Inspired by Nicholas de Stael

I've got a book about Nicholas de Stael from the library. I love his contrasts of colour - passages of very saturated in your face colour and  very neutral, subtle greys, flattened shapes, texture around each block of colour, like hedges round fields.




Nicholas de Stael 'The Fort at Antibes'

A quick mess in my sketchbook with just two colours got me inspired

I enjoyed the contrasts, how the colours overlapped, the small blocks of colour against their contrasting ground. So get a canvas out and get going:

I'm going to get a different hue of grey and cover alot of the RHS, and maybe the LHS as well.


Outside the window no 2

Another version of the same view. This one started with some dribbles on canvas as somewhere to start from. Messing with a cold and a warm colour.

But the tree just wanted to make a reappearance, and the block behind it.

I liked the links that seem to form between the tree and the dribbles underneath. Like kind of dancing shadows. So I wanted to preserve the transparence of the layers to let them continue to show through. The block looked too vague. I wanted it more angular. Adding the felt tip pen made it more urban and added another style of marks.

The colours (watered down gouache mostly) had rather gone their own way. I wanted greater definition of the block, and by contrast the tree was too brown and tree-like...so this came next:

Losing some of the pen marks, but enjoying the lines of the block, and the flat tree shape, but the yellow lower section bothers me. Thinking of unifying the non-tree ground so it all gets a layer of blue:

And the tree got a tinge of pink as contrast.

Outside the window - painting No 1

I've been working (very slowly and intermittently) on a 'painting'. It started back in November with some eco-friendly packing material which caught my eye, especially since it had that kind of grid quality from the cuts that had been made in the cardboard.

To make it even more textural, I glued some scrunched up tissue onto it  and gave it a coat of PVA, hence the shine. And then out came the bright colours! I was reading a biography of Gillian Ayres at the time. Her work is so fresh and vibrant. Here's an example. It's not the one I was looking at (in a library book, which has since been returned), but you get the idea....

I loved the show last year at the Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork Street, for her 80th birthday! I hope I'll still be painting if I get to that age. See their website for more of her work. So I thought I'd try and understand her complex juxtapositions of colours by using similar colours.

The composition was based on the view from the window: a mis-shapen tree in winter against a block of flats, the binary opposition of nature and the man-made environment which always crops up in my work. I had thought to place a window frame around and through the whole thing for another layer of contrast, but I think that would be over the top.
I was also trying to get a tonal range in each colour block; exagerated aerial perspective, if you will. For sure, I don't have Gillian Ayres eye or skill, so this was too much a jumble of brights with no rhyme or reason, trying too hard to do too many things.

What I thought I needed was separation between colours, and to take the tone of everything lighter, so I added lots more white paint:

I got very excited by the layers of overlapping colour, particularly in the top right hand corner, where blue and pink merged. But overall as a whole picture it wasn't working, so I covered the lot in a veil of white, and because the surface is so uneven, the colours below are still peeping through. I like the texture, the layers of colours, and the ghostliness. But I think I preferred the first, bright version, which is gone forever!

I've lost all the gradations in tone across the colour blocks, and the tree has almost disappeared. Indeed, the tree needs a different treatment from the building to differentiate the two.  I've redefined the tree as the strongest, whitest figure and it looks better already.

I think the tree needs to go even more opaque, but maybe not completely white...but then again, it still has a certain ephemeral quality because it isn't dead flat white. But being white, it is a non-colour against the still-coloured building. I'm going to leave it a bit nw, to see where it wants to go next.