After three days off watching the chess at the FIDE Candidates, I was back in…
Red House
Today’s one of those weird days of the year. The day before my birthday. Who knows what sort of art gear or art books will appear tomorrow? Whatever does, tomorrow will be the start of something new, making today a bit of an anticlimax and a day when I’m always going to be short of inspiration. But I needed to be painting after a fairly long break from the watercolours. I searched through a list of Hendrix tracks and a list of Blackwood short stories, looking for potential names of paintings but without any luck. Instead I searched through my pile of painting ideas, I found a black and white photo that Olly Crook had put up on Facebook of a hilltop covered in trees and surrounded by fog with another hilltop faintly showing through the fog in the background. It was the sort of photo that I could look at and put away before heading outside to paint an imaginary landscape without having a photo reference close to hand.
The plan was to do this painting using just three colours. I picked a cool blue, Mayan blue genuine, because my warm blue, French ultramarine, had recently been doing a lot of heavy lifting. I went for Indian yellow for similar reasons. Following the same logic, I might have been expected to choose a warm red but I didn’t to be working in an orange key, so picked quinacridone magenta yet again to to end up in the key of triadic left. Hematite violet genuine, cobalt blue, titanium white and cadmium red all ended up playing a part later though.
For a while, everything went according to plan. The sky worked well. So did the tree lined hill top, with trees tending to be yellow on the left, blue on the right and a green mixture in the middle with a bit of red thrown in here and there to hold the greens back a bit. And the red and blue hills on the right came out well too. The Mayan blue adds granulation; to both the hills and the sky. Definitely a good thing as far as the hills are concerned. Debatable for the sky but not necessarily wrong.
Where things started to go wrong was the foreground, which was supposed to be fog and which I hoped to be similarly valued to the sky. But my first attempt was too dark and, after that, I made a long series of failed attempts to rescue it. I tried glazing over with a mix of cobalt blue and titanium white (a recommendation by Zoltan Szabo) but this didn’t work. I tried the same thing but dropping some red, blue and yellow into the foggy glaze but that didn’t work. I tried adding hematite violet genuine to the mix but that didn’t work. I tried my three primaries with hematite violet genuine but that didn’t work. And with all these tries and with my original wash, I threw on loads of water and tried to remove the paint with kitchen paper but that didn’t work.
In the end I gave up and ended up with what you see here. A textured, purple hillside that looks like a dead, post nuclear landscape. I added some birds just to get some life in there and then a house with a (cadmium) red roof just so I could name this one after a Hendrix track. Maybe I also needed to add some red, white and yellow opaque spatters but they wouldn’t have been enough to rescue this one. I’ll quietly put this one to one side and chill out for the afternoon, psyching myself up for my birthday.
Leave a Reply