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
… 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
I’ve only been managing to do very quick sketches in the recent cold weather. It’s back to oils again, for now, but trying to be more adventurous with the colour.
Just trying to make notes in paint, really:
snow under red sky
odd little clouds
arrangement of snow shadows
The photos are a bit blurry due to the flash reflecting off wet paint.
More watercolour experiments … After a full month of rain, any light breaking though has been full of drama especially towards dusk. These still aren’t what I’d hoped they’d be but the process is encouraging me to be more daring with colour. I just haven’t been able to work solidly due to dayjob concerns getting in the way. Oh yes, and I foolishly decided to have a go at the NaNoWriMo ‘write a novel in a month’ thing and that distracted me from painting as well. I did manage to complete the challenge on time but now have a badly-written novel and a paucity of paintings (also, odd words like ‘paucity’ keep appearing in my mind).
Nolde actually seems to have invented many of his marvellous pictures while sitting in a darkened room. I have yet to try that, as I’ve been basing paintings on what’s going on in the landscape. Silly really, because at the moment there’s much more chance of sitting in darkened rooms for hours than there is of seeing anything outdoors!
Dregs of Sunset
In Hobdale
Here is a progress post on the watercolour happenings. I’m having fun with the colours but losing control of my clouds. If I keep the paper wet enough to create that lovely spreading effect Nolde achieved (yes I’m aping Nolde but learning loads) then the clouds I paint have a tendency to swell into barrage balloons. I really don’t know how he did it. Plus, the paper cockles with all that water swimming about, although I kind of like the effect (and Nolde’s paper cockled too apparently). Today I retreated a little and used less water, less of the mop brush, and managed to control the forms a bit more. Nolde’s pictures look so accidental and free – yet it’s fiendishly difficult trying to paint like that and still keep some sense of form, a composition that works and make the colours glow!
Cloud Stack
Clouds Take Over
Many Dark Lines
Very Large Red Cloud!
Fiery Orange Trees
All pictures are 9″x12″.
I think I will continue with the watercolour experiments for a bit longer and see if any can be successfully made into oils. It has been an exciting project. I’m really missing using my oils, but my passion for colour has been reawakened.
… painting experiments are proceeding, involving watercolour and paper.
Unfortunately, nothing has emerged so far that’s good enough to share. It’s a long time since I used any watercolour but slowly I’m remembering its ways. Using very thick paper the process isn’t so dissimilar from oils in that you can work on a piece for quite a long time, adding and removing paint – but I hope to become a bit more spontaneous (the difficult thing) as I improve.
The idea is that watercolour will be used for the initial painting, hopefully capturing the vivid colours I want. Then I can remake the piece in oils trying to capture the brightness and light of the watercolour. Well, that’s the idea … we shall see. So far, the watercolour version is capturing the muddy murk of my worst oils, but I shall persevere.
Apologies for the corny title – but Berlin was truly inspiring. I was lucky enough to see two Emil Nolde exhibitions.
One I had the highest hopes for was at the Berlin Extension of the Nolde Foundation.
This was the Unpainted Pictures – a series of small glowing watercolours completed during a time when Nolde was forbidden to paint by the Nazis.
However, the exhibition I enjoyed more than this one was: Man – Nature – Myth at the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings). There were some lovely mournful etchings of harbour scenes and beautiful bright watercolours from Nolde’s South Seas expedition.
I discovered that Nolde’s oils were sometimes painted from smaller watercolour or oil pastel pictures and that gave me an idea to try making some plein airs in watercolour for a change, maybe transferring the more successful ones into oils. I haven’t used watercolour since my illustration days when I spent ages carefully stretching unyielding swathes of Arches HP paper and furrowing my brow over a size 4 brush. So I thought it might be fun to buy a simple block of paper, forget the stretching, and get a couple of large brushes to paint in a bold and free manner!
Then hopefully the results will feed back into the oil paintings – either directly by making an oil version or indirectly by learning something from trying a different technique.
Anyway, I’m very excited about all the possibilities!
Just looking through some older work while I tidy up the studio a bit and found this oil so thought I’d post a (slightly out of focus) pic. Is more expressive/less realistic colour the way to go?
