Spot relationships

If you’ve purchased Charles Hawthorne’s book “Hawthorne on Painting”, you might want to do what my friend Suhita is thinking of doing, which is to take one of Hawthorne’s ideas at a time and work with that. I tried that today. In the introduction of the Landscape chapter, I read this: If you will only put a spot of color in the right relation to other spots, you will see how little drawing it takes to make form. Let color make form, do not make form and color it. Work with your color as if you were creating mass — like a sculptor with his clay. Interest yourself in the relation of one color to another — in this way your color rather than drawing creates form. The value rather than the drawing make a boat stay behind the piles of a wharf.

With that in mind I went out in search of a nondescript place to paint, nothing too pretty or picturesque (which is easy to find when there’s no snow in January in Montreal) and with no central structure (like a house) in the middle of the scene. Just a bunch of light and dark stuff. I did a bit of pencil drawing to set up the placement of elements on the page, and then with a limited palette of Raw Umber, Cerulean Blue, Organic Vermilion and a touch of Quin Gold, I tried to paint the relationship of shapes, one next to another. Near the end of the sketch, I dipped into some Phthalo Blue because I couldn’t get the darks dark enough to make the wires and the outside staircase. It’s not a great sketch, but it’s a really interesting process and I encourage you to try it next time you go out. Every time you put your brush down, ask yourself a question about what is next to the shape you are painting. How dark is the pole against the sky (very dark) or the pole against the trees (almost the same)? It’s a great exercise in looking. And keep this final quote from Hawthorne in mind: When you go out to paint and things mean only spots of color to you, you have your painter’s eye with you.

Studio still life and sketching materials

There’s nothing more dismal than rain in winter, at least in Montreal. I’d much rather have snow to paint than the big piles of grey slush that are outside my window now. With that in mind I decided today would be a good day to clean up my studio (but not before a bit of sketching) and also create a page with a list of the supplies I use when I go out to draw and paint. I’ve been wanting to create this for some time, and now that it’s a separate section on my blog, I’ll be able to update it as often as I change the colours on my palette. Have a look at the new page here.

Sunrise

If my dog could talk she would tell you that her morning walk was somewhat delayed. When I looked out my window at the sun coming up through the trees, I put off the walk for 30 minutes so I could sketch this scene. It was mostly done with a 1″ flat which is a pretty big brush for an 8″ x 8″ sheet, but I wanted to capture the big shapes of warm and cool light on the snow and houses. There was some morning fog and I vaguely remember the weatherman mentioning a smog warning too, hence the muted tones. My pigments are all on the light side: Cerulean Blue, Hansa Yellow Medium, Pyrrol Orange and Burnt Sienna. Maybe a little Alizarin Crimson in the tree. And if the dog could talk she would tell you that she eventually got her walk.

A day of starts

My references to the Charles Hawthorne book may get tedious, I warn you, but there is much to learn. Here is one that is relevant to my day. “Do studies, not pictures. Be alive. Stop when your interest is lost. Put off finish as it takes a lifetime — wait until later to try to finish things —make a lot of starts.” That was me today — a lot of starts. Four to be precise. Two in my car, on location (both disasters) and two in my studio, of this same scene at MacDonald Farm. Fortunately I had the time to keep at it today, which doesn’t happen that often. Painted on Arches paper, 15″ x 7″.

A little gem

On the first page of a book I read this: We must teach ourselves to see the beauty of the ugly, to see the beauty of the commonplace. It is so much greater to make much out of little than to make little out of much — better to make a big thing out of a little subject than to make a little thing out of a big one. In every town the one ugliest spot is the railroad station, and yet there is beauty there for anyone who can see it. Don’t strain for a grand subject — anything is painter’s fodder.

This is my kind of book. When I was in Boston a few weeks ago I found it on a rack in an art store. “Hawthorne on Painting” is a tiny book  — first published in 1938 and only 91 pages long — but it’s a gem. It’s a compilation of quotes collected by the students of Charles W. Hawthorne, who founded and taught at the Cape Cod School of Art for 31 years. There are sections on landscape, still life, watercolour and working from the model, with a little intro to each. Open any page and read one of the quotes. I guarantee something will ring true for you. For me, it’s like going back over the notes I made while listening to the critiques of my first painting teacher Edgar A. Whitney. Maybe you’ve already heard about this book, or read it, but it’s never been on my radar. I think I will be reading it slowly. There is much to think about here.

Family

There’s not much that I can say about today’s sketch. This scene put a smile on my face, and I hope it will do the same for you.

Aviation museum

There’s more to this building than meets the eye. It houses the Canadian Aviation Heritage Centre, but from the outside you might not know the treasures that are displayed inside. “The Old Stone Barn” is part of MacDonald Farm and I’ve painted it many times, from many different angles. As often happens, I’m never there at the right time to visit the Centre, but it sounds intriguing (art gallery, memorabilia, artifacts of both civil and military aircraft). I had originally hoped to paint a watercolour on site today but the snow was coming down heavily and with no plows in sight I feared getting stranded on the farm, so I sketched instead.

Happy new year!

A few things I’m happy to have found in 2015:

Fluid watercolour blocks
New triads like this one (Cerulean Blue, Quin Gold, Pyrrol Orange)
A platinum carbon pen
Pentallic sketchbooks
Da Vinci Casaneo brushes
And lastly — the time to sketch

I hope you have the best possible start to the new year, and a productive 2016 with lots of learning and discovery!

New view

During my absence over Christmas there was apparently a huge wind storm. I know this because the neighbour’s fence fell down, and in the process it offered me a new view for my wheelbarrow sketches. The neighbour didn’t have time to fix the fence before the snow storm hit us today, so those sections may very well remain under the snow for months. The white stuff is still falling and we may end up with 35 cm. before it’s all over tonight, so I sketched from my kitchen window today. With cars sliding all over the roads and ending up in ditches, it was no day to be out sketching in my car studio.

Sketched in a Handbook Journal Watercolour book, 9″ x 12″. Falling snow added by flicking white acrylic paint from a dry toothbrush.

Driving south

I love painting the changing panorama on a long highway drive, which in today’s sketch is the road through central Vermont. The cloud cover was low when I started and by the time I was done, we were in complete fog. The view is different with every bend in the road, so I begin by drawing a few lines with a pencil. As I start to paint the shapes of the mountains shift, but the colours and the clouds are basically the same. A green patch here, some rusty pines over there. A basic structure and then a little bit of improv. The only constant: the road in front and the heavy clouds overhead.