Saturday 25 April 2009

Spring steps

Elquí 1, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 70x80cm

... all across town. I must say I love Spring in Glasgow. It's delightful and fickle. It's full of promises. Promises that pretty much all involved know won't be kept. And it's ok. Well: not really. But seeing that the promises of days of light, warmth and sunshine won't last much past mid-June at the very latest and thus are made to be broken, everyone takes them as such.

So I grinned as I walked home from painting at lunch time, grinned again at the sight of strappy vests, painted toenails and that delightful expectation of promises you know will be broken.

I also grinned because of this: I condensed my pastel travel kit into: cadmium, cadmium, cobalt, earth pigment x2 and ended up with a zingy small palette for oils. Yes - I changed my mind - I had written off the oils until autumn but I want the space, the shine and the layering one, two or three large(ish) duck linen canvasses are promising me for the next couple of months.

And you know what: I know that that's a promise that won't be broken. And soon I will have Elquí Valle in large scale amazingness (well: if I can pull that off).

Now: where is my nail varnish? My sandals?

Elquí 1, WIP
oil on canvas, 70x80cm

5 comments:

Irene said...

Welcome to GREEN honey, wundeschoen!!!
Fruehling auch hier, aber volle Kanne.
Das aber nicht fuers Blog :-)

Kuesschen aus Jerusalem!!

Anonymous said...

Oh my, I think this is going to have amazing light. Can't wait to see it progess.

Gesa said...

I: yes: green, but even more yellow ;)

... I think you may be right, Cath - that yellow will be difficult to dampen down, so I'm quite curious where it will go. I want it more abstract, but that's maybe for Elqui 2 or 3... we will see.

Thanks :)

Jala Pfaff said...

I LOVE this oil sketch!

Gesa said...

Jala - your set of comments made me smile on Thu morning though I've been slow to respond. Working with the oils and the prints in parallel is intriguing: I love the strength of the pigments in the oil colours and am bored with the generic pigments in the print ink; but also I am beginning to see how I'm getting a sense of how the relief printing works and how I can make the medium work. With oils I just again discovered today just how much I don't have a clue :)