colour scheme i

all the while, i hear this in the background

in light

there is (no) matter.

this one - like bethan huws - was in my diary since december. and with attempt number three, i not only saw the matter that light makes, but so did my parents.

before we arrived, we laughed at the arrogant marketing that the City of Wolfsburg - Hitler's car city where the Beetle was first mass-produced - was of course with the Turrell's Wolfsburg Project the site of Turrell's largest installation in an exhibition space:

the main installation, Bridget's Bardo is a ganzfeld piece of two spaces that merge from one into the other: the viewing and the sensing space, separated by a sensor, you must not step into the viewing space. light changes and all the while you sense the view and wonder what that space is in front of you, a wall, a cube or simply nothing in colours that change as the light changes.

and you wonder and wonder. the separating between viewing and sensing space are sharp corners in space. but behind or in front of the planes become depths and you see nothing but colour. all around you and in so doing colour becomes you.

at the back of the installations are two rectangles, one at the top where the bridge lead down, one at the bottom where steps lead down to the floor below. of distinct and separate colour they appear as planes again, not as openings.

small groups of people spend ten minutes as light and are encouraged to go again, as many do. second time round i begin to see some shadows, not on the walls nor ceiling, but on the floor, looking back into the piece.

how crucial shadows are in helping you orientate yourself and to grasp dimensions, forward and backward and upright.

how do you mark light in the absence of shadows and spatial demarcations with any thing other than that pure light?

what form has fog and nothing than the absence of form?

the exhibition continues with some smaller installations, one (milk run iii, a spectral wedgework, 2002) operating in darkness with dark orange light and your perception as it plays a myriad of tricks on you; and plenty of illustrations of the roden crater project and some large scale aquatints Turrell made with experiments of light deprivation and selective openings of panels in the mendota hotel in california. here, the light modelled geometric objects which he captures on the aquatints. i found a link with images of this aquatint series, First Light (1989-90) at this site here.

and i thought i'd add this video here too: about another skyspace and roden crater. enjoy!

How come?

In colour. Blue. 40x40cm (WIP, I think)
Soft pastel/acrylics on canvas

... that my abstracts are always ending up seascapes?

Don't have a clue!

This is in fact an abstract interior still life, in case anyone is asking.

And just to add to confusion: it's pastel on a 3D canvas, over pumice, gesso and acrylics. Oh, and its first incarnation, this hosted a rubbish landscape in oil from a few years ago.

I let it mature a bit and see if I can sort out the composition a bit more.

In colour: squares

Having arrived back home on Monday night, I quickly realised:

I could do a paired series to the White Room.

Simply not of someone else's flat somewhere but of mine now. No: it's not that I 'could' do this. There's little choice, I feel. I simply have to. The start:

In colour: square 1, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board


In colour: square 2, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board


In colour: square 3, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board

Matisse, colour, and I

I'm putting myself up for the modesty award today, with a title like that. But never mind...

Following my White Room experimentation I've been reading more about, and preferably BY Matisse. It's Matisse On Art. And it's a funny little book. Funny because each original piece of writing is preceeded by an, often longer than the original, introduction by Jack Flam. It's all very well but goes some way in confirming my view on why I do not want to become an art historian/critic. [hahaha.... slagging while blogging is so much more fun ;)]

So, after reading the first few of the introductions I've decided to skip them altogether and it makes for much better reading.

There are three themes that intrigue me in Matisse:

1. The way he produces space that is so full of ambivalence, superficial and completely out of reach;
2. The way he uses colour to achieve this;
3. And all the while the space he creates on canvas is so ambivalent, he thrives for an expression of his own sensations and emotions - by the means of painting - that ranks harmony and serenity above all other sensations.

Oops, (3) just acquired words while I was typing. His desire for balance and harmony struck me first off when reading On Art, but all the same the space he creates is so ambiguous, so obvious yet ungraspable. Interesting... is there more in it than harmony?

Similarly to Morandi, Matisse's use of flattening of 3D space catches my attention - the trickery, the playful involvement of the onlooker in letting us partake in a game of hide and seek, of appearances, illusions, a bit of shadowdancing and a good performance. In the form of an apparently immobile and fixed STILL LIFE. Ha! Still life, my a***! It is certainly not still.

Well... I was planning to cover (2), his use of colour, in this post today, but seeing my ongoing rambling in tangents - while always worthwhile - it seems an ambitious plan.

So, maybe I should start with the "I" from the title. I was introduced to Matisse with one of the very first of my pastel sketches/drawings/paintings that I posted on WetCanvas for some c&c, four years ago. I don't remember why I posted a second version of this view from my previous flat. In my mind, this, the first one, is still the better one (even if only on greyboard rather than any proper ground), and if I remember correctly it's still at home behind M.'s wardrobe.

View through Hallway, 2005
soft pastel on board, 48x65cm

For some curiosity, see the link to the discussion on WC here.

Matisse was recommended for his inversion of blue and green for distance, red and yellow for proximity. And that I should make up my mind between a more 3d or 2d feel of the image.

In Notes of a Painter (1908), Matisse made his first and explicit intervention into how he paints and what he regards as important. And there's a lot in there on order, clarity and what he calls a 'condensation of sensations' which achieves serenity in a painting and supercedes the capturing of fleeting moments and impressions.

I'm circling round that sentiment... circle, circle, circle... and I think that that is very different to how I use colour. And how I enjoy using pastels for plein air work. I think that whenever someone asks why I love pastels I will reply (probably along many other pastelists):

I love them for their immediacy... pure pigment in stick form and on it goes and it's there.

No condensation of sensation for me... rather a bit of a shameless: I feel. I paint. It's there. (Or not).

Circling further, I also see how Matisse is thus radically different from people like Eardley or de Stael. The ability of Eardley's paintings to move me to tears stands out, and it stands out as very different to Matisse's pursuit of serenity and harmony.

Isn't that all very intriguing!? I will continue.

But first, another pastel sketch I found from California. Initially I thought it was from the day when sky and sea become one, but it is in fact from the morning after the fog was beginning to lift, Ate had already gone swimming and I needed to get a bit of the silence of the fog on paper - though I admit, it looks a bit too thunderstormy humid instead of silent.

Kalifornien Strand, soft pastel on board, 35x25cm

Nonetheless, I am with Matisse when he declares he employs colour to capture sensations and emotions... they are not there to copy nature but to be expressive of his subjective being there. And for that, I am also rather forgiving of the rather rubbish composition of some of the plein air sketches of late... this one's particularly bad and wonky... but it was the sensation of colour that I was after. That's all.

Layering across space

Elqui 2, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

... from Elqui Valle to the Scottish West Coast?

I had posted a number of work in progress updates of the three oil paintings I've been working on over the past months (e.g., here at: art? anyone?). They are finished now.

In the process a number of intriguing things took place.

(a) I lost the hill tops and managed to continue on Elqui 1 as an abstract piece at the first attempt. This was where I wanted to get to with the oil paintings but, on the basis of previous iterations required to move from representation to abstraction had not thought it would happen so quickly. But, Elqui 1 is for the next post.

Today, I want to talk about the Elqui 2 and Elqui 3. Well, they were meant to be larger - 80x70cm like Elqui 1 but somehow I very successfully have (still) mislaid my framing tools and so while I have stretchers I cannot for the life of me find the stapler nor the canvas I bought ages ago.

So, the two pieces are only 50x50cm - one on a bought deep canvas, the other one on a handstreched rough(ish) cotton canvas. One was too slick in surface, the other one far too rough.

(b) The task? Undo layer 1. The challenge: How? The palette, though very limited, is strong with the two cadmium yellows. I stuck with turpsy paint right throughout, for each layer work first with brush, then a bit with palette knives; often softening the knife marks again afterwards with brushes or rags.

Undoing - initially it was going to disappear under a white layer. But I didn't dare too... as you can see. I kept the original composition for the most part and discovered the fabulous greys in that palette. So, on went a succession of grey layers interspersed with keeping local colours and the main composition.

Elqui 3, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Here, the rough and poorly primed canvas of Elqui 3 proved a fascinating ground for experiment. Suddenly, I ended up with a whole new series of edges, lines and half disappearing vistas. Even more bizarrely, the piece - solely designed to explore hue and markmaking was taking on some landscape element. Well, despite the name it wasn't never going to be a landscape. Even more strangely: it wasn't the arid valley of the Chilean Cordillera that was appearing but some West Coast of Scotland seascapes.

I kept working on it - something I am very pleased about. With oil paintings I have in the past closed them off far too quickly. Quickly I would no longer be able to see what to do next. Not so with these ones. Somehow I managed to keep them open for much longer, adding more layers in the process described above.

Elqui 3, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

And, what did I learn?

1. painting with oils is fabulous (well: I knew that before, but now I do with even more resolve)

2. the palette of cobalt blue, cadmium yellows and burnt siena so easily creates landscape associations, regardless what you do

3. layerings with grey build up distance (possibly also sense of time? - need to explore that further); wiping these and reworking at various stages of drying can strengthen that illusion further

4. I now know how to keep open a painting for longer

Towards the end of the painting process I deliberately played with 2. and 3. - to have a little flirt with the landscape elements in the paintings, to bring them out, muddle them up again, displace them and so on. VERY enjoyable. It was also interesting to get people commenting while I was painting. How much they enjoyed being able to see a landscape - something - emerge and how sure they were that that was what they saw. Interesting... let's think more about that...

Art? Anyone?

Elqui 1, WIP
oil on canvas, 80x70cm

Not quite finished but this is what Elqui has transformed into (once the hilltops were lost). The three made yesterday morning very enjoyable. They, and the fact that we are getting rather excited about the exhibition opening on Wednesday - and that pretty much is organised. Oh, yes, and then one of my fellow painters expressed her interested in buying Elqui 1 off me once it's finished. Hm... nice... just as well that there's no space anywhere for me to put it up, otherwise I may have been tempted to keep it.

More about them once they are finished in a couple of weeks.

Elqui 3, WIP
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Elqui 2, WIP
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

And then I lost the hilltops...

... Find something, lose something.

Today's painting (as started here) had plenty of both. My cadmium on canvas fest was indeed rather strong-willed. So much, so that I ended up with this and was a bit speechless.

Elqui Valle 1, WIP,
Oil on canvas, 70x80cm

Its challenge was rather obvious: c'mon, Gesa - I'm about abstraction, I don't want to be Elqui Valle and the Cordillera. Ok, ok... away they went with one turn.

Elqui Valle 1, WIP 2,
Oil on canvas, 80x70cm

And stage two thus looks like this.

[oops... sorry, empty promises...
didn't take a photo from what it looked like at the end of the morning,
but I can tell you: it's MUCH better... promised!]

I wonder if I'll find Elqui Valle in here again or whether I'll just be left with a marvellous palette, plenty of texture and plenty of layers.

... To be continued....

Lines across a field

Lines across a field, 37x45cm
Pastel on Japanese paper

... ok, here's the promised crit & comment bit on Saturday's studies of THE field. This should have been ready earlier in the evening but some simple editing tasks currently take ages. I even had a Photoshop Elements in my shopping trolley inbetween.

I am intending to be good-willed and patient with my new open source image editing software.

But: essentially: I don't understand it! It makes out to be intuitive and yet it asks for channels, terminals, plug-ins, for me to build its help file and suddenly I am back in year 11 trying to ignore the fact that not a single one of my scripts ever got the computer to play chess, move the cursor or whatever tasks one tried to make a computer in 1990 perform. Ach... but... I still don't understand it. The Help files aren't built and the user manual doesn't tell me how I can change colour retrospectively. So, Gesa, start again...

After a while of this, I now have something that highlights the problems in the study. It was study no 2, it followed the one I posted on Sunday. Again: the task was drawing marks and a different palette. The scene originates with last summer's sketches and I did some more in December. I am therefore back with the fields again; searching for a subject for a reductive lino print.



But before that, I tackled some highly unsuitable paper with my Terrage sticks - it's a Japanese paper, fairly thin and with a kind of felted surface - consequently: crisp marks kept evading me and it dissolved rather quickly - as the second circle from the bottom shows.

The composition looked wrong to me, but after a while I realise that it's a bit more subtle than that: the top circle shows too much contrast between sky and forest in the background; and the salmon in the second from top circle folds the space of the field against the forest in a funny way.

In many ways I love that effect: how hues make space, bend it, twist it and confuse the onlooker. I like the salmon colour a lot since I discovered it, but it doesn't work in that field.

So, for a pastel drawing study, the marks are intriguing but some of the hues are not worked out in relation to each other - I think the violet blue in the foreground is wrong too.

And, while I cannot as of yet put my finger on it, I think it got me further for a reduction linocut. There's something in the layering of different hues here - and perhaps the solidity the drawing is struggling with in the background, which could work well in print.

Good... more on that to follow.

'Where the wild things live'

- that was Juanita's comment on this drawing. You have seen a small detail of it already and today is the day for all of it*, and some more details.

Where the wild things live, Detail
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

'Where the wild things live' - I was well chuffed with that title. She got the eeriness and moodiness straight away. I made it a couple of weeks ago when I took more of the handmade Arches paper to draw with pastels. The palette is again similar to the earlier one, but less limited. The marks are drawing marks with some later reworking to calm some areas and to introduce more highlights. It is less sketchy than the previous one, and - at least for me - a fair amount of time working and reworking was spent on it.

I was meaning to write-up more on Wolf Kahn's approach to landscape as subject matter along with this post. But: I left my notes on that in a notebook in Glasgow, while I am - again - in Berlin for a week. So: the WK's landscapisms have to wait a little long.

Do go and visit the wild things in the meantime, though:

Where the wild things live,
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

* oh, dear, there's a bit of stage fright going on right now:
what if the detail was so much better than the whole piece???

Monotypes of Pond reflections

When I came across Wolf Kahn's monotypes I was intrigued to go back to monotypes. I remembered how difficult I found the painting on the plate - remember my complaints back in autumn here?
I have also been meaning to use oil paints as printing medium rather than the oil-based, washable relief inks I've been using so far.

I am preparing for a couple of oil paintings of the two scenes I'm working on, but I am not quite there yet, I feel. But one way of moving towards these was trying to include some of WK's pigments of choice: notably cadmiums. I had bought cadmium reds and yellows very early on when I started oil painting but have never used them so far. There are a couple of powerful pigments I'm fairly familiar with, notably phtalos - no, that' s not right: I use them in acrylics, but have never used them as oil paints (except dioxazine purple), and I have stayed clear of the cadmiums.

But, yesterday was the day: I prepared a palette, including also a pale violet grey, a pale rose, lime green, prussian and ultramarine blue and some umber to soften this in-your-face-pigment-fest.

I had new copper plates I wanted to try and here are my results:

Trees on Water, Monotype 2
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm



Trees on Water, Monotype 3
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm

I diluted the paint with a mix of turps/stand oil, ended up wetting the paper and with the final, a ghost print, I did quite a lot backdrawing to get most of the ink onto the paper. The mix of paint/medium may need some more experimenting, but I am taken with the marks and the yellows.


I also tried some reductive monotypes: inking up the plate in ultramarine and removing ink to build up the scene - with brushes, painting knives, paper towels, and at points adding more paint (also in black and prussian blue). These are very different, much more abstract and moody. I will try this out more.

Trees on Water, Monotype 4
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm

Drawing with pastel and not painting

Trees in lake, study, 29x21cm
Coloured pencils on cartridge paper

The way I tend to use pastels is very much like paint: I tend to treat the support as a surface made up of different shapes, colour fields rather than developing a piece of art out of lines and linear marks. I also tend to work with pastel board - usually Colorfix board in darkish purple, light blue or anything in between. When I tag my pastel pieces in Flickr or Etsy, I have to remind myself to also label them as 'drawing' not simply as 'painting'.

So, although I work in dry medium I tend to say that I paint with pastels.

Just recently, I begun to draw with them. Not only that but I also reverted back to white paper as support - something I had given up as early as I could leave some sort of semi-competent mark with pastels quite a few years back. Admittedly, the paper I am using now is no longer cartridge but handmade, heavy-weight Arches paper.

And: how wonderful the white paper is and what drawing marks the pastels can make!

You may guess that the inspiration for this has been Wolf Kahn's use of pastels as his plein air medium of choice and my delving deeper into his palette, working process and subject matter.

So, while some smaller studies in pastel and coloured pencils preceeded these (like the one on the top of this page), here are two studies of the Pond Reflections. Both use a fairly limited palette, with greens introduced to the second one.

Pond reflections in Colour , no. 1
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm



Pond reflections in Colour , no. 2
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm

It's with these ventures outside comfort zones that I surprise myself: oh, are these really your marks? Your choice of hues? Of building up tension between different marks, hues and shapes?

Hm, maybe ownership isn't the way to approach this... let me think about this a little more.

I've been trying to draw with pastels for a while now and it's slowly building up a repertoire of marks and lines that will stay. It is also interesting to see the different hues that are being introduced - my small travel box now includes very different sticks to last summer - they are much more pigment-laden and full of reds, orange and magentas. Interesting...

Who's fed up yet?

Na, enough Trees on Water? Or can you deal with another one?

This is the one I will submit as part of the assignment:

Trees of water,
Lino print on Japanese paper
15x15cm

Do you recognise the colours? It's straight from Wolf Kahn's palette. I figured if I don't get round to the pastels all that much, I can do a bit of palette exploration in print. So, this is lime green and ultramarine blue. There is some intentional misalignment and some wiping back on the blue block.

Good. That's that pretty much done. On to the next. It'll be a reductive lino cut. Should I chose a trees on water reflection or something new for a change?

And a PS in form of a personalised message.
I., I may not have mentioned this before,
but I have a personal preference for your choice of three?
A subtle hint? How's this?
Thank you!!!

A bit of learning: Wolf Kahn

Over the past two weeks I've been digging around some work on how to work with water reflections. Most of the digging was done on my sofa with some of the books that had been staring at me for far too long.

Inspired by Lindsay's and Vivien's excellent posts on Kurt Jackson on Watermarks and their respective blogs, I begun with KJ's Thames Project. I still haven't seen any of his paintings in live, but this book already provided a few inspired coffee rounds with M..

But I got stuck: I find his markmaking just utterly fascinating, but it's a wet media markmaking... there is no way I can splash with dry dusty pastels.


So, enter artist #2: Wolf Kahn. I had bought one of his books when Casey's Wolf Kahn project introduced me to his fantastic colourist landscapes which build up so much tension and ambiguity between abstraction and representation that I can look at them forever.

Warm Tones on the River by Wolf Kahn, 1990
Pastel, 11x14 inches
Private Collection, New Mexico

Well, having decided to explore water reflections in dry media (well: mainly pastel) for a little while longer, I've been since reading through WK, had a few email conversations with Casey and begun to find a way of exploring WK's work.

As a start today: his palette. It got me terribly excited. I loved it. And nonetheless it has been a very strange and alien one for me. Hm, I don't quite know if I get the words for it.... let me muddle around for a while on this:

It's colorist - note the omission of the -u-. It's a palette I've come across since in quite a few other Northamerican artists, notably in Tracy Helgeson's oil paintings [I am putting the link to her Sales blog in here as much of her current work involves portraits.]
I am tempted to describe it as a rather cool palette, but that is not right: there's plenty of warm tones sitting next to high chroma cooler hues; so: high chroma is maybe more fitting; it seems rich in phtalos, cobalts and cadmiums. And, other than cobalt blue, these are pigments I haven't used much myself.

Well... I think I can see the difference and particularities but it will probably need a few more iterations to speak of them.

Kahn describes his pastels as immediate responses to - or better still: part of the experiental seeing of - being in landscape (or nature?). They are characterised by marks closely associated with drawing. Rather than using sanded boards, he draws on paper - lightly toned paper.

Diane Townsend's Terrage pastels are said be to be developed with a particulay eye on WK's palette. She carries one set of twelve of WK's favourites, which are these here:


Diane Townsend Terrage Pastels: Wolf Kahn's Favourites

dioxazine purple 188
mars violet 93
red oxide 88
quinacridone magenta 182
blue-violet gray 135
gray 124
ultramarine blue 18
ultramarine blue 20
permanent green 164
cadmium red light 56
cadmium yellow 67
cadmium orange 63

I found this image in the book, it's rather different to many of the others, but it resembled most closely some of the eeriness of my recent pond reflections.

Black Pond i (study) by Wolf Kahn, 1997
Pastel 11x14 inches
Beadleston Gallery, New York

And where is all this getting me to?

A first glimpse is this:

A pastel drawing on white paper with an unfamiliar palette. Hm... Comments to follow once I've made up my mind...

Trees in lake,
Soft pastel on paper, 30x20cm

A few related links:

• See Diane Townsend Pastel website here
• Casey's Wolf Kahn Project at the Colorist here
• Wolf Kahn Pastels by Wolf Kahn. Harry Abrams Publishers, New York, here
  

Paintings I like - without a horizon

Mark Rothko, Untitled 1969
Acrylic on canvas, 234x200cm
Collection of Christopher Rothko

Mark Rothko's work has a similar effect on me as Joan Eardley's. It just swallows me up... gulp... I'm gone. The paintings are left.

It's quietly sombre contemplative. The scale and the colour are just all that is there. I had been looking forward to the Tate Exhibition and kept wandering through the rooms, back and forth. The scale of paintings, the different series - 15 or so of the Seagram Murals in one room; the Black form paintings, Brown on Grey and Black on Grey. Fabulous.

There were two comments that stuck.

One was a conversation I overheard in the room with the black on black series: such variety in black (red, brown, green and blue ones; opaque, transclucent, matt, shiney). An elderly couple sat next to me. Her emotional response to the black was straightforward: "He must have been such a sad person." And she was clearly distraught by all the black she saw.

That's it. Enough said. You see, you read, you associate painting=painter.

Have a look at the series in question for yourself. The Tate has the exhibition online... here is the link to the Black Form Paintings

Similar to the Twombly exhibition, I had taken an audio guide - actually much more: a nice touch screen, music, stories, additional images. Very nicely done! And not in this room but in a later room, the curator commented on Rothko's association with the Abstract Expressionists. He, the curator was doubtful, commenting along the lines that while Rothko intended and experimented intensely with the evocation of emotional responses by the viewers of his paintings, the paintings themselves don't tell us all that much about Rothko the person, they are thus not particularly expressive/expressionist.

Interesting thought. I'll keep that.

The other one was the commentary on the last series: Black on Grey. In various sizes, formats, different borders surrounding them.

Instruction #1 for that room: This is not a horizon line. Don't read it as such.

Mark Rothko, Untitled 1969
Acrylic on canvas, 206x236cm
Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel

And here is the Black on Grey room

That is difficult - not to read it as horizon line. But I'm trying - and the painting is all the better for it. Brian had commented on abstraction as the barest hint at something, to be filled in. Let me fill that thought a bit further - or take it elsewhere.

• The whole exhibiton is online with a lot of additional material. See the link here
• Casey over at the Colorist has a lot good things to say about Rothko too

Seascape in Earth

Some of the pastel studies [from here] have already found their way into large print, eh: scale.

Seascape in earth WIP
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

This one intrigued me for the burnt orange/cobalt blue. The colour field inbetween was struggling to hold the strong hues together. But nonetheless, I liked the lime green/earth pigment in the sea a lot.

The small 15x10cm format is always a tricky one I find. I like its challenge to work something out so small, but for many compositions that simply doesn't work for me: so, while several of the small studies have some beauty in them somewhere, they do so precisely because of their flaws.

Now: a seascape in earth colour/green and orange. In some way it gets me around the earlier posed concerns about landscapisms: the obvious enframing, reading as something specific. The walking, running, stumbling between abstraction and representation, and back and forward again.

Seascape in earth WIP (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

The pastels as medium took me one step beyond my struggles over perspectives, marks, lines, textures and palettes. There's something awfully complex about the sea, water, reflection and movement.

I reckon that part of that complexity is also unfamiliarity? I'm not too sure about that - while I also think that being unfamiliar with 'stuff' is usually quite helpful, it seems to be standing in my way. It does so in a manner that the fields from earlier this year didn't do. Well: there is probably nowhere in world I have spent more time, been more often over more than 20 years than those fields. So: they are known, familiar, saturated with stuff: experiences - some better forgotten than others.

Does that make it easier to represent them? Push them onto a canvas, turn them into something else in that process? Something that is outwith my biographical past?

I am in two (or five?) minds about that.
Well: seeing Rothko in London made me think about abstract expressionism - expressive of the artist, or precisely not! - a bit more... to be followed up later.

So... from all that experiental expressive experimental struggling, just going with fields of colours, and doing so in ways that don't read obviously as water was just what was required. And it was good and harmless fun. I made use of Brian's experiment of using water for diluting pastel on the board [thank you!]. Well: the board I used was one I had prepared quite some time back - it was a glorious lemon yellow with plenty of splattered acrylics on top. To mute some of the underpainting (and not to have to use too much pastel rubbed into the uneven surface), I used a wet brush. It flattened the pigment, turned it opaque. And: mysteriously and fortuitiously, took on the resemblance of water (how lucky is that??); I also found that my priming with pumice powder, and the resulting brush marks work rather well for the seascape.

So: a cop out on several levels - not building up by use of lines but again by fields of colours; no limited palette - but that's ok, that's for later. Let's stick with this for a wee while.

Seascape in earth WIP (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

For the sea.... a limited palette and some concerns over landscapes

I've been toying with ideas for the next paintings. I've known for a while that they will be seascapes - based on the sketches from Eigg. [see the Flickr set here]

But I've also known that I don't want them to be pretty or fluffy. And I think I now am getting a sense how that can be avoided:

• focus on lines and markings not fields/shapes of colour. I want to try and build up fields/shapes much more strongly through lines and textures: layer them more strongly and busily
  
  
• don't do landscapes, i.e. to enframe them as beautifully constructed views.

The making of landscape in culture takes me right back to Geography (yes, academic discipline and thus capital G). I just had a little look on my computer, as I was sure I would find some writing done on a critique of the construction of landscape in Victorian England. But instead, I found something on something not so different, and for the moment, that should be sufficient:

The British Marxist historian and literary critic Raymond Williams wrote succinctly on the construction of rural communities in Victorian novels as visible, or as he calls it as knowable.
Williams finds that most novels operate with the concept of a community that is knowable, meaning that people, and their relationships can be easily communicated to the readership. More importantly, however, is that the knowable community is highly socially selective, as, for instance in relation to Jane Austen’s novels:

It is outstanding face-to-face; its crises, physically and spiritually, are in just these terms: a look, a gesture, a stare, a confrontation; and behind these, all the time the novelist is watching, observing, physically recording and reflecting. That is the whole stance – the grammar of her [Jane Austen’s] morality. Yet while it is a community wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is an actual community very precisely selective. Neighbours in Jane Austen are not the people actually living nearby; they are the people living a little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited. (Williams 1975 203)

In contradistinction, the city in English literature became the place where such knowable communities were hidden from view and easy visibility – but had, as in Dickens’s work, to revealed and teased out. So similarly to Austen's seemingly 'simply there' rural communities, 'landscapes' are also made: produced, conveying particular views of what is contained within a vista, what isn't - and it's usually the stuff that doesn't fit that is hidden.

Good... so, there's my essential ambiguity with landscape painting. Doesn't stop me from doing them, though.

Now, one way I try to address that (and surely won't resolve it) is by foregoing the distance.

Foreground, middleground, finish. No background to enframe. It's a concept that keeps fascinating me, but also one where my intuition on reasonably good composition so quickly leaves me. Where is the horizon line to orientate? To know, to see where you stand?

Troon shoreline, Oil sketch in Moleskine 24x21cm

Now, this sketch does look pretty dumb as photo, it doesn't do that badly IRL, but yes: middlegrounds confuse the heck out of me, generally, and need some more attention. Well, I better just call that sketch 'sketch' rather than shoreline, so that there is no confusion ;)

Well, the past couple of weeks, I've been spending saturday mornings at some mixed media experiments with this.... VEEERY variable success. [But yes, the Eldon Group is back in full swing, and very nicely so).

But, at least today I took out the oils, gave Irene the challenge to pick three colours for me, and I chose a fourth and so the palette for the series of paintings is going to be:

• Naples Yellow Light
• Raw Sienna (yes, again)
• Prussian Blue
• Cobalt Green

And this is where they get me to colourwise:


Well, there's a start, I need to make sure I've got at least two canvasses ready for next Saturday and then it'll be all good (at some point along the line)...

Remember these ones: Coloured Squares

Various Coloured Squares, 10x10cm in wooden frame
Oil on Canvas board

They were done as part of the early colour investigations before all those fields in oil earlier this year..

I had six of them framed in a wooden, deep, double frame before the exhibition in June. Small squares they are quite impressive that way.

On my list for things to do this autumn was the concerted effort to recoup some of my extortionate framing costs from before the June exhibition.

So, all my paintings - small and large (if they are not going to some local sales/exhibitons) - are being put onto Etsy. I've also promised myself to do the same with the various plein air sketches I've done for the past 18 months or so. Vivien's shop opening prompted me to grit my teeth and write up descriptions for various things. And the first new items to go in are the Coloured Squares.

Here's my shop: http://www.gesah.etsy.com

And these are direct links to the six different Coloured Squares:

• Pale blue on Umber
• Green on Red and Ochre
• Dark Green on Lime
• Green on Green
• Purple on Umber
• Yellow on Green

And, I'm diverging from my straightfoward naming conventions of anything serial. So, rather than merely calling these CS#23 or thereabouts, they are COLOUR on COLOUR.

Dark Green on Lime
Oil on canvas board, 10x10cm

The world in high chroma

... a consequence of the limited palette but also a bit of playfulness. Late summer colours just shout cobalt and orange at me. So, I willingly oblige. And this is what I end up with. My parents don't recognise their world in my paintings, but that's probably quite alright, hm?!

Do you see what I did again: painted pages in my sketchbook. I think of 'Liar, liar...' and grin quietly to myself. Determination, heh, overrated... The colour I used was my old school posterpaint - kind of low grade gouache with little opacity, but ok. It doesn't rough up the paper all that much, but I just liberally add hairspray and it works pretty well, thanks again, Brian!

Where's the shade, Softpastel on Colorfix
34x24cm

This scene was a spontaneous find this morning. Spontaneous only in that sense that it's a view I've seen thousands of times. The shadow shapes on the path intrigued me.
Do you see them? No? Well, they somehow got lost, didn't they? I'm never too keen on any of the rather obvious composition points like: lead the eye of the viewer into the painting by using a path... well, it becomes so quickly so generic, so I ignore them. And the shadow shapes got lost at the expense of the fields in the distance. I will need to try again, tomorrow morning, find another way to ignore the path and keep the shade.

With all these questions

... there's a bit of searching going on. - As Vivien rightly says in her comment to yesterday's post... so: do it.

Well... The post got sparked off (quite literally) but the most fabulous glow in the sky I had seen in a long time. A thunderstorm at around sunset turned the sky into that iridescent grey yellow which in turn reflected throughout the garden and coloured everything green into a kind of glowy red/orange.

No chance for a photo of it, though I tried as you can see. I think my amateur photography skills were no match for it.

So I sketched. Attempt #1 yesterday didn't get the sky. But it got something of the heavy rain shower making the trees fade in the distance.

Thunder at Sunset #1
Soft pastel in Moleskine

But, again, I'm kind stuck with the texture of the sketchbook. It refuses to take more than 2 (max 3) layers of my soft pastels. Then I remembered Brian's explanation (scroll down Vivien's post to read his comment) of how he made the beautiful British Columbia landscapes in his sketchbook for the exchange. So I followed the instructions: one layer, rubbed in well with some paper, another layer, rubbed in, etc. And to use fixative (well, my mum's hairspray in this case) in between. And: hey ho... darker than before, more transparent then before and all in all enough to keep me happy.

Soft pastel in Moleskine
Layering, rubbing and more of the same
Yellow, lime green, pale purple and neutral grey in various combinations

So, here's a bit of experimentation from today:
Note 1 - the transparency of the rubbed in layers
Note 2 - the depth of the dark pastels overlayed

Thunder at Sunset #2
Soft pastel in Moleskine


More Skyline
Soft pastel in Moleskine

So, all in all not a bad day... and that's been on the painting front alone.