Summer, West Bergholt, England
oil on canvas, 1910mm x 810mm

Private collection

oil studies

Crop and sky colours change dramatically and subtly across the field in the early morning. Standing up in the wheat, on boards slotted in the lid of a painting box slung about my neck, I made studies comparing colours across five zones:

 

 

For how digital photos were used click here.

 

sky blues

With the canvas laid on the floor, strips of colour mixed with slow drying stand oil were laid out. Adjacent strips were then blended using badger blenders, which look like little shaving brushes. If their domed tops are applied at right angles to the canvas they leave hundreds of tiny dots of paint. A circular dabing motion across strips blends the paint so that colour transitions become imperceptible. This was how the picture was given a seamlessly changing sky.*

 

 

ideas

The picture is one of a series based on a single field near West Bergholt in Essex. About two hundred years ago, the English painter John Constable was working a few miles away in East Bergholt, and I have always loved his work. My own work belongs to this tradition.

It is early morning. Because we can’t look towards and away from the sun at the same time it's hard to see the full grandeur of the effects of light that surround us. This is possible in a painting though and is what I wanted to show in this ordinary Essex field.

Towards the sun, transmitted light shines through dry leaves turning them stained glass orange. 120 degrees to the right, raking light turns the wheat ears into countless little white sculptures.

Blue damsel flies and wild oats float in a cereal sea of huge power. Demeter unleashed. A pair of wood pigeons swerve away from, Bill Jack, the farm manager, as he walks the tramlines. Dry ears curl, ready to harvest. A needle contrail in the blue sky moves towards Stansted weaving man and Nature together.

The eye level is the same as that of the farm manager suggesting that, in their different ways, both artist and farmer are working outdoors. On another level, I showed a print of this painting at a fair in New York. One visitor assumed the figure must be my father. My dad had died just before I started this picture, and I realised the passing American had seen a truth.

 

differences between painting and photography

A source photo compared with a similar area in the final painting reveals key differences between painting and photography:

 

 

The photo has thousands of colours. We tend to make sense of this kind of scene by latching onto objects or grops of objects, and pethaps by noticing the illumination. But the scene is hard to see.

 

 

The painting has a limited number of colours. This not only makes the scene easier to see but also draws attention to the colours of the natural world. We feel we understand what we see because we see the organisation of seeing. This creates a kind of vitality. It's me and you doing this, not a machine.

Because we can sense that each colour is a separate material mark the paint itself is at work. Further enhancement comes from the contrast of smooth, filmy areas and thicker, lumpy paint, and the use of rich glazes (oranges) over reflecting paint to produce coloured transmitted light - all classical rescources of oil painting. **

 

hanging

 

 

notes

* This method of blending is described in Ralph Mayer, The Artists Handbook of Materials & Techniques, 1991 edn. pp.543-544. I think it comes from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, before impressionism

** This use of a tinted reflecting layer beneath a glaze of similar hue is found in Titian. See Arthur Lucas & Joyce Plesters, The National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Volume 2, Number 1, January 1978 , pp. 25-47.

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