Sky and Sea

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 10, 2012

10 Aug

The main interest in this little seascape is the sky. It started out like this (below).

I used lots of red at the base of the painting in an attempt to give the final sea colour a richness and depth. I’ve applied the paint quite thickly on the top part of the piece. I waited until this layer was completely dry before I worked on it again.

This is the next stage below.

I’ve given the cloud shapes more definition and divided them in to dark and light areas. I then used some charcoal to mark out the rocks in the foreground and lots of blue and white paint to describe the sea. I’m happy enough not to do too much more with it at this stage and I wait for this layer to dry.

This is how the finished seascape looks below.

I’ve used charcoal to heighten the contrast in the clouds and give the illusion of rain falling. I enjoy using charcoal with paint like this although they are not traditional partners – what do you think?

Late Summer Hedgerows

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 8, 2012

08 Aug

The roadside is brightened with mounds of purple and yellow colour at the moment – the long flowering gorse ( remember when I took some photos of the first Spring gorse earlier this year? ) and the purple heather.

The other colour that is starting to appear is the orange of the Montbretia plant. It has been visible until now as bright green clumps along the roadside.

The sight of the first few blooms makes me a tiny bit sad because it signals the beginning of the end of the Summer (what Summer I hear you say?) In a couple of weeks, these grassy banks will be bursting with swooping orange flowers. Here’s some more pictures.

This next close up makes me think of Triffids…

Welcome Back! Seascape in Progress

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 6, 2012

06 Aug

I’m back after my short break and I’ve returned to the sea to do some painting..

I started this one with the idea of setting up some kind of contrast between the bright shore line and the darker water out to sea. This is how it began below.

The sky takes up less than a third of the page so the emphasis is very much on the water. I’ve used a touch of red on the island shape and some charcoal in the foreground to suggest some rock shapes. The rest of the colour is a mixture of acrylic paint and ink.

This is the next stage below. I’ve used lots of bright colour near the shore line – turquoise, green and some pink. I find the colours of the sea seductive and inviting near the shore and I want to play this against the water further out towards the horizon where it becomes mysterious and dangerous.

The next image is exactly the same but taken a couple of days later. The paint has ‘settled’ and some of the thin layers in the foreground have shrunk a bit as they have dried. The colours have dulled a little too but I’ll bring them back later when I varnish the finished piece.

This is the finished painting below. I tidied up the horizon line and added a bit more purple to the island shape. I also used some more paint and charcoal on the rocks. Once the paint was dry, I varnished the whole thing.

I’m happy enough with this one – it needed very little adjustment after the first sitting so I think it has an energy that reflects how it was made. I like the way the paint and charcol bled together in the foreground into these watery shapes that look like seaweed.

Do you think the contrast works here? What does the sea mean to you?

Summer Break

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 27, 2012

27 Jul

I love this Mary Wilson Little quote;

“There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it”

I’m taking this to heart for the next little while to spend some quality unwind time with my family..

Don’t go away! I’ll be back in the second week in August..

Deborah

(Image taken from violetdart on etsy.com)

Paul Henry

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 23, 2012

23 Jul

I’ve been looking at some of Paul Henry’s landscapes recently and thought I might write about them here.

Henry was an Irish artist who was known especially for his West of Ireland landscapes. He was born in Belfast in 1887 and he studied art in Paris before his return to Ireland where he lived and worked on Achill Island (1910-1919) off the Mayo coast for many years. While in Paris, Henry was greatly impressed by the modern avant-garde movement of the time and the bold colourful works of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gaugain. Landscape painting was no longer just about realism but about colour and energy and the individual mark of the artist’s hand. I love this quote by S.B. Kennedy in his book on Paul Henry where he describes these new ideas of the time:

“Cezanne and Van Gogh saw clearly because they had cast aside all the theories and prejudices of the Schools and were looking at nature as if for the first time, and above all seeing it with emotion.”

This notion of seeing landscape with emotion really resonates with me because it seems to me that this is what painting is all about. I imagine then how Henry must have taken these new ideals and applied them to our own peculiar landscape and weather conditions, without the heat and intensity of the mediterranean sun. He recognised the singular beauty of the landscape and the light in the West of Ireland and he learned to articulate this using his own palette of muted colours. The painting above is called ‘Errigal County Donegal’ (c.1930 Image taken from imma.ie ) and it demonstrates this very well. The setting seems to shimmer in a kaleidoscope of greys tinged with blue and pink against the golds and browns at the base of the painting.

This next image below is an earlier work (c.1922-23) called “The Bog at Evening’. I love the simplicity of this composition – mountain, horizon line, turf and water. I admire the contrast that he has set up between the shadowy dark browns of the turf and purple mountain and the delicate pinks and pastels in the billowing cloud shapes. The reflections of the clouds in the bog water and the low evening light give the painting a perfect stillness where only the evidence of human activity now remains.

Image taken from D7ET website

This next painting is called ‘West of Ireland Cottages’. Once more, the atmosphere dominates this piece, the vastness of the sky and mountains over the small settlement of cottages. The strong blues of the mountains sing against the yellow of the thatch and gold of the bog, a perfect example of how complementary colours can be used together with great effect.

Image taken from Christies.com

This last painting (below) is called Bog Road. It uses similar colours but the tones are more subdued in the top two thirds of the canvas. The lightness of the sky contrasts strongly with the dark stacks of turf. The middle ground is highlighted with a streak of gold where the sun drops down between the clouds and sits beautifully against these ribbons of blue that he uses to describe the receding hills.

Image taken from Mayotoday.ie

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Paul Henry’s work for me is it’s apparent simplicity. Many of his greatest paintings seem at first glance to be composed of a simple arrangement of shapes and colours. It is the degree of complexity and subtlety within these seemingly simple choices of colour, tone, shape and gesture that make them so exceptional in my opinion. As a painter, I have so much to learn from these paintings!

What do you think about them? Do you think that they are relevant to day or have anything to do with modern Ireland?

Sea Holly and Thistles

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 23, 2012

23 Jul

I took some photographs of wild flowers beside the beach at Tra Mhor last week. I am constantly amazed at the variety of wild plants that find sustenance on the edges of the shore. I thought this plant (above) was a type of thistle with its sharp pointed leaves but when I looked it up later I discovered that it’s a Sea Carrot. The photo was taken after a rain shower so you can see the droplets in the pink flowers which gives it a lovely velvety appearance. The next photo (below) is of the flower head which is white and dome shaped with a tiny red central blossom.

I was pretty sure that the next plant (below) belongs to the thistle family but I checked it later and found that it’s probably a Creeping thistle based on it’s size and it’s soft lilac colour.

The next photo is of some ants which are feasting on the thistle flowers – I’m not sure if its the nectar or the nectar eating aphids that they’re after..

This next image (below) is of some Sea Holly. It’s a bit like a giant thistle with it’s central globe of flowers but these ones are surrounded by large grey blue bracts or leaves.

Sea Holly or Eryngium maritimum was believed to be an aphrodisiac in England in Elizabethan times – ouch! In fact, it was not the leaves that were used but the roots, which were candied. They are named in a speech by Shakespeare’s Falstaff:

“Let the sky rain potatoes;
let it thunder to the tune of Green-sleeves,
hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes (sea holly),
let there come a tempest of provocation…”

The Merry Wives of Windsor’ by William Shakespeare – Falstaff, Act 5, Scene v

The next image shows a group of snails on a holly plant. When I looked closely I began to see dozens of them and the brown scarring and holes on the plants where they had been.

Here’s a close up of one (below) right on the tip of a thorny leaf. I do believe that we made eye contact!

Bog Cotton Painting

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 9, 2012

09 Jul

I wanted to make a painting of the Summer bog and include some bog cotton as I saw in Oughterard recently. This is how it began (below).

I used more paint to describe the grasses in the foreground and the bog surface as it recedes in to the distance. This was done while the first layer was still wet. I decided to wait until the paint dried before painting the wandering water channel (below).

After a couple of days, I returned to the piece and used some blue and grey ink together to describe the water. I also added gold paint and green ink to enrich the colour to the right of the painting. Then I applied a touch of white to describe the bog cotton. I leave it at this point although I feel that it needs more work.

When I return to the painting I see that it needs more contrast and more colour. I darken the area to the left foreground with a combination of red and purple inks and I add some pink and red to the middle ground. This is the painting as I have left it (below). I will leave it for a couple of days and then decide if it needs anything more..What do you think?

My Life as a Potter

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on June 20, 2012

20 Jun

I have mentioned my work as a potter in this blog and so I’ve attempted to illustrate my potting life ~~more clearly~~ here in order to show how my pots and paintings might relate to each other.

I learnt about Raku while studying ceramics in N.C.A.D. I also spent a few months in the south of France as a student with a group of artists who specialised in this technique. Raku is an ancient Eastern method of firing clay whereby the glazed bisque pots are heated up very quickly, removed from the kiln while hot with long tongs and reduced in bins of sawdust. The latter half of the process is in fact a Western adaptation which was pioneered by a group of American potters in the 1960’s. This dramatic process is very exciting and produces lustrous metallic glazes with crackled surfaces. I used the technique for my degree show in 1991. Here are some examples of the things I was making then.

These pots were thrown on the wheel and altered from the inside while still wet. I remember seeing an ancient Roman pot that had been decorated by finger marks made from the inside and this was a revelation to me. I became interested in the notion of clay as a skin with some kind of bone-like structure behind it. I drew lots of animal skeletons in the Natural History Museum and I also looked at plants and seed pods for inspiration.

These little tea bowls (below) were an homage to the ancient Japenese form of the technique.

The next few images are of me practising raku in Dublin in the 1990’s. The first one shows the kiln loaded with some pots and ready for firing.

This is me taking a pot out of the kiln with a long pole. I also used a tongs but I was able to hook some shapes from the inside with this rod, which avoided marking the outside of the piece.

The next photograph shows the reduction process in action – I always worked with another person for safety. I used dustbins filled with sawdust and wood shavings which ignited when the molten piece came in to contact with them. More sawdust was poured on before the bin was sealed with a lid and some wet paper. The pots were allowed to smoke for a couple of hours before they were taken out and cleaned. The reduction takes place because the chamber is starved of oxygen and so the oxides are drawn out from the metal oxides present in the glaze. This is what produces the metallic effects – copper oxide produces a copper glaze here where it would produce a green glaze in an atmosphere with oxygen present.

I set up my own pottery studio in Clifden in 1997 and made raku pots for just over three years. I learnt how to work on my own and I had a shed and a small outdoor space as well as a workshop where I prepared the clay and made large vessels on the potters wheel.

I made purer shapes – spheres and ovoids with narrow openings. I used copper and cobalt oxides in my glazes to produce the blues, greens and metallics that I liked. Here are some examples below.

The next pair (below) are simple figurative pots – parent and child.

Here is a close-up of the glazed surface (below). I still love these rich lustrous colours as you can see in some of my paintings. I identify them with the precious and the magical which is an association I like to make with nature in my paintings.

Summer Evening at Streamstown Graveyard

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on June 16, 2012

16 Jun

I went for a drive yesterday evening towards Claddagduff, north of Clifden and stopped at this graveyard on the way. It is situated on the side of a hill beside the road and looking out to sea at the mouth of Streamstown Bay. You can enter the graveyard through sturdy metal gates or by stepping over a traditional step style in the wall (below) as I chose to do.

This is the view on the other side of the wall (below). This graveyard is still in use and is an interesting mixture of ancient, weather beaten stone remnants and modern headstones.

These next two photos show the view moving West as the bay wanders out to the Atlantic. The smooth edges of this grey headstone (below) stand erect among the scattered stone blocks whose carved linkage with the past ( if there once was any? ) has long since been eroded.

As the evening drew on, the shadows grew longer (below). I read what I could of the modern stones and found familiar local names – King, Coyne and Casey.

I left wondering if the beauty of a place such as this makes any difference. I think that perhaps it does – as a better final prospect for the living, compared with some anonymous square field and for those left behind who might draw some kind of peace from such a setting

Landscape – Dark Pool

by Deborah Watkins. Posted on June 9, 2012

09 Jun

This is a landscape on canvas (5″ x 7″) that I have just finished. It is based on an area between Clifden and Roundstone known as the ‘Bog Road’ which offers impressive views of the ‘Twelve Bens’ mountain range.

The photograph below shows the painting after the first sitting. I have used quite a lot of acrylic paint and ink to get it to this stage. The pool in the centre is the main focus of this one as you can see.

Here it is from a different angle – I’ve brought the painting around the edges of the canvas (below).

I wanted to make the piece darker in terms of colour and mood when I came back to the painting. These bog pools have a bottomless watery darkness about them that I am trying to convey here. I got it to this stage (below) but now I am not happy with the sky or the mountains in the background.

I returned to the piece when the paint had dried and attempted the background again. I decided to introduce some reds and purples to the mountain range as there is too much blue in the piece above. Here is the painting as I have left it (below).

In an effort to create more drama and movement, I allowed the grasses and water to spill over the front side of the canvas (below).

I am happier with the piece now and I think that the red mountain range is an improvement. I hope that I have managed to create this dark mood I am looking for. What do you think?