Ancient Lights

After a little bit of thinking, I decided to keep pthalo blue, cobalt blue, viridian and Indian yellow from the last painting but to bin the burnt umber and to replace the two reds with quinacridone magenta and cadmium red.  Don’t ask me why: these were just the colours that I fancied using.  With both a warm and a cool red in the squad, this painting isn’t in one particular colour key.

With this painting, I made it to the end of my tube of Daler Rowley pthalo blue.  It’s been an interesting colour, a more vivid cool blue than the Prussian that’s keeping it out of my squad.  If I ever decide to change the Prussian to pthalo, I’d be using Winsor blue (green shade) which I now know to be pthalo blue under a different name.

This time I started with masking fluid spatters rather than masking fluid birds but otherwise followed exactly the same process as for my last painting.  While doing this, I added a few tree shapes against the sky.  And I scraped a few lines into the paint with a palette knife, something I didn’t do on the previous painting.

To finish the painting, I started by stabbing in lots of clusters of spots in cadmium yellow, cadmium red and titanium white.  But I wasn’t happy at the end of this as the very bottom of the painting was a bit too light and separate from the shape above it.  So I decided to put the hilly shape along the bottom and then stabbed in some spotty, opaque clusters.  I really should have painted in the foreground hill first and then decided whether the opaques were to be applied to the foreground or the middleground.  It doesn’t really make sense with them in both places.

And once this was all done and the masking fluid removed, it was time to judge the painting.  The things I like are the sharp knife edges on the viridian shapes at the top.  And how some of those white spots in the middleground could be interpreted as people carrying lights?  I’m struggling to be honest.  And there are lots of bad points: the blue being too vivid, the front hill being a funny shape, similarly sized dots  in the foreground and middleground, the reds and yellows in the middleground outlining a giant triangle that’s too symmetrical and central.

No, it’s a failure this one.  It’s not going up for sale.

The name for this one is another Algernon Blackwood short story.  I’m wondering whether a pattern’s developing where the better an abstract landscape is, the more likely it is to be named after a Hendrix track than a Blackwood short story.