CADELL'S PAINTING TECHNIQUE-IN HIS HIS LANDSCAPES

I was fortunate enough to visit the excellent selection from the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation which was shown last year  in Berwick. Naturally enough I was drawn there because of the Cadell landscapes. The Dunara Castle at Iona and the lovely Loch Creran. This gave me the chance to look closely at his painting technique.

Both paintings are on board and measure 15"X18" a landscape format common in Cadell's work.( Most books give the measurements in inches.)

The Dunara Castle at Iona, Fleming-Wyfold Foundation

Firstly it is commonly said that he painted on gesso because it helped give luminosity to his work. Alice Strang in her catalogue for the Cadell  exhibition at the SNGMA speaks of the,"dry, chalky finish that.... enhances luminosity"* and sees this as particularly appropriate to the Iona landscapes. This seems to be received opinion on the subject and as far as it goes it seems reasonable. (She also says that the gesso ground absorbs the paint, this is not strictly correct, what is absorbed is the binder which holds the paint together and the medium-perhaps a traditional oil/turps mix which may be used to dilute the paint.)

But I am not sure if that the "luminosity" explanation is a sufficient or even a strictly realistic explanation. A varnish-which Cadell emphatically rejects-can deepen and enliven the darker colours on a painting and  give a greater dynamic range.A glossy surface usually does this-in painting and photography.But many artists  from Impressonism onwards have avoided a traditional glossy varnish on their paintings.I think that like them Cadell preferred the chalky surface and the unity he could obtain with it. He also may have enjoyed certain aspects of painting onto  absorbent gesso and the way in which it modifies the normal handling experience of painting onto a relatively non-absorbent ground. Having in the past painted onto gesso grounds with oils I can vouch for the difference.The paint does not dry much quicker than  work done on a normal ground; instead it remains greasy.

If FCBC had been a cack-handed incompetent who couldn't compose with colour then his work wouldn't have been luminous at all, gesso or no gesso. He deliberately chose his color range.It is certainly true that from the evidence of Cadell's own instructions on the backs of his gesso paintings that he did not want them varnished. This would have altered the chalky surface to an academic gloss. In those places where the ground shows through the colour would have become yellow as the varnish aged.So might the impasto areas where varnish would likely fill the hollows left by the hog hair brush bristles.

Also of course, it is easier to transport gessoed panels rather than canvases and this might well have been a factor in their frequent appearance as supports for the Iona paintings.
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And you can get a pure strong non-yellowing ground with gesso. And by gesso I don't mean the stuff you can buy in tubs in art shops nowadays. That isn't gesso as Cadell or Mantegna would have understood it.

Detail from Dunara Castle showing typical brushwork on a gesso ground.

If you paint in oils onto a raw, unsized or lightly sized, chalky gesso ground, as Cadell seems to have done, then a fair part of the  binder/medium in your paint will be  sucked immediately into the ground. It becomes difficult to manipulate the paint, to push it around. And Cadell was nothing if not a fluent painter.The painting does not dry that much more quickly for it will still remain greasy. But you can drag some more colour over it to get  a broken effect or work into it because it does set up a little. This can be seen quite noticeably in Cadell's treatment of the hills in the  Loch Creran. It may be that Cadell liked the heavy drag of paint and brush.Your brushwork will be more fluent if you use a medium-perhaps a traditional linseed oil/turps mixture.It seems to be quite clear that Cadell used such a medium in the blue construction marks in the Loch Creran. These construction marks are sometimes reinforced or added to at a later stage in his paintings, perhaps with the brush he used to sign his work.They can appear under or over the patchwork of pastel colours  for which they are the scaffolding.A good example of this work can be seen in the painting which was illustrated in Bourne Fine Arts'  2005 booklet as Sandy Creek, Iona. A detail is used as the frontispiece and you can see construction marks and the thinness of some of the artist's brushwork.

Detail of man in foreground of Dunara Castle showing  different paint qualities- a wetter, more squelchy pink in the

background and  perhaps a drier mix in the back and hat of the figure.

Loch Creran

Detail of the painting above-middle distance on right. Shows Cadell's use of blue to construct a basic composition (under) and then to reinforce it (over) when completing the painting. The area just above the words "rough textured brushmarks-a kind of "stuttering"  texture could, I believe have only been produced by the drag of a brush on a highly absorbent gesso ground.

Here just out of interest are a couple of snaps taken at or close to Cadell's viewpoint on the South side of Loch Creran.
The first was taken at a time near to high tide. Cadell's viewpoint was probably higher and behind my own in one of the fields at Dallachullish.

*F C B Cadell, Alice Strang, Edinburgh 2011, page 79.
An earlier post on the same topic is here.