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.
