Alternate

3 consecutive days.....these show the variety that is built into the process, both in terms of approach to the subject, and method. The sizes and surfaces also vary.

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Stylistic Range....

(top image, sold) I seem to have 3 types of pictures that I alternate between. One type is a straight observational record, with plenty of abstraction and design underlying the construction....but it attends to a strong desire to set down what presents itself to the eye (this type is not shown in these slides, but you see examples in the post previous). The second still follows observation but also asks for more 'bending' (emotion and interpretation also informs everything seen)....and the last type is based on memory of location but does not necessarily conform to the experienced visual layout. I need all these 3 types to account for my experience of this wonderful place I'm living in.....

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Ridge

 

I use various starting methods and reference methods to make my pictures. This one is based on a memory, with no visual aid or reference in front of me. Works such as these tend to be more abstract in nature, and perhaps deal more strongly with mood creation....colour interaction is always key in the work.

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3 collages made today.

 

3 small collages, on single ply matte board,  with acrylic painted papers, made today. Every few days, I need to switch the methodology a degree. Nothing is abandoned, but everything needs to be continually refreshed.

Wishing

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A small thing.....5 x 7.5 inches. Habit can be a real killer....it is often the enemy. We get tired of doing the same thing. I often look for ways to change something up. In this case, the diagram was even briefer than usual.....anything that makes an impression is worth making note of, but in this case there was the briefest of scribbles. The painting was made in a very washy way, working into the acrylic while it was still very wet. I enjoyed drawing with a small long brush and also with the pencil. It doesn't take much to make some change.....but it's important to keep doing it almost continually.

Brushes.....and.....

I had a few questions about brushes and procedures. Perhaps the picture will help. I wear brushes down to nothing....especially the bigger ones for filling areas. I tend to favour a distressed brush perhaps because it can do rough things....I get worried when things start to look too predictable. The stiff bristle round brush that you see...all worn down, was used for the top layer of many of my skies...I liked it for applying thick impasto. Haven't used it lately though...perhaps its time is done.

I AM careful about the smallest rounds that I use to draw fine lines with. I try to hold the brush very easily and make the lines almost accidentally. The paint is often thinned a fair bit for those lines. Small rounds are replaced quite often. I use a few flat synthetic brushes, but favor the rounds.

Almost everything gets underpainted very simply. A blue sky will have a thin wash of perhaps pink, applied in 10 seconds....little bits peek through.

I'm primarily a tonal painter. The Value...the degree of dark/light of the colour is most important. I'm also very conscious of how colours are greyed. I use a simple method of 'approximate complements' to grey. As I instinctively sense that a colour needs to be brought down in intensity, I go to an approximate opposite to grey it in stages. Finding great greys is so important.

I'm more intuitive rather than scientific in the way I find my colours. Red is the complement of green, and small bits of red will grey or reduce the intensity of green, but so will a whole variety of browns, reds that move towards orange, etc....that's why I think of this method as greying with approximate complements....they will all grey your colour, but in different ways.

A little exercise for anyone who feels they haven't exploited greys enough yet:

Grid a 20" x 26" sheet of bristol or any stiff card into one inch squares. Set out a full palette of colour plus white. Fill every square with a greyed colour....no full intensity colours allowed. I have no black in my palette but am a great fan of Paynes Grey. I wouldn't use the Paynes for this exercise though. You'll be surprised by how much exciting variety you'll find just by consciously reducing the brightness of colours.

Lake Ontario, February 8

5.75" x 7.25", acrylic collage on paper.

Made as a demonstration piece for some AP students. I took my lunch hour to drive along the lake, made a very brief pencil diagram of this composition, and completed the collage and painting stage in the studio.

The time lag between making the collage papers and actually using them in paintings continues to fascinate me. Here, I notice the slight resist in the sky caused by the blue over an existing dry layer of glue. All studio papers are kept for reuse....there is no telling what will be useful. Spoken like a true packrat, I know, but in this piece you can actually see how so called rubbish is transformed.

Memory Work

My preferred method of working for the last week or so, has been from these little 1 minute diagrams pictured here. It's been very pleasant working these out. The advantage of this method is the reliance on memory. All that is diagrammed is the shock of the impression created by 4 or 5 elements in combination....Coyote Hill in snow shown here....the little diagram for it is on the page.

You can see that the sketches have a bit of an 'abused' look....the paper is folded up and lives in my breast pocket. When I see something that I'll paint, a little sketch gets made. This particular page started during a staff meeting....bit of a doodle of a head there, and a few notes deemed important at the time.

How Easy Is It Anyway?...How Hard Can It Be?

Matisse started as a painter who was very much tied to the things he saw, but steadily he moved to the point where he wanted much more than that. Colour and all the elements of art needed to be distanced from the 'simpler' act of seeing, while somehow still grounded in 'experienced' reality. It's this duality that still gives such strength to his work. And if we think that this was an easy victory, and not really much of a step, fairly familiar terrain already explored previously by Gauguin and Cezanne just to name two who were at least in the same ballpark, we should think again.

I am mightily surprised by the actual record because the Fauve works produced in Collioure in 1905, seem, on the face of it, such a joyous release. But not everything is as easy as it might at first seem.

" More than forty years later, Georges Duthuit described the state in which his father-in-law [Matisse] approached the act of painting, a tension so extreme that those closest to him risked being sucked in with him to the verge of breakdown or vertigo. "The obvious forebodings experienced by the painter-who is at the same time so prudent, and so orderly that people call him 'the Doctor'---made him tremble. During the few years when he was able to endure this vision, Matisse spent whole nights without sleep, nights of desperation and panic." From now on Matisse would never again be free from the insomnia that had first attacked him on Belle-Ile. Amelie helped him through the interminable nights by reading to him, sometimes until dawn. The novel Matisse remembered reading in 1905 was Alexander Kuprine's Yama, an account of life in a provincial Russian brothel which deeply disturbed him. In fact, he could not have read this particular book (which was not published in French until 1923): it was a freak of Matisse's imagination that transposed Kuprine's powerful images of brutality and exploitation in a nocturnal underworld back to the summer at Collioure, when the stable, familiar daytime appearance of normality seemed to be blown apart before our eyes.

It is not easy to understand today how paintings of light and colour, mediated through scenes of simple seaside domesticity----a view of fishing boats above pots of scarlet geraniums on the studio windowsill, Amelie wrapped in a towel or seated barefoot on the rocks----could have seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and colour. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries, going back to painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo, and before them to the Greek and Roman masters of antiquity. He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a twentieth-century art that would draw its validity essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses. "

Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, Volume 1, Penguin, 1998