Freedom in Painting: Black and White ( Preparation and Reading )

 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. 

Wilhemina Barnes-Graham 

Prunella Clough is another favourite particularly how she renders textures 

Likewise, the textures  and change of scale in Nicolas de Stael ( and love that edge of red )

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  

Willem de Kooning 

Franz Kline 

Conrad Marca-Relli 

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. 

  Next - how did the class go!

Masterclass in Composition and Thoughts on Colour

Among the preparations I made for Elizabeth Barton's Masterclass was ( as instructed) , files containing images that inspired me, copies of 'good' paintings by artists of the same subject. I had a folder of waves, another of vases, a portfolio of images at speed from a train. I settled for using the one on doors as being more graphic they seemed easier subjects for the exercises. Given the plethora of pictures I had, it was surprisingly easy to choose an image from the village at the top of the Anovreti Gorge in the Peloponnese. It hadn't changed much from when I did a watercolour of it 8 years previously apart from peeling a little more and that particular Greek blue has stuck in my mind for decades Laying tracing paper over the photos, drawing then photocopying and cropping resulted in this image which got the thumbs up during the critique process from my peers. The combination of diagonals and wonky lines is particularly appealing.

On day 2 we discussed the importance of tonal studies, not something I've done much of but potentially very useful. I only had time for one stab at it so not quite balanced but definately worth pursuing. It also came in handy for my painting course!

Interesting thoughts from Elizabeth on colour - on using ones that sum up the emotions associated with the subject rather than being representational. Something I definately need to work on in helping me move towards abstraction. Co-incidentally, a post on this topic today from Robert Genn in his Painters Keys. Also an apt quote from 'Bright Earth ' by Philip Ball which I'm currently rereading

"The seventeenth -century French writer Roger de Piles clearly felt that painters re-created the landscape to suit their own vision- to such an extent that this 'imagined reality' impinged upon the artists very perception of nature:'Their eyes see the objects of nature coloured as they are used to painting them.' "

That's me! Seeing purple in everything!

I digress - talking about colour always does that for me. I argued for using 'Greek Blue' for this piece because it is so much about the colour itself but it would be interesting to try a different palette of colours eg reds- that's where Photoshop comes in handy.

A useful part of Elizabeth's class was the the one-to -one attention and opportunity to get another opinion. As part of the selection of artists intepretation of doors I'd brought along this newspaper clipping about Prunella Clough. Following on from our'homework' looking at artists and quilters we admired, I was more able to articulate why I like this piece - the bright fine detail inserted on top of a looser , larger scale painting, the interest this generates.

This made me think of how I could combine texture of peeling doors with image of the whole area without having the same level of detail all over. With Elizabeth's input looking at my photos, we combined a photo of the door area with a photo of frayed sample done for QuiltWOW workshop on distressed doors. Definate possibilities!