Adventures In A Painted Landscape

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 …

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.

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?