OIL SKETCHES OF NORTHUMBERLAND

Here are a couple of recent oil sketches of Northumbrian scenes. They are quite small and intended as ideas for paintings on a larger scale.I have added surrounds which will give an idea of the kind of dark frame which might be appropriate for the subject. Oil seed rape is now part of the Northumberland landscape and provides a strong colour note.

Towards Cheviot from somewhere in the Ratcheugh area.

Late Spring.

DIARY OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER 1

I was out painting near Alnwick on Friday.Two pochades were the result. And I found a view which may make another painting someday.

The sky on Friday was not very interesting-hardly anything in the way of clouds to be seen. I decided to paint a sketch which had little or no sky and would be almost all green.It gave me the chance-or challenge to make a painting out of nothing as you might say.In this sketch  there was no drawing and not much of a design.I always find this difficult and tend to want  more dramatic compositions.In this sketch I started with the pink of the track but used no construction lines. It was more a question of building up as opposed to filling in.

I thought it was really amusing that here I was, an artist of 2013 trying to put into practice something of the advice that Pissarro gave to Louis Le Bail in the early 1890s.

Do not define the outlines too closely; it is the brushwork of the right value and colour which produces the drawing. Paint the essential character of things; try to convey it by any means whatever, without concern for technique. When painting, make a choice of subject, see what is lying at the right and left, then work on everything simultaneously. Don't work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere, with brushstrokes of the right colour and value, while noticing what is alongside. Use small strokes and try to put down your perceptions immediately. The eye should not be fixed on one point, but should take in everything, whilst noting the reflections the colors produce on their surroundings. 

 I found it  liberating to work in this way on a pochade and the art historian in me began looking back to Pissarro's involvement with Neo-Impressionism and to the  work of Signac,the Fauves and so on.One thinks also of Cézanne who surely benefitted considerably from his friendship with the "humble and colossall Pissarro".

The palette for this painting I used particularly the following colours:
viridian hue, chrome oxide green, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, permanent rose,  winsor lemon,yellow ochre,burnt sienna,flake white hue.


When I had finished work in the lane I set off to find another motif. When I last saw this view near Alnwick there was no sign of leaves on the trees.

MARKET SCENE -OIL SKETCH

This is a sketch in oil on prepared paper. In a sense it is entirely imaginary. Influences are French more than anything else.I am thinking of Daumier and Bonnard.I am not trying to depict a particular place or people.Here below is an associated drawing from a sketchbook.

Pochades-or not

Craster Concrete IV

This is a pochade. It fits my definition of the term  because it is a small painting.In art history you particularly come across the term pochade with reference to those little panels which Seurat painted in connection with the Bathers and the Grande Jatte. Monet uses he term pochade in his letters of the 1870s and 1880s.His idea of a pochade is always a painting larger than a Seurat panel.According to John House*, Monet's pochades can measure as much as 73X92 cms in the case of the very well known painting of La Grenouillère in the National Gallery, London.Perhaps this is what Monet would have called a large pochade-he does use the term.And he also uses the term esquisse-almost interchangeably.But it jars considerably when I see someone referring to pochades by Constable-with reference to the same-size sketches for his six-footers.But this is what you find on the very inadequate entry on Wikipedia. 

No, the word is French and must relate to poche=pocket. The work is small, so it could fit in your pocket.

There is a group on Flickr devoted to pochades and there you can see works by Tadeusz Deregowski who does tiny pochades which must be about the size of a hand.He makes an individual box for each work.You can see his website here.They are really enjoyable and very freely painted.A good pochade will be small but these do not look like small paintings.

*Monet: Nature into Art"by John House;Yale,1986. See especially chapter 6.