In Praise of "Fiddling"

I submitted an article to Leisure Painter last year, which was eventually rejected as the magazine editor didn't think the illustrations would have shown up well on the printed page - and she was probably right.

However, I think it will work here: and feel it needs to be said: so I'm publishing it myself.   Comments appreciated.

IN PRAISE OF FIDDLING

"Don't fiddle", they say; "less is more". And I suspect this is why I'm seeing more and more paintings in exhibitions which just aren't finished at all. The advice has been taken so literally that oil and acrylic paintings are left thin and scratchy, looking like nothing so much as a paint-by-numbers effort (where the paint is thin because they give you too little of it, and most p-b-n'ers stick rigidly to the lines).

Thing is, this is good advice for watercolourists, on the whole. Once you've applied a wash, the best thing to do with it is often to leave it alone - fiddle with it and you get back-runs and mud.

But there are reasons for this. Watercolour is a medium which relies on its transparency and purity of colour. There are opaque colours in watercolour, but many of us avoid them because they can quickly ruin the light, evanescent appeal of a watercolour painting.

Oil and acrylic, save in special circumstances (glazing, particularly) are not primarily employed for their translucent qualities. They can certainly be used as such, but the usual approach with both is layering of one colour over another, or one tone over another to achieve depth and form.

So it should go without saying - but it doesn't - that you aren't going to get the best out of these opaque, layering pigments if you don't actually layer them: this doesn't mean you have to add finicky, nit-picking detail - that is true "fiddling"; but it does mean that the subtlety of oil and acrylic is best exploited by a process of addition; a painting may actually accrete layers - we can work them up in stage after stage, each one strengthening the image, establishing form, shape, tone, shadow, light.

Oils and acrylics are, in short, USUALLY additive rather than subtractive media - whereas in watercolour you might, as a matter of your usual technique, take something out, in oil and acrylic you're generally going to be doing the reverse. Yes, you'll sometimes find you have to take the sponge, cloth or knife to the paint, to remove a claggy mess of mud: but this isn't something you'll actually be planning or hoping to do. It may form part of your technique, but only because you haven't yet mastered it.

There are of course those of the plein-air persuasion, who very reasonably point out that there's no way they can apply careful layering in oil, because it just doesn't dry fast enough out there in the field - in fact, it IS possible, but only with a delicate and at the same time sure touch. Even so, one takes the point - yes you can work over several days; or finish off your plein-air study in the studio; or of course use the plein-air sketch as the basis for a larger painting to be tackled indoors. But the typical plein-air work requires mixing the right colours to start with, and getting them down in relatively quick, unrehearsed, and unfussed strokes of paint. Such paintings have great immediacy - they might however sacrifice subtlety. Many of us, perhaps most of us, sketch en plein air, and either finish the painting in the studio, or start a new, larger one, using the sketch as our guide.

One of my recurring nightmares is that I drop dead in the middle of a painting - because most of my opaque work reaches a stage that might generously be described as god-awful: a stage at which you could only think the poor old chap's lost his touch; to think it should have come to this, etc.... But then, it's a work in progress - true, if a watercolour starts to look as though something horrible has happened, it probably has. But oils and acrylics - mine, anyway - nearly always go through the "oh dear, surely he can't have meant to do that?" stage, and by way of illustration I offer an acrylic painting of mine that did, in the end, represent what I had in mind, but had rather painful birth pangs before it got there.

Here's the sketch – the tones are broadly indicated, plus as much of the detail as I felt necessary:

Figure 1

I toned my board with a mixture of Burnt Sienna and a touch of red, to produce a map of the tones; no detail – just putting the big shapes in. And I roughed in the sky with ultramarine and white. I decided at this point that I didn't want a complicated land-mass and a busy sky – if I do this again, I think I might make the sky more interesting, since it occupies quite a large area of the painting.

Figure 2

At this stage, it doesn't look too bad at all: the profiles of the cliff are about right; I've mixed ultramarine and burnt sienna for my darks, just placing the foliage areas. In fact, if I'd been a bit more careful with these shapes and darks, I could even have glazed over the top to finish the painting in half the time (in theory at least).

Fig 3

Had I been going to pursue that route, this is the stage on which I'd have based it: just firming up the darks, lightening the lights, and refining the drawing, then adding transparent glazes. However, that wasn't what I was after: I wanted a rather more rugged look than that approach would have given. So rather than refine shapes, I built the painting up from the broad shapes I'd already established – remember, I had my sketch to show me those details I was about to cover with opaque white, mixed at this stage with varying amounts of ultramarine, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre.

This is the stage at which I would not have wanted to drop dead (any other time, fine: but not just now). Because it looks … well, vile, don't you think? But – I've got the big shapes; I've got the build-up of opaque paint which will give me my textures, especially in the near cliff. What have I got to do now? Well – this was perhaps the most important stage of the painting. It doesn't look it, maybe. But all I've really got to do now is – fiddle. Take a good, chisel-edged flat, and a fairly large rigger, and turn these blocky shapes into convincing rocks and trees.

And this, completed in one stage, is it. I've removed the fence from the bottom left (without which I would never have stood on that bit of cliff, but it wasn't needed in the picture). I've added a little chunk of cliff beyond the first promontory, which isn't there in reality, but the composition needed it. And using no more extra colours than viridian, a little Naples yellow, and a touch of prism violet, I've just built up detail by, well, fiddling. The hard work was done at Stage 4 – you've GOT to get those basics down, however awful they look, before you can put clothes on them.

There are things I would do differently if – when – I tackle this again: a bigger canvas (this one is 30 by 40cm); a livelier sky; and next time I might actually try getting to Figure 3, establishing some lighter lights, and apply transparent glazes. And I might do a version in oil, which lends itself better to the textured approach (especially if you're using only paint, and not any kind of texture paste). But without a bit of fiddling with detail, I'd have had a different picture. So long as you remember that the time comes when the fiddling has to stop.

Oil painting - no solvents

Well, that was a revelation.  I've always used a little Turpentine or odourless mineral spirits of one kind or other in oil painting until recently.  Experimenting with none, I first of all produced a couple of rather dry looking paintings (though varnish will sort them out in due course). 

This one however doesn't look dry - I used a minimal quantity of Linseed Oil as medium, and nothing else at all.  Moreover, I didn't feel I needed anything else - so goodbye Liquin, Turpentine, Low Odour Spirits, Sansodor, and all the other things customarily mixed with oil paint to make it flow. 

And yes, Linseed Oil will tend to yellow somewhat, but the addition of solvents does nothing to counteract that anyway.

Apologies for it being a snow scene, when we'd hoped to have seen the last of it, though.

Oil painting without solvents

Right then - for a while now I've been telling people who don't like to use White Spirit, or Odourless Mineral Spirits, or Turpentine, that you don't HAVE to use solvents with your oil paint.  You can just use Linseed Oil, or, indeed, nothing at all.  No Liquin, no Oil Painting Medium, no Turps or Linseed.

In practice, doing without any oil or medium at all isn't easy when using brushes - though perfectly possible if employing a painting knife.  But what I didn't necessarily tell people was that I did tend to use a little bit of solvent, either to apply a colour wash to the painting board, or to clean brushes, or to make the paint more workable.

So - I've just started an oil painting in which I intend to use Linseed Oil, and possibly a little Stand Oil towards the end, but no Turps, no spirits, at all.  I know it can be done, it's just that I haven't really ever done it.  We shall see what transpires.

New page on Facebook

I now have a page on Facebook that will be devoted entirely to my artwork - no politics, no idle chat, no long, rambling moans...........

Robert Jones Isle of Wight Landscapes is its title, at least until I can think of something snappier.  My brain tends not to work in that way, at least when it comes to self-promotion. 

Anyway, take a shufti.

In memory of Edward Gouge, PhD, 1947 - 2018

This has been a bad couple of months for all of us in the Isle of Wight Labour Party, as we lost our Secretary, Dr Ed Gouge, to a brain haemorrhage in January.  It temporarily destroyed my desire to paint anything.   Yesterday was his funeral - he is much missed.

This post is dedicated to him, and illustrated with the one painting I have completed this year, based on a photograph by another of our members, Mr Mick Lyons.   It depicts the change of season from summer to autumn at Priory Bay, Isle of Wight - it's an oil, 16" by 12". 

Happy Christmas, One and All (well - nearly all....)

They'll be coming round the headland when they come - Round the Island race off St Catherine's Point

This is an 8" by 10" oil on board which I've had the devil's own job photographing - I just seemed to have lost the knack of photographing my own stuff, Lord knows why.

Think I've got it more or less right now though: anyway this is as good as it's going to look if I'm the one taking its photo .....

And here's another version of the same painting, perhaps showing how hard I found it to photograph an acceptable image.....

Charlie's Day Bed

Well here we are again.  I think we can safely say that the weather has cooled down now - not that it was exactly tropical in August.

But we are back, with a few paintings to follow; this one is of Charlie the dog, who has featured here before.   My landlord has been breaking up old concrete, and Charlie discovered what she thought was a comfortable spot and went to sleep in it, surrounded by dandelion leaves and with a mattress of earth and shattered concrete.

She can be a little ----- strange, at times.

Acrylic, 16" by 12".

Too hot!

Temporarily retired until the weather cools down.  I have two paintings sort of on the go, but the chances of finishing them this week while this weather continues are slim: as slim as I shall be if I keep melting...

Young People: Please, Vote.

Still alive......

Just busy with other things.

I have painted a couple of acrylics, which had to be packaged and posted before I'd got good photographs of them.

These are the best I can do (the photographs, that is, not the paintings - I'm sure I'll do better than those ONE of these days....).

The top one is a view of Tennyson Down from Headon Warren, outside of the village of Totland; the lower one is Fort Albert, or reasonable simulacrum thereof, from near the slipway at Colwell Bay, Isle of Wight.

Email contact

As users of any email server linked to EE /Orange will know, the email service they provide is being closed down - without any consultation, obviously: it's far too much to expect EE to consider the interests of its clients - on May 31st.

A number of people choose to contact me through my Freeserve email account, but it'll be defunct in a couple of months, so I would ask those with arty inquiries, including purchase inquiries, to use the email at the top of this blog - i.e. robertphillipjones.napa@gmail.com.

Anyone wanting to send me any other kind of communication could use that address, or if they prefer write to: jones-ratville@hotmail.co.uk.

Over the next few weeks, while I work on the much neglected website at www.isleofwightlandscapes.net, I'll be showing a number of unsold paintings here - if interested in any of them, either of the above email addresses will do!  One of my favourites, of woodland on Niton Undercliff, with the cliff behind, painted last Spring, is shown below.  Not a large painting, it's just 10" by 8", in acrylic - on offer at the moment at just £85.00 plus post and packing.

Eyes front.

Got my new lenses this morning - a big shock .... The improvement in my vision is dramatic,  I can see colour better, especially when it comes to differentiating the darks, so I've no excuse for not painting.

Now, I'm relying on you, here and on Facebook, to hold me to this.   Self-discipline has never really been our watchword...

On the road again.....

At last the heaving chest has subsided; I've been able to get to the hospital for my eye checkup, following my problematic cataract operation - very thorough tests today reveal there's a cataract in the other eye, but it's in its infancy and neither the surgeon nor I need worry about it for a good few years if we're lucky.  I've had checks on the retina, the macula, eye pressure, and the next step is to go back to my optician for a new prescription to take account of the improved sight in my right eye and balance the spectacle lenses.

I've painted nothing for around a month now - either couldn't see properly, or felt too ill to approach a canvas in anger.  I shall be making up for this very soon, and intend to flood the blog with new work - even though, if you neglect them, skills deteriorate; but working on them anew brings them back.  You don't forget the veriest basics, but a fallow period invariably means that you have to work hard to regain the level of ability you had before.  I wish I knew why this was, but I don't - however, it's been observed by many others; hence Constable's advice to paint a sky a day (which I wish I'd taken) - it does help to keep your hand in; And it hurts you if you don't - I wish that weren't true, but all the experience I've gained over 50 odd years of doing this suggests that it is.

But never mind: fish and chip day tomorrow!  I told the fish and chip van proprietor that this was the highlight of my week - he looked at me oddly, and shook his head - "if that's true," he said, "I feel sorry for you."

But - if you live for the satisfaction of your stomach, as I fear I do, it IS a highlight.  And anyway - I like fish.  And batter.  Crunchy batter.  And chips..... come on, you've got to love SOMETHING!

The sold painting

This is the painting I sold to Australia - from a walk along the old Blackgang Road, painted in 2015 in watercolour.