Persistence, rage, tomato, tomato.

Out painting this morning on a crisp Christmas day. Work in progress is my second attempt at painting this footpath. It looks horrible, and if I didn't know better by now I would cast it aside like an unwanted frisbee.

Experience, however, has informed me that no matter how bad a painting gets out in the field, I can usually work wonders with it back in the warm. Of all the personal qualities you can bring to painting, persistence - or, better still, sheer bloody minded spite and a furious refusal to be beaten - is one of the most useful.

Here's another from this month, from what's turning out to be a series.  

3 extremely useful colours

And they're all pretty similar:

Titanium Buff

Naples Yellow

Flesh Tint

Titanium Buff is cool and greenish, Naples Yellow is warmer and more yellow, while Flesh Tint is a pale pink. Using them to lighten landscape greens means you can get the light tone you need, along with the correct colour temperature, without resorting to white.

They provide a useful short cut, in other words. I started using them to hit the right notes in landscape greens back in the spring, painting March fields in cool, rainy weather.

Painting out of doors at that time of year meant I had to find a way to paint bare trees, a technical problem I'd always balked at before. I did some woeful winter landscapes last year, but since then I managed to find a way to paint bare branches en masse that looks half way convincing. As ever, the best way is to work from large masses to small, adding only as much detail as will suggest more than is really there. Masses of bare twigs can be suggested by fuzzy edged paint scrubbed into the darker wet paint used for the mass of branches. Edges and sky holes do most of the work.

Painting in the open air makes a huge difference. I find I'm relying much less on photography these days, though I still take reference shots before I start painting. I find that working from life - even when the weather changes between painting sessions - gives me far more to work with, and even if I manage to ruin the painting on site, I can rescue it in the studio. When you work from life, your visual memory is more engaged, and you bring things back to the studio in your head, as well as on board or canvas.

Oak in a field, March.

On Drawing Trees And Nature

...Is a book I've had on my Amazon wish list for a long time, and I finally got around to finding and downloading a pdf copy from Google. It's long out of copyright, so feel free to go ahead and do the same.

The drawings are beautiful. Oddly modern looking, and not as weirdly formulaic as I'd half expected. (If you've ever looked at a collection of 18th or 19th century drawings or prints you'll know what I mean, those wavy, unlikely looking trees with feathery foliage.) 

J.D.Harding's trees are splendid. He's obviously worked from life, following his own excellent advice, that he passes on in the text in somewhat indigestible wedges of dense prose, but it's well worth your effort to read and re-read his lessons and take all you can from them.

He tells you how to look at things we're all used to seeing, but in a manner that will help you draw or paint them. Consider his instruction another tool in your internal toolbox, a starting point for your own investigations. Just like the writer has been handed down the language and grammar he uses, or the musician the notes and scales and theory, painters have access to a wide and deep body of knowledge. You don't have to invent drawing. 

Rembrandt self portrait

I painted a copy of a Rembrandt self portrait this past week. Copying is one of the best ways of learning how to paint, providing you pick someone worth copying. You get in their head, plus you get to know what painting a masterpiece feels like.

You also get to see the quality gap between your work and theirs, which is chastening. But you find ways to close the gap a little.

I don't think I'll be starting a career as a forger any time soon. The finished piece is a different beast from the original, even at a casual glance, but I learned a thing or two in the painting of it. Such as:

- How to make a restricted palette work hard.
- How to use glazes and scumbling over an underpainting.
- How to control tone for a dramatic light effect.
- How to control edges to describe what you're painting.

The whole of art history is a Google image search away. If you want to kick your painting up a notch, go to it.

Rapunzel

I'd been passing by this crumbling old building on my regular walk for years before I got around to painting it.

I have painted it before, from the road. It featured in this painting I did back in '92 or '93, 'Albert Mansfield's place', which is what my old man called it when he recognized the place in the picture.

Finally I got around to taking the photograph that would act as the basis of the painting. The tree shadows did it for me. Some subjects just need a light effect to set them off, and I always like the challenge and reward of including a cast shadow in a painting. Shadows tell you so much: where the light is coming from, and what, unseen, lies outside the picture and casts the shadow, and the nature of the surface on which the shadow is cast. The challenge lies in managing tone and colour temperature and edges to make the shadow convincing, and the reward lies in the opportunities this presents for the use of rare and beautiful colour.

The photograph presented some difficulties with the composition. The original photograph included a strip of sky and the full height of the background trees, and the tangled tree shadow on the wall to the far left. I did a small watercolour study on site which told me this might present insoluble problems. I used GIMP to crop the photograph in various ways, and eventually settled on my usual 10" x 12" study format for the painting.

I took the painting to what I thought was a finished state, but put it away to get some mental distance from it. When I took it out again after a couple of weeks I saw that the foreground saplings had to go. They broke one of my own rules: Don't try to paint something through something. I rubbed out the saplings with a piece of sandpaper and repainted the wall. 

I also took one of my most useful tools - two L shaped right angles of mount board - and decided on a new crop for the painting, cutting off the distracting and redundant two inches at the far left to end up with a 10" x 10" painting.

That seemed to solve all the composition problems.* Now the painting just had a few components that all worked together: the building, with its pointed roof, the tree shadow that sprawls across it, the trees in golden light behind the wall and the ivy bound tree in the middle, plus the foreground with its shadowy grass and reflecting stream.

I worked and reworked the wall, aiming for an effect of sun struck stone and brick. I did as much with the background trees, using texture and colour to add interest.

Any painting I can bring to a conclusion and in the process come up with a couple of tools to add to my inner toolbox, I'm happy.
Why Rapunzel? Every time I passed the building, it put me in mind of those Hockney etchings of Grimms fairy tale, and the contrast between that and the building's original purpose - it was a pig pen - made me smile.

* A square format has a kind of power of its own to please the eye. For many simple subjects with a frontal quality, it often ends up being the best choice.

Get up and go? I got up and went.

In line with my new get up and go approach, the sidebar to your right contains an email sign up form. Go ahead and sign up. You'll only hear from me when I have a new painting to show you, or some interesting news. Your email address will not be sold on.

Also, towards the bottom of the sidebar you'll see some links. These go to the portfolio pages of my online gallery accounts, and my YouTube channel. Check them out.

Oak in a field. 2014, oil on board, 12" x 10".

Support the arts. Buy a painting. You know, one I did.

Study for field. 2014, oil on board, 10" x 12" (H x W)

I've decided that this blog is going to be a lot more... selly.

I'll be selling originals and prints through my Saatchi online account here. I could sell through the blog, but I figure they get more footfall than I do, and it makes sense to leverage their traffic.

There'll also be a permanent link in the sidebar to a Kindle version
of my book about landscape painting, several years in the making
and now just about ready for publication. It will tell you most of what I know about painting landscapes, with illustrated examples showing works in progress.

Future blog posts will relate to current work, and the occasional
how-to about my working practices, which might prove of interest to the painters among you.