Beach Studies

I've spent a few weeks at the beach recently, on the East Coast of Mauritius, in Trou d'Eau Douce, where I have a weekend house.  This is what I did:

8 x 10" Pink Ripples

8 x 10" Patterns on the beach

Pink Rock 8 x 10"

6 x 8" Storm approaching done onsite

6 x 8" Storm approaching 2. done at home afterwards.

8 x 10" done at home afterwards. oil on board. Storm approaching 3

Pink Sand 6 x 8" Oil on board.

8 x 10" The Shallows. Oil on board

Deserted Beach 8 x 10". Oil on board.

6 x 8" oil on board. Calm after the storm.

Vol au Vent, Mauritius

I went back to a favourite spot of mine, Vol au Vent, Henrietta, where there is a superb view over the West of the Island of Mauritius. I was going to carry on with the paintings I had been doing on site there since last year, but as soon as I had set up my easel and paints, it started to rain and a huge cloud descended and almost blocked out the view. These are the old paintings I was going to carry on working on, this is what they looked like in the beginning, but I had put them together to make a diptych and had worked many times over them.:

                                            Picture 1.

61 x 75 Sun coming up. Stage 1 July/August 2011

                                         Picture 2

61 x 75cm view over Medine Sugar Estate, West Mauritius. Stage 1

                                      

 Picture 3

61 x 75x 2   I put them together and worked on them on site. Stage 2. I painted over the 2 paintings above.

This is Picture 1 and Picture 2 put together and worked on many times over. I still wasn't happy,so was going to go back and work some more on them. I suppose I should have left Picture 1 alone,and not fiddled with it in the first place, as now it has gone!

I lay them flat on the ground and worked on site every time. Or put one up on my easel. It's a heavenly spot, all alone on a ledge looking down over a huge space. One can only hear the birds and the wind.

This is the study I did in the rain, on Monday 13th August:

                                           Picture 4.

8 x 10" in the rain. small study in oil

61 x 75 oil on canvas, painted over the 2nd picture above.

 At home I painted over the classical view you can see in picture 3 above, the left hand picture. I decided it wasn't 'me' so took my quick sketch I had done in the morning and transposed it on top of the old picture.

Then I did the same with the other one, I took this quick sketch I had done last year, Picture 6,  and transposed it on top of Picture 3, the right hand picture, above to make Picture 7.


                                         Picture 6

5 x 7" oil done on site.

                                 
                                         Picture 7

61 x 75 oil on canvas done on top of picture 1.Stage 1.

same as above, stage 2.

This is what it looks like now. You might ask why I paint on top of old pictures. The reason is that I'm not happy with them and when I go back to the spot I ask myself  'what is it that really interests me in this view" and the answer with this view is the lines of the hills as they go off up to the horizon. As I hadn't put them in the first picture, picture 1and 3, I decided to move the whole picture to the right, and in doing this, I had lost the original picture. But it doesn't matter, this is how we progress as artists and how the picture develops. One mustn't be afraid of losing a picture, a better one always come in it's place, it's just the initial courage that one needs!

My pictures are becoming more abstract too, more modern which is a good thing, I'm painting the feeling of the place.

7 Cascades, 4th Pool, Blue/Red Form and Space, the thought process and unfolding of ONE picture over 9 months.

In October 2011, when I was down at the waterfalls, sketching most days I did this charcoal sketch:

 25 x 21cm Moleskin sketch book. Charcoal.

 It kept coming back to me in my mind so, I suppose a few weeks later, I made a study of it  in oil on a 10 x 8" board:

25cm x 19.5cm Oil on Hardboard.

Then I made an oil painting of it using some bright colours:

65cm x 50cm Oil on linen canvas, primed with rabbit skin glue and oil primer.

That was the end of the painting for the moment.

In July 2012 I went to the UK to visit my family and went to see my teacher, Richard Webb for a tutorial. He looked through my pictures and made a comment on this painting saying how much he liked it. I too, liked that particular picture but as it was 'half finished' and had left it, was quite surprised by his comment.

When I got back to Mauritius, in July,  I kept thinking about the picture, so took it out and decided to make some small colour plays of it.  I took my new pigments, oil, glass palette, the whole lot, and a very large canvas too and went to paint with a friend. These 4 paintings are what I did all on one day:

Oil on MDF 20.3 x 19.5cm

Oil on MDF 20.3 x 19.5cm

Oil on MDF 20.3 x 19.5cm

 107cm x 89cm Oil on linen, primed with
rabbit skin glue and oil primer

I posted it onto Plein Air Artists website http://pleinairartists.ning.com and made a comment about not liking some parts of it. I had been looking and admiring Thomas Wezwick's  work so decided to have another go at the picture using bigger brush strokes and using all of my studies rather than just enlarging the small sketch. The artists who inspire me at the moment are: Wolf Khan,  Chiam Soutine, and Paul Wonner. It was the messiness and huge brush strokes that I loved.

I also tried not to 'copy' the smaller sketches, but to let the painting tell me what to do. I was aware that I wasn't doing this enough when painting big pictures, so I kept my eyes in front and tried to feel what to do, and it worked.



This is what I produced, it was painted over the picture above, I had no idea that it would change so much:

117 x 89cm (34 x 42") Home made oils on Linen, primed with rabbit skin glue and oil primer

.

I was aware I was expressing myself emotionally at the time, something I haven't done before. I worked in a fast fury in the evening from 9 till 1.30am, I was totally transported! I find it easier to work at night when the house is quiet and all the housework jobs are done. I appreciate it is very hard for women to paint at home, and little tricks like this:  painting early morning or late evening, going to paint with a friend, or having a friend come to paint with you are very important and help us to concentrate and work.

In Khan's book by Justin Spring he says "This intuitive interpenetration of forms and space is one of the most personal features of an artist's method of composition, standing in stark opposition to the mechanical and experientially false system of linear perspective, which both the impressionists and Cezanne had rejected. The new sense of spacial recession, achieved with colour, became an indispensable part of Kahn's vocabulary." I feel I am doing this, it is space and form, interpreted by colour that are my major sources of inspiration. I feel colour for definite parts of my paintings when looking at the landscape. This has always amazed me. When I go back again to a place and carry on a painting, I will pick exactly the same colour for a particular part without looking at the canvas first.

I feel it important to explain how a painting takes a long time to develop, slowly in it's own time, over a matter of months. I wait for the painting to tell me what to do and it does. I am in the dark all the time, not even aware that I am building the blocks of a painting, until it comes together at the end. I just keep doing what I feel I should be doing, whether it's going out to paint on location or working from sketches.  I can also leave it for a while, travel for example and do sketches there, then will carry on when back, not interrupted by the break.

I hope that by explaining this I will help other artists in their search for the needle in the haystack, and encourage them not to stop looking, they will find it!  It's not the end result or the taking part that is important, but the journey of discovery.

I blew up the last of the 3 oil sketches to 42"x35", working quickly and cleanly. I mixed my pigments to make this, I'm really enjoying this method it reminds me of picking my home grown herbs when I cook. I like to make everything from scratch, I feel it's me.  I also get a lot of paint to play with.
It took me a couple of hours and I've left it alone. I'm not sure about the sky, looks a bit odd, like a crown but I feel I must trust the feeling I had when painting it and leave it alone. There's something magical about being inspired, it's like a gust of wind, it comes and then it goes.

42 x 35" 107 x 89cm Oil on canvas.

7 Cascades, deep space-the subconscious.

I've been thinking about what is attracting me to the 7 cascades and it's the Space. So today I went back again with this in mind and did a charcoal sketch and three 6"x8" oils one after the other. I like to work like this because I get quicker and freer as I go.

6"x8" first sketch

6"x8" second sketch

 6"x8" third sketch.

If you look at them from far away, the third has a feeling of deep space. You can see how by simplifying it one can actually achieve a better 'feel' to a painting. I like to work for several hours this way, this is when the subconscious starts to work and we use our depth mind.

I am reading "The psycho-analysis of artistic vision and hearing by Anton Ehrenweig." He says:

 "The need for beauty belonged only to the surface layers of the mind, but was foreign to the 'gestalt-free' depth mind. The break-through of the depth mind in modern art has done away with the aesthetic surface of art and revealed the unbeautiful gestalt-free vision of the unconscious. Thus modern art can serve as the most direct evidence for the irrational and unaesthetic modes in which our unconscious depth mind creates and perceives form."  pg15 preface and introduction.

In other words: pretty pictures belong to the surface mind and 'form free (abstract)' pictures come from the subconscious, depth mind. He goes on to say that dreams, which come from our subconscious, are also inarticulate and don't make much sense to the surface mind. This is how the subconscious works.

He also says that the artist's task is to: "produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. I may be permitted to add that the public may project not only missing contents, but also missing articulate structures into the artistic form which, because it is half-consciously produced, shows the inarticulate structure typical of all unconsciously created form..."p14

"To a great extent, the creative process remains on an unconscious inarticulate level where unconscious perceptions communicate themselves directly to the artist's 'automatically' working hand. The cycle of the creative process is closed through the secondary projections of the public whose surface perception cannot but transmute the half-articulate form material of art into a more articulate gestalt. Hence we shall describe it as the artist's primary task to disintegrate the articulate and rational surface perception and to call up secondary processes in the public which will restore the articulate structure and rational content of surface perception." p 14.

Trou d'eau Douce-Beaches

8"x10" sparkling sea. Oil on board

6"x8" ripples in sand. Oil on board

I've been looking at the light on the sea...so difficult to convey, but we all enjoy a challenge!

Blue Woman/7 Cascades

Oil in Sketchbook 27cm x 22cm Sketch 1.

6 x 8" oil on board Sketch 2

5 x 7"Oil on ply Sketch 3

5 x 7" Oil on ply Sketch 4

8  x 10" Oil on Board. Sketch 5

I worked from 9am till 12.30, you can see the progression from the 1st to the 5th sketch. I started by putting in the light and the shade working quickly. Then as I progressed I FELT the body of a woman appearing. This is the magical part, it's the FEELING in the landscape. The rest just happened on it's own.
When I had done sketch 4 I was very surprised and excited, the 2 small pools were the woman's breasts and the larger pool was her tummy. I felt the mountain on the left in red, was her leg. So I started another one, trying not to think of the figure but just letting myself go. This time I had painted her second leg in red too. It was not until I got home and looked at it the following day that I realised what I had painted. Dare I say it?....her legs are apart..she looks like she's giving birth...In fact you can see whatever you want, it might look like 3 pools and valleys to you!

Bright Pools, 7 Cascades, Looking down from 3rd waterfall.

8"x10" Oil on MDF (orange ground)

The sun was shining today, after 10 days of rain - I was very eager to get ready and go out painting! I'm still thinking about the space in this place and haven't mastered it yet so back I went again. I chose a different spot, right in the middle of the 'ledge'. Choosing the right spot for the painting is very difficult, I try it from all different angles before I get it right. I could see the pools below, with the sun sparkling on them, the water on the right spilling off the ledge and the valley in the background. It was stunning.

I worked a long time on the rocks and was happy with them. I can now feel the first pool higher than the second which is also higher than the third. I used a  mainly earth palette of: cobalt, ultramarine, mars yellow, raw sienna, burnt sienna, indian red, caput mortuum (mars violet), raw umber, burnt umber, flake white, titanium/zinc.

More waterfalls

I tried some larger versions in the studio from my smaller studies:

60cm x 75cm oil on canvas

50cm x 65cm oil on canvas

 I did some more work on the above paintings:

60 x 75cm oil on canvas

50 x 65cm oil on canvas

I went back again and did more studies, this time looking at the water falling over the edge and the pools, I was trying to capture the light on the water. The pools were round, so beautiful:

20cm x 25cm oil on MDF Quick study done on site

6" x 8" Oil on Masonite. Done on site.

colour plays-waterfall

I did some small colour plays from the oils I did on site the other day

 

5 x 7" oil on ply

5 x 7" oil on Ply

5 x 7" oil on ply

 

I feel like doing a large one of these, but not sure which one yet. I find looking at them in photo form very helpful, I think the third one works best as the yellow brush strokes are going down  and takes one's eye down. I also like the movement of the brush strokes, the foreground is going horizontal and the background is going vertical. What do you think?