Summer, West Bergholt, England
oil on canvas, 1910mm x 810mm
Private collection
lambda print available click here
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.
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.*
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 to inspect
the crop. Dry ears curl, ready to harvest. A contrail in the sky
moves towards London Stansted, weaving man and Nature together like
a needle.
The eye level is the same as that of the farm manager suggesting
that, in their different ways, both farmer and artist work
outdoors. I showed a print of this painting at an art fair in
New York. One visitor assumed the figure must be my father. My dad
died just before I started this picture, and I realised this
passing American had seen a truth.
That a piece of ordinary farmland should offer a place for this
kind of memory is not surprising : I have lived most of my life in
English suburbs and the adjacent countryside has always been a kind
of Heaven for me - so that's where my father is.
A source photo compared with a similar area in
the final painting shows 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, which not only makes the
scene easier to see (parse) but also draws attention to the colours
of nature. We feel we understand what we see because we see the
organisation of seeing. This creates vitality. It's me and you
doing this, not a machine.
Because we can sense each colour as a separate physical mark the
paint itself is at work. Further articulation comes from the
contrast of smooth, filmy areas and thicker paint (impasto). In
addition, the use of rich glazes over reflecting paint for
orange produces coloured transmitted light. These are all common
rescources in oil classical 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.
.