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- Herausgeber: Crowood
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Underpinning all good landscape painting is observation. Starting from this standpoint, this book introduces the artist to painting the natural and man-made landscape. Initially equipped with just a handful of pencils and paper to explore the world outside, it allows confidence to grow alongside an understanding of the art and craft of painting landscape. Written by artist Richard Pikesley, it demonstrates his approach and that of other contributors, who illustrate the diversity of paths that can be taken to achieve a passionate and personal response to the landscape. Richly illustrated with over 300 colour images, this book emphasizes the importance of observation, and advises on how to 'learn' the landscape; it teaches the rudiments of drawing, and develops confidence and technical understanding of the subject; it explains colour mixing on the palette, and how colour works in nature and is affected by sunlight. Also included is a guide to the materials, equipment and techniques of the landscape painter. Finally, there is advice on presenting, framing and displaying your work, and how to find exhibition opportunities.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Landscape Painting
Landscape Painting
RICHARD PIKESLEY
First published in 2019 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2019
© Richard Pikesley 2019
All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78500 672 2
DEDICATION
To Debs, of course. But as painting can be a mysterious and intangible business, and never knowing what I know until it’s said out loud, this book also owes much to all those students, teachers, friends and fellow artists, conversations with whom have shaped and given voice to how I feel about painting.
CONTENTS
Introduction
For most of my working life I have been a landscape painter. As a child I drew and painted, and made a mess, all the time. Later, after I’d finished my years at art college and was teaching full-time, I would always have my paints and brushes with me so that I could squeeze in a brief spell of working on the spot on my journey to and from work. I’d organized my life so that I had a twenty-mile drive to and from work each day, initially over the Chiltern Hills and then along Dorset’s extraordinary Jurassic coast. That daily thread of work kept me sane and kept me going as a painter. Alongside having to order my thoughts to teach others it was the most formative part of my development.
■Iceland – the Journey North. Oil on board, 20 × 16 in (51 × 41 cm), Richard Pikesley.
I mention this now as I know that, for many readers, painting landscape has to be fitted around busy lives, perhaps at weekends or an annual holiday. What I hope you will take from this book is that painting, and more particularly working from landscape, is an ongoing and immersive process, something to do every day, even if just for five minutes in a sketchbook or perhaps in your head on a train journey. It’s as much about habits of seeing as about doing, and even a modest amount of time set aside each week will be enough to get you started.
For the past thirty years I have been lucky enough to paint full-time and am able to organize my life around a cycle of painting and exhibiting. The paintings I am doing now have roots that go a long way down, back into my past and an accumulation of earlier experiences and encounters. But alongside painting I’ve always kept a thread of teaching going and find it hugely enjoyable working alongside individuals and small groups. It is from this experience, and many conversations and encounters, that this book has grown. Painting is a long way from the sequential inevitability that is described in many books on the subject. For me it is increasingly something that I do all the time, but which involves many false starts and changes of direction along with some surprises. Although to be a good practitioner it is necessary to have a good grounding in the painter’s craft, painting itself is not simply a craft activity where if you do the right things in the right order, success will follow; much of this book is therefore about ways of looking as it is about making paintings. Like the threads of a tapestry, today’s painting might pull on threads that stretch back many years and stitch them in with something brand new and that I’ve just seen.
■Rain Passing, Pilsdon Pen. Oil on canvas, 34 × 36 in (86 × 91 cm), Richard Pikesley.
For those who have already gained some experience painting in other genres, much that you have already learned will be helpful. Landscape painting does however present the painter with new challenges, both in terms of how the visual world is seen and understood and how that vision might be translated into paint. Working outside often involves dealing with much bigger spaces than those encountered in a studio and much of the landscape painter’s thoughts will be directed towards dealing with this. Consider too that there are no hard and fast boundaries around any of the categories of painting, and landscape painting isn’t always about fields and cows. Subjects might, for example, be urban or marine and the approach may vary from the highly realistic to painterly abstraction or narrative fantasy. This book aims to give the reader a grounding in technique and ways of seeing, but without in any way hampering individuality or the development of a personal voice.
■Red Roof, Iceland Sunrise. Oil on canvas, 18 × 20 in (46 × 51 cm), Richard Pikesley.
Teaching also involves lots of learning, and I know that having to find ways to verbalize all of the rather intangible processes that are involved in the business of painting has helped me understand more. There have been some memorable moments, often one-to-one conversations with students that have helped us both. Sitting at a painter’s shoulder I can say ‘look at that’ or ‘have you thought of this?’ Having the landscape and the painted response in front of us speeds up the learning process. Painting often feels like a three-way conversation between the artist, the subject and a developing image, and a good teacher simply adds a fourth voice. I’ve written this book imagining that I am by your side as you work.
I have tried to get you drawing and painting straight away in Chapter 1, and the topics covered do develop in complexity as the book progresses; however, I could have put the chapters together in various different sequences. Above all, I hope the book gets you thinking about painting and how we explore and make sense of the visual landscape.
CHAPTER 1
Seeing and Painting
My own experience is that it’s much easier to be aware of what I see when I’ve got a pencil or a brush in my hand. The act of making a mark closes the circuit between the world out there, my thinking eye and a developing image of what I see. It enables the question, ‘Is that what I see?’, from which the rest simply follows.
Making a drawing slows me down, makes me stand and look and, in addition to the drawing itself, gives me time to process a visual memory and experience of a place. It allows me to make the first step towards the translation from the messy and complicated three-dimensional world towards a response to the encounter on canvas or paper.
■Western Sky, Knowle Hill and Beyond. Oil on canvas, 36 × 24 in (91 × 61 cm), Richard Pikesley.
Each medium we might use makes us look at the world in a different way. Drawn lines make us aware of the structural bones of a composition whereas loose blocks of oil paint in which edges blur and dissolve reinforces a sense of the visual world into flowing and continuous space. So, right from the beginning it’s good to work across several media, getting into the habit of using each method as a way into a different view of the landscape. Like a child growing up learning two languages, each medium is nuanced to access the visual world from a different direction.
So as we begin, let’s equip ourselves with a minimal kit with which to make these initial explorations. We’ll need something to make a drawn mark, a surface on which to work, and a source of tone to make things light or dark or somewhere in between. A few colours will complete our basic kit and leave us free to walk around in the landscape without the encumbrance of too much ‘stuff’.
What follows is probably already too long a list, so choose from it things you already have or that you can easily find. Buying a lot of equipment or materials is not necessary yet. I’m tempted to put ‘a decent pair of boots’ at the top of any list of equipment. Remember, landscape painting is essentially an outdoor pursuit, so your personal comfort and safety are essential. You won’t work effectively if you’re cold or wet through.
■ Sketchbook studies – where it all starts.
A BASIC KIT
• ‘B’ pencil and sharpener
• Pens of various sorts: dip pens, cartridge-type drawing pens, ball point, etc.
• Paper
• Paints and brushes
■ The bare necessities: a basic drawing kit.
■ Sketchbooks come in all shapes and sizes. Those with spiral bindings will lie flat but tend to self-destruct with heavy use. Buy the best paper you can find.
PAPER
Use either heavy cartridge, thick enough not to buckle when wet, or hot pressed (HP) watercolour paper with its smooth surface receptive to drawn marks. Cut the paper into working sized sheets depending on personal preference. A 30 × 22 in sheet of paper will yield four sheets of 15 × 11 in, eight sheets of 7.5 × 11 in or sixteen sheets of 7.5 × 5.5 in. I find that cut down into this smallest size, little sheets of heavy watercolour paper are a handy size for my little pocket watercolour kit and a good alternative to a small sketchbook. A lightweight drawing board just a little larger than your preferred size of paper will allow you to use bulldog clips to hold the paper firmly in place. As an alternative to individual sheets of paper by all means use a sketchbook, but choose with care. The quality of paper varies enormously, so try to find something that allows you to make drawn marks with pencil or pen and is robust enough to accept wet washes without buckling. Sketchbooks have one further disadvantage for the travelling landscape artist: as you have to turn the page to reveal a new sheet, the one you’ve been working on previously will run and blot unless left to dry fully. If I’m using a sketchbook for making watercolour notes I’ll use two, and alternate them to allow a bit of drying time.
■ Pencil and watercolour, drawn right across a double page spread. Sketchbooks are a valuable resource.
PAINTS AND BRUSHES
Watercolour, acrylics and gouache will all work well on individual sheets of paper or in sketchbooks. Each has a different quality but all have their place in gathering information. Being water-based, these media need a minimum of other materials and equipment; they dry quickly and help keep things relatively simple through the early stages of learning to paint.
■ My cigar box watercolour kit. Small enough to slip into a pocket, this little box contains everything I need to paint a small watercolour with a few sheets of heavy watercolour paper, brushes and paints. The box of paints even has a water container and water pot built into it.
Watercolour
Watercolour comes in tubes to squirt out onto a palette or in pans made workable by brushing with water. Watercolours are transparent, can be built up in layers, and combine well with pencil or pen lines, which can be seen through the washes. They can also be used as a tonal wash with just one colour over line drawing. Colour combinations in washes can be tricky initially and we’ll deal with this more fully later on.
■ Watercolours come in two types, either solid pans or liquid colour in tubes. Both are sold in various sizes.
Gouache
Gouache is sold in tubes; mix with water as with watercolour. These colours are opaque, and are a useful medium on their own and in a mixed-media approach. Originally made for designers, who needed flat colour for preparing artwork for printing, these paints also fabulous for the landscape painter as they allow you to work quickly without having to wait for overlaid washes to dry. When using these colours, try to make colour judgements wet against wet, as these paints change tone just a little as they dry, which makes ‘patching’ an area of dried colour or calibrating close tonal steps a little tricky.
Acrylics
On the face of it, acrylics have all the advantages of watercolour and gouache (and oil paint for that matter) and few disadvantages. Although I don’t often use them, as I’m a bit put off by their somewhat plastic quality, they are transparent enough in thin washes, cover well in thicker layers when mixed with a little white, and dry quickly.
Brushes for watercolour, gouache and acrylics
For now, just a few inexpensive synthetic brushes will do: a couple of pointed ones, one small and one larger, and a wash brush. In general, use the softer type for watercolour and gouache, but hog hair brushes and their synthetic equivalents may be used with acrylics. Take care to wash them after use, especially after using acrylics, which will otherwise quickly dry and destroy the brushes.
■ Good brushes can be expensive, so look after them with a canvas roll.
STEP OUTSIDE
No grand expedition yet. Bring your minimal kit and step outside. Unless you are completely surrounded by walls you will probably have a view with a mix of distances – some near, others further away. So how do we understand the space around us? Perspective is a system of ordering the space within a drawing or painting and we’ll come on to this later, but for now there are plenty of other visual clues which are a little easier to understand. Reading a painting and having a natural sense of space unfolding beyond the picture frame is largely a process of recognizing clues which the artist has left for us. The following section is all about learning how to lay this trail of visual breadcrumbs.
OVERLAPPING
So firstly, let’s consider the simple observation that if one thing sits in front of another it blocks part of our view. The world may be seen as a whole series of overlaps, each of which implies distance and space behind it. As a simple demonstration, look at these two hands. Held slightly apart it is hard to know which is closest but as soon as they overlap the spatial relationship is clear. As an exercise, find a simple view in which objects overlap, perhaps a dustbin in front of a tree trunk, which in turn interrupts our view of a building beyond, and so on. Make a drawing that contains nothing other than the way these shapes overlap and create their own illusion of depth.
■ It’s hard to see which of these two hands held up side by side is nearer.
■ As soon as there’s an overlap, their spatial relationship is clear.
■ Drawn by simply starting at one point and letting the pencil run until it hits the edge of the paper, this drawing is full of overlaps, such as the tree in front of the tractor, and with few other visual cues these are enough for us to understand the space being described.
■ With big shapes filling the foreground giving way to smaller enclosures, our expectations help us to interpret the space within this drawing.
EXPECTED DIVISIONS OF SPACE AND SCALE
Standing in an open space we experience the horizon as an approximately straight ‘horizontal’ running from side to side across our field of view. This conditioning makes us all expect that a rectangle divided horizontally is representing an outside space or landscape.
Enclosed ‘lozenges’ of shapes reduce in size with distance. The surface of a drawing tends to fall into a pattern of big ‘open’ spaces in the lower foreground area, and smaller enclosures as you go back towards the horizon. Above the horizon, space reverses and cloud shapes generally open out, increasing in scale as your eye travels upwards.
You don’t have to understand all the intricacies of perspective to appreciate that things appear smaller when they are further away from our eye. By carefully recording the relative size of things, a sense of space begins to open up.
MAKING A START
You’re now in the business of noticing things. You are in the centre of a world which falls away from you in all directions, so position yourself where you can stand safely in one spot but turn to get different views. Along with the visual, is the wind on your face or your back? Did it rain in the night?
■ Line alone can say quite a lot. In this drawing I’ve once again just let the pencil run around the edges of things, recording overlapping and changes of scale. Try not to think about enclosing one thing at a time; instead just simply look for the edges as they crop up.
Initially using just line, drawing with pencil or pen, record what is in front of you until you fill the sheet. Work right up to the edges of the paper, drawing everything you can see without any thought for design or composition. Try to arrange your sheet of paper or sketchbook so that it and the subject are in your eye together, rather than working on your lap, for example, so that your head has to turn as you move your gaze from subject to drawing and back. Consider the spaces between all the edges and fill up the page remembering that part of filling the page may be big open spaces without much incident. When you find yourself just decorating, turn a little to get another vista and repeat the exercise.
If there are moving things within your view – people, clouds, dogs, sheep, etc. – don’t leave them out. Record what you can even if it’s just the back of a van or someone’s legs. Don’t worry about any form of completeness other than filling the page.
It’s very likely that there will be long edges in the foreground which cut right across a lot of more intricate stuff further back. If this is the case those foreground edges make a great ‘ruler’ for measuring changes of scale. In the drawings I’ve made as examples, you will see that I’ve used a very soft pencil and let it run, leaving the point in contact with the paper as I move around the sheet. I haven’t, in these drawings, done any measuring, relying instead on eye alone.
At the end of the exercise you may have five or six drawings. Arrange them so that you can see them all and pick out which one works best. Remember you only have to please yourself.
Now for a good exercise with a big surprise element. You’ll need a sheet of transparent acetate film of the sort sold by art shops for wrapping prints and mounted drawings.
■ Drawn from my seat on a train, my eye was caught by the distinctive tower. Because the apparent scale of the elements within a landscape fall away quickly with perspective, the foreground elements within a composition take up a lot of space and small movements of your eye make a big difference to how the foreground relates to what’s beyond.
■ The tower disappears behind another building…
■ … before reappearing. A great lesson in how altering your viewpoint a little opens a wealth of possibilities.
Our brains have a tendency to flatten out space, making near objects seem to shrink a bit while things at extreme distance are ‘telescoped’ somewhat larger than they’re actually seen. The surprise element in this exercise is in understanding the extremities of scale that exist in any view. Elements in the foreground will appear very big and the furthest details will be tiny.
Step-by-Step
Tracing the landscape
Step 1. Select a view through a window which gives you a mix of open space and more intricate detail, ideally with a view through the foreground scene to distance beyond.
Step 2. Tape your acetate film onto the glass with little pieces of masking (drafting) tape so that you can see a view through it. Organize its position to give a view with a good mix of distant and close incidents.
Step 3. Keeping your eye in one position, use the marker pen to trace the major lines of the view onto the surface of the acetate sheet.
Step 4. When you’ve drawn every edge you can see, remove the acetate sheet from the window and lay it on a sheet of white paper so that you can see the drawing. Photograph the drawing to keep a record, as the pen lines will probably rub off the acetate sheet.
PARALLAX
Another phenomenon which tells us about space is called ‘parallax’. Standing with something very close and partially blocking your view, notice exactly what you see. Move your head just a little to one side and notice how the background doesn’t change much but the bits close to you are transformed. As I write this I’m looking out of a train window and seeing the distant urban sprawl of south London hovering behind a blur of trackside structures. As the train slows I can make a drawing which soon becomes a little series as the train stops and starts. As it does so, the foreground and middle distance appear to move in relation to what’s further behind. The view of a distinctive tower is eclipsed for a moment by trackside buildings, only to reappear in a different context. Even standing at an easel, small movements of my head result in a difference in how the landscape is seen. And our binocular vision creates the appearance of a three-dimensional world by combining two slightly different views of the world. Parallax is an important part of how we interpret our three-dimensional view and make spatial judgements. We’ll return to this later when discussing how we go about choosing viewpoints, but for now, it is enough to know that it’s worth trying out different places to stand.
AERIAL PERSPECTIVE – TONE
Nothing to do with straight lines, aerial perspective concerns the way that colour and tone are altered by atmosphere and distance. Painters and other observant people have noticed for centuries that distance plays a big role in how we perceive colour and tone. As with so much in these early chapters, what follows is about allowing your painter’s eye to see objectively without preconceptions getting in the way. ‘Tone’, also known as ‘value’, simply refers to degrees of lightness or darkness, without any concern for colour.
■ In this photograph the hedge through which we are looking is seen very dark and with strong contrast, reducing to tiny steps at the horizon.
■ The fence post close to my eye is seen as much darker than anything further away. The range of perceived tonal steps from light to dark reduces quickly with distance.
I’m standing out in the open fields above my house. There are some long views up here and I’ve got choices of whether I look out to sea, along the receding coastline, or turn my head and look inland. Choosing this option first, the landscape is mapped out by hedgerows, the first of which is so close I’ve got my drawing board resting on it as I work. The furthest is about five miles away. Thinking initially just in terms of light and dark, I am immediately aware of a difference between the range of tones in the foreground and what’s going on further back.
Now, I’ve stood next to many inexperienced landscape painters who in this situation wildly exaggerate the tonal range that they think they can see. Try to think now in terms of relationships between tones rather than tackling them one at a time. Using gouache, I can achieve quite a good tonal range by having white and black paint on my palette and mixing steps in between. With care I can probably achieve about fifteen steps from the lightest tone I can make and the darkest. Of course, nature has infinitely more, from the brilliance of the summer sun to the deepest shadow.
As a practical demonstration of how this works, find a viewpoint with some sort of small obstruction crossing a distant view, a branch or a fence post quite close to your viewpoint would be ideal. In my case there is a fence post standing just beyond the hedge on which the drawing board is resting. I look at the point where the rising post crosses the fields near the horizon. What I notice is a revelation, albeit one I’ve marvelled at many times. Sliding my eye across from my close-up post to the most distant hedge line the difference is immediately striking. The hedge in the far distance has a tiny range of tone between its lightest part and its deepest shadow and the whole thing is very much lighter than my arm’s length fence post.
In the examples here you’ll see that I’m not worrying at all about drawing, but simply placing slabs of tonal paint against each other in a sequence taken from the landscape in front of me. Starting with a biggish brush, make large-scale decisions about simplest divisions of tone, then start to subdivide. looking for smaller components but keeping them within the broad context of the bigger divisions.
■Long View West, Eggardon. Oil on board, 7 × 8 in (18 × 20 cm), Richard Pikesley. A tiny oil study, mostly about aerial perspective.
■Sheep, North from Eggardon. Watercolour and gouache, 11 × 12 in (28 × 30 cm), Richard Pikesley.
■Landscape with a Draftsman. Oil on canvas, 41 × 46 in (104 × 118 cm), Jan Both, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org). Painted around 1645, this Dutch landscape shows both dramatic changes in tone and colour to represent spatial distance.
The strength of this effect will vary according to time of day, direction of sun and atmospheric conditions, but without fail, the perceived tonal range from light to dark diminishes with increasing distance. Later on, in Chapter 7, we’ll talk about tonal pitch and how it is important not to start too light (or too dark).
AERIAL PERSPECTIVE – COLOUR
It’s not just tonal relationships that are affected by increasing distance. A good understanding of what the intervening atmosphere is doing to degrees of light and dark leads us into the parallel effect that air and distance have on colour.
■Lyme Bay, Summer Evening. Oil on board, 5 × 12 in (13 × 30 cm), Richard Pikesley. An open view to the west illustrating changes in colour as well as tonal range.
■Peach Tree and Vines. Pastel, 30 × 38 in (76 × 97 cm), Patrick Cullen.
There’s an old truism often applied to painting, that ‘warm colours advance, cool colours recede.’ As with many old chestnuts there is a degree of truth in this but it’s not the whole story. Getting back to the hedge that we’re leaning on and the field beyond it I can see a full spectrum of colour, both warm and cool in my immediate surroundings. But looking past my branch, and away to that distant view I’m aware that part of my colour world is absent from those parts that are furthest away.
I’ll turn my head to look along the coast where headlands form stepping points going back into the far distance. Now I notice that not only is the range of light and dark becoming much more compressed as my eye travels back, but the colour world is changing too. Gradually the warm reds, browns and ochres are being eliminated as the world becomes more entirely blue.
How much do I need to include to make a painting?
The answer is usually, not everything. Working out in the open can be daunting simply because it may be hard to know how much of what is visible to use to build a painting. This of course is entirely your choice but here are a few thoughts to help you decide.
FINDING A FOCUS
It can be tempting to take on painting a grand view. But such views often lack a particular focus as everything is pushed into the middle or far distance. Also best avoided are viewpoints with two fairly equal focal points as these can lead to a sort of visual ping pong as the observer’s eye flits between the two points. There will be much more on this in Chapter 10, ‘Finding a Viewpoint’.
WORKING SIGHT SIZE
If I look past the sheet of paper on my easel and draw the bit of landscape alongside it on the same scale as I see the landscape itself, it is said to be ‘sight size’. Whether we work on this particular scale is a matter of choice dependent on lots of factors but it is generally best to avoid working much over sight size. It can also be rather difficult to compress a wide angle view onto a very small format.
■ Working sight size, the scale of the painting on my easel reads as the same as the scene I’m recording when viewed from my working position.
ANGLE OF VIEW AND PERSPECTIVE
