I signed up for 'Freedom in Painting: Black and White' at Creek Creative immediately after the excellent course ' Painting the Novel' earlier in the year, Ashley is such an excellent tutor.
As usual I overprepared ! I've been meeting up regularly with fellow artists Hazel and Teddy ( always so inspiring ) and in between times we've been sharing what we've been up to on Instagram.
I've long been a fan of Terry Frost and I can still remember the impact of seeing one of his 'Through Blacks' paintings ( above) from 1972-3 at the RA exhibition . With it's collaged semi-circles and subtle variations, it looked very different when viewed from the side or full-on, one of those pieces that has to be seen in the flesh to appreciate. In the catalogue he talked of " while making 'through blacks' I got the experience of seeing the blue side of black, the red side of black and the yellow side of black" The colours on the left hand side were the one he was mixing from. There's more about the process and his thoughts on colour perception here.
Spurred on by the postcard sized colour mixing exercises that Teddy had done, I had a go myself with acrylics on watercolour paper, including using some of the combinations I love from watercolours . I like to see a hint of the colours that made them when mixing blacks.
Above:primaries Azo yellow, Alizarin Crimson and Phalo blue ( with overlayers of white)
Below: Ultramarine with burnt umber/burnt sienna
One of the bonuses was that the burnt sienna and ultramarine are transparent ( at least in the Winsor and Newton range I was using) so you get translucent blacks (and a bit of granulation as in watercolours. )
I also had an extensive trawl through my considerable collection of art books and catalogues to find inspiration. Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham is one of my favourite artists, I love her abstracted landscapes - you can see the dry stone walls in the painting above.
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| Wilhemina Barnes-Graham |
Prunella Clough is another favourite particularly how she renders textures
I could have chosen any painting in the book I have of Anthony Whishaw's work , he uses a lot of black and white , I like the subtle variations in line and mark .
The subtle, ghost-like layers of paint in work by Ian McKeever ( below) has always appealed ( I used his 'Temple Paintings' as inspiration for my series of Honesty quilts). This time I picked out pairs of paintings where he'd used black on white and whites on black - get very different effects
Then I spent a long time looking through the catalogue from the RA Abstract Expressionism exhibition - so many examples to choose from , remembering the huge scale of many of the works : the 'drawings' of Willem de Kooning; the large gestural brush strokes of Franz Kline; the collage of Conrad Marca-Relli
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| Willem de Kooning |
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| Franz Kline |
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| Conrad Marca-Relli |
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| Conrad Marca-Relli |
On the requirements list for the course was at least 2 canvases and a range of different black and white paints . As I also needed large quantities of paint ( including 2 x 500ml of white!) for the David Tress class at Lund Studios I put in a a large order of supplies!
We had instructions to paint one of our canvases in black paint beforehand. While I was doing so , I painted some canvas paper I had and experimented with transparent mixing white (I've never used it before) . Mixed with matte or gloss medium it has definate possibilities for glazing rather than using oils.
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