Study Plains

Study Plains 3_2, Gouache on Board, 18x12cm

I've been playing with the winter scenes again.

Following the excursion into Nicholas de Stael's work, I wanted to push the airy, flowy scenes of Fields in Winter towards more abstraction. With de Stael, I got really struck by the extent to which he was able to par down the compositions: so simple and yet so strong. One of the reasons he seemed to be able to do that was that there exist strong, almost whirllike focal points in his paintings - certainly in his Agrigente landscapes; and these focal points are almost central to the painting. I need to experiment with Photoshop a bit more to give you a visual sense of what I'm describing here.

In any case, I try to apply that sense of focal point coupled with a really parred down composition to the landscapes scenes from a while back. To do so, I took some small scale (18x12cm) boards, gessoed and with a burnt umber underpainting, and used gouache. I've done a few of them and uploaded them here.

These are just two to start with. I worked again with a limited palette and explored some variations. It's been great fun; I want to write up a bit more about them, but need more time to do so.

In the meantime: Here's another one.

Study Plains 2_4, Gouache on Board, 18x12cm

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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Compositional struggles

On-site sketch, Maktesh HaGadol,
W/C on Moleskine
24x21 cm

Yesterday's desert landscape has been the latest in a long series of attempts of grappling with one scene from my Spring holiday to the Negev.

Following on from several on site sketches, pastel sketches, some more compositional pencil drawings and a round of gouache and pastel sketches to establish highlights, I still felt that the composition of what I started with was too complicated and unnecessary. I felt I was struggling with elements where each elements worked in its own right but not as part of the painting.

Cropping the image on the left to leave out a difficult-to-read midground was my solution for the time being. It seems to work a lot better through this simplification. Click here to see the cropped image.

Pastel/Gouache on paper, Maktesh HaGadol
40x30cm

Pencil sketch of ridge detail

Gouache links and sources

I've been doing a bit of digging around gouache techniques, resources and artists.
I was hoping for an amazon one-click solution but was sadly disappointed. There seem to be very few technique books around.

The one that is consistently recommended is that by Pamela Kay, Gouache: a personal view, Atelier 1995. Yet it looks as if it's difficult to get hold of (an Amazon price tag of £95 isn't very encouraging). Katherine at Making a Mark has written up an excellent post as part of her floral project on Kay's floral artwork, which is very much based on gouache.

I have also found a couple of interesting blogs by artists who work with gouache:

• Erik Tiemens' Virtual Gouache Land

• Jared Shear's Terra Peer
  

• I found both through Charley Parker's Lines and Colors , who has a whole number of review of art blogs on his site

Gie's a gouache

In the fields, Mixed media on paper
40x30cm

My favourite Saturday morning art group is back again, and while it will take a while to balance Friday evenings with Saturday mornings, it was exciting to be back - it's a great group of people and many of them have been going for a long time.

I'm keen on doing more work with oils but am not quite in the mood for that yet. So, I took my tubes of gouache along - I got them as a present early in summer but still haven't tried them out - what have I been missing!

It's funny how some media just feel right straight away and others just don't. From pastels I moved to acrylics and I remember vividly the intense frustration when everything just ended up as muddy, plasticky grey. In constrast, oil paints were just a revelation - their luminosity, the various oils and assorted accompaniments to go with them (even smelly turps) just add to the experience.

So, gouache has been a plan to pursue for a good while - really as a means to keep mixing media with pastels, and there's plenty of artists who did precisely that - mainly Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas - to which I won't link now but make a mental note of yet another draft folder file.

High pigment load and their ability to mix, remix and keep playing with makes gouache an exciting water-based medium. Their opaqueness (or is it opacity?) makes them ideal as underpainting for pastels - just see in the sketch above in particular with the blues and magenta where the intensity of hue would be difficult to achieve solely based on pastels.

The painting is based on one of my outdoors sketches at my parent's place.... low in a field of grasses with a high horizon lines made up of trees - some cobalt blue would have been better for the sky, but there is always another time. The mixed media are gouache, acrylic ink and pastel.

Here's to new paintings and explorations.