The Self-Isolation Residency 17th April 2020: Day 19

Today I started the new painting, I had said a little while ago that I would try at some point to do a painting  where I will try to go through the whole process step by step, well it appears that thgis is that painting.  As I said yesterday I felt that the other painting that I am currently working on is too light and bright to really express what I want to about self isolation, not that I am really in a dark or depressed place mentally at the moment, although I do appreciate that a lot of people are struggling with the current situation. Personally I don't find my days affected so much by the lockdown  on a day to day basis; most of my days are spent in the studio painting or in my study doing research; I do of course still tutor some students and that of course can't happen in the same way as usual, but I can give them online tutorials as and when needed. So for me it's almost work as usual, but my reflective side really wants to express the potential dark side of lockdown not just for me but for everyone. If you like by creating this self portrait I am using myself as an example of what we are all going through.

So back to the practicalities of the painting itself. My basic start was exacting the same as the other painting and as the way that I pretty much always start a painting these days; on a black ground and planned the painting out by drawing the basic structure in in red (left hand image immediately below). You may remember that when I started the previous painting in this way that I thought it might give the whole painting an undesirable  underlying darkness; this is of course not an issue with the new painting, indeed I would have to say the darker the better.

On the subject of darkness this is where the first really  big difference comes between this and the previous painting and that is in my choice of palette. Generally when I paint I restrict myself to a very tight palette of just 4 colours to keep the balance of the painting harmonious. Many painitings tend to struggle or fail completely because the artist chooses to use far too many different hues within it. I take myself back to basics and just select one yellow, one red, one blue and one white to work with. In the previous painting, because I thought that I wanted the final product to be bright I selected hues that are quite close to the primaries, cadmium yellow, cadmium red and french ultramarine along with titanium white and these certainly did give me brightness. These are however not the 3 hues that I would usually choose to use, on the whole I work with richer, deeper colours and it is to them that I have returned in this painting; yellow ocher, alizarin crimson and prussian blue along with the titanium white, although I haven't used that yet.

I'm approaching the this painting as I often do by breaking in down into 3 areas tonally, light (yellow ocher), medium (alizarin crimson) and dark (prussian blue) and block painting these areas to begin with.  As I said I'm going to take as many picture to go along with this painting as possible, so immediately above right, the first light tonal blocks added to the red drawing with the yellow ocher. Quite often at this stage the brush will pick up some of the red from the drawing lines as I work with it whilst it is still wet, but I really like that, especially in regards to the yellow.  Next, ( below left) I work in the middle tones with the alizarin crimson, these of course also pick up some of the yellow and have other interesting blending effects. And finally I block in the dark areas with the prussian blue (bottom right), this gives me a really good idea of what the final painting is likely to lock like and so gives me a good opportunity to assess it to decide if any changes are necessary, so far there aren't any needed.

So next the final but by far the longest and most complicated phase of the process begins, 'massaging' the paintings into a more detailed semblance of order. I have already just started on this process as you can see in the image at the top of this post, but more about this tomorrow.