found pot

 

 

found pot (oil on board 30cm x 30cm)

 

 

This is an old aliminium container that I found in ruined borie (stone hut) in the countryside near my studio.

work in progress...

painting wall

The last week or so I have started a series of paintings of single found objects - mostly vessels of one sort or another that I have found in the ruins that dot the landscape around here.  For me, still life painting is a way of slowing things down, and slowing the viewer down.  Contemplating abandoned objects introduces an element of randomness, and is way of avoiding prettiness and sentimentality (I hope!).  Happy Christmas!

beech wood shadows

Shadow Woods II (oil on canvas 100cm x 65cm) David Atkinson

The weather has been cold, so I have been working exclusively in the studio, developing some paintings that I started in the summer (see the August entry below).  The subject, ostensibly,  are the beautiful and complex shadows falling on the forest floor.  I have used the sensation of those shadows as a starting point and built up layers of paint reflecting the depth and complexity of the shadows themselves.  Once in the studio, I have freed myself from the 'real' colours and developed a new set of colour relationships (which is fun to do).

Shadow Woods II (detail) David Atkinson

Villars - portrait of a house

villars - portrait of a house (oil on wood 23cm x 23 cm) David Atkinson

I made this painting at the end of the summer.  I liked the way little house, and those next to it made an irregular grid.  That made it easy to think of the painting as an abstraction - to forget that it is a house and see it as series of colour shapes.  It is a feeling, or way of looking, that is much more difficult to achieve when painting something with less apparent structure, like a landscape.

Luberon storm

luberon storm I (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

luberon storm II  (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

luberon storm III  (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

Here are three small paintings, made one after the other, a few weeks ago as a storm worked it's way up the valley.  Sometimes, being forced to work very fast is a very good thing - no time for thinking to get in the way, just look and record.

L'Isle sur la Sorgue

L'Isle sur la Sorgue (oil on board 25cm x 32cm) David Atkinson

It seems that I am becoming preoccupied with the ephemeral - shadows and reflections.  It is a bit like the fascination of painting skies (something else I like doing).  Everything changes constantly, obliging you to work in a fast and fluid way.  Reflections in water gradually reveal themselves the more you look, and it's a challenge to find a range of mark making that somehow convey all that complexity.  This small painting was made in situ in about an hour, looking down into the river Sorgue.

beech tree shadows

beech woods (oil on canvas 100cm x 65cm) David Atkinson

I have become very preoccupied with shadows as a subject this summer - they are so ephemeral yet so important to how we perceive the world.  They can feel dark and substantial or light and fleeting, and their colour hard to define.  This painting is one in a short series that I have been developing in the studio having started in situ, layering paint and disrupting the surface to try and capture some of the feeling and mystery of  this place.

red goult

cemetery at goult (oil on board (23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

Here I have spun the colour wheel in my head a bit, in order to examine some colour relationships.  As we know, colour is relative in the sense that it is always dependent on it's context.  I have simply converted all the colours to their complementary opposite, so green becomes red, blue becomes orange etc.  I was wondering whether the relationships, one colour to another, still held.  This painting took me about 20 minutes and was made in situ.

Lagarde

Beech woods at Lagarde (oil on wood 23cm x 23cm) David Atkinson

It's still really hot here, so it was nice to go up into the hills where its cooler, and there are beautiful shady beech woods.  I painted three images on this particular morning, all of them concerned with the shadows cast by the trees.  For a while, they looked too complex to deal with.  The floor of the woods are covered in copper coloured leaves, and lots of broken branches and debris, but the shadow are deep and cool.  I eventually worked my way towards simplifying  everything in a way that made sense to me.

Sault

Sault 1 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

Sault 2 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

Sault 3 (23cm x 23cm oil on board) David Atkinson

I went up painting at Sault one day last week, to get out of the heat.  Sault is a village high up on the plateau of the Montagne de Vaucluse.  Despite it's remote location it was heaving with people because there was a market on, and a lot of other people had the same idea to find somewhere cooler - so it was a bit of a challenge to find somewhere calm enough to paint. It turned out to be a good day with really good cloud formations as a storm formed over the mountains.

chateau de bourgane

chateau de bourgane (oil on wood 30cmx30cm) David Atkinson

I painted this a few kilometers away from here at the chateau de Bourgane - it's a very modest chateau with beautiful dilapidated gardens.  I think it has an wonderful atmosphere, and I have painted there quite a lot.  This particular painting was made in a box hedge labyrinth with huge cedars growing up between the hedges.  It gives a fantastic structure of verticals and horizontals that provide a huge range of painting possibilities.

farmhouse near st saturnin

farmhouse near st saturnin (oil on linen 60cm x 40cm) David Atkinson

This is a ruined farmhouse that I have painted, drawn and made etchings of over the last few years.  This painting I really struggled with.  It's a bit bigger than I have been working on lately, and it just died as I painted it.  I reworked it several times, introducing random elements to disrupt the surface and keep me interested.  As a result, it has ended up with a lot of paint on the canvas!

back outside...

Villars (oil on wood 30cm x 30cm) David Atkinson

The weather is getting better, so I am getting outside to paint more.   This painting took an hour or so, working on an earth red ground.  Good fun, helped by the fact that I was sitting next to cafe and so had a ready supply of expresso.  The owner(s) of the house (there seemed to be at least three)  came across a few times to check on progress...

white pot II

white pot II (oil on board 30cm x 30cm) David Atkinson

I'm not really sure that this is finished really, but it might be.   I am experimenting with different approaches to still life, as can be guessed from the very different approach to the one earlier in the blog.  Here, the composition is more dynamic and the space is built up using individual brushstrokes.  I think that I am using these paintings as a means of exploring different ideas that I can bear in mind when I get to painting outside again - which I hope will be very soon.

white pot

white pot (oil on wood, 30cm x 30cm) David Atkinson

I sometimes like the challenge of painting something really simple.  This is really simple - in terms of colour, form and composition.  The trouble is that you can't hide mistakes or weaknesses with a bit of fancy brush work!

near Villars

landscape near Villars (oil on linen, 40cm x 40cm) David Atkinson

This is a painting made in the studio, compiled from paintings and drawings that I made outside.  I have pushed elements around and layered and scratched and scraped the paint, all things that are difficult to do when working outside directly from the motif.

Bowls

bowls (oil on board 30 cmx 30cm) David Atkinson

This is much the same process as the lily, below.   Happily, ceramic bowls don't wilt.  These particular bowls were thrown by Liz, my partner, and have not yet been fired so they are beautifully pale and mat.

lily

lily (oil on board 25cm x 32cm)

The weather is a bit rough to paint outside at the moment, so it's still the studio for me.  I don't often paint still lives, but it is nice to have a lot of control over lighting, set up and everything else.  To say nothing of being comfortable with a cup of coffee.  I like lily's, not just because they are beautiful (which they are) but also because they have clear, architectonic structure that is very satisfying.  They also, of course,  have symbolic connotations of purity and death which makes them even more interesting as a subject for a still life.  I never know how far to push this kind of painting;  this one has had a couple of sessions, and I could go on refining it forever, but at some point the painting dies if you are not careful.  Just like the flower.

Buoux

buoux (oil on board, 25cm x 32cm)

This is one of  a series that I am working on, exploring the beautiful rock formations near the village of Buoux.  There is long tradition of painting subjects such as this going back to the beginning of the 19th century and beyond.  Corot and others who were part of the Barbizon school used to go out into the forest at Fontainebleu where there are distinctive rock formations that have an organic feel.  See also, later in the 19th century, Cezanne's painting "Rocks in a Forest".  I also really like Michael Andrews paintings of Ayres Rock.  There is a stillness, and an absence of narrative, that leads to a simple contemplation of form.

Les Cordiers

Orchard at Les Cordiers (oil on board 32cm x  25cm)

This is a painting made of a part of a much larger painting, using some drawings and etchings that  I made of this place as supplementary  material.  It's about 200 meters from where I am sitting.  I love cloud shadows, they make me aware of the huge volumes that I am trying to deal with in landscape paintings.  You can see the reddish ground peeping through in places - it seems to really activate the greens.