‘In My Trials and My Tribulations’

Crouching Man, Oil on Canvas, 10″ x 14″

To purchase Crouching Man for £225 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline at carolineamyart@gmail.com

Voilà! My first nude! And what better way to start than with a nice, muscular male?

I am very pleased with the result but I have to say, this glazing process is really testing! I’ve mentioned before that there are certain stages of the painting process that I enjoy and certain stages that I don’t. Now that I’ve started layering and glazing, instead of painting alla prima, these stages have become much more pronounced and the feelings associated with them much stronger. I really enjoy the initial stages of creating an oil painting, that is to say getting the basic underpainting finished. There’s a very simple pleasure that comes from shaping forms in monochrome – unhindered by the worries associated with choosing the correct colours, I feel I can really enjoy the simplicity of building and modelling solid shapes using only light and shade. However, simple pleasures are often fleeting – the melting of a creamy chocolate in your mouth or the warm embrace of your evening bath – and the trials and tribulations quickly begin as I move on to paint my first glaze.

The first glaze over an underpainting leaves very little colour on the canvas. The dark areas of the monochrome underpainting often overpower the colour of the glaze meaning that the shaded areas of the underpainting remain a dark grey/green and only a little colour gathers itself in the white areas of the underpainting. It really is quite a disappointing sight. The colour sits there, weakly and pathetically. It stares at me through insipid eyes and tempts me, ‘Go on,’ it whispers, ‘throw me in the bin. You know you want to.’ And really really, I really really really do want to at this point. I’m faced with a dull, watery looking painting and it’s difficult to see how everything is going to end up okay.

Unfortunately, this feeling continues for the first few glazes. I really have to put the painting to one side as each layer dries and ignore it. I have to take it up again, quite dispassionately, and continue as if painting the next layer is simply a necessity, part of a routine. During these early layers I start to accentuate the form of the subject, so the painting does start to take shape. But it’s still far from what I’d hoped it to be. Indeed, at some points I think I’m never going to be able to complete the painting successfully and it crosses my mind several times that perhaps I should just throw it in the bin. At the end of the day, it’s difficult not to get carried away with my expectations, hopes and painterly ambitions.

It’s only when I reach the final two layers that I can start to see how the final painting will look. I can start to visualise the final outcome and start working towards the finished piece with a positive mindset. And, really, it’s only when I’m adding the finishing touches to a painting, bringing out the highlights and deepening the shadows, that I start to really like what I see before me. It’s only at this point that I can begin to judge the quality of the painting. And thankfully, at this point the trials and tribulations end and I’m filled with excitement. Extreme happiness laced with excitement. And after all the work and the doubts, this is more than enough to keep me painting and more than I need to help me enjoy creating art a little more each day.  

N.B. Though not visible in the photograph, the painting above is executed on a 10″ x 14″ canvas with a very dark Prussian Blue background. Please see below for the original grisaille underpainting as discussed in my earlier post Layer Cake.

Pure and Simple

 

Verdaccio Venus, Oil on Canvas, 10″ x 14″

To purchase Verdaccio Venus for £150 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline at carolineamyart@gmail.com

This week I started the glazing process for the grisaille and verdaccio underpaintings I recently posted on my blog. But when it came to glazing the verdaccio underpainting above I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Although when painting an artist is working towards an end product, a ‘finished’ painting, various stages of a painting can be just as aesthetically pleasing as the end product itself. You may have been to an Old Masters exhibition, say, and seen numerous sketches and preparatory drawings alongside the finished masterpieces. And, if you’re like me, you’ll have found those preliminary works and studies just as fascinating and beautiful as the gilt-framed monumental oils themselves. Now it’s this love of some of the preliminary stages of a painting that has led me to leave the Verdaccio Venus just as she is, in all her soft green and simple beauty.

You’ll notice, however, that I’ve recoloured the background using a mix of Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna and Titanium White and thus erased the previous verdaccio background. When first painting this reclining nude I initially painted her onto a coloured ground the same as that which you see before you now. I remember thinking how beautiful the reddish ground looked against the soft green of the figure – red and green are complementary colours and therefore provide stunning effects when placed next to one another. This thought came flooding back when I decided to glaze the Verdaccio Venus and it came back so strongly that I decided it would be a shame to hide this effect in order to produce another coloured nude just like the others I currently have on the go.   

So here you have it, a verdaccio underpainting with a coloured ground beautiful and captivating enough to be considered a finished painting in its own right. And it’s something I see myself doing more of alongside larger coloured works, because at the end of the day pure and simple can often result in pure beauty.

Glazed Expressions

The Line Up, Oil on Canvas, 10″ x 14″

To purchase The Line Up for £225 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline at carolineamyart@gmail.com

Drum roll please! So, here you have it, my first painting created using a grisaille underpainting and the glazing technique…ta daa! I think you’ll agree that it’s very different to my previous paintings in terms of effect. There’s a real richness to The Line Up and the fruits actually appear to glow on the canvas. In fact, I got a little carried away with the richness and luminosity produced by the glazing technique and decided to push it as far as I could – far past the realm of realism and into the world of idealised, genetically modified looking fruits. The apples in particular remind me of colourful plastic or wax fruits, which for some reason I associate with theatrical stage sets and twee little shops such as Past Times.

But I digress. The experience of painting The Line Up and exploring the technique of glazing has so far been very interesting and my head is now whirling with questions, ideas and dilemmas. I feel like I’m ready to move onto a bigger project and I’m itching to put together a portfolio of work which I hope will one day be exhibited in a gallery in a sell out show…okay, well, exhibited at least! In order to do this I really need to develop an individual style. I already have some ideas regarding subject matter but really it’s the style thing which is perplexing me a little. I find myself pulled towards the bright colours and luminosity which result from the glazing technique and wonder if I can effectively incorporate these into my work. I find a lot of art on the market at the moment too drab and too obsessed with thick, impasto blobs of dull colour. So I want to fight against this – I’m naturally attracted to bright, rich and glowing colours and also prefer smooth, almost photographic-looking paint surfaces. But how far do I push this? Do I want all my subjects to look plastic? To look unreal? I think that perhaps I do. But it’s actually quite difficult to settle with this idea.

When looking at a painting one naturally uses the subject matter as it appears in the real world as a point of reference for judging the quality of the painting. When the painting deviates greatly from this point of reference and strays into abstraction it’s clear the artist has developed a specific style and the work can therefore be appreciated for its non-realistic qualities. However, if a painting differs only slightly from its point of reference then its creator might simply be regarded as a bad artist – someone who has tried to tackle realism but failed. If I extend real objects into the realm of extreme colour and exaggerated richness and luminosity will I be considered a bad artist who didn’t get it right? Or will viewers appreciate my own individual style?

One Thousand Shades of Grey

As mentioned in my previous post Layer Cake I am currently harbouring a collection of underpaintings all created using slightly different techniques. After having executed some grisaille underpaintings I decided to explore the technique of Verdaccio. Verdaccio itself describes a mixture of Mars Black and Yellow Ochre which leads to a greyish, soft green colour. This mixture was adopted in fresco painting for the painting of the initial tonal values of a composition, i.e. for painting the underpainting. The technique of creating an underpainting in this mix of paint has since become known as Verdaccio.

Verdaccio is widely favoured in portraiture and figurative paintings as it’s particularly effective when used for the creation of flesh tones. As I am currently working on a series of nudes it therefore seemed only fit the give this technique a whirl and see what the results would be. As with the grisaille underpaintings I have varied my experiments in Verdaccio somewhat in order to find the best approach to the method. In the underpainting above I have stepped away from the traditional Mars Black and Yellow Ochre mix to a mix of Mars Black, Chromium Oxide Green and Underpainting White (this is a fast drying pigment specially designed for use in the initial layers of a painting which ideally the artist would have dry quickly. Flake White is the traditional alternative to the more modern Underpainting White but contains significant levels of lead and is therefore classified as toxic by the EU and only available in small quantities). In the underpainting below I have stuck to the traditional verdaccio mix of Mars Black and Yellow Ochre.     

The differences in the two mixes really are strong so I’m very interested to see how both paintings pan out once I start glazing over them. As you can see I have once again painted these underpaintings over a warm ground of Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna and Titanium White. Interestingly, the effect produced by this ground remaining visible underneath the underpainting gives you a foretaste of the effects produced by glazing – there’s already a little glow in the painting. I hope this whets your appetite for more paintings and that you’ll tune in soon to see my progress!

Layer Cake

I’m still here! And I’m still working away! Once again I have flung myself head first into the deep, dark pit of cyber-silence. But this is not another one of those abandoned and redundant blogs destined to haunt the far-flung corners of cyberspace for all eternity. No, I assure you that my recent periods of silence indicate new directions and fruitful experimentations in painting. Indeed, they indicate that I am developing a new style and trying out new subject matters and only that I am not, as yet, advanced enough in the creative process to display the fruits of  my exploratory labour.   

Basically, I have made a move away from alla prima or direct painting methods towards the more traditional methods of layering and glazing. This means that I will no longer be able to complete paintings in one or two sittings, nor indeed in one day, and that new works may take up to two months to complete. However, I am confident that the results will be worth it and with regard to the progress I have made so far I am extremely pleased with the richness and luminosity of the results.

The traditional method that I am trying to learn basically begins with a monochrome underpainting over which very thin, transparent layers of paint, known as glazes, are applied. Thicker, opaque areas of body colour are also used where more solid forms are required but I’m mainly concentrating on the use of glazes. In this post are two examples of grisaille underpaintings I painted recently and I am now in the process of waiting for them to dry thoroughly before I start the glazing process – this drying process will take up to two weeks. Grisaille is a French term used to describe a monochrome painting executed in grey or brown shades and it can indicate either a finished painting undertaken as decoration, usually depicting objects in relief, or an underpainting used to established the initial values in a painting which then act as a base for subsequent layers of paint.

I am using grisaille in the latter sense of the term, as an underpainting upon which to slowly build the final piece. One of the advantages of this method that I am most interested in is the luminous effect that it can produce. The lighter, white areas of the underpainting develop a rich glow when thin glazes of colour are painted over them – something which will never be achieved through alla prima or direct painting (both of which are techniques that have been favoured from the twentieth century onwards). The mesmerising effects of light that we see in our everyday lives are therefore much easier to capture through glazing – if thick layers of opaque paint are used as they are in more modern methods then this thin, transparent, luminous effect is lost and any light can become heavy and dull. Furthermore, the colours achieved in paintings which have been glazed are often richer than those achieved in alla prima or direct painting methods. In the former colours mix optically in the eye when you look at them, whereas in the latter pigments have been physically mixed together on a palette and can often become a little dull in the process. Glazing essentially requires knowledge of how the eye perceives colours which overlay or abut one another and then requires this knowledge to be manipulated to produce the desired effects.            

As I am a newcomer to this method I have experimented in the underpaintings above with different depths of colour. The first painting is deliberately lighter and softer and allows the burnt sienna and raw sienna ground the show through. The second is darker and covers the ground more effectively. I can’t wait to see the differences these approaches will produce! It’s going to be a long learning process but it’s one I am very excited about! I also have a collection of similar underpaintings on the go which employ slightly different methods and I’ll be writing a little more about these in my next post. Stay tuned!

Let Them Eat Cake!

Whipped Peaks, Oil on Canvas, 10" x 14"

To purchase Whipped Peaks for £225 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline at carolineamyart@gmail.com

Snow-tipped mountain tops always make me think of whipped cream. Without fail. Whenever I see the Alps I think of cream - lovely thick whipping cream whisked and whipped and worked into silky peaks that sweep off into elegant ribbons at their ends. And more often than not this cream appears in my mind atop a white cake - usually a fruit cake - intended for a celebratory feast. Now it’s most likely that this association comes from my childhood experience of Christmas cake, certainly one of the most exciting things about the Christmas preparations was being able to decorate the Christmas cake. A day or two before Christmas my mother, my sister and I would all sit elbow-deep in brightly coloured icings which we shaped into Santas, snowmen, penguins, icy ponds, pine trees, reindeer, presents and much much more. These creations would then be placed on top of the whitest of white icings which covered the marzipan and dense fruit cake of that special seasonal cake.

In essence, my experience of snow is limited to skiing in the Alps, decorations on Christmas cakes and all forms of Christmas focused marketing and paraphernalia. It’s quite natural then that I might associate all the white of the Alps with the white of Christmas cartoons, cards and decorations etc., and with the white, snow-sprinkled decorations of the Christmas cake. So when I see mountains I see cake. Why that cake is topped with whipped cream is quite beyond me – my mother, quite thankfully, never ladened our Christmas cake with whipped cream. I can only put it down to a comparison between the texture of snowy mountain tops and the texture of whipped cream, the little mounds of which we refer to as peaks. Or indeed meringue would also make a nice comparison. So if you’re not a fan of Christmas cake just imagine a Baked Alaska next time you’re gazing at the mountains…

Now this might all seem wildly irrelevant and a little bit bizarre, but these associations are so strong for me that I have to write about them. Just as I had to paint the creamy peaks of the Austrian Alps as you see them above I have to tell you what I think of everytime I see the painting Whipped Peaks or the Alps! And these thoughts of cream and cake are all associated with a very intense feeling of comfort and homely pleasure – obviously a side effect of my cake decorating history. 

Bizarre as all this really is it touches on the fact that certain images will always have a special resonance for us and that the reasons for this often remain deeply personal and treasured, no matter how strange their origins. Evoking that resonance is something art does beautifully and art should be admired and treasured for this very reason.

And You Are…?

Self-Portrait Study, Oil on Canvas, 10" x 14"

As I said in my brief update post Good Things Come to Those Who Wait! I’ve tentatively turned my hand to the self-portrait! Indeed, I have a collection of ‘mes’ and ‘not-so-mes’ staring over my shoulder as I type, scrutinising anything I might dare to write about them. So here you have it then, in particular for those who don’t know me, the self-portrait study above is me. Hello world! Great to meet you!

I’ve got a basic likeness down okay and as a beginner I’m really happy with the above self-portrait. Still, there are a few things to be improved upon in my next self-portrait attempt, namely widening my mouth and chin, softening the angularity of my head and generally making myself look less severe! Importantly then, I now know what technical and aesthetic points to look out for when trying to capture my own image in paint.

It’s really quite a strange experience painting yourself. I worked from a photograph specifically taken for the purpose of creating a self-portrait, so I didn’t have to face a mirror and try to stay relatively still for hours on end. I therefore didn’t have to cope with the peculiar situation of having ‘a me’ stare back at me very very intently, thus removing the slightly ghostly feeling associated with painting oneself. In fact, as time passed I found that it wasn’t so much the ghostly presence of another me that I was aware of, instead it was a sort of absence of myself which felt weird. By this I mean that the more I painted the more my image became an object or a simply an image – nothing more and nothing less. Though I always tried to capture myself accurately in my brushstrokes and lines the harder I tried to do this the more my painted self ceased to be a person. I therefore lost all sense of ‘painting myself’ and I felt more like I was just painting any old object again. I no longer recognised my image as an image of myself. I didn’t even feel as if I was painting a stranger, I just felt as though I was painting a thing. My image could have a been a tomato, a shed or a Parisian cityscape and painting it wouldn’t have felt any different.

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel, but the above wasn’t it. Maybe I thought that the strong initial feeling of recognition we experience when we glance at someone we know well would extend and stay with me for the duration of the process. I perhaps thought there’d always be some kind of special feeling associated with painting someone I knew which might manifest itself in a persistent awareness of that person as a living, breathing and feeling human being. Above all else I didn’t expect that person, myself in this case, to disintegrate into just another object to be captured in lines and forms. I don’t think this feeling has affected the outcome in any negative way – it certainly is a living, breathing and feeling me who stars out at you from this page. I’m just really taken aback by the nature of painting a self-portrait and I’m really really quite intrigued and fascinated by it.  So here’s to many more portraits!

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait!

Those of you who follow my blog will have noticed that things have suddenly gone really rather quiet. Well, as I touched upon in Bring It On…, I’ve started exploring new techniques, new subjects and new challenges. The works I’m producing at the moment are largely studies executed to improve technique and explore new painting methods. In time these will develop into finished works quite different from the still life and landscape paintings I’ve been working on until now. In particular, they will hopefully develop into some interesting portraits and self-portraits. That’s if I can bear having more images of myself sitting around my flat, it’s starting to get a little creepy!  

Once I’m more settled into a pattern with this phase of experimentation I’ll start posting paintings regularly again and perhaps play with some paintings similar to those you’ve been all been so positive about so far. To keep track of my progress you can find my fan page on Facebook or follow caroline amy art on Twitter, both of which will notify you when I post new art works on my blog and enable you to interact with me in alternative ways.

In the meantime please do continue to explore this blog, there are many paintings hidden in its depths which you may not have seen yet. I also have a selection of paintings for sale on the Paintings Currently for Sale page, some of which have just been added today. This page can be found by following the link here or by clicking on the blog’s banner at the top and then selecting Paintings Currently for Sale from the menu on the right.

Thank you for your patience and support and keep your eyes peeled for new developments!

Bring It On…

Puzzled, Oil on Canvas, 5" x 5"

If you would like to purchase Puzzled for £50 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline on carolineamyart@gmail.com

After a good three day break from painting I’m pleased to say that the ability to paint hasn’t left me. I’m pleased with the progress I’ve been making in my small daily paintings and can now confidently say that I can paint well…I hope you agree! 

Quite naturally, I’m now getting ready for a new challenge. So I’ve decided to return to my art history books for ideas and inspiration. I’ll continue to post small paintings as I have been doing over the past month or so, but I hope that over the weeks these paintings will start to develop into something, well, something…different! I’m not sure what that ’something’ will be yet but I hope you’ll follow me and give me feedback and comments as I go along my way. I really value feedback from anybody and everybody as it helps me to grow and develop – sometimes we’re so deeply enmeshed in what it is we do that we forget to stand back and look at the bigger picture and our overall success. So please, let me know what you think!

Until these developments start kicking in here’s another still life for you to feast your eyes upon. It’s another of my better half’s puzzles and I just love the perfectly interlocking, imperfectly curved shapes of the puzzle. It’s a kind of spherical jigsaw comprising 6 wooden pieces, all of which fit neatly but trickily together to make a Cubist-looking ball. To accentuate it’s puzzling shape and nature I’ve placed the sphere to the top left of the canvas, with part of the puzzle spilling over onto the sides of the canvas. In this sense it almost looks like an abstract form and if you didn’t know what the object was it’d take a while to work it out. One might say, it’s a puzzling puzzle which leaves it’s viewer well and truly puzzled!

Plastic Fantastic

The Conquered Cube, Oil on Canvas, 5" x 7"

If you would like to purchase The Conquered Cube for £60 plus postage and packing please contact Caroline on carolineamyart@gmail.com

My better half is mesmerised by Rubik’s Cubes. Absolutely mesmerised. So our flat is brimming with various Rubik’s Cubes and indeed all manner of little logic puzzles. Some of them really are quite interesting in terms of shape and will, I think, make great subjects in the future. But before I progress to painting the more intricate and elaborate of his puzzles I just had to start with the good old Rubik’s Cube, a simple but iconic puzzle guaranteed to keep any true whizz-kid occupied for all eternity. How quickly can you do it? Can you do it with a limited number of fingers? How many moves can you do it in?

This particular cube is great for using in a painting as it comes with it’s own little stand. This allowed me to place the cube at an interesting angle as opposed to it just sitting straight and square on a surface. The angles of the cube contrast the conventional rectangular shape of the canvas which allows for more interesting shapes and outlines in the background space. And as I started to paint the cube I thought it was all going to be relatively easy – blocks of colour, very little shading, etc. However, these are exactly the features of a subject which make it difficult to paint! Plastic, fantastic as it is, is afterall flat and shiny on a Rubik’s cube with little else to say for itself…

If a subject has little shading, clean blocks of colours and it’s sides are pretty flat form wise then it doesn’t allow you to use the usual techniques required to make an object look real and three dimensional. You have to be inventive but subtle in any attempt to make the object look as it should. One thing I find really helps is numerous layers of colour as this gives an impression of solidity. Although I use the alla prima method for my small studies layers of paint can still be worked on top of one another, wet over wet with a little more medium added to each layer as you progress.  I always start my paintings this way but found that I needed to add more colour and an extra layer to the Rubik’s Cube to make it look solid. I also made sure that I included some bold highlights on the top edges of the cube and some very subtle variations in shade for the blue, red and yellow sides. When combined all of these little changes have made the cube look sturdy, solid and strong and I’m pleased to have conquered a painting challenge even if I myself can’t conquer the cube!