In my posting of January 14th,
I mentioned I’d taken up art classes and showed you my rather effeminate attempt
at a Greek bust in charcoal. To our great joy, in January, we were allowed to
start dabbling in oils. Despite my stated preference to work in water-colour, our
lovely teacher, Evangelia, suggested we use water-soluble oils. The owner of
the art-supply shop I had previously gone to rather sniffily replied these were
modern materials that probably wouldn’t stand the test of time. No worries, I
thought, we’re hardly in the David Hockney league!
Once I collected my supplies, I
felt a mixture of self-importance (here I am: a ‘real’ artist, complete with
canvas, brushes and oils) and trepidation – what kind of mess was I going to
make with these colours and wasn’t working on canvas just a touch too
presumptuous?!
Virgin-white canvas is equatable with
a blank A4 sheet of paper and an essay topic alongside. It’s the where-do-I-start
anxiety. Then once the pencil outline is done, will I muck it up with the
paint? At least water-soluble oils are more forgiving as a mistake can be fairly
easily worked over, which is not so for water-colour.
I donned a lab-coat hanging outside the
studio, clearly used to protect other wannabe artists. I noticed two things:
- none of the other painters were covering up
- shortly into the exercise, Evangelia came over and draped a second garment across my legs Somehow I manage to splosh paint everywhere.
Building up the colour to achieve
depth needs quite a bit of work. My untrained eye often tells me a piece is
done, then Evangelia will come and advise me to start on the shading next!
This is my first ‘oil-painting’.
Now it didn’t help that the blooms were of synthetic materials – and mine most
certainly convey a strong sense of the inanimate – but they are recognizable
as flowers, so not bad.
In our pre-Christmas
pencil/charcoal phase, one of the subjects we worked on in charcoal was a bowl
of quinces. What really surprised and pleased me was the reasonably accurate appearance
of window light reflecting on the shiny surface of the bowl.
So I set my next goal: doing the
same subject in oils, to see if I could get that same effect in a different
medium. First you can see the pencil sketch with the background washed in, as
well as what are lines supposed to mark the material folds but which resemble
stranded jelly-fish!
Next the material has been painted in, though I think I
overworked the folds and tucks a little and that distracts the eye from the
quince-bowl. In the next picture the quinces are now being worked on.
The final version below was completed
at the end of January, and the leaves are mostly artist’s impressions as the
leaves in our original pre-Christmas composition had withered beyond
recognition. I left the bowl, focus of much anxiety, to
the end, hoping I could get that desired lighting effect. Eh! – achieved to some
extent. So now I have a set: quince-bowls in charcoal and in oil.
Our classes are held once a week in the local
council premises, and we are mainly lady ‘penshies’, as the Scots vernacular has
it. We all have one thing in common: for three hours we shelve our household
duties, dump our daily concerns and do our own thing. We lose ourselves in
representing or recreating a subject of our choice; we push our skills of
perception and manual dexterity until we achieve the effect we are after.
I have tried to work with diluted colour to attain
the delicacy of water colour; I have thrown caution – and oils - to the wind
and applied thick dollops of colour, leaving on the canvas thick brush curves
and satisfying strips of sheen.
Last week as I left the class,
Evangelia asked if I was going straight home. Her concern was that I might be
going out into public places looking like a woad-painted Ancient Briton – my face
was spattered with cadmium blue!
No matter. I get the same sense
of satisfaction from practising my art as I do from trying out a new recipe. The
initial sweet anxiety of anticipation gives way to full-on concentration, total
involvement in the task.
At the end it feels like you’ve experienced a mental massage, been
transported to another place. If the finished article is recognizable and
presentable, then so much the better.
But that will never cease to surprise me!
