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Shadowing an Artist

29/4/2019

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Poor language - so often misaligned, even twisted out of recognition.  Take the word “shade”:  it must have been miffed to find its root employed to describe a criminal or, worse, a sexual deviant.    “Shade” is in fact  a delightful word, deserving only of positive connotations.    It was even ahead of its time.  Let me explain.

To begin with, no one but a masochist who is planning a short life finds a beach and self-broils.    Once you realize that solar radiation does not peel off and simply accumulates over a lifetime, it’s either dips in a vat of SPF 30 or long sleeves, sunglasses and a good hat unless you have the good sense to seek out shade.  Cool, restful shade, best cast by trees.

Having blue, light-sensitive eyes, I am naturally inclined to do just that.   The older and taller the trees, the better.  I even want to see them from every room in our house.  (Thus, wind storms make me as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.).   Most of the time, though, it is not only comfortable around these wise old plants, but comforting.  

As one who doesn’t like to be in bright sunshine, it might seen counter-intuitive to love it (while happily under a tree);   again, give the credit to shadows.  While overcast days flatten the landscape and sap colour, a sunny day fills the world, including shade, with colour.  When you stop to think about it,  while sun lights up our visual field and floods it with colour, it is shadows which give the world three dimensions.  If you have ever been instructed to draw or paint a globe, it becomes immediately necessary to darken certain areas by identifying “core shadows.”  Fail to do this and all you have is a circle.  Darks and lights help us understand the world.

It gets better.  Artists make a distinction between different types of shadows. That three-dimensional object will itself cast a shadow.  Such “cast shadows” are a joy to paint because they will contain both the colours of the object and what’s lying under the shadow.  For that matter, the core shadows will be subtle and rich as well.  Perhaps that is the inspiration for the word "shade" as it refers to colour variations.

Now think of your garden as a collection of of core and cast shadows.  Visualize a shady garden in late spring when the canopy has opened and light peeks through, creating a kingdom of greens to reign throughout.   No need for sun shelters because the trees capture most of the light and grab the solar radiation for themselves.   It’s my vision of heaven.

But wait!  Something’s in short supply.  Yup, it’s flowers.  This point was hammered home this week when I was gazing out the bedroom window and saw flowers forming on the magnolia we planted in 1997.  What?  It hasn't bloomed since 1998.  And then I remembered that that big Manitoba maple that uprooted itself during a windstorm had been removed and that there was actually some sun back there this year.  Now we have a new concept, one which Jon and I were slow to learn, let alone observe:  “shade-tolerance.”  I still feel guilty about the white pine seedling which we carefully planted just into the ravine.  It unfortunately needed full sun and we had doomed the poor thing to cling to life for a decade before succumbing to energy starvation.  And that magnolia would have also failed that “Are you shade-tolerant?” quiz, but we were too stupid to ask.

So since we moved here almost forty years ago, we have been painfully learning what plants/trees are shade-tolerant.  It breaks my heart that tomatoes are most definitely not.  But in the same way that I love forests for their green bounty and variety of dainty flowers, I have sought out and developed a repertoire of plants which are grateful for shade in my garden.  My spring favourite is viola.  At first, the genus will be represented by pots of pansies, but scores of shy wild blue violets will soon stud the forest in the back garden.   I've been meaning to paint these lovely faces for years. 

​Here goes.
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grisaille 10 x 20
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Shooting for the Moon

16/11/2017

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There’s been a lot in the news about da Vinci lately;  in fact a new biography characterizes him as possibly the most “diversely talented” human being ever.  Quite apart from his brilliance of invention, often centuries ahead of his time, da Vinci’s paintings continue to fascinate us.  The Mona Lisa is not a particularly beautiful woman but the way he rendered her image completely elevates the painting.


Lighting was part of the magic:  “You should make your portrait at the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light then is perfect.”   As a result, there are no strong tones anywhere.  Everything is muted, softened and a mood of calm dominates.


That is not to say there is a no detailed underpainting.   This is particularly noticeable in his “cartoon” (or drawing) of “Virgin and Child with Ste. Anne.”   Graceful but distinct lines of the drawing anchor the portraits.  I love the fact that the faces are exquisitely accurate;  people do not look alike and art with generic faces falls short for me.  He mustn’t have thought  feet were important — here they are crudely depicted, as is Ste. Anne’s hand (which he was probably having trouble placing) and the women’s headscarves.


Yet this solid linear structure is brought to glowing three-dimensional  life by means of softened darks and lights.  This kind of application is called sfumato --  “smokiness, ” which looks as if it might have been rubbed on by hand (we can see his palm print in one painting).  Again, in the fully painted major works, this sfumato dominates the work, and is achieved by multiple glazes using earth tones — ochres, siennas, umbers - on top of a restricted palette .   Martha Stewart’s “duck egg” palettes would be right at home.

I’ve been in the mood to return to portraiture.  Da Vinci reminds me that there’s nothing harder or potentially more beautiful.  Wish me luck.

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Ignorance without Bliss

3/7/2017

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“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”
― Walt Whitman


Sure, Walt.  Now try getting away with this this while painting a familiar face.  Better still, a canoe.  

No dice, huh?  I was reminded of this, as usual, the hard way.  Back in the underpainting stage, I decided to tilt our lovely old cedar-strip canoe so that the viewer could spy its deep red body;  well, didn’t this turn out to be an act of wilful self-injury.   By the time  the painting and I were into final glazes, that canoe and I were in a fight to the death.  No matter what gunnel lines I adjusted,  our beloved canoe just looked more and more drunk.  My “vagueness - ignorance, credulity” didn’t do one good thing for a watercraft which was increasingly resembling Farley Mowat’s famous  “boat who wouldn’t float.”

Well, I’m the painter so occasionally I remember to exert some control.  Now the canoe sits as straight as a prim Victorian miss, only its decking visible.  And because you no longer ”know” that it is a splendid red, I shall have to settle for telling you.  (My favourite 18th century novel was Tristram Shandy;  Sterne was the first novelist to allow the reader to imagine something for himself.)  So please imagine a deep rich singing red.

Come to think of it, you probably would have assumed that anyway..…  Okay, then.  The game is on.  What if I tell you that this canoe is deep forest green? 

​
Stay tuned.  There’s lots of layers still to come.
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30 x 40 glaze oil unfinished
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Popeye  Paints

18/3/2017

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It’s a moody overcast day — the perfect time to work on the grisaille.  Yesterday I put on some Rufus Wainwright and contently scrubbed in my light values.   Unfortunately, I am not ambidextrous.  While Jon can cast with either arm, my coordination is limited to my right arm, which is threatening to look like Popeye’s while the left channels Olive Oyle.  Oh well.  So I ache a bit.

The happy news is that building layers of glazes also builds patience;  I spent my life rushing around.  There never seemed to be enough time as I hurtled from one responsibility to the next. So choosing to build a large painting by means of a slow layering is actually luxurious.  It always surprises me to find that I love establishing the bones of the structure by means of a value study.  Full colour is a long time off, but that is okay.  As usual the lights were easy to locate yesterday while today’s dark values are subtle and elusive.  Hurrying would be counter-productive as the background trunks and branches quietly reveal themselves.  I can begin to foresee the layers of transparent primaries but feel no impatience about getting there.  This stage is mainly about looking carefully and feeling my way in by dint of heavy-duty brushwork.  

So it’s demanding physical work but pleasantly meditative at the same time.  Now that I’m in the dark values, I’m listening to the score from “Gettysburg.”  It’s sombre and full of loss but faithful to the hope of meaningful sacrifice.  The perfect quiet inspiration to practise patience.

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The Sycamore Dreams

17/3/2017

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Jon has gone steel-heading and I have no excuse to postpone starting “The Sycamore Dreams.”  The image currently occupying my brain was taken last September during that golden hour when the setting sun burnishes its beloved land.  

Sycamores (platanus occidentalis) are magnificent trees.  In fact, the Canadian flag actually features a sycamore so don’t believe your Grade 1 teacher about that being a maple leaf.  While the leaves are perfectly nice, it is the bark which fills me with joy.  Mottled in irregular plates of taupe, cream, pale  yellow and green-brown, this species is beautiful in the extreme when it is planted as a specimen tree.   Sycamores grace golf courses throughout the GTA so  bravo to the course designers who thought to include them.  

You will note that the branching is haphazard;  unlike solitary elms,whose classic urn shape might feature a pendant oriole nest, a sycamore has more of a Medusa shape, giving it the impression of having changed its mind frequently.  I personally like its gnarly habit.
Background colour of burnt oranges and russets comes from maples behind the sycamore, which is bare.  Only its top branches are still catching the sun, somewhat bleached by its low-angle intensity.  Lower down, the trunk is cast in cerulean blue shadow, and a mysterious plume of steam rises to complete the magic.  All I got done today was to tone the 30 x 40 canvas and block in the sycamore itself.

But the dye is cast.  I’ve gone and made a promise I have to keep.  Sometimes the only way I can face a big painting is to announce its conception.  Now I will feel obliged to tackle it seriously.  I see major backaches here (literally)  but also the promise of something lovely and exotic.  Besides, the “shapers” Lyla so thoughtfully gave me for Christmas are just the tools I will need to detail the fine background.  

Stay tuned.
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What would Frost think?

26/1/2017

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As I have been working through the transparent colour foundation layers, Robert Frost’s “Stopping in Woods” has been resonating in my brain.  Why, I do not know, because his woods bear precious little resemblance to mine.

Frost’s narrator has stopped on a snowy evening to admire a beautiful woodlot.  In clear contrast, the image I am developing is a light-filled morning in October above The Credit River.  While many of the deeply coloured sugar maple leaves have fallen and are scattered on the forest floor, the beeches, who boast what horticulturists call “persistent foliage,” are stubbornly hanging onto their clear yellow leaves. The contrasting autumnal note is provided by the grey-green hemlocks making their last bid for precious light before our hemisphere tilts away from the sun.  So what I have is a scene more light than dark, more colourful than shadowed.  But I want the same thing from a passer-by:  the urge to pause and to drink in the loveliness of the forest.

Autumn scenes are notoriously difficult to paint because they tempt you to throw every high-intensity colour at the canvas.  "Go big or go home" tends to produce a garish painting that is too exhausting to live with over the years.  So with a slightly subdued palette I am choosing to play the long game - hoping to capture this autumn day through subtlety rather than high-key drama.  

With that in mind, I concentrated the blue layer, though omnipresent on the canvas,  in the tree trunks and the purples of the path.  It was important that the trunks are not be pure black (the natural outcome  of burnt umber glazed with ultramarine blue);  overly intense trunks would have overwhelmed the delicacy of the leafiness.  So, quite limited blues.  The leaves and the trunks had to play nicely together.  Next, with the arrival of yellows, the beeches threw their hats into the ring and the fallen maple leaves acquired deeper tones.  Here and there green leaves appeared.  The trunks' complex contours began to emerge.  A light glaze of alizarin crimson completed the complex colour foundation.   Nothing more to do for a day or two while the primary glazes dry. 

Soon, the final glazes!  I hope that Frost’s narrator will already be feeling the urge to linger:  the woods may not be “dark and deep” but I think they hold the promise of loveliness nonetheless.
Picture
"Above The Credit" 3 (30 x 40 glaze oil on canvas)
Picture
Above The Credit" 3 (30 x 40 glaze oil on canvas)
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Deep Woods ON!

22/1/2017

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My beloved claims that a casual observer could judge my progress within a painting by the degree of sartorial inattention (Actually, he said “You look more and more like a bag lady.”).  Today, at 2 p.m., I admit that I am sporting an aged pair of leotards and a camisole which has seen better days.  However, as Sherlock would say, “The game is afoot!”  Theodore is asleep,  exactly equidistant from Jon’s study and my studio but he’s the only one who’s relaxing around here.    

Jon is busy marking the end-of-term papers, just getting to them now after working late all week to create review packages for his math students;  that he is retiring in ten days is an abstraction, to be dealt with when it happens.  Otherwise, his sole gear is “Drive.”  

I too am completely absorbed in what’s in front of me.  It’s a highly complex forest scene, autumnal in palette, and large.  The value underpainting has been a real workout, necessitating the sorting of "what to edit out" and of "what to rejig."   I have chosen to bring the eye in at the middle left (the traditional way we read anything) and sweep it across upper part of the forest to peek at the subtle yellows at the right.  For that reason, I will tamp down the complexity of the canopy;  it must not distract, only convey the eye across itself.  Then I want the viewer’s eye to descend the big beautiful tree at the front, at which point it will notice the path, and obediently follow its serpentine progress into the forest.  Its final twist is to the left, which brings us back to where we started.  That critically important path must have strong white highlights because it is the bride in this wedding;  because the secondary role of matron of honour must fall to that foreground tree, my intent is to make it interesting without allowing it to steal the show.   I guess this analogy makes me mother of the bride, the exhausted architect of it all.   I should have hugged my mom more at the time.

Only once this value underpainting is dry shall I  begin to add the layers of transparent primaries.  If glaze oil painting has a particular virtue for the painter in terms of process rather than product, it is the steady increase of anticipation as the image takes shape.  I get more and more excited.  Imagine what I shall be wearing by the time I’m into final glazes.

In the meantime, maybe, just for the heck of it, I will get properly dressed.  

As long as it doesn’t throw my game off.
Picture
"Above the Credit" 3 glaze oil 30 x 40
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Slow Horses

7/1/2016

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Picture"In the Gorge" #2 oil 30 x 40
Mick Herron’s delightfully funny take on British spies is titled Slow Horses;  you find out pretty quickly in the novel that the term refers to less-than-stellar spies who can’t be allowed out and must be somehow stabled so that they cannot harm themselves or the nation.  

I am a Slow Painter in a that and another sense.  Jon has given up asking me what I painted each day.  The answer is inevitably along the lines of “so-and-so’s eyes” or “that tree on the far right.”  Today, if I am diligent,  it may be “the value study for In the Gorge” #3.  I even did the focal point yesterday;  today brought the endless blur of dead cedars partially or fully emerged in the river.  Darned it there aren’t quite a few more than I noticed at the time.

I took the reference shot from a bridge above a lovely section of the gorge on a clear summer’s day.  Jon had been instructed to fish as usual.  No trouble selling that assignment.  I leaned out and took forty or fifty shots, of which several were worth using.   But there they sat.  The famous story I’ve told before about Winston Churchill bears repeating here.  A Sunday painter, he sat gazing at his blank canvas one week;  his friend grabbed a brush and made a dark swipe across the expanse of white:  “The enemy is vanquished.”  

It took the pressure of three upcoming shows to summon the courage to vanquish my own enemy.   This is not unusual.  And, as usual, a slow horse I remain.  Last night when I broke down and asked Jon to come see what I’d accomplished, his first comment was “Oh, I wouldn’t have chosen that one.”  And only then did he tell me that his left arm was on an awkward angle because he was trying to keep his prized Hardy bag out of the water.  Normally he would not carry it while wading deep, but the prospect of being immortalized must have inspired his inner fashionista. Dang.  Hadn’t noticed that the arm was in a funny place until he mentioned it.  Note that once I'm painting, it is no longer Jon's arm.  MINE!  But I decided he was right anyway. So today’s first act of regret was to tuck the forearm in front where it belonged.  The rest of today has been spent rendering the complex calligraphy of the downed trees in white and burnt umber.  It's 5, I’m cross-eyed and my arches collapsed several hours ago.    Both I and the light are failing. 

Once in a while, some well-meaning soul suggests that I enter an Art Battle, which is essentially a speed test.  

​Fat chance.

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The Relative Value of Things

11/11/2015

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There's a scene I've been dying to paint -- a shot on a canoe trip.  It is early morning and the world is misty blue, with forested hills falling away in the background.  The water is all softnesses too;  only the two canoes stand out against these soft blues.  How could it be anything but a joy to paint?

It was only when I got down to work yesterday that it struck me:  98% of the painting will reside in the same three values, all of which are in the low scale.  Hmmm.  More easily said than done.  High key painting is easier in this regard, because you might misjudge a value and still pull the thing off because of the high contrast.  This baby, on the other hand, necessitates really careful sequencing so that the hills recede rather than looking confused.

So yesterday I toned a 24 x 24 and laid in the value foundation.  I am shooting for the relative values by tweaking the combinations of white and burnt umber.  I'm not worrying too much about the canoes or their occupants (one of whom is Jon, though only I would know that).  They are problems to be solved another day.  The issue at hand is staging the background, which consists of four ranges of forest, all of which are soft blues.  I hope you can find them already.  

​I'm starting to scare myself.  Tomorrow - the beginning of the colour foundation and the blues will begin to show themselves.  Wish me luck.


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Following the Melody

17/9/2015

 
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Went to a terrific workshop yesterday, where Johannes Vloothuis crammed our tiny brains with a million good ideas about composition.  Joe focused on what he calls the "melodic line," which is the path the artist uses to guide the viewer's eyes into and out of the painting.  It tends to enter on the left, as European readers are accustomed to doing, and usually near the bottom.  Then it inscribes graceful arcs which are subtly connected, until it draws said eyes up and out.

He was preaching to the choir because I have been pondering this while building the underpainting of this ancient tree.  The rhythmic undulations of its roots were the very reason I had chased down this particular tree.  I see that I should knock back the value of the rock on the far right, so as not to lead the eye out;   the roots themselves will constitute the path which swings up into the brighter leaves.  I hope the eye will swing upward and loop through the branches. I have roughly planned the route but need to add more hue to define it better.

For me, at least, these final glazes constitute the payoff for the slow and sometimes agonizing job of building a strong underpainting.  By now, I'm generally champing at the bit, ready to lay out a full palette and get to work.  If the muse shows up and I don't have to assign the painting to Le Salon des Refusees in our basement, this baby might be finished by Monday.  Artists live in hope.  You have a good weekend yourself.
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