Being totally burnt out with river drawings and paintings after 4-5 months of lockdown where I kept it local, I went back to the trees…the Dead Tree series. I did try different angles and perspectives of the river, as you’ll see in a future post, but there is only so much you can do of a single subject before extreme boredom and irritation kicks in after many months. I am jumping forward slightly, I have a backlog of river pieces to post and want to break things up, but you will see them eventually peter out. Change is afoot!
I currently have banned myself from working at the river, it’s gotten that bad. I think even my art teachers who bemoaned our lack of interest in a homework subject with homilies about using our imagination would have struggled with months of the same grind, same locale, same shit, different day.
So the first port of call was trusty Richmond Park, and this etchr pad watercolour and Kaweco Sport drawing was created on the same day I painted the bog garden. Much more detailed than my recent watercolours, especially for A5, I had to paint this angle as like the time below I forgot to wear long trousers so could not venture into the ferns. Deer ticks are rife. I love the Ultramarine granulation in this – still Rembrandt but I have since gone back to Winsor and Newton’s French Ultramarine.
I am still loving the etchr pads, I am doing some of my best work which is galling when people want to buy it. I’d rather not rip out sheets or separate panoramas – and indeed there is work on the other side I’d rather not lose. I have tried to do more single sheet work as well, but frankly quite often the magic isn’t there. Although the next one is a single sheet, and works well:
The other thing that has changed is my use of pens and ink. I read an interview with Brian Ramsey about what he uses as an artist working in ink. This is where I got the tip about the Kaweco Sport – now my default fountain pen – and the Pentel Parallel Pens. I’ve written about both here, but around the time of my trip to Coventry – more about that in future post – I got the rest of the sizes – 1.5-6mm, and some brown, sap green and bright green Rohrer & Klingner Sketchinks, to join the blue and black I use in my blue/black mix.
You can see the inks used here in washes, the pens sadly didn’t arrive before my trip. But the reduced colour range has become part of my process since, for I felt I was covering up a multitude of sins with my use of bright colour. I have an ambivalent feeling about colour, quite often I feel that I can’t get the exact shade and many non-cotton pieces have been destroyed by overwork or rework and the paper just disintegrates. Probably why the etchr pieces work better, they can take that abuse! So taking colour partly or mostly out of the mix really helps focus on tonality for me.
Hence this dead tree in Richmond Park – near the King’s Clump in fact – was created with fluid lines with my 3mm Blue Black Parallel pen, then washes of coloured ink, layering the brown with the blue to get darker shades. I have since created landscapes just using those four – well five to be exact – colours and apart from a lack of reds/yellows it works well. This drawing shows both my Van Gogh, Samuel Palmer and yes, Graham Sutherland influences….even though I have scoffed at his drab palette, I can see why it’s liberating to just have a few colours. Less is more.
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