Two Braeburns
Number three of the ten pairs of objects series.
Set up and method for this one were the same as the last two. The progress shots should make it pretty obvious how I've got everything laid out. Again I'm working sight size, and I'm continuing with the technique of laying in the shadows first, drawing the painting out with tone, and then applying opaque colour to the areas in full light.
With this one though, I laid in the shadows with brown, a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine. In the last painting, the Garlic and Peach, I drew out the painting with grey, which meant I had to colour all the shadows afterwards even though they were mostly brown. So doing them brown today to start with seemed like a good idea to save time and work. It's very easy to overwork a painting, to fiddle and fiddle until the life gets fiddled out of it. Putting in the shadows in brown meant less fiddling.
I know I said in the write up of the Garlic and Peach that I was going to mix the brown, but I copped out and used it straight from the tube, purely for the sake of speed. I'm always against the light and time is necessarily limited so it would seem like obstinacy to make myself mix the colour for the underpainting. Of course this meant adding a colour to my limited palette - burnt sienna, so now I have a six colour palette, seven when I'm painting something very bright red, alizarin won't do it and I have to use cadmium red.
I also said I was going to use burnt umber. I used a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine because that's what Julian Merrow-Smith uses, he described a little of his technique on his blog, where he mentions using a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine for underpainting and shadows. Julian's paintings are stunning, his work is an endless source of inspiration for me. It's like poetry what he does with light. In the case of this painting, burnt sienna and ultramarine were ideal for the shadows and I could mix up colours very close to what I was seeing, going either warmer or cooler depending on what I could see. Apart from on the apples themselves of course, where I dragged some colour into the thin, sticky paint and medium mix. Oh, I used Roberson's maroger again today, I seem to be reaching for it by default.
I've constructed my usual jerry-rigged light box by leaning a shelf up against the still life set up, and covered it with a dark green throw which is pulled round behind the apples and pinned to give the dark background. The apple on the left is mostly in shadow, with full light falling on the one on the right. I want to catch this in the painting.
Unfortunately this photo is very blurred, but I was quite exited at this point since I could see the effect that the warm brown shadows were having, I was getting the idea that this painting was going to be an improvement on the last one, and I wanted to get on. I really couldn't be bothered with messing about with the tripod, thus the camera shake. At this stage, I've also started dragging some colour into the shadows. I've tried to do this as thinly as possible, so I don't lose the translucency and can still see the ground through the paint. The paint on the areas with light falling on them is thicker, none of the ground is showing through, except on the highlights which I've left blank for filling later.
The dark background has been laid in with a mixture of alizarin and pthalocyanine green, my version of black, and the opaque paint for the wood, just the areas in light, is going on. Once this was done it became obvious that the shadows on the wood were basically done, and would just need a bit of retouching here and there. I've struggled a bit with the cast shadows on the wooden shelf lately, so it was nice to see that already they were working better than they had previously, and I'd barely touched them.
This painting took four hours. That's very quick for me. I got an early start with this one because now we're getting into summer there's more sunlight, which gets into my room at about half two in the afternoon. When that happens, if I haven't finished painting, all the colours, all the shadows and tones, change completely as the sun creeps across the still life set up and I'm basically screwed. Everything I've painted will be wrong. The forecast for today was sunny so I knew I was going to have problems
Everybody's been moaning about what a grim, wet summer we've been having so far, I think I must be the only one who's happy about it. On overcast days the light stays constant for pretty much the whole day and I don't have to worry about sun stopping play. As it happened the day became overcast just about the time the sun was due to come through the window. All the same, today I started painting at eight to be sure I could get the painting finished before there was any danger of the sun intruding.
Because I'm concentrating so much on the light, it's very important to me that it doesn't change too much whilst I'm painting. The best light comes from north facing windows, because the sun will never get directly onto the window and the light stays constant throughout the day. The baroque Dutch painters, masters of light, used to set up their studios in houses on streets which ran east to west so that one side of the house would have north facing windows.
How this kind of knowledge became lost to the current art education establishment I don't know, but I suspect that it got lost, along with so much else, when modern art became more about self-expression than producing a faithful representation of what we see. Much of the information about how the old masters worked is out there on the web or in books and can be found with some digging, but as someone who's spent some time in art education, I find it sad that nothing like this was ever mentioned, let alone a part of the curriculum. I remember classes painting from life when the model would simply be placed under the dodgy fluorescent lights already fitted in the old classrooms, sometimes flickering constantly like fluorescents at the end of their life have a habit of doing. No wonder so few painters these days can match the old masters for rendering of light.
Anyway, back to the painting. I'm happy with my two little apples. I think I've got closer than I have so far to a convincing feeling of the light, of the reality of those two little braeburns sitting on a bit of wood next to the window in my back bedroom, and that's all I want. Laying out the painting through placing glazed shadows in warm brown, cooling into black with more ultramarine, really helped me put this painting together. There's no doubt in my mind now that painting translucent shadows and using opaque paint for light is giving me a stronger feeling of light. This will become a permanent fixture for the rest of this series, and most probably beyond.
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