Embracing a Personal Style in Landscape Painting

I wasn’t aware that I was developing a “style” until it had already happened. It was the product of years of experience including a two year TAFE course, followed by art workshops of different lengths, from one morning to two weeks. I quickly discovered that each teaching artist has his or her own style, and this is more-or-less what they try to teach you – with the exception of TAFE where the painting teacher appeared not to teach you anything.* I want to write more about how this kind of exposure affected my development in painting although I think it might be too long a story.

However, now that I have a kind of a “style”, I am constantly being told that it isn’t what is preferred/needed/admired. I am told I need to loosen up with my landscapes. I paint in a realist-impressionist style. I don’t want to reproduce the actuality of a scene, but I want it to convey the sense of it, the details, the feeling of it as I encountered it on one particular day and time. I don’t want it to be abstract. I want the viewer to see a tree, if a tree is there. I love the ‘looser’ impressionistic techniques of Cummings or Sciberras, but that’s not what I want to do. I have been reading a lot about the history of landscape painting, and thinking about what the landscape itself means to me. I think I know what I want to do, but I may be going about the task in the wrong way. Some of this can be attributed to my earlier classes at TAFE, but not all.

So, in a spirit of self-examination, I have been thinking about the whole process of what happens when I come to do a painting. This really only applies to paintings since 2015/6. My TAFE work and the earlier work while at the Petersham studio was approached differently, in many ways with a greater level of abstraction, but even so, it still wasn’t “loose”.

HOW DO I PAINT? Every painting I work on belongs to a series or a theme. This is determined by the place I have been, from which each painting comes. So almost all my paintings to date have been part of “suites” belonging to specific places. The first and most obvious is the Blue Mountains generally, and certain sites, especially Megalong Valley and the Hartley area. I have also done a couple of paintings based on a trip to Hill End, even though those paintings did not depict Hill End township but rather the rural landscape around it. The other major site is Capertee Valley, which I am still working on. Another series came from a trip to Broken Hill with ny daughter Obelia, with visits to Silverton and Menindee. I did not stay at these two places although I had been able to. More recently I have been painting scenes from the Lane Cover River near Sydney.

While I do some plein air sketching and painting, I also take a lot of photographs. Each of my major paintings is based on a photograph from my collection. I have not tried to use other photographs, although am thinking of doing a series based on older artists’ sketches of Capertee, which are very interesting. Having selected the relevant photograph, I then try to follow the same series of steps.

If I have painted the scene en plein air it will be on smallish canvas boards in oil or sometimes acrylic. I hate painting on these boards, hate the stiffness of them and the unpleasant texture, but for outdoor work they are the only thing that is really practical. I have recently been working hard to improve on these pictures, to make them “sing” more, they always seem a bit flat and boring even though they can look really good on the wall in a frame.

I then turn to the main task. I have mainly painted in oil, but due to health reasons I have been working to develop a practice in the new Golden Ooen acrylics, which I will write more about more shortly.

At the end of the day I want to produce a painting from my experience of place. I try to do one or more pencil sketches, or sometines a gouache, looking at the shapes and forms, depending on horizontal or vertical compositions. These might be closely related to the photograph, or diverge a fair bit from it. I don’t try to do an accurate rendering using any kind of grid or other projection. The shapes are sketched in by hand, and may need a bit of adjustment but in the end they are just a simple sketch. I then take the same image and finish a fairly loose quick painting using acrylic on paper to capture the composition better, considering the light, the best palette for the scene and so on. These are proper pictures on 300 gsm watercolour or mixed media paper, no larger than A3 size, some smaller.  I have shown and sold quite a few of these pictures much later, after the final picture is completed. If I ever do anything “loose” this is it.

After that I try to scale up to a larger picture on canvas using standard acrylic. I use a  good pre-stretched canvas from an art store, on a narrow frame, usually 16 x 20 ins or 18 x 24 depending on the scene. These are always representational, to a degree, with some flexibility due to light sources and angles. These come out quite well, but nothing like a genuine oil. There’s something flat about acrylic, no matter what you do.

Finally, if I still like the picture enough, I move onto an oil on canvas picture. As mentioned elsewhere, I use only really good quality oils. I used to use a variety of medium quality paints especially when I was at TAFE but I would never do that again. Working in oil is so special and specific, especially wet on wet with a limited palette, you just can’t do anything with the poor quality low density paints. I am finding Windsor and Newton paints to be of much lower quality lately and don’t buy them any more except maybe for one or two particular colours.

So, to the main oil painting, which is the principle reason for all this effort. It might be quite small, or as large as 24 x 30 but I am not even trying to work on anything larger than that these days because I have no real studio to work in and it’s impossible without space to move around the painting in. If I ever get a real studio again I do want to try a larger-scale oil on canvas or if I win the lottery an oil on linen, it is by far the loveliest thing to paint on but so expensive and given that nobody is buying my paintings I really can’t afford it.

By now I should know the shapes of the images and outlines of the composition by heart but even so there can be surprises and they don’t work out on the canvas as they did on the paper. Maybe because the sizes are not identical – there’s guess work no matter which way you do it.  I put the outlines onto the canvas first with a smallish brush using very light touch using a thinned burnt umber or maybe ultramarine. If these shapes seem approximately right, I then put in the darks – places where dense shadows are evident, dark trees, anything else which will be at the lowest end of the spectrum. After that, other main areas are blocked in.

 There are a lot of different ways to do this, using different colours depending on the scene. If it is of an open valley with dense grasses or bushes in the foreground a dark reddish purple can be brushed loosely over that whole area. A different undercolour, or more than one, goes where the grasses and hillsides are. Sky can be underpainted in at this stage also, but it will be changed in accordance with how intense it needs to be, how much cloud there is and where the light reflects from the clouds. Because I no longer use any thinner or spirits, all this has to be done with a light mixture of paint and oil – walnut or linseed probably.

There are a couple of Gamsol products which can be used to mix that first layer, eg Gamsol Solvent Free Gel can be used to dilute oils but it still does not create that free-flowing underpainting which turpenoid or gum turps does so well. If you do the first layer with only oil, then you must wait for several days for it to dry before you can go back to that painting.

Now it is time to return to the painting, and here is where the real tough stuff happens. I want to paint the essence of the scene. It needs to be like the scene. I don’t want to move the road, or put in a house, or add spare bushes or a pond, just to make the picture look better. BUT here is the problem: everyone says “You are making a painting, it is not real”.

When artists do produce absolutely realistic pictures, which look like a photograph, I admire the skill but see no purpose to that. The painting has to say something more than a photograph would, it has to reference the beauty or the challenge of the real which it is depicting, but also express something about the weather, the feeling of the place at that season, as well as the emotion of the artist, if such a thing is possible.

“Realist” painting aims at reproducing an actual scene exactly as a viewer would see it. I want to respect the shapes and forms of the earth and its characteristics, its rocks, the way the trees glitter or shine in the setting sun, the way the light bathes the beauty of the earth which shares itself with the viewer from so many different perspectives and angles. But as to the detail of how to make that happen – that is the mystery! I find myself getting closer and closer to the surface of the canvas. I find my brushes getting smaller, the details on the trees coming forward, the shapes of shadows on the saplings, all of this has to be somehow brought forward into a total view.

So after hours of labour over several days, waiting for layer after layer to dry, I stand back and look at the picture and I think I see what I was getting at but still it looks formal and stiff. I don’t want to start again or throw the painting away, but now I don’t know what to do with it.

How do others go about the construction of their works? What does it mean when artists (especially art teachers) say so constantly that you should paint “looser”? I wish more people would talk about it openly, or show how they learn to do it.

*This is not to disrespect my TAFE teacher who was and is an outstanding artist whose work I would have liked to learn to emulate. However the main concern seemed to be that students be free to “express themselves” or at least not feel bossed around. The best students did good work anyway. Others who were struggling to understand traditional colour mixing or elements of composition did not get anything like “tuition” in these very basic fields.