Painting and Playing God

Here is the second in my meditation triptych series.  This one uses a detail view of the rocks that I was sitting on, made of serpentine.  Beautiful rich red coloured rock shot through with creamy white veins and patches of green.  It is lovely to look at and I have convinced myself that it colours the sand, I can see pinkish hues in the sand, I know I can!
The time of day for this painting is late afternoon, it is winter, the light is low and rain is coming.  There is a slightly ominous colour to the sky, the rain did come later in quite a big storm too so perhaps that accounts for the strange light.


This is the watercolour sketch for the larger painting.  The sketches in the earlier post, "Training Session", are for this painting also.  I find that by doing these I can calm my senses down and think about colours, tones, effects of light and what is happening in the picture.  Also what I want to happen in the picture, after all, by the time a sketch makes it to become a finished painting, destined for the framers and then the gallery wall, you the artist, are most defiantly the boss.  You can twist light, move mountains if necessary, smooth a cliff or ruffle up a forest.  It is your world, you get to decide what you want to show, to hide or to underline.  

Ah ha!  I have just worked out why I have spent my life being an artist.  I am very bossy, didn't get to be God so became the next best thing, an artist.

Painting Journey

I am taking a little trip, you can come too, it is the journey of a painting.  Off we go, across the fields, through the woods, past the village to the ferry, across the water, along the coast to Grebe rock.  

It sounds like a long journey but it isn't, just a couple of miles.

I have with me my dog and my sketching gear.  I am revisiting a painting that I did earlier in the year as I am working on a few paintings for the gallery in Falmouth, Beside The Wave. 

 It is a great spot, you can sit on the cliff and look down through the trees at the water.

First of all I have a cup of coffee, then I sit a while and really listen and look before making a watercolour and pen sketch.  

First I paint the water, looking at how the light is showing the way of the wind.  Next I am using a big permanent marker pen for the trunks, I want to get the feeling of them, big and solid masses.  I use a smaller pen for the scribbles of tiny branches

Then I write a few words down in another note book, it is just to fix things that I have noticed and want to remember for the painting.After that I head home to begin work on the painting.

Once home, the first thing to do is to make a working drawing. 

 I use scraps of coloured pastel paper and black and white conte crayons to make rapid sketches.  This helps me to decide on the composition, the direction of lines and generally to think through the painting.

This is then drawn onto a gessoed board and painted.  It takes several layers of paint to get the depth of colour that I want.  I use brushes of several sizes, a small pallet knife and some bits of card to paint it... and here it is:

Durgan

Oil on board.

6in x 6in.

ONE BEACH .... AND TIME

Mawgan Porth, Cornwall

Light changes a scene dramatically and is one of my key interests - the particular colours that it creates, the way the sea changes from indigo to lavender to turquoise to jade.

In the mornings the far cliff is bright, lit by the morning sun and shining. Below it the small stream that comes down the Vale of Lanherne (or Mawgan) trickles to the sea, shining and reflecting sky and cliffs.

This is the wild Atlantic coast. The tide ebbs and flows leaving deep pools scoured in the sand, in drifts across the wide beach, with intricate patterns of wriggling ripples between. As these dry out a little the wind across the surface creates a series of neat tiny steps leading down to the waters edge. The beach shelves more steeply than the Norfolk coast and so the tide doesn't go out anywhere near as far and therefore moves a bit slower in and out, giving the surf time to carve deeper. In Norfolk the pools and strands of water are very shallow and dry fast on the almost level surface, the sea is calmer and ebbs rapidly for a mile or more, here water remains until the next tide. Down at the waters edge the waves loom high, the horizon isn't straight but a mass of heaving swells and it's noisy with the waves crashing on sand and rocks.

As the day goes on the far cliff becomes a silhouette with little detail, backlit by the afternoon sun and then with evening the sun sets over the sea in a spectacular variety of colours and clouds.

The colours change constantly, the clouds change, the reflections in the pools change - the tide ebbs and flows. Rain approaches across the sea and I watch the approaching edge cross the cliffs, obscure them and a rainbow moving forward with it appears to end on the beach below, in front of the cliffs, then the rain reaches me and the rainbow is gone and there's just a silvery haze. Nothing remains the same. If only I could paint faster ......

In another post I'll show some of the paintings and sketches done there and studio works from them.