All About Colour…

The work was created as a selfish pleasure, an excuse to tip out all my tubes of watercolour, sort them into colour friends and then paint each one on a piece of white paper. It was lovely to do, like dead heading Geums and Pansies.

It took me a happy couple of hours and looked so inviting once it was done.

Colour, water colour paint, simply magic.

I mostly avoid commissions.

It should be a good thing. To be asked to produce a piece of work – to agree a price, discuss the content. It could be inspiring.

Possibly someone has seen previous work and wishes something similar and there begins the ambiguity, the gap between what the commissioner thinks they are asking and paying for, and what the commissioned undertakes to deliver. To simply repeat a piece is really not simple and is also soul destroying dull.

It is scary and for what ever reason historically, I’m really bad at it. Breathing life into a commission is so different from my usual practice – like lighting someone elses fire. It takes a professionalism and understanding of working process that I don’t have. There is a random, almost chaotic element to my my own creative ways – commision requires a diciplin and planning that my indulgent ways have not developed.

So why am I spending my time on this one now?

I took the work, it was a beautiful image and I could see my way to develop it in two slightly differing ways. This would free me from prescriptive copying, but also give the commissioner a choice.

The figure was tricky in two aspects. The photo – back lit, no detail, she looked naked, wbich was actually a bit uncomfortable from behind. So I resolved to hint at a costume. Also the right shoulder a really odd shape… I needed to make that more believable. Photos may be ‘right’ but a painting needs to work better than that.

I enjoy the loose working, finding the composition, shifting colours and shapes. The photo was pretty much black and white, so I chose a mininal palette of burnt umber, burnt scienna, ultramarine, turquise, lemon, ochre, and a wee bit of cadmium red. – white. I could mix deep rich greys.

I am lured towards working on canvas, and I do think in this case it has added authority, but paper is where I feel more at home. I understand what I can do on paper. How far I can push it… I am a bit too respectful of canvas, I think it inhibits and bullies me.

I feel both paintings have distinct merits I am pleased with the isolation and distance in the one on canvas (top) and the rich colours and intimate feel of the one on paper (bottom) +

It’s up to the commissioner to decide…

Is pride and pain ridden. My personal rule is: submit work that i am really lifted and surprised by. Work where elements have combined and it feels like something magical happened. Something beyond the norm. Something I want to share. Then if it doesn’t get accepted, remember, the work hasn’t changed, but it wasn’t what ‘ they’ were looking for.

I also remind myself that if the judges are good and accept my work, they are still good even when they don’t. They can’t suddenly become idiots eh?

Getting work accepted is a great feeling, but the work doesn’t become rubbish if its not accepted. Which is why I have to feel confidence in it. Any doubt, then its better not to enter it in the first place.

I chose my work carefully and don’t submit it to humiliation. Like a ballet dancer might when gliding into a rave. So how do I feel about the next open show?

I’ll let you know…

At what ever stage you feel you are in the creative journey, collage is good practice, an aid to strong composition.

The clunky pieces are placed and fitted together without the hampering of detail. A desire to make good is overridden by the compositional bias. Placing a piece of the jigsaw and seeing it is sound… Or not.

Cut and paste the pieces, asses the tones and replace if they don’t read well.

We tore up magazines stealing from their pages a range of textures and tones – avoiding colour, though allowing it to creap in through the side door.

A tonal sketch helped the process… But then I believe sketches usually underpin our better resolved works.

Sketch to collage to paint. Do, Undo, Redo. If it’s worth doing you will find the time.

The nights have been cold, the days bright blue and sunny. More frosts in April this year than ever before on record – thats weather for you!

An orienteers planning meeting gave us ligitimacy to travel to the centre of Scotland, yes really… Its marked by a huge rock on a site just south of Newtonmore, about half a mile from where we parked the van. The river Spey ran slowly, lazilly enough to hide its direction of flow: through the valley below – and snow is still visible on the mountain tops.

The slight nippet breeze confused the rivers flow – making it appear right to left, but debris in the trees disguarded by the winter floods assured of occasionalf fast flow of left to right.

I lay on the grass beside the river. Warmed by the sun and cooled by the sharp breeze. Then listening, watching and painting. Weighing up the irrational and rational internal discussion. The water, dark and deeply enticing, the awareness of chill, snowmelt. Never disappointing, but still needing an inner conviction. Checking resolve. Entry and exit. So I swam.

I lay listening – birds unaware of being heard, the river, motorbikes on the road nearly a mile away, no planes. I sat drawing. Washing being placed on a line. A task familier to so many, made less drudgery by its setting, in the valley below the mountains.

Overcoming the anziety of driving big vehicles while pulling machinery behind, is helped by the desire to assist daughter and partner in at least some of the many tasks they have taken on. Living a life of journeying, with no possibility of reaching an end. It takes a different mind set to cope with a never ending, cyclical trail of jobs. In a small way, it is illustrated by owning a dog or other animal. Or cooking daily meals. Through a satisfaction of planning the menu, preparing and cooking and eating. A series of small journeys enjoyed and completed.

I felt intimate with the landscape, observing the surface, its undulations, the plants. Where the grasses grew taller or spacer, where brambles encroach and where reeds reveal underlying dampness.

I now yearn to paint. Having such time of close observation, while hampered in the cab of a land-rover – even though it felt in some ways as meditative as taking paint brush to paper.

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The river looks like milky coffee, full of snow melt and earth run off. It swishes, swirls, swoops fast past the bottom of the garden. The same southerly wind that has transformed the snow back into water, has breathed the air and earth with gentle warmth. The iron hard ground softening enough to allow the first floral delights to emerge.

Such a transformation – barely 4 days from white to colour at home. And with the snows receeding I feel my spirit lighten. It was a magical time, but Narnias snow only suited the wicked queen, its charm short lived, how quickly we yearn for some warmer sun and springtime growth.

If we hadn’t stopped to help a car driver, bottomed out on a snowdrift. If we had walked past or walked faster.

We chose the more sheltered woodland paths, because the wind that had caused so much snow to pile up in drifts, was cutting cold and fierce. Over half way round our meandering loop we met a family group with dogs. They were brisk and tence and had been using a dog whistle. And we could hear they continued to do so as we progressed on our walk.

Nearer home than away, we saw a young alsation trying to get over a sheep fence – two rows of barbed wire at its hight. I guessed it could be this dog that was being summonsed by the whistle, it was distressed and agitated. And then I saw a deer on the snow…

It was apparent that the alsation had only just killed the deer and was now fretting to get back to its owner, who at that moment appeared from the woods. Together, we helped the dog over the wire and I asked if she wanted to do anything with the deer. No way…

So we dragged it home and did the job of gralloching, skinning and butchering. It took three hours, but felt right on a couple of levels. Not to leave the dead deer to rot and waste and to challenge ourselves to the task of dealing with the carcass.

It’s not art what we did, but the walk reminded me of an art piece. Shed Boat Shed, by Simon Starling. To walk and be willing to engage with things that you come across, unquestioningly. To see a car stuck and to help dig and push, that slowed our progress – so all things become part of the journey, planned and unplanned. Like painting, when I start with an intention, but allow diversions and changes on route in order to effect a solution.

The Christmas Carol ‘Good King Wensleslass’ has the words: ‘Earth as hard as iron, water like a stone’ . So appropriate here just now. Winter has returned to Scotland and the UK – just to show it can!

Over the last couple of days I have continued sketching the trees outside – through the studio windows.

Yesterday we went out for a walk in brilliant sunshine. Crisp air, sharp blue sky.

We came back in a white out as 3 or 4 inches fell on us.

And the world went white. It was such an opportunity to paint this subject, changing all the time.