Talisker Distillery

I was busy yesterday putting together my applications for Portrait and Landscaoe Artist Of The Year yesterday. The PAOTY deadline isn’t until 7 February but I’ll be submitting my application this week. I already have a self portrait but need to pick two out of Gary Moore, Gary Delaney, Phil Lesh and Doctor Zachary Smith to support it. If anyone wants to recommend which two in the comments, please be my guest.

Anyway, my thoughts are starting to turn to LAOTY, even though deadline day is even further way, on 2 May. After feeling really happy with The M2 and Islay Beach Cottage, I’m wondering whether I should go with soft pastels this year. I’ve only done nine paintings with them so far, of which seven are landscapes and only two of them have been created since I read the Robert Brindley book and finally got the hang of this new medium. Which means that if I’m to use soft pastels on LAOTY, I need to start doing some soft pastel landscapes, not just for practice but also to be able to collect together three paintings worthy of submission. I could wait until after Christmas (when I’m hoping to receive some warmer pastel colours) but let’s not fanny around. I’m painting a soft pastel landscape today.

Today’s subject is the Talisker distillery on the Isle of Skye. I’m breaking my rule here on not painting distilleries unless I sample their whiskies within 24 hours of the painting (before or after) but every artist, chess player or actuary knows that you only understand a rule if you know when to break it. And with my shortage of warm colours, I wanted to paint a white building.

I started by putting down a really rough outline, all by sight without using a grid. This is something I’m happier to do with pastels than with watercolour as it’s a more forgiving medium and much easier to correct. I tried to start with really soft strokes with( the side of the pastels and to keep this going as long as possible but went in hard too early today. It was probably a mistake to put down my original rough outlines with pastel rather than with pencil: that set me off on the wrong track.

Let’s go through the elements of the painting, starting with the sky. Not too bad but not yet perfect. My skies are getting slowly better. I think I need to be a bit softer with the pastels in the sky but can’t resist going all in with the rain clouds.

The hills are also OK. The horizon is a bit hard edged for my liking: at one point I had a soft, lost edge there and it looked great but I ended up overworking things. Colour-wise, I’m really looking forward to having more purples available to me after Christmas: Scottish landscapes need purple.

It took me a while to get the trees working but, after looking back at the Islay painting, I remembered what I’d done before and then I was away. One thing I don’t like about these trees, though, is the regular spacing: this is something I’d change were I to do this one again.

Then there are the buildings. I’ve used lots of colours in both the roofs and the walls. I don’t think I could have done better with the roofs: in reality they’re a purpleish grey and I don’t yet have the right colours, so I had to go rogue. For the white walls I wanted to introduce some blues, reds and yellows in places, like I do with watercolours. I did kind of do this but (i) didn’t leave enough white, and (ii) blended all those impressionistic colours together into a grey.

In the foreground, I had some perspective problems as a result of working without a grid. I ended up having to make the road on the right slope upwards more sharply in reality. And the soft pastels allowed me to do this, even after I’d put in the rails. Definitely a forgiving medium. It also took me a couple of attempts to get the tunnel and the angle of the river under it correct. I think this bit of the painting looked better earlier, when the tunnel wall blended into the water with no clear edge between the two. The water was overworked, probably because I felt the need to redo it every time I tinkered under the tunnel. I ended up filling the tooth of the paper with pigment and being unable to add any more, even after scraping loads of pigment off with a credit card. All the messy stuff on the banks, though, that worked.

Overall I found this to be an unsatisfying painting. Too many lessons that I’d learned in the past were forgotten. I need to do another soft pastel painting soon, while the memories of this one are still fresh. This one won’t be part of my LAOTY submission, but is going up for sale.