THE MYSTERY VALLEY

Looking down the valley from a high vantage point some of the land formations are extraordinary. Some look like neolithic earthworks, they just look too fantastical to be natural, like a background for a Leonardo da Vinci painting. What is exciting about this area is this is just the mouth of the valley, I know it stretches for about 10 miles and so far is unexplored by me. Its a good start for the painting it reminds me of a Michael Andrews landscape, although there is a long way to go.

Alwinton, looking west. Day 1

A FAST FINISH

I got some advice at the end of Day 2 that my painting was finished and that I shouldn’t do anymore to it. Obviously, my intention was to carry on into Day 3 as it had never crossed my mind that the painting was finished. It was only when I sat down at the beginning of Day 3 that I realised my friends assessment was not far off at all. I have done half a day on it and I do think it has improved, but I have only changed about 10% of the painting. I could dabble a bit more and add more trees or refine some of the background but it won’t actually improve the painting. Anyway, this unexpected finish means I have no new boards prepared, so no painting tomorrow.

Alwinton in winter

THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

This painting is anything but. It was a miracle I had any usable photographs as I chose to go out photographing in 50 mile an hour winds. Its all about mood and motivation, why can’t these come along at the appropriate times? Britain may be falling apart on many fronts but one thing it still has is its landscape and I am discovering there is just as much beauty in the winter as the summer. This is a genuine surprise to me. This painting is progressing well, I think I have captured that cold, clear, sharp bright light you only find in the winter.

Alwinton in winter. Day 2

A SYMPHONY IN

browns….. This must seem deeply uninteresting to the casual observer, but to some painters it is an intriguing proposition. For me it is the motivation behind this painting. There is more than brown and I would prefer it if there wasn’t, I will consciously seek out some monochrome landscapes to photograph. I want to be painting across the seasons, and there is beauty in an English landscape in winter, although my mexican wife would disagree. Just recently I have started to think that these paintings need to be bigger. Not as a lazy way to create impact, but because I always go for the expansive view. As these paintings improve I will look to increase their size.

Alwinton in winter. Day 1

WHAT NOW 2024

More of the same but better would be my reply. This painting is now finished and it was a good one to end 2023. There is an area of Northumberland that I seem to have zeroed in on around Alwinton but just beyond that is a long valley accessible on a single track road that really intrigues me. It has the river Aln running through it and is flanked either side by steep hills. Seeing whether I dare take the car and explore.

Lorbottle in autumn

SERIOUS ARTISTS

don’t paint trees in autumn (too pretty), sunsets (ditto), mountains (too obvious), puppies and crying children (too sentimental) sheep (too ugly). These are all things I heard in my formative years. Clearly its had an impact, its taken 30+ years to paint my first autumnal trees, and I wish I had done it sooner. Painting these trees, ‘pretty’ was never a consideration, the fascination is the randomness of the colour changes and juxtapositions. The overall effect is magical. There is also the strange shapes to be found in such a scene, these can only be appreciated by an artist who is attempting to paint or draw them, they need a long period of observation before they reveal themselves. This painting is heading towards a finish.

Lorbottle in autumn. Day 7

HELLO 2024

I thought if I start 2024 early I could make up for lost time? Two weeks of festivities over and I am looking forward to 2024 with more confidence. The year ahead is genuinely exiting in terms of my painting. I will have a full year of painting unlike 2023 when I was still putting the studio together. I think the main change I would like to make is to start drawing outdoors again. Whats stopping me? I got out of the habit many years ago, hopefully its just a case of getting started and replacing idle time with productive time.

Lorbottle. Day 6

A MUCH BETTER DAY

Here I am again, obsessing over the details but this time getting the results that were so hard to achieve yesterday. What is it with good and bad painting days?. Its difficult to determine in advance how the day will go. Mental sharpness seems to be a pre-requisite, but that’s no help, my brain is dormant most of the time until it is needed, much like a car battery. The task for today was to paint in the fore ground trees but I got side tracked correcting my feeble painting efforts yesterday. So many trees to paint, at least their pretty colours, being autumn. The sky is not photographing well at the moment, too reflective.

Lorbottle. Day 5

TURNER PRIZE WINNER

I would like to make a late submission for the Turner Prize 2023. It is my first abstract in stone with the suitably pretentious title, ‘Abstract No.1, The Fall of Rome’. I can’t see why this is any less of a contender than the usual suspects. It is in fact a rather elegant solution to solve a damp problem we inherited. Lime mortar, old school solution for a very old problem.

Abstract No.1, The Fall of Rome.

PERSONAL PREFERENCES

I have spent countless hours making changes to paintings knowing that working at this level of subtlety hardly makes any difference. There is an obsessive element to my painting where things get so nuanced even I fail to see the difference. I think there is an underlying dissatisfaction with your own limitations as an artist that fuels this obsessive compulsion. Sometimes its the actual subject that creates these difficulties, like tricky lighting conditions or in this case a very odd clash of acid greens and reds. Today was a marginal improvement and some laboured painting.

Lorbottle. Day 4

DON'T OVERTHINK IT

just paint. This is the advice I would give to my young self setting out to college. Of course I would just ignore it, then spend the next 35 years slowly learning the lesson. Now I can do it, but is it too late? I could be an Alfred Wallis type character undiscovered until old age, I don’t mind waiting. Will I develop sufficiently over the next 25 years, that is the gamble. Fortunately I enjoy painting so I will carry on regardless. I sense a stylistic shift, this does not surprise me, its gone more Bruegelesque, which means I will pull out my Bruegel books and head off in that direction for a couple of weeks.

Lorbottle. Day 3

AN INFINITE VARIETY

I had some doubts when I first moved here a year ago whether all the effort of moving was going to be worthwhile. What I have found here is an infinite variety of spectacular landscape that really motivates me to paint. I have come to realise that even if I took on Van Gogh’s work ethic I would never exhaust the possibilities here. This is very reassuring, prior to this I flitted from idea to idea, and this has been the pattern since I left college in the 80’s. I am assuming that with consistency of work and subject the rate of improvement should accelerate.

Lorbottle. Day 2

THE DRAMA OF AUTUMN

This is the most dramatic photo I have used to date. Not only do you have the colours of autumn, you have a setting sun and a stormy sky. I have toned down the sky a bit, but some of the trees are almost cadmium orange. You also have the magentas and browns of the dying heather contrasted with the acid greens of the fields. Its a lot to take in but it shouldn’t make for a dull painting.

Lorbottle. Day 1

EXPENSIVE PAINT

One of the benefits of using expensive paint is you feel compelled to go into the studio if your palette is piled high with the stuff. Especially if its all premixed and ready to go. This only works with oil paint of course. I am due a few days of painting and I had an itch to finish off this painting. I thought it was finished but the foreground trees needed just a bit more work. I am not one of those painters like Chagall who would return to a painting years or decades later to rework it. I need to strike while the iron is still hot, or at least semi-warm.

Alwinton

THE LONG TERM PLAN

My strategy for my painting is to do more in the future. This may seem like a lame ambition made by someone who isn’t really planning to do more painting in the future. However, my particular circumstances are that we have just moved into a very old cottage, 260 years old! which in my opinion needs a lot of work. The plan for me is to focus on getting all of that work out of the way and of course this means less time on my painting than I would like. This will increase over time. Anyway, back to the painting. I can’t think why I thought that the foreground trees could hold up as a silhouette. If I’m being honest I wasn’t sure I could pull it off in terms on painting them in detail, some of this is still new territory. Comparing today with the previous version it is very clear it needed it, still learning. I think this painting is finished.

Alwinton

LOOKING TO PROGRESS

As the headline reads, its about a Painters Progress, and today was all about that, as is every day. I thought some areas of the painting needed a visual punch and a bit more experimentation with bolder colour and shape. The biggest problem for me as a landscape painter is how to deal with the ‘empty’ areas. As I have no intention of painting every blade of grass then I need to find a solution. I am becoming more interested in the tracks and natural pathways in the landscape, some of the shapes are quite bizarre. I suppose its the same as looking at clouds and seeing the shapes of animals etc, of course, I’d like to think my work is a bit more serious than that. The changes I made today are very close to working and I like how they challenge your preconceptions of how a landscape should look. I think if I apply the same approach to other areas of the painting this is going to work.

Alwinton. Day 7

EVERYTHING I TOUCHED

didn’t turn to gold, not s**t, either, more like bronze. One of those sessions when you know instantly that its going to be a grind. How can mixing paint one day be different from any other? I decided to press on without inspiration but with pig headed determination. Gradually I started making more right than wrong decisions and the painting started to advance. Its funny when things are going badly you can’t think of anyway to improve a painting. But when things are going well it seems every area can be improved, and more importantly you know what is needed. After a tough afternoon this painting has improved.

Alwinton. Day 6

THE TIPPING POINT

This is the moment every painter works towards, when the painting shifts into another dimension, from being an ordinary rendition of the subject to something that has gone beyond the subject. Its a kind of magic, to quote the Queen song. Its when the painting starts to work independently of the subject, using the language the painter is trying to apply. Today, it was seeing the tones that already existed in the subject but really pushing them to a higher key, a form of Fauvism if you like. The painting is starting to work. The mid-ground diagonal line of trees reminds me of a cast of characters from a late Guston painting.

Alwinton. Day 5

BLACK & BLUE

I feel like I have been trading blows with this painting all afternoon. At every moment it seems like it was resisting my efforts to advance it. Once I got into belligerent pugilist mode I started to make some gains. If you can still retain some control this way of painting is normally quite effective. Where you might hesitate in a calm state of mind you tend to act on instinct, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, guns blazing approach. Anyway, a couple of areas have suffered with this method but they can be recovered.

Alwinton. Day 4

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

Quality not quantity, why do I have to choose?, I want quality and quantity, which means working with mastery, oh well, I’ll take quality. I am back to my hyper self which I much prefer. I never see Bob Ross struggling with his landscapes, he gets it right first time, although his trees and mountains always look the same. Did he really have any ambition to get better? I don’t think so, still he made a lot of money, not a bad trade. This painting is slowly emerging, still not sure how much detail to put into the foreground trees. They are creating a strong silhouette, which seems to work at the moment.

Alwinton. Day 3