Let's disappear with Turner

JMW Turner, Venice with the Salute, c1844
Oil on Canvas, Tate Britain

How about into this piece of art?


As the lady next to us said: 'You can't possibly see what's in that'.

Or can you?



And in a blink, he, it and I are gone. Nowhere to be found.


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Landscape, fields and abstraction

Hahaha.... I didn't post the two paintings central to the previous post on de Stael, did I?

Well... here they are. The de Stael that is currently on show at the Tate Modern is this one.

Nicolas de Stael, Composition, 1950
oil on canvas, 79x125cm
Tate Modern

There is another one with similar compositional characteristics in a blue colour scheme with stronger saturation:

Nicolas de Stael, Le parc de Sceaux, 1952

Oil on canvas, 162x114cm
Collection Phillips, Washington DC

Both of the image files are so small in size that there isn't much to see other than hue and overall composition.

Where are the marks and the texture?

Now... the final state of Elqui 1 is as this.

Elqui 1, 70x80cm
Oil on canvas

It is signed and ready to be taken to the framers. And, more importantly: it is sold! As you can see, the orientation of the painting moved back to the original - several layers later, the associations with hilltops are rather distant, yet important.

De Stael's method of working on the two paintings in this post is very different to mine: very thickly applied paint, borders that separate geometric shapes and a palette based on very similar hues.

And: still! Something doesn't leave me alone with his paintings and what I want to do with mine. Haven't figured it out yet other than a persistent gut feeling.... let's find out a bit more...

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....

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

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

Canvas makings

I always seem to need quite some time to get to the actual painting I want to. So, it's been week 4 of 6 and I finally got going on the final set of oil paintings on the landscapes.

Part of the delay this time was the fact that I had run out of canvases. Well, I had plenty of ready-made or DIY small and square ones. But the last ones I worked with were considerably bigger, about 80x70cm or so, and I loved the feel of space and distance I could easily achieve with these. I also retracted my previous favouritism of square ones to go back to a landscape format. - The gouache studies used that format and very effectively so.

So, finally, this week I had planned ahead, had bought some stretcher bars, although not without difficulties; and also some more canvas. The very first lot of canvas fabric I had bought a couple of years back was some fairly fine callico - I loved it for acrylics and smaller sizes; but had bought some heavy cotton canvas after that: it was fairly coarse and heavy. So heavy that my fingers were sore after stretching it onto the wood.

So, when I was in the fabric shop this time I ended up buying some medium-heavy linen - Irish linen in fact - twice as expensive as the cotton canvas but seeing that I don't use that many large canvasses I was feeling generous.

Pulling the canvas over the stretcher bar

Easy to stretch, pull and fix, it was a joy to work with. After assembling the stretcher bars (use a hammer if it's too difficult by hand), I cut the fabric so that it just stretches around the wood on the back side. I begin by stapling the wide sides: three staples on one side, turn to the opposite, pull firmly into place, and again staple 2 or 3 (with 5cm between each staples or so); I then turn to the two other sides and continue to work round the whole frame by frequently turning, pulling and stretching evenly. Once I'm close to the corners, I pull these in neatly, fold over and staple firmly into place.

Working my way around the frame

As far as priming is concerned, I used acrylic gesso for the first ones. But ever since, I've been using simple white emulsion paint: much more economical, and it works well for the type of paintings I do - fine details rarely figure in my paintings, and so the emulsion paint is more than adequate. I gave each canvas four thickish layers of primer.

Seeing that used such precious canvas I was a bit doubtful about the cheap emulsion paint. But for the moment it looks great: the primer tightened the canvas to a good, sound drum; it bounces perfectly, has enough give, the surface is well sealed but still there is the weave texture throughout. It was such a pleasure to work on it.

I think that's one of the benefits of making my own canvas: the painting actually starts well before the paint/sketch/study - it's the selection of materials, bars, dimensions. So, by the time the first brushstroke goes on it, my canvas and I are already best pals...

Finished, stretched, primed and ready to go

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 ;)

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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Winter. Colour. Squares

Sixteen Winter Colour Squares, 10x10cm
Oil on canvas board

Sixteen of them - in small 10x10 cm to teach my hands how to get to the colours inside my head and outside on the fields.

Winter, anyone? Can you find it in there? Where?

The squares are either oil bars or oil paints, a couple of them are both.

Tell me, which ones are finished? Which ones work for you? Which ones should be taken on further?

Winter Colours Square #1, 10x10cm
Oil on canvas board

Funnily, some of the cooler colours I got to with the oil bars - e.g. with emerald green, blue violets and primary blue seem to call winter more easily than yesterday's oil paints. Yet, the texture of the oil paint is just sooo much nicer, I forgot how enjoyable it is to move them around, on the palette, the knive and brush and eventually on canvas, and how they can be worked into again and again.

Winter Colours Square #9, 10x10cm
Oil on canvas board

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Plan no 1

Conifers on hillside no 1, 20x15cm
Oil and oil pastel on paper

... for this year (and future ones?) is about oil paint. It's about technique and about taking time to learn things properly. Early last year I had dabbled in oil, but then moved back to pastels and the increasingly mixed media artwork. I'll stick with that as plan 1b (that's the assorted pastels, gouache, acrylics and whatever comes along with it), but for the Saturday mornings up until summer I want to focus on oil painting technique.

Subject matter is a bit secondary at the moment, but I must admit that I keep circulating around the Northern Germany winter fields and woods - there's something there that wants a bit more expression - and it isn't homesickness. Yet, by developing a familiar (as well as well-known and comfortable) subject, I'll have more time for the technical explorations.

So, first off, there were a few studies with Sennelier oil bars (and some oil pastels on top) - I actually did these back in autumn, but yesterday I took them out for the first time.

Conifers on hillside no 2, 15x20cm
Oil and oil pastel on paper

The first technical bit will be more explicitly about colour mixing - and here I already stumbled over the oil bars - I got 10 or so as a set with a workshop. Yet - of course (and I should have known that before I got excited): other people's colour sets aren't really mine. So: what do I do with primary reds and blues when I got used to cerulean, ultramarine and alizarin crimson? Well: experiment and mix, I suppose. And in the worst case: flog them again.

I've got a strong sense where I want to get with those colours - I think that is probably also an advantage of knowing the landscape well - Those earth colours, a lot of umbers, some silvery greens. And yet, my paint tubes don't seem to easily get me there. Small amendments thus include cobalt blue and lemon yellow (no cadmium) as well as a primary (!) red.

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Constable and Turner at V&A

In the end it took me two visits to the V&A to find the paintings I was looking for. On the first day I, mistakenly, thought there would be late opening, so just as I finally found the two galleries with Constable's oil sketches and Turner and Constable's landscapes, the museum was closing - I wonder if that had anything to do with my endless browsing through the museum shop beforehand ;)

Yesterday, however, before I went back home and made sure I would get to look at the sketches.
Having posted one of Constable's cloud studies in the earlier post, I was curious to see with my own eyes and try to find out more about this clouds/sky studies. Much of the sketches were donated to the museum by his daughter in the 1880s and give rich insights into his working and study practices. They are often painted on paper/card and he kept these as reference material for his larger paintings.

As for record keeping, these were the additional notes Constable wrote on the back of the cloud study #82:
'Looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to the blue' Dated Sept. 5. 1822

I'm interested and intrigued how such studies - of which Constable said, according to the museum notes, to have completed over 50 reasonably large ones by October 1822 - are becoming part of ones working repertoire - the one when one knows how to present and represent a cloudy but fresh evening sky in summer. It reminds me also of how my life drawing tutor - with a keen focus on human anatomy - stressed again and again that observation is just one part, the other part is knowing and understanding anatomy.

With all this talk of working knowledge, reflexivity and experience, my geography friends will laugh - it is plain clear that I've just been to a conference and my head is full of academia talk. But, hey, isn't it nice to be able to make those connections? More to follow, I suppose.

Here, for some exploration of the gallery if you aren't in London is the V&A website who offers a rich resource and also some virtual tours through its various room:

Constable's oil sketches in room 88
The sketches are mainly on the left hand side and you can zoom in close to look at them

Turner and Constable's landscapes in room 87
Three of Turner's seascapes are on the left here, with Constables landscape paintings to the right

The virtual tour uses Quicktime software to allow you to move around and zoom in - it works pretty well.

Bedrock and Clouds No 5

This is just going to be a quick post: the n key on my keyboard is still broken, so every typing becomes a bit tedious (or trying to replace with words without the 'n'). I finished a few of my paintings and, in the process of formatting photos for the almost ready website) redid some photos that were still missing.
This is the final one of the Bedrock and Clouds series (it's #5)


Bedrock and Clouds #5, oil on canvas, 40x40cm

It was one where I tried to use the technique Lyonel Feininger used by applying geometric shapes and wiping back the oil colours before applying the next layer.
This link should take you to Google's image search of his pictures - look out for his 'Vogelwolke', which is one of my favourites and his Gelmeroda series.