Bluebells and a Green Bottle
A couple of new paintings: another on the Spring theme, some Bluebells, and a visit with an old friend, the Green Bottle.
These paintings are number nine and ten of the ten single objects series. Both of them I enjoyed and I'm pretty happy with them, but mostly I'm interested in what happened in the last one, the bottle. It's my first sight-size painting, and I used a medium with the paint. Both these things together have got me pretty exited, I'm hoping that the next series of paintings will show why.
The bluebells came from the back garden, I'd forgotten we had any so it was nice to see them all come out. There was lots of choice, I picked some at a nice stage of growth with some fully opened flowers and some still budding.
I suppose you could argue that this is more than one object since there's a lot of flowers, and also that the bottle makes it two objects anyway, but I didn't want the flowers dying on me like the Wilting Cherry Blossom.
I didn't put too much detail in this painting. At the speed I currently work, (slow,) I can't paint something complicated like this in any detail in a single sitting. This one took about six hours I think, everything seems to take me about six hours at the moment. What I did want to get was a feeling of the light. I still believe that a painting can live without detail if the light is caught right, and I don't want to get tied up in details and high levels of finish at this stage. Basics first.
Working sight-size with this one helped me to get (I think) the closest yet in terms of getting a feeling of the light. It's a washed out painting tonally, but the subject was washed out tonally too. The light was very diffuse and it was a grey day anyway, still, when I look at this painting, sometimes I can feel the light on the back wall. Sometimes I can't and I think it's too roughly painted and the shadow doesn't quite work. I think a little chink of light is starting to show through in these paintings now, and I need to work at making it brighter, more real. I think that will come with more accuracy, I just need to paint what I see.
The next series is going to be, logically enough, ten pairs of objects. I'm going to continue working sight-size, and intend to try out some home made medium, word is it's best to make your own. For the bottle painting, I used Michael Harding paint and Liquin medium, a bit like running a Rolls on vegetable oil. Actually I won't actually know how good Liquin is until I compare it to some others, so a feature of the next set of ten paintings is going to be medium experiments. Here at the Foxton atelier we believe in training our student in the materials of his craft.
This is the first update for about three weeks I think. There's a bunch more stuff to post, Bargue drawings, portrait drawings and cafe sketches, which hopefully I'll get round to soon. But the last week or so I haven't done much drawing or painting. The clouds are lifting though, and I've been assessing where I'm up to, what's working and what isn't, and what's coming next. Basically more of the same. It's nice to know where you're headed.
Posted 19th May 2006
