Studio Notes no 42

Hello, another week goes by -

Continuing on with my notes on Gouache and approach/background to painting —

This week I explore green….. I hope you find something here that sparks interest and inspires.

Mixing greens to find a path

I do not need blue to make green, for a yellow and black will take me into the heart of green. Black is, after all, everything.

Primary yellow and black gives me such a satisfying green, but with blues all the yellows sing out and there’s a cacophony of possibilities. 

If you want woodland shades, low light and moodiness, then start with deep yellow and just get murkier. Find yourself stepping further and further into black then add white for greys and then blues and you’re coming out for air.

As a suburban child I knew green as a summer event, playing fields and painted railings, digging ponds beneath arching roses, the overgrown gardens of elderly neighbours. We walked with our doll prams around the street, into cul-de-sacs, picking leaves from front gardens. Julie’s Nan had a privet hedge full of birds - that was our pretend greengrocer’s shop. All of this puts me in a certain age of playing outside until all the greens have turned a murky black-brown with gold halos from street lights. 

If you add just a little red to a green you get a suburban evening green. If you make it grey with a touch of white you make it a dream that never fades.

Green paint stained and clogged the art room sink. The plants on the art room window sill were not green but vague remnants of plants the teacher who was sick had left to fend for themselves. if I used green from a watercolour pan I always added a little more yellow for good luck.

Green was the colour of the bus we never got on, the green bus that took you away from London into somewhere called the countryside. I had dreams of going it alone, riding on the green bus and finding myself in a valley of villages with no names, and someone taking me into their cottage to feed me like a stray cat.

If you mix phalto blue with yellows (and hints of black, brown, white)  you get all sorts of wild, bright greens. You can believe in a countryside where it is always spring into summer. 

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a beautiful photo of Grantchester (not mine)

Early summer in Grantchester meadows, Cambridge. It is the day when every leaf sings and every tree is aching with sap and poetry. This is a place of poets and melancholy, and beauty. There are so many greens, walking beneath the trees and by the river. Here is where thoughtful people have strolled. I feel I am both imposter and actress, dressed in a mint green dress he tells me is more or less see through in the sun. He is younger and eager, in a way that frightens me a little. I am a woman in her thirties with two small children but today I am playing the role of a woman starting over, with a handsome potential suitor. As we duck and weave our way along the river banks, the greens ache and astonish, and I have no idea where we are heading. 

If I mix yellow into a dried up green, I can remember. If I add a little white into a yellow-green I can feel the sun on my neck, the rub of tall weeds on my legs. If I add water into drying paint, I can pretend the sun will never fade from here.

It is a glorious day, in a way that England can be glorious again for just one day. I am letting down my guard and allowing this young man to kiss me. We both have our anguishes and expectations. He has no interest in poetry and is bored when I try to bore him, talking about Rupert Brooke*. 

I am not a painter, yet. Or maybe I will never be one. Just a storyteller, just a mixer of greens.

I mix the greens in my head, I take yellow and mix it with sky blue and put a bunch of daisies in my see-through pocket. 

( echoing green - a painting from 2014)

Although I remember,  I do not paint these exact moments. Instead I choose to reinvent, provoked by memory. I layer paint to reveal small truths. Often I mix greens as I work, taking a scene from light to dark and back again. With gouache I can just about layer and keep the paint fresh, but it has its limitations. Only so much paint can be applied and then you start getting into chalky mud territory. All the greens will slide down the river bank into dank murky depths of despair.

If I am painting with gouache I do not draw beforehand but work it out as I go with thin layers becoming richer. I will revise and make new, wiping off, printing off areas of paint that have become too complicated or muddy. 

Grantchester is and was impossible and lovely. I can’t attempt to paint it exactly, but will reinvent. I read Sylvia Plath’s poem on Grantchester and nod with gratitude, her description of the place just gets it: 

‘It is a country on a nursery plate…

Hedging meadows of benign
Arcadian green’

Plath declares in ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows’ - and just so. 

And yes I love to explore these idyllic notions, adding my own little bits of mischief that may or may not get noticed. May or may not get painted over. Reinvention is a kind of self preservation - I can change the times and the angles, and really whose story is it anyway? The viewer is the storyteller. I just mix the paints and with a good brush and bravado - hope things dry just so. 

pages from ‘green book’ I made in 2019.

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*The poet Rupert Brooke lived in Cambridge and wrote, most famously, the poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. Brooke died in the early years of WWI. I wonder what he would have written had he survived.

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I hope you have found my recent writing on gouache interesting and perhaps inspiring. More on these notes soon - but next week I will write about something else. Possibly stitch related.

recent book pages (book my own - nfs)

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small notes from this week:

Watched a sparrow pulling at dandelion petals. A beak full of silky yellow. He flies off and comes back for more. I will never pull a dandelion from the lawn ever again.

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No one knows who refilled the sugar bowl. I thanked my daughter but she said: ‘wasn’t me, I didn’t’. For weeks I have been scraping at the last crystals and then one morning, adding a little sugar to my strawberries, I find the bowl filled to the brim. I don’t ever fill it to the brim, anything, do I? My son has had nothing to do with it either.

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The houseplant with shiny round leaves (I think it’s a pilea) has produced pink stems with dainty flowering tops. Either this is a cry for help, from the pot-bound plant, or just a delightful thing that should happen.

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I have rediscovered a patchwork project from last year. It is so lovely in its imperfection. It has made me think again about ever trying to do things so that all the seams line up.

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My work is shrinking, meaning I get to squeeze into smaller and smaller landscapes. But there’s a big display of bottles and ceramics on my windowsill and I might just challenge myself to paint it - actually fill a big sheet of paper, quite scary!

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Thanks for reading. Many thanks always for your kind comments, likes and support. These posts are shared for free each week. If you would like to buy me a coffee it would be very much appreciated. This really does help me to give more time to sharing here.

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