painting

Some days, painting is like ringing a bell. Other days, it's like pushing rocks uphill.

And some days - not too many, thankfully - painting is like trying to reverse an excitable bull out of a china shop without breaking anything, while keeping one eye peeled for whoopee cushions.

Seriously, do you ever have days at work when you just know that if you even think about making a single move something expensive will fall over, or catch fire, or probably both, for no good reason?

On those days you are the plaything of the fates, and the best thing you can do is sit on your hands and resist any and all urges to do something useful. Because if you attempt anything - anything - at all, you will not only fail, but fail in so spectacular and horrifying a fashion that people will ever afterwards speak in awed tones of your abject incompetence, and cross the road when they see you coming. Just in case it's catching.

It's one of life's hardest lessons: some days, you can't do a damned thing right.

On those days, I kick back, do a crossword puzzle, maybe catch up on the gardening and odd jobs around the house. The ironing gets done. I might cut some MDF to size, or think about ordering some paint or brushes.

What I don't do is go near whatever painting I'm working on. Because it would explode.

I also don't worry about it. Because I know those days never come two together, and tomorrow will be great because I had a break.

My advice? If you break a window trying to get the screw cap off a tube of paint, you should maybe take the day off and do something else.

six monthly painting review

Back in March I spent a couple of hours sorting through what I'd done since last September in my six monthly review. A quarterly review is a good way to keep track of productivity, progress, and problem solving. If you can put a name to what you need to change, it's easier to handle.

In the past year, I'd started 30 paintings, and finished 24 of them, nine of which I wouldn't be thoroughly ashamed to frame and exhibit. Add to that 8 quarter imperial (11" x 15") drawings and about 120 drawing book pages.

In looking back through a year's worth of work I made a list of twelve points that need fixing in future paintings, which was the whole point of the exercise. When you spot your mistakes, you can give them the attention that will mend them. 

This year, I'm going to produce more. The aim is to produce enough viable paintings to stock several commercial galleries. That's going to be my main focus now I have my areas of competence mapped out, and systems in place to expand on those.

Does this sound too coldly mercenary? Well, with no other saleable skills*, and having developed an unfortunate predilection for paying my bills, wearing shoes, and eating six or seven times a day, it's necessary.

* Unless you need an ornamental hermit.

painters I found online

When I'm not painting I like to trawl the internet and see what painters I can find.

I found Duffy Sheridan's videos on YouTube, and they're well worth a look. His somewhat distracted* commentary gives great insight into the thought processes of a painter at work.  I recommend doing an image search of his paintings, they're gorgeous.

I came across Ryan S.Brown's landscapes while looking for another painter's work, and I eventually Googled him and found his website. That links to this splendid article about his work process as applied to a large landscape painting he did, as part of a Hudson River School Fellowship award.

* It's hard switching between painting mode and talking mode when you're working, as anyone who has made a YouTube instructional video will verify.

palette

Lately, I've noticed that my wide ranging palette has shrunk, to ten go-to pigments that cover all my needs:

Titanium White
Cadmium Red
Spectrum Orange
Cadmium Lemon
Oxide of Chromium
French Ultramarine
Permanent Mauve
Yellow Ochre
Raw Sienna
Burnt Umber

I have a paint mixing ritual which suits almost every painting: French Ultramarine and Burnt Umber, mixed to make a black. White added to this to make a range of greys. The black added to Oxide of Chromium for a shadow tone green, then separate greens mixed with Oxide of Chromium and Yellow Ochre and Cadmium Lemon, for the light side. The greys end up in the clouds, while sky blue is mixed from Ultramarine and white.

When things get too green, the Cadmium Red and Spectrum Orange kill the bilious notes and liven things up. The basic colours can be turned warm or cold as needed - yellow greens for grass, blue greens for nettles, violet blue for evening skies, cool blue for cool days.

So, shrinking palette, good or bad thing? It could be the main reason for my samey colour chord, as noted in this post, but that could equally be taken as a sign that I'm getting it right - I've accurately caught the colour scheme of the small patch of land I paint.

Some colours I stopped using because I found them too difficult. Viridian, for example, gives me problems. Too cold on its own, odd and out of place in tints, too assertive in mixed greens. It makes a good black, and beautiful greys, when mixed with Alizarin Crimson, but I currently have no use for those colours.

I've just started a small painting using a restricted palette, and I went with Burnt Sienna, Golden Ochre and Indigo as my red, yellow, and blue. Three primaries and their mixtures should be enough to take you through most of your colour solid, but the compromised colours of these three pigments provided an extra challenge. 

As an exercise, a restricted palette is good because it makes you think hard about colour choices, and really work the pigments you've allowed yourself. So far, the painting doesn't seem particularly less colourful than previous paintings that used a wider range of colours.

Next week I'm going further afield, so we'll see if I find new solutions for a new landscape. Meanwhile, here's a drawing of a horse in which I mucked up the head.

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.