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back to landscape

Posted jane -->on 19th Feb 2018

more efforts painting landscape –

this is a detail from the winter ashes I painted two weeks ago. one of the things I have brought from the still life painting of the last few months is this pink ground. I’m finding it more helpful than the green I was using, warmer than grey and brown which I have also tried. it’s a very translucent pink, and I mix it up from translucent white with some ochre and a little red.

I’m also using thicker paint, and a gloss glazing medium when I want more transparency, and working wet into wet (you have to be quick to do that with acrylics)

for Cley18 I’m going to be producing one large painting, six foot six inches wide, so I’m beginning to make small studies

one of the possible subjects is this wooded hillside, on my projected line from Bale to Cley; last week I painted this little study, 30 cm x 30 cm.

I want to keep to this time of year, or early spring, before the trees have any leaves,

so you can see the bones of the landscape

today I had a go at a version of this, which had sun and cloud lighting up some of the trees

it’s a start, at 70 cm x 50 cm, and also incorporates some text, which I want to add to the paintings now, it’s become such an important part of what I do.

this is actually from a Farrow and Ball ad ….

but it seems very apt for Cley18

 

I stuck a print-out ripped-edged on the canvas (acrylic makes this easy)

and painted into it, then partly over it, so it’s well embedded into the texture. believe is the clearest part.

I’m hoarding phrases to do with distance, viewing and perspective. Spitting Distance is one I like.

collecting skies too

this is looking west from the western edge of the Bayfield estate. the trees on the horizon are the shelter belt of conifers on the eastern edge of the Holkham estate. not the right direction for this project, but I think there’s a painting here at some point.

another around my line on the map.

Bayfield has so many gorgeous little hills covered in trees

but Bale can answer back with this …. and I think I am going to have to try to do less, the last two paintings when I look at the photos of stages, I’m persuaded that I should have stopped well before I did!

snow, gales, sunshine

Posted jane -->on 13th Feb 2018

candlemas has been and gone, the snowdrops now at their best, though they started to poke through the leaf litter in early January

and the snow has been and gone

the first lot thawed almost as soon as it was down, rivulets pouring out of field drains

pools lying on other less well-drained fields

Cakes lane still flooded at its entry

the snow freshens up the poor old browny-grey landscape at this end of winter

and for a few hours or a day or so the reflected light is glorious

every muddy lane is magically transformed into a pretty picture

a scene I painted without snow

suddenly demands rethinking

but the temporary transformations soon dull to slush and mud.

Bimba’s first snow was exciting at home in the garden

but now the grass is cut up into muddy paw sized pockets

and the frost and wind have taken over, drying the land up a little at last.

 

still life winter

Posted jane -->on 13th Feb 2018

more of these twiggy concoctions obsessed my painting mind before and after christmas

so I need to get them down in the blog before I catch up on the late winter landscape ….

though for me they are still partly about the landscape and the time of year

oak twigs with leaves still slightly green when I brought them indoors

and alder cones and catkins … and the old viburnum berries glowing in the light. in this reversed succession of painting method you can see that the leaves’ original loose tranparent painting ended up being how I left them in the finished painting. so often less is more!

then I found this fieldfare in the lane, killed by a glancing blow from a car no doubt. too beautiful to leave for scavengers, and utterly paintable. I’ve always found dead birds very alluring, and drawn or painted them when the opportunity has arisen.

a chance remark made me think about putting the sad corpse into a bigger more ambitious still life

and these rose hips have been calling! they are from a species rose growing outside a friend’s garden, against the wall. we don’t know what the rose is called. also I got another spray of darker red ones from the other side of their gate, and we know this is “Cupid” a hybrid-tea.

I’m planning to try to propagate this one from cuttings – the twigs have sprouted new shoots even in my vase.

having a corpse in your still life is an old dutch tradition, I think – the reminder of mortality.

the glass vase itself came from Richard Scott’s antique shop in Holt

it’s a lovely object in its own right, and makes the twigs (also hydrangea stems) more interesting to paint

I had to move the drawing of the bird around in the foreground. the canvas is 100cm wide and 80 tall, so a slower paint ….

a more ambitious effort, and not a painting for the faint-hearted or small house, I think!