One more painting I want you to look at

Here is another picture that has been on my mind recently. It’s Sir Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-27, Tate Britain).

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=13675&tabview=image

Sir Stanley Spencer is really three painters wrapped into one—a religious with a gentle, sweet view of “the resurrection and the life,” a superlative landscape painter, and a sexually tortured, brutally honest figure painter.

In April I visited the Church of St. Martin in Canterbury, which is England’s oldest parish church in continuous use, founded as the private chapel of Queen Bertha of Kent in the sixth century. As you can imagine, its graveyard is crowded.

I attended a funeral of a sweet eight-year old boy on Saturday in an old burial ground in rural New York. It doesn’t look that different from the churchyards at St. Martin’s or Cookham. What a comfort to imagine Tyler’s resurrection just as Sir Stanley Spencer saw it.

Talking about paintings in class

We are currently analyzing paintings in class. This week, Gwendolyn brought Franz Marc’s “The Yellow Cow,” 1911, Guggenheim—NYC.


Franz Marc, Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh), 1911. Oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, NY.(http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_98_5.html)

Franz Marc is hard for me to peg. On the one hand his painting clearly evokes the anxiety of Europe at the beginning of a century of world war (the artist died on the battlefield in March, 1916, near Verdun-sur-Meuse, France). On the other hand, there is something Chagall-like in his delight in these animals, which is very appealing.

Opinion in class on Marc’s cow was decidedly mixed. While some responded positively to the color, others found the palette and angular cubism disturbing.

Marilyn brought J.E.H. MacDonald’s “The Tangled Garden,” 1915, National Gallery of Canada—Ottawa.



The Tangled Garden, 1915, Oil on Cardboard, National Gallery of Canada—Ottawa) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JEH_MacDonald_-_Tangled_Garden.jpg#filelinks)

“The Tangled Garden” shares some traits with impressionism, in its color handling, wet-on-wet painting, and rich impasto. (The delightful color shifts are not as apparent in this high-contrast reproduction.) However, it is a very carefully drawn and mapped painting, and MacDonald makes no attempt to mask his draftsmanship.

J.E.H. MacDonald is one of Canada’s Group of Seven painters. We share a lot of landscape features with the Great White North so I think it will be interesting over the next weeks to consider more work by the Group of Seven painters and their associates. (See McMichael Canadian Art Collection and National Gallery of Canada for more information on the Group of Seven.)

From 99 º F to 65 º in two days

At Rochester, the shore of Lake Ontario is flat and covered with fine cobblestones. The shoreline is very even. It is hard to break up the strong horizontal and diagonal lines, except by putting in the dark overhanging trees.

What the lake lacks in architecture it makes up for with incredible light and color. On a windy day, the water shifts from violet to emerald as cloud shadows fly across its surface.

It was 65 º F when we got there with steadily strengthening winds. By noon, the wind was so strong, there were whitecaps on the lake and my hat had blown away. Of course, this fellow was happy…

I start with a crude sketch in Transparent Earth Orange (Gamblin’s transparent version of Burnt Sienna). My first pass is a very static composition, since I’ve divided the canvas into three equal spaces with two well-balanced lumps in the foreground.


I move the horizon line up gradually. I’d wanted clouds racing across the sky but realize you can’t have it all. I hope to break the bottom diagonal with little hummocks of plants along the shore.

The horizon moves even higher and only the clouds distant over Ontario remain. In truth, the only darks are in the foliage on the shore but I don’t want to weight the bottom of my painting so much. The shadow color on the water ranges from tints of ultramarine to quinacridone violet, depending on when you look. The green ranges from yellowish to emerald green.

My first pass is mainly to establish darks. Often the highest chroma in Lake Ontario is at the horizon line and the color of the water becomes less saturated the nearer you are to it. (This is the opposite of most long views, where the color becomes lower key the farther away you look.)

Next I establish an overall color scheme. I like this little sketch at this point, but I am concentrating so much on the water lighting that I don’t notice I’m “regularizing” the shapes in the foreground. The mind wants so much to balance things, but that same symmetry will dissatisfy me farther on. (The lump on the left is a young box elder and the wind at this point was bending it nearly double.)

I need to set the diagonals of the breakers, which appear to change angle as you scan the shore because they are rolling in from the west (over my left shoulder). Although the angle changes, the waves break at about the same distance from the shore no matter what direction you are looking.

I begin to consider the interstices between the breakers and develop the foliage in the front. Unfortunately, my painting pal has to leave, so we call it a day.

My biggest issue with this painting is to make the foreground shapes more interesting. I also want to refine the waves. But again, I want to do this on location, rather than in studio.

Painting on top of a ridge

This study is about half finished. It was done on a ridge above Naples, NY (in the Finger Lakes region). Since I don’t want to work from photos, I will go back next week.

The thermometer read 99º F; later we found out that was as high as it would go. The photo was taken at the end of our painting session and the light was then much bluer. The mountains were a more complex color earlier in the day.

My goals for next week are to refine the drawing/painting of the tree line and the fields in the foreground. There is an unfortunate confluence of line where the tree meets the valley—I need to resolve that too. My painting is a little cramped horizontally, but I won’t try to fix that on this draft; instead I’ll paint it again.

Here is the view from the top of the ridge.

One more time with feeling--Tilt-a-Whirl

My last attempt at blogging was so difficult it scared me away. But here I am, back for more.

This was done last Saturday at Seabreeze Amusement Park in Rochester. It was painted from about 30 feet away. The figures are imaginary because the cars were whirling too fast to see people. I loved the odd pulsating thing on the right which rises up and down like a sea monster. The canvas and lighted bulb actually conceal the mechanical arms of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The best I could hope for in the chaos of an amusement park was a straight rendering of what was happening. I finished at dusk so was able to suggest the lights coming on.

I realize after the fact that most people hold themselves very rigid as the Tilt-a-Whirl spins. My figures are too relaxed.