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A very productive day in the studio!

I did a lot of cleanup work this evening, fixing the figure up with some black shoes, deepening the shadows of his bag, clarifying the shadows of the jacket, glazing his over-white shirt with some dirty grey and painting his pants with a layer of grey. (Blues next).

The landscape got a thorough work-over too, with additional shadows between rose leaves adn below the man, and a re-emphasis of the trunk of the tree, while a skull and a couple of long bones have made an appearance at its foot. I used some Van Dyke Brown to made the edges of the cliff sharper, while aligning the jagged cuts toward the mountain far off in the distance. I briefly experimented with putting flagstones beneath his feet, but disliked it, so I think I’ll be busy painting grass pretty soon.

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It’s strange that time can evaporate so quickly when we are absorbed in tasks that occupy our attention above all other things – I spent two or three hours painting these daisies and roses without noticing that the whole morning was gone. On the left I’ve added a multitude of daisies to augment the nice oranges of the foliage. I’ll add yellow to the white later.

Now the right hand side is beginning to take shape with the addition of this flourish of roses. I’ve started in the same way that I did on the left, with general leafy shapes over greens and oxide red, then the white flower heads, soon to be followed by light grey foliage and stems.

I’ve got to get back to work on the figure again, and I made a gentle gesture towards that today, adding white double headed eagles to his buttons. I have admired Rembrant’s method of painting golden necklaces and rings, and his rendering of golden emboidery for a long time, so here’s my chance to emulate him in a small way, using his technique of putting a glaze of Raw Sienna over a bright impasto white to make it look the paint  resemble crusty gold.

My easel is very large and I have always extolled its virtues, but yesterday it suffered a total disaster when one of the pulleys used to pull up the shelf that holds the canvas snapped – made from cheap cast metal, it simply couldn’t take the weight of the painting, which crashed down to the floor, narrowly avoiding falling over onto me as I was painting the early layers of the foliage on the right side. I’ll need to replace the broken pulley and its remaining partner with some much better quality steel pieces. As the shelf fell the weight of the painting broke the strips that held it into the cart that slid up and down behind it, which means that I’ll also have to rebuild the entire shelf’s sled assembly before I am able to use it again. This is a serious problem because I’m working on the bottom of the painting at the moment, so I need to be able to raise and lower it to a decent painting position. Right now the painting is sitting upon a table against the easel, which is not exactly ideal, but at least it makes it possible to work.

Once I’d managed to get the piece back up and in a good position I was able to get some good work done on the landscape and flowers on the right hand side. It’s been all about Iron Oxide to colour the flowers orange, with a little cadmium yellow here and there, while the megaliths that dominated the centre of the piece are completely gone now, so we can see what I expect to be the final shape of the cliffside. A layer of green background leaves is not very clear in the picture here, but looks effective in reality. After a couple more layers of base leaves I expect to paint some grey flower heads so the foreground blossoms pop. I mean to put some pinks over the orange of the flowers on the left, so that they have a nice warm vibration and some depth in the spaces between the petals.

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 finished and by doing a lot of hard work.

There’s a very large image file of Millais’ Ophelia here.

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.