Meet the Paintings - Dog Roses, Dumgoyne

Today it's 'Dog Roses, Dumgoyne', another local scene.

It's a very sweet little painting, only six inches square, but it's like a little jewel. I put it in a lovely cream frame with silver bands to set it off.

The location is one that I know really, really well.  It's on the Old Mugdock road looking across the valley of Strathblane, with the volcanic plug of Dumgoyne in the distance at the end of the long ridge of the Campsie Fells. Dumgoyne is something of an iconic image for me, as I saw it every day coming home from school, and I can see it now across Glasgow amongst the distant hills.  It's a dramatic reminder of the volcanic nature of the local geography.  The Strathblane Valley itself was created by a giant sheet of ice scraping down between the hills, flattening and sculpting the landscape.

Here's the photo that I took, and based the painting on.

I've often painted and drawn at Mugdock over the years, and, as it my practice, I return to the same spot at different times of the year to paint the same scene.  So I also did a painting of the same roses in the autumn when they were rosehips.  

I really like to get to know a view over a long period, down to recognising individual plants and trees, and having that continuity.

You can explore the location on Google Maps here - EXPLORE ON GOOGLE MAPS.

Meet the Paintings - Cow Parsley at Queens View

Queens View is a local beauty spot on the A809 road to the north of Glasgow between Milngavie and Drymen, so fairly local to me.  It's on the road to the very beautiful and famous Loch Lomond, and you can see Ben Lomond in the distance there in the painting.

Here it is in its frame.

It's also the spot where you can explore The Whangie and The Devil's Pulpit - colourful names for local geological formations.  You can read more about them here  The Whangie and Devil's Pulpit.  It's also a good spot to go sledging in the winter (or it was, when winters used to have a lot of snow!).  At midsummer, Ben Lomond is the place to climb during the night to meet the sunrise on the summit.  So it's a landscape that I know very well.

Here's the photograph that I took there and which was the basis for the painting.

The cow parsley in the picture is great to paint - its 'umbrels', or umbrella-like crowns of white flowers give it a great expressive shape that lends itself to oil paint, so I'm very partial to finding some in the foreground of any scene!  As it dies back during the summer and autumn, it has a lovely reddish colour to its tall hollow stems.  You can read more about it HERE.

Take a look for yourself at Queens View on Google Maps here - Explore Queens View.

Painting a Painting - Queen's View with Ben Lomond

Here's another series of photos showing the stages of painting a painting.

Here's the photo that I took of Queen's View to the north of Glasgow, in some beautiful autumn sunshine, with Ben Lomond in the distance.

Back in the studio, I've got one of my largest sized of canvas, a 40" x 48" linen canvas.  

I've prepared it with a lovely warm lilac background as the midtone to work from.  Having this colour on the canvas as a base means that you're not working out from a very stark white, which can shine out between marks.  

The lilac background informs all the colour choices you make in the rest of the painting, so it literally sets the tone.  

It's how Turner painted his watercolours - he soaked his papers in buckets of red-coloured pigment, which unified the busy turmoil of marks and gave a warm glow to the work.  

Caravaggio painted out of black backgrounds with no preparatory drawing - that suited his dark character and need to paint fast (he was a man on the run from his enemies).  

Impressionists painted out of white backgrounds, which made their colours have a bright intensity which expressed the sense of outdoors light and airiness that they were trying to capture, giving a spontaneous feel away from stuffy tradition. 

It's physically a big size of canvas to work on, and is quite a challenge.  Just actually  stretching to make the marks right across in a small crowded studio is quite difficult!  Also,  it's hard to get the space to keep standing back from the painting to see how it's going.  Standing back regularly is very important - you can see where you're going wrong!!

As I work, it becomes clear that it's all about the blues of the sky working with the complementary oranges of the quiet middle ground, and the yellows and the lilacs working together.  I want it to have a really autumnal feel.  

The sky and the foreground are quite busy and detailed, so it's important to have that calm, quiet middle section with not much going on in the way of brushstrokes or detail.

The middle ground must be completely finished before I put in the long strokes of the foreground plants on top of it.  There's no going back!

Gradually, it all comes together. Concentrate!

I don't have a firm idea of how I want the painting to look when it's finished - I can't actually picture that at all - but I know how I want it to feel, and the painting becomes itself as I paint it.  

As I've said before, I try not to be too prescriptive, but to let passages of paint just happen.  It's like you're curating the marks into one composition, rather than forcing them to be there.  I can guide the paint, but if I don't let it become its own thing, then it looks too forced.

Just painting what I see!

Solo Show in London

A huge thank you to everyone who came along to the opening of my show at Duncan R Miller Fine Arts at 6 Bury Street, St James's in London last Wednesday.  I really do appreciate all your support and very kind comments.

If you missed the show, it's open until 7th March.  In the meantime, here's a quick look round at the paintings, which are mostly of scenes in Wester Ross and Sutherland, the Gower Peninsula in Wales, and Cornwall around St Ives and the Lizard Peninsula - all scenery from the rugged west coast!  

What you don't see here is the texture of the paintings, unfortunately, but hopefully the vibrancy of the pictures comes across.  They really are jewel-like when you see them hung.

You can see the paintings online at the gallery website.

 

Meet the Artist

Lemond Gallery, Saturday 17th September, 1-4pm.

See you there, folks!