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.