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1. OUTDOORS
To find a new picture I have to be outdoors for several days. I
physically adjust to being in the landscape. Richard Mabey in
"Nature Cure" is good on this. All sorts of things help, walking on
uneven ground, animal sounds and movements, rising to the
unexpectedness of everything. For an evening painting I set up
early to let my eyes adapt. Unadjusted eyes can't see. Everything I
do is to help my senses and reactions do their best in contact with
the natural world.
I set up with an outdoor oil painting kit that goes back to the
19thC. I have a big pochade box with a strap that goes round my
neck so that I can paint standing up if a crop is high. There is a
digital camera, on a tripod for low light shots, a comfortable
seat, flask of hot coffee, snacks, fruit & a tot of whisky. I
ware lots of extra old clothes in unnoticeable colours. If you are
still, you can get cold even in summer. I suppose I look like a
tramp. I usually feel utterly happy at about this point, with
brushes, palates and rags, watching.
There is a tramp in the area. He walks the lanes and looks as
though he sleeps rough. He has layers of clothes held together by a
belt. He's usually dirty and may be on medication. We nod to each
other.
studies
I paint studies on primed boards of MDF or thin hardboard. If
I've got my painting kit out it's because I've already thought
there may be a painting here. Sometimes I might have an idea from a
photo taken several days or sometimes years previously. Or it might
use a photo taken minutes before. Remember you can shoot, look at,
adjust and re-shoot digital shots on the spotâ€" a huge change from
when, as a student, I had to take film to the chemists shop. Speed
aids immediacy. Technology can help contact. Sometimes I start to
paint a colour study without any photographic clue â€" though I
would take back up shots with selective exposures as soon as I knew
what effect I was after... Basically, if it's a study for a larger
picture I will take photographs as soon as I get going.
When I started the oil study I already had photos from a
previous visit at around 6pm. There were no swallows. I did these
shots because I felt that no one had really looked at rape as it
responds to light. The oak tree determined the composition, at the
centre of a square. I had an Oak exhibition in mind, with a
thematic presence of a tree that changes inside a changing
world.
I wanted to make an extreme image about this man-grown yellow,
so I first used early evening light with my back to the sun. This
gave an outrageous yellow explosion below the delicate,
still-winter brushiness of the trees: almost impossible to conceive
of in combination - yet there it was, fixed under a still blue-grey
sky, enhancing the composition.So, a few days later I was all set
up. Clear sky, ready to go. As six pm approached the crop started
to flare in the sun and I started to paint.
I paint in the base colour-tones very fast with quick drying
acrylic, so the whole thing is in roughly in key from the off. Then
I work on top of this with oil mixes in very clear, separate values
and patches (f.). If the sun is changing fast you have to
work very fast. Its like keeping up with the band if you play
guitar. (I sometimes make notes on the mixes on the board, and/or
describe colours and colour relationships on a portable voice
recorder). I tried to sort out the main colours of the scene, and
the study was ok but not quite together somehow, and there was
something in the original idea that was wrong, I felt…too much of
a precocieved idea maybe.
I put my things down, sat down and got another board ready. I
noticed that the light was fading only very slowly, so I waited for
something different. I blocked in the next board in a lower key for
lower light, and then noticed the upper sky was now lighter than
the dead-alive horizon sky. The crop was now in shade, but still
shouting, and the horizon trees were blanking out and there were
unimaginable red-blue greens inside the rape. I started to work
fast and in under an hour had all I needed. At the same time I had
taken a series of selective exposure photos. It was now darker and
about 9pm when a group of swallows flew at and past me like
bullets. The lead bird turned violet against the rape. I quickly
made some marks to record this, and noticed a red radio mast light
on the horizon and put that down, then a car headlight in the
distance. I packed up and went home.
Sometimes everything seems slower when I'm driving back, as
though I have time to spare, like a racing driver. As I drive back
through the suburbs the number of trees decreases as I get into
town centre, and streetlights and advertising take over. When I get
back indoors I feel different. I'm energised and tired. Sometimes
if there is day light , I get the study out to see if it's any
good. Otherwise I wait till the next day. In this case I left it in
the box, finished off the whisky & went to bed.
I needed source images for the swallows, so I later went to a
field of barley where I knew they hunted and eventually got some
images that seemed to match what I'd seen at 9pm in the rape field.
It was better to do this in broad daylight to get the shutter
speeds needed to stop such fast objects. The shapes were unforseen
so I was learning to see. They looked like marks and remind me of
Etruscan aminals painted on pots.
2. COMPUTER WORK
Next day the study looked unfamiliar but of a piece, so I
started work on the photos. These went into Photoshop.
2 things about Photoshop:
- Each pixel is quantifiable in terms of tone, hue and
saturation, so colour selections can be made from the entire image
based on the numerical value of the colour of any pixel.
- Each selection can be made into a discrete layer and
manipulated independently of anything else.
Oil painting technique from the time of Titian was mainly wet on
dry: each separate colour mix of paint is laid on dry paint, so
each value remains separable visually, like separate notes. Ther
advantages of this are best pointed out in front of a good painting
that uses this method. "Clarification" is a rough summary. The
studies are made with this in mind, and the studio painting is
built up to bring it out.
My basic insight connecting traditional oil painting with Photo
shop is that each has layers that can be translated one to
the other. Printers think like this too.
The differently exposed photos are selected for closeness to the
tone range of the area of the scene I was looking at. Only three
photos were needed for this painting :
 1. Best
vertical tonal range of sky
 2. Best
distribution of yellows & greens
 3. Best
tonal values of trees at horizon
For each of these photos colours are selected that correspond to
similar colours from the oil study "well enough". (Matching by
relative tones is a good guide.)
So, if I have, say, five yellows for rape on the oil study, the
task is to identify which six colours/tones in the appropriate
photo correspond to each of these five values. To do this I select
a small range of similar yellows in the photo and see how they are
distributed throughout the image. Photoshop lets me select not just
one unique value; there are a variety of tools that allow me to
select similar values next to it. So a photoshop selection can be
like a colour selection while oil painting, because you are
representing a group of very similar colours as one common value.
Thus :
all the reds in this image represent a small range of darkish
reddish yellows that have been selected, then coded red so I can
pick out the distribution. This then gives me the distribution
pattern for the reddest dark yellow from my oil study. The canvas
has a dot grid on it so I can transfer the distributions and
gradients from one grid to the other.
This layer shows the darkest yellows and greens. The selection
itself can be subdivided and digitally manipulated to express any
differences registered in the oil study. The A3 print outs are
taken into the studio to work from.
This layer is the distribution for the darkest greens and
blacks.
The canvas is a meter square. I stretched it myself using
acrylic pre-primed linen. The initial under painting was to be in
acrylic, as usual, but there was an oddity. The first painting I'd
had in mind was a night painting, to pair with an already started
day painting of swallows over barley. So the canvas was first
underpainted with acrylic for a night scene.
Yet I felt this would make an under painting for the new
picture, because the emotion I wanted was to do with floating on
blackness, as though the Greek underworld was beneath the vision.
so I started to paint directly on top of this in oil
These are early oil layers . They are in the study key, but
effected by the dark under painting. When subsequent layers are
added the increasing opacity brings a closer match to the study
values. Paint goes on in different ways in different parts of the
picture. Its not mechanical and hard to summarize. The piece of
cotton is a bit of the grid set up.
The finished picture took months, though less than six. I work
methodically, with set hours. I start before 9.00, breaking off for
coffee at 11.00 lunch at 1.00 and tea by 4. After tea I knock off
if I feel like it. Cleaning up and a change of clothes takes 45
mins.
I spend a lot of time making sure I mix colours that match
the study as closely as possible. Like a lot of realist painters, I
mix up quite large amounts of basic values and keep them, often
underwater in containers, for weeks. (Jenny Saville does this) If I
have a store of premixed values I can get off to a easy start. If
you look again at the oil study you will see little U's (= used)
written here and there. These indicate patches of paint mixed in
the studio to match the values mixed outdoors. These new patches
give me a more durable reference patch that's less likely to ware
off when I wipe the board clean after painting a mix on the bord to
check it next to an original colour.
You can see the patterning of distinct layers in this detail
from the finished painting. This area of the picture has some white
grid dots left, whereas in the detail below there are none :
 These
differences in finish add something. I can't talk about this very
clearly at the moment as its at the edge of what I want next.
A goal I've had for some time is to have maximum realism
with maximum artifice.
Finished painting. I decided to call it Swallows at 9pm
when I compared it to its companion, which was finished first.
(Origially it was going to be a day & night pair) The two
titles, Swallows at 11 am and Swallows at 9pm
mean various things. The crops are different but it's the same
field, and oak, so there's at least a year between the two images.
So the birds have been to Africa and back.
There are only a few days in the year when both crops look like
this, and only a few minutes in the day when the light is like this
evening painting. The Latin for bird watching is augury. In the end
there were 4 swallows and a tiny red light. I feel this makes the
unexpected beauty both slightly uneasy and more truthful.
Swallows at 11 am has a different emotion. It's a soft,
cloudy, animanted atmosphere. At the back of my mind is Eliot's
Four Quartets : the tree "at the still point of the
turning world". There is light above the clouds and the hunting
birds seem ecstatic. The barley is like the down in the small of a
womans back. It's amazing how emotions get made in art, I
think.
Copyright Stephen Taylor, 2006.
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