Hard or soft landscape

For this exercise I decided to explore the relationship between soft and hard landscapes and the need to combine them to enjoy our surroundings more, an idea that came to me when I was walking in the country park near my house.

There’s a lot of controversy about building more and more houses in our area and this has already eaten up part our country park, though a lot of natural wetland and greenery remains. As a lot of work is under way in the country park to improve the car parking, pathways and infrastructure, there are still trucks with building and landscaping materials around, and the nearby new housing development is not quite finished. In the end we will benefit.

I did some sketching in the country park -

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But as I’m not comfortable working on my own in isolated places, I also took some photographs so I could finish the work at home -

I decided to paint this view of the entrance to the carpark (related sketches 2 and 3 above) as I could see a nice interaction between the old tree and the triangular road sign in the foreground - the yellow-painted metal gateway in the middle ground - and the trees in the background.

The squiggly texture on the bark of the tree made me think of Van Gogh, and I was so interested in his “Hospital at Saint-Remy”, which I saw at the Van Gogh and Britain Exhibition that I thought I would experiment with that technique -

I also recall the research I did on George Shaw’s work, which I really like because of his ability to make a solitary and very familiar scene into something very atmospheric and even sombre, one example being the Time machine, a quite simple composition of a very familiar scene, a telephone box in front of a metal fence with a garden in the background -

I wanted however to attempt a looser approach as my tendency is to try for realism, which sometimes overwhelms me and limits creation of more expressive work. I also wanted to experiment with different techniques to achieve impressionistic effects using sponges and irregular brush strokes.

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My finished piece was -

I enjoyed experimenting with Van Gogh’s long curved and broken brush strokes and found the technique useful to achieve the texture of the tree bark. I think this was a fair attempt though my paint was thinner and my colour pallet more muted.

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Looking again at the George Shaw painting, his work was photographic-realistic, which I wasn’t aiming for. What I wanted to depict was a fairly modern scene with an atmospheric feel to it, and I think I was partially successful, plenty of incentive to try again.

Reference

"George Shaw: An Introduction," by the British filmmaker Jonathan Law. Yale British art,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2yo580CCAc