bright noise

they occur frequently throughout here. in particular in my winter posts. my winter posts are the most similar ones throughout. they are of night walks, snow flurries and flurry stars. the same fields, the same paths. and once in a while, the same one, two or three figures. two is the more common number of them.

like in this one here.

the night was perfect. clear. ice cold. a rather full moon lit up the fields and the dark forest. it was the sharpest night bright you can imagine. and still: the photo in all its hazy noise didn't take note. didn't listen carefully enough. or was it my hand, eye or memory that didn't get it?

reflections 1

if in doubt

... say nothing. or: take a field and a winter sky.

Paintings with ghosts - not for free

There are two paintings in the exhibition that give me goosebumps. Not in a good way. One's up on the wall, the other one is in my portfolio. The one on the wall is an obvious one. She stares at you, supposedly all serene - but OMG - she is standing on so many fishes and not in a good way.

The other one I had forgotten about. Forgotten about until I was going to sell that drawing twice over. One of our postgrads had bought it and another one was drawn to it too and indeed upset that it wasn't available anymore.

Fields in December 1, mixed media on paper, 52x40cm

So I told her a story - the story of the painting or rather what lies at the centre of it.

I drew it as one of my first attempts to develop the initial sketches from the fields around my parents' place 18 months ago. It's the first one of a set of two - two different scenes. It's a composition that intrigued me first off - I like it a lot, its intersecting fieldlines, different winter coloured fields and just on the horizon line the birches along the road to Schweimke.

The drawings - with acrylic inks, a bit of acrylic paint and graphite ended up being harsh and almost monochrome. I moved to more colour. But at some stage a couple of weeks later I wrote long lines of associations for these two scenes.

Well, and it made me realise that at the heart of this one, there a three deaths, a few years apart.

My granny with the travel bug was dying slowly throughout 1992. The night she finally did, we slept while a friend of mine, a couple of years older than me, had a car accident. He crashed his car on this early December night, 500 meters from our house in the early hours of the morning. He was drunk. No one found him, those 500 meters away from our house and the village. So he died the same night as my granny. At the point where the sky meets the horizon line, right at the centre of the painting.

Beyond the horizon line are the moors. (Thinking about it, the village is surrounded by eerie places - if you remember the Bull's Hollow.) My neighbour, who prefers ploughing his land while drunk to sex (well, almost) had a brother. He was a few years older than him, probably about 10 years older than I. A, the brother was away a lot for all the time I lived next to him; away in hospital for treatment of his depression. When he was home, he would go for walks, long walks around the fields.

I can't remember talking to him ever, he was just this intensely sad and lonely figure to walk the fields. His depression was the first I ever encountered, it frightened the live out of me and so did he. I couldn't comprehend it and just felt engulfed by it whenever I would see him in the distance. One day, a few years after I moved away, he would not return from one of his walks. Instead, another neighbour would find him on a rope somewhere in the moors. Across the horizon line to the right.

Now, they are the ghosts that look at me from that painting. I know they are there.

I told B the stories and so she decided she preferred the other one; and I sold both. Now: the other one has a lot of stories too, they are fabulous ones: of friends, parties, nights out and the road out of the village. It's the scene I love most of all of those fields, so there are many paintings of it.

Fields in December 2, mixed media on paper, 52x40cm

There is none more of the road to Schweimke. I think one ought to be careful with those ghosts, not?!

Happy hour - not just in Falkirk

Have this for a travel interlude along with some appropriate music.

Winter sun at Falkirk
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

Lino cut variety

Lino cut on blotting paper
coloured pencil, oil pastel, indian ink
15x15cm

Take block of black layer, pull print on blotting paper, let paper dry, use coloured pencils liberally, add oil pastels to overlay black printing inks, splash a bit of indian ink around.

A name for it? How about 'not-printmaking'? Monoprint? Or does that require a mixture of other 'pure' printmaking processes.

I think I may just call it mixed media, wonderfully generic, isn't it?

Some plein airs, daytime

The meadows #1
Pastel on board, 35x25cm


The meadows #2
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

Eery does it every time

There are two more posts (I think) around the dusk/mist/nighttime paintings before I'm gone. Let's stick with them rather than getting sidelined by all the other exciting things.

There's something about the place, village, area where we moved to when I was 13 that keeps my attention. It does so mainly out of view, it's a persistent call which I catch once in a while from the corner of my eye, and it is gone when I try and focus.

It is a quality of place that stayed with me since the very first time I visited that place, I must have been 9 or 10. The village is small - about 250 inhabitants, it's surrounded by a few fields and then it's woodland - or rather forests for kilometers in pretty much every direction, interspersed with a bit of heathland and moors. It's remote, at the far northern edge of an administrative district, it means that the school bus journey took the best part of an hour. Just outside the village is a boggy hollow in the middle of forest. It has a story. - Of course.

The bull's hollow

A rich farmer had a farmhouse in that part of the woodlands. He was haughty and arrogant (how could he be anything else), and had been stalking an old deer for weeks. He neglected the duties of the farm, left his family for nights on end to stalk the deer. Without success. He grew more and more frustrated. One evening he cast a curse: If I will not kill the deer tonight, all my possessions, house and family shall go to hell. And of course, he did not shoot the deer and without fail, all and everyone went to hell: the earth opened up and swallowed everything that belonged to the farmer. Except the farm's bull. He had broken loose that evening - again - and since the farmer had only the deer on his mind, he didn't get caught, and thus the bull survived in sorts - and as a ghost he haunted the the village and its surrounding. Long, long after, the bull attacked the local shepherd, who prayed for his life to be spared. And it was. Out of gratitude, he carved the wooden door of the chapel which is still intact (and right next to my parents' house).*

So, there you go. That story freaked me out no end at the age of 9**; so much so, that when my parents told us a couple of years later that we were to move, but didn't tell us where to, I just proclaimed: yes, moving's fine but there's one place I do not want to go to: BOKEL.

Tough, I wasn't in luck. It was precisely that place that we moved to.

It is and remains eery, uncanny. There is somethig haunting but all the same intriguing. The German for it is unheimlich. A couple of the drawings last winter got a bit of that, and it found its way into one of the oil paintings too.

Low Sun, oil on canvas, 60x65cm

With my dad and my brother we used to go for walks, often in autumn or winter after nightfall. There are a couple of outlying farms, about half an hour walk in any direction, it was often to one of those that we would go. With a torch or just in moonlight. I think it'll be time for a few of those next week, just a shame we've passed the full moon. But I think the chapel will make my first nocturne - safely done from my parents' porch, looking across the graveyard onto the lit, rather cute little, red-bricked chapel.

*Thanks to Wiki you can actually read up on the geological specificity of the hollow - no journey to hell insight.: here
** Well, really it didn't take all that much to freak me out: dinosaurs, monster, vampires, alien starships, thunderstorms, helicopters, border controls, atom bombs, tanks ... take your pick, I'm sure it'll have had me scared.

Present #1

... well not really a present. But something good nonetheless.

My rejects from the RGI exhibition were parked in some of the postgraduates offices in the department. And when talking about the paintings, we arranged for them to come and look at sketches and the small bits and pieces that are kicking about my flat. It got labelled as Wine and more (mulled) wine at Gesa's, but it effectively was a private viewing.

I surprised myself with how many paintings I can display in my tiny flat - which already is severely lacking in available wall space. When I was preparing, I caught myself thinking just how presumptious the whole thing was, and almost hid the paintings away again (well, it was about wine in the first place, wasn't it?). I think one of the last jobs I would ever contemplate doing is marketing. It's not that I cannot enthuse people about stuff, but to do that in order to SELL stuff? I dunno.

I still laugh at a job interview I had in Glasgow years ago about a job as a fundraiser for a charity. Who knows what made them invite me... possibly some equal opps stuff on foreigners or so, but I completely made myself trip up, fall face flat down in the show... hahaha... that will never work as alternative career.

Now... my visitors last night were enthused alright in any case. So much so that they ignored all the small pieces and went for the proper(ish) stuff. No questions asked. I sold more than £300 worth of original prints, small paintings and an old oil painting between the four of them. How very cool. And I promised them to take them round my friend's place were the Coloured Sand paintings are temporarily deposited.

That's me done: I far exceeded my (unambitious) pre-Christmas sales target. Got a few new fans. And some money to go towards my next holiday. Cool.

My present #2 is on its way also: a present from work in the shape of a new laptop. Not any old laptop but one without a right click. Cannae wait!

PS: the photos are mangled uploads to flickr... I've been searching for Watermarks. I think these qualify and I rather like the recomposition of them

Eerily does it...

Eerily, oil on canvas,
60x65cm

... it lures, unsettles and seems to offer something behind those trees. Doesn't it?

So, here's the difficult child of the four... With the least distance between fore- and background, that tree line calls out. It's wintery, blurred, cold and yet somewhat... something... Don't know quite what it is.

But it makes it not easily likeable like beautiful haze and groovy primaries.

Over the past few weeks I've written down associations and memories to all these images. Funny, I think it would be difficult for me to get any scene, landscape, impression on paper or canvas which has more association and memories that these four, five scenes in the series of winter drawings and paintings.

And still, I struggle to trace back the uncanny in this one. I like it, though, maybe because of it's recalcitrant and diffident attitude to beauty.

Eerily, oil on canvas, 60x65cm, detail

More wintery siblings

Primaries WIP, oil on canvas,
80x70cm

... to the earlier posted Haze. These two are not quite finished, they are slightly larger in scale (80x70cm) but worked with the same palette.

Little to say about them just now, so: Hello to the Works In Progress of Alongside and Primaries (I even used the thesaurus for some online playtime with titles).

Alongside WIP, oil on canvas,
80x70 cm

The canvas of Primaries was in an earlier life a very mishapen life painting in oil, so I am liking it already much better. These canvasses are not that much larger to the previous ones (80x70 to 65x60) but that extra bit of space is making a huge difference to how it feels - well, both in lugging the canvasses around, but more importantly to the painting process itself.

There's one more of this series - the outsider, ugly duckling and difficult child... will introduce it shortly...

On beauty...

Haze, Oil on canvas, 65x60cm

Yesterday I finished (?) one of the oil paintings I've been working on for a while. It's the one where haziness was the challenge: how to work with light, atmosphere and mood.
This is where I got to.

Looking at it from the far end of the corridor - our usual spot for a good viewing and critting I felt a bit lost for words. I kind of gathered where I was heading with this one when my friend to whom I showed the first WIP picture from a while back got all dreamy eyes and loved it.

Hm - it is dreamy, beautiful and really rather romantic. Think Caspar David Friedrich, romantic - German Sturm und Drang in painting. And that from the drab field/forest round the corner from my parents' place. Hm...

It's kind of nice to know that I can do beautiful paintings - I think. But what is it really in there that makes it so romantic?

Palette, light and the filling in of associations?

These set of oil paintings are turning out FAR more representational than what I was trying to get it. The task for them was all about light, light and more light. - Hence the liberal use of white.

So, there is plenty of light.

But also - thanks to the raw siena, red earth, lemon yellow and cobalt blue - I've ended up with a very organic palette: It's easy to mix the most beautiful greens, earthy browns, and plenty of light and dark variations of these.

Thirdly, the field and the haze at the line between fields and trees is rather organic in marks and lines also: I was trying - as indeed with the exaggerated line in the mixed media drawing of the same view (here) to abstract this line - it's been the bit in the scene that really got me, the one I was trying to capture and play with - but: it just integrates, neatly becomes a part of it and helps again at making it dreamy.

Good - next attempt: a good painting with less beauty and romanticism ;)

Winter in different colours

Fields in December #3
Mixed media on paper, 45x60cm

Ok... here the second lot of winter drawings... well, not really drawings anymore but more mixed media on paper - and the paper did take a bit of a battering, as the not very good photo of Fields in December #4 shows. It warped in despair over my reworking of the middle ground: layers of acrylics got hidden by layers of gouache only to get more acrylics on top... Not sure if that is how it's supposed to be, but I did like the washed back effect of the gouache.

Fields in December #4
Mixed media on paper, 45x60cm

So, here the palette is much warmer - thanks to the red iron oxide. But the generous applications of white, and in particular the dark greys that cobalt blue and raw siena make knocked it back a bit, or rather turned the heating off. That cobalt blue/ raw siena has quickly turned to one of my new favourite colours. Well, probably not all that new really, if I have a closer look at my range of pastels - it's been there all along, but with this bit more systematic colour learning, I now get a sense of how to get there through mixing.

What am I talking here... there is no cobalt blue in my acrylics, so it's thalo and cerulean, with some sepia and raw siena. Hahaha... now I remember again the hesitation of applying a new layer of these different ones on top of the first one. But, hey, seems to be working alright. Also, the lemon yellow has been coming into its own: with titanium white gouache it lifts the middle ground of #3, defines tree outlines in #4 and did a lot more magic on the oil paintings... which will be next one for posting.

These past few weeks of mixing, experimenting and observing what happens when have been great. And it's been one of those times again where I'd wish I had more time :).

Oh, and finally: my absolute favourite in these is the line in #3.

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Some winter drawings

The weekly drawing/paintings sessions are about to come to a close over the next couple of weeks and I have begun to bring home some of the drawings that I did over the past few weeks.
If you remember, I've been doing all these winter frozen hazy landscape sketches in late December, and been working them up both in mixed media drawings and oil paintings.

• For photos, see this post

• For sketches, see this post

So, here's the first drawing/mixed media lot: two scenes worked on paper - the paper shines through and in fact provides the dominante hue. In addition, I've used some acrylic paint - parchment, grey, cerulean blue (I think) and some raw umber. The paint is worked with knifes, scratched and reworked, sponges and brushes. The lines are acrylic inks, in sepia, grey and royal blue (which is thalo blue).

Fields in December #1,
Mixed media on paper, 45x59cm

The process wasn't that straight - I kept working over it again - mainly to get some depth and texture into the woodlands, but also to define - move forward/backward - different masses.

Besides the winter mood, I was keen on developing a range of marks for the trees, in forground, further away or just at the horizon line. Here, varying hue, value and lines took some time. In the end, I faded quite a few of the very linear trees with gouache/acrylic washes - white and cerulean to make them less dominant.

Fields in December #2,
Mixed media on paper, 45x59cm

I like how both of them work together, yet in terms of composition, complexity work very differently - and to see that the simpler one (#2) actually works compositionally.

What I was somewhat surprised of was just the extent to which my winter theme carried with it moody, overcast skies and bleak emptiness - far more than I intended, in fact. And I can show how I used the limited palette (cobalt blue, raw siena, lemon yellow and red earth) for the oil paintings in another set of drawings too, to moderate and temper that freeze. - That's for the next post.

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Palette limitations

Yesterday's palette.
My favourites?
The middle section: the greys and dark reds

Trying to systematise my oil painting technique, I limited my palette to the following:

- cobalt blue
- lemon yellow
- raw siena
- venetian red

plus titanium white, lots of titanium white.

Of these colours, it's only been the lemon yellow which I had already learned to use and value (though largely as underpainting ground for some pastel paintings - notably, this abstract one here).

In fact, of the earth colours, both raw siena and venetian red (or any red iron oxide) would be ones where I could theoretically appreciated their value and importance for paintings but would invariably opt for umber and yellow ochre instead... feeling somewhat smug that I managed to deal with the opacity of the latter in oil while I detested it in acrylics.

Similarly the titanium white got banned from my palette in favour of naples yellow light to try and avoid chalkiness. But over the paste two weeks I've managed to demolish my white tube in no time and urgently need to buy some new one.

The plan with these colours is to get to some winter colours with low sun, bare grounds, some woods in the distance and alternatively clear blue or overcast skies. Of all the colours, I am quickly becoming excited about the possibilities that both the siena and the red iron oxide offers: the most luminous, earthy variations on browns, greys and greens. In particular when mixed with the cobalt it just makes the palette sing.

With these colours I've started four paintings based on the German winter sketches - they are in their early stages yet, and I'm smiling to myself as they are currently strongly in the spring or autumnal mood rather than winter... but hey, patience will get you there, Gesa.

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... and winter colours

The end of the previous post on lines and compositions was introducing some of the colours of those wintery fields, woods and grasses. In summer I had begun to notice more clearly different landscape palettes - notably Scottish summer colours and how they changed from the colours of the Negev desert in Spring.

So, now onto Northern German winters... noticing the changing colours and the factors that make up those colours such as low sun, bare trees and fields, cold temperatures and so on has been one of the exciting moments of beginning to paint: suddenly everything around me takes on all these variations and changes in colours: tone, hue, value and chroma and blue stops being just blue but becomes much more than that.

Enough talking... I only took a few oilies and my watersoluble neopastels with me - for both I just need very few sticks to be able to mix without water. I did a couple of test patches of where my colours would get me. Nothing fancy but useful nonetheless.

Neopastel ii colour swatches in Moleskine

Oil pastel colours swatches in Moleskine
(For blending I used the clear Sennelier medium stick
for the first time - like it...)

Since I had come back home, I had been meaning to do some more experimentation with those colours - but life somehow came in the way. So, while that is one of the next things to do (over the weekend, maybe?), here are some more photos which captured some of the views that really stood out for me:

The haziness above a bare field (at start of the post); but also the variations of some lush greens, ochres and yellows of different fields, meadows and the tracks beside them. Lastly: the silvery greens of conifers intermixed with just a hint of heather purple - and their variations.





I've uploaded some more photos to this Flickr set here
And: as a wave to other people's recent blog posts on colour - including some very good suggestions for sketching, see Lindsay's post here and Penelope's here.

Oh, and seeing that it's post no 1 in 2008: Have a very good new year!

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Winter lines

Pencil in Moleskine, 21x24cm

My journey into the countryside left me with plenty of photos and sketches. The weather was sunny and cold for a good deal of my stay and so I was running around outside for a bit, soaking up not only fresh air (well, too much pig farming around for it to be really fresh) but also plenty of winter vistas, glistening and hazy low sun over fields, bushes and woods.

Pencil in Moleskine, 21x24cm

One of my sketching comfort zones is clearly the one that seeks out horizon lines, and intersecting fields - my sketches are still somewhat minimalist - I need to remind myself to include more value and shade. But all the same, I am beginning to like the hasty marks left in the sketchbook - it had to be less than five minutes or otherwise I wouldn't have felt my fingertips any longer. It's funny how the warm and nondescript West Coast Scotland winters have wittled down my tolerance for cold.

In any case, here are some sketches - in pencil, in felt pen and graphite, and the last one with a bit of colour wash included to begin to add some winter colours... which will be the next topic.

Felt pen and graphite in Moleskine, 21x12cm

Pencil and Neopastel ii in Moleskine, 12x21cm

I had begun to name the sketches, and - since most of my art thinking happens in English rather than German - did so with English titles, but they just feel wrong in this case. Funny one, that one.

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Ice crystals in high fog

ok... there it is: calm countryside with meadows and fields covered in stillness. No snow but enough frost to let the branches bear down heavily with beautiful ice crystals under a grey sky.

Did I say that I was going to go somewhere rural?



With a cold nose and even colder fingers I am taking it all in, beginning to figure out how the stillness and the ice crystals would and could translate onto paper...



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Frosty interlude... I wish

Alfred Sisley's Frost in Louveciennes had greeted me one morning a couple of weeks back, and after a Saturday which never quite made it to a proper day with all the low clouds and heavy rains, I wish for precisely such a winter morning. Hm, maybe tomorrow? Maybe not?

Alfred Sisley, Frost in Louveciennes, 1873,
Oil on Canvas, Puskhin Museum, Moscow

Sisley's trees tell us about the time of year, but even more so it's the colours of the sky and air which capture so well the crispness of a clear winter morning. Cool grey blues are combined with a hint of red reflection on trees and buildings to carry with them this winter air.

Makes me think of how to capture the invisibles, impressions as in Sisley and his fellow impressionists in their outdoor painting adventures.

Much more mundane, some of my own bare trees against a clear sky sketches:



Backgarden and Tyseley Station,
Pen and a bit of Neopastel ii on Moleskine

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