Reflections

 Rennies Mill River in summer

7 x 9   acrylics

Rennies Mill River winds its way through the city of St. John's and became one of the rivers that I have been tracing and recording last summer and producing a small series around.

This more intimate view is a combination of life studies and photographs, capturing the fast flow of this shallow section.  Shimmers of copper and gold reflect off rocks in the river bed and the values changes subtly and dramatically as the water moves around larger rocks or turns in the river.  The hot summer sun makes a glaring reflection in the centre of the river as the water breaks it up and sends off ripples of light.

Studying reflections and how they are created is very helpful to the painting process. When you understand why something looks as it does, it becomes easier to work out how to recreate it on canvas. Wikipedia's section on reflections is a good starting point.

Reflections of sunlight in moving water are seen beautifully in this short video clip.

Water studies

While I have several projects on the go at once, there are several water-related ones that keep jumping into my head and insisting that I make some inroads on them.

Reflections on water is the predominant image that calls me and I've done a couple of studies in preparation of larger pieces.  I'm a firm believer in doing studies that let me work out most of my mistakes before I translate them onto a large canvas.

The first is a simple water pattern in late evening on a local pond.  Its not complete in terms of light but enough information is there to make it recognizable for what it is.  This is done on in oils on a 6 x 12 gallery canvas that I reclaimed from another start that didn't go as planned.

The second piece is strong reflections on the surface of slowly moving water. The distorted shapes create an abstract pattern and lots of negative shapes to work from.  Its a bit of a puzzle to paint but a little concentration helps as well as the small size of just 6 x 6 in acrylics.  I wanted to ensure that I would like to do this before I went larger with this one.   I drew this up on a 20 x 20 canvas and will work on it as and when I can.

Mission Trails, California

detail from larger work

Katherine and I are taking part in an exhibtion in California in November with friends - details later.

At the end of this post is a slide show of the work I've done - there are 5 paintings, with close up details following.

The work is based around Mission Trails Park in California. I needed to work around how I was going to tackle painting an area that is so different from the usual land and seascapes I paint here, in a very different climate. Needless to say it ended up involving water :>) Unusually for me, I was working on painting a place I don't know personally - a friend had provided photos and I used Google streetview, which was really useful for getting a feel for the area and did lots of research. Still, it was difficult. I usually work plein air and learn the feeling of a place as I sketch.

I started with the coloured pencil drawing of a still pool, reflecting the trees behind, the dry landscape very different from England - but the rocks and trees and reflections all interested me. I was trying to get to grips with the landscape there, the aridity, the rockiness, the mood.

As I thought about it, I realised that I wanted to abstract the images a little, play with texture, time, and shape and colour, experiment and include collage. All the works except for that first one are mixed media, using whatever was going to make the kind of mark I wanted. The joy of collage is the ability to move elements around to work out the composition before finally sticking down.

This is the final version that the above detail is taken from


It went through several incarnations on its way and further work with scissors as it became rather overcrowded and needed room to breathe :>) I would have liked to have given it even more room but had to work to a specific size - 11x14 inches so that it would fit the frames at its destination.

Each tree is a separate piece of paper, with watercolour, monoprinting and drawing to create the bark. The background is also collaged and then painted and drawn into.

Each was pure experiment with only a loose idea of the final result, responding to the marks, moving the trees and background pieces around until I felt they could be fixed.

There is watercolour in there, coloured pencils, ink, acrylic, gouache, biro (ballpen) and charcoal pencil - maybe other things that I've now forgotten!

The dark background helped with the fragmentation of the image, the changes in time/viewpoint and linked to the black of the charcoal and biro. It isn't of a specific place but plays with a mix of elements from many sources and imagination.

The colours play with warm and cool neutrals against the blue of the sky and reflections - the touches of warm apricot tones glowing against the blue (I hope!).

The 'some, a little and a lot' guideline applies - with most of the painting in neutrals, the blue and purple becomes more important.


If I'd had Sarah's instructions on varnishing watercolours in time I would have tried it out on this one - I think it would work best without glass.

you can see earlier versions here

Towards Dusk

This one again plays with the idea of time and fragmenting the image. Daylight moves into dusk.

What do you think?

work in progress, Vivien

Above and below: details from an experimental collage/mixed media development from tree sketches. Vivien

I'm experimenting with collage and mixed media to develop the recent images of trees (and of course water!)

The trees are done separately and stuck down with spray glue so that they don't become wet or stained with adhesive. I've played with marks - running paint wet-in-wet, splattering, drawing into wet paint with the wooden end of the brush, adding the occasonal bit of coloured pencil or watercolour pencil and keeping everything loose and abstracted.

There is a 'frame' around the central section, made up from trees at each side and tops of trees at the top - at the bottom the rocks create weight to balance these. The 'frame' is a deliberately disjointed, with elements that cross into it but a clear break elsewhere. (see link to whole image and further close ups below)

The pool with its reflections is worked loosely on yet another piece of paper that is collaged in.

Most of it is done in watercolour with different papers - white, cream and pale browns worked over in the various media. There is also coloured pencil, ink and a small touch of buff titanium acrylic in the final touches here and there.

(That's a colour I find really useful, particularly for doing the edges of canvasses - no mixing to match the colour for second coats)

click here to see the complete image in progress and further close ups.

Click on the above image for further work on trees

Feedback/crit/comments very welcome :>)

Nameless Pond

Nameless Pond

5 x 7 oils

I've been sick all weekend and haven't ventured out much except for some air on Saturday. I have also been looking for inspiration that hasn't come my way lately either and figured I'd wander around the property to see if something jumped out at me. (not literally!)

I live on 16 acres of land, so its possible for me to wander fairly far and see a lot of different landscape from ocean to meadow to woods to stream. There is also a pond on the property that the ducks use as a swimming hole in the summer. Right now there is only BD and Buddy, the Muscovy ducks left along with a few mixed breed ducks who were recently attacked by a mink. No more ducks or chickens for awhile, its too heartbreaking when mink get into the barn - and they always do.

The pond is just clear of ice and the water is pristine in it so you can see to the bottom and watch little trout dart back and forth from the safety of the brush at the sides. With all the snow and rain runoff, there was a lot of water flowing into the pond and out in a little stream into the bog in the meadow next to it. The waterlogged meadow is filled with hundreds of blue flag irises in July, both there and on the other side of the road as far as the eye can see.

The pond hasn't got a name as its not big enough to be mapped, however it is a source of interest for me in terms of water, tenants and seasonal changes. I decided to try a study of the pond in its current state. Rippled slightly by the spring breeze with water flowing out into a stream of its own making, it is searching for its path to the sea. The source of this water is the same water table that supplies my own drinking water. There are no municipal services here as I am far off the beaten track, so I have a dug well and a septic system. I am so used to drinking this water that I can taste the difference in any other.

Some glimpses at works in (slow) progress

I've never posted images of unfinished paintings and I have some qualms about doing it. I have my own concept of the 'skin' of a painting---and until I have achieved that skin, a cohesive visual and tactile surface, I don't show my work. 

Still, the paintings I'm working on now are telling ME what they want and they are taking their sweet time doing so!

 I keep regular studio hours every day. I'd anticipated being finished with these long ago. But this process has been fascinating--- and that is why I'm letting myself give you a midcourse report.

 Besides, I'm going to Santa Barbara, California tomorrow for a five-day business trip, so there'll be a pause in painting. And maybe that'll be a good thing, though it means more delay in finishing.

I've relearned two contradictory lessons:

Lesson one: Don't pick a painting subject that presents tasks you're not interested in! Here, it's the inclusion of strict geometry in objects. It's one thing to pick a subject for sketching that isn't intrinsically interesting to you--a sketch is not a big time commitment. In this case, I fell in love with the cloud reflections in a swimming pool in Texas, and the way a pair of butterfly chairs there, also reflected in the water, seemed to float in space.  I decided to paint the scene, without analyzing the pictoral problems inherent in it. I need to always keep in mind what it is that engages me as a painter--- illusionistic representation of objects and space is not it. Oops.

Lesson two: Be receptive to new experience and accept that the honing of paintings skills of all kinds is useful---and fun. So, I'm enjoying this self-imposed task---when I'm not throwing things at it;D. Here are the two things I'm working on, seen in the context of my studio.

I've enjoyed the Iceland rock and water paintings the most of all the water paintings I've done so far. To try to convey the energy and shapes of rushing water is thrilling, allowing for a level of abstraction that I find very challenging to define and produce.  The one on the left is the one I'm now working on. The one on the right is my favorite of this series so far, because it combines abstraction with energy and it has a good skin! The one on the left is less abstract. Not sure where it'll end up, but we'll find out!

Here's a detail of the pool painting. I am so eager to start my colorful, nongeometric, calligraphic koi paintings, but I want to finish these first. They're worth completing.

Cloudscape - Willow Pond

Cloudscape - Willow Pond

coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

My Ecology Park Pond series continues. I've been trying to get to grips with clouds lately and can now understand why so many of Monet's later paintings in the water garden at Giverny involved an awful lot of looking into water - and reflections and the deep dark depths of the pond.

The thing is drawing clouds in water isn't like drawing clouds in skies. The ones in the skies don't butt up against deep pools with weed underneath. Plus the trees which touch the skies don't have ripples in them.

Then there's the whole thing about getting water to look like water.

Plus avoiding your clouds from beginning to look just plain grubby!

If all else fails you can always turn the drawing upside down to check it out and whether it works. The problem is it sometimes looks better upside down!

Cloudscape - upside down!

Sketch, print, draw... and repeat...

I've been moving between drawing and printmaking back and forth rather frequently since I first sketched the pond reflections. While I find it difficult to prepare linocuts meticulously, I nonetheless find moving between different media is helping me clarify composition, marks and value.

It is something that always intrigued me since I saw Otto Mueller's and other members of the Bruecke's woodcuts done on site in 1910s Dresden - the angular shapes of his, Schmidt-Rotluff and other's figures fascinated me, and once I had realised that part of their painting form was so strongly influenced by their woodcutting practice, I was curious to examine more closely how one medium's specific qualities and limitations can inform another medium and vice versa.

A page from my printmaking notebook.

I was compiling the material for the printmaking course I'm doing, and realised that I had done precisely that - not with nudes on the lakes in the surroundings of Dresden, but with the two scenes of pond reflections.

Pond reflections in Colour,
Soft pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

While the linocuts were done soon after the original plein air sketches [see my earlier post on one of them here], I then went back to delve a bit more into Wolf Kahn's Colorist palette and work with pastel, my favourite medium, in a different way: to draw rather than paint with the pastel sticks and to work on white paper (both things I had 'left behind' rather quickly when I stumbled into working with soft pastels).

Trees on Water, Monotype 2
20x15cm, Tosa Shi paper

From these pastel drawings I went back to printmaking - not relief cuts this time but monotypes in colour and monochrome. In colour first, using some of Kahn's favourite hues (notably cadmiums and ultramarine), and then to try monochromatic prints with a lot of wiping away, adding again,... to develop the composition further and see what abstractions it may yield.

Trees on Water, Monotype 4
20x15 cm, Tosa Shi paper

I am now going back to the next relief print - it's a different scene: there's no water in there, unfortunately, but have a look here for the first round of sketches and monotypes.

If you want to read up on my exploration of Kahn's palette and drawing marks: this tag assembles my blog's posts on Kahn.

The waterways project so far

The waterways project so far ........

As the weather gets warmer (my arthritis doesn't like this cold :>( ) I want to get a lot more work done on this project. It was always intended to be a slow burn project but it's a little too slow burn at the moment!

The beautiful huge willows that overhang the water in the charcoal sketch of the 15C packhorse bridge are now the sad pollarded stumps of the lino prints and pastel. Though interesting to draw, the landscape is poorer for their loss. I know they will grow again but it will be a long time before they regain their beauty.

So far I've only looked at Aylestone Meadows, the canal marina at Market Harborough and countryside nearby and the city centre with its old factories and weirs.

I've looked at aerial views thanks to mapslive.com and I'm interested in taking them further at some stage. They show you the context - how the bridges and rivers, canals and streams relate to each other.

In the Charnwood Forest area are old slate quarries, now flooded and surrounded by trees that I want to look at soon. Rocks and depth and craginess - something quite different from the tranquil canal.

update: link to oldest fossil found in that area in really ancient rock

So many things I want to do - I just need the time.

artists books

I fell for this leather bound sketchbook with hand made paper inside, and scruffy deckle edges - it just looked so appealing - I was hunting for Christmas presents for others at the time but who could resist it? :>D

I love it and rather than use it as a sketchbook I plan to make it an artists book - with finished pieces rather than a my normal sketchbook mix of anything and everything. It's 7x5 inches and I found it on ebay uk if anyone fancies one.

That little leather thong winds round and effortlessly catches against the stitching, holding the book closed and protecting the pages with that wrap around flap :>)


The first page in a book is always slightly daunting and I decided to experment with a lino I'd cut.

I hadn't got the proper inks handy to try it out. I suspect they will be dried out anyway, it's so long since I used them.

So, I painted some luscious pearlescent lavender acrylic ink over the lino printing block and printed quickly - it was fairly successful. The larger areas didn't have a consistent coverage but it printed quite a lot of it.

I then worked on it with pastel pencils, biro and gel pens.

The lino was stylised and quite graphic - you can see it on my blog here. Working into it created something different. I love that pearlescent acrylic ink - one of my Christmas presents :>)

This is going to be an ongoing project, adding small paintings to it regularly on a water theme.

________________________________________________

UPDATE: As a result of the comments on this post, I've now created two posts on my blog which are about lino printing and how this lino print was produced.

• Linoprinting - with a bit of virtual linoprinting ... details the process for producing this print
• linoprinting 2 highlights some excellent and useful comments -with some very useful tips - from the first post.
  

The bull's hollow

One of the few ponds around where I grew up is really a rather small lochan - a little loch, if I stick with Scottish terminology.

It's the bull's hollow, a depression where a peaty bog developed along a small area of open water. It's in the middle of forests, woodlands, a bit of moorland and heathland, and like so many other landmarks it has a story, which I told a couple of weeks back in my blog [see here for the story].

In any case: it was one of our first destinations for an afternoon walk, and while the rest of my family continued walking, I stayed back and after a few sketches in the moleskine (some of which I posted in my blog here), I did these two pastel sketches, trying to capture the stillness of the water surface. It was so still and so clear you couldn't really tell what was the reflection and what the actual tree.

Water reflections #2,
pastel on board, 25x35cm


Water reflections #1
pastel on board, 35x25cm

And as a belated add-on: here are some photos from the day:

ONE BEACH .... AND TIME 2

This post showed you photographs of this beach through various times, tides, weather and lights - here are just a few of the sketches and paintings done in response to this - many plein air, others are large works on canvas 40ins+ and tiny aceo's done from sketches and memories. I like to work in a wide variety of sizes.

There have been several ongoing discussions here that are really relevant to this series - we've been talking about looking at the same place again and again through different light and seasons - and that is something that really interests me and that I often do - though not to the extent of visiting daily, more in bursts of lots of works over a whole day as the light changes by the hour (or minute with our weather!) on multiple occasions.

This series is about precisely that - the fantastic changes in colour, light, mood, what can be seen clearly and what is lost in shadow, vivid or dark, sunny or cold and breezy, the tide ebbing and flowing leaving pools and streams of glistening water, reflections and wet sand, sunsets, rainstorms. rainbows, wind, wild surf, calm days, blue skies and turquoise seas, silver or green or indigo seas - always different. Unfortunately this is 360+ miles away from me so I can't get there as often as I'd like :>( to do more plein air work there through the winter storms - which are spectacular down there and I would love to get down and paint :>) - so often I find 'bad' weather the most interesting to paint.

For anyone interested in colour, a sense of place, or the mood of a place on a given day, plein air sketching, revisiting a well loved spot regularly and observing the changes is essential. You learn so much and notice more and more. You see colours the camera can't catch. You see fleeting effects of light and colour that you try to fix in your visual memory. You feel the wind or the sun and hear the sea and the birds, which all adds to your memories for future paintings.

In the morning light the far cliff was brightly lit but by afternoon it became almost a silhouette with details hard to make out, backlit by the sun as it went lower in the sky, finally setting over the sea - sometimes in a vivid blaze of colour, other times in subtle silvers and muted colours.

Some people like to work with a limited palette. I find that within a painting I limit my palette but each painting requires different colours in the mixes to catch those fascinating changes. I like to have quite a variety of blues, reds and yellows and then colours like viridian, magenta, permanent rose and a range of colours that only get used occasionally but are perfect when needed, I always mix colours and rarely use them straight from tube or pan but within that mix need a specific blue for instance. So that means I have a wide range of colours to choose from.

Gesa has developed an interest in nocturnes and this is something that fascinates me as well and I've been working on a series, some are in the slide show above, I became really interested in the light on the beach at night and how very bright and light the reflections could be and the beautiful light in the sky just after the sun set as well as sunset itself.

I'm planning to continue this series from the sketches I have but will also think about a local area of water - maybe the local canal - where I can visit regularly at different times, catching the light and reflections and changes with the seasons.

If I think of somewhere local that will interest me enough to constantly revisit, I'll work in a variety of media - it may be that I base it on the canal at Aylestone, here, where there is a medieval packhorse bridge

- so - to stick to the same viewpoint on every visit?

which viewpoint?

or to simply look at a small area around there from whatever viewpoint appeals on the day?

I think it should certainly revisit the same viewpoint frequently, to investigate those fascinating changes in light and colour. Being me, I'm bound to end up loking at other views in the areas as well so I may as well be realistic and weave this mini project into the larger, slow burning (very slow at the moment - as in completely stalled!), waterways project on our local waterways.

I have to think about it. What do you think?

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.

Studying lines and squiggles

Kew Watermarks #1 - a study
coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I've always liked the sort of squiggly lines you get with reflections of straight lines in water which has air movement across its surface.

I started the above drawing about two years ago after a visit to the Kew Gardens. I found some water which was obviously designed to pick up reflections from the glass house - which it did beautifully - and I was transfixed. It became almost meditative to watch how they changed with very slight changes in the airflow across the otherwise still water.

I tried to do a picture afterwards but couldn't get anywhere with it.

After nine days of watching eight other people talk about water and show me water I picked up my pencils yesterday and finished it. I'm calling it a study as I want do more and to try and improve it!

Maybe in pastels?