I like free stuff!

I was hoping to be analysing this artist and that artist today, but with one thing and another London will wait. Instead, I thought I would share a resource I stumbled across.

It appears the only supplier of reasonably priced genuine lead paints in England at the moment is Winsor and Newton, (Mr Harding, I don't care how good it is, £400 per litre is too much money for white paint) so I have spent some time on their website. If you can see past the PR it is a fabulous resource which I will be referring to extensively in future. I particularly like the analysis of historic painters palettes.

This morning while following links and trying to find somewhere with Cremnitz White both in stock and below full retail, a dealer's website pointed me to a free download I hadn't noticed: The Oil Colour Book. Look past the agenda (strangely enough, it only mentions one manufacturer's ranges and only describes one manufacturer's history in depth before eulogising that same manufacturer's commitment to excellence at every opportunity) and there is excellent information on pigments and oils and their characteristics and on techniques, supports, manufacturing processes and just about everything oily. More detailed information is out there, but to get it in one place costs money and this will be more than deep enough for most people.

The Mystery of the Terrapin in the Cistern

I'm getting myself together for a day in London. It doesn't happen very often what with me being broke and hating the place, so when I go I like to have a plan and, thanks to this blog, I do. Morandi at the Estorick and Friedrich at the National for sure. I'll have to see where there is a Nicholson or two but there's bound to be one in one of the Tates. If its Tate Britain there will be a Nash and a Sutherland in the same room, and it would be rude not to get up close and personal with good old JMW. I would look into the Barbican as its almost en route between Islington and Pimlico; the free gallery always has something interesting and unexpected and that is where I discovered Anthony Whishaw but unfortunately it appears the current exhibit is so popular there is a three or four hour wait. Wherever I end up, it will be a hard day of deconstructing, examining and beard-stroking.

The point of this post though is not a route but a habit. Every time I go to town, I start with the same object: the Terrapin in the Islamic room at the foot of the north stairs in the British Museum.

Sculpture is not my thing, I prefer the ambiguous spaces of paintings but I adore this. Its one huge lump of jade, carved into a terrapin 18 inches long with workmanship that is flawless. Even the underside is immaculate. I know little about carving, but I do know jade is difficult to work with. The fascination for me though  is stylistic. The terrapin was carved in Allahabad in the 17th century, yet its form is so sleek and simplified it could have been made in the west between the two world wars. Despite this simplicity, it is so accurate that experts have identified both the species and the gender and I just love it when objects manage to bridge to opposing sets of goals like this - in this instance simplicity and realism, stone and liveliness, understatement and extravagance.

The sadness is that it is not better known. It was discovered in a cistern and now lives in a mirrored glass box in the far corner of a room filled with Iznik ceramics, antique weaponry and intricate astrolabes. The people in that room aren't interested in a terrapin by a window and just walk past. In truth, most people never even find the room, tucked down by the back door, and those that do are often just getting their bearings before heading upstairs to the nearest blockbuster gallery, the Egyptians.

Update: The terrapin is on loan at the British Library until April

The Frustration of a Water-Meadow in February

Everywhere I go it is plain that Spring is in full flow.

Some trees have blossom already, there are a few flowers in the gardens, leaves are in bud, the kestrels are out, the kingfishers are visible again and the change in dawn and dusk is very apparent. I think I even glimpsed a bat the other day.

The mead however is still so soggy as to be un-passable in parts. There are areas that are fine, a tarmac path, the raised area beneath the woods, the woods themselves and the part of the mead closest to the Windsor Road, but the most interesting part is still out of bounds. I could probably wade through it in wellies, but that would be very hard work that is likely to involve falling over or losing a boot.

It is still all the rain that fell at Christmas thats the problem. There's been enough to keep topping the mud up ever since. The patches of water shrink or grow each day, but they show no signs of going as after a couple of days the squalls come back.

Ho hum.

Stepping on the path to Enwhitenment

The work I have done with the recent snow has highlighted to me my ignorance about white and I have determined I will make better use of it in future. It has forced me out of my comfort zone and made me treat white as a colour in its own right. I have yet to fully resolve them but there have been some very interesting moments featuring off-whites in ultra close harmony which do strange things to your eyes and perception, turning the surface into an apparent source of light. In particular white modified by a blue-green like viridian or pthalo-cyanine is startling when adjacent to white modified by a violet. My initial impression is that if you start with two colours close enough to each other to clash and use them to tweak different areas of the same white, strange things happen.

It is time I understood all this.

Left is a sketch of Runnymede in a break in the snowstorm with the Egham skyline as a dark streak in the distance. The sky is based on Zinc White. I painted this to explore the cold in the aftermath of seeing Grayson Perry and Will Self talking about Hunters in the Snow. I realised part way through that, since we are all used to seeing the world blurred by camera and speed, smearing the horizon would speak of the harshness of the wind here, almost as if the wind is whipping the paint across the canvas. It was also conceived as a vehicle to explore my new tube of paint - Winsor and Newton Iridescent White.

When I first saw this paint I assumed we would be talking about oil on water types of iridescence and I was both excited (having read the Seven Deadly Colours: The Genius of Nature's Palette in which the author examines seven ways nature generates colour, pigment being just one and iridescence being another) and wary as I thought it could be uncontrollable. In fact it is ground up mica coated in the same pigment as titanium white and has a very subtle shimmer. In use it is reminiscent of some of the more subtle shimmering make-ups and body-lotions out there - it turns out there's a good reason for that! I have yet to play with mixing colours in, but for pristine snow its subtle pearlescent quality adds a cute little something which you would not be able to put your finger on.

The big problem for me is its sheer warmth doesn't cut it in this context. Fortunately it allows colours beneath it to glow through so I painted the foreground with a mirror image of the sky in alizarin crimson, lemon yellow and ultramarine before adding a coat a of zinc white and finally a heavier coat of iridescent white which was worked entirely horizontally to emphasise the movement on the horizon. This all gave it a blushing, shimmering coldness which doesn't photograph at all but does enchant me and leaves me desperate to know more about the colour.

The first step on the road to mastery of the colour white is to gain understanding. As and when I can sell some junk on ebay I will invest in a tin of the lead-iest lead white of all, Cremnitz to round out my options. I think I will be able to make use of its relative warmth and texture in interesting ways. Soon I will have whites based on titanium, zinc, lead and mica. To explore these I will work on small, postcard sized canvases or boards, probably with one repeated composition. It may end up half colour chart, half weather forecast and half Ben Nicholson. I suspect each will be a moment of stillness if seen individually, or a bewildering chaos if put together. We'll see.

My seven step plan is as follows:

Step one: Complete my palette of different coloured whites
Step two: Play
Step three: Immerse myself in the work of Ben Nicholson and Giorgio Morandi (there happens to be a show in Islington until April which is a bonus)
Step four: Undertake my series of postcard sized experiments
Step five: Remake my snowscapes with this new-found skill and understanding
Step six: Translate this palette for use in landscapes which are not covered in snow - perhaps concrete in bright sunlight, tarmac in the rain and southern England's characteristic flat, overcast skies
Step seven: Gather these into a small show that shows a compelling progression - initial sketches > experiments > sketches reworked into proper paintings > paintings from step six.

A plea

Back in the day I saw paintings by Sean Scully. I forget where and they were, maybe New York, maybe 90's, no matter. As ever, his work was monumental with simple, painterly stripes of alternating colours. The paintings I remember were exploring olives, earths and greys. These colours were thickly painted over a bright ground which peeked through here and there between the stripes.You will rarely see a more convincing exploration of how colours affect each other.

These works changed my attitude and were the beginning of a love affair with colour, although back then I didn't realise it. The practical effect was not evident for some years but in due course, I found I would use a searing bright orange for my underpaintings. It would glow through the colours, tying them together and would wink at you through any gaps in the paint.

It wasn't just a random orange though. Used with care it could burn your eyes, but it was also versatile in a mix - strong enough to hold its own but not so strong as to overwhelm the colours it was mixed with. It was semi-transparent, could be knocked back enough to let the canvas shine through, used with a medium in a very clear glaze or lifted off with a cloth to leave delicate almost peach-coloured staining. Used thickly and with planning it could appear to be opaque too.

The paint in question is Orange Lake by Michael Harding. It is no longer available. I am looking at alternatives - Michael Harding themselves recommend Permanent Orange as being a different colour with similar characteristics - but in the mean time, if anyone out there has any usable surplus they would sell at a reasonable price, please get in touch!

Left: neat Orange Lake squeezed from the remnants of a ten year old tube - Centre right: mixed with Michael Harding Lemon Yellow - Top right corner: mixed with Atlantis Yellow Lake