Van Gogh: Wheat Field in Rain

By now you've worked out I'm a big fan of weather so, since its raining a lot right now, I've been rummaging round rain paintings. Its seems like there are a few standard approaches which almost everyone takes these days. Some paint the world in really bright colours despite the fact that falling rain mutes everything. Some paint raindrops on the canvas and in front of the scene as if they are looking through a window. Some paint everything in dull colours and pick a person or object out in a primary colour. Some have everything fading to grey. Etc etc etc... Do an image search on google for "rain painting" and see what I mean. Artists' lack of invention, thought and sensitivity when painting this most unpredictable of weathers is soul destroying. Where is the delicacy of drizzle? Where is the violence of the squall? Where is the poetry of a half-obscured landscape?

So it was quite a relief to find this painting by Van Gogh. It is well observed, clever and well painted. This is one of the most colourful painters of his time and, as it was painted in 1889, it was painted about the same time as some of the sunflowers and bright cornfields and yet our Vincent has toned his palette right down and judged his colours with a delicacy befitting the subject.

The manner of the painting itself is intriguing. He has found a way to make the distant mountains all but disappear in the rain without simply blending them away. The trick he uses for this is just so simple and elegant - he uses the same colours as the sky but changes the texture slightly and then draws the outline of the skyline on top in a related colour. The intermediate hills use the same idea but the colour is halfway between the foreground and the sky. The foreground itself is noteworthy too. Van Gogh's distinctive brushwork is used for the field as it would normally be, but it is juxtaposed with a very small number of raindrops which are indicated as simply as they can be with light and dark slashes. By carefully judging the angles of the two sets of marks - the perspectival and textural wheat and the dynamic rain drops - Van Gogh has multiplied the impact of both to add light, space and energy.

The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Not this Sunday after all

The street gallery in Windsor has been called off due to a forecast of very strong wind. I'll be looking for an alternative or else joining in with the next one. As and when something is arranged, I'll post it on the blog.

This Sunday: Windsor Street Gallery

Come and meet me and other local artists this Sunday in Windsor. I'm doing my first art fair which should be fun. We're there all day at the top of Peascod Street, almost within the shadow of the castle itself.

I'll be taking linocuts, oil sketches and one of the skylines and I'll also take a couple of nocturnes to see what sort of a reaction they get. Prices will be reasonable.

Hope to see some of you there!

Right click and choose open in new window. It'll all be orange soon...

New Work: Nocturnes

Its time to call a temporary halt to my beautiful nightmare: considering the term nocturne's musical heritage perhaps I shall call it an interval.

I have loved making these, I think I could work on more for many months yet to come. They are strange - easy on the hands but incredibly difficult on the judgement. The hand and brush skills required are minimal but the everything else is demanding. When you are working within such a tiny tonal range then the way every mark catches the light, the sharpness or softness of every edge, the tiny differences in colour, the opacity and transparency of every glaze or impasto, the relative glossiness of each passage, the way the texture of the canvas is emphasised or disguised and a thousand other subtleties take on a disproportionate importance because they are the only way the space, the light and the looming quality of the landscape can be indicated. They are the hardest things I have done, and I am a better painter for having made them.

So far there are six. Two show the full moon in relation to the bushes that grow along the riverbank here, the square one barely shows the Thames itself reflecting back the inky sky. All of these three are dominated by the street lamps of either the M25 or Englefield Green which, although they are out of sight, are close enough to stain the sky near the horizon as if with a permanent, artificial sunset. The other three explore the impact of car headlights. In one they are blinding, in another they slash the world in half but at the same time help give form to it and in the third they are less dominant and give glimpses of the surrounding trees.

There are two larger ones yet to be started related to these, and three more which are just a gleam in my eye at this stage which will look at the way mist rises across the meadow. I'll freshen up with something else a little more autumnal before I make those though.

I know you must be sick of me bemoaning the difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting, especially given my tendency to build paintings from multiple layers of transparent paint, but never has it been truer than here. The plan is to show them in Guildford in January; coming and seeing them is the only way to understand the subtlety. I may put close-ups up here at some point to give you a chance, but I've gone on enough for one day!