Adventures In A Painted Landscape

We have been away camping again. It has been interesting getting used to living indoors after spending nearly two weeks in a tent. This is my favourite beach, in a mystery location! I also made another sketch near here, well more of a diagram as I only happened to have a tiny diary with me at the time. Strangely, the ‘diagram’ brings back more memories than this oil pastel. I hope to make my diagram into a painting but it will be a bit of an experiment working from something that’s mostly in my head. I really admire artists who can paint what’s in their mind’s eye as in my case it usually turns out to be a ‘frightful daub’ (which could say something about my mind, I suppose)!

oil pastel sketch of the beach

I’ve just returned from a week’s camping and walking in the Lakes, where I made some frenzied marks in my tiny A6 sketchbook using oil pastels … could be a painting in there somewhere, but I really need to go back.

view from my tent - Patterdale campsite

the view from Helvellyn

a view from Crinkle Crags

from the top of Crinkle Crags

Still struggling to get back in the painting groove. This is last night’s attempt, with challenging quickly moving windy clouds and changing light, but beautiful freshly-washed colours after some much-needed rain.

Windy cloudy evening after rain

Switching over to watercolour to try and get back some kind of sense of colour, I have veered too far and become garish! Fun, though.
These aren’t brilliant but I feel as if I’m slowly getting back towards a painting routine. Hope to have more to show soon.

Eek! A garish sky in watercolour ...

A rather watery one of the hill

Still finding it difficult to make time to paint and finding the results are often iffy, but that is how it goes! I liked the colours of this evening sketch, if not the drawing/tones/much else!

quick evening sketch of hills, oil 6x8

I have been trying to capture something about this lovely valley for ages and maybe this would make a good composition – but the colour didn’t really happen (and has been bleached out even more by the camera flash).

attempt to paint Crosedale, oil 6x8

The weather is set to remain fair for a couple more days so hopefully I can produce some more paintings before the end of the month. Off to read about Emil Nolde to get my colour inspiration back …

I’m slowly, creakily, getting back to my painting and it feels, as always, like starting from scratch. So these oil sketches are a bit dauby and clumsy, and I expect that’s how it will be for a while.

It’s much easier to paint when you’re already in the habit of doing it. Once you stop, the fear (or whatever it is) builds up and beginning again seems like quite an obstacle. Whether it’s fear of failure, or success, or both, I’m not sure – but it certainly gets in the way, and not just for me – I know other people who have the same feelings.

I think really it all boils down to something Lowry once said: Painting is ‘damned hard work’.

cloud study, oil on canvas, 6x8 inches

cloud study 2, oil on canvas, 6x8

light over Dentdale, oil on canvas, 6x8

I think you have hung your paintings wonky, and I am not impressed …

paintings, settee and reclining dog

Warning: this is not about painting, and, even worse, it is about not painting!

It probably isn’t a very good idea to post without any pictures but I am just not finding the time to paint at the moment and it’s quite frustrating. The reasons why are actually good reasons – I’ve started doing freelance writing for a couple of different companies as a way of earning extra income.

Originally, I had planned to work for just one company and bring in a minimum sum each week, but as I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with my applications I panicked and made lots all at once. One firm took me on almost straight away and that was great – but they only gave me small amounts of work to begin with. Fair enough, I thought – I’m just starting out. Then another firm accepted me and I found myself in the middle of a gruelling testing process that went on for weeks.

In the meantime, the first company had found me the extra work I’d originally wanted, and – sure enough – I now find myself trying to juggle just a bit too much work trying to keep both firms happy.

One of the companies is British and it is much easier working for them than the other, which is American. I don’t have to run everything through a US spellchecker and worry about language differences in general, nor do I have a strict editor who gives me marks out of ten for everything I write, which is a bit frightening and feels like I’m continually doing exams. The British company certainly allows a bit more freedom but – of course – the American job pays more, making it difficult to decide what to do.

I have to remind myself that the whole point of the writing work was to have something flexible to allow me to keep painting, while in reality it seems to have taken over my life.

Never mind, I’m sure I’ll sort things out before too long and in the meantime I apologise for the lack of pictures!

I’ve been out sketching again. At the moment we’re having a lot of sunny but cold days and I’ve been finding there’s just enough time to sum up a scene in pencil before going completely numb. The Howgills continue to elude me. They have fabulous shapes that resemble sleeping forms (I think human, but they’re famously supposed to be elephants) but they’re so huge it’s difficult to know how to fit them into a picture without losing the mass. The sketch below was made in a lonely valley that I love. I’m trying to learn its shape and work out what to do with it. The second sketch was just capturing a lovely moment sitting on a strip of a path somewhere very high up in the sun.

'sleeping' form in pencil, A6

on Crook fell, pencil A6

… with no home to go to since I removed the other two pages of the Fellpainter site. These were previously on the gallery page. I’ve temporarily condensed the site down to just the blog page while I decide what to do with the rest of it.

another hill painting, oil on paper, 9x12

hill painting, oil on paper, 9x12