Near Vicarstown – Time Lapse Painting
Near Vicarstown
A mentioned in previous post this painting nearly ended up in the scrap heap. The sky part of the painting was a problem. To understand the issue let me explain the process I use to produce a sky for a landscape. After the scene is decided, I make multiple tiny thumbnail sketches (3″x2″ approx.) to decide on the composition. At this stage I will know if I need to add ‘weight’ to a part of the design by using the sky. For example, this painting had a lot going on in the left hand side with a more or less, empty right hand side. So the sky was going to have more going on, on the right, to balance this.
In a way the sky is an inverted landscape, the closest part is directly above the viewer, on the ground the closest part in directly below, both run to the horizon obeying the laws of perspective. So there are 2 landscapes. I try and paint the sky to completion before starting to finish the ‘second’ landscape.
Nowadays I paint the sky ‘landscape’ in a completely different way to the way I paint the ground. Every colour is blended with a large brush. As you can see in the video, I use sweeping diagonal strokes and then vertical and horizontal strokes to blend the shapes. Morphodidius commented in the last post about the magic in paintings. Well if you want magic, this is magic. Blobs of paint turn into a sky in a few strokes. It’s an acquired skill but not overly difficult to master. Look at the videos and practice. The vital ingredient is courage. After you spend a lot of time constructing the sky, with its highlights, mid tones and shadows, you swipe a wide brush through all this work. When it works, its magic.
At the 6 minute stage in the video, the sky wasn’t working. Overworked, hard, fussy, I could use a few other descriptive terms, but I won’t. At the 7 minute stage the sky was transformed – it just needed a little more blending, upwards. I still had the shapes to add weight, but there was also a chaotic randomness to the shapes of the clouds which worked in this tranquil landscape with its ‘human activity’. The painting took longer than usual to complete, about 3 hours.
Near Vicarstown – Oil Painting
Near Vicarstown
The location of this scene is close to last post’s painting. The signs of human activity is here with the half sunken boat and the cottages in the distance. I was hoping to have a well ordered painting and started in the usual way. After 1 hour of painting the sky, it was not great. This painting nearly didn’t happen. The sky was stiff and hard, with too much contrived design. I abandoned it and was about to wipe the paint off while it was still wet. Then I remembered my own advice to beginners, ‘leave it for 24 hours then decide’. 24 hours later I completely rescued the sky in 5 minutes. It just needed to be brushed in a different direction?? Isn’t that crazy? The disorder created just worked. I will have the video of the process for next post and you will see what I mean. This is a common enough occurrence with my paintings (see videos), one minute it looks disastrous and then it completely changes. Painting is always ‘knife-edge’ for me.
It reminds me that the physical nature of paint really does steer the painting in certain directions. Learning the boring stuff like materials and their handling is critical if you want to control the painting. As a realist painter its difficult to work towards an image while the paint decides to go somewhere else. Speaking of paint, the colours used in this painting were Burnt Sienna (red), Yellow Ochre (yellow) and Cobalt & French Ultramarine Blue (plus black & white). I really don’t know why I thought the extra blue would have been an advantage. It wasn’t. The medium was Liquin plus 5% ‘Stand Linseed Oil’, plus double-up the volume with White Spirits.
I’ll post the video of the painting process in a few days.
Vicarstown – Time Lapse Painting
Vicarstown
I learned to take photographs with a ‘film’ camera, 24 shots per roll, and you didn’t know what the results would be like until the film was processed and printed a week later. F-stops, shutter speed, film ISO, exposure, focus, etc, etc. had to be learned and understood to take good photographs and then there were the darkroom procedures to be mastered. There was very little margin for error, your settings had to be 100% right, 100% of the time.
Recently one of my sons and I were on an impromptu photographic outing. We both have sophisticated digital cameras. I still go through this same process as I’ve always done, and I produced 6 or 8 good photos from the outing. He took, maybe 500 or 600 photos – bracketed exposure, focus, etc. picked the best and ended up with 6 or 8 good photos, every bit as good as mine. With new technology, he knows enough to ‘get the job done’. He won’t regress.
So whats the point? Its this, technology has moved in a giant step and its changing the world of art, and because we’re in it we can’t see it. Has Photoshop made realist landscape and portraiture painting obsolete? Has paint become a physical material to be manipulated into different shapes and textures, as paint, not as images of ‘reality’. Will today’s kids be bothered to learn the technically difficult art of realist landscape or portraiture? Are we the last of a type who had no option but to learn the technically difficult stuff in order to ‘get the job done’.
The art is in the doing as much as the final result. Here’s the video of the painting from the previous post. See you soon.
Vicarstown – Oil Painting
Vicarstown
Vicarstown is a small village north of Athy, Co. Kildare. Half-way to Monasterevin on the canal route. The canal was extended from Dublin to Athy, via Vicarstown, in 1791. Passengers could now travel from Athy to Dublin in relative comfort and safety. The journey took 13 hours to travel the 50 miles. The fare was very expensive. Mary Leadbeater, the Quaker writer from Ballitore near Athy (she was the grand aunt of Ernest Shackleton), described passengers who undertook the journey to Dublin as ‘half gentry’ and noted that ‘ there was card playing’.
Vicarstown Photo
I wanted to paint a recognisable scene for a change. Much of what I have been doing lately was from imagination based on memory. I worked from a photograph, which I have included here, to keep me on track. There was very little of the ‘sense of place’ in the photo, so I had to add to the scene without straying off too much. The landscape is flat. This stretch of canal travels all the way from Athy to Monasterevin (13 miles) without any locks (to adjust for different levels in the landscape). Its a bit like Holland so I did what the Dutch artists would have done when confronted by flat featureless landscape – create an enormous open sky.
Another feature of this painting worth noting is the limited palette. There are only 3 colours used. Burnt Sienna (red), Yellow Ochre (yellow) and Prussian Blue (blue). It wasn’t a deliberate plan, I just didn’t seem to need extra colours, until the end, the foreground needed to be a grassy bank. I was tempted to use a ‘tube’ green like Viridian or Chrome Green but it would not have been in harmony with the rest of the painting. So I used a Yellow Ochre and a little Prussian Blue to make a green and dragged it over the Burnt Sienna under colour.
As usual I recorded the painting process and will post in a few days. It was a 3 hour painting so the time lapse will be a little longer than usual. See you then.
Bluebell Grove – Time Lapse Painting
Bluebell Grove
I would recommend mixing a small quantity (5%) of Stand Linseed Oil with Liquin when your painting is going to have rich dark shadows. Even after a few days the dark colours are almost dry without any dull matt finish, normally associated with using Liquin on its own. I will ‘oil out’ the painting anyway in a few days to protect the Liquin from any future varnishing.
Unusually, at this stage the painting is glowing which usually only happens after the ‘oiling out’ process and I would have to attribute this to the oil in the medium. I am aware that one of the downsides of using Liquin is a certain ‘dulling’ of colours when compared to Linseed Oil paintings. The vibrance of this painting does seem to corroborate this view. The lack of ‘greasiness’ in the handling of the paint was also there which is an advantage of using Liquin. This medium mix seems to be the best of both worlds.
Here is the video of the painting process which took about 2 hours to complete. There is more info on the painting in previous post.
Bluebell Grove – Oil Painting
Bluebell Grove
This is another small painting, about 9″x12″. Its that time of the year again when the Bluebells carpet the woods. I painted ‘Bluebell Wood’ this time last year and you can see it here. This time the colours are a little different and also the method of painting. There is a definite ‘dot painter’ look to this painting. I like dot paintings and now appreciate the amount of work involved in the painting process (see this site for some great dot paintings).
I’m still experimenting with dark shadows and Liquin. The end result of this experiment is this. If I need dark shadows in a painting to stay ‘wet’ for a few hours while I finish the painting, I will add about 5% ‘Stand’ Linseed Oil to Liquin and then double the volume with White Spirits (‘Stand’ Linseed is better than standard Linseed which I’ve been using in recent experiments). If you are not familiar with recent posts concerning Liquin, here’s the story. Liquin begins to dry within a few hours of application. The tones of dark colours begin to lighten as a result, so its difficult to gauge final colours when the shadows are changing colour. The small amount of oil in the Liquin is enough to keep the ‘wet paint’ look without affecting the great handling which Liquin offers.
The colours are a little different this time, but still only 4 used, Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Yellow, Prussian Blue and Viridian Green (plus, of course black and white). I used old round bristle brushes to create the dot effect (this action ‘breaks’ the bristles in the brush and I didn’t want to destroy my new brushes).
I videoed the process and will have it for next post.
Recent Hail – Time Lapse Painting
Recent Hail
Hail is one of those subjects which is very difficult to capture in a realist landscape painting. The question is asked of the viewer: is it snow, ice or a mistake by the artist? Phenomenal natural events, like a spectacular sunset, cause a similar reaction. I did a painting with a rainbow a few months ago (here) and the same issue arose. If I didn’t give the viewer a clue as to what the ‘white’ in the painting was, would you have assumed a lighting effect, or a light fall of snow? This is the problem. I like my painting to be able to stand alone and be accepted as it is without excuses or explanations. That is the type of painting it is, but I accept this does not apply to all paintings. At one point in the painting of this picture (see video), the hail was heavy on the ground as it had been in reality. But, as far as the viewer was concerned, it was snow. I then reduced the ‘white’ gradually by reapplying the original colour until an ambiguity existed, it could be light snow, or hail, or just dried-out undergrowth. It could survive as a ‘standard’ landscape, without the explanation, but the title ‘explains’ the rather odd white bits and why they sit in the shadow areas.
The painting is quite small (11″x8″) and took about 2 hours to complete. The colours were Burnt Sienna & Raw Umber (red), Yellow Ochre (yellow) and Prussian Blue (blue), plus black and white. There was very little medium used. A tiny amount of Liquin in the final details. The initial ‘darks’ were not dark enough to create problems as the solvent evaporated, and the darker colours were some of the last bits painted and these did contain Liquin.
Here is the video of the process.
