintings I had done purely from sketches and colour notes (still got some – I should really photograph them sometime). I carried my drawing habit into the furniture workshop, and still have some of the job assessment drawings I would do when addressing what had to be repaired. This one is an Irish Chicken Coop Dresser. As usual with pine Irish Dressers chunks of cornice were missing, the bottom was entirely rotted off, and a lot of the glue dissolved after an overnight soak in the caustic tank to strip a couple of centuries-worth of paint off. (I also see from the notes that I was actually starting work at 9.30am, when I should really have been starting at 9am sharp. Oops...) A lot of this activity was swept away by the arrival of cheap digital photography, of course. The sheer convenience of capturing an accurate image in the blink of a shutter was always going to beat the effort of actually drawing for a few minutes.

Anyway, the upshot has been that over the last month or so I've renewed my keenness for Window Work. I increased my sessions from a very reluctant 20/25 minutes (during which I could barely sit still) to around 40/45 minutes and up to an hour - concentrating much harder on the 'looking' while allowing myself a bit more looseness in the mark-making (I quite enjoyed using the angled hatching to help the impression of form). In particular, I've been looking more closely at gait, and trying to work out what's going on with non-stationary legs. Really easy to do with a camera, obviously, but then you end up with a frozen image, which perhaps doesn't increase any understanding of the movements involved.

Which is sort of the whole point of the exercise...

 

Sun – Oleshky Sands

 

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the third of the 21x15cm pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show.

One evening a couple of months ago, I was looking at the satellite view of Southern Ukraine - an area of some intense news focus just now. I was intrigued by a huge pale anomaly on the south bank of the Dnipro River, just across from Kherson. Looking closer, and seeing the images available on streetview, I found this miraculous landscape – the Oleshky Sands. It's a sandy 'desert' - the dunes held together with scattered patches of rough grass, and peppered with clusters of random pine and birch. The local 'experts' have produced some very good quality panoramas for streetview, with some interesting skies as a bonus. Not surprisingly, it's a National Park, but - sadly - currently an occupied military zone.

The composition is all about the soft light, and the soft sand. The horizon from the original source image was levelled, the centre raised a bit, and the further landscape at the edges much reduced and simplified. The finished painting probably ended up missing the overall 'violetness' of the sky, but I did have a bit of fun playing with its underlying warm and cool undertones.

Technically, this was pretty straightforward. However, being fed-up indenting soft card surfaces when using crayon, the initial placings were done with a water-soluble graphite pencil. As I've just indicated, the sky is constructed with lots of thin layers. These are not true transparent glazes, but coloured 'veils' using semi-transparent Zinc White. The landscape was painted with mostly opaque pigments (e.g. Unbleached Titanium Dioxide – a usefully dull and opaque greyish beige), and the main sandy forms worked largely wet-into-wet. This was possibly an attempt to say something about the difference between solid earth and thin air by using contrasting paint qualities. Hmm. I have perhaps made the dune tufts too hard, and the atmospherics a little too fuzzy, but there we go.

I should expand more on the Small Scales show. It's basically a wide variety of top-notch painters' work on sale at reasonable prices. The show is exclusively online. My two recent pieces are up just now, and the gallery has added a couple of my unsold ones from past years. This painting - running very late – has been varnished and is in the gallery now, and may possibly be online by the end of this week - but the fourth of the pieces may not be finished in time to be included. I'm treating it as a work-out for a larger painting anyway, so nothing's lost.

Getting back to the graphite pencil, though. I'd seen some work where another painter had used water washes of graphite, and was puzzled, because in my experience graphite and water don't mix. Literally a couple of days later I was chatting with an old mate from college – an art teacher – who gently broke the news to me that water-soluble graphite pencils had been around for quite a long time actually. Which made me feel a bit silly. To cap it all, though, water-soluble graphite, on the primer anyway, seems to wash off with thinned oil paint as readily as it does with water. Which is not so good.

Hoping for better luck with my next technical breakthrough, whatever that's going to be...

Mislaid Landscape

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second postcard-sized picture for the Open Eye Gallery 'Small Scale' show. There's some music associated with painting it, though not as a mood-setter. While working on the last stages I was listening to Radiohead's first album, 'Pablo Honey', and this happens to be the first track. Very refreshing. The whole album – which includes their breakthrough single 'Creep' - is quite raw in comparison to what they went on to produce, but you can hear where they're going.

The original source image was a screenshot grabbed from google streetview. Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea where this landscape is. This is annoying, a) because I wanted to use more information from the surroundings when composing the picture, and b) to source more material with that light and landscape. The screenshot was taken when I was under the mistaken impression that the global coordinates were still being displayed (a practice discontinued some time ago). I now make sure that I have a record of a landscape's location and time, and that I can find it again. This one's got to be European, but whether it's Western Russia, France, Poland, Sweden, or Lithuania, is beyond me.

(My current method of recording a location: Once in streetview, go to the little info box in the top left corner. Click the 'three dots', then click 'Share or embed image'. Either copy that on-screen link or take another screenshot of it).

What I liked about this setting was the saturation and freshness of the colour and light, and the way that while the shorter trees of the group were still, the tall birch was being made ragged by quite a strong and very local gust of wind. This tree also seems to lean into the wind, which is even more interesting. The only compositional tweaking is some cropping of the source image, and some repeated and reversed copy-and-pasting of some of the original foreground grass, to hide some road surface in the bottom right corner.

Colour-wise, I've used a fair bit of Cadmium Lemon in the greens to boost their intensity – a step up for me as my palette is usually fairly muted. In terms of paint handling, there's quite a lot of scratching into the wet paint in the foreground grass, and – except in the clouds - I refrained from mass blurring and softening with fan brushes. Until the last session, that is, where I had to correct some jarring and misjudged final darks in the trees, and blurred the lighter opaque greens over these hard-edged miss-steps. I wish now that I'd softened some of the red-browns of the trunks and branches – transparent glazes over the plain white bark - but there you go.

This little painting probably took too long and may still be too rough, but I did learn something about widening my range of marks. Whether that gets carried forward is another matter, but all-in-all this was a useful piece to have got done. And despite being a little angsty about the trees, I'm actually quite pleased with the softness of the sky. It feels very calm.

Which is nice...

 

Sky - Lipovka

oil on card 21x15 cm

This is small postcard-sized piece, the first finished of my contributions to the Open Eye Gallery's annual Small Scale show. And I'm pleased to say that its painting went quite well.

There's no particular music associated with this, though I did do a lot of catching up with Melvin Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme from BBC Radio 4. (There is so much of interest to listen to there – explore the Archive, you won't regret it) Having said that, during the final easel session – when I was hunting the painting down, and where everything fell into place – I listened to Reinbert de Leeuw's recordings of Erik Satie's piano pieces (like this one). Which connected rather pleasantly.

The source image was a fairly random but lucky find when free-roaming through google streetview one evening. It's a view from a Russian motorway – the M-4 - just north of the Lipovka turn-off.

Compositionally it's all about the sky (of course). The supporting landscape was flipped left/right and a little reworked, the distant hills have been enlarged, and I've shifted one of the cumulus to the right a bit. I'd taken the original screen shot probably about seven or eight years ago, and - failing to do anything with it - carried it forward year by year in my 'Cloud Studies' folder. When I finally got round to developing it and needing more info about the wider context, I found – to my horror – that I had no idea where this was. I had to go back to my original screengrab files and look for clues there. I found that I had, luckily, taken another screen shot some minutes down the road, which included a map view with a place name. As this is the only motorway in that locality, I simply tracked up and down it till I'd found the original location AND the right date. Streetview has now gathered so many shots of locations at different times, and on both sides of the roads, that it can be a bit of a jigsaw now, and the available source dates can change within yards. It is a fantastic resource, but it can be annoying when trying to trace a particular view on a specific date. I did find it though – eventually - and such was my rejoicing that I was close to making the title 'The Prodigal Sky – Lipovka'.

There's nothing unusual technique-wise here – spot grids, basic crayon drawing developed lightly with Paynes Grey fluid acrylic, then oil layers. Annoyingly, the spot grid crayon had rather pressed the card and made little indentations. They're not particularly deep, but could have gathered concentrations of paint where not wanted, so I may have to re-think using crayon on the relatively soft card surfaces.

All in all, I'm pleased that I finally got to grips with this image, and I think I've made a good enough stab at the higher altocumulus masses. Madam said that the lower cumulus clouds really do seem to hang in the space. Which was nice.

I should just say: The date of the source image is June 2013, and all is well. It is the main arterial road from the Moscow area to Rostov on Don, and eastern Ukraine. I have no doubt that the traffic on it just now – night and day, in both directions - is grim, deadly, and tragic. This present will become the past. And whatever sky is there today will be replaced by another one tomorrow, and constantly be wonderful.

 

Overcast – South Queensferry

oil on card 30x20cm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sheep Studies

pencil

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three Crows

oil on panel 31x25cm

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

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

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

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

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

Which pangs my heart given the painting's genesis.

 

Window Work - April 2022

 

watercolour

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

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

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

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

Nice to be back...

Oryol

oil on card 21x15cm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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