BLOG about PAINTING

I wanted to try a different approach.  This time, I painted in the background sky on white watercolour paper, then added the clouds over top.  It does give more of a separation between the cloud and the sky, which I like, but it may be less painterly…

I find that when I’m painting every single day, things tend to go reasonably well.  However, when I miss any days, then I really struggle to get back into the groove.  The marvellous pianist/composer Paderewski put it so well: “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.”  

We’ve been so busy lately foraging for mushrooms and then dealing with our ‘haul’ (it has been an amazing year for mushrooms!) that I have barely managed to do any painting at all.  Many of the pieces reflect that.  They’re either too fiddly or they simply don’t convey what I’m trying to express.

So today, I chose to do clouds, an old favourite.  Not great results, but at least I’m painting.

After a week with no painting - but lots of successful mushroom hunting - I really needed to get back into the habit of painting daily.  With little time, I chose to do three fast, tiny little colour sketches.  I’m really quite happy with the results.

Gallery: 2024 Gouache Paintings

I’ve been looking for an alternative to oils for some time now. Oil pastels are great, but they don’t work at either low or high temperatures, which makes plein air painting difficult for much of the year.

I picked the brains of a helpful salesperson at Opus Art and Framing in Victoria, B.C. She suggested trying gouache since one can work back into previous layers. Well, I bought a few tubes and started. Talk about a steep learning curve! The gouache doesn’t handle at all like oils. It dries very, very quickly, sometimes between the palette and the painting. And it never gets to a ‘sticky’ point, like oils. It stays paintable forever. However, I’ve been working at it, and I’m rather falling in love with it.

Cowichan Estuary Series

The Cowichan estuary is where the Cowichan and the Koksilah rivers empty into the ocean. Located in a wide valley bounded by the magnificent Mt. Tzouhalem on the east and wooded hills on the west, it is magical place of fields and salt marshes teeming with birdlife. I love to visit it regularly to birdwatch and to simply drink in the amazing, ever-changing beauty of the place.

These pieces are all quite small - sometimes as little as 2 in. X 3 in. Many are done from photos for a few reasons. It was a very hot this summer, and the estuary could be baking by as early as 0800. Earlier than that, the light was wonderful, but the mosquitoes were also very active! As well, the estuary is a fair drive from home, and by the time I hike out to the ‘paintable’ parts, it has taken at least an hour. Finally, because glare can be a trigger for my migraines, I find it hard to stare into the light for any extended period of time. Many times that I tried sketching en plein air, I had to quit. It is often better to take some photos and work from them later. (I also then get time to birdwatch.) Hopefully as the autumn progresses, I’ll be able to get out into the field more often.

I challenged myself with rocks and water.  This is a view of a small canyon that we passed on our way to picking mushrooms. Done from a photo.

I struggle with rocks.  I find the piece awfully GREEN, although this is coastal British Columbia in the autumn.  As well, the actual scene was pretty well all green and grey - again, very BC.  I want to learn to inject colour into my landscape paintings.

Since I wasn’t happy with the painting - it was too green, there wasn’t enough variety in values, and it was too monotonal - I tried again, this time with a small, quick thumbnail.

Better.  Now I wanted to try a square format again and try for even more variety of colour:

I think I’m happiest with this one.

So, that’s the evolution of a painting.

I’m starting a new blog about my ongoing explorations of gouache painting.  I want to put up the ‘good’ stuff and the ‘bad’ (or unsuccessful) pieces.  This way, I can see any progression that I am - or am not - making in my efforts to learn this new medium and to loosen up my painting style.

So, to start off, here are two pieces that I did yesterday.  I did them at home, primarily working from a quick thumbnail that I did a couple of days ago out at the Cowichan Estuary, shown here:

Here is my first attempt:

I had several problems with it:

I didn’t like the colour of the background.  I found it too ‘blue’ compared to the rest of the painting, so it didn’t really fit in.

I thought that the patches of marsh grass looked too round, rather than being flat areas.

I also thought that the shapes were too similar in size.

Finally, I found that I was fiddling too much with the paint.  

So I had another go.  This time, I tried to work fast, just laying down colour and not overthinking things.  Here’s what I managed to produce in roughtly 1/4 the time it took to do the first piece:

While I do prefer it, it’s still not where I want to be.  Oh, well…

Spring is springing!

It's our last day at the current sit in Bussières-Badil, a small village on the northwestern edge of the Dordogne, just a few kilometres from the Charente. Tomorrow we head south again, this time to a small hamlet about an hour north of Toulouse. Hopefully, it will be as springlike there as it has been here the last couple of days.

Both yesterday and today have been fabulous - in the 17-18C range. The hills are greening up like mad, the crocuses are popping up all over the lawns, and the birds are singing their little hearts out. We heard a weird but neat hootling noise today and were puzzled as to which birds it might be (crows? jackdaws?) and what it might be that was getting them all excited. And then, when the noise moved overhead, we looked up and saw that it was coming from migrating cranes. They flew in loose upside-down, overlapping Ws of a few hundred birds, calling all the while. Then on a sandy hillside facing southwest, we were surprised to see scurrying lizards. Wow. This is wonderful. All of this while back home they're just getting over two months of snow and have segued right into four inches of rain. I almost feel guilty. Almost. But I figure the best and most sane approach is to simpy enjoy these days to the max and store up delightful memories for the future.

For our last evening, we've been invited down for drinks with the English-speaking expat community who have been very good to us, telling us about local trails, suggesting good markets and villages to visit, and babysitting the dog so we have time to go exploring. We'll be heading down to Chez Lola, whose Irish 'parents' have been particularly great.

Yesterday we went to see a small village over the ridge to the west, St-Sever-de-Rustan. Straddling a decent sized river, the village is the site of a Benedictine monastery originally founded in about 800 AD. The abbey was destroyed time and again during the various wars over the centuries, but nevertheless it grew into a tall, sprawling citadel that is now mostly derelict. Various bits even got sold off. The city of Tarbes bought the cloister back in the early 20th century and moved it down to their formal gardens. Strange...

The surrounding village is quite typical of towns around here - mostly two and three story houses butted up against one another along narrow, twisting streets:

St-Sever-de-Rustan

Then today we drove north to Miélan for the market. It was a lovely drive up the valley, surrounded the entire way by cultivated fields in a patchwork of golds, browns, russets and green. The market itself consisted of only a few vendors, but we got to see another town, and we bought an absolutely fabulous croissant at the small bakery off the town square. We also checked out the church, rather time-worn around the edges, but not over-the-top like the Spanish churches, and obviously well used. It's great to be able to do some small-scale exploration like this. The round trip, including our shopping and a brief amble around town (it was bitterly cold, so we didn't stroll for long), took just over an hour.

TODAY'S TIDBIT:

The French roads are great. The main roads are smooth, wide and clear. The smaller, rural roads run through beautiful wooded areas and, though not terribly wide, have hardly any traffic. Quite often, we go to our destination and back without meeting more than half a dozen cars, if any at all!

Mazerolles Farmhouse, South of Here

Besides all the birds, there is abundant wildlife of the mammalian kind.

First, we see deer pretty well on every walk. They bound across the fields in small herds of three or four, though once we saw a group of nine. We usually see them only at quite a distance, though once we flushed three from a small copse right beside the lane. Luckily, Ibis, the Dalmation cross who spends her time quartering the fields and who can run like the wind, is either unaware of or uninterested in them.

Then there are the Wild Boar. We've never seen any, which is not surprising considering that they are nocturnal animals. They do, however, leave traces. Lately, beside the roads we've found huge areas that they have rooted up with their tusks. The dogs are particularly keen on these. It's probably a good thing that the boars are nocturnal. On Wednesday I had to take one of the dogs to the vet for a vaccination. We ended up waiting almost an hour because the vet had been called out on an emergency. Apparently, one of the local hunters' dogs had been gored by a boar.

Finally - and this is huge - we saw a fox! I've only even seen one other, and that was in the wilderness of the Alaska coast. This one was poised, motionless, over a burrow in a field scarcely 10 meters from the road. The sight of it stopped us dead in our tracks. (My Beloved had never seen a fox.) After a few moments, it became aware of us and turned, sat down facing us, and calmly watched us for a few minutes. Then, having satisfied its curiosity, it turned and walked slowly off into the forest. It was a gorgeous creature with a thick reddish-gold coat and a magnificent tail. How exciting!

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Everybody knows about the Spanish siesta, but who is aware of the French shutdown from 1200 to 1500? It's a good thing that our hostess warned us. The French take lunch very seriously, so all the stores like the butcher and the wine shop are closed for three hours in the middle of the day. How civilized.

The day was warmish and dryish, so I went out painting. I took a folding chair from the patio and my painting kit, slung them into the back of the car, and headed back down a point lower in the valley that I'd sussed out on our walk earlier in the day. It was quite walkable from the house, but it would have taken me at least an hour getting there and back, and I'd rather spend the time painting.

Looking South to the Pyrenees

It was great to get outside and work en plein air, and I relished it. However, the highlight of my afternoon was the Woodpigeons. While sitting there quietly going about my business, I heard a soft noise not unlike the rustling of leaves. Realizing that it was the sound of bird wings, I looked up and there they were. Directly overhead was a huge flock of pigeons, weaving and folding its way through the sky, not unlike a flashing school of fishes. I was spellbound... So if there are unexpected hard edges in my paintings, blame the birds!

TODAY'S TIDBIT:

Apparently when you can see the Pyrenees clearly, that means bad weather coming. Well, it certainly rained last night!