WHAT?

Tanya Wood and Alex Hanna were the two suggested artists whose work resonated most with me. Tanya’s detailed drawings are so closely observed; I looked at her work on her website, www.tanyawood.co.uk; her “Edges” series was my favourite, great tonal contrasts, and I also liked the way she often leaves much of a page blank. Alex Hanna’s work, as seen on www.alex-hanna.co.uk , shows such range, from his closely observed and “sharp” paintings of everyday things like curtains, to his loose, impasto, more abstract images.

In this Exercise, I was looking to:

•  achieve something like Tanya’s tonal range, but also some of Alex’s gestural stroke making
• Use my water-mixable oils in a less frantic, more measured style (I watched a video by Raw Umber Studios recently advocating more thought with one’s brush-strokes)
• Try to use my long-handled brushes at their full length by standing back a bit when I’m painting
• Play around with gesso

SO WHAT?

My three items of rubbish I found in my studio; salvaged and repurposed items rather than throwaway – an empty CD case, an empty bath oil bottle, and an empty yoghurt pot.

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First I prepared my canvases. I applied a coat of gesso to each, but mixed a tiny bit of oil paint into my gesso first (Cobalt blue, Lemon Yellow and Persian Rose). When the surface was covered, I immediately painted very thickly into it with the leftovers of the gesso in a rough outline of each item, so they looked like this:

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(the rose canvas photo is a detail, didn’t show up well otherwise), and then as soon as the gesso felt dry to the touch I covered it with a dilute coat of titanium white.

While that dried I made my sketches, using a 4B pencil:

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I was going to use a limited palette of titanium white, ultramarine blue and raw umber for all three paintings; the colours I had used to prepare the canvases were fairly strident, even when covered with white, but I wanted something rather less obvious for my transparent items, and I also wanted the ultramarine to give me a wider tonal range than the cobalt might have offered.

I played around with my three colours (two colours plus white? Is white a colour?) before beginning, making myself a little colour card of possibilities:

I was pleased with the range of tones, and also with the olive-green I could mix, and the lush grey range. Beginning to see why, whenever you buy a “beginner’s” set of paints, they nearly always include these three!

Painting with a small long-handled filbert, I began to paint, starting with the bottle. 

It was a lot to remember…stand back, use the length of the brush, careful gestural strokes – but I did find that the length of the brush actually made me slow down just to control it, and that I really enjoyed making long slow strokes, which I hadn’t really experienced before with my habit of being closer to the painting. I added the shadow, then decided to block in the background with some light strokes of a fan brush. I was grateful in the end for the yellow ground, which helped get the colour of the “inside” of the bottle.

Next the yoghurt pot. Again I worked with the filbert.

I felt slightly constrained by my gesso underpainting at first as I had made it fill the height of the canvas, but it did turn out useful in helping convey the internal curves. Because the image was so large in relation to the canvas, I decided to omit any background apart from the cast shadows. I’d chosen the rose underpainting for this, I had been worried it would dominate, but actually it just makes the painting feel a bit warmer.

Finally the CD box. I’d been putting this off because of the straight lines, which indeed proved tricky, so I decided to abandon any attempt at photorealism and go for an impression. I emphasised the shadow and added the final reflection with a swipe with the fan brush. Again I decided to leave out the background apart from the shadow – my streaky blue underpainting felt sufficient.

NOW WHAT?

Looking back to the factors I wanted to focus on in this exercise:

• I feel I did well with my tonal range in the bottle and the CD case, less so in the yoghurt pot; also I managed some gestural marks – some long curves in the pot and also slightly spiky shadows in the CD case, which I hope convey the rather brittle nature of the plastic.
• I worked hard at remembering deliberate strokes; had a few lapses into frantic, but better than I usually am.
• Using the long-handled brushes at their full length consistently did not come easily, but the only way to do it seemed to be to commit to the stroke; tentative strokes invariably went wrong.
• My coloured gesso underpaintings have largely contributed positively to the final images, although my attempts to create rough raised images were a bit hit and miss – helpful when I’d got the underpainting right, annoying when it was slightly out of place. Jury’s out on this.

Also, I enjoyed working with this particular limited palette combination – offers lots of possibilities – to be used again.

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!

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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:

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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. 

WHAT?

Five minutes down the road from my house is a weir on the River Tavy – a very favourite place and one to which I go whenever I need a bit of headspace – so it seemed the ideal spot to dwell upon a little for this exercise.

SO WHAT?

I began with the ink paintings – I used ink a lot in Drawing 1, I love it, and it always feels like my “coming home” medium. I used black Chinese ink, which always dries slightly greyer than it looks when wet, applied with a rigger, which is such a versatile brush for mark marking depending on whether you use the tip or the side. In the first couple of images I drew into the paintings with a dip pen, but decided this wasn’t necessary for the other three. I painted on beige multi-media paper, actually size A5.

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I loved painting these, found myself freeing up as I went through the series, and becoming gradually more relaxed about how to depict the foliage, which I was struggling with at the beginning (hence the pen).

I decided to paint the same images in watercolour on postcard-size HP watercolour paper, using a size 6 round and a rigger.

I chose a limited palette: warm sepia, ultramarine and quinacridone gold.

It’s been quite a while since I used my tube watercolours, probably not since I started the course – but I found myself at least a bit better at reserving my white areas.

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The first two feel a bit insipid, I prefer the last three, and I realise that’s because I remembered to get dashes of only slightly diluted quinacridone gold in each, which  just lifts the image, being reddish-orange. I have painted the first two in more muted colours without adding my touch of zing!

Also my greens were either yellow-y or blue-y, I struggled to get that bright leaf green which would also have lifted the images a little.

NOW WHAT?

• I reminded myself of the enjoyment I get from drawing and painting with ink
• I have proved to myself the value of having just a touch of a bright, intense colour in a painting of fairly muted colours.

WHAT?

Maria was a German artist who lived 1647-1717. She was born into a family of printers and artists. She became fascinated with the portrayal of insect transformations, eventually travelling to Surinam with the younger of her two daughters. Here she painted plants and the insects associated with them, being the first to document this relationship. She worked on vellum in watercolour and gouache for each of her images. Here is an example of her painting:

“Banana Plant with Red and Purple Flower & Fruit”

1701-5

Watercolour and body colour with pen and grey ink on vellum

38.3 x 29.7 cm

British Museum, London

I wanted to have a go at working in her style, first by copying part of this image, then painting from a photograph of flowers in my garden.

SO WHAT?

I worked in my sketchbook on 150gsm cream cartridge paper, using Kuretake pan watercolours, to copy the lower part of the flower:

Next I wanted to paint from this photograph of tulips in Maria’s style, this time using Cobra water-mixable oils.

Having attended a recent Painting Dept Studio Group session where my tutor, who was leading the session, talked about her own use of dilute oils in the manner of watercolours, I was keen to give this a go.

I also wanted to use a limited palette, so my initial selection was titanium white, cobalt blue, lemon yellow and Indian yellow. I began working on a primed board with the two yellows; the Indian yellow is transparent and the lemon yellow semi-transparent, so I thought they would be good for building up layers.

As the layers developed, I decided to change my plan and make the entire painting in the yellows, leaving out the blue and white. This was inspired by two pieces of research:

• I had watched a video mentioned in the Technician’s Workshop section of the Painting Dept webpages: www.drawmixpaint.com. I had intended to bring out the lightest highlights using white, but the video suggested that yellow was an alternative, so I decided to use fairly concentrated lemon yellow for this purpose.
• I had attended a Zoom meeting, again from the Painting Dept, which was a “Film Club” session where we watched a video showing John Hoyland talking about his painting practice; he said (I paraphrase) that he basically paints in order to learn how to do it. I took this as inspiration to play around with my painting and experiment.

I photographed the painting as it developed, from the initial layer through to the finished product:

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Here is the final version:

NOW WHAT?

I have learned:

• That I should take John Hoyland’s advice and experiment more
• I enjoyed working in this method of building up dilute layers and should like to do this more
• Paying attention to the details of the paint characteristics on the tube paid off – the two yellows were transparent either wholly or partly, whereas the white was opaque and I think would have killed the luminescence of the painting stone dead – I probably should have tried it just to prove it to myself, but I’m afraid I was too attached to the final image.

The board I had picked out of the pile to use was not ideal as the surface was textured and quite dominant – I think the final image turned out to be strong enough to get away with it, but it has been a lesson to me to think more carefully about this aspect in future.

WHAT?

I looked at Mimei Thompson’s work earlier in this course and was attracted to it; in the example given in the course materials, Weeds, there is something about her contrasts of streaky background colours and bold colours for the main focus of the painting which I wanted to try and emulate for the subject matter I have chosen.

SO WHAT?

My husband has recently been in hospital for 9 weeks; he’s a great gardener, so I would regularly take photos of our garden to send him. I have chosen one of these to have a go at; a pink flowering currant. I selected this one because I wanted the challenge of setting a focused central image against a blurry background.

I have decided to look at water-mixable oil paint applied alla prima for this part of the course, for two reasons:

• I have been wanting to investigate it for some time
• It is a medium which I can “drop” at a moment’s notice and return to some time later, which is a useful feature in my life at the moment

I am using Cobra water-mixable oils; Talens do a helpful series of introductory videos for this paint on YouTube, which I have watched right through – I’ve found out about the exact function of gesso, why it’s important to prime paper, the importance of reading all the little symbols and notes on a paint tube, and which paints to choose to mix a particular colour.

For this painting I worked on a square canvas board, 30×30 cm; the photo was rectangular, but I cropped it to square. I haven’t copied it exactly as I wanted to try out Mimei’s style; her plants in the picture mentioned above are not exactly realistic, but they are recognisable.

There are frequently some directional lines in her backgrounds, and for my painting I felt they needed to fan out from the centre. I began with burnt umber and white over my prepared background, which was a chalky yellow house paint from the Annie Sloan range. I chose a mellow yellow to make a warm background, as if the sun was shining from behind the bush, and also because the leaves of the plant are a yellow green. The yellow is actually much more egg-yolks than it appears in this photo! This background surface accepted my brown and white paint well, and I stroked these on, very diluted, with a short flat brush, building up the darkness of the brown in the lower half, particularly on the right. 

Next I experimented with my green mix. I chose lemon yellow mixed with a small amount of phthalo turquoise blue – the result was highly chromatic, and I had to tone it down with the addition of white and then more lemon yellow. Still not right – but at least I’ve learned what a strong colour the turquoise is.

My pinks were from the tube – madder lake and Persian rose – tempered with a little white where needed and a dash of lemon yellow. I wanted the main flowers to stand out, so applied them thickly with a palette knife.

As always, I got carried away,  the paint is really thick – “fat over lean” with a vengeance.

NOW WHAT?

Not my finest outcome, and nothing like Mimei Thompson; I suspect she works in layers.

The green is garish and I lost interest a bit in the background so it all looks very sparse. However, I’m pleased I did it because:

• It has made me pick up the oil paints – I’ve had a bit of a block, struggling to get down to these exercises, and decided the only way to get past it was to run at something, which I did.
• It has demonstrated the need for/value of colour cards (see blog post on advice from Anna and Fiona).
• It has highlighted a need to do a lot more research into the alla prima method of working.

WHAT?

I chose to look at Sickert as I had a sense that enjoyed his paintings, but without knowing too much detail about him. I started off by watching a really interesting TV programme which I found on BOB called “Sickert vs Sargent”

(https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025lrcy/arena-six-days-in-september); this brought out a side of Sickert, his interest in the music hall, of which I hadn’t been aware; but more interestingly, it showed the interior of a house in which he painted many of his atmospheric paintings of people, mainly women, in/on/around beds.

I also treated myself to a book of his paintings: Baron, W and Shone, R (eds)(1992), Sickert Paintings, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Yale University Press, London & New Haven.

SO WHAT?

I chose a painting of an interior to work from:

The Blue Hat

C. 1912-13

50.7 x 40.6 cm

Manchester City Art Galleries

My intention was, not to copy the picture as such, but to study the colours of the setting. Sickert seemed very fond of what I think of as “background” colours – sludgy greens, browns, ochres, purples – and I wanted to see if I could mix them. 

I started with a palette of titanium white, burnt umber, pyrrole red, cobalt blue and lemon yellow. I found I could mix a near approximation to the sludgy green and the violet-y purple, but couldn’t get near the ochre-y colour – my lemon yellow was just too chromatic.

I adjusted my palette somewhat, retaining the pyrrole red, the titanium white and the raw umber, but substituting ultramarine blue for the cobalt, and Indian yellow for the lemon. I just focused on mixing the colours, first with white, and then with each other, to try and achieve a better match to Sickert’s colours.

The result was much more successful….the ochre and the sludgy green were bang on, I could make the characteristic purple and, interestingly, I could also make the pinkish-tinged grey which he uses so much.

NOW WHAT?

I learned that:

• Some colours are very hard to mix from a given red/blue/yellow choice – you can come close, but it’s hard to be exact – so experiment, get to know the starting colours you have, and think about what you will want to achieve before making choices.
• The dominance of colours, ie the amount you need to use, is also something to get to grips with before setting off; for example, in my second palette above, the ultramarine dominated the pyrrole red, which in turn dominated the Indian yellow.
• The addition of white seems to almost “subtract” from a colour.

Sickert had a characteristic set of mixed colours which he used over and over, particularly for his interiors, although they appear in his music hall pictures too; they are “understated” colours, colours which one’s eye initially passes over, but this means that when he does put a pure colour in (such as the blue of the hat) it really jumps out.

WHAT?

Further to my last blog post trying to pin down where I was going with this investigation…….

…I had decided to take my series of 8 detailed black and white drawings, in the style of Durer’s etchings (which I had produced by making rapid on-site sketches and then working into them in black ink with shellac following the method of John Virtue) and to tessellate them in a cross arrangement – also in the style of John Virtue (see e.g. his Landscape No. 75, 1987-89, black ink, shellac, gouache, pencil and charcoal on paper, laid on board. Private collection, London).

I had tried several other layouts, but this one I found the most balanced (symmetry appeals to me), and the pictures still describe the sweep of a view from top left to bottom right.

SO WHAT?

I tried them against a blank support, which is what John Virtue does – his look very stark, as did mine, and very “stand alone”, whereas I wanted mine to be part of a larger composition where I could show (a) that these drawings were part of a larger whole, and (b) a contrast between my tight, careful lines and looser, more flowing lines.  I made a very rapidly-executed design of moving water, drawing just with the dropper of an indigo FW acrylic ink bottle and a water spray, freely mark-making to convey river water in some of its various moods. Virtue’s later work shows large gestural Zen-like strokes, and this was how I felt whilst doing it. For this part of the work I didn’t copy anything, just worked from memory of all the earlier observations and sketches I had done to guide the marks.  Once this was dry, I mounted my tessellation in the centre.

NOW WHAT?

My husband describes the outcome as “very interesting – a lot to look at”. I feel that sums it up – I was very much in two minds when I laid the drawings on the background before sticking – was it too busy? A bit incongruous having black drawings on a blue background? 

Having lived with it for a few days and considered it, I am satisfied that it:

• Combines elements of the styles of both John Virtue and Albrecht Durer
• Shows different methods of using my chosen medium
• Incorporates tight right-handed drawings with my new-found large, free and expressive left-handed drawings!
• Makes the viewer work and move around the picture to assimilate everything contained within – it has the eye jumping from the free marks to the tight drawings and back over and over
• As far as subject matter is concerned, it combines the features of the river I had picked out as defining the essence of the river – water, bank and bed – and hence goes some way towards answering my initial question – “What is this river?”