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.

On the River Yare near Norwich. Oil 8"x12"

 A break from the calendar. Yesterday my wife and I visited our daughter in Norwich, had a pub lunch and a walk. We got back to the car as the light had almost gone. But is this a reason not to paint? Of course not. The girls disappeared into the pub while I got my pochade box out.

As can be seen there was very little light. (I didn’t have a torch). Of course your eyes get used to that, but then the automatic lights in the car park came on putting a horrible orange glow over the whole area. The result was an oil sketch that was far too blue. However I had taken a reference photograph before I began so this morning I re-worked it with much more muted blues and greys. The palette I used on site was ultramarine, white, cold grey and raw sienna. This morning I modified it with Cobalt, white, magenta and a touch of black. Here is how it looked when I finished in the dark lat night:

St. Benets Abbey, The Broads. Watercolour 12"x18"

The inspiration for this painting was a wonderful watercolour by my all-time favourite watercolourist, John Sell Cotman of the Norwich school of painters. He painted this in 1813.  Cotman was one of a number of contemporary Romantic artists for whom the “sublime” (I think what we would describe today as “awe-inspiring”) was an emotion that a painting should evoke. He acheived this time and again with dramatic architectural features set in stormy landscapes. When I found this view of the mill I instinctively recognised it as the same point from which Cotman had painted. I have a confession to make however. Although I started the painting on the spot, it was in late spring, and only when I got home did I decide to make it a snow scene. This was my idea of “the sublime.” (By the way, the version of this in the 2010 calendar does not have glass reflections on it. Copies of the calendar are available through me me at noel@noelgarner.com  for £10 a copy.)

Hunsett windpump, Watercolour 14"x20"

This painting hangs in my father-in-law’s lounge, so I see it regularly! It’s not a windmill technically. Like most mills in the East Anglian Broads, they were built to pump water off the land and into the drainage cuts. It’s a well-known feature of the Broads, often seen in photographs,but I chose a more unusual viewpoint that shows the sails in profile. I’m always trying to find new angles from which to paint mills. Even though I painted this years ago, I can easily picture the occasion I painted it, and remember the weather. This is the wonder of painting outside – you remember everything so much better.

In my last post I said I don’t like using masking fluid to reserve whites. Well, here on the cap and sails and fantail I needed to preserve the white of the paper. I carefully sketched the outlines of the mill in pencil and then painted around the white areas with initial washes of varied ultramarine blue, following the pencil line. Later, I erased the pencil. I like the mixture of loose, blended, washes and crisp areas with not too many lines of detail.

Baylham watermill. Watercolour and ink. 10"x14"

I painted this in 1993. No photo reference, just worked on site, and in the studio added a little gouache to the windows and penwork to sharpen some edges. I began the painting by applying a light wash of raw sienna and lamp black over the whole paper, and let it completely dry. This is a tip I picked up from a Rowland Hilder book. It means that when you do paint some white (or reserve a little of the white paper for highlights), it looks VERY white.

Looking back I really like this, partly because I know it is a fair representation of the subject – I don’t think a mill enthusiast will argue with the detail – but partly because it takes advantage of what I consider to be some essentials of watercolour. The colour washes are on the whole loosely applied and there is a mixture of sharp edges (on the building) and soft edges (in the foreground). The gouache is there for a purpose – personally I think white gouache is more “honest” than reserving whites with masking fluid. And there is just enough ink to sharpen selected detail. Now that I paint mostly with oils, however, I would find it difficult to paint watercolours in this style again.

Outwood mill. Watercolour 10"x14"

I am soon publishing a calendar for 2010 in conjunction with the mills division of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings here in the UK. They are an amazingly enthusiastic and knowledgeable group of people and have been most supportive of this project. Most of the paintings I have chosen in collaboration with them and I have revisited and tweaked most in one way or another, even though some of them were painted over 20 years ago! I will post them over the next week or so. I hope you find them interesting. If you’d like to buy the calendar please e-mail me at noel@noelgarner.com.  They are £10 each including postage (in the UK). The calendar is A4 portrait, full colour, 13 page including the cover, with semi-gloss finish, with hanger. The holidays shown are UK.  Final print-run will be decided on 16th November, and orders delivered by 1st December.

I painted the mill shown exactly three years ago, on the way back home from Gatwick airport. Here below, is how much I painted on site. (The colour balance here is a bit too warm). It needed more detail in the tree, and more depth to the shadows:

Up in the mountains we had no communications – no phone, radio, – certainly no TV (thank goodness). So when we returned to Kabul we were shocked (but not our friends who live there) to find out that there had been a massive bomb outside the Indian Embassy, killing and injuring so many people. We had been there only days before in a taxi. However, the art lessons continued at the Garden of Peace and Hope. I never taught the same group twice and it was impossible to know in advance what would be appropriate level to teach at, or what materials they would bring. This was another such group, and was too large really – over 30 aged from 15 to 30. I did a simple demonstration, below, showing a large tree in the garden casting a shadow on the wall behind, and asked them to do the same, but not getting into detail and focussing on the large shapes. By the way it is really hard doing a watercolour demonstration holding your piece of paper up in the air in one hand and painting it with the other at the same time as walking round the group!! 

Watercolour demonstration 8"x12"

This is the last of my Afghanistan posts. Tomorrow I move on to my windmill calendar for 2010.