Coffee Pot and Conkers
8th November 2006
Oil on Panel 9" X 7"
The finish on this one is a little rougher than some, but that's all to the good.
After I had some problems with getting tied up in detail too soon and losing the balance of the tones in the lemon and bowl study, I built this one up in a much more organised and deliberate manner, working from the general to the specific. that meant that I spent more time on trying to get the tonal balance right, which is as it should be, since this current crop of studies are exercises in relative tone. I didn't get a lot of time to mess about with details and finish on this one, since the days are short now, but the painting is none the worse for it, I think.
The key thing with this one was to make sure that I didn't push up the value too high on the side of the coffee pot facing the light. If I let that happen, then I would run out of headroom in my lights for the highlights. So this was a good exercise in retaining the ratios of the tones whilst still leaving enough room for the highlights to work. I've already gone on at some length about this in the write up of the jar and conkers, so I won't repeat myself here.
This painting was the first of this batch in which I started to use a more deliberate method to building the tonal foundation of the picture. I'm working pretty much as I did in the Harold Speed elementary tone exercise. In that exercise, the painting was built up in a deliberate series of steps. First the general background tone was laid in, then the main cast shadows. Although these tonal blocks were put as evenly and as flatly as possible, a lot of attention was paid to the edges. For example, a shadow cast by an object in natural light will have sharper edges close to the object, increasing in softness the further away the shadow gets. Some shadows may fall over the edge of the object, obscuring the edge completey. That had to be represented as truthfully as possible in the tonal blocks. Once the background and main cast shadows were put in, the shadow area of the object was filled in, followed by the half tone block and the light block. At all stages, particular attention was paid to the edges.
Edges. I don't think I fully realised how much the quality of edges can create a convincing feeling of form until I did the elementary tone exercise. When I did that painting of the Adonis, I found that when I came to the final modelling and finishing there was very little work to be done since the tones and the quality of the edges were already doing a convincing job of describing the form and the light.
But that first exercise was from a cast. The tonal range of a cast in daylight is quite easily matched with paint, there are no sharp, bright highlights. This painting includes a shiny white enamelled surface, which does give bright highlights, so I had to do a lot of translating of the tones in order to get the highlights to show. So I modified the Speed approach somewhat. I began by stating all the tonal blocks first, without paying any attention to the edges. I knew I'd got some of the basic relationships between the tones wrong in my last two studies, so I wanted to get the panel covered first so that I could see how all the main tonal blocks were relating, one to another. Once I had them all in, I spent some time tweaking them until I was satisfied that I had the relationships between them fairly accurately translated into my narrower tonal range.
What really surprised me is that even at this early stage, before I'd even got to the edges between the tone blocks, the light was already there, the coffee pot was already starting to live on the panel. Once this was done, I then returned to the Speed method, working on the background first, then the cast shadows, then the objects, looking always for the quality of the edges. But this time, since I had the tones of all the main blocks established, I didn't make any major mistakes in the tones, I didn't run out of headroom like I did on the last two.
Here's the painting at this early stage, with the tonal blocks laid in very roughly. There's also some detail here, but only in the highlights. I needed to have them established at this stage so that I could see how they were going to work. The drawing is very rough, and the paint is laid on pretty thickly without much regard for surface texture, but at least I can see how all the tones are relating.
You can see that I've brought down the tone of the side of the coffee pot in the light, in order to save my pure white for the highlights. I need that tone to be darker than it actually is in order to preserve the ratio between it and the highlights, or the highlights will get lost. This is what I mean by relative tone. I'm changing what I see, not trying to match the tones exactly, because it simply can't be done. What I'm trying to do is preserve the ratios between the tones whilst translating into the narrower tonal range I have available to me with paint.
I find it interesting that the camera has taken a rather different approach to this problem than I have, it's averaged out the lights, and accepted the glass ceiling of it's tonal range, with the effect that the highlights on the coffee pot have completely disappeared. You can see them quite clearly on the lid of the pot in painting, I could see them quite clearly with my naked eye, but the photograph misses them entirely. And people say cameras never lie. Some of this may be down to my incompetence with a camera of course, but this is as good an illustration as I can possible find of why I don't like to work from photos. When I work from life, I have all the visual information in nature available to me, from which I can select what I want to include in the painting and how I want to treat it. If I'd done this painting from a photograph of the pot, there would have been no highlights, resulting in, I think, a weaker translation of the object into paint.
Once I'd got the painting to this stage I had half a mind to leave it as it was. These are supposed to be just tonal studies, after all, But I couldn't resist a bit of tweaking, to see if I could tighten it up a bit. It did surprise how much the drawing can be sorted out, even with thick paint like this. Painting wet into wet in a single session like this does apparently mean that you can be very loose to start with and tighten things up later, which was a new way of working for me. The combination of the tonal studies and using a slightly modified version of Mr. Speed's tone exercise have changed the way I paint completely. I go for opaque paint across the whole panel straight away now, whereas I'd got into the habit of painting shadows translucently before with maroger medium.
Looking back at my earlier paintings, the mistakes in the tonal balance fairly shout at me. In particular, I often used to paint cast shadows much too light. Through these tonal studies, I'm starting to evolve a different approach, which I think is giving me a more convincing feeling of the light. The paint is harder to control, but I'm painting now, not just staining the panel with the odd area of thick paint. And by taking out little tricks like translucent shadows and thickly painted lights, I'm being forced to get the same (usually better) effects with more simple means. I plan to return to the opaque/translucent method at some point, but not until I can do a convincing job of a tonal study with flat opaque paint. I had the cart before the horse, I think, and I need some practice with this more direct method before I get into the intricacies of technique. I need to get better at translating tones effectively because I think it provides a very solid foundation on which to build up a painting. When this gets to be second nature, I can trust myself to get it right without having to concentrate my whole attention on it. Then I'll also be able to think about re-introducing colour without having too much to deal with at once. That's the real value of taking out particular aspects of painting, like I'm doing with tone and edges here, and practicing them seperately. Painting is a complicated business, and trying to do everything at once can be detrimental to your progression in the long run.
This raises questions for me about the advantages and disadvantages of being self taught, questions I keep coming back to as I work through my plan to become a full time painter. If, when I started a year ago, I'd limited myself to tonal studies like this for the first six months or so, I would undoubtedly be painting better now. Many times lately I've wished that I'd discovered Harold's book last year. But because of all the mistakes I've made with this, I think I've learned the lessons much more thoroughly. I still think that's the real advantage of teaching yourself, but you have to accept that the process will be slower.