10"x14" oil

This piece has given me so much grief. I think it’s what comes from having a high ideal that you really want to live up to. In this case I’ve wanted to paint a field of daisies for many years, having been inspired by the way the American watercolorist (neat spelling hey!) Philip Jamison does them. The blooms seem to float over the field, brushed by the wind, suggestively painted with some detail at the same time. The other thing is that these flowers are only out in spring. Year after year I manage to miss them, but not in 2009.  I started this in May, and I have been scrubbing it out and having another go at it on and off ever since. Today I got into it again with a light glaze of raw sienna to lift the dull background, and then this time went a little more carefully on the flower heads, thinking about the level of detail I wanted in each area of the painting.

This is how far I got on site. It was actually a lovely late afternoon, the low sun catching the flowers and throwing the coppice in the distance into deep shadow. Part of the field in fact is a poorly maintained market garden, and the bean sticks in the ground were catching the light quite nicely.   Just prior to posting this I went onto the web and found  a small reproduction of one of Philip Jamison’s paintings and I think my effort, though not in the same league, has captured the general idea. I’m interested to see that in fact he has not drawn in too many flowers, and they are more detailed than I had remembered. I love his work – makes me want to go to Maine.

Watercolour and body colour. 13"x19"

This one was started 20 years ago – how far I got is shown below. I have warmed the sky and buildings up with washes of raw sienna, plus a wash in the sky of a very pale purple of rose madder and phthalo blue, which unfortunately has not come out on the photograph. I have deepened some shadows, put in the foreground grasses and added detail and opaque greeens to the tree on the right. The geometry of the gable on the left is not quite right, but it seems wrong to correct it now.

I went onto the web to confirm that it was in fact Abbotsbury Tithe Barn. I found a few photographs there too, but none from this angle so I have no way of knowing how the scene has changed, if at all.

As painted on site

13"x20" Watercolour.

I’m still finishing off old paintings. I started this about 20 years ago. I’ve tried to work out where exactly it is, but can’t. The image below shows how it was when I started on it today. I have detailed the farmbuildings in the foreground. I remember they were in shadow and the sunlight was in the background. Can’t be sure if the farmbuildings were in a typical lakeland white wash, but I have guessed they were. I’ve lightened the mountain in the far background by wetting, scrubbing and dabbing with the tissue. Same with the dark patch in the upper left middle distance. Generally darkened all the foreground to throw the interest back into the distance, something that Rowland Hilder often did. I don’t think I would paint this scene like this now, but I have tried to complete it in the style I painted in at the time. The pigments I used today were Payne’s Grey, Aureolin (Cobalt Yellow), Indian Red, Burnt Sienna, and a little Permanent White for the chimney smoke. 

The painting as it has been left in my portfolio for 20 years

OK, so it seems I am into a short phase of finishing half done paintings, and this is another watercolour that has been lying dormant in my portfolio for around 15 years. It’s somewhere in Wiltshire, that’s all I know. Basically it’s a triad colour scheme as can be seen from the highlighted colour wheel below:

I’m not a slave to a colour wheel, but it is helping me to be more disciplined in colour and restricting the number of pigments I use. Invariably I am happier with the result. I guess it’s important not to get enslaved by a formula.

The next photo shows a lot more of the developed watercolour, and I’m getting more of where I think it should end up. This of course is now done from imagination based on what I have from the original work on site.

At this stage I am not happy with the pale green sunlight in the distance – it needs strengthening to draw the eye in. The tree on the right is too flat, and the bushes behind it are also flat and lacking a convincing base. A few white highlights will help to bring focus here and there. Also the blue of the sky needs to go a little bit towards purple to harmonise better with the road. A weak wash of ultramarine plus indian red over the whole sky, diluting towards the bottom and adding a little more indian red to the water should improve things. This was the final result:

Watercolour 14"x20" on "Arches" paper

Handle House. Watercolour and auto touch-up paint. 12"x17"

I’ve not painted for nearly a week. I’ve been working on finishing an oil painting, and it’s a mess. I get discouraged when this happens and don’t know how to progress, and then I just don’t paint. Anyway, that was then, and now is now. I’m cheered up because I’ve had a good session working on the painting shown above. I started it I think in 1982 and haven’t touched it since. This is how I left it:

I don’t suppose I’d been painting for more than a couple of years. My drawing was OK, but everything  else was very tentative – like the trees on the right. I suspect the sky was a bit like this when I painted on site – a watery ocre, but for today I have gone over it with a strong cool pthalo blue to set off the orange of the rooves and bricks. In every other way I wanted to increase the contrast, using the light from the left, and deepening some shadows with a mixture of Payne’s grey and burnt sienna.

I needed to pick out some white highlights (such as on the water) but my permanent white is in truck and it’s wet and cold outside; however I found this in my art drawer. It’s white enamel auto touch-up paint left over from when we had a white Honda about ten years ago.  It worked a treat, and seemed entirely appropriate for an abandoned old painting. I think this qualifies as mixed media…

Out of curiosity I’ve just googled “Handle House Trowbridge”  and found this photo that dates from the mid to late 1980s when some restoration work had been carried out on the river. Another more recent picture appears to show the building in the middle of a highly insensitive restoration job. I hope I’m wrong. It’s one of maybe only two teasel-head-handle drying houses remaining in the UK.  This post is dedicated to my former colleague Pat (nee) Tidy with whom I worked in the Planning Department in the early 1980’s, and who I recently and unexpectedly met at a mills conference.  She will know this building without a doubt.

Wicken mill. 12"x12" oil

It’s not at all easy to paint inside a windmill when it’s actually milling, as can be seen from the photo on the left. I painted this a week last Sunday when the wind was blowing strongly and the mill was going – to use a Quixotic phrase –  full tilt. The whole structure is vibrating, flour is steadily filtering through cracks in the floor above into your hair and into your paints. The noise is fantastic, the miller is rushing around; as the sails clack round and cover the window every second the lighting goes from dim to dark. Great fun. Of course getting the shape and geometry of all the wheels and cogs correct is quite important, but with everything moving I just had to do the best I could.

I showed my 2010 windmill calendar at the SPAB conference at Belvoir Castle on Sunday and I go to print on Friday, If any one would like a copy, please contact me before then. I set up my stall in the gallery, appropriately enough. Now, how often is one able to have work on display in the same room as several Gainsboroughs and a Holbein? Well, check this out! My little windmill interior on the easel with somewhat more illustrious work in the background. Thank you SPAB!! (I did ask if I could do a bit of painting on the easel to enliven my presentation, but they wouldn’t let me. Maybe they were just a tiny bit nervous I might have ventured to alter the Holbein just a teeny weeny bit in one corner…….)

Quinces. Watercolour 6"x9"

This is the last of three paintings that I have finally finished. This one I started in the garden of Peckover House, Wisbeach, East Anglia. I have strengthened the shadows, completed some leaves that were white paper, and emphasised the colour on the stems. The predominant orange/yellow/green palette pulls it all together I think. Just a little bit of “spatter” at the end was put in to break up the smooth graduated washes on the quinces.

Amazingly I passed this church yesterday. It’s 180 miles from where I live. What happened is that I had to go to a funeral in Bath, and our route there passed the turn-off to to this tiny village. Having finished the painting only the day before  I thought if there is time after the funeral I would call back and compare the reality with what I had painted. I had a bit of a shock:

To take this photograph I had to stand on the wall on the other side of the lane. To get the perspective shown in the watercolour I would have had to be a further 10 feet in the air. I must have imagined it at the time to get the angle I thought was best. The trees on the left are much bigger than I had remembered them, although I wouldn’t have put them in this large in the painting anyway. Also my original start on site was in winter sunlight.

I guess is serves to reinforce the old dictum, “Don’t let reality get in the way of a good composition.”  There is a famous painting by Turner overlooking Florence with the Duomo in the middle distance. When I stood on the same spot some years ago, it was clearly much, much different from the painting, even allowing for changes in vegetation and buildings.

Upper Langridge Church. Watercolour 8"x13"

This is another painting that has been half finished for such a long time. A victim of my style of starting plein air and then not getting round to developing and completing in the studio. This one was started at least a decade ago. What’s ten years though for a building that may be 100 times that age though?

Anyway, the day before yesterday I wetted the whole of the left hand side with clean water, cutting round the grave stones, then stroked into it a strong wash made up up Paynes Gray and Aureolin Yellow. Then as it dried, with a rigger brush, stroked in branches with Paynes Gray and Burnt Sienna. In the foreground I drew in the stones in the wall with a mapping pen loaded with dark paint. Finally some touches of gouache (watercolour plus permanent white) – first to the lighter side of the tree on the right, then some highlights to the stones in the wall, and finally some very pale ocre colour to pick out a few features on the church building itself. I’m satisfied with the result and it’s nice to have finished this painting at long last.

"Top of the run" Courchevel April 08. Watercolour 8"x14"

There are unfinished paintings that silently reproach you from the shelf where you know they are hiding. This is one such painting. Painting in the Alps is diametrically opposite to that other “A”, Afghanistan. One is cold and wet; the other hot and dry. So while in Afghanistan watercolour dries almost instantly on the paper, in the Alps you might freeze to death waiting for a wash to dry. So a different approach is needed. In a nutshell it is…use as little water as possible. In snow of course the paper is helping you  – you don’t have to paint anything (well, roughly speaking), and if the sky is cold and grey and trying to snow, you don’t have to paint the sky either. So this is very much the minimalist approach.

It was enought trouble carrying my gear with me, and I was really there to snowboard. However, this view had to be grabbed. People coming off the lift, and shuffling off on the shallow slope towards the beginning of the run was a stoty I wanted to tell. The fact that the skiers were disappearing over a slight ridge, and you can’t see them skiing, added to the sense of expectation.

I got as far as placing the figures in colour, painting the gearing shed on the left, touching in the snow shadows in the foreground, and a plain grey wash over the background ridge.  And that is how it sat until last night. So I put in the rocks in the background (which I had noted in pencil at the time), strengthened one or two of the figures, and finally - carefully – spattered some “snow” using a large brush loaded with fairly thick permanent white.

I had in the back of my mind the snow paintings of Sir William Russell Flint, an example shown here painted in 1927. He was fantastic at putting such life into skiers before the days when artists used cameras. He must have had a fantastic visual memory – or be able to afford models to pose in the right positions. I wonder if anyone knows.