After Lisbon... France

After the anticipation, preparation and high excitement of Lisbon, it was a different kind of joy to unwind in the northern French countryside of Pas de Calais. Our daughter and her boyfriend welcomed us to their lovely farmhouse home and we proceeded to enjoy all the charms of a tiny French village - from the noisy next-door rooster to the cow who craved human company, the visiting Dutch orchestra, the family jam-producing homestead, and the drives to surrounding Somme battlefields, village markets and sea and riverside towns, it was a feast of new, blissful and picturesque experiences. I would have to spend weeks, slowly, to sketch even a tenth of it, but this was a sociable, and mobile - lots more walking! - time with family and friends, so these were the few scenes I did get into my sketchbook. I hope to get the chance to do lots more some day.  

Sitting on the doorstep of the house, looking out of the gate to 'The Cité' - all of ...six? houses in a row, with the cow's field behind them.

The gateway to The Abbaye, where we gathered one evening with the villagers to listen to the orchestra and choir from Holland - heralded by a march through the town with bagpipes (?!) and a very quaint sort of barrel orchestrion.

The garage housing a very old Landrover that valiantly transported its travellers most of the way round Europe, but depositing them rather suddenly near Barcelona, and needing to be towed back to its resting place under the grape vines.

Reflections

Its not that I've been completely put off plein air painting after the last icky trip, but the weather has been a bit wet and wild, and I had taken some photos of reflections in the small dam I was sitting next to - so I painted from them, trying to keep a similiar sort of looseness as when sitting out there. But it is just a completely different thing working from a photo - a lack of urgency to get it down, a more orderly approach when I have all the elements already laid out in 2D... it just doesn't have that edge, somehow. There are some areas of this that I'm pleased with - the reflections in the left foreground, the tops of the reeds, but I want to try it again and get more abstract, rhythmic and colourful. This rough sketch is the kind of feel I'm looking for, though obviously its on the far side of 'loose'!
I have just discovered the work of Adrian Berg RA (that sounds like a South African name - but he's not) and would love my newbie landscapes to develop along those lines - do I see hints of Hockney in his work, or should that be vice versa?

When it comes to dedicated plein air painters - Adam Cope is right up there, out in the beautiful Dordogne. He has done a very nice thing for the New Year - a French tradition - paying homage to some fellow art bloggers and I am so honoured to be included on his list. My regular sketching habit, as well as plein air watercolouring began on a fabulous Chateau painting holiday that my sisters and I went on three years ago - merci Adam (and that is still about the extent of my French!) Plein air on the Dordogne (too big for the scanner so I had to photograph it) - I really sloshed the paint around on this one - had a wonderful time, and see how I stopped before it got overworked. In fact I think it was Adam who said "Stop"... a lesson to take note of!

Hats and rainbow falls

At last I've painted this scene from a Bergerac street from a photo I took two years ago - I just loved the display of saccharine colours and the way the hats and scarves almost seemed to be marching down the street. I nearly overworked it - did in fact, in some spots - but managed to control myself. This is watercolour on cold press aquarelle block - 55 x 46 cm

A reversal of the hats and 'falls' - an oil painting I did a couple of years ago, and which should have winged it's way to it's new home in Australia by now, but hasn't yet (sorry V & P!) due to logistical problems - it's big!.. 101 x 76 cm on stretched canvas. I do apologise to the hat-wearers for some unflattering renderings - I wasn't really trying for strong likenesses, but for a moment in time in front of the timeless Victoria Falls (this was taken from the Zambian side, so a less conventional view as has been remarked on by some).

A Holiday continued...

Well now, Adam left such a lot of questions on his comment on my last post A Holiday to remember - that I thought I'd reply with another post about the same painting in case anyone else wants to know too. His questions are in blue...

did you put a fine wash of transparent yellow down first that gives that wonderful warm timbre to the light?

I put a light wash of W&N Yellow Ochre down first, preserving some whites on the brightly sunlit areas - umbrella, hat, shoulder etc. When that was dry I used masking fluid to sketch in the long grasses and the small highlights on the umbrella.

i guess not being a in rush whilst out in the field 'plein-air', allows for a cooler, more deliberate & more planned approach. to lay a violet-based shadow wash over a bright, pure yellow .... (the shadow did go over the yellow stripes or visa versa? difficult to tell from a jpeg of a painting - though i can see that the greens are classic 'dark over light')

One of course has more time to plan how to go about portraying an object from a photo - which would hopefully help next time one is in a plein-air situation. On the umbrella I first put down my familiar, if predictable 'shadow' wash of ultramarine mixed with burnt sienna (which probably looks a bit violet against the yellow) and when dry added another wash of that on the underside, then added the yellow stripes afterwards.

great that you resisted the urge to fill-in the little empty 'gaps' in some of the washes such as on the back-side of the easel ...

I'm learning, slowly, when painting from photos, to leave well enough alone, to try to keep a freshness about the strokes!

Vivienne is a trooper to hold so many oil brushes in her hand & her posture is so strong & in the shoulders. very concentrated!

Think I added a few extra brushes, trying to keep my brushstrokes light and quick! I was quite careful to keep those little wrinkles around the shoulders to describe the posture.

i never expected that a palette lay-out diagram could have such a funny 'insert' image (see enlarged image at top of post) posed inside the middle of it!! (do you know pissaro's pallete with the painting inside it?)

That was such a quick sketchy-sketch, also from a photo, that I did for a 'value' study, just on layout paper, and decided to stick in my journal as it did remind me so much of the time, place and people - and the middle of the palette diagram was the only space left! Is this Pissaro's painting you were thinking of? I found it here....

but just a pedantic word here, if i may... what are the sizes of these two paintings? it's terribly difficult to have a real appreciation if one hasn't the sizes written underneath the jpeg...( you had to have one piece of negative criticism, didn't you?;)
A teacher is allowed to have a pedantic word! I know I'm very bad at recording sizes, supports and mediums - sorry sir! Vivienne painting is on Fabriano - 398mm x 250mm and the bench one is about 160mm x 105mm, stuck in my A5 - ish journal.

A Holiday to remember

I'm killing two birds with one stone (if they'll forgive the expression!) with this post, by submitting this watercolour sketch to Adam's 'Paintings of Painters Painting Project', and as a comment to Katherine Tyrell's serendipitous post 'Why choose a painting holiday' that appeared yesterday. The painting is of my sister, Vivienne, who suggested and arranged that she, our younger sister Gillian, and I meet in Bergerac, France for one of Adam's painting holidays in the magnificent Dordogne two years ago, which she had found cruising the internet, and which she thought looked picturesque, pleasant and relaxed.
We converged with huge excitement from our various continents - Australia, America and South Africa and spent ten blissful days relating (being close relations and not having been together for a very long time!), eating the wonderful French meals Adam had organised (my sketch journal of the time is mainly descriptions of food), and of course happy hours of drawing, painting and sketching as I hadn't done since leaving art school 30 years before. We had some formal teaching sessions, which occasionally brought about some groans as Lafayette-with-no-nose was presented for loosening up on, and - especially from me - as I finally learnt what it was that artists actually did when squinting at that pencil held up in front of them (the art school I went to was more into Dada and other isms than perspective and proportion) as I tried to get the great Chateau de Lanquais onto my little piece of paper. (Which has since helped me with my tendency to go off the edges, thanks Adam!)

What I found most useful were the tutor comments on what I was doing, the colour and tonal suggestions - and on when to stop - and I like the group 'crit' when you see what everyone else has done... all the differing styles and subject choices, and get some interaction on the day. I really appreciate the kick-start I got into re-kindling my own art vision and ambition (basically just to DO it), which has been further stimulated by this great art-blogging community that never fails to inspire me. It was great to meet other people drawn together by this common enjoyment, and with varying motives - at least two others came as a means of upliftment out of sad times. We 3 sisters ourselves carried with us the memories of our late artist mother and eldest sister, who would both have so loved such a holiday, which seemed to make the trip all the more poignant and significant. But also huge fun, completely different from normality, and liberating - Katherine is right when she says some of the older participants provide the most laughs and we had one irrepressible ball of fire and fun from Arizona(/New Mexico? - not old, but a baby-boomer like us - not old, I said!) who prevented us from taking ourselves or our dabblings too terribly seriously. Which was a very good thing.

A holiday in France

Here are some pages from my journal I kept on a wonderful painting holiday in France a year ago - the writing's mainly about the food, but the drawing 'notes' helped me to really be there with the details. My book is quite messy, with bits of paper stuck in it, and watercolour swatches sploshed around, but it brings back the whole experience. I drew with a Pilot fineliner, and a damp brush over it to make grey/blue washes. I couldn't really add more colour without washing all the line drawing away, but I like the looseness of the water-soluble pen. It is easy and inspiring to keep a journal on a great holiday, but very hard at home with the mundane day-to-day stuff. When you look back, though, at 'mundane' drawings of years gone by, they are the stuff of which memories are made and just as valuable, even more so, when it's your family, pets, homes you have preserved.