WHAT?
Having enjoyed painting with inks in Exercise 2, I kept my size 6 sable and my ink bottle (I had cleaned up the water dish, so no possibility of dilution) and just painted the desk of the bureau where I was sitting. It’s an old piece of furniture, lots of nooks and crannies, and all rather dark, partly because the wood is dark, and partly because it’s tucked away in a corner out of the sun. Lots of old bits of inky kitchen roll hanging around from exercise 2!
It made me consider my interior and where the sunlight falls through the day; it’s a North/South facing house, no windows facing West and East windows quite overhung by trees, so unless you are in a South facing window-ed room, our light is fairly even. So… up to the front South facing bedroom.
I had been looking at Bonnard’s paintings of interiors. Many of these paintings include an exterior view, usually incorporating light and gardens; however, even in his strict interiors, such as this:
Interior with flowers
Oil on canvas
he manages to get brightness and colour into what was probably in reality a dark corner with some fairly overbearing heavy furniture.
SO WHAT?
South-facing bedroom it is.
I went with watercolours again as suggested. Again I took a limited palette, but this time chose aureolin, a sunnier yellow as my main, along with ultramarine blue and warm sepia as before. I actually painted into my sketchbook, so on slightly cream cartridge paper, intending just a couple of dashes of bright orange for my bit of zing.
I did some mixing of my three main colours on the page as my version of “colour cards”. I remember seeing an exhibition of the work of Otobong Nkanga at Tate St. Ives a couple of years ago, and noticed that she often put small blobs of the colours she used at the side of her paintings.
It’s tricky for me to guarantee that I’m in a particular place painting at a given time of day due to my caring responsibilities which are sometimes unpredictable, so I knew that this exercise wasn’t going to go exactly as written. I had intended to paint a bit of my dressing table which holds a carousel of beads (where the bright orange zing was going to go). However, after a quick sketch I decided this was too fussy, and instead painted a darker corner by the window. I mainly used the aureolin and sepia for this – it was a dreary, rainy afternoon – reserving my bright blue for my point of zing, as per Sickert’s “The Blue Hat” (see earlier blog post).
The next morning was not quite so dreary, and I omitted the chair and pile of clothes and just tried to compare the three walls and bit of curtain; the walls look different depending on their orientation, despite all being originally the same colour.
I felt I didn’t have it quite right, so decided to abandon the yellow and just make a monotone tonal sketch using the blue. I cheated a bit, by taking a photo of this corner and changing it to the mono setting, and saw immediately what my issue was – I knew that the curtain was a cream colour but hadn’t allowed for it looking darker because it was in shadow:
NOW WHAT?
I confess to feeling a bit fidgety about this exercise at the start; I didn’t particularly want to work in watercolour, was struggling to find much variation in light around the house in frankly miserable weather, and didn’t think I could manage the suggested timings.
However, I have learned/confirmed that going with the flow is OK and that what you first intended to do (paint in style of Bonnard) isn’t necessarily what you end up doing (paint in style of Sickert and investigate tones); this has been said to me before, but most recently in the OCA workshop in April 2021 with OCA tutor Clare Wilson. And I found that letting go and following my interests made me feel better about my work, even though the outcomes are a bit scrappy.
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