SWALLOWS AT 9PM : An account of making a painting using oil studies,
photography, digital mapping and traditional layer painting.
1. OUTDOORS
• To find a new picture I have to be outdoors for several days, though perhaps years is
more like it, since sensitivity is accumulated. I adjust to being in the landscape. The
writer Richard Mabey in “Nature Cure” is good on this. All kinds of things help, walking
on uneven ground, animal sounds and movements, rising to the unexpectedness of
everything...
Of course I find myself outside in weather conditions & times of day that don’t show
what I really want. Then I either go for a walk bird watching, take photos or sit in the
car nearby, read, nap, phone a friend or listen to cricket if its on the radio. For a low
light evening or night painting I’ll set up early to allow my eyes to dark adapt. To adjust
visually to the landscape takes about half an hour. Unadjusted eyes can’t see. Everything
I do is to help my senses and reactions do their best in contact with the natural world.
• I set up in field with an outdoor oil painting kit the basics of which were developed by
the mid 19th century. I have a big pochade box containing the familiar paraphernalia of oil
paint in tubes and little jars of this and that. It has a lid that opens to hold a panel to
paint on and a strap that goes round my neck so I can paint standing up if a crop is high,
for example. There’s a digital camera on a tripod (to avoid camera shake) for low light
shots. A comfortable seat, flask of hot coffee, sandwiches, fruit, tot of whisky.
Discomfort is my enemy - I have to be alert and relaxed. I take lots of old clothes in
unnoticeable colours. If you are still it can get cold even in summer. I suppose I look like
a tramp. I usually feel utterly happy at about this point, with my brushes, palates and
rags, waiting andd watching.
There’s a tramp in the area. He walks the lanes and looks as though he sleeps rough. He
has layers of clothes held together by a belt. He’s usually dirty and may be on
medication. Sometimes we nod to each other from a distance.
• I paint studies on thin primed boards of MDF or hardboard. If I’ve got my painting kit
ready it’s because I’ve already thought there may be a painting at this spot at this time. I
might have an idea from a photo taken days or years previously. Or it might be that a
photo taken minute ago suggests something. Remember, you can shoot, look at, adjust
and re-shoot digital shots on the spot, a huge change from when I started painting, when
you took film into Boots. Speed aids immediacy here. I think of it as technology helping
contact. Of course I frequently start paint studies without a photographic clue, though
then I’d take supporting selective exposure shots as soon as I knew the effect I was
after. Basically, if I’m working for a larger picture I take photographs as soon as I get
going.
• When I started the oil study for Swallows at 9pm I’d already taken photos on a
previous visit at about 6pm. There were no swallows. I’d done these shots because I felt
that no one had really looked a rape as it responds to light and I wanted some quick
images to get a feel for a possible painting. The oak tree determined the composition to
an extent : it’s at the centre of a square. I had my Oak show in mind, and the thematic
presence of a still tree in a world that changes (T S Eliot “…at the still point of the
turning world…”) but which also changes itself… I wanted to make a quite extreme
image about all this man-made yellow and the first lighting I thought of was early
evening, with my back to the setting sun and warm light reflected off the crop directly in
front of me. This gave an outrageous yellow explosion against the delicate, winter-grey
brushiness of the trees; things almost impossible to imagine together, yet there they are,
juxtaposed against a still bluish sky, which enhances the opposition…
So a few days later I was all set up under a clear sky, ready to go. It came to 6 pm and
the crop started to flare up with the setting sun, and I started to paint.
I do the base colours (under painting) very fast with quick drying acrylic, so the whole
thing is in roughly in key from the start. Then on top of this I lay patches of oil paint
each with very clear, separate values, what Walter Sickert and the French tradition
called la pienture. I sometimes make notes about colour mixes on the board, or describe
colours and colour relationships on a little voice recorder. I try to keep mixes as simple
as possible. * If the light is changing fast you have to work fast. It’s like keeping up with
the band if you play guitar!
In this case I sorted out the main colour relationships of the scene and the study was ok,
but not quite together somehow. And I now felt there was something about the original
idea that felt wrong. Too much of a preconceived thing maybe…
So I put my things down, sat down, and prepared another board. I saw the light was
fading very slowly, so I would wait for something different. I blocked in the new board
with acrylic in a lower key to meet the falling light, and then noticed that the upper sky
had become brighter than the dead-alive horizon grey, the shadow of the Earth on the
atmosphere. The yellow crop was now actually in shade, but still irrepressible; the
horizon trees were blanking out and unimaginable red-blue greens appeared inside the
rape. I started to work fast and in under an hour had all I needed. At the same time I’d
taken a series of selective exposure photos. It was now darker and at about 9pm a
group of swallows flew at and past me like bullets. The lead bird turned violet against
the rape. I quickly made some marks to record this, and noticed a red radio mast light
on the horizon and put that down, then a car headlight in the distance. I packed up and
went home.
• Sometimes everything seems slower when I’m driving back, as though I have time to
spare, like a racing driver. As I drive back through the suburbs the number of trees
decreases as I get into town centre, and streetlights and advertising take over. When I
get back indoors I feel different. I’m energised and tired. Sometimes if there is day light ,
I get the study out to see if it’s any good. Otherwise I wait till the next day. In this case
I left it in the box, finished off the whisky & went to bed.
* What determines the colours I choose ? There seem to be at least two levels to this and both
have an imaginative dimension.
a) Global colour relations, the colour / light of the picture as a whole. Typically, I look for
the extremes to establish this. There’s a beginners method to get this where you put
down darkest darks, lightest lights, largest areas first, to establish the range, keeping
an eye out for the most saturated colours etc. But now I immediately look for a
dominant effect and go for that, so emotions and imagination are engaged from the
start. I think you can see this in the oil study .
b) Local objects or easy to see groups of objects : these will have distinctive or
characteristic sets of colours that I might want. Picking these out lets me miss out other
colours I see – so imagination and memory (informed by painting) edit to get
appearance. Examples would be the range of yellows on one plant, or the small number
of colours selected for a tree. I pull out what I will need later in the studio.
• I needed source images for the swallows, so a few days I later went to a field of barley
where I knew swallows hunted and eventually got some images that seemed to match
what I’d seen at 9pm in the rape field. It was better to do this in broad daylight to get
the shutter speeds needed to stop such fast objects. The shapes were unforeseen so I
was learning to see. They looked like marks and remind me of animals painted on pots
by the Etruscans.
2. COMPUTER WORK
• Next day the study looked of a piece but unfamiliar, i.e. good enough to make
something worthwhile. So I next started to work on the photos. These went into
Photoshop.
• 2 basic things about Photoshop:
a) Each pixel is quantifiable in terms of tone, hue and saturation, so colour
selections can be made from the entire image based on the numerical value of
any pixel or related range of pixels.
b) Each selection can be made into a discrete layer and manipulated independently
of anything else.
• Oil painting technique from the time of Titian was mainly wet on dry layer painting –
each separate colour mix of paint was laid on dry paint, so each value remained visually
separable, like notes. There are artistic gains that flow from this that are best pointed
out in front of any good painting that uses this method. “Clarification” would be a rough
summary. My studies have this in mind, and in the studio the painting is built up in this
way. I sometimes see nature in these terms even when I’m not working. (A visual
scientist told me that over the years he’d trained himself to see architecture in terms of
sets of spatial intervals that relate to different channels of information in the visual
pathway to the brain. Both art and science can change the way we see!)
• My insight connecting Photoshop to traditional oil painting is that each has layers that
can be ‘translated’ one to the other. Printers can think like this too.
• The differently exposed photos are selected for closeness to the tone range of the
area of the scene I was looking at. Only three photos were needed for this painting - it
can be many more:
1. Best vertical tonal range of sky
2. Best distribution of yellows & greens
3. Best tonal values of trees at horizon
• For each of these photos colours are selected to map to similar colours from the oil
study. The mapping is not perfect, but matching by relative tone value is a good guide
and the results are “good enough”.
• So if I have, say, five yellows for rape on the oil study, the task is to identify which six
colours in the appropriate photo map to each of these five study yellows. To do this I
select a small range of similar yellows in the photo and use the computer to test how
they are distributed throughout the image. Photoshop lets me select not just one
unique value, there are tools that allow me to cluster a unique value with similar values
next to it, a kind of simplification. So a Photoshop selection can behave like a colour in
an oil painting, “summerising” a group of very similar colours :
all the reds in this image represent the selection of a small range of darkish reddish
yellows. They are coded red so I can easily pick out the distribution. This gives me the
distribution pattern to map from the reddest dark yellow in my oil study. The canvas has
a dot grid on it so I can transfer densities and gradients from one grid to the other.
This layer shows the
darkest yellows and
greens. The selection can
be subdivided and digitally
manipulated to express
differences registered in
the oil study. A3 print
outs are taken into the
studio to work from.
this layer is the distribution
for the darkest greens and
blacks.
3. OIL PAINTING IN THE STUDIO
• The canvas is a meter square. I stretched it myself using acrylic pre-primed linen. As
usual the initial under painting was to be in acrylic, but there was an oddity. The first
picture I had in mind was a night painting, to pair with an already started day painting.
So the canvas was first underpainted with acrylic for a night scene :
Yet I felt it would still make an
under painting for the new
picture, because the emotion I
wanted was to do with floating
on darkness, as though the
Greek underworld was beneath,
or something… so I started to
paint directly on top of the dark
acrylic in oil.
These are early oil layers – they are
in the oil study key, but effected by
the dark under painting, like gravity.
When subsequent layers were
added I got increased opacity & so
a much closer match to the study
values. Paint goes on in different
ways in different parts of the
picture. It’s not mechanical and
hard to summarize. I’d have to
point things out in front of the
painting.
The piece of cotton is a bit of the
grid set up.
The finished picture took months, though less than six. I listen to audio books and
unobtrusive (often baroque) music when I’m working. The audio books for this one
were Lord of The Rings and Swans Way. I work methodically, with set hours. I start
before 9.00, breaking off for coffee at 11.00 lunch at 1.00 and tea by 3 – 4. After tea I
knock off if I feel like it. Cleaning up takes 45 mins and a change of clothes.
• I spend a lot of time making sure I mix colours that match the study as closely as possible.
Like a lot of realist painters, I mix up quite large amounts of basic values and keep them, often
underwater in containers, for weeks. (Jenny Saville does this) If I have a store of premixed
values I can get off to a easy start. If you look again at the oil study you will see little “U”’s
(“used”) written here and there. These indicate patches of paint mixed in the studio to match
the values mixed outdoors. These new patches give me a more durable reference patch that’s
less likely to ware off when I wipe the board clean after painting a mix on the board to check it
next to an original colour.
You can see the patterning of distinct layers in this detail from the finished painting. This
area of the picture has some white grid dots left, whereas in the detail below there are
none :
These differences in finish add
something. I can’t talk about this
very clearly at the moment as its at
the edge of what I want next.
A goal I’ve had for some time is
to have maximum realism with
maximum artifice.
Finished painting. I decided to call it Swallows at 9pm next to its companion which was
finished first. The two titles, Swallows at 11 am and Swallows at 9pm mean various things.
The crops are different but it’s the same field, and oak, so there’s at least a year
between the two images. So the birds have been to Africa and back. There are different
time scales. The oak is about 250 years old, the shadow of the Earth on the atmosphere
at sunset lasts about twenty minutes, the car was gone in twenty seconds, the birds in
ten.
There are only a few days in the year when both crops look like this. And only a few
minutes in a day when the light is like this evening painting. The Latin for bird watching is
augury. In the end there were 4 swallows. I think this makes the beauty fleeting and
uneasy. Little horsemen. Swallows flying between day and night.
Swallows at 11 am has a different emotion. It’s bright. We are inside a soft, animated
atmosphere with layers of movement above and below. There’s light breaking through
clouds and the birds look daft with excitement. The barley is like the down in the small
of a woman’s back. It’s amazing how emotions get made in art, I think.