Big studio, big painting

Well it's been an interesting time, I've been working in shearing sheds, doing building work, laying our fences, designing signposts, travelling, catering...

Anyway I'm back in my studio, or rather I'm now in my new, larger studio where my former business once existed. It;s a big room so deserved a big painting to break it in. A stormy summers day in the Falklands, bright sunlight broken by fast moving clouds and breaking through abig squall on the horizon.



...and it's big, 100 X 70 cm.




Ref:

Blocking in:

 First blend:

Filling in detail:

Nearly finished:

Leicester Bridge

Months ago I composed the reference for this project, probably about time I started painting it. This is a ruined timber bridge out on a farm called Leicester Creek, the owner expressed an interest in my painting a picture of the bridge some time ago so I've been meaning to have a crack at the subject for a while.

A departure for me as this is the first time I've attempted a large, architectural subject like this. Got off to a good start but still cna't be sure how this's going to turn out.

Charcoal sketch, 50 X 35 cm grey pastelmat:

Filled in the highlights with white pastel:

 Some detail and colour filled in, the colour is quite washed out so was not sure whether to make this a greyscale painting or to use some colour, descision now made:

Tinkering with new mediums....

For a long time now I've been meaning to dig out my almost unused oil pastels and neocolour water-soluble crayons to have a play with. It's not that I'm wanting to get away from soft pastels, just want to try something a bit different.
Rummaging around in my supplies I also unearthed a treasure I'd forgotten about, a gift from my mother in law that I'd never got round to using, a brand new set of Derwent inktense watersoluble ink pencils. Bonus.

It's odd working with such mediums, very different to use than my soft pastels, very fast to use and very responsive when shaped with a wet brush...I still don't like not being able to layer light on dark though and it's simply impossible to get the intensity of colour of soft pastels, good fun though and a far more portable medium.

Here's a silvery grebe, A3 cartridge paper:

Last week I also finished my second large settlement commission.

Hill Cove, soft pastels, 50 X 70 cm grey pastelmat.

More barbs

Looking at what I've done so far on my Barbed wire painting with fresh eyes this morning I saw that the original idea was lost, this was becoming a simple one dimensional painting of some grass and wire, not what I'd intended at all.

So I've thrown in more barbed wire, not as a literal dipiction but using a trick I've messed around with in the past. A relatively simple shape like the twists of barbed wire can be indicated as an extra layer in the painting by using the direction of pastel strokes rather than colour and shade, the underlying colour is still of the background scene but with the extra element indicated by the texture of the painting. I've not really got this to work before. I'm determined that I will this time though, the effect is still quite subtle, not yet sure how far I'll push it.

Progress:

Barbed wire

Just our walking my dogs and in a patch of long grass something catches my eye, on closer inspection it's a tangled piece of rusted barbed wire. Now this is most probably a bit of agricultural detritus but it immediately suggested an idea to me.

It's coming up to the 30th anniversary of the liberation of the Falklands from Argentine occupation in 1982, this short but bloody conflict left many scars, on the servicmen and women involved, on the families of those who died, on the Islanders who lived through the conflict and on the land itself. It was the latter that struck a chord in this instance, this innocuous bit of rusted metal, tangled and overgrown after many years seemed to take on significance as a metaphor of the effect the conflict has left, it's been a long time and time has healed much of the hurt but the legacy of those bloody days is still here. Question is can I translate that metaphor into a painting?

I'm sure going to try. This is a bit of a departure for me as I'm not working with a definate reference or goal in mind, I just want to see where the idea takes me, possibly even into the unexplored territory of abstraction. Painting by the seat of my pants so to speak.

Charcoal sketch on 50 X 70 cm grey pastelmat:

Progress so far:

Déjà vu

Glad to get that commissioned landscape out of the way last week, now I'm working on....a commissioned landscape....and it's almost fecking identical, 50 X 70 cm (again), foreground, sea, background, sky (again), settlement on West Falkland.....OK, it's a different settlement, Hill Cove this time.

Charcoal underpainting:

Progress so far:

Nearly done the 'scape

Nearly finshed, good thing too as I have to drop this off for carriage to the UK the day after tommorrow. Better crack on with it.

Getting there with the Landscape.

Feeling better about this now, think it's going to be pretty cool once it's done. Odd that I ended up doing it in colour, as the reference is an old photo I'd intended it to be almost black and white, just a hint of colour. Funny how sometimes a painting just goes it's own way, I've learnt now that when that happens one has to go with it, to try to force it to go the way you originally intended will ruin it.







Just finished this one too, commissioned portrait of two labradors. 30 X 40 cm grey pastelmat.

Landscape progress

Been cracking on with my Fox Bay landscape commission, going....alright. Can't get too excited about this one. Still, it's working so far so that's OK then.

Fox Bay in the old days.

A tough nut this one. Painting of Fox Bay West Settlement forty odd years ago, having trawled many old photos looking for references I narrowed it down to two, showing the view of the settlement from across the bay at Fox Bay East. There is often a problem with panoramic vistas here in the Falklands and that is getting enough going on outside of the narrow horizontal strip that is the middle distance to the horizon (which is where most of what's recognisable will be), I find there's only so much one can do with sky and featureless foreground but by combining these two photos there was a composition that answered.

Original photos:

Combined reference:

That was the easy bit, now just need to do a 50 by 70 cm painting of it. Progress so far:

The Tryworks

Way back in April I did a commission for a client of a sheepdog against a backdrop of mountains, Here it is, Bruce the Huntaway. I mentioned then the possibility of another, bigger commission of a historical scene of the old industry of harvesting penguins for their oil, a grisly and largely unknown practice that had been overshadowed by the larger and more emotive whaling and sealing industries.

I have now completed the painting, This is by a long way the largest, most complicated and most difficult piece I've attempted so far in my fledgeling art career. No photographs of this activity exist (that I know of) just accounts and some rather fanciful illustrations so the entire scene is a creation of my imagination based on what is known about the process. It boils down to this (if you'll pardon the pun):

Penguins were driven into a rough corral on a beach using dogs to keep them together in a flock. There was a large trypot that had a spout running into a smaller pot for refinging the oil. The penguins were clubbed inside the corral then passed out to be bled and gutted (to remove as much water and bulk as possible), the carcases were then thrown in the trypot which was heated initially with wood or coal but as the rendering proceeded with the oil soaked remains of the penguins that were fished from the pot with a long handled scoop. the refined oil was casked and shipped away.

Here's how the painting progressed:

This is the initial concept sketch I knocked out to get the elements together in a way I felt worked. On the right is a full size study that helped me to finalise the composition.

 

This is the initial sketch on 70 X 100cm anthracite pastelmat and the first roughing in of colours and light/shade.  

 All the detail coming together, at this stage I didn't know about the refining pot, fortunately there was room to fit it in where it was needed.

The finished painting. I was trying to get a dirty, hellish feeling to it to reflect the grisly nature of the activity while not portraying the protagonists as wicked people in any way, just men at work with a dirty job to do. I'm pretty pleased with it.

Experimental self portrait.

Self portrait on 30 X 40 yellow pastelmat. Decided to try out an idea I've been toying with to use the direction of pastel strokes to suggest other shapes than depicted by colour tone and value, as this is the first time I've kept it simple, just concentric circles centred on my right eye.

I ususlly use the pastel strokes as quite a strong element in painting so it's interesting to have that elememt shifed to another dimension...and difficult. We'll see where this goes. Still a lot to do on this.

Ref:

Sketch and start of detail in face:

 Colour filled in:

Progress on the double portrait

Tonights progress, more colour built up. I attempted to push these a little warmer but no good, I think these just are going to be cool toned paintings. It still surprises me how little control one has over the look of a painting once you're a into it. One of these days I'm goinf to do a completely crazy painting with no respect for colour tone at all, just using value and nothing else...could be fun.

Double portrait

It's my birthday, today I can do whatever I want....within reason. So bearing that in mind I've made a start on a pair of portraits of my niece. These are based on two photographs taken on the same day, same lighting but showing two different moods. I'm actually painting these at the same time, each time I pick up a new stick of colour I use it on one, then the other before I use another colour. Interesting experiment so far. Both are on 35 X 40 cm grey pastelmat.


Reference photos:

Charcoal undersketch:

  





















Filling colour with soft pastels:

So far so good.

Fighting Johnnyrooks

This is (I hope) going to be a piece that compliments my angry johnnyrook picture, if it works both of these are to be donated for an auction at an annual social event called the Conservation Ball, this is held to raise money for the local environmental charity Falklands Conservation. Here's a link to their website if you're interested

This is a subject composed using many shots of Johhnyrooks doing their stuff, they do fight quite a lot but they're so quick moving that I've never managed to get one good shot of the action I wanted to portray. Soft pastels on 30 X 40 yellow pastelmat.

Initail work showing the sketch and my (I think, rather nifty) monitor setup.

First stage, blocking out of basic shapes.

Some depth of colour added

More colour, movment and detail, colours are very brash so still a long way to go.

Bill Porter

Finished my portrait of Bill Porter, took a while and I found the WIP photos useful so posting this one as a complete work in progress. The finished pastel I'll give to the local social club which Bill chaired for many years.

Charcoal sketch

here's the first stage of the larger painting, graphite sketch on pale grey 30 X 40 pastelmat.

Filled in with charcoal, some colour next.

First blocking in of colour, conte soft pastels.

Bit more done, using my daler rowney pastel pencils on this, excellent pastel cores in them but the wood casings are terrible, grain all over the place so very hard to sharpen without breaking the core.

looking a bit flat, slapped some unison pastel on there, grand stuff.

Getting there.

Finished painting