Painting experiments are kind of like scouting missions.
You blunder off into the unknown, thrashing around and hoping to find something useful you can bring back.
Occasionally, you do.
I’ve been searching for a different way to paint flowers lately, especially roses.
If you paint them too precisely, they look like they’re made of porcelain. Lovely, perhaps, but frozen. Perhaps a little lifeless.
If you paint them too loosely, well they have no form and don’t really look like flowers.
In the last few paintings I’ve done, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to use the paint to describe the form of roses with as few strokes as possible. I’ve been hoping to find a kind of calligraphy of roses with the brush, but without losing the effect of a convincing visual impression and without losing the life.
In this one, I pulled back from the experiments and returned to my usual way of painting flowers. Except I didn’t, completely.
It looks like I brought something back with me.
Not unlike these lovely little roses, which I happened upon on a walk down Uley high street. They were kind of in someone else’s garden and kind of not. Enough grey area for me to justify to myself the act of picking some off the bush to bring home and paint.
I wonder how often I can get away with that before I earn myself a reputation? There are some very lovely roses hanging out of people’s gardens in Uley high street!
I was going to put this one up for auction tonight but a studio visitor bought it right off the easel today. More roses will be coming very soon, though.
Best wishes,
Paul
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If your painting is sold locally you might get rumbled though! Ah but maybe they will all want the honour of you painting their favourite flowers now,…..
The painting *has* sold locally – I’d better hope for the second result!
Beautiful – I can almost smell them from here!
Thanks Alex 🙂 And nice to hear from you.
Why don’t you fess up and go and knock on a door. Tell them who you are, and that they have so many wonderful roses, could you have a few for a painting you would like to do. You could tell them that you will let them see the painting when it’s done. But then they may think you owe them your painting as you got their roses for nothing. Oh, well. Good thought! hahahaha But personally, I think most people are better than this and would just enjoy seeing your painting! Worth a try for sure!! Good Luck. Let me know how this turns out.
he yes, I am planning to do that actually. There’s one garden I pass in particular with is a veritable treasure trove of flowers. I’m hoping that if the owner is as obsessed with flowers as they obviously are, they’ll be interested in seeing some of them painted too.
Hello Paul,
I like the roses, but more detail would have been nice, to wander around in the painting as I can in Dutch old master stillifes.
By trial and error I found/ think that a ground in light value 6 of a 9 step scale is an old master technique. It relates well to drawing on a light toned paper too. What do you think?
Best regards from Amsterdam,
Bas.
Thanks Bas.I think level of detail is a very personal thing, as is focus. Sometimes I paint with more detail and sometimes with less, but I’m mostly concerned with the overall effect and the composition. The roses were definitely the main focus with this one.
But I’m a fan of the Dutch still life tradition and like where it’s going now, too. You might like Jos Van Riswick‘s beautiful work.
Ground is a personal choice too. For a long time I’ve painted on neutral grounds, about a value 6, but now I’m painting on white grounds so I can (hopefully) work with a little variation in the paint more – some almost transparent and some opaque. It’s more obvious in life than in photos, but especially the background of this one has a lot of transparency of a warmer underpainting showing through with the white ground underneath.
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your reply.
It so happens that Jos van Riswick was my physics teacher back in school in the 80’s. He drove an old deux chevaux which we all got hold of one day and shook about wildly. I think he was in it too. He paints beautifully I think.
In the past I sent you a picture by e-mail of my copy after a Willem Kalf. You said that the drawing was not very accurate and right you were! I appreciated your straightforward critique for those are most useful.
I asked my previous question to you in part out of scholarly interest, being an art historian. I think you are a person of investigation too so I wonder if maybe you know something about the use of the light ground by old masters or if you have read something about it? And why did you use that value ground yourself? I am curious.
Best regards,
Bas
Watching Jos just painting eggs is hypnotic. I put the speed to x.25 just to watch the evolution into reality. His simple still life studies of form and shape have seduced me to explore doing similar studies in oil, while I’m primarily a plein air watercolorist.
I heard a lecturer once state that all you need for good portraiture was getting one eye “correct”, the line of the mouth and the shape of the nose. Properly capture those in-relation and the rest can be suggested in form and shadow. Watching Zin Lim’s creation of a monochrome portrait of Charles Dance was that revelation. One or two strokes and suddenly there was a living, human eye peering out. [ I’m sorely-tempted to purchase it, and I rarely purchase other’s works, but… ] I can’t stop watching his technique in oil-wash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FuJowe37nY&t=97s
Beautiful work with “Roadside Roses”, Paul! Roses are often thought to be the most difficult flowers to paint, and I have struggled with them for years, sometimes with some success, and other times not so much…You seem to have just the right amounts of detail and of impression. Keep up the inspiring work!
Thanks Michael! I can attest to roses being hard. It never comes easy for me, and sometimes mine don’t work out either. But I think the challenge is part of what draws me to them.
I really love this one, the brush strokes are so soft and tender
I can just imagine your checklist when going out for a walk.
– bottle of water
– sandwiches
– camera
– secateurs
– sunscreen
This is very nice to see, and well done for selling it straight off the easel !!
Heh. Actually that’s pretty much it. Forgot the map tho – and I always forget the sunscreen. I look like a beetroot 🙂
Hi, Paul-your roses are lovely, a nice balance between loosely expressive and tightly descriptive. I suppose you’re familiar with Kathleen Speranza’s sublime roses? To me, she paints the rose’s soul…thoughts of technique, color, etc, seem superfluous.
Thanks Shelley. Yes, I’m a big fan of Kathleen’s work. Her technique is very controlled and thought out though – have you seen her palette? It makes mine look positively chaotic. I don’t think she could make paintings that beautiful without such careful control of her colour.