I’m excited about an upcoming landscape painting, a commission for a friend and collector … a riverscape called Sandbar. The canvas … she wants a specific size … has been assembled, stretched with coarse linen, and primed with lead white. Because the linseed oil based ground (a primer basically to keep the oil paint from coming into direct contact with the linen fibers) needs to cure for a couple of weeks, I’ve got some time to consider how I want to execute the piece.
Like portraiture, I use a couple of different styles in landscape painting. One is a sketchy, colorful style — executed as “painterly,” which means you can clearly see that it is a painting — evident brush strokes, relaxed approach to the underlying drawing. The other style would be described as “realism,” either classical realism (think Constable) or contemporary realism (think Hopper). If I’m doing a quick plein air sketch, it will certainly lean toward painterliness. Studio work, using sketches and photographs as source materials tends to lean toward realism. But realism is a spectrum, and with landscapes I’m not anchored … I never automatically fall into a specific voice range. Probably shouldn’t admit it, but when it comes to landscapes, I don’t have a definitive style.
While waiting for the Sandbar board to set up, I’m going to do a couple of practice pieces … using pre-stretched canvases … cotton instead of linen … and ready to go right now. Regardless of style, I love to use a red toned ground for landscapes. My favorite paint company, Williamsburg, produces truly handmade pigments. A lot of artists don’t like Williamsburg because the pigments handle unpredictably … which is the very reason I love them. I love it when the materials and the subject participate in the process.
Williamsburg BrownPink is a magnificent landscape ground. Unless your are painting with VERY thick paint, the ground always shows through to some extent. The most beautiful classical landscapes I can think of have a soft red glow at the edges of the green elements. For me, red balances the green and also elevates it. So this morning I applied a toned ground, BrownPink, to 20 x 24 inch canvases. I used a couple of drops of cobalt, so they should be dry enough in a day or two. Here we go landscape voice …
