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?

Rewind 1

This is really a 31 dec post, only half a day late...... fixed now.

Yesterday's flight back home was in full view of a setting sun, the thinnest waxing moon, the evening star and a colourful wonderland above the clouds. It fitted all very well.

And, to round it off, a bit of moanful PJ Harvey. Powdered Wig Machine would have been good too... but take this one:



Next... some actual rewind of the past year... over the next few days...
Have a great 2009!

Nocturnes, finally

One step up from blurry photos: my attempts at drawing in the dark. They definitely qualify for experimental drawings, but not as plein airs. They were done from inside the house in darkness or candle light. That was enough of a logistical challenge. So, the sky turned green and other unexpected mix-ups since dark pastels do look strangely alike in darkness.

Nocturne #1,
pastel on board, 30x25cm

I do like the larger one, where it looks as if I used every pastel stick exactly once. LOL. Another logistical discovery: there is no point in trying to draw with black ink on a dark grey page in darkness. You will see nothing! But: purple works well, as per usual.

Nocturne #2,
pastel and ink in Moleskine, 24x21cm


Nocturne #3,
pastel in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Do you notice: the view is the same in all three of them. From the dining room, looking westwards.

Night walk #1

Ok... it was indeed time for winter night walk #1. It was the introductory route, the one with street lamps to keep the ghosts away. And, fittingly, it was 'Nocturnes for beginners'. Some blurry, long exposure photo shots.

So many stars... they just need a proper tripod... next time.

And, well... yes,... did we see something or did we photoshop?

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.

Painting the night

Ok.... I did a bit of digging around on

(a) how to paint stars, moons etc... I had been curious about dealing with light sources in dark skies; wondering about mediums to do this in best, etc.
(b) changes in hue, temperature and mood as the sun sets.

I found a bit on each of these, but above all, I stumbled into a lively discussion on WetCanvas on plein air painters who paint by night. Here's a keyword search on the forums with 'nocturne'.

I also found this demo here on the artists' network site

It throws up all sorts of new questions around practicalities of how to paint at night, mix colours, use headlamps etc.

And, then of course, I got reminded of the current exhibition at the MoMA on Van Gogh's Colours of the Night. Brian had not long ago guest edited a review on Casey's Pastelblog.

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889
Oil on Canvas, 74x92cm
MoMA, New York

The MoMA has a great online resource of the exhibition, if you follow the link here.

I've got a couple of sketches of evening scenes that I did over the past few weeks. They are all in ink, and I need some time to play with hues for them. But there are a couple of points on how to develop this. It'll go into my luggage for next week.