Assignment 4

The brief:

Review all your landscape paintings and preparatory sketches and assess which have beenthe most engaging exercises. Which landscapes have the most appeal for you?

Consider why certain paintings are more successful than others and which approaches andstyles have worked best for you.

Think about how you can consolidate your experiments by working on a large landscapepainting (around 90 cm x 60 cm or larger) using a location and viewpoint of your choice.

You could work on this landscape outdoors in situ and complete it indoors or build apainting from previous studies using supplementary reference material such as sketches,colour notes and photographs.

Make a detailed assessment of your finished painting in your learning log. Consider whatelements had a special appeal to you in your chosen landscape subject. Have you foundtechniques that suited your subject matter and ideas?

Review your experiences and make careful notes of future plans. Consider the influence oflandscape painters that you admire and explain how their work may have influenced yourown.

The review:

Of the nine exercises in this assignment, the landscapes that have engaged me most and appeal to me more than others are:

Exercise 1 “View from a window or doorway”

I think that my sketches for this exercise showed a varied use of subject and water soluble oil pastels as a sketching medium: from a west coast late evening view; a city building scape; studio doorway view; to two northern coastal views.

I chose to paint one of the coastal views as a test of my use of perspective, colour and brush:

Sinclair's Bay, Caithness (oil on canvas board)

Another of my sketches for this exercises was used in my painting for Exercise 2 “Hard & soft landscape”, but I think I kind of overdid the detail in this one:

Keiss Castle, Caithness – window view

Exercise 4 “Aerial perspective”

The original sketch for this landscape and the fnal painting just seemed to fow naturally for me – abit freer with both the sketching and the painting using soft oil pastels:

“Passing places – east Harris”

I love the 'red gate' and the passing place poles on this single track road – and, oh yes the sky – I just didn't really do the reality of it all justice, but I tried.

Exercise 6 “Painting a landscape outside”

I really enjoyed my experience painting outside underneath the Kessok bridge in Inverness and although the fnal study is a bit tight and 'engineered' it still works for me as a good representation of the scene and the feelings/emotions of the day:

Kessok bridge & ICT Stadium, Inverness

Exercises 7 & 8 were to me quite similar technical and tight paintings – lots of lines and too much detail, and although I think they were executed reasonably, I am fnding that it is not really my preferred style of painting.

Exercise 9 “Working from a photograph”

In this exercise, I moved on from washes to more distinct brush work, using more paint and I think it shows a freer application that is appropriate to the composition:

Old man of Storr from Loch Fada, Isle of Skye

Infuences:

From my research during Part 4 I have discovered many examples of painter's work that I admire for their technical skills, use of colour and inventiveness, but mainly I am drawn to those painters and their works that demonstrate a freer, dynamic and expressive mark making on the canvas that describes the natural world in all its beauty and excitement. For this reason I would say that my main infuences this far are painters of landscape such as: Constable (liveliness); Turner (brush work); Van Gogh (exuberance); Burra (abstractness); Hawkins and Howard (place, visual energy and luminosity); Jackson (vibrancy); Hockney (simplifcation); Thomson (bold mark making); Benson & Eardley (looseness); Nash (symbolic synthesis); Nolde (expressive/atmospheric); Moreau (fantastical).

What to make of all this – only time will tell!

The process:

For this assignment I chose to walk through the Glenurquhart Forest across from our home in Balnain to see what sort of landscape compositions I might come across. I cam across a group of Highland cattle at feed in the woods and was able to remain a bit away from them on the path and make three sketches:

I was particularly taken by the young calf who seemed fascinated by my quiet presence on the path and mum (presumably) remained content to munch away at the feeder trough for quite some time. I decided to make this the subject for this assignment and took a quick reference photo to record colours, values and tones for later use back in the studio:

Back home I marked up an 82 x 61cm canvas board with a rule of thirds matrix as a guide and pencil sketched in the main elements of the composition:

Making a start on the painting I again used acrylics to roughly lay down some ground colours:

The finished study:

I found that working with a larger canvas really helped me loosen up with my application of colour and mark making.

Radical departure away from brush work, I painted the fnal painting using size 5 and 1 palette knifes and went through quite a few tubes of paint – but I really enjoyed myself!

Palette used was:

WarmCadmium RedCadmium OrangeVenice YellowYellow OchreRaw SiennaBurnt UmberCadmium Green

CoolCerulean BluePhtalo GreenPayne’s Grey

Iridescent Green Blue and Titanium White.

Highland cattle at feed, Balnain Wood, Glenurquhart (Acrylics on canvas board)

Stuart Brownlee – 512319

3rd September, 2014