Congratulations Warwick Fuller

I don't know Australian plein air artist Warwick Fuller personally but I can't deny his early influence on my still-evolving style.

Fuller's DVD "Into the Light" represented a turning point in my art career. This video was the first time I'd actually seen someone start a painting with large tonal masses then lay light and detail over the top – and he completed the not-too-small painting en plein air. Suddenly it all made sense.

My first-ever oil painting was a miniature copy of Fuller's landscape painting, a small image of which appeared on the cover of the VHS edition. I still have my version of the painting (below) on a large canvas board with lots of other small painting exercises I did when I took up oils.

 My first oil painting. 11x8cm.
I used three water-mixable oil colours, plus white.

Many of my early works were largely attempts at using Fuller's approach and capturing his style with local subjects. Fuller's work has featured regularly in Australian Artist Magazine, for as long as I can remember, so I had no shortage of other examples to learn from.

And now, Warwick Fuller has met with royalty.

I received this news today from the Lost Bear Gallery mailing list:

Fuller's Brush with Royalty

by Caterina Leone

Warwick Fuller, a Hartley-based artist, has had an impressive career. With over sixty solo exhibitions in Australia and internationally, career highlights have assuredly been numerous. Yet his recent week painting as Official Tour Artist for His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall, during their tour of Australia, would doubtless rank foremost among them.

The Prince of Wales became familiar with Fuller’s work through his London gallery, Panter and Hall, who were contacted by Clarence House back in July. Fuller says, "I was completely overwhelmed when I learnt of the surprising request from The Prince of Wales". A watercolourist himself, the Prince has a policy of choosing an artist to accompany him on tours, appreciating the unique interpretation that an artist can give to the documentation of the tour, and as a way of supporting the arts. Paintings from the tour that are acquired by the Prince of Wales will become part of the Royal Collection when he ascends the throne.

Fuller describes the whirlwind tour as being orchestrated “at a relentless pace, with military precision, planning and timing”, something that is most likely unfamiliar to an artistic temperament. Additional challenges included weather, which at Bondi Icebergs saw an uncharacteristic and sudden deluge ruin a work in progress. Yet he managed to finish with nine paintings, together with a number of sketches.

The tour gave Fuller a unique opportunity to experience places and events usually inaccessible: rarely seen paintings by Roberts, Streeton and Ashton at the Sydney and Melbourne government houses, reminiscing with Prince Charles over memories of trout fishing in the Howqua River and camping and painting in Victoria, and enviable access to the private member’s stand at Melbourne Cup. He fondly recalls painting beside the Flemington racetrack-mounting yard, in a "halo of space and quiet” in the otherwise clamorous throng of people as the Melbourne Cup race commenced.

It was by no means surprising that the Prince should choose Fuller as his Australian tour artist. Fuller’s artworks timelessly and majestically capture the atmosphere of the Australian landscape. His paintings are not a record of its existence, they are a hymn to it, and as such he is able to make evident to all the beauty and nuances that many overlook; and yet his paintings go further; he imbues nature with something more: to borrow from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “the mind and soul of man”.

During the tour, Fuller was filmed painting at Penfolds Winery and interviewed with the intention of his inclusion in a documentary being made on artists of the Royal family. The documentary will air on British television next year.

In summing up his experience, Fuller enthuses, "This amazing honour has been a career highlight, one I’ll savour when chasing the elusive light of the Australian landscape”.

More here.

Back at the Gap - plein air oil

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

Date: Monday, November 12, 2012
Weather Forecast: Close to perfect again!

Today delivered another beautiful spring afternoon and plein air painting was back on the agenda. I headed down to the Gap in Albany's Torndirrup National Park to see what was on offer. This place is very changeable and I've witnessed it during storms and on the calmest of days. Today was fine and warm but there was a decent swell slamming waves into the granite cliffs so that's what I decided to paint.

Here's the "gotta have" location shot showing the painting as it was when I put the brushes away. It was getting dark when I packed up so I'll take a look at it in daylight and see if it needs any adjustments.

With this painting I once again chose a distant subject rather than looking for something nearby and ready-made for painting. I've looked at this point many times before and generally ignored it as anything more than potential background material but today, with the sun setting further to the south than on previous visits, I decided it was a worthwhile subject in its own right. One advantage of painting things that are a bit further way is that minor detail is easier to ignore because you just can't see it.
 
One thing I notice along much of the south coast of Western Australia is that the hills are so high and steep that the sky is often almost hidden from normal view in several directions. With access to many beaches requiring a long walk down rocks, sand tracks or stairways, the overwhelming feeling at sea level is that of being down in a hole. I'm interested in capturing that feeling in future paintings.

UPDATE:

  (Point break. Plein air sketch. 34x20cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Here it is as it came off the easel. At this stage I've made no additions or adjustments in the studio.

Rocky coast plein air oil painting

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

Date: Friday, November 9, 2012
Weather Forecast: Close to perfect!

I didn't get out much last week as it rained for seven days straight. I finally managed to get some painting done in the last couple of days though. Here's yesterday's effort.

This is a spot I've looked at many times but there's always been a reason not to paint it. It's high up on a cliff edge over rocks, exposed to the wind and is usually shrouded in heavy salt spray. And up until yesterday, the shadows always seemed to be in "just the wrong place". With summer just weeks away, the sun is now setting further to the south and the lighting down here was far more interesting.

(Down into the mist. Sketch. 30x25cm, oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I'm struggling to come to grips with painting the ocean while looking directly toward the setting sun but this one is better than previous efforts. In order to get it done as fast as possible, I used a limited palette and ignored detail. I was throwing paint on - although I was slowed down quite a bit because I'd left my palette knife behind and I use that for cleaning my brushes. Alternatives proved unsuccessful.

I'm happy with the result and can see a few things that need adjusting so I'm going to let this one dry then do a bit of work over the top to try an unify things and enhance the depth a little.

I might go back here a at different times and see what else I can get from it.

Bluff Knoll - plein air oil

It was very warm yesterday with clear blue skies in every direction. I took the opportunity to head inland looking for something to paint. With one month of spring to go, the paddocks are starting to lose their winter greens and take on the warm, dry colours of summer. I drove around for a few hours before ending up at Bluff Knoll, the highest peak in southwest Western Australia.

I painted here one morning a year ago (see Bluff Knoll) and in January this year (See Bluff Knoll in January) and while I was happy enough with the sketches I'd done on both occasions, I felt it was worth another go to try and capture the essence of the bluff.

By the time I'd set up my easel, there was only about half an hour left until sunset. I decided a thumbnail sketch was in order to ensure I knew where I was headed before the light changed too much.

I tried two formats, each sketch taking less than a minute. I decided that the vertical format gave me a better feeling of the towering nature of the mountain. I was particularly interested in the zig-zag line created where the major shadow area met the sunlit area. There's a very interesting piece of geology up there, where the sandstone forms a turret-like ridge that catches the sunlight, but it would fall almost dead centre in my picture so I couldn't make too much of it and decided, instead, to draw the eye up to the cliff face.

I quickly washed in my major shadow area with a mixture of ultramarine and crimson, thinned with low-odour mineral spirits. Then I assessed the colour of the sunlit areas. This is one of those confusing situations where you know the shrubbery on the mountain is green but the light shining on it leans strongly toward red - green's complement. So what colour is it now? It's a sort of red-green-yellow-orange-brown colour.

I used my handy-dandy oil colour chart to find a starting point and settled on a combination of cerulean blue (a green-blue), mixed with cadmium yellow deep (an orange-yellow) and added permanent crimson (a purple-red) to warm it up. I washed a mix of burnt sienna and permanent crimson on the sunlit area first to provide a warm, earthy base for this "green".

I approached this painting a little differently to how I usually paint on site. I didn't try to take any area toward a finished state and just laid in large areas of general colour until almost all the white primer was covered. I didn't even take these areas up to each other, at first. Once I had it all mapped in, I went back over all areas with heavier colour and closed all the gaps that I'd left in the early stage.

The shadows moved fast and I found the thumbnail sketch an invaluable map of where I was headed. You can see in the thumbnail that I'd noted a small patch of sunlight right at the top of the shaded cliff face. This highlight disappeared soon after I started painting so the sketch was a useful reminder to include it - and it is important to making that area interesting enough to look at.

I finished painting after sunset and had to use a small headlamp to see what I was doing as I added small flashes of colour to break up the large masses. I used a flash to take the location photo, above, just before I finished working on the painting.

Here's how things ended up with almost no work added in the studio...

 (Spring evening - Bluff Knoll. Plein air sketch.
25x30cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Spam in art

I'm getting a lot of spam lately from overseas companies selling cheap reproductions of paintings. I've deleted five comments in two days.

The comments are usually repetitious (the same comment is often posted to several articles on one blog and you'll usually find identical comments on other people's blogs), and have nothing to do with the articles they're posted to – showing that the person (or robot) posting the comment has no interest in the blog articles but is simply hoping to direct blog readers to their own site via free advertising. They hope to trade off the blogger's popularity.

If you get these comments on your own blog, can I suggest that you delete them too so as not to encourage the practice?

UPDATE:
Elizabeth Tyler has a bit more to say about these likely art scammers on her blog.

Lowlands Beach - plein air oil

With clear skies and moderate temperatures forecast, I headed back to Lowlands Beach (near Denmark, Western Australia) yesterday afternoon.

I parked at the top lookout on the eastern side of the main beach. The lookout is about 50m above the sea and offers views across the main bay and to the rocky point below.

I watched the waves for a while, not entirely convinced I was going to get a painting out of it. But then I focussed on one large rock below the lookout and, although it was a reasonable distance away, I thought it was worth a shot at painting.

Here's the scene as the camera saw it at 50mm zoom, which approximates our normal field of view. I'm about 50m up and the clear blue water is about 60m from the cliff I'm standing on - so, according to Pythagoras, that vertical boulder to the right of centre is about 78m away from me.

As you can see, there's a lot going on with all those rocks so my first major decision was to choose the boundaries for the painting. I rarely do thumbnail sketches – I should do them, but I don't – but this time I thought it would be wise to plan ahead a little. I chose to focus on the vertical boulder and small area of white water in the centre of the view (the blunt HB pencil in the photo below is for illustrative purposes only, if you'll pardon the pun. It's not the pencil I used but gives you an idea of scale).

The thumbnail sketch suggested that I should pay attention to the strong contrast between the foamy white water and the adjacent rocks and clear water. I could use the whitewater to draw the eye in to the main rock. I made the decision at this point to alter the relative size of the rocks near the middle and to the left so that they didn't all end up the same size. I also decided that I should keep the two central rocks grouped as a single unit. I was also captivated by the lengthening shadows cast on the white water by the rocks and decided these would help to hold all the rocks together giving me a large interesting dark shape rather than a scattered collection of bits.

That's quite a few decisions from a one-minute sketch - and it's more decisions than I usually make before starting to paint. I really should do thumbnails more often, I'd probably waste a lot less paint!

I began by washing in the major darks on a white-primed panel. I wiped back a couple of highlight areas in the rocks and there's a hint of swell out in the open water.

Next I laid in the the white water using a purple-blue for the shaded parts and a warmer green-blue for where the sun would be hitting. It was important to lock this down fairly early as it wouldn't be long before all the foreground white water would be in shadow. You'll notice I dragged the foam over the clear water to create an interesting transition zone. I was feeling pretty positive at this stage.

Here's the obligatory location shot of the painting as it was when I packed up. It was getting dark by now and although the sunset was beautiful, there's no sunlight shining on the rocks below any more.

Below is the finished painting in daylight. I barely touched it in the studio so it's about 99.9% as it was on site. If you squint, you'll see how the shadow area on the white water becomes part of the dark tone of the rock mass. It can be tough to get that tone right because we tend to perceive even the shadow areas of white foam as very light. Squinting at the scene is the key to getting it right.

 (Lowlands rocks. Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I will probably lop a couple of centimetres off the top of this painting as there's nothing of interest up there, plus the image is split almost 50/50 diagonally and the tall rock feels too low in the frame. I knew all this early on (my thumbnail is a better shape) but that's the board I had with me so I just went with it. If I chop it, I'll end up with something like this.

 (Lowlands rocks, edited. © Andy Dolphin)

Much nicer proportions, I think.

Of course, sawing a piece off a panel is pretty trivial (unless the saw slips but let's not go there). Real problems arise, however, if you finish a painting then realise you need to make the panel bigger – so try to avoid that eh?

Plein air oils in springtime

A few days ago I decided to head down to Denmark in the hope of finding a new painting location. I got distracted along the way and ended up driving down some back tracks for a few hours. It was cloudy, so I didn't mind too much as I still find cloudy days difficult for painting plein air. And I did find some nice areas of filled with wildflowers and some interesting places for future reference.

I eventually made it to Lowlands Beach. The surf was "pumping", more than I'd seen it here before, but it was too late to start painting so I just wandered around with the camera and took it all in.

Yesterday was fine and warm so I headed back to Lowlands Beach.

I got distracted again.

I stopped to take a look at the Youngs Siding General Store because it looks like something I might want to paint. While I was staring at it, and tossing up the possibility of painting it, I noticed a small cottage to my right. The sunlight was hitting it hard - I got the easel out and got to work.

Here's the on-location shot...

...and here's the end result. I'm pretty happy with it as this is not a typical subject for me and I captured the glow of the white picket fence, the thing that caught my eye in the first place...

(The Blue House. Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I made a couple of "executive decisions" on this one. The cottage had a fairly new roof, but I chose to make it older. The shrub on the right is much bigger than I painted it - you can see it in the location shot. I wanted to see a bit more of the roof so I pruned the shrub down a fair bit. I'm happy with both decisions.

It was still fairly early, so I packed up and continued on to Lowlands. This time I took my easel with me, down the steps to the beach. So there was no excuse not to paint something.

It took a while to decide which way to face. I sat and stared and wandered around for quite a while before settling on this view of the semi-permanent creek that flows out of the sand dunes, down to the ocean.

(Lowlands. Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I used a limited palette and almost threw the paint on the primed panel. I think there's about half-an-hour's work here - no time for major "executive decisions".

I'm  happy with the feeling of light in this sketch, especially the glow behind the foreground rocks and across the breakers. They were my combined subjects. If I had a little more time, I'd try to do something with the "lump" of rocks on the right. Next time.