Greek Hillside with Blue Agaves. Watercolor in sketchbook, 11.5" x 8.5".
This is where I ended up after working more on the previous sketch (below).
This sketch seems to be another example of my lifelong obsession with the thorny problem of how to depict the varieties of natural vegetation and growth which often form an almost abstract pattern that also teems with life. It's often what draws me to a particular scene, and that certainly was the case with this hillside. Van Gogh is the only artist who went after this problem, in both drawings and paintings, in a way that I identify with. Somehow, I keep going back to it, and maybe I should just give in and pursue that challenge as obsessively as he did. It's particularly difficult to capture in watercolor, but the spontaneity of the medium also mimics life in a way that none of the others can do.
Here are a few details closer to life size:
A regular reader here asked, a while back, if I'd post about my palette and what colors I'm using. Unlike the compact travel box I often use at home or outdoors, I used my large studio watercolor palette for this one. It has a fitted cover that helps to protect the paints, and you can leave a thin sponge or dampened paper towel inside overnight if you wish.
However, as is often the case, I didn't use more than a few colors! But some of them were different from what I'd normally have on hand when traveling. Here they are:
Now for some technical details. I don't usually use cobalt green, but with the addition of a little cerulean blue it gave the perfect color for the agaves. The painting was begun with very transparent washes using highly dilute Winsor red, Winsor yellow, sap green, cobalt green, and other greens/yellows/olives/ochres mixed using Winsor yellow, cobalt blue, yellow ochre. I find that in order to unify the colors across a landscape painting, it helps to use the same blues as the sky (cobalt blue here) and to continue mixing the colors for leaves and rocks and earth with a limited pigment palette, rather than using raw colors "out of the tube," as one-off appearances on the page. Therefore the olive colors are made with blue and yellow, with the addition of a little red -- a much livelier and more transparent way to get greyed greens than by using a opaque green like the chromium oxide, which is an enormously useful color, but it can get muddy when other colors are added to it.
The darks were all mixed with Indigo as a base (Indanthrone blue would have been another choice) which kept these areas quite transparent and luminous. A slightly dirtied (greyed) cerulean blue was used for the shadows on rocks and hills.
As the under layers begin to build up, then you can add some opaque pigments along with the more transparent ones. Here I chose chromium oxide green, Indian red, cadmium yellow, and Naples yellow. If you look at this detail of the vegetation in the foreground of the painting, you can see the opaque mixtures on top of the darks -- but those have to be added when the dark areas are quite dry if you want the brushstroke edges and shapes to remain!
Finally, I added some pencil lines for texture and form.
Thanks, Beth! That was me who asked about your palette. I've been experimenting and making some color charts so I have some of those colors and you use a few I haven't tried. I plan to do some painting in a technique that a local artist started here called "vitreous Flux" so I'm working on finding colors that mix well together because there is a lot of flow and mixing. So far I don't care for the colors that seem to have white in them, naples yellow and cerulean blue, but I love the phthalo blues and the clear hues. Mostly Daniel Smith paints right now since when I opened my old paint box half of them were solid and I had to buy new tubes.
I have the same palette.
Still looking for a color mix I did in a class years ago I can't seem to come up with again, a lovely shade of turquoise. Hope this gets me through a long winter here in NH.
Posted by: Sharyn | October 14, 2020 at 07:18 AM
In our hallway hangs a print of Vermeer's The Little Street, VR's favourite painting above all others. I fear she would kill to own it. The print was expensive, the sort our most prominent galleries (Tate, National, Dulwich) sell from their shops. This means its colour representation is as accurate as is possible (probably by Lund Humphries in my home town, a specialist in this kind of work) and the colours only fade gradually. Not surprisingly, I too have been drawn into its charmed circle and exposed to its technical magic. Not least in the way the brick structure of the house is rendered, which I think links up with the subject of your post - an impressionistic way of painting nature without simultaneously traducing the subject.
What could be be simpler than painting a brick wall?The bricks are reddish, the mortar whitish. Stand a metre away (our narrow hallway limits any more distant viewpoint) and one may confirm that this is indeed a traditionally built brick wall. Move nearer and the magic starts; the lines of mortar seem to be casually painted, without regard for thickness or colour consistency, almost as an afterthought. Stare on and you start to realise that there are large areas where Vermeer fails to show any lines of mortar at all. Yet the mortar is there because the wall continues to stand. The reason is obvious: in these areas the mortar has been weathered to the point where the white is closer to the red in the colour spectrum. Even so, to exclude all traces of the mortar seems a gigantic step in confidence and AWARENESS - awareness of what the viewer will see when standing at the optimimum point for what is a large painting. Move back to the other side of the hallway and this is confirmed.
A very small point I suppose. Don't necessarily paint what is there, only paint what is seen. Allow for how other eyes will respond. Basic stuff for you, a painter. Magic for me.
Posted by: Roderick Robinson | October 15, 2020 at 04:48 AM
Hi Sharyn, Glad to see that you saw this post! When I've tried to reply to you before using your email address listed with the comment, it always gets returned so I'm never sure if you've seen my replies. Anyway, for turquoise, I use a blend of viridian and cerulean and it's gorgeous. I wouldn't be able to manage without the particular shade that is cerulean blue, though I agree with you that for mixing colors and most uses other than skies, the transparent pigments of cobalt and ultramarine blue are a lot better. Indanthrone blue is also very useful and I've come to prefer it to the pthalo blues which are so staining. I mostly use Daniel Smith watercolors, like you, plus some Winsor Newton and I have a few odd tubes of Rembrandt. I'm dreading the long winter of isolation here in Canada, and like you I'm hoping that these vibrant colors will help!
Posted by: Beth | October 15, 2020 at 02:01 PM