Daily Musings
June 30th.
Up in the High Peaks of Derbyshire, the canal town of Whaley Bridge. The weather is good and it’s beautiful hilly country. I went up to a high balcony on the house, and from my vantage point, had a peek through the lush gardens to the hills in the distance.
June 29th.
An early painting in the yard. We had a long drive up North today, so cracking the Daily first was a priority. I chose a graphic view with a chimney down low on the canvas. It went badly though, so I scraped down and started over, incorporating the edge of the house next door and one of the windows. Still graphic, suburban, English, but no chimney.
June 28th.
A path through the wheat fields. Late in the day. Strong geometric shapes. A tiny sample of the patchwork of fields that make up much of the English countryside around here. No roads, just a foot path and telegraph poles cutting across the scene. I built up the paint again. With gouache I think the idea is to apply it thinly but that’s not the way I’m working. I’m probably making it hard for myself.
June 27th.
To quote a play on an old Clash song: “I fought the Sun and the Sun won”. My efforts clashed with the goal this evening. While chasing the fleeting effects of light, the drug of choice for impressionist painters, I have ended up with a composite milieu scattered across a timeline rather than a moment in time. With the Oxford plain spread below me twinkling, oscillating and pulsating with the different light effects of a sinking sun, I vainly tried to grab at them all and cram them onto my six inch square panel. I trudged back down the hill having lost the battle, with my painting in my hand.
June 26th.
Another crack at the rapeseed field. Outwardly simple and spartan, it’s all in the design. Well you have to get that bit right first, then it’s all in the paint application, texture, vibration and so on 🙂 The yellow really pops in the more muted colours of the English countryside. Painting a field feels like painting the sea; looking for ways to portray distance, recession and variety within a colourfield of sameness.
June 25th.
We returned to base, in a new car for our upcoming adventures in France, in heavy fog and low cloud. Alarming conditions to be picking up the new wheels, but I couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect of painting in the stripped-down views. By the time we reached home and I had hiked out to the local fields, the cloud had lifted a little but there was still enough to create the veils of atmosphere. I stopped at the yellow fields that featured in some of my paintings a few days ago from the top of the hill. I think it’s rapeseed, but I’m not certain. It’s real mood stuff. Simple graphic notes of luminism and minimalism. I gestured in a couple of rogue poppies in the foreground. Simple red dots, nothing more.
June 24th.
It was raining this morning. Well it is England 🙂 So I painted the begonias sitting on the window shelf in the kitchen.
June 23rd.
We stopped on the way back to base on the banks of the River Thames in Shillingford, after spending the night with friends. Jo, who now works remotely, tapped out an hour on the keyboard while I set up and painted the river and a few boats moored along the edge. We worked over a pint of shandy, munching on crisps, while the dogs chilled out on the grass. Just perfect 🙂
June 22nd.
Another climb up the hill to have a bash at painting distance and recession from an elevated position. I redesigned the landscape with a hawthorn bush in the foreground, a suggestion of the slope, and tried to get a feel for the rolling clouds. The colours ended up a little tropical this time, I’m not really sure why, it’s just what I saw. I had a near disaster mid-way through the painting when my easel fell over and I managed to catch my jar of water while it still had a few precious drops left in it, allowing me to finish the painting. It would have been a long walk back otherwise.
June 21st.
Summer solstice, the longest day of the year. After walking the dogs up the steep hill a little earlier, I turned towards the flatter Oxford plains with my back pack and set off into the surrounding countryside. I stopped by a willow pond that offered shade and painted the rolling fields below a sky full of billowing clouds. I was initially attracted to the scene by some rogue poppies that were scattered on the field to the right, but I largely overpainted them as they didn’t sit right in the painting. A faint suggestion of them is still there. In another variation of this painting it could be more about the sky by pushing the horizon lower, but that’s for another time. To get home I walked into the painting and along the footpath between the fields.
June 20th.
I took a fabulous meandering walk up the hill above the village, along the Icknield way, the ancient path that runs from Dorset to Norfolk which is apparently the oldest road in Britain. My tramp up the ridge was through gnarled old yew trees that must have seen a thousand seasons. When I got to the top of the hill I set up to capture my own moment in time of this vista. I actually worked up several paintings but they are all on the same panel as I adjusted lost, found and retrieved the scene spread out below. After a couple of hours, I came to a kind of compromise that rang true with what I had set out to achieve. I really am finding it difficult to capture the mid-distance in these sweeping vistas. I could haze out and grey everything beyond the foreground trees on the hill, but I want to add suggestion and detail into the landscape below…to add some interest. It requires infinitesimal shifts in value so as not to come racing to the front. At one stage I had a busy sky with bands of clouds but I dialled it back in order to push the eye down to the Oxford plains. I learned a lot to day.
June 19th.
I walked up the hill in drizzle to paint a view of the Oxford plains spread below me, a subject that’s pretty much out of my wheel house. Back in Bermuda, the horizon tends to be as hard as nails, rather than fading to grey blue, and I don’t generally paint from an elevated position with all the resulting perspective issues. The Daily project is the learning-train though, so I hopped on board with a student class ticket and set to work. As the clouds rolled over above me, alternating light and shadow, the scene below pulsed with changes. The block-in went well and initially I didn’t get bogged down in the plethora of detail. I painted-in and then uprooted a tree in the foreground that added nothing except problems. The rape seed fields glowed yellow green, but faded as they receded. Hmmmm. The terracotta roofs of Watlington at the foot of the hill glowed in the sun, then faded to a muted brown in cloud cover. I went round the proverbial houses again, a little off track here, a meander to left field there, the odd wrong turn. The gouache paint is very forgiving towards mistakes and remodelling a village. Thank goodness I’m not a watercolour painter. I was pretty happy with what turned out in the end, though as always never fully satisfied. That’s a good thing and that’s what drives you to go back for more.
June 18th.
This was painted from pretty much the same spot as the cows, but looking up the hill above Watlington with its famous “White Mark”. It’s actually the chalk exposed after the top soil was removed, done some 250 years ago to make the local church look like it had a spire from a local resident’s house. It’s challenging to make all the mid-tones in the background read, to keep that feeling of recession and distance in a sea of green, as it marches off to the horizon. It’s fun tackling such different subject matter.
June 17th.
We had walked this path through the wheat fields with the dogs earlier in the day. I returned with my back pack and paints in the late afternoon. I blocked in fairly quickly but then went round the houses a bit as I developed the piece. The long route did mean some nice textural build up, something the gouache can apparently cope with. A few curious walkers stopped to see what I was up to, including a couple who had got married on Saturday in a yurt at the top of the distant hill in the picture. Nice friendly people around here.
June 16th.
We arrived in Watlington, Oxfordshire, on a blustery rain spattered afternoon. I kitted up to paint and tramped around the neighbourhood looking for something suitable. I settled on a field of cows viewed from over the fence of the local pub. As I set up the weather improved and I got some low evening sun to assist me. I’m not familiar with painting cows from life and one thing I can tell you is that they mooooooove. 🙂 I scattered them randomly around the field and tried to gesture in their favoured positions as they ambled about. The big one in the foreground got up and sauntered over to watch what I was up to.
June 15th.
The hay field behind the pub where we are staying here in West Sussex. I had clocked it as a vista earlier in the day. When I went to paint it later, the farmer was there cutting the hay with a combine harvester but that didn’t matter as I still had the sea of yellow green juxtaposed against the grey sky and backdrop of the tree line to work with.
June 14th.
A bit discombobulated after a night flight across the Atlantic, we have holed up for a couple of days with the dogs in a characterful old pub/B&B called the Old House Inn, tucked in the countryside a few miles from the airport. I painted the front of the ancient pub. It’s all tall chimneys and crooked roofs.
June 13th.
My last painting in Bermuda for a few months. We head off to Europe tonight. We will be based primarily in Western France so the subject matter and palette will change. A pensive and poignant session down at the beach of the shadows cast on the sand by the shore line bushes. A similar theme to some previous dailies where I used oils. This allows me to compare and contrast the characteristics of the gouache.
June 12th.
Diving into the sea of abstraction. Fissures of dancing light. Bands of various blues and greens with nuanced oscillating edges. Transparency and opacity switching places as you paint. A flat surface with three dimensions recorded in two dimensions. Bathers breaking the shimmering surface, gliding slowly through the scene, a counter point to the harmony of the water but still part of the whole.
June 11th.
Phil and Melony, our next door neighbours, have a magnificent poinciana doing its thing right now. They are quite a tricky tree to portray because the bright red blossoms kind of sit on top of the shape of the tree, which behaves almost like an open umbrella. The inside structure of the tree is full of twisting branches. You could get lost following the labyrinth of those random boughs with the paint brush. I was standing in the shade of our banyan tree for this painting, which I must have a crack at one day too. It’s another tree that’s full of interesting character.
June 10th.
There are about seven paintings in here. I struggled to reach a state of harmony while battling the changing light and being distracted as I was dive-bombed by tiny eye flies in the sultry air. A couple of plateaus were abandoned when perhaps I should have stopped and admired the view on my easel. As an artist though, there is a tendency to forge on ahead in search of vistas on higher peaks of accomplishment. That means that you can get lost along the way sometimes. I reworked the piece one final time in the studio when I got home and I wasn’t happy with the discombobulation in front of me. Less is more.
June 9th.
The surreal and abstract visual of bathers in the shadows again. I began by intending to incorporate boats, but in the end opted to just include the reflections of a boat at the top and strip down the painting. A big fan of Katz, I like the minimalism of a scene like this. I’m just using two flathead brushes and neither is particularly small, which has the advantage of noting down suggestion rather than detail. I think it’s subject matter that could be explored in three dimensions. Some interesting sculptural possibilities.
June 8th.
A bay full of boats. I moved a couple of weekend boats closer together and squeezed in a couple of the floating rings to portray the vibe of the scene. A modern day Sur La Grande Jatte
June 7th.
After an aborted attempt at painting a complex view of the house, I turned through ninety degrees and went to work on the dappled shadows on the path that leads to the studio. I’m still unlocking the secrets of the gouache, which was one of the reasons I had to abandon the first painting. This view I had tackled before, so I at least had a mental map to help me on the way. Light is getting stronger and shadows darker…Summer is well on the way.
June 6th.
D-Day. A different kind of beach 75 years on, and feeling very thankful that those before have afforded me the luxury to create and make art. A lazy, lapping high tide enjoyed by bathers. A scene that transcends time and place. Healing waters, warming sun, dancing light.
June 5th.
Two figures in the shadows on the beach. Abstract, surreal. Colour fields of blue, green, yellow water filling the whole painting. Imperceptible meeting points of changes in colour and value meet in a moving liquid world.
June 4th.
The second day with gouache. A little further afield this time, down to the beach to tackle the sun going down over Daniel’s Head. Unlocking the possibilities of this new medium bit by bit. The quick drying properties allow you to overlay almost immediately. There is a lot of promise once I get more of a handle on how the paint moves etc.
June 3rd.
I switched over to using goauche today. It’s a water based pigment, but opaque unlike true watercolour. I’m not familiar with it, in fact this was only the second time I have used it. We leave for Europe next week andwill be doing some extensive travel, so a portable, quick drying water-based medium is very desirable. I chose to paint something familiar and close to the studio, Eric the palm, along with a solitaire palm. He is way higher than the solitaire in reality, but not wanting to have them way off in the distance or use an incredibly tall panel, I shortened Eric…or grew the solitaire, the choice is yours. I rather enjoyed using the gauche and look forward to unlocking its secrets over the next couple of weeks. I will likely return to oil once we are settled at our house in France where I will have time and space to let the work dry.
June 2nd.
Sunday evening. After my favourite kind of weekend, with friends staying over here at Sea View. After everyone had left, I ended up painting in the studio with the dogs, Jo, a glass of champagne and Pink Floyd for company. It was dark and stormy outside but cozy in the creative space. A Daily of Dailies.
June 1st.
The coconut palms have had their Summer haircuts. I juxtaposed this one against a dark and brooding sky as things happened offshore in the high humidity. The backdrop changes as you paint in these conditions and it’s important to stick to some kind of a plan rather than chasing the patterns around the sky. Likewise, the bands of colour in the water change radically. One moment a glassy sheen, the next there are lurid turquoises popping up all over the place. Paint what you see but remember the plan too. Incorporate new visual stuff that’s occurring as you work but only if it fits in with the overall scene. I made it with a minute to spare before the tropical rain came down.