oil on canvas 56x56cm
I got this image when pootling fairly randomly around Russian back roads on the Google Streetview, and was struck by this ‘cave’ I found in the trees on the edge of a village called Glazovo. I did think about adding figures, and did try out a barking dog early in the compositional stage, but it seemed to be too much. So, no figures or anything else lurking here, just the dark.
Sometimes an image strikes you for no reason, but I think I was reminded of seeing a particular painting by Edward Hopper in a magazine when I was in my mid-teens. There’s something a little unsafe about those murky shadows.
Technically, there are lots of thin glazes in this, most of the thin darks and stronger shadows in the trees are made using Prussian Blue and Raw or Burnt Umber, and a lot of the greens are a pure transparent Yellow Lake laid over them. Come to think of it, with this subject matter and colour range I could’ve saved myself an awful lot of bother by establishing the masses in monochrome. More straightforwardly though, the central ‘dark’ is a simple glaze made with pure Ivory Black. The idea is to differentiate that particular area from the rest in an effort to make it a bit edgy, like the shadow in the Hopper. This layered transparent surface is actually very rich, but possibly a bit overcooked. I think I started off aiming for some quite subdued late summer, overcast colours, but they see to have run a little out of control, which is interesting, but not what I was aiming for.
According to one of my painting tutors at the College of Art – Jimmy Cumming - Renoir said ‘Black is the Queen of all colours’, and that he (Renoir) had spent forty years learning how to use it. I do try to use it sparingly because it does have an impact, but then again John Singer Sargent used it all the time. Sargent was apparently quite miffed when, on a day’s painting together at Chez Monet, he asked if he could borrow some black and Monet rather sniffily told him he didn’t have any ‘cos he didn’t use it. I doubt if there was actual fisticuffs, but it’s an interesting little story that proves that there are no rules about this sort of thing.
I’m not unhappy with the bush on the left, but, like the colouring, the rest of the foliage got a little too loose and fuzzy and I think I lost control of the tree forms and masses on the right at a fairly early stage. There’s a phenomenon where the brain interprets random marks as faces. This can be useful when mapping out complex marks like foliage, but I think it started to get on top of me a bit here. I’m actually quite pleased with the sky though. I know it’s a thick overcast, but it has a glow about it. I wish I’d done it sooner – I’d worked up the foliage layers quite a lot before sorting the sky, then had to recreate the layer system over the grey overspill for the newly re-drawn tree line. This duplication of the surface-building process was entirely unnecessarily, and was very frustrating and annoying. A bit of thought at the beginning would have avoided all of that and got this piece out of the way in at least two-thirds of the time.
I’m sure the idea’s a sound one, but at the time of writing I’m a little bit ‘meh’ about this one. Short of re-starting (No!!), I cannot think of how to take this further so I’ll just draw a line under it and let it go. It happens sometimes, but if further inspiration strikes I’ll decide then whether to pick it up again.
Anyway, here’s some trees from Russia, and what with my curse/evil-eye/ superpower of killing trees that I’ve featured in paintings, if they’re not floorboards now they soon will be…
