Week one of lockdown
Nearly one week of lockdown complete, thankfully my studio is only 200m away and empty. Stanley the tortoise, James and Vincent the guinea pigs and Moses the dog have gone to live at home with Jac and Alan. No squeaking of pigs play-fighting and rattling of the upside down water bottle as they suck the water out of the stainless tube. Before he left Stanley did leave me a present at the foot of my easel, I was amazed at how his poo was precisely the colour of Vandyke brown one of my favourites.
Luckily for me, as lockdown was approaching, I managed to have two days tuition with Jac.
Day one was spent trying to resolve floundering issues I was having with my pomegranate and apple. It has been through transitions of floating objects , boring backgrounds, competing colours, compositions that were not working and needed input. Thankfully following discussion about how a cool object is accentuated by a warm background and vice versa, lost and found edges, increased detail in focal points with ‘cutting in’, creating a hard line in contrast to subtle gradients from dark to light with reduced detail. It’s a push and pull back and forth. All the while, in the mind, thinking about what it is that you want to say about this work. For me I enjoy the fresh coolness of a Western apple contrasted against the arid, dehydrated Eastern pomegranate. The relationship between the object and the background is fundamental in exposing this sense, yet Jac reminds me to maintain abstraction in the background and not become representational as this offers a narrative to the work that needs to remain with the viewer and not the painter. Narrative may come later.
Day two was spent returning to Grisaille, working with Ivory black and titanium white, here are two white glazed cups in the early stages.
I’m happy to be painting these cups as I have been studying the organisation of light as discussed by Vincent Desiderio. He talks about the classical light model and it’s four key zones when looking at the light falling on an object. The ‘incidence of reflection’/highlight, ‘light mass’, where light falls on the object, ‘the turning’, as shadow forms in the curvatures of the object, the ‘shadow’ in the area where no direct light falls. Desiderio describes the way that it’s not just the tone that changes between light and shade but the coolness or warmth of that tone. The incidence of reflection tends to be cool the light mass tends to be warm the turning cool and the shadow warm/neutral cool.
I have never realised this but as an artist this kind of stuff is extremely interesting. With a keen eye I begin to study white objects which demonstrate this perfectly. I don’t have any great examples of my own yet, but I am going to consider this when working into my cups and foot below which begins to demonstrate the turning point being cooler than the darker shadows. Take a white shiny object, look closely and you should see these transitions yourself.
I have found an image by Vermeer that does demonstrate some of this theory as you can see the warmth in the light the coolness in the turning and the variation between warm and cool in the shadow. Okay the highlight is warm but it’s not for us to comply rigidly with classical convention.
That’s it for now, I seem to be inundated with new messenger groups wanting to call each other for group video calls. That’s okay if they’re in the UK but the New Zealand lot called us at 5 o’clock in the morning yesterday. I hope you’ll find some positive things to do with your isolation it’s a great opportunity despite the reason.