reworking a painting

I'm still working on that autumn landscape I talked about here.

The bigger the painting, the more stuff there is in it. Which means there's more to irk you every time you look at it. I'm an expert at seeing exactly what's wrong with my paintings, though less so at knowing how to fix them - and given that this one will probably be around long after I'm gone (unless Google has plans to upload everyone's consciousness to a computer*) and will have my name on it, I'd rather it looked as good as I can make it. 

Which means whenever I learn or think of a better way of doing certain things, I feel the need to update this painting.

I've painted the sky four times now. I've reworked the bush on the left twice, the stand of trees in the middle four times, the threadbare hawthorn on the right for the third time. And it looks better for it.

I've written about the dangers of overworking a painting, but this is more a case of learning as I go. From three plein air studies, a lot of drawings, a bunch of photographs, and a video clip, I've made a painting I'm not altogether ashamed of. That it's taken me over six months and I still don't feel it's quite done yet is slightly embarrassing, but I can live with that.

Recently I reworked two paintings I'd abandoned in 2009, unable to finish them as well as I wished.

But there's more than one way to skin a cat. The solution? I cut off the bad bits. I used right angled pieces of mount board to find the best places for the new edges, then used a Stanley knife and straight edge to cut the canvases down. I sawed pieces of MDF to size, and marouflaged the canvases to them with PVA. 

Result? Two problem free paintings, ready for framing. 

What moral can we laboriously draw from this slight tale? 

- Good painting takes time.

- Good painting takes skills you might not have right now but can acquire.

- Sometimes, you have to settle for what you can get, and a painting whose problems have been surgically removed is just as good as a painting whose problems have been solved.

In years to come, when my body has succumbed to strong drink, I shall download my psyche into a robot avatar** and continue to roam the lanes and paint. Occasionally thrashing my metallic arms about and firing lasers in an alarming manner.


* It'll be an option in their new TOS next year.

** I'll choose the 'Robbie' model, from Forbidden Planet. 

Photo credit: x-ray delta on Flickr.

imitation

'...To derive all from native power, to owe nothing to another, is the praise which men, who do not much think on what they are saying, bestow sometimes upon others, and sometimes on themselves; and their imaginary dignity is naturally heightened by a supercilious censure of the low, the barren, the groveling, the servile imitator. It would be no wonder if a student, frightened by these terrific and disgraceful epithets, with which the poor imitators are so often loaded, should let fall his pencil in mere despair; (conscious as he must be, how much he has been indebted to the labour of others, how little, how very little of his art was born with him;) and consider it as hopeless, to set about acquiring by the imitation of any human master, what he is taught to suppose is matter of inspiration from heaven....

...For my own part, I confess, I am not only very much disposed to maintain the absolute necessity of imitation in the first stages of art; but am of opinion, that the study of other masters, which I here call imitation, may be extended throughout our whole lives, without any danger of the inconvenience with which it is charged, of enfeebling the mind, or preventing us from giving that original air which every work undoubtedly ought always to have.

...From the remains of the works of the ancients the modern arts were revived, and it is by their means that they must be restored a second time. However it may mortify our vanity, we must be forced to allow them our masters; and we may venture to prophesy, that when they shall cease to be studied, arts will no longer flourish, and we shall again relapse into barbarism.

...Thus I have ventured to give my opinion of what appears to me the true and only method by which an artist makes himself master of his profession; which I hold ought to be one continued course of imitation, that is not to cease but with his life.'

The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Discourse VI.

indigo

One of my recent oil paint purchases was a tube of Winsor & Newton Indigo.

I wasn't quite sure what I expected, but I knew from their literature and website that the paint would be a mixture of blue and black pigments.

The original indigo was named after the blue dye pigment obtained from the plant Indigofera Tinctoria. The cut plant was soaked and fermented in large vats, and its dark precipitate skimmed, strained, pressed, and dried into cakes of indigo pigment. 

Indigo, several hundred years ago, was better than the other blue pigments that painters had at their disposal, which, though they produced brighter blues, had their drawbacks. Ultramarine was expensive, as was greenish blue azurite. While smalt and blue verditer were cheaper, both offered limited tinting strength and hiding power. Both azurite and smalt could only be used when coarsely ground, which made paint of these pigments hard to handle in oil.

In comparison, indigo had better covering power and tinting strength, and was used in easel painting from the middle ages onwards. Sadly, it sometimes tended to fade rapidly if exposed to sunlight, as this interesting dissertation by M.H. van Eikema Hommes reveals. If you're determined to use genuine indigo, and you've a mind to grind your own paint, you can still buy it online.

Sir Isaac Newton added indigo to his spectrum, declaring it to lie between blue and violet, in an effort to maintain a conceptual connection between the colours of the spectrum and the seven notes of the musical scale. Modern colour scientists, along with the rest of us who have eyes, are somewhat sceptical that Newton's indigo exists at all, and generally call any wavelength in the 450nM region violet.

Indigo, then, is not so much a colour as a blurry notion of a colour. I have a dim memory of reading Graham Joyce's novel of the same name, which describes seeing indigo in the evening sky, through the skylight of an atrium in a particular building in Chicago, which seems to be an awful lot of trouble to go to. Just to add to the merry confusion that is colour naming, there are new varieties of indigo, each with their own definition. Electric indigo, for example, is the name given to a particular shade, which has the following painting package colour codes:

#6F00FF in hex
(111,0,255) in sRGB
(57,100,0,0) in CMYK

Winsor & Newton Indigo doesn't look like that, and it won't fade like the old indigo pigment. Made from a Pthalo blue, Ultramarine blue, and Carbon black pigments, it looks, obviously, like a blueish black. Mixed with white, it gives a range of lovely blue greys which work well on snow scenes, and one of which was the precise shade I saw from outside my back door just half an hour ago, in the swollen underside of a raincloud. 

It's a very nice colour. I'm going to be actively looking for excuses to use it.

colour chord

I just ordered some oil paint online and it set me thinking about the colours I habitually use in a painting.

Quite a lot of green - naturally, landscapes - but looking at a folder of paintings it seems I have a favourite colour solution to just about every painting: green, yellow ochre, grey, and blue. 

Would also make a nice sweater.

This isn't, I suspect, a bad thing. Other painters have their own favourite colour schemes, as can be confirmed by a casual look through a few books on painting.

I've been looking at David Briggs' website, to get a greater understanding of colour and how to use it. Ever since art college, I've used a colour solid as my conceptual toolkit for visualizing colours, and a warm/cool split palette for mixing them, but a recent reading of James Gurney's 'Colour and Light' had me reappraising my colour wheel.

The 'YURMBY' colour wheel he proposes adds cyan and magenta to the standard red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Finding a pigment match for a true magenta or cyan is the challenge, though with the addition of lemon yellow, just using these three as your primaries can help you, apparently, mix the greatest gamut of colours.

I might try a floral piece to give some of those pure primaries a workout. Most things I see when I'm out walking around here and looking for subjects are some variation on that green/ ochre/ grey/ blue chord. Trees, dirt, clouds, sky. Grass, fields, road...sky. It does give a calm, restful feel to the finished painting, but I think a change might be in order. 

My tube of unfinished red paint is probably older than most of your children. And perhaps even you.

I find I have to work on colour and tone consciously, whereas drawing and composition come more easily. Which brings up a whole new set of questions, about whether it's best to play to your strengths or work on your weaknesses, but I'm too tired and intellectually challenged to go into that right now.

painting spring greens

I'm breaking one of my own rules by painting a landscape full of
those acidic, poisonous looking greens you only see in spring, when plants and trees are sprouting and in bud.

The trouble with green, of course, is that it's so... green. And in spring, it's even worse. But I set out to paint the shrieking lime green of new growth and the unlikely blue of a spring morning sky, and I think it might work out.

I started on site, with a 10" x 12" board painted in two sessions on location. Then the weather turned English again, and I carried on working on it indoors, from a photograph, sitting in front of my monitor. 

I love it when the weather finally warms up enough for things to begin to bud. The first sign around here is when the hawthorn hedges get a dusting of green, which happened a couple of weeks ago. Now, the woodland in particular has a distinctly confectionery look to it, all mint greens and chocolate browns.

This is totally at odds with the pervading scent of wild garlic, which is everywhere. Pretty little white flowers, lush, glossy green leaves, and a smell that makes you wonder where the gas leak is.

On a completely unrelated note, I found a website which might come in handy one day. I never did get the knack of writing my own artist's statements. Check it out here.

art books II

Another look through my art book collection, to recommend some gems for your shelves. This time, I've divided them into two categories: purely instructional, and leading by example, the latter being books about particular artists and their body of work, rather than any teaching. 

In the purely instructional camp, we have - 

Colour and Light in Oils, by Nicholas Verrall and Robin Capon.Nicholas Verrall occupies the area between impressionist painting and straight realism, with his colourful and complex compositions. If you were in a mood to be snide, you could say he picks easy targets: pretty French street scenes, floral arrangements, summer countryside. But if you did this I would jab you pointedly with my index finger, before pointing out how his masterly use of colour makes his complicated subjects work every time. Lesser painters working in the same paradigm often thrash about and hope for the best, but he's notably in control of every aspect of his paintings, especially the colour and tone.

Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, by John F. Carlson. John F. Carlson was an American landscape painter of the early 20th century, and his book is regarded as a classic among American landscape painters. Do a Google image search to check out his work. It's a pleasant way to pass an hour.

Painting with David Shepherd, by David Shepherd and Brenda Howley. 'The Elephant Man' is perhaps best known for his paintings of elephants and steam trains, and more recently his work in conservation. I've always admired the genial way he completely ignores 20th century art history, as well as his throwaway rendering skills. In this book he tells you how he does some of the magic. 

You soon realize that the trouble with books that teach you how to paint is that they will all tell you the same thing - how to mix colours, how to apply the paint, what brushes to use - but these things aren't what you want. You want to paint as well as the people who write the books, but the awkward truth is you can only do that through long and arduous practice, after taking their advice on board, and by struggling with your own subject matter and painting methods. 

The Art of Andrew Wyeth, edited by Wanda M.Corn. This was another lucky bookshop find. Published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, it offers five essays and many illustrations, colour and monochrome, of the artist's work. The last essay, by E.P.Richardson, is titled 'Andrew Wyeth's Painting Techniques', and covers Wyeth's use of watercolour, dry brush technique, pencil drawing and egg tempera. Why do I like Wyeth's work? Because of his solid, unfashionable commitment to figurative painting, and making art that deals with the look of things. 

Constable: The Great Landscapes, edited by Ann Lyles. This is a detailed, in depth look at a painter with whom we're all too familiar, with four essays and dozens of full colour illustrations. It gives some insight into Constable's occasionally shambolic working processes, particularly his making of full sized sketches in oils as a means of starting his six footers. 

Can you learn how to paint from books? No, you learn how to paint by painting, but reading widely around the subject will save you a lot of time and effort. Good tuition from someone who knows what they're doing is your best bet, but you can pick up useful knowledge from books and DVDs.