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My student Cameron pointed out that the lush foliage in this painting reminds him of Millais’ Ophelia, which is exhibited at the Tate National in London. It’s a beautiful painting of the drowning of Hamlet’s lover, described in poetic detail by Shakespeare in the play.

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”

I’ve loved this painting since my mother took me to see the pre-Raphaelite collection in the Tate when I was a child, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be an influence on what I’m painting now. So, looking at the detail Millais put into this work sets a standard for me to aspire to, which I think I can probably attain with some attention to getting the foliage really accurately and by doing a lot of hard work.

At last I’ve painted over the last of the oxide base coat and the painting is moving into the final phases. I’ve given myself permission to paint fantasy into my work, revisiting my youth when I loved Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Michael Moorcock’s Chronicles. Why not? I’ve finally got to the point where I can paint what I want to, so I intend to enjoy myself. So here’s a little trip into unreality, with a precipitous cliffside and impossible flora.

Lots of work to do to complete it, but this is a nice place to be.

I’ll add more flowers into the foreground and bring colour into the white flowerheads that I’ve put into the ground. I think that the acacia needs to bloom with its characteristically abundant yellow flowers.

It’s funny how different areas of a painting demand attention at different times. I pretty much completed the top half of the figure at the beginning of the project, leaving the bottom half until now. There’s no logical reason for this, it just happened that way.

No rusty reds yet, but there are three greens over the grey, making a pretty layer of leaves which will work out very nicely when I define them a bit with some dark brown and a little detail.

The colour is a bit off in the bigger picture – the orange of the iron oxide is jumping far too much, but I wanted to show how the flowers are working in their context. I think they’re still a little too bright, so I might glaze them with a thin Raw Umber (a greenish brown) to quiet them a bit. It’s quite nice to compare this shot with the one in the previous post.

I’m pretty happy with this though, it’s on the right road. Perhaps a few more flowers to the right hand side of the bush?

I’ve added more light grey wild rose leaves to the bottom left corner. They’re disconcertingly bright at present, excessively drawing focus because they’re so strong against almost everything else in the painting and totally overwhelming even the white rose flowers that I  painted last week, but this will change as soon as I put a yellow-green glaze over them, when the darkness and density of the paint will either make them feel more absorbed into the background or pop forward from the shadows, depending on there position in the painting (those that I need to recede will blend more to the darker shadows, while those I need to pop forward will be painted lighter and with more vibrant colour).

I’m relishing the fast growth of my back garden roses right now, which are throwing out lovely new red leaves with reckless abandon, and reminding me to add a little reddish brown around the edges of the more defined foreground leaves in the painting to make them seem real.

Bert asked me to leave some of the crows with him at the gallery, so we put together a nice little flock of the birds ascending a wall. If you’re near Fifth and Spring and want to pick up a few of them, drop into the gallery and enjoy spending some quality time with the works he shows. His Bert Green Fine Art gallery is always interesting, at the heart of Gallery Row. He’s between installations right now, look for a new exhibit opening March 10th.

I’m happy to report that at the Kwan Fong Gallery at CLU we’ve opened a show of paintings by Paz Winshtein, a young and very talented artist from Ventura County. Paz’s work is dreamlike and brightly coloured, sometimes a little disturbing, but always drawing the viewer in for a closer look. Addressing issues of contemporary culture, like building and machinery, his work is quite unusual and I recommend a visit if you are in the area.

I’m thoroughly enjoying painting these roses, especially now that I’ve finally reached the top layer, where they are more specific and detailed and at last I can really see how the left corner is going to look when it’s complete. This layer is painted in a light blue-grey, mixing Ceramic White with Payne’s Grey, in much the same way that I did the first layer of the acacia tree leaves up in the top right. Once they’re complete (I want to continue putting them across the bottom half of the canvas) they’ll be ready for a glaze of yellow and green to make these ghostly shapes look more like living rose branches.

I love the roses in my garden and I like the idea of these painted wild roses bringing pleasure to people. But perhaps I should discretely paint some mildew and rust on the leaves, and some aphids being eaten by ladybirds, to remind us that even in the most beautiful wonders of the natural world we can find the cycle of birth and death. This fits nicely with the theme of the four paintings of which this is one – this piece is the journey of life, followed by the angel of death, followed by the in between state after life and prior to birth, then finally the cycle is completed by the angel of birth. (Incidentally, I don’t view any one of the four paintings as the beginning or end of the cycle, the four together make a unity.)

I’ve added three crows flying in toward the traveler beside the tree, adding a nice little detail to that area of the painting. I think they’re soft enough to avoid attracting attention away from the most important features of the piece – the sky and the traveler.

I’ve been enjoying working the wild roses up, using a light grey and a dense Ceramic white, with touches of Naples Yellow and a little Cadmium Red in the centers of the flower heads. I’d like to get serious about the leaves next, because although I’m happy with what I’ve done so far as a background, the rose leaves need to be equally carefully rendered as the acacia leaves in the upper right, or the depth will feel wrong. I expect to drop the bright whiteness of the petals back a little with a glaze of Iron Oxide. At first glance there doesn’t appear to be much difference to the work I completed Sunday, but there’s a lot more detail in the flowers now and I’ve added many more small and indistinct white roses in the background, putting the tree into a better relationship with the foreground.

I must confess to a deep seated temptation to paint a California Landcape purple into the mountains!

In this fantastic world airplane vapour trails never cross the sky.

Photos from yesterday’s talk, which was enjoyable. I spoke about alchemical nigredo, the grail flints found in Neolithic tombs and the nature of inner transformation discovered in the search for the purified and re-integrated prima materia, embarked upon by all alchemists.

A good day, an a la prima day of painting wild roses and establishing a landscape for the Fool to pass through. This was quite enjoyable and has set the foundation for the way that the composition will follow from here on, with detail and prettiness surrounding the traveling man. Having established these flowers with loose white and very pale browns, with a touch of Naples yellow in the centre of the mass of petals, I used a lighter green to sketch in leafy shapes, then scraped some Prussian blue patchily here and there between the leaves and petals. I’ll need to tighten up the drawing in the foreground, while leaving the middle and background loose.

The acacia leaves are finished in the right hand corner, but I’m considering adding more to the paintings in the lower right quarter. To complete the leaves I added a stroke of Burnt Sienna mixed with Raw Sienna to each leaf, turning them a little reddish-green.

I want to show how the horizon can be made to appear to fade away into the distance so I’m posting a before and after photo here – In the first picture I’ve applied a layer of Ceramic white over the top of the mountains and sky, making sure to cover further than the area that I know I want the glaze to go. The paint extended across the whole horizon line, of course. Using a soft rag (old  T-shirt) to gently wipe away the paint yields a soft coat of very thin white paint which gives the illusion of a distant haze over the landscape, seen in the second photo. I love the way everything appears to be falling back in the painting because of this neat illusory trick.

Meanwhile, in the foreground I’ve been using the same Ceramic white to put down the base coat of the wild roses that line the traveler’s path. In contrast to the thinness of the paint when it was used to make the horizon hazy, here I’ve put it onto the canvas with a soft round brush, letting the paint stay thick and ridged so that it will come toward the foreground and feel much closer. As I add detail to the flowers they will become more distinct and gain some colour.

I’m getting a good sense of how the painting will turn out. Looking good.