Swallows at 9pm

Oil studies, photography, digital mapping and layer painting.

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 spot– a huge change from when, as a student, I had to take film into Boots. Speed aids immediacy. I think of it as technology helping contact. Sometimes I start to paint a colour study without a photographic clue – though I’d take selective exposure back up shots 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 for Swallows at 9pm I had already taken photos on a previous visit at about 6pm. There were no swallows. I did these shots because I felt that no one had really looked a rape as it responds to light. The oak tree determined the composition to an extent, at the centre of a square. I had an Oak exhibition in mind, and the idea of a thematic presence of a tree that changes within a world that changes . I wanted to make an extreme image about all this man-grown yellow, so the lighting I first used was early evening with my back to the sun.This produced an outrageous yellow explosion against the delicate, still-winter brushiness of the trees: almost impossible to conceive of together, yet there they are, juxtaposed in front of a still bluish sky, which enhances the opposition.

So, a few days later I was all set up , with a clear sky, ready to go. It got to six pm and the crop started to flare up 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.

birds

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.

3. STUDIO

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.