Learning to See

Daffodils and Willow Pattern, Oil on Panel, 9.5 x 7 inches Currently at Auction I’m beggining to realise that I’ve fallen in love with painting daffodils. It’s partly because they’re such a challenge to paint. Keeping the chroma high and trying to show all the nuances of hue, all the slightly differing yellows, painting the

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The way I’m painting flowers now is a very good example of two things:

1. Painting representationally isn’t painting what you see

(Because usually, you can’t.)

2. How the Munsell big book can help you mix more expressive colour

When spring comes to this part of the Cotswolds, the landscape is transformed.

There are two flowers that are responsible for this change, daffodils and oxlips. I love them both, they’ve come to mean spring to me since we moved to this lovely part of the countryside. 

I’ve been itching to paint some since I spotted the first one a few days ago.

Tightness in paintings equals a lack of emotion and expression. Tightness is bad.

Looseness equates to freedom, expression and emotion. Looseness is good. 

You hear this a lot.

Actually (and although I’m painting more loosely now) I couldn’t disagree more.

I read recently (I can’t rememeber where) a quote that went something like “your last painting will tell you what your next painting needs to be”.

That’s why I’ve kept this one in the studio for a while. It was telling me something about where I was heading, and how I might get there.

I didn’t know that apples could be an endangered species.

In fact, I realise now that I knew very little about apples before I met my friends the Brent-Smiths, who manage traditional English orchards at Day’s Cottage Farm.

In fact, I’m just beginning to realise how little I still know.

This one started out as a demo on edge handling which I did as a live stream as part of our Threads artists’ community.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about and working through lately came together in one piece.