Not Every Twig

“Remember that it is the general structure and movement of the tree that is important to your painting, not every twig.” – Joanna Carrington, Landscape Painting for Beginners, 1971

With the warm weather and long days, it seems only right to be outdoors with my paint palette. Escaping to the shade, away from the aggressive sun and heat, I can make watercolor studies of trees that I just couldn’t accomplish otherwise. And I really think that the speed which these dry outdoors, with the sunlight and warm breeze, give them a different quality somehow than those that dry slowly indoors.

I concentrated on the general shapes of the trees, their masses. The sunlight breaks them up, reducing them to fairly abstract things. Sitting on The Long Meadow in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, I just focused on the relationship between large areas and smaller areas, and between light and dark tonal values.

I used to get hung up on small details when working on these plein air studies. The idea is to work in a quick, broad manner and to concentrate on the larger, more general masses. Details have their place, but usually not here where they are actually really easy to let go of once you know how. Initially, though, that is a difficult thing to learn.

^ “Trees (I.)” Watercolor study. approx. 4 x 6″ © Bullock Online 2014

^ “Trees (II.)” Watercolor study. approx. 4 x 6″ © Bullock Online 2014

^ “The Long Meadow, Prospect Park, Brooklyn” Watercolor study. approx. 4 x 6″

                                                             © Bullock Online 2014

the expression of an emotion

^ Storm Clouds Over Landscape with Trees. 2013. watercolor.  6×9″. © Bullock Online 2013

^ Sketchbook page showing storm clouds over a landscape. 08.2012. © Bullock Online 2013

“Every genuine effort in Art is complete. It is the expression of an emotion, and being such is finished.”
– Alfred W. Rich, Water-Colour Painting (ch. v), 1918

Continuing to work with a limited, 5-color palette, I am working from past sketches and notes. I have a real fascination with the idea of working representationally from notes and color sketches, and have been trying to get better at figuring it out and creating convincing effects. The attempt is to recreate something which was seen and experienced, and which is now a memory, and to do so faithfully and accurately. Yet painting is, in fact, an interpretation of that memory — conscious decisions from the start require limiting and abbreviating the thing depicted, or at least bringing it in line with the materials at hand, ironically resulting in, possibly, a more accurate depiction by deleting everything unnecessary and leaving only the important elements remaining. And this is not an argument for total reduction. Far from it. But the history of painting is of exactly these kinds of decisions, I think, and paintings succeed or fail based on these decisions. No less so in the case of landscape painting.

Time Was Upon the Wing

[^ Evening, High Humidity. watercolor. 10 x 13″. © Bullock Online 2013]

Time was upon
The wing, to fly away;
And I call’d on
Him but a while to stay;
But he’d be gone,
For ought that I could say.

He held out then,
A writing, as he went;
And ask’d me, when
False man would be content
To pay again,
What God and Nature lent.

An hour glass,
In which were sands but few,
As he did pass,
He show’d and told me too,
Mine end near was,
And so away he flew.

– Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Upon Time

While sitting on the fire escape and watching the day die out, unavoidably thinking about mortality and time and everything I want to do in what I hope will be a very long life, I knocked out this painting after a day of several failures. The failures always make the end seem nearer, so this was a nice way to finish up.

Visit Bullock Online: paintings and works on paper by Robert Edward Bullock.