The Treeless Landscape

For someone who loves trees (and loves drawing trees.), I find myself sketching landscapes without trees quite a lot. Many are coastal scenes, but hilly landscapes in this region also tend to have few trees. I suppose it's inevitable in these parts where the original tree cover was largely removed several centuries ago. It's a legacy of our industrial heritage, mostly down to shipbuilding and iron smelting, followed by sheep farming. Nowadays, the remaining shreds of our native woodland are so precious that many of them are protected by law.

Anyway, I love the wild windswept look of treeless landscapes: they motivate me to get down to a bit of sketching, even on a moody day like this.  

 

 I like that elemental feeling that you get from a landscape pared down to its topographical purity, with perhaps the occasional small plantation intruding here and there. However, in compositional terms I can find these landscapes a challenge. The shape of a hill becomes hugely important, as does its dominance within the scene. And the overriding focus becomes colour and texture.

In  spring I embarked on a few larger oil paintings. I love using oils but find them more of a challenge than acrylics, and often get a bit stuck. I was determined to produce a result.

Marsco (on Skye) is a hill with a beautiful angular shape.  We have walked into Glen Sligachan several times and I always have to stop and sketch the view. Glen Sligachan is quite bleak – sandwiched between Marsco and Sgurr Nan Gillean – and perfect to allow the shape of the hill to become the focus of the scene. 

 

I had already painted a couple of acrylic paintings from my sketches, but I was not altogether happy with these. I felt the colour was a little too realistic!

 

 

 

I made a start to an oil painting with some under-painting trying to get a feeling of lightness and that welcoming lure of the hills, and thinking about the marks to use in the treatment of the ground cover.  The first layer ended up like this (below left). 

Then I painted over this layer to get better depth of colour. All the time I was trying to maintain a similar palette and the lightness of colour.  I also tried to improve on the composition by turning the river into a lochan and raising the height of Marsco to allow it to dominate in a more pleasing way. 

So it ended up like this (below right).

 

 

 

 

 

Torridon is another largely treeless landscape.  I find the moorland behind (to the north of) Liathach and Beinn Eighe a great spot. The hills rise directly out of the boggy floor, like ships on the sea. I have sketched Beinn a Chearcaill several times, and painted it in acrylic, like this.

When it came to rendering the scene in oils, I decided to adjust the palette and use more of a geometric approach to the moorland, including the rocks.  Initially I couldn't quite get the look I wanted, and then this misty mysterious look emerged, and that seemed to work. So that's why it has ended up like this. 

However, the presence of such dominant hills takes the eye away from the emptiness of the moorland. I have realised that if I want to paint empty moorland scenes I have to think more about skies. So I have been working a bit harder of portraying clouds and skyscapes.  Then I thought about developing this sketch I did in the Fisherfield area.

Working in acrylics, I realised that the composition (the emptyness) could be enhanced by adding more sky. I had done the sketch on a bright windy day with the clouds scudding across the sky and I sought to capture this in the sky.

These three finished paintings have found their way to a show in the Lemond Gallery, Bearsden (Glasgow)  – the Big Christmas Show 2020. I got them nicely framed locally by Emma Noble in Kyle – she's done a great job. Look at the two oils!

 

Anyway - the work is all online at the Lemond Gallery which is now planning to reopen on Friday 11th to Monday 14^th December for its final session (now that Covid-19 Rules permit!).   If you would like to take a look, here's the link  https://www.lemondgallery.com/

A Spot of Reflection

It's harder than people think 'being an artist'. No, really! Self-doubt is a constant companion, made worse by the highs and lows of exhibiting and selling (or not selling!) work. But never mind the generalities, it's time I reflected on what I've done over the last month, what's working for me and what is not.

After the drawing episodes (see previous post), I had a spell of printmaking using a gelatine plate.  I was using bits of bracken and shreds of sacking to act as masks and create textured 'ghost' prints.

This felt like fun rather than work....

Then I tried cutting shapes out of textured material...

 Using thread and bits of lace as well as fish shapes...

And again, mixing shapes and textures...

Becoming more abstract...

And creating bolder abstract shapes....

 Out of all this experimentation I devised a set of basic rules to follow in order to achieve a pleasing result. I used these for a workshop I ran at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Dornie last weekend.  There's a randomness about the gel printmaking process, as I suppose there is about all monoprinting - or monotyping to be pedantic - and it certainly makes me think in more abstract terms about colour, texture and form....which is a jolly good thing.  I think there is a lot of potential for me to use this process to devlop the way I see and use coloured shapes and move away from realism towards abstraction. It keeps me focused on the aesthetics of putting together patterns of different colours that bears no relation to observational drawing.

However, I wanted to get some painting done this month too and I'm determined to work more in oils just to see what kind of results I can achieve. I started with a couple of ideas for lochan pictures, based on some sketches I did while out walking. Here's what I achieved the first session

And this

They look quite good at this scale, but I'm not at all sure about them. Need more work, I think but there is that risk of overworking. And they are a bit too realistic, not abstract enough.

But then I was really doing these to paint myself into another pic I had started a couple of months ago. Here it is...

I was quite pleased with this but thought it needed more work, and it had some elements that were a bit too realistic and the composition looked a little too contrived, too studied.  It is an attempt at an abstracted composition which I had worked out through drawing. My original little study, based on an observational sketch, was this (I've polished this up now and may get it framed - ha!).

What I liked about the scene was the orange island and the blue lochan and how they are opposites and kinda balance each other. However, the oil version wasn't quite working. So I went back to drawing and then back into paint - trying NOT to be realistic - and this is as far as it's got now.

Getting better, I think.  The composition has improved, but maybe the colour is too bright now. I did like the coldness of the earlier version. But that was done in a different season!

I know that I must keep focused on what am I trying to achieve. I'm not trying to create pretty pictures or cartoons: I'm trying to say something about what the landscape means to me: what it says to me - beauty, ruggedness, wildness; what I observe - quirkyness and delicacy; what I feel - preciousness, ephemerality. But there's no point in describing it in words...the challenge is to channel all of that into paint ... ha!

From Sketch to Painting

Can't believe it's more than a month since I last blogged. I've been busy printmaking and not had so much time for painting. This week I'm in Lochcarron and so I've started some new paintings (of favourite old scenes, of course).

Yesterday we went to Applecross and I did a couple of sketches on the beach at Sand. It was cold but the sun came out between showers and I managed to do these two. I was trying hard to capture the look of the wild sky. The sky did look particularly good yesterday.

Today I decided to have a go at a painting of this view. I thought I'd do one pic with a big sky and another with a big foreground in order to get a good composition.

I started off with my big sky pic looking like this. I was actually referring to a photo as well as my sketch. This is a terrible mess, but I quite like a lot of the marks.

Anyway, I carried on, started another pic, then returned to thie first one. Eventually it looked like this.

It looks a bit smoothed out now, doesn't it? Lost a lot of energy but there's the makings of a good pic in here. I want to revisit this, go back to some of the photos and try and introduce some better foreground marks.


Pic number 2 was to be my sky picture (sky and Skye, I suppose). I forgot to take a snap early on, so I only have the end result.

Again there's quite a lot I like and at least it has retained a bit of energy, I think. It's quite close to the sketch, but with some added foreground and the foreground colour gives it a spring-like ambience.

Of course, neither of these are a patch on the sketches, as usual, so that's my next challenge.

Painting practice

Was so excited to have new paper to use - my former work colleagues had given me a token for Greyfriars Art Shop and I got some lovely heavy Fabriano paper (hot pressed). A change from the usual watercolour paper. So although I've been a bit distracted with Peter in hospital, I was determined to get some painting time yesterday.

I decided to do another version of the view of Skye from the Sandy bay on Applecross. I had got as far as this last week (with a little adjustment of the clouds).

 I liked the palette of this and the composition. So I tried to approach a new version in the same way. Started off with charcoal, rubbed it out a bit, applied some gouache.  So it started off looking like this.

I carried on in acrylics and pencil marks, trying to minimise the amount of water I was using.  Quite soon it was looking like this.  Looks a bit scrappy, don't you think? And I felt I hadn't got the colours just as I wanted them.  Probably not added enough of the lemon yellow to the blues.  And not used enough Prussian Blue, I think.

Anyway, I carried on, trying  to improve the technical 'look' of the painting without losing the energy of the marks.

But you can see that I didn't do much more to it.  I think I got a bit 'gripped' by the painting, too scared to keep the looseness (cos there are some bits I like).  And the slightly different composition has lost some of the tightness of the spaces - it's all a bit too studied.  The things that I like? - the rocks are not bad and the irises in the foreground are nice and loose. So I think I've got to go back in with a looser approach with better flesh-coloured sand to get that cold look.  It looks just a bit too warm for Scotland (although they are having nice weather up there at the moment!).  Other tips would be welcome!